SIR Allen Stanford, the six foot four Texan with an obsessive love of cricket, could be impossible to find, the FBI admitted last night.
Cricket bars are always filled with Texans. The businessman has vanished without a trace leaving thousands of investors worried for their futures and wondering why yet another a Texan billionaire was so interested in cricket anyway.
An FBI spokesman said: "It's needle in a haystick time. We will of course be searching all over the West Indies, central America and even the tiny islands of the South Pacific, but let's be honest these places are already crawling with gigantic Texan cricket fans.
"He may try to assume a new identity, but if our undercover agents come across someone we think might be Stanford we'll engage him in a conversation about barbeques, guns and cricket but then make some really crass mistakes about the rules of the game in a bid to flush him out.
"If you are sitting at a bar and you hear a large man talking in a thick Texan drawl about silly-mid off, googlies and the bowling-style of someone called Curtly Ambrose, then please let us know so we can eliminate him from our inquiries."
The spokesman added: "We're also asking port authorities throughout the Carribbean and the Gulf of Mexico to notify us immediately if a huge, cricket bat-shaped submarine surfaces within their jurisdiction."
Meanwhile the England and Wales Cricket Board has admitted errors of judgement in its relationship with Stanford and is now desperately seeking a new unscrupulous millionaire to defile the national game.
An ECB spokesman said: "When does Conrad Black get out of jail?"