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How to ask your lawyer hard questions and get real answers --

Take a moment to look at your problems from your lawyer’s point of view.  He has to assume that you will not do everything he tells you or won’t follow his instructions precisely.

Don’t assume he’s a crook just because he’s a lawyer.  Don’t ask him to handle it himself for you unless you’re talking a six figure retainer.  He has to assume that, even if you do it yourself and follow his instructions to the letter, you’re engaged in a “high risk” venture -- the saving of your ass and assets -- and even if you do everything “right” there is still the off chance that you’re ex-girlfriend will turn you in for the reward money.  He knows that if you are arrested or, if you’re a softie and merely questioned, you are going to be offered reduced time, or no time, for naming names.  The easiest name you’re going to remember is your lawyer’s.  Everybody loves to hate lawyers.  Clients and government agents alike.  Lawyers cannot give you up without a court order, which, if they’ve been paid well, they might just fight for the sport of it.  But you can give them up as soon as it becomes expedient for you.
We are only good enough to try to save your ass or clean up your shit but not good enough to be treated like a friend, and certainly not good enough to do extra time over for not giving us up.  So your lawyer does not want to hear about the $8-million you have in cash in the garage from drug sales. He does not want to hear about the fact that you’re skimming $500,000 a year from your vending machine route that you’re not paying tax on. The lawyer does not want to hear that you’re under indictment in three countries and are thinking of becoming a fugitive.  Do you really expect him to help you commit a half dozen felonies, even for $500 an hour?

Rule One:  You cannot tell your lawyer the truth if it involves criminality (unless you’re under arrest, but see below).  This puts the lawyer in a very awkward position.  You have either made him a party to your criminal endeavors or have asked him to violate every oath he has taken.  A lawyer cannot ethically help you commit a crime.  Period.  Lawyers of civilized countries may be crafty and clever, but they are not customarily garden variety crooks.  They do not want to become your partner in crime.  Lawyers in less civilized countries may be more amenable to manipulation for a fee, but choose carefully or they may end up with the lion’s share of your money.  However, the downside of not telling the truth is that you may well leave something out that is critical for your success.  Then you’ll be angry at your lawyer or consultant if things go bad for you.  When O. J. Simpson was accused of murdering his wife, everybody knows that F. Lee Bailey and Johnny Cochran, and a host of other lawyers, defended him.  But what is forgotten is that for a few brief moments, before he was arrested, he had another famous Hollywood lawyer -- Howard Weitzman.  I have always wondered to this day if O. J. didn’t run to Weitzman and tell him what he’d done and asked for his help.  Weitzman was perfectly capable of handling the defense team. But what he couldn’t overcome would have been O.J.’s admission of guilt.  What could he do ethically?  Except he could have told O. J. to never tell another soul, even his new lawyers, that he did it, and then pass him off to Johnny Cochran.  Cochran and Bailey are about the smartest lawyers going and there is no way they did not suspect the guilt of their client.  But if O. J. had told them he was guilty, they could never have put him on the stand.  Those are the rules.  In the end they did not, but it was not because they couldn’t have.  It was because they didn’t want the prosecution to have a field day.  Understand, this is all novelist conjecture on my part.  But keep in mind the basic rule --

Rule Two:  Use a disposable lawyer or consultant to find out how to deal with another lawyer.  Set up an appointment.  The story is you’re just Passing Through.  Use a pen name.  Pay cash for the consult.  Ask every damned question you want to.  Suggest every “what if” you can think of. Remember, it’s your cousin who needs help.  Ask for the exact laws your situation impacts on.  Ask about penalties if you get caught.  Ask about law enforcement tricks.  Anything.  If you’re real cautious, repeat this with another throw away lawyer.  Criminal defense lawyers don’t, as a rule, know much about tax matters and international structuring.  Tax lawyers are not criminal defense lawyers.  You may need to see one of each.  Then, proceed on to your final lawyer or PT consultant knowing what and what not to say.

