When their parents ripped two young sisters from their privileged lives, gave them fake names, and took them on the lam, they thought it was because their father was in trouble with the IRS. It would be years before they learned the truth about his life of crime. 

By Barry Meier

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The Boxes

Erin McCann raced along the Pennsylvania Turnpike at seventy-five miles per hour, desperate to reach her mother’s house before it was too late. Erin, a lawyer, had left Philadelphia soon after the call came, and as she drove past the farms of Pennsylvania Dutch country, she could still hear her mother’s voice: “They’re out there. I’m done.”

Erin’s mother, Leah, had called to tell her a secret. Years earlier, she had hidden away two boxes filled with government documents connected to a series of extraordinary crimes. She told Erin that she couldn’t bear to keep the records any longer, so they were now at the curb with the trash. Erin, who had not been aware that the documents existed, asked her mother to bring them back inside. Leah refused. Now Erin’s only hope of learning the truth about the events that had shattered her childhood was getting the boxes before the garbage collectors did.

Back in 1984, when Erin was 13, her life seemed perfect. Her father, John H. McCann III, was successful, charming, and funny. Leah was beautiful and elegant. Erin and her younger sister, Meredith, who was ten, lived in a Tudor-style mansion in Fox Chapel, a wealthy suburb of Pittsburgh. The family had two golden retrievers, Ginger and Nutmeg, and Erin took riding lessons on a horse named Super Pony. There was a swimming pool in their backyard, along with a zip line, a tree house, and a playhouse from FAO Schwarz that looked like a log cabin.

Then, one September morning, the doorbell rang. When Meredith opened the front door, two men in suits asked if her parents were home. Her father was away on a business trip, but Leah came downstairs and told the men that she would be right back to speak with them after dropping Meredith at school.

By the time Erin and Meredith got home that afternoon, their mother had left town. They weren’t worried; she often went to Florida, leaving them with Julie, their favorite sitter. Over the next few days, Julie took the girls to Baskin-Robbins—Erin would later recall ordering mint chocolate chip, while Meredith got pink bubble gum. Whenever the pay phone outside the ice cream shop rang, Julie picked it up and handed the girls the receiver. Their mother was on the line. Leah said she was in Fort Lauderdale, decorating a new condo their father had bought.

After about two weeks, Julie told Erin and Meredith that they would be flying to Detroit for the weekend. Their mother was already there, she said, visiting her younger sister, Sally. The girls liked Sally and her husband, Steve Hagerman. Steve roughhoused with his nieces and gave them presents from the small chain of running-shoe stores he owned in the Detroit suburbs. Julie hauled several suitcases filled with Leah’s clothing to the airport, along with goodie bags of stickers and candy for Erin and Meredith. As she hugged the girls, she seemed confused. “It was like [she was] saying goodbye,” Erin recalled, “but we were like, ‘See you Sunday.’ ”

Sally was waiting for her nieces at the Detroit airport. Instead of driving home, she crossed the U.S. border into Windsor, Ontario, and parked outside a motel. She took Erin and Meredith to a room. Their mother was inside.

Leah told her daughters that they wouldn’t be going back to Fox Chapel—not after the weekend, not ever—because the government had accused their father of not paying his taxes. It wasn’t true, Leah insisted. Still, with federal agents searching for John, the family had to leave. They would all disappear and start a new life elsewhere, under new names. Leah told her daughters that they would never see their friends again. They couldn’t even call them to say goodbye.

Erin and Meredith cried and begged to stay behind—they said they would live with neighbors, with their grandparents, with anyone. Their mother was unmoved. She made it clear that, from now on, they needed to do exactly as they were told.

The McCanns vanished, as did Sally and Steve. It wasn’t that hard; they were living in the golden age of fugitives. Passports were easy to counterfeit, hotels and airlines took cash, and there weren’t cell phones or personal computers that authorities could track.

For a year and a half, Erin and Meredith hopscotched around the world with their parents. Their hideouts included a villa on Majorca, first-class hotels in London, and a remote ranch in British Columbia. Meredith, who had her father’s dark features, went by the names Alexandra Gregor, Alison McCarthy, and Rachel Mercer. Erin, who was blond like her mother, attended an elite British boarding school as Christine Jordan, an alias chosen by her father in tribute to Jordan Almonds, the candy. The girls told made-up stories to their new friends about who they were and where they were from. Then one day they would wake up to learn that they had to disappear again.

Their time on the run ended in heartbreak, and Erin and Meredith felt the reverberations through adolescence and into adulthood. For years they asked their mother to tell them everything she knew about the events that had turned their family into fugitives. Leah refused, and eventually they stopped asking.

Now Erin finally had a chance to get answers. She took the exit for York, the small city a hundred miles west of Philadelphia where her mother had grown up, and where she had taken her daughters after their lives came crashing down. When Erin turned onto Hillock Lane, she glimpsed the ranch house where she had spent her senior year in high school. The boxes of government files had been there in the basement, right under her feet.

Slowing down her car, Erin scanned the curb. There, alongside trash cans awaiting pickup, she glimpsed the outlines of two battered banker’s boxes.

Boom Times

Growing up, Erin loved hearing her mother tell the story of how she met John. She was on summer break from college, working at a luncheonette in Ocean City, New Jersey, when he walked in, ordered a Coke, and left her a huge tip. After that, Leah said, he swept her off her feet.

John spent his summer evenings collecting cover charges outside two popular clubs, Bay Shores and the Dunes, that his father owned around the coastal town of Somers Point, just across a causeway from Ocean City. John was raised in Philadelphia. He was an intelligent kid but had struggled to concentrate in school. His father, a former bootlegger, did not hesitate to hit John and told him he would end up driving a truck. After John failed all his classes one year in high school, his frustrated mother sent him to a military academy in Florida.

In Somers Point, John earned the nickname Cash because of all the money he collected at his father’s clubs. He used his income to reinvent himself. He started going by John H. McCann III, which he thought sounded more impressive than his given name, John H. McCann Jr., and dressed the part: He slicked back his wavy black hair, bought monogrammed shirts, and wore a ring engraved with his family’s crest. He drove a white Austin-Healey sports car and purchased expensive suits at a shop across the street from Princeton University. He told girls that he was a student there, even though he really attended Rider College eight miles down the road.

John liked to shower girlfriends with extravagant gifts. Before meeting Leah, he fell in love with a young woman named Susan. When she told him that she was flying to London on vacation, he purchased her a ticket to travel instead on the SS France, a luxury ocean liner. “He was a meticulous dresser. He knew about Hermès, Tiffany, and all of that,” Susan said in an interview. “He was a big-time spender.” John proposed to Susan, but she said no. She didn’t trust him, and she suspected that he was stealing money from his father.

When John and Leah became engaged, the newspaper announcement described him as a student at Stetson Law School who had earned a graduate degree from Princeton, where he was Phi Beta Kappa. Leah knew John hadn’t attended Princeton and had just flunked out of Villanova Law School, but these were the first of many lies she let slide. Along with his love, John offered Leah something she had always dreamed of: a lavish lifestyle.

As a child in York, Leah had felt embarrassed by her family’s economic situation. Her friends’ mothers were all housewives, but her mom had to work because her father didn’t earn much money doing radio and TV repair. Soon after meeting Leah, John romanced his future in-laws by sending them a new refrigerator and other appliances.

After getting married, John and Leah attended a small law school in Baltimore together, and for a few years afterward, John worked for a condominium developer. Then he decided to try politics. During a 1971 parade in Somers Point, where the couple had made their home, John and Leah sat perched on the back of a convertible waving to onlookers, with Erin, then an infant, on her mother’s lap. A banner affixed to the car read “McCann for Mayor.” At 29, John won the mayor’s race. A year later, he was also elected as a surrogate court judge.

