by Mark Seal
William Boss, apparently angry with his son-in-law for putting his daughter through hell for twelve years of marriage, and for dragging her through what was turning out to be a very bitter divorce, began surfing the Internet. He typed in the name Ann Carter and a Wikipedia entry popped up. Not only was Ann Carter alive, she was doing a documentary for TBS.
William Boss called his daughter with the news. “He said, ‘It’s a miracle. Clark’s mother isn’t dead. Something’s wrong here.’ ” Ann Carter, it would turn out, not only didn’t have a son named Clark Rockefeller, she had never even met the man.
A few months earlier there had been another incident that caused Sandra to question her husband’s identity. It was early 2007, and the couple had to prepare to pay their taxes.
“He was still pretending to be nice to me in an attempt to get me to come back to him,” Boss explained. “At that time, I said, ‘I’m going to call Phil [their longtime accountant] so I can get the taxes done.’ He started slamming Phil as being incompetent and the wrong guy, and we shouldn’t use him.”
“Why don’t I get somebody else?” Rockefeller suggested.
By that time, Boss wasn’t interested in her soon-to-be ex-husband’s opinion. “I’ll just call Phil,” she told him.
“I did, and he and I exchanged some e-mails. I said, ‘By the way, I need to make sure that my taxes are okay, because Clark has been working with you, and one thing I’m worried about is, I don’t know if you know that I have a six-year-old daughter named Reigh.’
“He said, ‘Oh, yes, I do know about that. Your brother told me.’
“I found that Clark had been telling the accountant that he was my brother so the accountant would acquiesce to what he wanted on the tax forms.”
“Meaning he would file it as a single return instead of a married return?” Boss was asked.
“Exactly,” she said.
At last, after more than a decade of glaring warning signs, Boss began to suspect that her husband was a fraud. “I hired a private investigator and gave the private investigator every single thing that Clark had told me about himself . . . and said, ‘Go find out who he is.’ ”
Boss asked her attorneys to find her a good private eye, and they suggested Frank Rudewicz, a former police detective with more than two decades of experience.
He agreed to meet me for dinner in Boston, and while I waited for him to arrive I read a transcript of his testimony in the Clark Rockefeller case, in which he described his business: “We are a licensed private-investigative firm. So [we] do anything from surveillance to internal investigations and computer forensics and litigation support across the country.” His online bio noted that he was also a “Certified Anti-Money-Laundering Specialist” and had extensive experience “investigating fraud, workplace incidents, and employee misconduct.”
I was expecting a hard-boiled detective in the Columbo or Mannix mold, but instead I encountered a big, friendly, clean-cut guy in a business suit. He was more than happy to relate the story of the strangest case of his long career—even stranger, he noted, than a famous case that was featured on the TV series Forensic Files, in which Rudewicz unmasked a man who used false names and assumed identities to fake his own death in Mexico and collect $6 million. (The detective’s work enabled the insurance company to avoid paying the bogus claim, and the scammer to be caught and punished.)
“I got a phone call from a lawyer representing Sandra Boss,” Rudewicz said. “I didn’t know who their client was. The lawyer told me, ‘We want to engage you to do an asset search.’ ”
Other than the fact that it involved a Rockefeller, the job was a routine one. An asset search is commonly performed in divorce cases when one (or both) of the parties is suspected of squirreling away cash. It involves scouring public records, tracing bank accounts, and cross-referencing databases in an effort to follow the money trail to any hidden assets. “There were a lot of construction projects going on, and she thought he may have struck private deals with the contractors and gotten kickbacks.” Rudewicz assumed the voice of his target overseeing the never-ending construction jobs on his Cornish estate: “‘Look, this is a $400,000 project. You pay me a hundred, you keep three, and we’re all set.’”
