Christopher Nolan is perhaps one of the greatest filmmakers of our time. His brother, Jonathan Nolan, is also an acclaimed writer and has been credited in films like The Dark Knight, Interstellar, Memento, The Prestige and more recently, WestWorld.
However, I was today years old, when I found out that the oldest of the Nolan siblings, Matthew Nolan, was allegedly an assassin, wanted for the murder of an American financer Robert C. Cohen in Costa Rica.
He was arrested and imprisoned during extradition proceedings and, wait for it, also tried a Batman-like escape from prison!
I say ‘Batman-like’ because he failed. Batman would have succeeded, of course!
According to reports, Cohen, the victim, worked as an accountant for Florida millionaire gem dealer Robert Breska, who was sentenced to four years in jail in the 1980s after being exposed as a drug trafficker. And when $5 million of Breska’s money went missing, he blamed Cohen for it.
The Costa Rican investigators told the American court that Nolan had assumed the identity of Matthew McCall Oppenheimer to hide his real profession.
The cops also quoted eyewitnesses claiming that they saw Nolan and Cohen together, before the latter was forced into a car near a local shopping centre. When the FBI was involved, they found out that Matthew Nolan had flown to Houston, Texas on the same day, then went on to Paris, New York and finally Miami, all the time using his father’s UK mobile number for his contact details.
He is said to have returned to Costa Rica three days later and joined his colleague Mejia and the duo is said to have tortured Cohen, damaging his internal organs causing a massive hemorrhage that ultimately resulted in his death.
However, the judge did not feel that Costa Rica had given enough evidence to suggest that Nolan ‘was a person who kills’ and ruled extradition out. Later, however, his extradition was allowed on charged of having a fake passport but by then the Costa Rican govt. had given up and Nolan was released.
This was in 2010. Later that year, Nolan admitted to attempting a prison break from a Chicago jail.