The Man in the Rockefeller Suit

by Mark Seal

  Now he was sending out another response: Catch me if you can.

  An ambulance rushed Yaffe to the hospital with a concussion. Detective Joe Leeman from the Boston Police Department drove the frantic Boss back to her hotel, and she gave him pictures of her daughter and ex-husband, which were quickly distributed far and wide. Meanwhile, at police headquarters, clerks proceeded to enter Rockefeller’s name into various databases. They found nothing. One of them called the detectives, who put Boss on the phone. To their amazement, she claimed that Clark did not have a social security number or a driver’s license and that she had never seen his tax returns.

  What about credit cards and cell phones?

  His credit cards had been in her name, she explained. As far as she knew, he didn’t have a passport or a checking account. Since their divorce, she had reached him at a cell phone number listed in the name of a friend. She couldn’t give them any information that would help trace him.

  Twenty-four hours after the kidnapping, the curious case of Clark Rockefeller was being scrutinized by FBI special agent Noreen Gleason. She put in a request for the suspect’s records, expecting to receive the usual upper-class profile: Ivy League diplomas, a long string of privileged addresses, tax returns with seven-figure bottom lines.

  “There’s nothing,” the investigators told her.

  She asked for his social security number.

  “Not even that,” came the reply.

  Gleason was incredulous. She called a Rockefeller family spokesman. Of the 78 direct descendants of John D. Rockefeller Jr. and 140 descendants of John D. Rockefeller, there was not a Clark among them. He might be a distant cousin, the spokesman said, but, given the circumstances of his crime, that seemed highly unlikely. In short, the spokesman declared, “We’ve never heard of him.”

  Very soon, however, anyone who watched television or followed the news had heard of him. Gleason and a battalion of FBI agents and police in the United States and abroad would spend the next six days chasing a shadow. Like Darryl Hopkins and Aileen Ang, the authorities quickly realized that they had been duped. Before embarking on the kidnapping, Rockefeller had devised an equally elaborate escape plan. He told his many well-heeled friends that he was taking a trip, in every case to a different destination, in every case a lie. To one, he said he was sailing to Bermuda; to another, flying to Peru; to another, the Turks and Caicos. From Alaska to Antarctica, the authorities tracked down every lead, and every one turned out to be a dead end.

  Because of all the publicity, tips poured in to the FBI and the Boston police from around the globe. But the most valuable one came from a friend of Rockefeller’s right there in Boston. Clark had been at his house the night before the kidnapping, the friend told investigators, and had drunk a glass of water. The friend hadn’t washed the glass yet, so agents rushed over and got it. Technicians carefully lifted the fingerprints and sent them off to the FBI lab in Quantico, Virginia.

  While the prints were being analyzed, Gleason fretted. It wasn’t just that they didn’t know who in hell the abductor was; more important, they couldn’t know what he might do now with his daughter. Gleason was a tough blonde who’d put in seventeen years at the FBI’s Boston field office. She knew how badly a parental kidnapping could go. In too many cases the kidnapping spouse, when tracked down, said, “If I can’t have her, she’s not going to have her either.” Such cases often ended with the kidnapper killing the child and then himself. If they let it get to the point where Rockefeller knew he’d been caught and he still had his daughter, Gleason feared the game would be over. All the power would be in his hands.

  “We need a ruse,” Gleason told her associates. But they had to locate him first.

  When the fingerprints came back from the lab, one thing was finally clear: the kidnapper was definitely not a Rockefeller. He was Christian Karl Gerhartsreiter, a forty-seven-year-old German immigrant who had come to America as a student in 1978. Shortly after his arrival, he disappeared into what the Boston district attorney would call “the longest con I’ve seen in my professional career.” The elaborate, labyrinthine nature of Gerhartsreiter’s shape-shifting adventures, from the time he set foot in this country as a seventeen-year-old student right up to his disappearance, makes his story more bizarre than any gifted writer of fiction could possibly invent.