Rockefeller had dug deep pits—security bunkers, he called them—all around the Doveridge property in Cornish. His wife suspected that he might be literally hiding money in their backyard. The investigator wasn’t only looking for hard cash but also boats, cars, anything hidden. And Sandra was convinced that he had hidden something, Rudewicz said, because there was so much money flying out of her checking account—and frankly she had been too busy working to check on where it had all gone. Now, at long last, she wanted answers. “She was saying, ‘Before I give this person money—and I know I have to give him money to settle our divorce—I want to know if he has already stolen from me. I want to know if he’s stashed some money, so instead of offering a million, if I know he has five hundred thousand already, I can offer less.’ ”
Based on Rudewicz’s limited interactions with Boss, he found her to be a “very organized, driven individual who was, in my opinion, used to dictating and determining what she wanted and what she got. At least in this context.” In other words, a very tough cookie, except, as she admitted on the witness stand, when it came to her husband. Initially, though, she was less interested in who her husband was than in whether or not he had stashed any of her cash. As she told Rudewicz, millions of her hard-earned dollars had flowed through Clark Rockefeller’s hands. The private investigator went to work.
“We started with his name, date of birth [which Sandra had given as the leap day February 29, 1960], and address,” Rudewicz said. Entering this information into a few databases typically produces a list of prior addresses, potential relatives, neighbors, and, in some cases, places of employment.
The search results showed his addresses with Sandra in New York, Cornish, and Boston, but absolutely nothing from before 1994, when he met Sandra. “That was strange,” Rudewicz said. “This wasn’t a seventeen-year-old kid who was just starting out in life. This was a grown man with a high-profile name, who, from his own account, had a very substantial life prior to meeting Sandra Boss.”
Rudewicz didn’t find any hidden assets; he didn’t find any assets whatsoever in Clark Rockefeller’s name. Nothing that Boss and her attorneys had told the private eye about Rockefeller could be verified: not where and when he was born, although his birth certificate certainly should have been easy to find if he had been born in a New York City hospital, as he had always claimed; not who his parents were and how they had died; not his father’s $50 million legal dispute with the U.S. Navy; not his admission to Yale, at fourteen or at any age; not his (or any Rockefeller’s) having lived at 19 Sutton Place; and not his relationship with his “godfather,” the late Harry Copeland, who Rockefeller claimed in an affidavit had given him most of the information he possessed about his long-deceased parents. (Rudewicz tracked Copeland’s supposed widow, then in her nineties, to a Virginia nursing home, but never got to interview her.)
Rockefeller had no employment history, no relatives, no addresses, no passport, and no credit cards that weren’t paid by Sandra Boss. There was not even a marriage license issued to Clark Rockefeller and Sandra Boss. He had, in short, absolutely no trace of a pre-Sandra life.
Most of his lies, however, had some kernel of truth behind them.
“The brilliance of Clark Rockefeller, if you can call it that, was that almost everything he told people had some semblance of fact—not true, but some facts,” said Rudewicz. “Was there an Ann Carter? Yes. Was there a Rockefeller born on February 29, 1960? Yes. There was a Scott Rockefeller, who lived on Long Island and was born in New York City. So now I’m thinking, ‘He’s done his research and has picked somebody who has that birth date with the same last name, so that anybody who checks is going to get to a certain point, and that will keep buying him time.’ ”
Rudewicz handed me a piece
of paper from his briefcase. It was a copy of an entry from the 1978 Yale yearbook for James Frederick Clark, a young man distantly related to the Rockefeller family with three of the same names that Rockefeller went by, as well as some of the honors and affiliations he claimed—Yale dean’s aide, marching band, drama club—the implication being that Rockefeller had gone through the Yale yearbook, found someone he admired, and simply used him as clay for the character he was building.
Rudewiciz checked the records on Rockefeller’s cell phone bill. Nothing suspicious, and nothing that could give him any solid leads. They tried to get his computer, where surely he kept his secrets, but Rockefeller had taken it with him. “He never let me near the computer,” Sandra told the investigator, who searched blogs, social networks, anything and everything that might show where—or with whom—he was communicating. Again, nothing, other than technical geek Web sites and one book review he had written for Amazon.com.