Rule Three:  You cannot expect your lawyer to suggest a course of action  -- The Plan -- that has aspects of criminality to it.  Even if you have reasonable and legitimate defenses to charges of criminal intent, your lawyer is not getting paid enough, unless it’s at least $50,000, to put up with fallout from your situation if you get in a jam.  There is a lawyer of international repute who writes PT books on taxation.  The fellow’s name is Marshal Langer.  Late of the U.S., now reportedly living in Europe.  (Why, I wonder?  It’s the climate, stupid!  And I don’t mean weather.)  Anyway, Dr. Langer is a fabulously smart lawyer who knows every legal way to out-smart the government tax people.  He’s got a plan for everything.  They’re legal and they work.  Downside?  They’re usually expensive to plan and operate. And a lot of people with PT ambitions want less interaction with government, not more.  Would Marshal Langer ever tell a client, “Hell, George, just get a second passport in another name and bury the money in the Bank of England?”  No, readers, he would not.  That is illegal.  He wants to live to be old on his farm in Portugal.  Who can advise you of such a plan?  A decent PT consultant.  Or a lawyer writing about problems in general.  Often with language like, “I cannot advise this plan since it may be illegal in your country, but I know of persons who have been successful with it.”  This is code for “It works.  I’ve done it myself.  Go for it.”

Rule Four:  Listen carefully.  Your PT consultant may say something like, “I cannot assist you if you are actively involved in criminal activity."  By this he means terrorism, drug trafficking, or child pornography -- the Holy Trinity of law enforcement these days.  What is your lawyer or consultant telling you?  If you’re doing anything illegal, he doesn’t want to know. For the most part lawyers don’t care about tax problems.  But taxes can involve criminality and the lawyer doesn’t want to be an active party to your crime.  He knows what you're talking about when you say that you’ve got a problem and that your dad just died and he left a note that there was $500,000 in cash in the garage and you don’t want to ruffle any feathers. Does he have any ideas?  The lawyer may assume that you’re telling the truth.  Or he may figure you’ve got $5,000,000 in back yard and, depending on how high you are when you talk to him, or how many buttons are unbuttoned on your shirt, or how many gold chains around your neck, or how many tats running up your arms, that it may have come from drug sales.  The more you look like a drug dealer, the less anyone wants to help you.  And this is why you get caught.  If you walk the walk and talk the talk, then for goodnessakes take acting lessons.
Banks are requiring a copy of the passport details of a foreign customer. Lawyers and consultants are starting to do it also.  And lawyers or consultants often want a statement that the funds that you give to them to invest or use for you are not from illegal sources.  They are not required to do a lot of due diligence, but a minimal amount looks good if your plan goes south and the crew cuts end up in their offices ready to ruin their lives for the privilege of having known you.  Do you have to tell you lawyer or consultant the truth?  No!  It’s not a court room and God is not asking the questions.  What happens if you eventually get caught and you lied to your lawyer in furtherance of a crime?  Well, one, at least the lawyer is not looking at time.  For us, this is good.  As for you, you may face “obstruction” charges -- this either slightly enhances the sentence you’d get or would run concurrently with whatever sentence you get and it’s very hard to prove.  Long and short, if trouble gets that far, obstruction enhancements are not your real worry.  Do you have to send some private party who requests it a true and correct copy of your passport?  Think about it.  Can a xerox copy of one be altered, even to the point of putting another photo over your own and whiting out the name and adding a new one? Or a new number?  I’m not sure of the legalities of this in your particular country of citizenship, but if the lawyer or consultant says, “NOTE: COPY NEED NOT BE NOTARIZED” what do you think he’s telling you?  But do a decent job of it.  You don’t want to embarrass your consultant.  Then he's got a duty to dump you.

