Missing FG

[Supercub]

I've been following his story pretty closely, and it is pretty fascinating. First, I think it's important to remember that running away is not a crime, and the police always need to weigh a family's need to know with an adult's inherent right to privacy. Put simply, the more likely a runaway scenario appears, the less likely the police will be to reveal information to the family beyond the basic conclusion that the missing person left of his own volition. Once Mr. Dart did not appear in a hospital, jail, or morgue, the chance of it being anything other than a runaway became slim. We can only hope that the police did their due diligence (realize this is not allows a safe assumption in JPN), and they found evidence that further pointed toward the runaway scenario. Due to privacy concerns, they may not have divulged much specific info to the family, because again, running away in itself is not a crime. The police's job is to determine an absence of foul play and a reasonable assumption that the missing person is mentally competent.

I think he ran away. The most obvious and most likely explanation is usually the right one, and I've seen no evidence to suggest he was somehow the victim of some elaborate ploy. Maybe he has a girlfriend. Maybe he just got sick of it all. Who knows. It's pretty fascinating and freaky to consider why someone would leave so much, so suddenly and cruelly.

I give his family a pass on their possible mishandling of the situation. I'm speculating that they came to underatand that he ran away a week or two after his disapperance and didn't feel capable of publizing that fact. They wanted to leave it to the police to handle, so that maybe their heartbreak wouldn't be compunded by the humiliation of having to broadcast that this man abandoned his family. That's pretty understandable. I can't imagine how difficult and hurtful this would be.

I don't give his friends that same pass. This has become such a shitstorm, because a group of people started posting info about his disappearance all over the Internet. I don't know if they consulted with Dart's wife about doing this, or what, but it was this effort to "help" that created this extra level of humiliation and scandal. If they had just let the police handle the situation, then it could have been easier on the family. This relates to the friends' constant refrain, "he could never do that..." Of course he could do that, and he probably did. Any person is capable of doing something that is incredibly shitty. Any person can be fucking awful in the right circumstances.

[Samurai_Jerk]

I'm with wagyl on this (and by extension, I'm a piece of shit, too). The individual completely fucked his family over. There is no reason it's the insurance company's job to make up for that. It's not fuckover insurance, it's life insurance. If you want fuckover insurance, you'd need to pay more. A hell of a lot more. Try to get an insurance policy that legitimately covers the policyholder for the family breadwinner abandoning his family. You can definitely get a specialist insurance shop to write you such a policy, and they're probably going to charge you close to 100% of the payout value up front, because anybody looking for such protection is pretty much guaranteed to go missing right away.

If you told people in Japan "if your husband goes missing and stays missing long enough, you're entitled to the life insurance payout and can keep it when he comes home", I think we'd end up with half the salarymen taking an extended vacation. Seriously. Imagine if the insurance company does NOT sue to recover the payout. What message does that send? How many of their policyholders will suddenly go missing? The answer is: a hell of a lot.

I wouldn't want my life insurance premiums pooled with people entitled to fuckover pay.. it would raise my premiums immensely.

Again. The family did nothing wrong. The guy was declared dead. If anything, you can argue the insurance company fucked up by not doing their due diligence. Anyone who defends the insurance company in this case is morally bankrupt.

[Kegsy]

This is from the author of the Times article (on the FVJ)

Everything important that I have been able to confirm is in the article. Of course, there is much that remains unexplained, but about that one can only speculate. One thing that may not be clear is that the police concluded that there was no crime to be investigated early on, and shared their conclusions with the appropriate people. The new information in this article is not something that has just been announced by the police. I found out about it, and when I put it to them, the police confirmed it.


So from that it would suggest that it didn't take 9 weeks for the police to learn this. It took 9 weeks for the journalists to learn it which is a big difference.

[Kegsy]

As for the comment RE the yakuza taking him, there was a comment on the FVJ about that and it was promptly removed.

[Kegsy]

I don't give his friends that same pass. This has become such a shitstorm, because a group of people started posting info about his disappearance all over the Internet. I don't know if they consulted with Dart's wife about doing this, or what, but it was this effort to "help" that created this extra level of humiliation and scandal.

His wife reported him missing to the police. Don't you think it's normal for friends to want to help?

[omae mona]

Again. The family did nothing wrong. The guy was declared dead. If anything, you can argue the insurance company fucked up by not doing their due diligence. Anyone who defends the insurance company in this case is morally bankrupt.