Those jobs were fine, but John wanted to be rich, and eventually the opportunity presented itself. In 1974, the long-dormant coal industry was roaring back to life after Arab countries halted oil shipments to the United States to protest its military support for Israel. Speculators were scooping up coal mines, and John’s old boss, the condo developer, said he would buy one if John agreed to run it. The pair purchased a mine outside Pittsburgh, and John began spending all his time there. He was still collecting his salaries as mayor and judge, but he wasn’t attending city council meetings or court hearings. When someone tipped off a local paper, the Press of Atlantic City, it sent reporters to stake out John’s office and soon ran an exposé depicting him as a no-show public official. John resigned, telling the paper that he was eager to move on to a new future in coal anyway.

Erin often heard about her father’s days as mayor of a small New Jersey town. She didn’t know that his tenure ended in scandal, because her parents never told her.

The McCanns left Somers Point for Fox Chapel, where John had an older home extensively remodeled. Twelve-foot-high bay windows in the kitchen looked out onto a patio and a pool. Leah added her own decorating touches, including a Waterford chandelier near the front door. “It changed the whole look of the house,” she told a reporter for an article about local society homes.

Erin’s best friend, Rachel, was the elder sister of Meredith’s best friend, Courtney. While the younger girls rode bicycles together, Erin and Rachel raced small motorbikes on a track carved out of a field behind their houses. They looked so much alike, they thought of themselves as twins. But when Erin returned from shopping sprees with her mother loaded down with new school dresses and shoes, Rachel couldn’t help feeling jealous.

One of Leah’s closest friends was Aleta Bleier, the wife of Rocky Bleier, a former running back for the Pittsburgh Steelers and a local legend. Rocky had volunteered early in his football career to fight in Vietnam and was seriously wounded. He was told he would never play again. Instead, he helped lead the Steelers to four Super Bowl championships. The McCanns attended the glitzy 1980 Pittsburgh premiere of Fighting Back, a made-for-TV movie based on Rocky’s life. Erin recalled becoming separated from her family at the event and getting a ride home in a limousine.

At the Pittsburgh Field Club, Leah and Aleta played tennis or sunbathed by the pool while Leah smoked cigarettes and drank Manhattans. John and Rocky went to Steelers games and boxing matches. The couples’ children were close in age and spent school vacations together skiing or at a Florida resort called the Lago Mar, in Fort Lauderdale. During the Christmas holidays, members of the Steelers came to the McCanns’ home to sing carols. Erin had a crush on the team’s star wide receiver, Lynn Swann, and one year she gave him a peck on the cheek under the mistletoe.

To friends and neighbors, John came across as a generous and gregarious cutup. He liked to wear silly costumes and stage a home version of Family Feud. One Christmas season, he arrived by helicopter to the private school his daughters attended, dressed as Santa Claus. On most weekdays he was away at the mine, but when he was home, Erin and Meredith would snuggle in bed with him and watch old episodes of The Abbott and Costello Show.

They also saw another side of their father. John was strict and controlling. He wanted his daughters to dress in identical clothing embroidered with their initials, and told them to wear their hair long, that it looked more ladylike than a popular bob cut. He wrote down chores for everyone in the family on sheets of yellow legal paper. Erin and Meredith got lists of books to read and words to memorize. The house had about a dozen phones, and John instructed Erin to answer formally: “McCann residence, Erin speaking. How may I help you?” John told his daughters that there was only one right way to install a new roll of toilet paper—feeding forward from the top, not hanging down in back—and insisted that they get straight A’s while lying about his academic achievements.

John struggled with his weight and made his daughters self-conscious about their appearance. “A moment on the lips, a lifetime on the hips,” he chided. As he cycled through fad diets, he sometimes made the girls go on them, too. They would eat half a grapefruit for breakfast, then go jogging with their father.

The coal boom didn’t last, and by the late 1970s John was scrambling. He told his daughters that his business went bankrupt. A former employee later told investigators that John and his partner had drained money out of it. An investment firm that bought the mine also accused John in a lawsuit of concealing the involvement of organized crime in the operation in exchange for kickbacks.

Soon he moved on to marketing sketchy tax shelters. A prospective business partner later told federal agents that John had said they could make a quick profit together by charging investors $250,000 to set up a shelter when the real cost was only $25,000. When the man said that the plan was illegal, John’s response was brief: “Nothing is illegal until you hear the doors slam.”

Despite his schemes, John’s financial hole deepened. Bill collectors kept calling. The owner of the Fox Chapel Pharmacy, where Leah bought cosmetics on credit, froze her account until she paid what she owed. The McCanns were plummeting toward bankruptcy.

In late 1981, John and Leah flew to Detroit to see Steve and Sally, leaving their daughters, who had no idea of their parents’ dire financial straits, at home in Fox Chapel. Leah confided to her sister that John was broke and desperate. Sally said she thought Steve might be talking to John at that very moment about making a fresh start by joining him in the sneaker business. Instead, the men were discussing a much faster way to make money.

When Sally met Steve in the 1970s, at Arizona State University, she was an all-American springboard diver and he was a big-time pot dealer dispatching couriers with suitcases loaded with marijuana to Detroit, where he’d grown up. By his sophomore year, Steve was already living in a three-bedroom house with a swimming pool; when Sally moved in, one of her friends saw Steve hand her stacks of bills to buy furniture with. Steve eventually stopped selling pot and went legit with his shoe stores, but by the early eighties his businesses were struggling.

By then, America’s taste in drugs had changed. Cocaine was in, and Hollywood was cranking out movies about the trade in white powder. At a Chinese restaurant, over red wine served in brandy snifters, Steve and John talked about how they could get in on the action. From his days in the drug business, Steve could locate sources in South America trafficking in cocaine and dealers in the U.S. to distribute it. John could be the front man for the enterprise, raising financing, managing logistics, and creating cover stories to conceal what they were really up to.

John claimed that he never used drugs, and he always told Erin and Meredith that people who did were fools. But he was good at lying, and he loved money—particularly separating fools from it. As soon as the McCanns left Detroit to return home, Steve told Sally that he and John were getting into the cocaine business. “Are you kidding me?” Sally replied. Pot was one thing, but coke was serious.

John and Steve didn’t look like partners in crime. With his custom suits, John resembled a business executive, while Steve wore running clothes and carried himself with a bad-boy swagger. But the two men shared a lifelong craving for status and attention, and they saw money as the way to get it. John liked tipping waiters, bellhops, and parking valets with hundred-dollar bills. As a college student, Steve had walked into a General Motors showroom and, after a salesman ignored him, whipped out a wad of cash and bought a Corvette on the spot.

In early 1982, John and Steve made their first score in Colombia. Steve told a friend that, on an early smuggling run, he put cocaine in bags that he strapped to his torso with tape. By the time his flight landed in Miami, his skin had become so raw from the adhesive that he was bleeding. He was terrified that he’d be caught, but he made it through customs. (Steve declined to be interviewed for this story but replied to some questions over email.)

Soon after, in March, Leah threw a big fortieth birthday party for John at the Lago Mar. According to Erin, the celebration had a boardwalk theme. She and Meredith traveled to Florida for the party, as did plenty of Fox Chapel friends. Everyone had a great time except John, who appeared distracted and depressed. Aleta Bleier later recounted how a friend had told her that she’d seen Leah and John after the party and asked them if everything was OK. Leah replied that they were having trouble paying bills. “Oh John,” Leah said, turning to her husband, “you’ll come up with something. You always do.”   

Within a few months, Leah stopped talking about unpaid bills. She also started paying for everything in cash. Even her manicurist noticed and brought it up with Aleta Bleier.

John told people that he and Steve were taking business trips to South America to look at coal mines, oil and gas companies, and other investment opportunities. In fact, the two men had leased a private jet and installed a mirror-covered partition at the back of the passenger cabin. Behind that was a storage compartment. On the way to South America, it contained cash. Coming back, it was filled with cocaine.

John bought an expensive portable Betamax machine so he could watch movies on long flights. No one was funnier to him than John Belushi, and he thought The Blues Brothers was a great movie. John liked to imitate Jake Blues, Belushi’s character, and shout Dan Akroyd’s famous line, “We’re on a mission from God.”

The cover story John settled on for the smuggling operation was that he was investing in South American shrimp farming. He opened an office in Guayaquil, Ecuador, and hired a woman named Josefina to run it. He had a marine biologist take him around to farms that were for sale and brought boxes of frozen shrimp back to Fox Chapel he claimed were from his new business.

