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Luigi didn't even need to go to Canada - he could have gone straight to LaGuardia and hopped on a plane (well, LGA is quickest with public transit or a cab from the shooting), but he didn't have a network abroad or a place to hide, and being a gringo with little money and a crippling back injury is not a pleasant life in the sort of countries peripheral enough to hide in. If he was healthy and had planned ahead, he could have spent the rest of his life off the grid in some distant surfer town (South America, if you're feeling ballsy, but the really secure move would be to fly Newark-Johannesburg and then get to Madagascar. Great place to disappear forever if you like surfing and don't ever want to go near cell service). I don't see many shooters other than him having the mental stability and executive function to pull that off, though. Tyler Robinson definitely couldn't have.
is he supposed to live the rest of his life off of cash pre-dropped in secure locations in Madagascar? Otherwise he'd get caught as soon as he tried to use an ATM, no?
If he'd put some advance work in with crypto and some basic mixing he'd probably have been fine to get a couple years worth of Madagascar living expenses together and largely untraceable.
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You don't need a bank account in rural Madagascar. You won't even find a bank. What you would do is, if you were prepared, go up to Antananarivo occasionally and trade crypto for cash, but realistically you wouldn't need to do that much - a competent white guy can find a way to support himself at a subsistence level, which is all that is really available there. I knew of one surfer hippy who ended up being elected chief of the village he lived in, it's very rare but it happens.
I doubt that any of this would work if you were wanted for a major crime. A substantial reward would be posted for someone like Luigi Mangione and if he had contact with people in Madagascar someone would almost certainly recognize him.
I think that if the US authorities make your capture a priority, there are only two ways to evade arrest: First, if you are given sanctuary by a country that hates the US and doesn't care about making those relations worse; and second, if you truly go off the grid in the sense of living alone in the woods without any contact with others.
As far as the first goes, it's hit-or-miss and you are always at risk that your host country will decide to use you as a bargaining chip. As far as the second goes, if you are going to choose this route, there's no point in leaving the United States since there is plenty of remote land here and why chance the scrutiny of an international border crossing? In any event, living the rest of your life as a hermit in a cabin in the woods would be pretty miserable for most people. In fact, I think a lot of people would prefer a life sentence in prison.
I'm not sure that if he leaves the country, they find out he did it, at least not for a lot longer than what happened. But yes, you would want the authorities to lose your trail quickly before you get to the next country. The ideal thing for someone like Luigi is probably to have a few political sympathizers ready to pick you up, hide you, and move you. This guy is obviously way lower-profile than Luigi, but the same idea: how would anyone in rural Wales know about the FBI Most Wanted list or the reward for him?
(I think the other reason people don't do this is that it takes a very specific type of personality to truly disappear off the grid like that, and those people generally drop out of society well before killing anybody, it's more pleasant than being a literal woodlands hermit but still not suited to the vast, vast majority of people.)
I think that's easier said that done. A huge percentage of people are some combination of lazy, incompetent, and cowardly and would flake / screw things up.
Through the internet, I guess. A certain percentage of people have a lot of time on their hands. And a certain percentage of people are very good at recognizing faces. An American who shows up and starts living in a small town in some other country is going to arouse some level of suspicion.
Sure, but, at the same time, people have managed to do that part successfully many, many times. Particularly in countries with barely-functioning law enforcement like South Africa (or, apparently, the Bay Area). It doesn't mean it's foolproof, and the number of networks capable of pulling that off for political purposes rather than organized crime (who move people around for various illegal purposes and get away with it all the time) has thankfully greatly decreased, but it's not impossible.
Oddly enough the articles I can find on Daniel San Diego's arrest, even newer ones, have exactly zero details of how the authorities found him, which makes me guess they picked him up with some Edward Snowden stuff. Could be wrong and they're just refusing to give details though.
Yeah, but you also underestimate just how backwards some parts of the world are, and how often you find random mzungus who've settled down there. I'm talking regions of people who barely know that the internet exists, if they even do. That does shrink over time, it may be gone in a couple decades, but for now there are still places you can go. The danger would be that if you got tracked to the country or general region, it would presumably cause an old-media sensation there and get into local rumour mills that there's an American murderer on the loose.
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