The choice of the name Thomas Randele has drawn its own speculation. Investigators believe the first name Thomas was at least partly chosen in honor of Thomas Crown. The last name Randele does not carry an obvious meaning in available reporting.
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## The Golf Pro Years
In the early 1970s, Thomas Randele—who had grown up in Lakewood, Ohio, with whatever access to golf a working-class suburb offered—established himself in suburban Boston as an assistant golf professional at a country club. Over time he became the club’s manager. He worked in golf for years. His Wikipedia entry names Pembroke Country Club as the institution where he worked; other reporting confirms the golf career in general terms without always naming the specific club.
Golf is not an obvious career for a fugitive. It is a public profession. You deal with club members, you know their faces and they know yours, you organize tournaments, you manage staff. If you are hiding, a position in golf—where your name appears on the club roster, where your employer has your Social Security information, where your customers are often prosperous people with the kind of social networks that produce unexpected connections—is not the obvious choice.
But Conrad may have understood something about how hiding actually works. The risk of discovery, over the long term, comes less from the nature of your profession than from the quality of your documentation and the plausibility of your story. If your Social Security number is valid, if your credit history is clean, if you present as an ordinary person with an ordinary background—if you are, in short, forgettable in all the right ways—then the specific profession matters less than the consistency of the performance.