Initially, John and Steve purchased cocaine in Colombia and flew it to the Bahamas, where the drugs, transferred into suitcases, were placed on chartered fishing boats bound for Florida. To smuggle one shipment, John paid a bartender he knew to take his wife on a honeymoon in the Caribbean and, in return, bring back luggage filled with coke. Posing as newlyweds, John said, would make “excellent cover.” As an added touch, he gave the bartender a fake identity. “I was supposed to be a truck dealer or a … president of a trucking company,” the man later told investigators. “We had cards printed up, and letterhead.”

As the size of their operation grew, John and Steve changed their smuggling route. By mid-1983, they were flying large loads of coke into Monterrey, Mexico, where they transferred it to a Chevrolet pickup truck that had storage compartments hidden in the chassis. The truck’s driver, bound for Texas, stopped at a horse-racing track on the way and spread betting slips on the dashboard to make it appear that he was returning from a day of gambling south of the border.

Soon, John and Steve were spending money like crazy. Steve indulged a long-held fantasy, paying $40,000 for a souped-up 1983 Chevrolet Camaro that had just won the Trans-Am Championship. After a week of professional training, he began competing on the Trans-Am circuit, racing against other drivers, including the actor Paul Newman. Steve also remodeled a lakefront home in Michigan and threw raucous parties. At one a mariachi band entertained hundreds of guests. According to an article in the Detroit Free Press, Steve, John, and Rocky Bleier got into a food fight at one gathering, throwing shrimp at each other before engaging in a wrestling match.

John also had a taste for cars, and he bought a Cadillac and a replica of a 1937 Jaguar. He had the doors on the vehicles embossed with the McCann crest. He bought a pony for Meredith and gave Leah a gold Rolex and a diamond necklace. He loved turning gift giving into a public display of wealth. Once, when Erin and Meredith were with their parents at the Pittsburgh Field Club, a waiter placed a kir royale in front of their mother. There was something shiny at the bottom of the cocktail: emerald-cut diamond earrings. Erin thought they were beautiful.

At the beginning of the summer of 1984, the McCanns threw a party in Fox Chapel. Erin, Meredith, and their friends danced on a wooden platform next to the pool while a DJ played Motown and Michael Jackson hits. Guests dined on lobster, and there were machines that made popcorn and snow cones. Bars were set up around the property. John didn’t drink much, but Leah was so fond of her Manhattans that he nicknamed her Lady M.

Erin and Meredith were looking forward to the rest of the summer. They usually went to a camp in South Carolina. But a few weeks after the party, their father announced that he had a special treat for them. They were going to stay for a month at Josefina’s home in Guayaquil and take educational trips to the Galápagos Islands and the Amazon.

The girls hated the idea of being away from their friends in a country they had never been to before. But they knew not to argue with their father. They loved him, but they also feared him. He would explode with rage and scream when challenged or disobeyed. He never struck them, but once, when Erin refused to share a bowl of popcorn with him, he threw it at her with such force that the plastic bowl broke when it hit her arm. The girls had seen him hurl objects at their mother too, and one day, as Leah ran through the house slamming doors to escape from John, the wooden letters that spelled out Erin’s name on her bedroom door fell to the ground.

Parts of the girls’ trip to South America were spectacular. They cruised on a boat through the Galápagos, spotting marine iguanas and penguins, and swam alongside sea lions and reef sharks. During a hike in the Amazon, a guide snapped open a tree branch and dared them to eat the ants pouring out of it. When they did, their mouths erupted with the taste of lemon. At a monument in Quito marking the location of the equator, they stood with their feet straddling the earth’s two hemispheres.

Most days, however, they were homesick. They didn’t get along with Josefina. They hated her cooking, and were glad to have a duffle bag filled with M&M’s, Twizzlers, and bite-size candy bars their dad had given them for the trip. For her part, Josefina wasn’t crazy about having the girls around. “The younger one is nice,” she later said in an interview with investigators, referring to Meredith. “But the older one is a brat, just like her father.”

Going back to Fox Chapel early wasn’t an option—John had sent his daughters to South America to get them out of the way while he plotted his next move. Two years earlier, in October 1982, President Ronald Reagan had announced a major escalation in the war on drugs, and as part of that effort, strike forces comprising agents from the FBI, DEA, IRS, and other agencies were going after suspected smugglers. Investigators working with a federal prosecutor in Detroit named Michael Leibson got an anonymous tip that coke was fueling Steve Hagerman’s extravagant lifestyle. John also attracted the attention of federal officials. In early 1984, he arrived at the Miami airport on a flight from Central America, a London Fog raincoat draped over his arm. When a customs agent inspected it, he found that the coat had seventeen hidden pockets. One of them contained $11,250 in cash and a notebook filled with names and phone numbers. Officials seized the money and the notebook.

It was only a matter of time before the feds connected the dots and learned that Steve and John were working together. John began making contingency plans. Aleta Bleier was visiting Leah one day when a real estate agent walked in with clients shopping for a house. Leah brushed off the showing, telling Aleta that she and John just wanted to test the market in case they ever decided to sell. John also hired a private investigator to check if his phones were tapped.

Erin and Meredith came home at the end of the summer and went back to school. In mid-September, John and Steve left for another business trip, this time to Bolivia. John was now presenting himself as a sales rep for Hughes Aircraft, a helicopter manufacturer. After dining with two Bolivian generals at a hotel in Sucre, John showed the men a forty-five-minute film demonstrating the military capabilities of a Hughes chopper. He then gave each general a revolver purchased in the U.S.; in return he and Steve received a charango, a traditional Bolivian stringed instrument. After the meeting, Steve called it a “cheap ukulele.”

John and Steve eventually got down to the real business they had come for—picking up a hundred kilos of cocaine. They flew on their jet to Monterrey, where, John later said, he and Josefina hauled suitcases of coke to a “deserted road” and stuffed them in the customized Chevy pickup. The plane continued to Laredo, Texas, where federal agents were waiting. Investigators had used an informant to track the jet, and now a drug dog went crazy sniffing around the mirrored partition. The cocaine was already gone, though, and John and Steve weren’t on the plane either: The two men had stayed behind in Mexico.

After learning about the raid, John and Steve fled to Canada. According to Sally, Steve considered D. B. Cooper—the airline hijacker who’d vanished in 1971 after escaping by parachute with a $200,000 ransom—a personal hero. He and John were certain they could disappear, too, and with their families in tow.

In September 1984, federal agents fanned out to serve grand jury subpoenas to dozens of people suspected of being involved in the smuggling operation. When Meredith answered the door of her family’s home for two agents, Leah quickly plotted her escape. She dropped Meredith at school, waited for the men to leave, and snuck back into the house to pack a bag. Then she flew to Detroit to join Sally.

Both Leah and Sally knew their days as wealthy suburban housewives were over and that they needed to figure out what to do next. At first, Sally considered staying behind to face the music. Earlier that year, she had discovered that Steve was having an affair with a woman named Heidi who worked at one of his shoe stores. Sally had talked to a therapist about divorce, but by September she was five months pregnant. After two miscarriages, what she wanted most was a family, and that meant staying with Steve.

Leah was not going to leave John, simple as that. He told her that a family traveling together was unlikely to attract attention when crossing borders. So Leah sent for her daughters in Fox Chapel.

Fugitives

Erin and Meredith sat in the lounge of the Panama City airport, feeding quarters into slot machines. Their parents had given them rolls of coins, said that they’d be back soon, then left the airport to go into the city.

Two weeks had passed since the girls learned that they were leaving their lives behind. After meeting Leah in the motel room in Windsor, Ontario, they went with her to Toronto to reunite with their father. John was growing a mustache and told them that they would be embarking on a fantastic adventure. From there the family went to Montreal, where Leah had her hair dyed brown and Erin got the short haircut she’d always wanted. As a joke, John and his daughters posed for a photograph wearing costume noses and eyeglasses, the kind found in a novelty shop. Josefina also arrived in Montreal, apparently to deliver counterfeit passports. (When she was later interviewed by U.S. agents, Josefina denied any wrongdoing and said that she had no knowledge of the cocaine-trafficking operation.)

