In hindsight, Marcus Schrenker's plan to disappear doesn't appear particularly smart. The 38-year-old Indiana businessman, accused of betraying investors by not telling them about hundreds of thousands in fund fees - and facing a US$533,000 legal judgment - bailed out of his plane, authorities say, two days after losing his court case.
Military jets were scrambled in response to his mayday call on Jan. 11. Pilots saw a dark cockpit and an open door before the small aircraft crashed near a residential area in Florida. The next day, Mr Schrenker sent an e-mail to a friend, apologising for the trouble he'd caused and saying he would be gone by the time the note was read.
But the only place Mr Schrenker went was to jail. US Marshalls found him holed up in a Florida campground the following night. This time he was bleeding profusely; he'd slashed his wrist and was muttering the word 'die.' His financial travails now include charges of deliberately crashing an aircraft and making a false distress call.
Convicted hedge fund scammer Sam Israel III, 49, lasted a month on the lam in an RV complete with motor scooter before surrendering to authorities.
Sentenced to 20 years in prison for defrauding investors of US$450 million (S$680 million), Israel was supposedly driving himself to jail when hedisappeared last June.
On the dusty hood of his SUV, which he parked on an upstate NewYork bridge 150 feet (46 metres) above the Hudson River, Israel had finger-painted 'suicide is painless,' the title of television's 'M-A-S-H' theme song.
He didn't jump. He got into a recreational vehicle driven by his girlfriend, who later admitted she trailed Israel on his aborted trip to prison and picked him up. He dropped her off at their home in Armonk, New York.
Then Israel grew a beard, and apparently rambled around a Massachusetts campground while police - who didn't buy his vehicular postscript and arrested Ryan on charges of aiding and abetting - searched for him. His mother begged him to surrender.
On July 2, he puttered up to a Massachusetts police station on his scooter and gave himself up. Returned to New York, he stood before a furious judge, complaining of his bad back. The judge ordered his US$500,000 bail forfeited. He faces up to 10 additional years in prison for running.
'In their minds, all they have to do is erase the stigma and start over,' said M. Harvey Brenner, a public health professor emeritus at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. 'It's not easy to do. You have to have the constitution of a spy and live a double life.'
Mr Brenner, who is more empathetic than psychologist Cass, says people like Israel 'believe they can regain their reputation with new people. Then they can put the bad stuff behind them.' Others might call them delusional. And there is little sympathy for those caught stealing from others in this nightmare recession, where already dismal unemployment rates jumped last week to 7.6 percent, reflecting the biggest loss of jobs since December 1974. -- AP