  It was the summer of 2008, and the economic boom was about to go bust. Housing prices were beginning to sink, investment funds would soon be gutted, and America’s New Gilded Age ethos was starting to seem a thing of the past. Within months, of course, the era of excess would be over. The crash would come in a sickening wave, revealing just how much had been built on an illusion. In this, Clark Rockefeller was a man for the times.

  It was my longtime friend Roxane West, a woman who divides her time between New York City and Texas, who first told me about Clark, screaming his name to me over the phone the day after the kidnapping. “Clark Rockefeller!” she said breathlessly. “Mark, did you hear about Clark Rockefeller?”

  Roxane launched into a wild and improbable story. A vivacious blond Texas oil heiress, she’d recently been living part-time in New York and begun attracting the attention of billionaires, rock stars, UN diplomats, and heads of state. Two months earlier, Roxane and some friends had been touring the art galleries of the Upper East Side, including Steigrad Fine Arts, which was located in an opulent town house on East Sixty-ninth Street and specialized in old masters. There, during the cocktail hour, she met an unusually charming man who said he was an old friend of the gallery’s owners.

  “Hi, how are you?” he had asked in an upper-crust accent. “My name is Clark”—he paused, then dropped the last name—“Rockefeller.”

  “Oh, hello,” said Roxane.

  He certainly looked like a Rockefeller, she thought: the preppy chinos, blue blazer, and red rep tie; the scholarly glasses; the patrician air. Roxane’s friend Eric Hunter Slater, a student of bone structure who prided himself on being able to spot a blueblood from across a crowded room, saw the resemblance too. “He’s got the Rockefeller chin,” Slater whispered to Roxane once the man had turned away. “Notice the jawline: small but strong. It’s a dead giveaway.”

  Almost immediately, Rockefeller began trailing behind Roxane. He invited himself along when she and her friends left the gallery, and when the group wound up at a friend’s apartment, he cozied up with her on the couch. At the end of the evening he insisted on dropping her off at her home in a taxi.

  She received a text message from him the next day. “Sorry about the impersonal text, but giving a tour of the Met, which frowns on phone usage,” he wrote. “Let us meet . . . Please text me . . . I did want to tell you that I find you superbly . . .” Then the text trailed off, leaving it up to Roxane to figure out what he meant.

  He called her shortly after that, suggesting they have lunch. They met at a fashionable Upper East Side restaurant, and he told her a little about his life. His parents had been killed in a car crash when he was very young, he said, leaving him with a sizable trust. He was forty, a graduate of Yale, and a single father—his seven-year-old daughter had been produced by a surrogate whose egg had been fertilized by his sperm. He worked as a nuclear physicist and was about to leave for China on a business trip. He’d just come from giving his daughter and her friends a tour of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, whose collection he knew extensively, since his family had donated much of it.

  After paying cash for their lunch, Clark said goodbye to Roxane at the curb. Almost as soon as he left, she began receiving e-mails and text messages from him. He called it text flirting. She proceeded to share some examples over the phone:

  “Problem: I cannot get you out of my head. What to do? Argh!”

  “Just gazed at Saturn for the last ten minutes. Viewing excellent tonight in Brookline. Wish you could see this. Wish I could see you.”

  “In a submarine. Crowded. Strange. Thought of you a minute ago.”

  “Sipping strange tropical drink
in Nantucket now. Would love to see you. This coming week perhaps go to Central Park and kiss. Sound good?”

  But then he complained that he wouldn’t be able to make it to Manhattan, because he couldn’t find suitable accommodations in any of his private clubs, and he said he would never consider a hotel. “Have overnight sitter, but all clubs totally booked for tomorrow . . . annoying.”

  After reading me a few more messages, Roxane said she never saw the mysterious man after their one lunch together. Then she suddenly shouted, “And now he’s kidnapped his daughter!”

  That night I turned on the television to discover that almost every channel was talking about Roxane’s suitor, but in even more sensational terms.