At night, the girls got to stay in their own hotel room. When Erin turned on the television, she noticed an adult film option. She and Meredith had never watched porn before. Erin hit play.

From Canada, the McCanns flew to Mexico. Until then, Erin had sometimes enjoyed feeling like she was a kind of spy, complete with an alias, a disguise, and fake documents. But during the six-hour trip to Mexico City, reality began to set in. She sat next to her mother in the smoking section, telling her about all the parties and bar mitzvahs she would miss in Fox Chapel, as though her adolescent commitments might have the power to turn the plane around.

After a few days in Mexico City, the McCanns left for Guayaquil, but John said he needed to make a brief stopover in Panama City. While Erin and Meredith played the slots, he and Leah went to a Panamanian bank to withdraw drug profits John and Steve had deposited there.

John had decided where his family were going to start their new life: Majorca. In the 1980s, Spain was a mecca for fugitives because of the country’s loose extradition laws. Its scenic southern coast, the Costa del Sol, became known as the Costa del Crime because of its popularity with people on the lam. Majorca was also a favorite destination for criminals fleeing justice.

In Guayaquil, John made the necessary travel arrangements, while Erin and Meredith took a few Spanish lessons. But when the McCanns arrived at the airport for their flight to Spain, they hit a snag. Authorities wouldn’t let Meredith board because of a problem with her documents. So while Leah and Erin flew to Europe, John and Meredith stayed behind. They would follow a couple weeks later, once Meredith’s papers were sorted.

To Erin, the hotel where the family first stayed in Majorca felt like a palace—and, in fact, it once was. The Castillo Hotel Son Vida was housed in a thirteenth-century castle, and the walls of its majestic lobby were decorated with beautiful tapestries and portraits of Spanish nobles. Outside, a sprawling veranda looked out on the island’s main city, Palma—and beyond it, the blue-green Mediterranean. The signatures of celebrities who had visited the hotel, including Maria Callas, Aristotle Onassis, and Truman Capote, were on display. One day, according to Erin, she and Leah caught a glimpse of a current guest: General Muammar Gaddhafi, the notorious military ruler of Libya.

Back in the U.S., the hunt to find the McCanns was underway. The Bleiers were among the first people questioned by federal agents. Aleta said she and Rocky had learned of their friends’ disappearance after returning from a brief vacation and finding that the McCanns’ dogs had been left behind. She told investigators that she didn’t have a clue where the McCanns were and described how John and Leah had suddenly begun spending money in 1982 with abandon. Along with the gifts John bought his wife and daughters, he had outfitted their house with an expensive, high-tech security apparatus, the kind that used electronic beams to detect intruders. “The alarm system was unbelievable,” Aleta told authorities.

Rocky said that he and his wife had never believed John’s stories about shrimp farming, and that, when he pressed John to tell him the truth, John had confided that he was getting rich trading foreign currencies. According to Rocky, John also said that he paid lower income taxes by shifting money through banks in Panama and Switzerland. An IRS agent said that it sounded a lot like money laundering. (Aleta is deceased. In a brief interview, Rocky said he did not recall his precise interactions with federal officials investigating John.)

Agents also met with a helicopter pilot who had known John in Fox Chapel. The man told them about a recent telephone call he received from John, after the McCanns vanished. “I’ve got some problems, I had to leave,” he recalled John saying. “I won’t tell you where I am, but I’m fine. Leah and the children are with me. Everybody is fine. I’ve got money. Money is no problem.”

Sometimes Erin threatened to turn her parents in, though she never meant it—she didn’t want her family torn apart.

By the late fall of 1984, Erin and Meredith were students at the Baleares International College on Majorca. Along with learning Spanish, they struggled to remember their aliases, Alexandra and Elizabeth Gregor, and that they were from Philadelphia, not Pittsburgh. Their father warned them never to use their real names, and they had messed up only once. One day Erin got so annoyed at her little sister that she screamed out her full name—Meredith Logan McCann—in front of other kids, then quickly tried to cover the mistake by telling them that her sister made up names for herself.

Not long before Thanksgiving, Sally, now seven months pregnant, joined the McCanns on Majorca. She and Steve had been in Switzerland but decided that Costa Rica would be a better place to hole up. Sally was planning to stay with Leah while Steve flew to Central America to check things out.

Sally remained haunted by the memory of Erin and Meredith pleading with their mother in the Ontario motel room, hoping she would let them return to Fox Chapel, to their happy childhoods. On Majorca, she saw that little had changed. Erin was constantly fighting with Leah. “I hate you!” she would scream. “I don’t want to be here with you.” Sometimes she threatened to turn her parents in, though she never meant it—she didn’t want her family torn apart.

After a week, Steve arrived in Majorca to pick up Sally. Unbeknownst to his wife, he hadn’t gone to Costa Rica but to Detroit, where he’d kept a large stash of money and valuable items. The trip had been anything but smooth. According to an account in the Detroit Free Press, as Steve crossed into the U.S., a border agent became suspicious of his passport—it was indeed fake—and placed him in an interview room. The agent stepped out, and when he returned, he noticed that a ceiling tile had been dislodged. Pushing it aside, he pulled out several documents featuring Steve’s photograph and the name Esteban Phillips Gonzalez. Steve had apparently stashed them there hoping that the agent wouldn’t find them.

Steve was charged with carrying a counterfeit passport. When he didn’t show up for a court hearing, the feds issued a warrant and a manhunt ensued. Steve, who was hiding out in hotels, managed to meet with his girlfriend, Heidi, and other people he trusted, and he’d told them about the location of safes and storage lockers where he put his valuables. A few days later, Steve’s inner circle rendezvoused in the parking lot of a Bob’s Big Boy and deposited the money, jewelry, and other items they retrieved for him in the trunk of a waiting car. “I guess it’s time for me to leave,” Steve said.

Together he and Heidi flew to Dallas with a duffel bag stuffed with cash. He had offered to get Heidi a fake passport so they could continue to see each other abroad, but that never happened. Steve continued on to Majorca, and from there he and Sally flew to Costa Rica. A few months later, Sally gave birth to a baby girl.

In December 1984, a front-page article appeared in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette about the McCanns’ mysterious disappearance and John’s suspected involvement in cocaine trafficking. It featured a photograph of the family’s Fox Chapel home and interviews with neighbors. The article began, “Where is John H. McCann III?” Erin didn’t know about the piece. In the pre-Internet world, she had no clue that her family was now infamous.

By early 1985, Erin and Meredith were settling into Majorca. Erin had a moped she zipped around on, sometimes going with a friend to bars, where they danced and smoked cigarettes. John still traveled a lot for work—or so the girls thought. When he was home, the family gathered in the living room of their rented villa to watch installments of the British film series Carry On, among the few English-language options at the local video store.

Then, in March 1985, John sat his daughters down and told them that they would be leaving Majorca for Canada. Steve and Sally had moved there from Costa Rica, and John and Leah wanted to be closer to them. But first, John said, the family would be stopping in England to look at a boarding school for Erin.

It was the girls’ second trip to the UK since fleeing Fox Chapel. The first, according to Erin, had been an exercise in opulence. The family stayed in a five-star hotel in London, went to the Ritz for tea, shopped at luxury stores, and saw West End musicals. This time everything was second-rate. Erin and Meredith didn’t know it, but their father was running out of money.

Despite his financial and legal problems, John still harbored a longtime dream of sending Erin to an elite boarding school. He had become fixated on one called the Royal Naval School, which was located in Haslemere, a quaint village about an hour outside London. While traveling there by train, John prepped everyone in the family to play their part. They were the Jordan family, he said. Erin’s name was Christine.

During her interview with the headmistress, Erin kept thinking that she was now living a lie within a lie. She couldn’t believe that her father was thinking of sending her away. Maybe the interview was his idea of a joke—a mean one. When her family left campus, she hoped never to see the place again.

