Samuel Israel III — a fake suicide off a bridge, then a quiet surrender

On June 9, 2008, the day Samuel Israel III was ordered to surrender to federal prison for a twenty-year sentence, he disappeared instead. The next day his 2006 GMC Envoy was found abandoned at the apex of the Bear Mountain Bridge over the Hudson River north of New York City, the phrase “Suicide is Painless” — the theme from the television series MAS*H — traced in the dust on the hood. The staging was meant to read as a jump. Israel had not jumped. The fifty-year-old hedge-fund manager, already convicted of running one of the era’s notable investment frauds, had driven away to hide.

Israel had founded the Bayou Hedge Fund Group in 1996 and induced investors to place more than 450 million dollars in his funds. The money was misappropriated and the returns were fiction. After losses mounted in the late 1990s, Bayou’s chief financial officer, Daniel Marino, created a sham accounting firm called Richmond-Fairfield Associates whose sole function was to audit Bayou and bless its falsified statements. The scheme unraveled in 2005; Israel pleaded guilty that September to conspiracy and investment-adviser fraud, and in April 2008 a federal judge sentenced him to twenty years and ordered him to forfeit 300 million dollars.

The flight was brief and unglamorous. While a manhunt treated him as a fugitive and his face moved across the news, Israel was living in a recreational vehicle, having staged his death with help from his girlfriend, Debra Ryan, who had watched him paint the message on the car. He moved the RV between campgrounds in the Northeast. Within three weeks the calculus of a fifty-year-old man hiding in a camper, his health failing and his money gone, collapsed. He resolved to give himself up.

On July 2, 2008, twenty-three days after he vanished, Samuel Israel rode a motor scooter to the police station in Southwick, Massachusetts, walked in, and identified himself as a fugitive wanted by the federal government. The faked suicide bought him nothing but a second crime: in July 2009 he was sentenced to an additional two years for bail jumping, consecutive to the twenty he had tried to flee. Debra Ryan was sentenced to probation for helping him.