The Man in the Rockefeller Suit

by Mark Seal

  “I remember he came up to me one time and asked, ‘Do you know anybody who buys this type of Eurobond?’” said Bob Brusca. “I just looked at him and said no. I thought it was so odd. That was supposed to be his job! It would be like somebody who is supposed to be a dentist coming up to you and asking, ‘Do you know what a bicuspid is?’”

  Yet Crowe led the department, at least for a while. Things soon began to stall, however. “Nothing was being done—there was no trading going on whatsoever,” Barnett told me. “We were just sitting and twiddling our thumbs. He went out with me on one account. He tried to bullshit, and you can’t do that when you’re dealing with people who have been in the industry for ten or fifteen years.”

  Yet the men who worked with him at Nikko agreed that a certain amount of swagger was an important asset for bond salesmen in those days, and Christopher Crowe had swagger in spades. The ability to tell high-flying, almost inconceivable stories about one’s business experience and personal life “frankly can be a great quality for a salesman,” said Brusca. “They’ll say things that are just utterly fantastic and ridiculous, but they’re able to be successful as salesmen.”

  No one called Crowe out, however, at least not at the beginning, because either they believed him and his story to be real, or they were all busy worrying about their own careers, according to another of Crowe’s Nikko colleagues, Stan Forkner. “I was concerned with my own stuff, not really paying him much attention,” he said. “I suppose he did what he could to get up to speed and sort of play the role.”

  Central to the role was making money, and Crowe must have realized that in order to do that he would need help. He got it in the person of a finance pro I’ll call Jim Rivers.

  “Jim’s a character,” said Richard Barnett. “One of the trade magazines did a piece on him. They called him the Mayor of Wall Street. We’d go out and a homeless guy would ask him for money, and Jim would put him up in a hotel for the night. Jim knew every bartender in Manhattan—not only knew them, he knew their kids. He was an ex-Marine, and as soon as he would walk into a bar they would start playing the Marine Corps Hymn.”

  I called Jim Rivers, and, sure enough, he asked me to meet him in a bar. There was no Marine Corps Hymn playing, just a big, affable fellow nursing a drink and dolefully recalling the man nobody really knew.

  “I was hired to run the corporate trading desk in August 1987, and he was there,” Rivers said of Crowe. “He was supposedly in charge of the three salespeople. They were all pretty inexperienced, but he was the most inexperienced of all.” By then Nikko had brought in Mary Clarkin, who had spent twenty-seven years at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, to help oversee the operation, and her job eventually included overseeing the sales manager, Christopher Crowe.

  “He reported to Mary, but he sat directly across from me,” Rivers said. “I used to joke with him. He never took his jacket off, and he’d make announcements about his clothes: ‘Look at my new suit from J. Press,’ or wherever—always a top-quality company.”

  Two months after Rivers went to work at Nikko, the world’s stock markets crashed on the day known as Black Monday, October 19, 1987. It was the largest percentage drop in a single day in stock market history, and by the end of the month the markets had fallen by 45.5 percent in Hong Kong and 22.68 percent in the United States.

  The crisis made the executives in Nikko’s Tokyo headquarters “petrified of any kind of risk after that,” said Rivers. But Black Monday was just another day for Crowe. “He just sat there in his office calling people up,” Rivers remembered. “That’s all he used to do. He’d sit there all day long. Who he was calling, I don’t know. Half the time he’d be speaking German to people.”

  While playing the part of a high-flying Wall Street executive, Crowe also continued to impersonate a fabulously wealthy aristocrat, making liberal mention of his relatives Lord Mountbatten and the Battenberg family, and of the Battenberg–Crowe–von Wettin Family Foundation, which he had formerly run, supposedly. He said the foundation owned a huge collection of luxury cars and European castles. (In truth, the foundation did not exist.)