  “International manhunt under way for a Rockefeller!” one news anchor exclaimed.

  “Authorities search over land and sea for a man and his seven-year-old daughter,” reported another.

  Clark Rockefeller was suddenly the most wanted man in America. He’d soon become emblematic of a time when people would believe just about anything if it was wrapped in a famous name. As his story unfolded, it seemed, like its main character, almost too astonishing to believe.

  Part One

  CHAPTER 1

  Christian Karl Gerhartsreiter: Bergen, Germany

  The public’s first glimpse of the “real” Clark Rockefeller was on May 28, 2009, at the Suffolk County Superior Court in downtown Boston. Hordes of spectators and press were eager to finally get a good look at the mystery man who had simultaneously fascinated and horrified Bostonians for nearly a year. It was beyond imagination that here, in one of the best-educated cities in America, a smooth-talking German immigrant could successfully pose not merely as a member of the aristocracy but as a Rockefeller.

  The defendant was hustled in by a group of guards. Seated among his high-priced team of attorneys, he was still completely in character as a Boston Brahmin and gentleman of the world. He entered the courtroom, to paraphrase Carly Simon, as if he were stepping onto a yacht—or into one of the many private clubs to which he had belonged. It was as if his life of wealth and privilege were only being temporarily disturbed by this unfortunate proceeding.

  “Hear ye, hear ye!” the bailiff boomed, announcing that court was in session. Then he instructed everyone to rise as the judge, a handsome, no-nonsense Italian American named Frank M. Gaziano, entered the courtroom. From the moment he spoke, in a commanding voice, it was clear that this judge was going to do everything by the book. The defendant stood, buttoning his sports coat. He was wearing perfectly broken-in chinos and Top-Siders with no socks, just as he had been on the day he kidnapped his daughter, but instead of a polo shirt he wore a white button-down, a red-striped rep tie, and a navy blue blazer with brass buttons. He stared straight ahead, sphinxlike, as the prosecutor, David Deakin, began leveling all manner of charges against him.

  Clean-cut and straight-talking, Deakin brought to mind Atticus Finch, the saintly country lawyer in To Kill a Mockingbird, as portrayed by Gregory Peck in the film version of the classic novel.

  “The rules don’t apply to Christian Gerhartsreiter,” Deakin began.

  At this, Rockefeller showed absolutely no emotion.

  “That is what the evidence is going to show you he believed.”

  Deakin addressed the members of the jury, who had been chosen mainly because they had somehow managed to remain unaware of the barrage of media coverage about the incredible case of Clark Rockefeller. For a master con man, duping this group of mostly young, impressionable-looking Bostonians would be the ultimate victory.

  However, Rockefeller did not deign to testify; instead, he let his lawyers tell his story exactly the way he wanted it told. He sat silently as the prosecution witnesses recounted how he had tricked them, his only shows of emotion an occasional blink or a clench of his jaw.

  I had been investigating Clark Rockefeller since the previous summer and was convinced that the trial would answer my lingering questions about his fabricated life. Here, in this courtroom, the people Rockefeller had taken for a ride in his once indecipherable puzzle of a life were set to testify against him—most importantly his ex-wife, the ultra-successful management consultant Sandra Boss. I imagined that it would be like a cafeteria line of information: the witnesses would dish it out and all I’d have to do would be to write it down.

  How wrong I would turn out to be.

  As the case dragged on for more than two weeks, and as I listened to the parade of people whose trust the defendant had betrayed, I realized that I was as gullible as any of them. I had allowed myself to believe, just as they had, that I actually knew the man. In fact I knew only a small piece of the story; despite having spent a year doing research, I had seen only the tail of a whale. The body remained submerged and hidden from view.

  “To understand this evidence you are going to have to go back to 1978,” David Deakin had told the jury at the outset of the trial, “because it was in that year that seventeen-year-old Christian Karl Gerhartsreiter, born in Siegsdorf, Germany . . . came to the United States on a tourist visa.”

