By David Segal
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, June 21, 2008

NEW YORK -- Every fugitive must balance comfort and stealth, so what are we to make of the news that con artist and suicide faker Samuel Israel III is lamming it in a 31-foot RV? At minimum, the choice suggests he's far more concerned with quality of life than invisibility. Because if your first priority is eluding a nationwide manhunt, skedaddling in a 14,500-pound house on wheels -- with a queen-size bed, a fridge, a shower, a 50-gallon fresh water tank and a furnace -- seems pretty dumb.

Seriously, was J-Lo's tour bus booked? Why not just skyjack the Goodyear blimp and flash "Suckers!" on the side?

Generally speaking, any four-wheeler you can win on the Showcase Showdown is a little too luxe for a getaway vehicle. But Israel's longtime live-in girlfriend, a decorator named Debra Ryan who was arrested on Thursday, said she helped him pack up a 2007 Coachmen Freelander just before he disappeared on June 9, the day that Israel was supposed to turn up at a federal prison to begin a 20-year sentence for defrauding investors in his Bayou Management hedge fund. (All but $100 million of the $450 million entrusted to Bayou is gone.) The police that day found Israel's idling GMC Envoy on a bridge north of New York City, with the words "suicide is painless" scrawled into the dust on the hood.

As if. There was a search for Israel's body in the Hudson River for a few days, but it was called off as suspicions grew that the guy had pulled the old fake-your-death switcheroo. The feds interrogated Ryan for 10 days before she fessed up on Thursday.

Yes, she admitted, two days before he vanished, she'd helped Israel, 48, attach a motor scooter to the RV. And yes, she'd driven with him to a rest stop, where Israel stashed the Freelander. And yes, she drove him to that very same rest stop the morning of June 9, the day he was supposed to surrender.

The very busted Ms. Ryan, free on $75,000 bail, could face 10 years in prison for her role in this charade. As J. Geils once put it, love stinks.

By all means, these crazy kids get points for style, although not for being the first to try such a scheme, but their purported plan sounds more like your granddaddy's idea of retirement than the Great Escape. Set aside the obvious problem. (Fifty gallons of gas, at prices like this? Ouch.) Israel has ruined a heretofore superb narrative. It's safe to say that when word hit the newspapers about his RV, a dozen screenwriters in Hollywood slapped shut their MacBooks and started to cry. You need a chase scene to end this film, and there aren't a lot of chase scenes with 31-foot recreational vehicles, are there? Try to imagine "The French Connection" with the villains in a Winnebago. It does not work.

Unless you're willing to do a U-turn into farce. Up until the Freelander entered the picture, we had a good psychodrama-slash-white-collar caper movie here. Israel, whose grandfather was a well-known commodities trader, never showed much skill as an investment whiz during the nine years he ran Bayou out of a cottage in Stamford, Conn. His main gift, it turns out, was the ability to deceive, particularly when it came to the accounting audits that reassured investors about his hot hand in the market.

The first half of Israel's story is one rich person after another salivating over fabricated returns and writing checks. When the scandal is uncovered, there's a brief interlude in court, where our hero pleads guilty and promises to head to prison as soon as he gets one more surgical procedure on his chronically aching back.

Next we get the chicanery of the pretend leap off the Bear Mountain Bridge. Then -- cue "Price Is Right" music -- a guided tour of a Freelander?

"Yes," you hear Rod Roddy in a voice-over, "it's the Coachmen Freelander. Cab over queen bed for extra comfort. All-in-one coach command center. Reclining captain's chairs. Rear storage. Tilt steering. Coachmen! Your gateway to the easy life."

The Freelander is a tricky plot point to smooth over, but for the record, Israel is not the first criminal to find the RV irresistible. Not by a long shot. A group of inmates, known as the Texas Seven, hunkered down and masqueraded as Christian missionaries in an RV at a motor-home park in Colorado after they escaped from prison in 2001. (The cops found 22 weapons and police scanners in the vehicle.) Couples have taken on new identities and settled down in motor homes, sometimes with pretty decent success. (For instance, one Bobby Shamburger -- really, that's his name -- who'd fleeced investors in his insurance company of $200 million and then high-tailed it to Phoenix, where he re-christened himself Jim Tyler.) Comb through the news archives long enough and the RV starts to look like the go-to ride for your modern outlaw.

"It's not a bad move," says Donald Smith, a sales manager at McCord's RV Center in Longview, Wash. "I mean, think about this guy Israel. He's got every convenience known to man -- a shower, a kitchen, a TV, so he'll be able to keep tabs on what the media is saying about him. You guys in the media are really good about broadcasting stuff like that. If he turns up on 'America's Most Wanted,' he'll know. He can park somewhere in the forest and then cover up his RV with branches. If he's careful, he can stay put just about anywhere for two weeks, maybe more. His hot water will run off a 12-volt battery."

There are other salesmen less optimistic than Smith, and they say an RV is just too big and obvious for any wanted man, especially now that U.S. marshals have released a photo of the Freelander that Israel is using. A spokesman yesterday said the U.S. marshals aren't talking about this case at the moment, though Marvin Lutes, a retired marshal and president of the U.S. Marshals Service Association, was full of advice. Which boils down to "run, Sammy, run."

"He should get rid of the RV," Lutes said. "Leave it in the woods, dump it in a lake. Then head to Canada."