Rule Five:  Any information older than a few weeks is dated and may be useless.  The solution matrix for a PT has a lot of variables.  Lots of countries, thousands of laws.  The world is in constant flux.  I once knew a man who thought he needed to run from a low level federal felony.  He let a few of his friends know he was in trouble, one of whom was another attorney.  The attorney felt sorry for him and when one of her clients suddenly died, a client to whom she had been married and had all of his ID, she quietly passed the packet on to my friend.  She said the man had never had a U.S. passport and that the social security administration (whose number you have to put on the application) took at least six months to get caught up on death reports.  If he moved fast, he’d get the passport before the death was reported.  Well, within a week my friend got a new state I.D., dusted off the dead man’s social security card, got his birth certificate, and went to the post office to apply for a passport.  He had to age his hair and he put on a great imitation of an older man.  Or so he thought.  The passport agent had been trained to look for suspicious applicants, especially potential terrorists.  Well, as luck would have it, my friend’s passport application was marked for careful inspection.  That meant a call to the social security administration.  That’s when the passport office learned that my friend was dead.  A new law had been passed a few months earlier, unknown to the lawyer who gave him the documents, requiring all morticians to call a toll-free phone number within three days of death.  My friend was cagey, discovered that his passport application was in trouble since its express mail tracing number wouldn’t work and the 72 hour expedite was three days late, got another passport from another country using methods in the usual books, but had the misfortune of having a young U.S. State Department Special Agent assigned to tracking him down.  The agent had a career to build and spent nearly $2-million and one year hunting my friend. He was caught and did prison time in a federal camp.  (His parole is almost over and he’s leaving the country the minute he can.)  Current information is precious.  If you’re embarking on shark infested waters, getting the latest charts and weather updates is very important.  Choose your consultant carefully.

Rule Six:  Plans and decisions made in haste or panic are usually flawed.  Becoming a PT or expat should be a well crafted and well planned course of action.  Sometimes you are trying to escape from the fallout of your own life’s poor choices.  You’ve fouled the nest.  Fresh starts are in order.  A portable trade or occupation should be in place and clean of your past.  Funds should be secreted offshore in places that don’t lead directly to your past life.  At the very least this is a six month project if well orchestrated.  Maybe, if you’re a genius and lucky, it could be done in three.  I would suggest a year of careful planning and implementation to do it really right.  In an other scenario, you have behaved in a sober and law abiding manner your whole life, but you’re at last ready to throw off the shackles of serfdom.  Think who the Over Lord is -- a government who hates to lose its slaves.  A feudal Lord that can hear and see everything and has spies and storm troopers  everywhere.  The guard towers are manned and heavily armed and the orders are “Shoot to kill.”  A bulletproof escape plan is essential.  This is the information age -- information about your every thought, every dream.  You must operate at a Defcon One level of secrecy as you plan your escape.  Operate on a "need to know" basis.  You're at war.

Rule Seven:  Free is not necessarily cheap.  You can put together quite a nice kit from stuff you can order over the internet.  Actually, I could. I’m pretty sure you wouldn’t fare as well.  If you’re really lucky, your kit will be full of the right stuff and you won’t have over paid for it.  But that’s not usually the case.  For most persons, money for an independent consultant is well spent.  Either a consultant who represents no product and coaches your own efforts to put together a kit, or else someone who can broker most anything and can pick and choose products for your shopping cart that really work and are genuine and honestly priced.  Since I do this for a living, I usually know off the top of my head what any citizenship costs anywhere on earth and what it costs to open a bank or bank account in, say, Naurú.  I constantly keep up on the various programs and costs around the world.  I have a decent relationship with a number of honest providers.  I know who routinely charges an extra $1,000 or $10,000 for the same product someone else has.  I know who are the intermediaries and who are close to the source for products.  I’m not bragging.  It’s my job.  But I don’t fix my own car because I don’t have the experience or skill.  You may be better at that than I.  Just like I don’t have to take five years to learn how to fix my own car so long as I can find an honest mechanic, you don’t have to go through a very risky learning curve in order to secure your future if you go to the trouble of finding an honest and knowledgeable consultant.  What you would pay up front for a decent consultant, you could lose tenfold in an instant by bad decision making.  Or put another way, a good consultant can save you a lot of grief and expense on the road to freedom.