In June 2008, facing a 20-year prison sentence for fraud, the American hedge fund manager Samuel Israel III parked his SUV on Bear Mountain Bridge, in upstate New York; scrawled “suicide is painless” in the dust on the hood; then leapt to his death in the Hudson River, 110 feet below. Except he didn’t: instead, he transferred to a campervan he’d arranged to have waiting nearby, and drove north to begin life again, under a new identity. But ‘pseudocide’ – the art of faking your own death – is harder than it looks. The authorities, having apparently not been fooled for a moment by his staged suicide, tracked Israel down in Massachusetts a month later. He remains incarcerated, his
