When he was 20 years old, Tom Conrad robbed the Cleveland bank where he worked as a teller, and even though the U.S. Marshals relentlessly hunted him for half a century, he was never caught.
That’s because he didn’t make any mistakes.
He grew a beard, moved to Boston, and changed his name to Thomas Randele. He got a social security number under that name, and lived a quiet middle-class life, managing a country club and selling upscale cars. The man named Thomas Randele married and raised a family.
He and his wife were together over 40 years. She didn’t know. (From her standpoint, it must’ve been nice not having in-laws.)
His circle of friends included an FBI agent who described him as “a gentle soul, you know, very polite, very well spoken.” A car dealer he worked for called him “a gentleman.” He never talked about his family. “You know all the years I knew Tommy, I never heard him mention a sister or a mother or a brother or a father,” the ex-FBI agent said. “You could never pry anything from him,” said another close friend.
The Marshals Service never found him, because he left no trail. He “had a head start and was disciplined enough not to make missteps.”
He didn’t brag or live it up on the money — $1.6 million in today’s dollars. (That’s more than another never-caught fugitive, D. B. Cooper, got away with. And his caper was far less dangerous.) Nobody knows what happened to it.
He didn’t write a book on how to disappear. The only reason anybody knows is because he spilled the beans to his family just before he died of cancer.
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