  One evening, Rivers told me, he and the boss, Don Sheahan, were heading to Sparks Steakhouse on East Forty-sixth Street to interview prospective salesmen. “We had a limousine waiting for us, and Crowe asked if he could hitch a ride. I said, ‘Fine.’ It was right before Thanksgiving, and Don and I were talking about our plans. I said to Crowe, ‘What are you planning on doing?’ And he said, ‘I’m going to stay at home and read prospectuses’ ”—detailed business reports and analyses of securities. “I said, ‘That sounds like a great Thanksgiving. You don’t have anywhere to go?’ He said no, so I invited him to my house. He took up the invitation as fast as a greyhound, and he said, ‘I’m going to come down in one of my cars.’ I asked, ‘How many cars have you got?’ He said, ‘I’ve got a whole car collection—Ferraris, Alfa Romeos, Lamborghinis.’ I said, ‘All right, pick one out and come down. I’d like to see it.’ ”

  Rivers drained his drink and laughed. “He showed up in a ’65 Chevrolet that was belching more smoke than Mount Saint Helens. I’m not joking. The paint was so faded that you could see the body right through it. I said, ‘Where’s your Lamborghini or your Ferrari?’ He claimed there was a power failure and he couldn’t get the garage door open, so he had to borrow the car from his maid.”

  Crowe wore an ascot to the Riverses’ Thanksgiving dinner—“You would have thought he was at the Kentucky Derby”—and regaled the family with tales of his relatives. “He went on and on with this whole shtick: ‘Lord Mountbatten is my [Uncle], and I come from a long line of royalty.’ He had a stack of pictures with him, which he said were pictures of his houses. Some of them were of a mansion in Greenwich, Connecticut. He said he was having it refurbished and a new pool put in.” Of course, Crowe told the Rivers family about how he had been a movie producer and was responsible for the new version of Alfred Hitchcock Presents.

  Rivers shook his head. “He ended up staying not just for Thanksgiving but for a few days. He had CCC monogrammed on everything, even on his slippers, bathrobe, pajamas. My son was about sixteen at the time, and he asked him, ‘Do you have your underwear monogrammed too?’ Crowe said, ‘Absolutely.’”

  A different side of Crowe emerged when a securities salesman whom Rivers was friendly with visited the Nikko offices. “My friend’s about six foot six, and Crowe is five-seven, give or take an inch. There was something on the desk that belonged to Crowe—a souvenir or something. My friend picked it up, and Crowe went nuts and started hollering at him. My friend said, ‘I’m sorry, I didn’t know it was yours.’ When I walked him to the elevator, my friend said, ‘That guy’s got a screw loose. You better watch your back.’ I went back and said, ‘Christopher, we don’t talk to anybody like that!’”

  Crowe snapped back, “If you ever touch anything on my desk again, I’ll bring in my Luger!” Rivers found the threat strange, because a couple of weeks earlier the guys in the office had been discussing guns and Crowe had insisted that he knew nothing about weapons of any kind.

  “I said to him, ‘What caliber is your Luger?’ He said, ‘Nine millimeter.’”

  “You know a lot more about guns than you admitted,” Rivers told him. He shot me an uneasy smile. “That’s when I started worrying a little more about this character,” he said.

  He was living the life of a Wall Street player: a six-figure salary, an office in the World Financial Center, and an estate in Greenwich—or at least a few rooms behind an estate in Greenwich. A list of some of the charges on his American Express card (issued in the name of CCC Mountbatten) from 1987 to 1988 shows his increasingly lavish lifestyle. He dined in Manhattan’s finest restaurants: the “21” Club, Le Bernardin, the Quilted Giraffe, and Bellini by Cipriani, among others. He was a regular on Broadway and at the opera, charging tickets to shows including Phantom of the Opera and Madame Butterfly. There were numerous charges for clothing, from such stores as Burberry,
Church’s English Shoes, and J. Press, the Ivy League–style clothier that seemed to be his favorite—his Nikko colleagues told me he would frequently get packages from there delivered to him at the office. He bought chocolates or flowers on almost a weekly basis—gifts, presumably, for people with whom he wanted to ingratiate himself.

  Crowe invited several of his coworkers to visit him at home, telling them that he was living temporarily in his pool house while the main house was being renovated.