Poor family. It's awful (and I am not being sarcastic). The father fucked them over. But again, the fact that the family did nothing wrong does not mean they're entitled to a boatload of life insurance money payout for a guy who's not dead. That money belongs to other people. Taking it away from other people actually affects them. It's morally bankrupt to believe that other people - who have nothing to do with that family - should be forced to pay for that guy's fraud.

[Screwed-down Hairdo]

Don't you think it's normal for friends to want to help?

It was admirable...and I hope they help his missus and kids, too.

[wagyl]

As for the comment RE the yakuza taking him, there was a comment on the FVJ about that and it was promptly removed.

Thank you for that confirmation. In this current world of readers easily able to go back to the sources, it would be better if journalists recorded that their quotes were no longer in existence at time of going to press. Otherwise, it can look like a made up quote. But then you get stuff like the Daily Fail article, which is a print out of Faecesbook anyway...

[Kegsy]

The Fail article is a copy of what was on Facebook plus they stole a few comments underneath. What was on Facebook though, was what Richard Lloyd Parry had submitted for the Times.
I don't know what the rules are, but if any of us had so blatantly copied another piece like that when we were at school/uni we'd have probably been in a spot of bother.

[wagyl]

I'm with wagyl on this (and by extension, I'm a piece of shit, too). The individual completely fucked his family over. There is no reason it's the insurance company's job to make up for that. It's not fuckover insurance, it's life insurance. If you want fuckover insurance, you'd need to pay more. A hell of a lot more. Try to get an insurance policy that legitimately covers the policyholder for the family breadwinner abandoning his family. You can definitely get a specialist insurance shop to write you such a policy, and they're probably going to charge you close to 100% of the payout value up front, because anybody looking for such protection is pretty much guaranteed to go missing right away.

If you told people in Japan "if your husband goes missing and stays missing long enough, you're entitled to the life insurance payout and can keep it when he comes home", I think we'd end up with half the salarymen taking an extended vacation. Seriously. Imagine if the insurance company does NOT sue to recover the payout. What message does that send? How many of their policyholders will suddenly go missing? The answer is: a hell of a lot.

I wouldn't want my life insurance premiums pooled with people entitled to fuckover pay.. it would raise my premiums immensely.

Again. The family did nothing wrong. The guy was declared dead. If anything, you can argue the insurance company fucked up by not doing their due diligence. Anyone who defends the insurance company in this case is morally bankrupt.

I'm pretty sure that neither of us will be changing our positions on this, which is fine by me, but this conversation is an interesting one. Maybe you are proposing that an Insurance company can withhold paying out where a guy goes missing, because he might turn up in 16 years time? Due Diligence is not complete. There is still woodwork to potentially flush him out of. I would question the morals of that insurance company.

Insurance, all insurance, is no more than gambling. You are betting that you will be unlucky, the insurance company is betting that you will be lucky. Insurance is already a mugs game, because it is much easier to fake that you have been unlucky when you are in truth lucky, than the other way around. There are the costs of running their offices. Added to that, insurance is in the business of selling confidence, so they have the expense of maintaining impressive, substantial offices, because no one buys insurance from a tin shack. All of these reasons add up to say that if you are able to bear your own risk and are not inordinately unlucky, it is probably better to avoid insurance companies where you can. Sometimes you can't, like when you have a loan on property, and sometimes it is much more polite to do so, like when your errors will impact other people, when you run them over or into their building and you wouldn't have the assets to pay them out.

That said, insurance is a business which has built up standards and expectations, with a long history of court battles and judicial decisions about what their contracts cover, and what their contracts do not cover. Insurers regularly cross-insure each other over potentially massive claims. Now, if insurance was such a morally bankrupt industry, surely those within the industry itself would not enter into contracts with others in the industry.

And then there is life insurance. Not only is this a gamble, but it is also a gift. You are not around to benefit from your lack of luck, you give that to the beneficiaries. The person who paid the premiums is not the person who is paid. Now, I thought it was a long shot, but I went to see if this Liberty Life Insurance had public information which might explain why they were seeking recovery from the family (not that I find it surprising in the least). It turns out, Liberty Life Insurance, if it in fact exists, has zero web presence. There is Liberty Life Assurance of Boston, the most likely candidate. With this slackness, can we rely on the newspaper report of "suing the family" which I suppose must be shorthand for suing the individual members of the family, and once again I suppose does not include the father? The language is too loose to have a firm foundation upon which to pontificate as we are doing here. The news report does make it clear that the family's beef is with the father, not with the insurance company, which is only regarded as an added frustration.

