He gave his name as Thomas Randele. He listed his birth year as 1947, making himself two years older than he actually was. He gave information consistent with a real identity except for the name and the birth year—the same parents’ first names, the same rough background, a version of his own history that was close enough to remember but different enough to constitute a new person in the official record.
The application, investigators would later say, raised no red flags. The Social Security Administration in 1970 did not have the cross-referencing systems that might have flagged the discrepancy between a birth record and a new application. There was no database of fugitives against which new Social Security applications were automatically checked. A young man presenting himself and asking for a number received one.
With a Social Security number in the name of Thomas Randele, Conrad could build the rest of the infrastructure of ordinary American life. He could open a bank account. He could apply for a driver’s license. He could build credit. He could, in time, become Thomas Randele as thoroughly as it was possible to become someone you had invented.
The choice of Boston was not, investigators later suggested, entirely accidental. Lynnfield, the Boston suburb where he would eventually settle, was near the locations where The Thomas Crown Affair had been filmed. Whether Conrad chose the Boston area because of the film’s geography or whether this was coincidental—whether Thomas Crown was an inspiration or merely an idol—is one of those questions that cannot be answered from outside. Peter Elliott, the U.S. Marshal who eventually closed the case, said simply: “He modeled his whole life after the movie.”