Fugitive Martin Frankel, 44, a.k.a. Michael King, a.k.a. David Rosse, a.k.a. Eric Stevens, the financier who is accused of embezzling more than $200 million from a slew of insurance companies, and his traveling companion, Cindy Allison, 35, a.k.a. Susan Kelley, lounged in their Hotel Prem suite. They were watching the movie Patch Adams. For the fifth time.
It was just another Saturday night on the lam for Frankel and Allison, who for nearly two months had been shacked up here on the banks of Lake Alster in Hamburg, Germany. They had just pushed aside the remains of room-service dinners, the halibut lingering on trays in the suite's living room. On the floor next to Frankel's bed was a black suitcase that contained nearly $2 million in diamonds and about $250,000 in U.S. currency. The case never left his side.
"Then there was this noise, a little jiggle at the door," Allison told TIME in an exclusive interview, "and Marty turned to me and said, 'Do you think they're coming to get me?' and I said, 'No, don't be ridiculous.'"
She was wrong. Two German detectives burst into the room with guns drawn. From behind the protection of a bullet-proof Plexiglas shield, they announced in halting English that they were seeking two Americans. For some reason, they began to aggressively question Allison instead of Frankel, accusing her of using a false passport. Then Frankel looked up at a tall, blond detective and said, "I'm the one you're looking for."
Throughout the summer and into the fall, law-enforcement authorities in more than 115 countries had been looking for Frankel. The 6-ft., 135-lb., mousy-haired, bespectacled, bumbling, barred-for-life stockbroker had been transformed by the tabloid press into a sort of postmodern James Bond villain--one part Goldfinger, one part Woody Allen. He had eluded authorities for four months while traveling with a retinue of women, as rumors spread of his living large while lying low. Law-enforcement officials at first suspected that he was in Israel, then Brazil, and finally admitted they had no idea where he was.
Yet according to Allison, Frankel lived quite openly throughout much of his winding journey. He had gone from his Greenwich, Conn., mansion, where police found smoldering file cabinets and incriminating documents (item No. 1 on his to-do list: launder money), to a White Plains, N.Y., airfield, where a private jet flew him and two women, Mona Kim and Jackie Ju, to Rome, along with 25 suitcases and that stash of diamonds. Then he jaunted through Italy and Germany in chauffeured limousines, steadfastly maintaining to whoever would listen that his case was a misunderstanding that would blow over.
"I thought it was tax evasion or something like that," says Allison, back in the New York City area. "I didn't know what he had done. I used to ask him how much was missing, and he would say he didn't know."