After the McCanns arrived in Canada, there was a family reunion at a Toronto hotel. Steve and Sally were there with their new daughter. So were Leah’s parents, who had come from York, and John’s mother, in from Philadelphia. Erin and Meredith were glad to see their grandparents, whom they had spoken to only occasionally on the phone since going on the run. It wasn’t clear what their grandparents knew about the reasons the family had fled the U.S., though John’s mother, Ruth, had told federal agents the previous December that she didn’t believe her son was involved in drugs. “He doesn’t even smoke,” she said. (Ruth also told the agents that she believed the government was wasting resources its on the investigation, because all drugs should be legalized.)

A few months later, federal agents paid Leah and Sally’s parents a visit to ask if they had heard from their daughters. They said that Leah and Sally sometimes called but never mentioned where they were. They didn’t tell investigators about the Toronto reunion, but they did mention that John and Steve had once taken them to the Bahamas. What they didn’t know was that suitcases filled with cocaine were stowed on the charter boat that brought them back to the U.S.

Authorities always raised an eyebrow at the blond girl with the East Coast accent carrying a passport that said she was from South America.

Steve and Sally, now known as the Martins, decided to settle down in Vancouver, where Steve and a friend started a company selling Canadian lottery tickets to gamblers outside the country. He also began managing a Studio 54–style nightclub called Ammnesia—the extra “m” was added for style. John, who had become dependent on Steve for money, rented a ranch house outside Lumby, a small village in British Columbia about five hours from Vancouver. He told the landlord his name was Jack James McCarthy and that he was a lawyer, investment adviser, and geologist who, following a recent heart attack, had been urged by a doctor to find a quiet place to live. Lumby’s location among stretches of grassland and pine forest fit the bill.

Meredith’s parents got her a horse, and she made a new best friend, Denica, who lived on a nearby farm. The girls went on cattle drives together, and Denica showed Meredith how to raise and slaughter chickens. Erin wasn’t around. Her father hadn’t played a joke on her in the UK: Not long after the McCanns relocated to Canada, Erin found herself riding up an escalator at the Vancouver airport, watching as her parents disappeared from view down below. She was bound for the Royal Naval School.

Erin was miserable. In Fox Chapel, she had her own room with a phone. At the Royal Naval School, she shared a room with six other girls. She walked a mile every morning from her dormitory to the building where classes were held, and did the reverse after dinner. When her classmates went home on weekends, she stayed on campus by herself or went into London. Erin tried to look cool by buying a pair of electric-blue boots. They didn’t make her feel any better.

On Sundays, Erin talked to Leah on the phone about the latest episodes of Dallas and Dynasty—except when Leah didn’t call, leaving Erin waiting by the phone. Erin wrote letters to Meredith but never heard back. The only family member to visit her was Steve, who turned up unexpectedly one day. He told Erin that he was on his way to Germany for his lottery-ticket business and wanted to see if she was OK.

Back in Lumby, when spring arrived, Leah and Meredith, whose latest alias was Alison, cleared a plot of earth to plant vegetables. John, who had traded his suits for blue jeans and gingham shirts, was busy with other projects. He brought in truckloads of topsoil and sealed up the basement of the family’s rented house, covering the windows with foil and putting a padlock on the door. He told his family not to go down there.

Meanwhile, John and Leah, who now went by Lisa, threw parties for their neighbors that were different from the ones locals usually attended. Guests were offered a cocktail some of them had never tasted before: a Manhattan.

That summer, when Erin came to Lumby on school break, she thought that she had found a way to avoid going back to the UK. She told her parents that she wouldn’t fly overseas again unless she had a U.S. passport, because she was sick of being hassled about her Ecuadoran one. Authorities always raised an eyebrow at the blond girl with the East Coast accent carrying a passport that said she was from South America.

But Erin underestimated John’s resolve to keep her at an elite school. He managed to get a birth certificate from Georgia, and Leah took it to a public library. There, Erin watched her mother use a typewriter to alter the document. Then John and Leah took a risk, traveling to Spokane, Washington, to get their daughter a passport using the forged document. Within days, Erin was on a flight back to London.

While the McCanns were in Lumby, their Fox Chapel home was put up for auction to pay off the mortgage. It had sat empty since the family vanished. Erin and Meredith’s best friends, Rachel and Courtney, had explored it once, climbing in through an open window. The place looked ransacked. Dresser drawers and clothing lay scattered on the floor. Courtney saw a pile of credit cards issued to names she didn’t recognize. They took some stuffed animals when they left so they could return them to Erin and Meredith when they saw the sisters again.

After the house was sold, Courtney introduced herself to the new owners. She told them about the McCanns and their disappearance, and she offered to show them some of the house’s nooks that she had gotten to know while playing with Meredith. In the basement was a bookcase she hadn’t seen before. It had a button on top that, when pushed, caused the bookcase to swing open. Federal agents were alerted and searched the house for other secret compartments.

By mid-1985, prosecutor Michael Leibson still didn’t know where John and Steve were hiding. But he was learning that John had swindled people for years—first to support his lifestyle, then to bankroll drug buys—because some of his victims had contacted the authorities. The former owner of a clothing boutique in Fox Chapel where Leah shopped described how John approached her after she retired, offering investment opportunities. He told her that he had found a way to identify future locations of fast-food franchises and was making money by buying the properties and flipping them. When John fled, the woman said, he took $75,000 of her retirement savings with him.

Several participants in John and Steve’s smuggling ring also agreed to testify against them. One of them was a former helicopter pilot named James Scarfone, who had flown John around during his time in the coal industry and later worked for him as a gofer. Scarfone had accompanied John on two trips to South America but was fired in 1983 for getting into a fight with another pilot. Afterward, Scarfone’s wife noticed that he was becoming increasingly anxious and paranoid. One day he went berserk and tore down all the curtains and blinds in their home. Scarfone was hospitalized, and a doctor told his wife that he was addicted to cocaine. Scarfone said he had gotten the drugs from John.

In interviews with federal agents, Scarfone described how John and Steve came into his hotel room during one South American trip with two large suitcases filled with plastic bags of cocaine. John handed him a bottle of aftershave and a Seal-a-Meal, a machine used to store food leftovers. He instructed Scarfone to coat each bag of coke with aftershave before using the vacuum sealer to encase it in another layer of plastic. “How do you like that?” Scarfone recalled John saying. “Now you’re an international smuggler.” (Scarfone is deceased.)

An old high-school friend of Steve’s named Timothy Alan Dick also spoke with investigators. Years later he would gain fame as Tim Allen, the star of the television show Home Improvement and hit movies including The Santa Clause. But back in the early 1980s, Dick was on parole after serving prison time on a drug charge. Steve hired him to do marketing for his shoe stores and his Trans-Am racing, but Dick told federal agents he’d stopped working for Steve after hearing rumors that he was selling drugs. According to Dick, Steve then mistakenly suspected he was the person who’d tipped off the government to his coke smuggling. “He probably thinks I’m responsible for all this,” Dick told the feds. (Tim Allen did not respond to an interview request made through his publicist.)

Even as a fugitive, Steve missed the game. “He wanted to go back to work,” one of his accomplices later testified, “go back to Bolivia.” But when the authorities finally located Steve, it wasn’t because of anything his friends or collaborators had said. He was tripped up by his own arrogance and sloppiness.

In late 1985, he was having dinner with Sally and some friends at a restaurant in Whistler, the ski resort near Vancouver, when Mounties walked in and arrested him. A lottery ticket broker in Germany, whom Steve visited after seeing Erin at boarding school, discovered that Steve had stolen his customer list and filed a complaint with Canadian authorities. During their investigation, the Mounties reportedly found something Steve couldn’t bring himself to destroy—his membership card in the Sports Car Club of America, bearing his real name—and authorities soon discovered that he was wanted in the U.S. on drug charges. When they arrested him in Whistler, Sally, who was pregnant with their second child, was carrying fake identification. She was taken to a women’s detention center; she later recalled being placed in a cell and hosed down with cold water.

