The Man in the Rockefeller Suit (21 page)

“I left mine ajar a lot,” she said, explaining that she was a smoker and needed the cross-ventilation. “He introduced himself as Clark Rockefeller. He never flaunted it or elaborated on it.” He just let it lie there, having its hypnotic effect. “He told me his work was solving Third World debt, particularly on the Pacific Rim.”

She laughed. The door to her apartment was open, and she stared at the door to his as if she could still see him standing there, togged out head to toe in his preppy casual daytime clothing, hair bleached with blond highlights. “When I heard the part about Third World debt I decided, you know, he’s crazy. That’s not a real job. But then I thought, okay, he’s a Rockefeller, he’s eccentric.

“He told me his parents had died when he was sixteen in a car crash, that he had grown up in Cambridge and Boston, that he went to Harvard. I said, ‘If your parents died when you were sixteen, who took care of you?’ And he said, ‘I took care of myself and lived in the town house and went to school myself. But I graduated early.’ And I thought, okay, he’s a mathematical genius and therefore is solving these Third World debts.”

He invited her over for a few of the parties he was soon hosting in his apartment, where young men were dressed just like Clark, “in their madras and khakis and drinking their gin and tonics.” Once, she met his niece, Alice Johnson, whom he introduced as a debutante. As Henry got to know him, his “quirks and oddities and paranoias” multiplied.

“He told me once that he never ate in restaurants,” she said. “So I said, “Clark, this is crazy! Why wouldn’t you eat in a restaurant?’ He said, ‘Because you can’t trust the kitchen. I only eat in private clubs.’

“He was
very
particular about his food,” she continued. “He would only eat his little sandwiches—you know, the cucumber and watercress on white bread with the crusts cut off? He would only eat a certain Pepperidge Farm cookie: the Nantucket. He would only drink Earl Grey tea. Oh, and what was his favorite food? Oh, my God. His favorite food was haggis.”

“Haggis?” I asked.

“It’s a Scottish dish,” she said. “And his favorite drink was Harveys Bristol Cream.”

Yet, she added, it all made sense in a strange sort of way, the pieces of the crazy puzzle the man of wealth, taste, and distinction presented to her, because it all was guaranteed sound by the famous name. She repeated, “You just think, ‘Oh, well, he’s a Rockefeller. He’s eccentric!’ ”

One day Clark called to tell her he had inherited some paintings, and asked for her help in determining their value.

“Well, I’ve got a Jackson Pollock, a Mondrian, somebody named Rothko, and I think Twombly or something,” said Rockefeller, mispronouncing the names of these masters of modern art. “I was literally almost on the floor!” said Henry. “A Rothko alone would have been eight million dollars back then. Today, Rothkos sell for thirty, forty million.”

The art dealer cut Rockefeller short and rushed from her apartment to his, “doing the math” along the way. When she entered 7M, she was stunned by what she calculated to be a multimillion-dollar, irreplaceable, museum-quality collection of paintings, haphazardly hung on walls and sitting on the floor. She blurted out, “You need an insurance policy immediately, and you should probably get an alarm system! We’re coming out of an art recession, but, Clark, these are very expensive paintings!” Then she asked him, “Where did you
get
all of this?”

“He said he had inherited them from his great-aunt Blanchette” (the Museum of Modern Art benefactor and widow of John D. Rockefeller III), who, Rockefeller threw in, “started that little old museum on Fifty-third Street.” Henry was stunned.

“He then said, ‘I’m really disappointed because I wanted to inherit the Bierstadt,’ ” meaning he wished his great-aunt had left him a work by the German-born nineteenth-century Western landscape painter Albert Bierstadt and not “all this modern stuff.”

“It all made sense,” said Henry. “I did a little research, and Blanchette Rockefeller indeed died in 1992, so there could have been an estate settled. And so I thought, ‘He’s a Rockefeller! What else could he be?’ You don’t go out onto Madison Avenue and pick up any of these paintings! You just can’t do that in an afternoon!” The art had her convinced.

Next she got upset, not with Rockefeller but with herself for blowing what she felt had been a major opportunity. “I was living next door to somebody—right under my nose!—who had the means, being a Rockefeller, to purchase major works of art, and I had somehow missed this,” she said. “I am an art dealer, so I was very upset about this.”

