So he’s 63 and he is almost certainly not going to be eligible for parole for 25 years. ie he’s most likely going to die in prison. His bail is $10m, which is not insignificant but I am quite sure that this could be forefeited by someone who was earning hundreds of millions of dollars a year at one stage.
My questions are, why wouldn’t he just skip the border to Mexico or somewhere else? Is there anything physically preventing him from doing so (eg electronic tags)? Surely this is the easier option rather than spending the rest of your life in jail? What measures are taken by the state to prevent this from happening?
Perhaps but I am not sure that I would necessarily want to run the risk if I was him? My advice would be to get out now!
Regardless, it doesn’t really answer the question about whether there is actually anything preventing him from doing this other than his own conscience.
I would be very surprised if he hadn’t. When you earn that type of money, you are bound to have SOMETHING overseas. Even if it is just a $20m yacht…incidentally, wasn’t it his yacht that was called ‘Aquasition’?
Where would he go? Almost anywhere that would offer a comparable lifestyle to the US would extradite him. He’s not facing the death penalty, so pretty much any Western / industrialized country would send him back. Beyond that, I think you can be relatively sure that the US authorities have his passport, and probably have tabs on his major assets lest he consider flight.
An interesting thought experiment. The simplest practicalities (like not having a passport) get in the way.
I suppose he could pass a message to the Cuban embassy in Toronto offering a large hunk of cash for a place to hide. Then across the Mexican frontier with a fake ID. Then off to Havana (on a Cuban passport) from Mexico City.
Of course if the plan fell apart he would be locked in the slammer so fast that he would catch cold from the breeze.
Brazil? If he divorced his wife and could father a Brazilian child in record time he would be safe.
Conversion to Judaism? That plus a midnight flight to Tel Aviv might work.
Does he have enough ready cash to bribe a country into upsetting the US?
Ebbers also thinks he didn’t do anything wrong. If he flees, it would mean acknowledging that he did do wrong. That just doesn’t fit into his kinds worldview.
Wow, I am now having fantasies of Bernie Ebbers (and Ken Lay and Joseph Nacchio and Dennis Kozlowski and John Rigas and Gary Winnick and …) trying to flee to Cuba and spending the rest of their lives rotting in a Castro jail.
I’m told that getting a passport can be quite easy if you know the right people. So, continuing this as an exercise, Mr Ebbers liquidates a lot of his assets - after all, he’s got huge legal bills, right? He buys himself a false passport in another name, perhaps learn a foreign language or two, sends suitable assets abroad, escapes over the Canadian border (it’s longer and less well guarded), changes his appearance somewhat, then settles down to live a quiet life somewhere. He could make a passable retired British gentleman, for instance.
Sending the assets abroad is the difficult bit as they’re more easily traced, but he could escape with a briefcase of rare stamps or gems. And a Swiss bank account.
I tried Googling to come up with examples of rich people who have skipped bail. I was amused at the number of people described as “fugitive financier.”
I would assume that an update of this article would have to state that Hussein and Jackson are no longer fugitives. Bin Laden and Bush, on the other hand, are still at large, so far as we know, anyway. It would seem a point of debate whether bin Laden’s or Bush’s continued success at foiling his would-be captors is more impressive. I think I’d have to go with Bush, considering that he manages to remain free even though there is always at least one law enforcement official within a few feet of hiim every hour of the day. He must have gotten hold of that cloak of invisibility after the sinking of Hy-Brasil.
Escaping to Canada or Europe is no answer, any country worth living in is going to send him right back. As for getting a fake passport and living in Canada under an assumed name, why not get a fake driver’s license and live in the US under an assumed name?
Going underground in the US would be much easier. The advantage of going to a third world country is that you can bribe the cops more easily and live semi-openly. The disadvantage is that you have to live in a third world shithole and you are under the power of whoever you pay off to look the other way. How much of a cut are they going to demand? How long will they stay bought?
Much better to disappear in the US with a suitcase full of cash. We’re not exactly a police state, and who’s going to pay attention to one more wealthy retiree who keeps to himself? Just get your fake documents in order, get in a car and start driving until you find a nice quiet spot in Arizona or Wyoming or some such, and pay for everything in cash for the rest of your life.
What’s so bad about living in some obscure Caribbean nation? No, it’s not a first world lifestyle, but it wouldn’t take that much cash to set oneself up fairly comfortably. Surely it’s gotta be better than the slammer. You guys need to stop comparing his prospective lifestyle in [insert obscure tropical country here] with his lifestyle as a free man in the US, because the relevant comparison is his prospective lifestyle as in a federal prison. Unless he thinks he’s got a chance of winning his appeal, I don’t see what the downside is in attempting flight. What are they going to do, lock him up a few extra years after he dies?
I understand this thread has turned into a higher level questioning of what prevents a life on the lam for the convicted very rich. However in the particular case of Ebbers I am not at all sure that Ebbers has the kind of money that is being talked about here.
He owes WorldCom about $400 million. According to various sources most of the wealth he had, about 85% of his billion dollar wealth in 2000, was Worldcom paper that is now gone. In fact the very heart of the Government’s case is that Ebbers was obsessed with keeping WorldCom’s stock price high, and panicked about $400 million in personal loans that were backed by his shares in the company.
I doubt he could liquidate anything without alarms going off everywhere. Any assets he still has are collateral up to the hilt and he is working with WorldCom and former employees on how much he will eventually pay back - in short, if Ebbers had $400 million that could be liquidated it would have been by now.