I'm pretty sure he's bullshitting. Even the Mossad couldn't track down every high-profile Nazi after the war, and often took years to find even the ones they did find.
Jobs paid cash and did not need I-9s with E-Verify. There was no TSA Secure Flight database query for every airline ticket. You could forge a passport without breaking RSA. Landlords didn’t insist on running your credit. Photos and surveillance footage only moved by hand and could only be searched manually. The license plate from a car on the freeway only hit a database if a patrolman read it with his eyes and spoke it into his radio. There were no audio, video, GPS, and RF devices in people’s pockets.
If you broke out of prison in the 60s, you might have actually started a new life. Almost no one makes it past the first year anymore.
Mail out gold to an intermediate destination or better yet use cryptocurrency. Buy a vehicle with cash and sneak across the border or be in a country that has open borders with another. Have a destination where you can live with cash for a while and use that time to acquire an identity. Don't log into any online account or call anyone from your old life. It is pretty straight forward but I bet most people would leave a million digital breadcrumbs. There are tons of places you could disappear to that nobody would notice or care who you were just get there with cash.
You also dont have to go far and dont need much cash. In Germany the last generation of the Red Army Faction is still on the run and from time to time makes it into the news for robbing a money courier. The other former members of RAF, RZ and co who were caught a few years ago lived rather ordinary lifes in the French countryside. Once you severed all ties to your former life and your looks changed over time you are good. Bulger was only caught after someone recognized him due to persistent media coverage and alerted the FBI.
Not quite. For the first few months after he went on the lam in late 1994 sure, but after that the old Winter Hill gang went to pieces as the indictments started raining down and he was pretty much dependent on the resources he himself had piled up before hitting the road. The whole point wad to avoid all contact with old friends. It was how it took the FBI until 2011 to catch him, this very lack of network contact.
There wasn't much interest in finding whitey until after all the people he could have told "interesting" (true) stories about had retired with their pensions.
I don't know, I'd rather not have people serving life sentences periodically spending up to a year on the lam and adding to their tally with little fear of repercussions. The high likelihood of being re-captured cuts both ways.
Back then they didn't have the technology and networks we do today.
Social media facial recognition is a game-changer for this kind of thing. You'd have to live as a hermit if you attempted to fake your death, because if you're in the background of a photo uploaded to the internet, game over.
FWIW, Frank Abagnale Jr (the guy depicted in the movie "Catch Me If You Can") was asked whether he thought it'd be harder for him to do what he did with technology as it is today.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vsMydMDi3rI
He suggested that technology makes it easier for the fraudster to come up with the right details, whereas he often had to bluff when he was defrauding people.
Not necessarily. It needs to be a photo depicting you clearly enough along with ideally other photos containing you, and the person has to be able to search by faces on that dataset.
I believe e.g. Facebook will try to automatically suggest tags for faces, but I don't think something like Twitter makes those recommendations.
Facebook'll do it for you. Create a profile, upload a few photos of the subject, and they may start alerting you that you've been tagged in others' photos.
Back then there was no lightning-fast international network other than horribly expensive international phone lines, no Internet, no tracking devices better known as cellphones, no national registries searchable in split-seconds. There were not many regulations on international transport as long as you had a decently forged passport. Additionally, there was a lot of support from e.g. church networks that helped out fleeing Nazis. Even the Mossad has its limits.
If you broke out of prison in the 60s, you might have actually started a new life. Almost no one makes it past the first year anymore.