The Escape Artist

If you read his IMDB profile, you see a successful actor-a guy whose face you've seen in TV shows, mostly the bad guy. So what. The backstory of Ian Jarvis. A nice Jewish boy from New Jersey quits Georgetown University in his junior year and crosses the country in a Chevy truck. He does some plum work as a drug dealer, escapes half a dozen FBI agents at an airport, and spends the next eight years on the run, a federal fugitive in Paris, London, Ibiza, Corsica, and Morocco. His adventures in this fascinating memoir are breathtaking, dangerous, and inspiring. He hangs out with Carl Bernstein, Robert F. Kennedy, Walter Chrysler, Chet Baker, and Amanda Rothschild, lives in Paris for 3 years with two call girls and works for the King of Morocco. Closing in on thirty, however, he decides to return to the US, face the mess he left behind, and find a way back to the rails of the American dream. Two years later, Ian is selling Playboy shoes (really. ) in Michigan when his nine-year-old daughter, two grades behind in her schooling, comes to live with him. To create the stability she's never known, Ian leverages a fake resume and fluent French to talk his way into his first serious job: an entry-level salesperson at Saint-Gobain in New York. He's named Vice President of the American division a mere eighteen months later and goes on to a highly successful career in the cosmetics industry. After selling his own company and seeing his daughter off to college, Ian reinvents himself as a high-level executive consultant, writer, actor, and radio host. That's another story.