Frank Ahearn was in a Borders bookstore on Route 17 in New Jersey when he spotted a man carrying a book on offshore banking and a travel guide to Belize. Ahearn was working as a skip tracer at the time—someone paid to find those who “skip town” and disappear—and suspected that this stranger was eyeing an exit from his life. Ahearn offered some unsolicited advice. You’ll be easily found, he warned. The credit card the man was about to use would leave a trail to the bookstore and, potentially, to his destination.
The two men got chatting, and it wasn’t long before the Borders browser wondered if he could hire Ahearn to help him execute his escape. Ahearn didn’t hesitate. “My first thought was, If I can make it expensive to find this guy, that’s a problem for the person who’s looking for him,” he says now, more than 25 years later. From that first client—whom he did, indeed, help leave his life—Ahearn has carved out a unique career as a real-life disappearance artist or, as he describes himself, “a human-privacy expert.”