  “That house in Greenwich had all the trappings,” said Stanley Forkner, who, like Crowe, was a vice president in Nikko’s corporate bond operation. Forkner said he hadn’t actually been to Crowe’s home, but I soon had the names of others who had, people who would sit in the pool house with Crowe and watch movies that he claimed to have written and directed. My requests to speak to these people went unanswered. One obvious reason could have been their embarrassment at having been duped into believing the charade. After all, they worked for him and some were even hired by him. Despite Crowe’s speaking German on the phone and mentioning his Luger (the German military’s pistol of choice in the world wars), no one could have guessed that he was actually a no-name immigrant.

  “He spoke the most perfect English I can imagine. Any traces of an accent were gone,” said Wayne Campbell, a longtime librarian at the Greenwich Public Library. He got to know Crowe fairly well, because Crowe made frequent visits to the library to check out old movies—film noir, mostly. He would usually show up on Saturdays, taking a break from the pressures of Wall Street, and was a regular presence at the Friday night movie screenings that Campbell organized in the library’s theater.

  I visited Campbell, a veteran librarian with white hair but a youthful air, in the Greenwich library, which today, thanks to a $25 million donation from a longtime Greenwich resident, is a sprawling white modern edifice. Although now the library’s film collection consists mostly of DVD discs, two racks of the boxy VHS tapes that Christopher Crowe checked out remain. Campbell took me over to the two large shelves where the tapes are stored, and where Crowe, who said he was a Hollywood director in addition to being a Wall Street powerhouse, spoke often to Campbell about his love of film.

  “I knew the film business was in Hollywood, so what was he doing in Greenwich?” Campbell asked. “But he seemed to know so much about film! The directors. Filmmaking technique. Which I don’t know where he got—Unless he was a voracious reader.”

  He began rifling through the old tapes, picking out what he remembered as Crowe’s favorites. “The classics,” he said. “Alfred Hitchcock and Orson Welles. Critically acclaimed films. We had a three-day turnaround. He would check out one and then check out another when he turned the first one back in. Until he went through a lot of our collection of fifteen thousand titles.”

  He knew as much about high finance as he did about film, Campbell continued. “I’d say, ‘Hi, Chris, what’s up?’ He’d say, ‘Well, the long bond has gone up to four or five percent and the yield is this or that.’ I would just sort of nod, waiting for him to finish so that we could go on to a film subject. But he would reel off some spiel about bonds that was very convincing.” However, Campbell said, some things about Crowe didn’t make sense. For instance, he said he lived with his mother in Greenwich. But why would a successful executive in his late twenties be living with his mother? And why did he never say what her name was?

  Then there was his taste in women. “He was very interested, hormonally, in a girl who worked in the film department,” Campbell remembered. “She was very pert, vivacious, cute, intelligent.”

  I found some information about her in my dossier of papers:She met Christopher Crowe while she worked as a projectionist at the Greenwich Library. Crowe would attend screenings of old black and white movies approximately once a month.

  Crowe told her that he was the director of the new Alfred Hitchcock Presents. He told her his mother had been a silent screen actress. If this is true, she would have been in her early 50’s when Christopher was born. He said his mother lived in an area of Greenwich that was only accessible by a private road.

  She went out for coffee with Crowe on a couple of occasions. She felt comfortable doing this because Crowe knew she was engaged to be married and never made a play for her.

  Crowe once offered her a job with a Japanese financial firm he was supposedly working for. He told her the company needed new people. Although the salary would be $40,000 per year, she knew how expensive it would be to live in Manhattan and turned down the job.

  It wasn’t difficult to imagine Christopher Crowe standing in the middle of the old film tapes, pursuing the greats of film noir, sucking up the plots and characters like a sponge, more clay to build the character he was playing then and would play in the future. There was Psycho, Chinatown, and Cape Fear. “That would have been right up his alley,” Campbell said. “An edginess, good technique, and riveting supense.”

  Even murder?

  “I’m not going to say that,” Wayne Campbell replied.

  The securities business being a small community, someone eventually remembered Crowe’s torturous tenure at S. N. Phelps and Company—and not just anyone, but the big man himself. “Stan Phelps called me up,” Jim Rivers told me over drinks. “He said, ‘How the hell did you hire this guy Crowe?’ I said, ‘Wait a minute, Stan. I didn’t hire him, and also I heard you hired him and you fired him.’ And he said, ‘Yeah, I fired him because when we got his social security number back, it was Son of Sam’s.’ I said, ‘David Berkowitz?’ He goes, ‘Yeah.’ I said, ‘Does Sheahan know this? I don’t think he does.’ ”

  Rivers reported to Don Sheahan that Crowe had used the social security number of the deranged serial killer who claimed to have been taking orders from his dog. “Don said, ‘We’ll check into it.’ It took him a long time, because Crowe was there for at least another six months before he got blown out.”