So being brave and taking on board all of the various assumptions that this report is accurate in all details, why might the insurance company take action against the family? Even in litigious society USA, unlike the coffee drinking MacDonalds customers with their negligence claims, Insurance is a contractual relationship so there are not sky high awards. Insurance companies know the limits of what they might be able to get in a court judgment and know the benefit of settlement out of court, and don't go around suing for the heck of it. I think the insurance company may be limited to attempting to recover payment from those they paid out to, and it is for the family to join the father in the court case. Or else they have made the decision based on the fact that the father has no assets so any judgment against him would be a hollow victory. I agree that it is a sucky situation which will satisfy nobody, but nowhere am I seeing that this is at all unexpected. You are free to avoid insurance companies if you do not like the industry as a whole. I wish you good luck. Interestingly, the insurance companies wish you good luck too.


Just one more thing. I still can't work out why the fuck the "missing father returned from the dead" story is news, anyway. My life would be none the poorer for not having the information. I suspect it was the titillating hook of "turns up in a gay relationship in Palm Springs" which got this into the papers.

[Supercub]

Don't you think it's normal for friends to want to help?

It was admirable...and I hope they help his missus and kids, too.

It may have been admirable on some levels, but it was also ill-advised. I never understood under what scenario publicizing his disappearance in almost exclusively non-Japanese websites would facilitate his discovery. Would some gaijin walking down the street in Harajuku see Dart and say, "Hey, you're the guy everybody is looking for! You should really call you wife." The most obvious and likely explanation was always that he ran, but his friends could not accept that explanation, I guess. Remember, Dart's wife made that announcement that basically thanked people for their concern but wanted to leave it to the police to handle. I believe that was after the story had been published in major Brit publications. So much for some privacy.

I think his friends are in the events planning business or PR whatever, and they treated this like another promotion. The more pub, the better. Well, maybe not.

Sometimes discretion is the better part of valor.

[matsuki]

Ehhh, the dude was too public to avoid speculation as soon it was reported that he went missing. After the wife chimed in about holding off on poster and such, it was too late to stop the speculation (actually, it fueled the "he's a runner" idea) Anyhow, just saying it's a bit of a reach to place blame on his friends who were acting with limited info and with a genuine desire to help.


As to what's going on...I find it hard to imagine there is foul play involved. If he was in fear for his life or whatever, how would any father would leave his family behind? (or even avoid contacting his wife??) He's British...if he was in fear, the logical reaction would be escape with the family to the UK, no? The amount he withdrew is interesting...but if it's less than what his stake in the company is, I doubt we'll see any embezzlement charges. Sucks to say but even with such a clean and generous background, I'd still place my bet on him doing a runner, maybe with a new lover or maybe to start life over again in yet another foreign country.

[Kegsy]

That's one hell of a wrong assumption.

Garin was one of the founding members of the Foreign Volunteers Japan, the vast majority of members on there are people who got involved either directly or indirectly with helping the victims of the March 11 earthquake and tsunami. When it was announced that Garin was missing, don't you think it's only natural that these people wanted to help to find him. They wanted to do a poster campaign in Roppongi, handing out leaflets in the area that he was last seen. Much like Lucie Blackman's father did. They were asked not to by the family, and although many questioned it, they didn't go ahead with their campaign.

This was nothing about a campaign from a business point of view. This was about looking for someone that they assumed had been a victim of foul play. Whilst those who didn't know him have claimed that it was obvious that he'd run away, for most of those who knew him that was the least likely outcome. And as such, it's natural that they would look. They didn't because the family requested they didn't. But they kept talking about it as did everyone who knew him who was looking for answers.

And I fail to see what's wrong with that.

[Supercub]

Well it didn't work out very well, did it? I don't understand the foul play thing. If he's the victim of foul play, he's dead or in hospital. Publicity is largely irrelevant. This wasn't a child kidnapping.

I get that people just wanted to help, but they really didn't help at all. They turned a terrible situation into an international story. When grown men disappear, it's probably best not to post all over the Internet about it. How is publicity likely to help?

That's just my take on it.

[Kegsy]

So your take is that every time an adult male goes missing, then nobody should bother to look for them? Just the immediate family, in case they've done a runner. Afterall, foul play never happens to grown adult males does it.

If you went missing for a couple of days, are we to assume that no-one would be bothered by your absence?

And just remember that his friends didn't actually do anything, except worry about it.

[legion]

Who is looking after his wife and kid(s)?

With the new immigration rules she has zero chance of taking them to the UK, so I hope she has a strong family network here.

[TennoChinko]

So, where's Garin Dart hiding out?

