The 2008 FBI manhunt to apprehend Christopher Nolan’s brother: “He knew we were after him”
2008 was a massive year for the Nolan brothers, with Christopher directing The Dark Knight, which cleared a billion dollars at the box office and inspired a generation of big-screen blockbusters.
The screenplay was co-written by his younger sibling, Jonathan, reuniting them once more after they’d collaborated on Memento and The Prestige. As for Matthew, the oldest? Well, he had a banner year, too, but not for the same reasons, since he found himself being hunted by the FBI.
In the most bizarre case of art imitating life, it was revealed that Matthew Nolan had been arrested on suspicion of being a hitman, and as part of his illicit scheme, he’d adopted ‘Matthew Oppenheimer’ as a code name. Did that influence Christopher’s Academy Award-winning epic? Probably not, but it’s a curious coincidence nonetheless.
According to police sergeant John Lucki, he first encountered the oldest Nolan brother in 2008, claiming that he’d name-dropped The Dark Knight and his fictitious involvement in its financing to facilitate a scheme where he’d write cheques for Costa Rican bank accounts, deposit them in Chicago, and withdraw as much of those funds as he could before the cheques had cleared, making away with $600,000.
Digging even deeper, Lucki discovered the FBI also had Nolan under surveillance for kidnapping and murder. He’d been tied to the 2005 death of Robert Cohen, an accountant who was found tortured and murdered in Costa Rica, and Nolan was the last person spotted with the victim before their demise.
The following year, Interpol issued a red notice for his apprehension, and when a United States arrest warrant was issued in 2008, FBI special agent Pablo Araya was tasked to set up surveillance at Nolan’s Chicago home. “I saw his wife, his kids, his nanny, and his mother-in-law, but I never saw him,” Araya recalled.
“He was hiding in Florida. He knew we were after him.”
The suspect “seemed to be very savvy about surveillance,” the fed noted, being especially good at “covering his tracks and using multiple aliases.” However, when Nolan and his wife filed for bankruptcy in early 2009 and would have to attend a court hearing as a result, the FBI pounced, slammed him up against a wall, and informed him that, at last, he was under arrest.
While he wasn’t convicted of being a hitman, with Luis Alonso Douglas Mejia convicted of Cohen’s murder, he did use the surname Oppenheimer as an alias for financial crimes. After being collared by Araya, he tried to escape from the Metropolitan Correctional Centre in Chicago and was sentenced to 14 months behind bars for it. After being released in 2010, he vanished off the face of the planet, and as you’d expect, neither Christopher nor Jonathan has ever publicly spoken about their brother.
“He’s very arrogant,” Araya reflected. “He told me I’d never have caught him if it wasn’t for the bankruptcy.” That may or may not be true, but what’s indisputable is that The Odyssey director’s oldest sibling was captured, arrested, and convicted after being placed under FBI surveillance, which would make a hell of a movie in itself, although you’d never convince Christopher to direct it.