Leah panicked when she heard about Steve’s and Sally’s arrests, and decided to leave Lumby right away. On the way out of town, she let Meredith say goodbye to Denica. Years later, Denica would recall her friend saying she had to go to Philadelphia because her grandfather was very ill. Meredith handed Denica a carrier containing a cat she had adopted and asked her to take care of it until she got back.

Erin sensed that something was wrong when her parents sent her a plane ticket to Seattle, rather than Vancouver, for winter break. After landing she was questioned by border agents who were skeptical that she was from Georgia. “They wanted to know why I didn’t have a Southern accent,” she recalled. When she finally got to her family, they were holed up in a cheap motel, and her parents were arguing about where to go next. Leah said if they were going to be arrested, she preferred that it happen in the U.S., but John wanted to go back to Canada, where the odds of getting caught seemed lower.

Leah won the argument, and the family rented a house in Marysville, thirty-five miles north of Seattle. Leah told people she met that her husband was a lawyer for the Securities and Exchange Commission. John told a different story—that both he and his wife were lawyers for Lloyd’s of London, the insurer.

By early 1986, Erin and Meredith had been on the run with their parents for seventeen months. It had been exhausting. Erin was thrilled that she didn’t have to go back to boarding school, and she began to rebel. She told her mother that she wanted birth control pills so she could start having sex. She also began smoking pot—she knew that her father would flip if he found out, but she didn’t care. During a class skiing trip, she got so stoned she veered off course on a hill and found herself waist-deep in snow.

Around the same time, investigators working with Michael Leibson found a critical piece of evidence in the case against Steve and John: the modified pickup truck used to smuggle coke across the U.S.–Mexico border. When mechanics took it apart, they discovered the hidden compartments. “It’s a work of art,” a person working with the feds later said, with real admiration.

John kept disappearing from Marysville, telling his daughters that he had to go to Lumby to pick up dishes and other things they had left behind. Desperate for cash, he was also plotting new crimes. He contacted a former associate who had helped him and Steve buy cocaine in Bolivia and suggested the man invest in a new drug deal. But John’s real intention, he later said, was to rip off the ex-associate.

One evening in early February, Leah and his daughters expected him back, but he never arrived. “We were supposed to go to the movies and were waiting for him,” Erin recalled. “We went to bed that night thinking something had happened.”

They were right. When John reached a U.S. border crossing near the town of Sumas, Washington, authorities questioned him about his Canadian driver’s license because he sounded American. When they discovered that the license was counterfeit, John was arrested. Soon enough, officials discovered that he was the subject of a drug-smuggling investigation. John had reached the end of the road as a fugitive.

Justice

Leah told the girls only that their father had been detained—not why or what it might mean for him or for them. She then decided to go back to Fox Chapel, where she hoped that she still had friends. She put her daughters in a van and started driving east. It was the middle of winter, and there were snowstorms along the way. The van felt hermetic. Behind her mother’s seat, Erin noticed a bag containing the ingredients needed to make a Manhattan. Each night, when they stopped at a motel to sleep, Leah mixed herself several drinks.

They didn’t find a warm welcome in Fox Chapel. Newspapers in Pittsburgh were filled with articles about John’s arrest and alleged drug business, and when Leah and the girls went to see the Bleiers, no one was comfortable. Julie, the girls’ favorite sitter, had moved in to an apartment above the Bleiers’ garage and filled it with furniture from the McCanns’ old home. Erin briefly saw her friend Rachel, whom she’d once raced motorbikes with, but that was awkward, too.

The only place left for Leah and her daughters to go was York. Her parents’ home was tiny; at first she and the girls slept in the same room. They had kept a remnant of their father’s life as a fugitive: his Betamax machine. To make money, Leah decided to sell some of the jewelry John had given her. But when she brought a few pieces to a store, she was told they were fake.

Leah needed a job. She hadn’t worked since Erin was born but still had her law license, so she applied for an opening as an assistant prosecutor in the York County district attorney’s office. Her initial interview went well. She told the district attorney that she had avoided being served a federal subpoena but since resolved the matter. The DA invited her back for a second interview.

But when Leah returned to the county courthouse at the appointed time, agents arrested her. A federal grand jury in Detroit had just indicted her, John, Steve, and Sally, along with twenty other people, on drug-related charges. Soon after, John and Leah were also indicted by a separate grand jury in Pittsburgh for income tax evasion. “If this hadn’t happened,” the York County district attorney told a reporter, “I probably would have offered her a job.”

Leah was soon arraigned in court in Pittsburgh. When she walked out after being released on bail, press photographers were waiting. She was dressed in a linen suit and broad-brimmed hat, and was wearing the gold Rolex John had given her. That, at least, was real.

Denica told Meredith what everyone in Lumby already knew: John had been growing pot in a hydroponic farm he built in the basement of the house the McCanns had rented.

For Erin and Meredith, the first few months in York were awful. Two years earlier, they only had to ask for what they wanted. Now, to earn pocket money, Erin made sandwiches after school at a deli in the York outlet mall. Articles about their parents kept appearing in the papers, and while awaiting trial, John remained in custody. Meanwhile, Leah went about life as if everything were normal, even though it was decidedly not. As a condition of her release on bail, she had to report every day to a probation officer.

Erin and Meredith kept asking their mother to explain what their father had done and what she had known about it. Usually, Leah didn’t respond. When she did, it was only to say that prosecutors had accused their father of drug trafficking to force him to plead guilty to tax crimes. The charges against her, she said, were baseless—part of a pressure campaign. Erin, who was nearly 16, began to suspect that her father had done something really wrong, but she kept her suspicions to herself.

In the summer of 1986, Leah sent the girls on separate trips. Erin went to see friends in Pittsburgh, while Meredith flew to Lumby to spend time with Denica. By then, Denica had learned her friend’s real name, and she told Meredith what everyone in Lumby already knew: John had been growing pot in a hydroponic farm he built in the basement of the house the McCanns had rented. The discovery came to light when new renters moved in and found that the septic system wasn’t working. The pipes, it turned out, were clogged with marijuana. Apparently, John intended to sell his crop to patrons at Ammnesia, Steve’s Vancouver nightclub.

Meredith seemed devastated by the revelation. That night, Denica listened as her friend cried in bed.

John and Leah were scheduled to go on trial together in the fall of 1986. On the eve of the proceedings, however, there was a dramatic development: John agreed to plead guilty if prosecutors dropped the charges against Leah. Because of the extent of his drug crimes, he faced the possibility of life in prison. The plea deal was a rare selfless act on his part, though Leah didn’t strike Michael Leibson as especially grateful—impatient was more like it. In a court hearing while the deal was still being hammered out, Leibson heard Leah tell John that her charges weren’t going to be dismissed until his case was finalized. “What else do you want me to do?” John replied.

Six months later, Meredith and Erin sat next to their mother in a Detroit courtroom to learn John’s fate. Erin had always idolized her father, but now she understood how much of what he had given her family—their lavish life in Fox Chapel, the fancy gifts, the luxury trips to Florida—was connected to cocaine. Still, she wanted to believe him when he blamed everything on Steve. John told his daughters that their uncle had lured him into drug smuggling, and that Steve’s recklessness caused them both to get caught. Erin had always adored Steve. He visited her in the UK when no one else did, and when she was younger, he taught her to shoot a rifle. Now she was starting to despise him.

Prior to sentencing, John had sent a letter to the presiding judge, Barbara Hackett, laying responsibility for everything at Steve’s feet, and explaining that he had always planned to stop selling coke once his family was financially secure. “The truth is my heart was never really in the drug trade,” he wrote. The letter backfired. “Your involvement in this is pure greed,” Hackett told him in the hearing in Detroit. “To even suggest that your role in this is peripheral is really a sham.” She also reprimanded him for claiming that he was only trying to do right by his family. “As much as you suggest you love your wife and your children, you moved them from country to country, using phony identifications, imposing on them lifestyles and anxieties during very formative years,” Hackett said.

She sentenced John to life in prison without the possibility of parole, plus an additional hundred years. His daughters watched his face collapse as he was escorted out of the courtroom in handcuffs.