Here are my six picks:

Valencia, Comunidad Valenciana, Spain
Central District, Hong Kong
Mumbai, Maharashtra, India
Dingley, Victoria, Australia
Makati, Manila, Philippines

and this one says he is still in Japan:

Nakanoshima, Nagasaki, Japan

[Supercub]

So your take is that every time an adult male goes missing, then nobody should bother to look for them? Just the immediate family, in case they've done a runner. Afterall, foul play never happens to grown adult males does it.

If you went missing for a couple of days, are we to assume that no-one would be bothered by your absence?

And just remember that his friends didn't actually do anything, except worry about it.

The police were looking for him, and that's actually their job. It sounds likely they figured him for a runner pretty quickly and informed his family of that conclusion.

About a week after his disappearance, a number of people who claimed to know him launched a concerted effort to broadcast his disappearance in a variety of Internet sites and twitter. As best I can tell, they did this without consulting his wife or the authorities. All kinds of speculation erupted and little bits of innuendo and rumor swirled. The western media picked up the story and a flurry of articles came out making this relatively unknown case an international story.

This shitstorm began when some well-intentioned people showed a significant lack of discretion and judgement. It's not that big of a deal, but it should serve as a cautionary tale about the power of social networking and all that.

[yanpa]

It's not that big of a deal, but it should serve as a cautionary tale about the power of social networking and all that.

Maybe Michael Q. Todd could do a seminar about it?

[Taro Toporific]

So, where's Garin Dart hiding out?
Here are my six picks:...
Makati, Manila, Philippines
...

I'd go to Baguio, Philippines were the weather is better/cooler and the availability to sophisticated fake IDs and passports is good.
Transit to 3rd countries where border controls are "flexible" is also ideal in the Philippines.

[Supercub]

And again, I don't understand how fears of foul play would recommend publicizing his disappearance. People generally report corpses regardless of having seen the person on a missing poster. Hospitals tend to contact the authorities about a John Doe who shows up with traumatic injuries.

[Russell]

So, where's Garin Dart hiding out?

Here are my six picks:

Valencia, Comunidad Valenciana, Spain
Central District, Hong Kong
Mumbai, Maharashtra, India
Dingley, Victoria, Australia
Makati, Manila, Philippines

and this one says he is still in Japan:

Nakanoshima, Nagasaki, Japan

Maybe he is in some airport in Russia?

[omae mona]

Supercub, I don't disagree with you that the publicity was never likely to be helpful in the first place. But I am not quite following what harm you believe was done. The "shitstorm" seems, to me, to have had at least a few positive effects. Probably made the friends feel less helpless. Helped struggling newspapers sell. And kept me entertained. Why not shit up a storm?

[wagyl]

Why not shit up a storm?

Spoken like a true, self-confessed piece of shit.

[Coligny]

. Why not shit up a storm?

Which one of you pervert put a webcam in my loo...

[matsuki]

. Why not shit up a storm?

Which one of you pervert put a webcam in my loo...

Is it German sheister week again?

Oh...and my bet is he is no longer in Japan based on everything in that article. Plenty of cameras at the airport could confirm him leaving the cuntry willingly and would make sense as the police have said embezzlement is a possibility. I have to agree with Taro...if the dude did any kind of research, he's now living with a new identity somewhere in SE Asia. I still think it's with a new lover too...doesn't make sense to ditch the wifey, kids, work, company AND the rest of your family without some pretty major motivating factor. He obviously didn't take enough money for that to be it so...

[Supercub]

I enjoyed the shitstorm quite a bit too, but I feel sorry for his family who presumably would have preferred this story had a much shorter reach.

[Coligny]

If the newborn need a foster family and is not allergic to cats, i still have an empty bedroom...bit dusty, but ready to go anytime....

[canman]

Maybe the "shitstorm" Supercub is talking about, is with all the additional publicity, including the western media, when it was learned that the guy did a "runner" it made him look like an even bigger loser! If the facts were only known by a small handful of family and friends, that is one thing. But now, countless people know his name and how he abandoned his young family for parts unknown.

[omae mona]

Maybe the "shitstorm" Supercub is talking about, is with all the additional publicity, including the western media, when it was learned that the guy did a "runner" it made him look like an even bigger loser! If the facts were only known by a small handful of family and friends, that is one thing. But now, countless people know his name and how we abandoned his young family for parts unknown.

Ah, thanks canman. I was a bit oblivious to that point. But still, if embarrassment is the biggest problem that family is facing, then maybe life is not so bad for them after all. Personally I have a hunch there are a lot more pressing concerns for them though (e.g. financial, the effective loss of a family member, etc.).