By the second day of his investigation, Rudewicz smelled a rat. “I told Sandra Boss’s attorney, ‘There is no record of this guy, there are no addresses.’ We had to be careful about how we would communicate this back to the client. This was her husband. We couldn’t just say, ‘You married this stone-cold, boldfaced liar.’ ”
“So what did you tell her?” I asked.
“I said, ‘Look, we don’t know who he is. We know he’s not Clark Rockefeller, but we don’t know who he is.’ ”
Despite the mounting evidence that he was not a Rockefeller, Clark continued to cling to the name, as Rudewicz explained in his testimony. “As we kept running into dead ends and asking for more information, it became known to Clark that a private-investigative firm was engaged. We had asked for birth-certificate proof. We were told that it was [issued in] the city of New York, a hospital in New York, he could not remember which. Vital records required an application and an affidavit, which we were provided, signed by Mr. Rockefeller.”
Rudewicz was asked to produce the addendum to the affidavit, then to read it aloud:J. Clark Rockefeller under oath do depose and state, Sandra L. Boss (Sandra) and I met on February 5, 1993, and ever since then she has known me by my one and only name, James Frederick Mills Clark Rockefeller. If I indeed had a different name, one would find it difficult to imagine that in all the years she has known me such a name would not have come to light, particularly since Sandra, throughout our life together, met many persons who have known me by that same name for much longer than she has known me.
“Mr. Rudewicz, let me ask you, how many of these deep background checks have you done in your entire career?” the investigator was asked before the grand jury.
“This is a significant portion of our business. It would be thousands,” he said.
“Among those thousands, how often have you come to this result, where you simply cannot find information about a person?”
“Never.”
Sandra Boss summed up Rudewicz’s findings in her grand jury testimony: “The private investigator proved (a) that nothing Clark had said was provable; (b) he couldn’t figure out who he was.”
“Do you remember any of the specific details that you told the private investigator that he then told you were not true?” she was asked.
“Sure,” Sandra replied, and she began to list some of her husband’s many lies:
“He hadn’t grown up at 19 Sutton Place. That had actually been a multifamily building for a long time.
“He hadn’t gone to Yale.
“He hadn’t gone to any of the other schools that he had said he had gone to.
“He hadn’t worked for First Boston.
“He didn’t have a birth certificate that said he was born in 1960 in New York, New York.”
In short, Boss stated, “Every single thing that he ever said.”
If she was humiliated, as a Harvard Business School graduate and a young partner of McKinsey & Company, to have fallen prey to such a monstrous con, she didn’t show it in the courtroom. And she didn’t act humiliated when she got the news. Instead, at last, she took control. Her days as a cowering wife under the sway of her powerful husband were over.
In consultation with her lawyers, Boss settled on a plan. She knew that Clark despised courtrooms. “I noticed that when we went in front of a judge on a minor issue he got very nervous,” she said. So she decided to make what she called “a big play.” Her lawyers put “every single thing about all the bad treatment,” as well as the endless and unfathomable lies, into an affidavit, which they filed in the probate court where the Boss/Rockefeller divorce was being handled. Then they waited to see how Rockefeller would respond.
Her husband “completely freaked out,” Boss said. Two days later, his attorney called Boss’s and said, according to Boss, “Clark wants to settle. You can have Reigh. You can take her to London. All he wants is a million dollars.”
She had an escape hatch in her job. A while back she had been offered a position in the London office. Now she told her superiors, “If that offer is still open, I’d like to take it.” “Because I thought he was an incredibly scary person who had no identity, and that I needed to get her out of the country so that he would not kidnap her.”
Moving from the Boston office to the London office came with a pay cut of more than $1 million, but for Sandra, being able to put an ocean between her and her soon-to-be ex-husband was well worth it. She told Rockefeller’s attorney, “I’m really glad that I can have full custody of her. Let’s talk about the number.’”