Back in York, it didn’t take long for Leah to move on. She started dating a local prosecutor who specialized in drug cases. About a year after John went to prison, she announced to her daughters that she was divorcing their father and getting remarried. Meredith walked over to a framed photograph of her parents hanging on the wall in their home. She smashed her fist into it, shattering the glass.

John had come up with a plan to win early release. In 1988, he injected himself into a major political controversy—the Iran-Contra affair.

Erin tried to be a normal teenager. She got her driver’s license and cruised around York in a burgundy Chrysler Cordoba that belonged to her grandmother. The car had a white leatherette interior, and she and Meredith nicknamed it Lola, after the 1970 hit by the Kinks. Erin didn’t talk much about her family’s ordeal; only some of her friends knew scattered details. Then, on a drive to Philadelphia with her friend Jill, Erin unloaded—she spent the whole trip talking about her time on the run. “She wasn’t emotional, but there was an edge to her voice,” Jill later said. “She told me about how her parents dropped her at boarding school with false passports.”

By then, Erin and Meredith had begun traveling to Virginia to visit John in federal prison. The girls always arrived with a plastic bag filled with quarters so they could buy snacks from the vending machines. They would spend a few hours with their father, talking and eating microwave popcorn, peanut M&M’s, and Charleston Chews. He seemed upbeat, telling them jokes. After each visit, they would get letters from him containing to-do list and news stories about how to get rich.

Soon John had come up with a plan to win early release. In 1988, he injected himself into a major political controversy—the Iran-Contra affair—by notifying a U.S. Senate committee that he had firsthand information about the role one of the scandal’s key players, General Manuel Noriega of Panama, had played in international drug trafficking. That summer, John sat at a witness table inside a congressional hearing room wearing a suit and tie. In testimony broadcast on CNN, he detailed meetings he claimed to have had with the Panamanian strongman to win his approval to smuggle cocaine through his country. At one point, John claimed, Noriega had pointed to a folder on his desk, alleging that it was from the CIA and contained information about John and his family. “Wife, children, where we lived, what businesses I had been in,” John testified.

Two senators told John that they didn’t believe him. They said staffers had discovered that he’d flunked out of law school, and that he hadn’t always used the name John H. McCann III. They also pointed out that Manuel Noriega hardly spoke English, and that John didn’t speak Spanish. How could the two men have had the detailed conversations John was describing? Lacking proof of his claims, John went back to prison no closer to release.

By 1988, Sally had returned to the U.S., pled guilty to tax evasion, and been sentenced to five years of probation. Steve remained a free man, fighting extradition from Canada while running Ammnesia. It wasn’t until 1991 that he lost his final appeal and was taken to a Vancouver jail to await transportation over the border.

Anticipating this moment, Steve had choreographed an escape plan. Inside his cell, he reportedly cut open his leg, collected the blood in a cup, and drank it. Then, after eating lunch, he began vomiting up blood and was brought to a nearby hospital. An accomplice walked into the facility waving a revolver and ordered Steve’s unarmed guards to remove his handcuffs. Steve then jumped into a waiting van and disappeared. He remained on the lam for four months before Mounties captured him and extradited him to Detroit. In 1992, Steve was sentenced to thirty years in prison.

In September 1996, Erin and Meredith greeted guests at a restaurant in Somers Point, located at the site of Bay Shores, one of the bars where their father worked the door decades before. A few days earlier, John had died from leukemia at age 54, in a federal prison hospital in Minneapolis.

Leah attended the memorial. After refusing for years to visit John behind bars, she’d started to do so in the months before his death. Susan, the woman who decades earlier had turned down John’s marriage proposal, was also at the gathering. She and John had remained close. In the late 1970s, when she was going through a divorce, John secretly flew to Atlanta to see her. He bought her a house and a new Mercedes-Benz, and gave her $25,000 to start a catering business. After Susan remarried, she continued to see John and even spoke with him by telephone the night before he died.

A woman named Marie who saw John while he was behind bars also attended, bringing snapshots of John with Erin, Meredith, and his mother during prison visits. John had changed during his decade of incarceration. He had become fit from lifting weights and riding a stationary bike. The hours he spent sunning himself in the yard had turned his skin caramel-colored. Dressed in his prison uniform of a beige short-sleeved shirt, beige pants, and a woven belt, John looked like a trim cruise-ship captain ready for his next voyage.

Emotionally, though, he was the same. Even in prison, he continued to try to control his daughters. For years he told Erin that she needed to become an investment banker, even though she wasn’t interested in finance. He told both daughters where they should go to college. And his appetite for schemes never diminished. After Erin got married, John tried to persuade her husband to go in on a phone-sex business and split the profits with him.

In his final days, John wrote farewell letters to four people: his mother, Erin, Meredith, and Susan. John thanked his mom for believing in him and understanding his strengths and weaknesses. “I also am sure that you of all people know that I couldn’t resist all of that money for selling a powder that grew on trees to fools who paid thousands of dollars to shove it up their noses!” he said. “What an adventure. What profits.” He told Erin that he was proud of her decision to become a lawyer, but joked that “even on my deathbed” he still thought she needed to get an MBA. He assured her that she could count on him for guidance after he was gone. “All you have to do is think about me and I will be there,” he wrote. “You can ask me anything—and you will know the answer.”

When the memorial in Somers Point concluded, Meredith and Erin walked to the town’s waterfront. As a young man, John had loved to waterski there and impress girls by doing tricks. It was a cold, windy day. His daughters threw his ashes toward the water. The wind blew them back.

Revelations

In 2011, Erin sat inside a rented apartment in Avalon, New Jersey, a beach town not far from Somers Point, looking at the boxes she’d rescued years earlier from the trash outside her mother’s house. She hoped that what was inside would help her write about her childhood.

Leah had gotten the boxes from prosecutors in 1986. At the time, both she and John were awaiting trial, and the feds were obligated to share the evidence they had gathered in their investigation. Erin wasn’t sure why her mother decided to reveal their existence when she did, roughly fifteen years later. But she guessed that it had something to do with a therapy session.

Leah had never sought counseling for herself or her daughters after their ordeal. But when Erin’s marriage fell apart, she began seeing a therapist. Eventually her bottled-up anger about her childhood and sense of abandonment spilled out, and Erin’s therapist suggested that she invite her mother and Meredith to a session. It was a marathon affair, during which Leah acknowledged that she bore some blame for what had happened to their family. In Erin’s recollection, her therapist jumped in, assuring Leah that “she too was a victim” who hadn’t been “given many choices.” Sometime after that, Erin got the call from her mother that sent her racing to York to save the boxes.

Erin brought them home. Beneath their worn lids, they held scores of legal-size folders, each labeled with a different person’s name. There were the names of the McCanns’ neighbors in Fox Chapel and of her father’s business associates. There were names Erin didn’t recognize. Investigators working with Michael Leibson had interviewed roughly one hundred people. Many of the files contained transcripts of those conversations; others held reams of grand jury testimony from witnesses set to appear at John and Leah’s trial.

Over the next few years, Erin was too overwhelmed with work to examine the boxes’ contents closely. Occasionally, she would pull out a file and skim it, and most of what she read pertained to Steve. But her therapist kept urging her to write a book about her past. Finally, in 2011, Erin took the plunge. She quit her job, paid off her student loans, and took the boxes to Avalon.

But she didn’t write a book. She didn’t even read most of the files. During her years of therapy, she had worked through much of her anger toward her parents, and she realized that she didn’t want to get back on an emotional rollercoaster she might not be able to step off. Also, her relationship with her mother had dramatically changed since Leah gave her the boxes. “She became my best friend,” Erin said.

Over the previous decade, Erin and Leah had started vacationing together, sometimes going to the Lago Mar in Fort Lauderdale. Erin had also become her mother’s caretaker. Leah’s descent into alcoholism accelerated during her second marriage, which ended in the late nineties. She spent most evenings drinking at a restaurant in York. One day, the owner of the law firm where Leah worked alerted Erin about her mother’s behavior. Erin helped organize an intervention, but after a stint in rehab, Leah started drinking again.