She immediately reverted from neighbor to art dealer. She
had
to do a deal to stake her claim on Clark Rockefeller. This became immediately clear when she invited him to an opening in a gallery she had rented; as soon as his famous name floated through the air, the other dealers surrounded him like bees to honey. “He calls me the next day and says, ‘I’m being bombarded by all of these art dealers!’” Martha Henry remembered. “I said, ‘Well, you can’t go to an art opening and tell everybody that you’re Clark Rockefeller! If you want to keep a low profile, you need to leave that part out.’”

Henry had found him first, after all, and soon it was time for her to take him shopping for a major piece of art. First stop: Knoedler & Company, the esteemed Upper East Side gallery that had been in existence since the Civil War, and where John D. Rockefeller had been a client. Here, Henry showed him a work from the estate of Adolph Gottlieb, a historically significant painting from the 1950s. They agreed that, at $300,000 to $400,000, it would be an extremely prudent addition to his collection. “It’s a perfect provenance for someone like Clark,” Henry said. “The Gottlieb estate was allowing this picture out. They would not necessarily sell it to anyone. But to a Rockefeller they would do it.”

Rockefeller kept returning to Knoedler, sometimes alone, to inspect the Gottlieb. I spoke to a woman who repeatedly showed him the painting. She had been chief of staff of the Whitney Museum of American Art, the preeminent museum for contemporary art on Madison Avenue in New York City. So she was an expert in contemporary art, and, she quickly discovered, Rockefeller was too. “He knew his art history,” she remembered. “He talked about the other art in his collection.” While debating whether or not to purchase the Gottlieb, he invited the woman from Knoedler to see his other pieces. Like everyone else, she was dazzled by the large and iconic works of the greats of American contemporary art. “Honestly, it never occurred to me for a second that those paintings weren’t right,” she said.

When it came to buying the Gottlieb, however, Rockefeller kept balking. Things came to a head one day in Knoedler when he studied the painting for the umpteenth time with his dealer, Martha Henry. They looked at the Gottlieb this way and that way, until the scion of the great family finally spoke. “That painting has
green
in it,” he said. “I don’t buy pictures with green in them.”

“What are you talking about?” asked Henry.

“Well, Mondrian only painted in primary colors, and he would never have put green in a canvas,” Rockefeller said huffily.

“ ‘Oh, Clark, you’ve got to get past primary colors,’ ” Henry told him. “‘We’re not in kindergarten anymore.’ But he would not budge, and we could not do the sale.”

Meanwhile, strange things were always going on in 7M. Clark baked a loaf of fresh bread for a neighbor he barely knew, and Henry thought it odd. Most New Yorkers don’t have time to toast bread, much less bake it. But Rockefeller seemed to have all the time in the world, especially for leisure pursuits. “Obviously he didn’t work, but didn’t seem to be broke,” said Henry, who would occasionally go out to lunch with him. “He paid,” she said, “in cash.”

“One day he called and wanted to know if I knew any young men that could escort this teenage cousin of his to debutante balls,” Henry continued. “He said, ‘The family will pay for everything. Her date’s dropped out.’ ” Henry pulled a little prank on him. She did know someone who had indeed just told her that he would
love
to go to a real New York City debutante ball. It was actually her own boyfriend, although she didn’t tell Rockefeller that at first.

“Where did he go to school?” Rockefeller asked.

“St. Paul’s,” she said, referring to the prep school in New Hampshire.

“Oh, perfect.”

When Henry said, “Oh, by the way, he’s forty-three,” Rockefeller said, “That’s
not
funny, Martha.”

Another person in his life during this period was Rose Mina, the investment firm star whom Clark had met while working at Nikko as Christopher Crowe. I found her name on the list of credit card charges Rockefeller made under his former alias: “October 14, 1988: Airline ticket for [MINA/R] via Pan American World Airways from JFK to London to Delhi purchased at Thomas Cook Travel.” There was also a return ticket: “For [MINA/R] via United Airlines from Delhi to Tokyo Narita to JFK.” In addition, he had purchased tickets for a Henry Mina with an equally complicated itinerary, from Pittsburgh to Delhi. That ticket had been refunded and reticketed.

Why was Crowe flying Rose and Henry Mina to Delhi and Tokyo? Later, Rose Mina would be identified in the media as his business partner and the trustee of his estate. But despite queries from the media—and dozens of e-mails and hand-delivered letters from me—Rose Mina has remained stoically silent on the subject of Clark Rockefeller.

