GAL: HOW I FAKED MY OWN DEATH
Quest to leave it all behind
Elizabeth Greenwood was having dinner at a cheap Vietnamese restaurant, feeling sorry for herself over her $100,000 in student-loan debt and the bad life decisions it fostered.
She pondered the potential consequences: “A Dickensian debtors prison or a life on the lam.”
Or, her dinner companion interjected, “You could fake your own death.”
That night, Greenwood Googled “fake your own death,” and her “thought experiment” turned into a years-long quest to see if it could actually be done — planting the seeds for her new book, “Playing Dead: A Journey Through the World of Death Fraud” (Simon & Schuster).
As she dug deeper, “It became very clearar to me that I had stumbleded into a bizarre underworldrld made up of people withh forbid-forbidden knowledge andnd those seeking it,” she writes. “And while my intentionention to fake my death might not have been as earnestnest . . .I had definitely becomeecome a seeker as well.”
Greenwood, a Columbia University adjunct professor, eventually scored a death certificate on the Philippine black market that documented her demise in a car crash in Manila on July 2, 2013.
“I’m dead on paper but still kicking in Brooklyn,”” Greenwood quipped during interview with Post.
Along the way to her own “pseudocide,” Greenwood ventured to find “the people who traffic in” fake death, along with “the people who have done it themselves.”
A Filipino-American businessman, whose name was changed in the book, was gambling in a coin-toss game in Manila in 2001 when he was fatally stabbed in a beef over the winnings. He was taken to the local morgue, and his wife flew in from LA to identify the body. There was a funeral with a priest, and the grieving widow had her picture taken next to the open casket. The body was cremated and shipped back to the United States.
Later that evening, the widow “met her husband for dinner in a Manila res- taurant,” writes Greenwood.
It turned out the real corpse was that of “the local drunk,” according to private eye Steve Rambam, who has been probing fraudulent death claims for insurance companies for 30 years. The “widow” was trying to cash in six policies purchased by the dearly departed. Rambam tells Greenwood he solved the case by revealing that the businessman’s passport photo “didn’t match the body that came in.”
Insurance companies normally wait seven years to release money without a death certificate, so the impatient couple produced a body in order to get the certificate ASAP, Greenwood writes.
Gettingg a bodyy to be your corpse’s stand-in is nnot as difficult as it sounds.
“You can just go into any city morgue in almosalmost any developing country, aask to see the unclaimed bodies and cry, ‘Oh, it’s poor Uncle Marco!’ They’ll be happy to get a body off their hands,” Rambam says.
In June 2008, Sam Israel III, a hedge-funder due to begin a 22-year prison stint for a $450 million fraud, abandoned his SUV on a Hudson River bridge with “Suicide is Painless” written in dust on the hood. He was found a month later in Southwick, Mass., living in an RV.
New York-based “privacy consultant” Frank Ahearn, who wrote a book on “How to Disappear,” tells Greenwood that Israel fit the death-fraud mold: “None of these white-collar criminals plan their exit. They just keep going until it all falls down.”
Ahearn mused, “Did he think the feds were going to show up and say, ‘Hmm, he wrote a suicide note on his truck, he must have jumped off the bridge! All right, fellas, let’s go home!’ ”
In 2012, Long Island dad Raymond Roth, 47, and his 22-year old son, Jonathan, hatched a plan to fake the elder Roth’s drowning at Jones Beach. The week before, Raymond — in the midst of a bitter divorce with wife Evana — had named his son the beneficiary of his life insurance.
But father and son never collected, because Evana “enlisted a hacker to break into Raymond’s e-mail” and discovered “their plan to stage the drowning,” Greenwood writes.
Some frauds try to hide in the body count of a mass-casualty event. Steven Leung of Hong Kong, trying to dodge a passportfraud charge, pretended he died in the World Trade Center on 9/11. He posed as two fictitious brothers — “William” and “Jeffrey” Leung — while trying to talk a lawyer and the city Law Department into issuing a death certificate. But the feds busted him five months later while he picked up his mail at a Chelsea shipping store.
Faking one’s death is not illegal in and of itself, but the mechanics involved are. “You’d have to lie to the police and file a false police report and death certificate,” Rambam says.
Ultimately, Greenwood and her experts conclude that faking your own death is “ineffective.”