  In fact, according to Bob Brusca, Phelps’s warning and the bogus social security number weren’t the real reasons for Crowe’s demise at Nikko. “Basically, Crowe wasn’t successful because he didn’t have customers,” Brusca said. “He was just this lone guy. No matter what your background is, no matter what your pedigree, at some point you’ve got to contribute something—you’ve got to do some business. You’ve got to do something.”

  Everyone’s patience with him wore thin, I was told. “I recall him getting chewed out a couple of times,” said Stan Forkner. “You know, by the senior guys, or by the traders, who by nature are kind of belligerent.” Still, the Nikko staff was surprised when the axe fell, because the Japanese never fired anyone. They believed in a job for life, at least back then, before the country was laid low by an economic tidal wave that washed away ancient traditions.

  “Right after he left, I was at the Museum of Modern Art, and I was very sure that I ran into him,” said Bob Brusca. “I was, like, five feet away from him, and he just walked on like he had never seen me before.”

  By then Christopher Crowe was already in the process of becoming somebody else.

  CHAPTER 8

  Missing Persons

  As he had done since entering the finance industry, Christopher Crowe continued failing upward. His tenure at Nikko, disastrous as it might have been, was merely a prelude to even bigger things.

  Kidder, Peabody & Co. was a venerable, all-service American securities firm, established in 1865 and known for its stellar investment banking division. (It no longer exists as an independent entity, having been acquired in 1994 by PaineWebber, which itself has since been folded into UBS.) One day in the summer of 1988, Crowe showed up at the headquarters of Kidder Peabody, located in the heart of the financial district in lower Manhattan, and walked unannounced into the office of Ralph Boynton, who had recently left Goldman Sachs to run Kidder Peabody’s international bond operation.

  “In those days there was no security in the building,” Boynton remembered of the years before September 11, 2001 (and before the 1993 World Tr
ade Center bombing), when office buildings were not considered potential terrorist targets. “He knocked on my door and said he was looking for a job. I was new to Kidder, and I was looking to build a small team in New York to distribute or sell Eurobonds [a type of bond issued by multinational corporations and subject to little regulation]. I didn’t have a budget to do this. Kidder, unlike Goldman, was a strict commission house.”

  Crowe came off as smart, humble, well mannered—even a bit too formal, Boynton thought—and keen on coming to work for Kidder. Despite the fact that he seemed to have wandered in off the street, he made a very favorable impression on Boynton, at least in the beginning. “I thought he was good—bright, polite, presentable. Selling Eurobonds doesn’t take a rocket scientist. He didn’t look too bad compared to some of the salespeople.”

  So Boynton, like so many others before him, decided to give this guy a chance: a two-week tryout. “We didn’t do a background check, because we never got that far,” he said. “I took him to Los Angeles for a meeting with several clients who bought Eurobonds. I was trying to determine his skills as a salesman, to judge whether he was the right guy to deal with these people.”

  They flew to L.A. on the same plane, Crowe in his typically preppy coat and tie.

  “How did he act?” I asked Boynton.

  “He was intelligent, articulate; very pleasant, not gregarious or presumptuous. He was a pretty nice guy from a personality point of view.”

  Having apparently won over yet another potential employer, he seemed on his way to landing his third prestigious job in the financial sector. Then his past came back to haunt him.

  The police reports tell the story, starting with his credit card activity between the time of his firing from Nikko, in July 1988, and his arrival at Kidder Peabody. The charges are mostly plebeian: gas stations, delicatessens (the famous Zabar’s in New York City being a favorite), and downscale restaurants such as Ham Heaven and Curry & Tandoor. On September 12, the day he began his job at Kidder Peabody, he ate at Popover Café, a popular brunch spot on Manhattan’s Upper West Side known for the airy, bulbous pastries it is named after.