Mina clearly played a role in his rise in New York City. “I’ve been trying to figure it out,” Martha Henry told me, sitting in her apartment. “Because there was a time, when he lived here, that every night during the week somebody would come into that apartment, arriving between, let’s say, eleven-thirty and one a.m. And every morning they would leave between, say, five-thirty and seven, something like that. I would hear the door open and close. If I was sleeping, it would wake me up. And it was very regular.”

We stood up and looked through the peephole, which afforded an excellent view of the hallway. “At one point, I looked to see who was going in and out,” she said. “It was an Asian woman. And she was dressed businesslike—a suit and a briefcase.

“At one point I said to him, ‘Clark, you have a girlfriend!’ He said, ‘No, no, no! She’s not my girlfriend. She manages my money.’ ”

Henry thought, “They’re friends, and she’s crashing on his sofa, because investment bankers really do work long hours.” But she kept teasing Rockefeller about her, and he kept insisting that she was just his money manager. Then something strange happened. “She never stayed there again,” said Henry.

Soon Clark Rockefeller was gone too. Approximately two years after he moved into the apartment adjacent to Henry’s, he mentioned to her that he was looking for larger accommodations, and perhaps she could help. She called a friend specializing in residential real estate, who suggested Alwyn Court, the turn-of-the-century building on West Fifty-eighth Street with the most intricate terra-cotta façade in the city. “He said, ‘Oh, I would never live there. That building is so dreary and depressing. The apartments are dark.’ Blah, blah, blah.” Besides, he added, he had to rent in a Cushman & Wakefield building. “Because those are the family buildings—the Rockefeller buildings—and I can get a very low rent.”

He needed a spacious place, with plenty of room for his art collection, his Gordon setter, and—oh, yes—his bride. He was getting married, he told Henry. The lucky girl’s name was Sandra Lynne Boss.

CHAPTER 10

Sandra

S
he walked into the courtroom just as I imagined she had walked into all the phases of her life: confident, perfectly put together, seemingly in complete control. Tall, thin, elegant, and attractive, she was wearing a conservative navy blue suit. Her highlighted brown hair was cut in a chin-length bob, and her unblemished skin seemed to require very little makeup. Even in the confines of a courtroom, Sandra Lynne Boss, at forty-two, was clearly a star.

“My name is Sandy Boss, and my last name is spelled B-O-S-S,” she told the prosecuting attorney in an authoritative voice, enunciating every syllable. She was living in London, where she worked as a director, or senior partner, at McKinsey & Company, the world’s premier management consulting firm, which advises corporations, institutions, and governments on how to improve their operations.

She answered questions about her background succinctly. Born: “Seattle, Washington.” Immediate family: “My dad’s name is Bill and my mother’s name is Verla. And I have a twin sister, whose name is Julia.” Education: “Blanchet High School.” College: “Stanford.” Major: “American studies, and then I had what’s called the secondary major in economics.”

What Boss didn’t say was that her life, like that of her ex-husband, had been a journey of reinvention. The daughter of a Boeing engineer, she came from an upper-middle-class family in Seattle and was raised in “a nice two-story Cape Cod house with a finished basement,” according to a friend. Early on she developed what would become her defining trait. “She is one of the most competitive people I know,” the friend told me, adding that Sandra competed most doggedly against her fraternal twin, Julia. As a 1985 article in the
Seattle Times
reported, “Julia and Sandra, seniors at Blanchet High, are the only sibling Merit Scholars from this area. They’ve never spent more than three days apart. . . . Nonetheless, when Julia announced, ‘I want to go to Yale,’ Sandra replied, ‘Okay, I want to go to Stanford.’ ”

“Julia and Sandy used to play this crazy game that dates back to when they were growing up,” said a friend of both. “They would find a point of competition, and they would confer on who won that particular round.” In childhood, it was selling cookies; in high school and college, it was scholarship; in young adulthood, it was often material things. “If one of them had a Hermès scarf and the other one had Christian Louboutin shoes, they would have to figure out which one was better, because they both cost about the same.” On the witness stand, Sandra said only, “Twins are very similar to each other and we get compared a lot, and so we had what I would describe as a normal twin relationship, which is we love each other and we compared how we were doing in life.”