When Erin moved to Avalon, Leah spent summer weekends there. Her health was starting to fail. Alcohol abuse had desiccated her appearance, and she had heart problems and respiratory disease from decades of smoking. Erin kept the boxes of files in a closet. She thought she might revisit them someday, but now wasn’t the time.

Leah broke down in tears and told her sister that she shouldn’t have followed John and would never forgive herself for what she’d done to her daughters. “I feel like I failed them,” she said. “I feel like they hate me.”

A decade later, Sally traveled to York to see Leah. Her sister was dying of cancer, and Sally hoped that she would finally tell Erin and Meredith the truth about what she had done.

After their time on the run, the two sisters took very different paths. Sally divorced Steve but delayed getting remarried until her children were older, because she didn’t want to introduce new complications into their young lives. She also spent time in therapy talking about the choices she’d made. Sally knew that Leah had been aware of John’s crimes, just as she had known about Steve’s. She understood why her sister never admitted her complicity—Leah was desperate to protect her reputation and her law license, and she didn’t want Erin and Meredith to think less of her. But Sally also saw the toll Leah’s secrets took on her daughters.

As an adult, Meredith largely avoided traveling, something that Sally thought was a result of her being forced as a child to cross borders with fake passports. Erin couldn’t stand Steve and thought of him as the real villain in her family’s story. She didn’t know, because Leah never told her, that Steve and Sally tried to convince John not to send Erin to boarding school. They had even offered to host her in Vancouver, so she could go to a good school there while the rest of her family was in Lumby. John refused, and Leah didn’t intervene.

Once, when Leah and Sally were together, Leah broke down in tears and told her sister that she shouldn’t have followed John and would never forgive herself for what she’d done to her daughters. “I feel like I failed them,” she said. “I feel like they hate me.” Now, as Leah faced her final days, Sally told her that there was still time to free herself and her daughters by being honest. “You have to look them in the eyes,” she said. “They know you love them.”

Leah tried to apologize, but it was difficult for her to admit to everything she’d done. One day, she sat outside smoking a cigarette and told Erin how badly she felt about abandoning her at boarding school. “I have forgiven you,” Erin told her mother. “You need to forgive yourself.”

When the agents repeated the testimony about how she had guarded suitcases containing coke, Leah dismissed it as absurd. “There was never a time, any friend who knows me will tell you, that I ever stayed inside while the sun was out,” she said.

It was Meredith who finally went through the boxes in earnest. She got them from Erin in 2024, three years after their mother’s death, and not long after the sisters appeared together on a podcast in Pittsburgh, hosted by Aleta and Rocky Bleier’s son, Adri, who goes by Wiz. “I remember the day you didn’t show up for school, Meredith,” Wiz said. “And then you didn’t show up the next day…. Y’all just disappeared.” Meredith said her dad “Disney-fied” everything that followed, trying to make the time he spent ducking justice seem like an adventure for his daughters. “He loved that we were world travelers before the age of fifteen,” she said. She pointed out that she and Erin still didn’t know the whole story of what happened. “We only know it from a thirteen- [and] ten-year-old perspective,” she said.

The boxes changed that. It was clear that their father had never been Steve’s pawn. The John McCann who emerged from the files didn’t need help to embrace a life of crime. He was a career con man and a sociopath who lied to his daughters and everyone else about everything. He’d also dreamed of becoming a cocaine kingpin. “John was talking to me about bringing it in containers,” one source told federal agents. “Freighters full of it.”

According to Erin, Meredith called her when she found the folders about Jim Scarfone, the helicopter pilot who had worked for John. Apparently, along with helping their father smuggle coke, Scarfone had acted as an enforcer, once going to the home of a drug dealer who owed John money, brandishing a pistol at the dealer’s wife, and telling her that her husband better pay up. Erin and Meredith also discovered that their father had numerous affairs, including one that took place even as he was uprooting their lives in Fox Chapel. A former secretary of John’s told federal agents that he had urged her in the fall of 1984 to get a passport so their romance could continue abroad. “The depth and scope of all of his lies was broader than I had ever imagined,” Erin said. “We were all props in his play.”

But it was the material in the boxes about their mother that really hit hard. One of the files pertaining to Leah contained a single piece of paper—a memo—that mentioned Meredith directly. It was written by the federal agents who came to the Fox Chapel house in September 1984, to serve subpoenas. “Upon arriving at the McCanns’ residence,” the memo read, “a young female child answered the door.” There was also a copy of Leah’s indictment and the evidence investigators amassed implicating her in John’s crimes. A source had told federal agents that he believed Leah had “full knowledge of whatever it is that John McCann is fleeing from.” One of Steve’s associates also testified before a grand jury that Leah was part of the smuggling operation. He recalled her telling him how much she hated having to wait in a Fort Lauderdale hotel with suitcases of cocaine until Steve’s associates came to get them. “Leah had to sit in the room to guard the coke, to make sure no one would rob them,” the man testified.

When Erin told Sally about the files, Sally sent her nieces another document that Leah had given her back in 1987. It was the transcript of an interview IRS agents conducted with Leah right after John cut the deal that shielded her from prosecution. The agents asked her whether John had any bank accounts or property abroad so that those assets could be seized. Leah said she wasn’t aware of any.

Then their questions became sharper. The agents clearly believed that Leah was guilty, even if she was off the hook, and they ticked through the evidence against her. When they pointed out that her signature was on false income tax filings she and John had submitted to the government, she said that she never read documents John told her to sign. When they asked why she had stopped keeping detailed check ledgers in 1982 and began paying for everything in cash, she said that she had no idea. Leah claimed she never knew about John’s basement pot farm in Lumby, and insisted that she had only learned he was smuggling coke three months before the family left the U.S. When the agents repeated the testimony about how she had guarded suitcases containing coke, she dismissed it as absurd. “There was never a time, any friend who knows me will tell you, that I ever stayed inside while the sun was out,” she said.

Sally knew the man who testified about Leah’s alleged activities in Fort Lauderdale and thought he might have lied. But reading the IRS interview nearly four decades after the fact, Sally also suspected that Leah hadn’t been truthful. Her sister was a lawyer who read documents carefully and understood business matters. Sally believed that Leah wanted the agents to know she was angry and resented being challenged. At the end of the interview, Leah made a statement similar to what she would tell her daughters over the years. “I think you know damn well I never had anything to do with cocaine,” she told the agents.

John and Leah always controlled what their daughters knew about the past. After the boxes, Erin and Meredith had a decision to make—whether to hate their parents for what they did, and what they hid, or to find a way to love them in spite of it.

Rachel remained appalled by what John and Leah did to their daughters. “They robbed Erin and Meredith of their childhood and innocence,” she said. But Erin didn’t feel that way.

In the fall of 2024, Erin and Meredith arrived in Fox Chapel for a visit. Their old friends Rachel and Courtney were holding a celebration-of-life ceremony for their mother, who’d recently died. The four women, now in their fifties, traded stories about their shared childhood. Rachel had never forgotten a big birthday bash John and Leah had thrown for Erin. It happened in December 1983, the month Erin turned 13, and the party was at a discotheque called Heaven. The movie Flashdance, which was shot in Pittsburgh, had just been released, and people danced to the film’s theme song: “What a feeling / Being’s believing / I can have it all.” Erin received a special present from her father, a ring embossed with the McCann family crest. It was the last birthday she celebrated before her family fled the country.

Rachel remained appalled by what John and Leah did to their daughters. “They robbed Erin and Meredith of their childhood and innocence,” she said. But Erin didn’t feel that way. She chose not to. She often said she felt grateful for everything that happened, because it made her who she was.

Meredith also made a decision. Before leaving Fox Chapel, she went to visit her old home. She hadn’t been inside since the day Julie took her and Erin to the airport and put them on a flight to Detroit. The house’s owners gave her a tour. Much of what she remembered from her childhood—the tree house, the log cabin from FAO Schwartz, the zip line—was gone.

As Meredith was leaving, the owners gave her a gift. It was a rolled-up set of blueprints, drawn by the architect her father had hired to renovate the house for his young family. John’s handwriting was all over the plans. He had made notes back when every day in Fox Chapel felt full of promise.

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