To a very very small extent. There are literally hundreds of marinas within a few miles of Manhattan. All with dozens of boats apiece heading out every day. Just checking these boats before they leave would be Herculean, never mind stopping them from picking someone up on some lonely beach or pier. And I haven’t even discussed the pickup boat originating from an offshore vessel.
Same with all of the hundreds of trains and other crossings. Even if they could lock down the city, they would not for this person. the disruption would raise unholy hell as you interfered with the commutes of millions of people.
Yes a lot of Home Security is theater. Any determined Thief can get in to your average home in many ways. Most just aren’t very bright determined or resourceful. Which circles back to Manafort, if he is determined and resourceful the anklet means nothing.
Indeed. If I was writing this as a spy thriller, I’d probably have Manafort call in some favors to his well connected friends.
Have an unmarked limo (or heck, motorcycle, since we’re talking Spy Thriller) show up at his place. Heck, if his place has an alley out back, it’s even easier.
Snip off the ankle bracelet
Make off into the night, quickly
Head to not a marina, but to a train yard, where a furnished shipping container is there to live in for a few weeks.
Take the shipping container cross-country to a marina. Chicago if heading to Europe on a cargo ship, or San Diego if heading to Asia.
And that might be something you could count on if you were skipping bail on a drug or assault arrest. It isn’t something you can count on when your indictment made international news and you are probably under a wire tap. He couldn’t rely on his own vehicles, the Feds certainly have the plate numbers and can turn them over to the NYPD to enter into their automated readers. He can’t exactly call to arrange for someone else to give him a lift. Once he cuts that wire, the odds of a press release going to every media outlet in the country with his picture go through the roof. At that point every person he passes poses a risk.
He should be wearing that collar around his neck. If you had a billion in the bank would you stick around for a trial that would likely land you in jail forever?
Pretty good up until number 4. If you want shipping containers go no further than Port Newark, where five or ten thousand get loaded on a single ship.
But in my reality number 3 is all he needs to achieve. Sunglasses and a baseball hat in the city of 8 million people will get you very far anonymously. Most people here are not glued to their TV and staring at pictures of a financial Fugitive. He may be a gigantic asshole but he’s not a mass murderer or even an escaped convict.
I think he could cut his ankle monitor and make it down the elevator to a waiting car before the FBI or Marshals could respond. Once he’s in the car he probably needs to make a switch to a different car before he leaves the city. From the city he just needs to make it to a marina in NJ, where he gets on a small boat that ron-day-vooses with a big boat 12.1 miles offshore.
Or he could go to a private airport and get on a Gulfstream. Probably boats are a bad idea. That gives pursuers a lot of time to make plans.
The big advantages in NY and DC especially are that he may be able to slip undetected into Russian diplomatic cover, and they smuggle him out of the country. Freedom of travel on the Eastern seaboard would bigly facilitate this.
That’s actually an interesting point. Does he even need to get out? There’s a Russian consulate in the upper east side, he could probably lay low there inevitably. It’s not like the authorities aren’t considering him a Russian agent, so what’s the diplomatic fallout going to be?
Hard to picture a Trump-style high roller like Manafort being happy as an Assange-style tenant in some other country’s consulate or embassy. He will want to get out of the country. Wherever he’s under house arrest now is inevitably nice than some rooms in the consulate.
How big is a diplomatic pouch? Is it like a real pouch, or is it more notional, and possibly as large as a shipping container?
Ah, the old spy-in-a-duffle-bag routine. Wikipedia says that yes, a literal shipping container can be a diplomatic pouch, so long as it contains documents and such of diplomatic importance.
He could be on a boat off Manhattan before most cops have put down their donuts. An hour in the trunk of a car and he could be anywhere within 50 miles encompassing >500 miles of coastline.
Tony Mockbel pulled it off. It wasn’t a simple matter of just going to a local marina. He had friends working on it for some months. They bought a good boat and shipped it across Australia before launching it on the west coast. Mockbel traveled separately and met the boat off shore. They would have used something like a zodiac, and departed from a beach.
Here’s another plan. I’d get someone to sneak me in the freight entrance of a luxury Condo building where an oligarch buddy owns an unused tax shelter unit and lay low in his apartment for several months till the heat is off. Then exit the country.