She countered his million with $750,000. He shot back with $800,000. “We settled on eight hundred, and he also wanted two cars, a dress, and my engagement ring,” said Sandra. What dress—and why he wanted it—was not discussed at the trial. But from that point forward, Rockefeller, unwilling or unable to produce documentation to prove his identity, never stood a chance. Boss got everything: the historic house and church in Cornish, the town house on Beacon Hill, and, most important, custody of Reigh.
The judge approved her request to take the child to London, where mother and daughter moved into a lovely home in the well-heeled Knightsbridge neighborhood, limiting the doting father to three court-supervised visits a year.
“Why did you want supervised visits?” Boss was asked.
“Because I thought he would kidnap her. I knew that he was good at privacy. I knew that he didn’t have the identity that he said he had. I found it entirely possible to believe that he had a scary other identity.”
Rockefeller had no choice but to agree to her terms, which she enumerated for the grand jury:
“I [would] have full effective legal custody of Reigh. He would get $800,000 in three payments. Bizarrely, that neither of us would write a book, and that he could have three supervised visits a year, either in Boston or in the city that he could prove he was living.”
The visits would be strictly structured. “No overnights. For the first of what was to be three annual supervised visits, he was allowed to see his daughter for eight hours a day over three days, sequentially. He had to meet with her therapist beforehand and after. All the terms of the visit had to be agreed upon in advance.”
Sandra and Reigh Boss moved to London on December 23, 2007.
“She was taken from me four days before Christmas, which was evil,” Rockefeller would later say. “I just want to be with her. I want to get her up in the morning, send her off to school, walk her to the bus, wait for her when she comes back. Give her something to eat at night, and put her back to bed, and the next day the same thing again.”
“On the day of the [divorce settlement] hearing he sent me a text message: ‘I’ve just signed the Treaty of Versailles,’ ” remembered Clark’s Starbucks friend Bob Skorupa, referring to the treaty that ended World War I, which Germany signed under protest. John Greene, another member of the Starbucks group, added, “He gave up all rights to his kid in return for $800,000, plus there would be no due diligence—that is, no investigation of his true identity. We would be here at Starbucks, an
d his kid was gone, legally taken to London. I think he took the money from her and then had regrets. I think the moment he took the money he started planning on how to get his daughter back.”
CHAPTER 19
Chip Smith: Baltimore, Maryland
A seemingly broken Clark Rockefeller walked the streets of Beacon Hill during the 2007 holiday season. His third-floor bachelor’s apartment at 73 Beacon Street, where he never even unpacked boxes or arranged furniture, would be paid for by Sandra for six months. But though he had a temporary place to stay, he claimed to be rootless without his daughter, his Pinckney Street town house, and the clout he had enjoyed for so long, thanks to his wife’s seemingly bottomless bank account and her credit cards.
“He told me he’d spent $800,000 on the custody fight and also had to pay Sandy’s attorney’s fees of $1.2 million, and he was completely broke and was going to have to start looking for a job, which I found funny because he had never mentioned having to have a job before,” said one friend who watched Clark’s slow decline.
Rockefeller spent the Christmas of 2007 with the artist William Quigley and his family at Quigley’s sister’s house in Boston. There were children at the celebration, which seemed to compound Rockefeller’s misery. “It just makes me so sad seeing all those children running around,” he told the Quigleys. “I miss Snooks so much.” In the course of the evening, someone asked about the status of his modern art masterpieces in the divorce. “I had to give my whole collection to the family trust, so I no longer own it,” he said. If that weren’t stressful enough, he added, his ex-wife now wanted him to pay her even more money, up to $15,000 a month. The artist’s brother-in-law asked Rockefeller why he didn’t just move to London to be near his daughter. “You’re a Rockefeller!” he reminded him. “You can do anything you want.” Rockefeller replied sadly, “Everything is depleted.” Quigley remembered, “He kept saying, ‘I just miss her so much!’ He was completely devastated and ripped apart.”