  He was right. To even come close to drawing a portrait of a phantom, one had to go back to the beginning, to the obscure corner of Germany where the young man supposedly met the first victims of his lifelong con.

  One day in the courtroom, as the prosecutor was trying to untangle the jumbled threads of Clark Rockefeller’s past, he read a brief letter that the defendant had written to the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service in Milwaukee a few years after his arrival in America. It was dated May 26, 1981:Dear Sirs: With this letter, I would like to inform you that, as of tomorrow, my address is going to be changed. My new address is:Christian K. Gerhartsreiter

  c/o Dr. Elmer Kelln

  [Address withheld]

  Loma Linda, California 92354

  The name was a clue, the first step in what would become a very long and unforgettable journey.

  “Hello,” a woman answered at the Kellns’ Loma Linda, California, home. She stopped me as soon as I said the name Clark Rockefeller.

  “Elmer!” she yelled, and her husband came on the line. “It’s quite a story,” Elmer said, suggesting that I come out to California for a visit.

  Elmer and Jean Kelln are still in the same modest home, on a typically pleasant Southern California street, where they lived when they first met the man now known as Clark Rockefeller. Jean, a large, bubbly, hospitable woman, opened the door. “I made a chicken salad,” she said, leading me into a sunny living room with an upright piano in the corner. “I hope you’ll stay for lunch.” Elmer joined us in the kitchen. A short, compactly built man who looked a bit like the actor Mickey Rooney, he had recently retired from his dentistry practice and had become a faculty member at Loma Linda university’s dental school.

  It soon became clear that although more than thirty years had passed, both of them were still smarting at the way they remembered every detail of their experiences with the future Clark Rockefeller. As Elmer told me their story, his wife got up from the table and returned with a batch of photographs.

  “He was always posing,” she said of the man I had watched sitting mute and stone-faced for weeks on end in the Boston courtroom. She showed me a picture of a teenager with long brown hair, wearing a white schoolboy sweater over a blue shirt and giving the camera a wry smile. Then she flipped through a dozen others. One of the most intriguing photos didn’t have anyone in it. It showed a little cluster of buildings with what looked like a totem pole in the middle of them. It was Christian Gerhartsreiter’s hometown of Bergen, Germany. After hearing Elmer and Jean Kelln’s remarkable tale, I decided it would be the next stop on my journey to find out who Clark Rockefeller really was.

  Bergen is a speck of a town—a village, really—home to five thousand people, each of whom seems to know everyone else. I drove from Munich, less than fifty miles away, with a German journalist I had enlisted as my interpreter and guide.

  On first impression Bergen look
s like something out of a fairy tale, a picturesque hamlet nestled in a verdant valley of the Bavarian Alps. The focal points of the town center are a church and a beer garden (God and beer being the two pillars of Bavarian life), and towering over both of them is the totem pole from Jean Kelln’s photo; it’s actually a maypole, I later learned, a common sight in Bavarian villages.

  It wasn’t difficult to find the house where Christian Karl Gerhartsreiter had grown up, at 19 Bahnhof (Train Station) Street—it was almost the first one off the highway. But as soon as we parked in front of the row of shops across the street from the house, I could literally hear the sound of doors locking and shutters being drawn. In the coffee shop directly across the street from the Gerhartsreiter home, a woman said that Irmengard Gerhartsreiter lived in the house and her son Alexander lived in an apartment in the back. Irmengard’s husband, Simon, had died many years ago. The woman knew this, she added, because Irmengard’s parents had once run a business where the coffee shop now stands.

  The childhood home of Christian Karl Gerhartsreiter is a white two-story house with a starburst over the door and intricate designs around the windows, accentuated by navy blue shutters and a profusion of red geraniums exploding from window boxes. I knocked on the door repeatedly, but there was no answer and no audible movement inside the house. Peering through a window, I could see a tidy kitchen and other obviously inhabited but impeccably neat rooms.