The Man in the Rockefeller Suit (22 page)

After attending a one-year master’s program at Oxford University in England, Julia Boss received her Ph.D. in history at Yale and went to work as an editor at Algonquin Books in New York City. In 1994 she married Charles Knapp, a fellow Yalie, who also worked in the book publishing industry.

As Sandra moved through a series of impressive jobs, people found her smart but aloof, ambitious but intensely private. “We were a very collegial bunch,” said someone who worked with Boss. “We did everything together—everyone except Sandy. Sandy did her own thing.” But despite her shyness, the coworker added, “she was aspirational. She always wanted to be on the inside looking out, but she was on the outside looking in.” Then she met her future husband.

After some preamble, the prosecutor, David Deakin, got to the pivotal question. He looked over at the defendant, who sat expressionless, staring straight ahead. “Do you know the individual seated at the counsel table?” Deakin asked the witness.

The second Boss looked over at Rockefeller, her expression turned stern and cold. Any trace of the smile that had lit up her face only a moment before disappeared.

“Yes, I do,” she said stiffly.

“Were you once married to that individual?”

“Yes, I was.”

“Under what name did you know him when you were married to him?”

“Clark Rockefeller.”

“When did you first meet the defendant?”

She sat up in her chair and told a story that soon had the entire courtroom transfixed.

“In the spring of 1993,” Boss began, “I was in New York, interviewing for a summer job.” Then twenty-six, she was entering her final year at Harvard Business School that fall. “I spoke to him on the phone,” she said. “He was a friend of my sister’s through church . . . St. Thomas Episcopal, on Fifth Avenue. I don’t know if she was formally a member, but she went every week.”

Boss had been raised as an Episcopalian in Seattle, and during the grand jury hearing that would lead to Rockefeller’s indictment on kidnapping charges, the prosecutor asked her to rank her family’s level of commitment to the church on a scale of one to ten, from casual to devout.

“Eight or nine, in terms of, you know, church every Sunday, Bible study. I went to Christian schools.”

“How important would it have been to you that the person [you married], or anybody you were seriously interested in, share your religious outlook?”

“It was important,” she said. “I wasn’t obsessed with it, but I wanted to be with somebody who had the same value system I did.”

Thus Clark Rockefeller was vetted, in a sense, by his mere presence as a regular parishioner at St. Thomas Episcopal.

As for their first in-person meeting, Boss testified in court, “He was having a party, and he heard from my sister that I was in town, and he wanted to invite me to the party.”

“What kind of party was it?”

“It was a Clue party, and everyone was supposed to be a character from Clue” (the board game in which players are guests at a mansion and try to determine which one of them killed Mr. Boddy, their millionaire host).

Rockefeller assigned each of his eight guests a character and instructed them to come in costume and tell his doorman that they were there to see Mr. Boddy. Rockefeller played the role of Professor Plum, a Harvard archaeologist who, appropriately enough, always becomes uncomfortable when asked about his past.

“I was supposed to be Miss Scarlet,” Boss testified, referring to the game’s femme fatale Hollywood actress, whose career is in shambles and whose desire to marry rich has brought her to Boddy Mansion.

Sandra arrived at the party with her sister and their host, dressed in purple slacks as Professor Plum, greeted them with a glass of sherry in his hand. She immediately liked what she saw. “He was blond, blue-eyed, preppy, clean-cut, fit,” Boss said in her grand jury testimony. “He was very physically attentive and, you know, guys may or may not make an effort to make sure you’re having a good time. He was very attentive.”

“I’m pretty sure we played the game Clue,” said Tom Rizer, who went as Mr. Green, the character whose sexual proclivities would cost him his job with the State Department should they become known.

“Obviously Clark arranged this to meet Sandy,” Rizer continued. “He had already taken an interest in Sandy’s sister, Julia, but she was taken. So when he heard that she had a sister . . . Well, it seemed to me it was love at first sight for both of them. Sandy was overwhelmed with him. He was a very handsome man.”

On the witness stand, Sandra said Rockefeller engaged mostly in small talk at the Clue party, but shortly after she returned to Boston he called and said he’d like to see her again. “I thought it would be nice,” she testified. On her next trip to New York, they started “light dating,” as she described it, although she wasn’t eager to launch into a new relationship, especially not a long-distance one. She was on a career track.

None of Boss’s previous relationships had worked out, she said, in part because most of the men she had dated were intimidated by her intelligence. Rockefeller was different. He “made a big deal of celebrating [it], as opposed to saying, ‘You’d be nice if you weren’t so smart,’ which, you know, was appealing.” In court she admitted to having been attracted by the simple fact that someone like Clark Rockefeller “was very enthusiastic about the idea of getting to know me and being romantically involved.”

“How did that make you feel?” the prosecutor asked.

“Good, flattered. I liked him.”

Boss continued in her grand jury testimony, “He said his father’s name was George Percy Rockefeller, and that he was related to the William line [of the Rockefeller family]. His mother’s name was Mary Roberts, and she was from Virginia. His father was an engineer and had done some design work for the Navy. His mother was, I guess you could use the expression, a stay-at-home mom, but he described her activities as being kind of charity stuff and shopping.

“He said they had a lot of money. He said that he grew up at number 19 Sutton Place, which was a large town house that he pointed out to me in New York.” An old-money enclave spanning just six blocks along the East River, Sutton Place was a likely neighborhood for a Rockefeller to have lived.

“He said they had houses in Maine and in New Hope, Pennsylvania, and Pound Ridge. They had a big boat, that kind of stuff.”

Yet despite his wealth and status, Rockefeller stressed that he was just an ordinary man, Boss said. “He took an interesting approach, which was to sort of let it all out in an ‘I’m a really subtle guy’ way.”

His life of privilege had been fraught with considerable pain, he told Boss. When he was two or three, he had fallen down the stairs in his family’s home on Sutton Place, and the accident “affected his speech so that he was perfectly smart in learning, but he didn’t talk,” she said. His being rendered mute prevented him from going to school (except for a one-day stint at the Collegiate School, a boys’ day school on the Upper West Side that dates back to 1628) and necessitated home tutoring.

He was diagnosed as “aphasic,” she added, meaning language-impaired, until he experienced a miraculous breakthrough: one day a neighbor brought his dog over to the Rockefellers’ home—he had asked them to dog-sit while he was away. “And the dog was in the town house, and he saw the dog and said, ‘Woofness,’ and then after that began to talk.”

Boss said all of this with a straight face. That single word, “woofness,” magically broke the spell, and Clark began to perform phenomenally in school. He was chosen to attend Yale University at age fourteen.

“Did he explain how a fourteen-year-old could attend Yale?” the prosecutor asked in court.

“What he said was there was an early entrance program and that occasionally young students were accepted,” Boss responded. He loved to talk about his cherished days at Yale, she said—the friends he made, his classes, and how he excelled in his major, mathematics. He even opened up to her about the tragedy that befell him during his senior year.

“He told me that his parents wanted to come up and visit him,” she recounted. Clark wanted to stay on campus that weekend, however, so he persuaded them to take one of the family’s sports cars instead of one of the sedans; that way there wouldn’t be enough room for him to ride with them around New Haven. On their way to see him, he told Boss, his mother lost control of the sports car and both she and his father were killed, leaving behind their only child, then eighteen. “He told me that his father’s family had attempted to assume custody of him, but that he had been able to resist that, because he was eighteen, and so he said that he lived on his own in the town house on Sutton Place.”

“Did you have . . . any reason to doubt what [Rockefeller] was saying?” the prosecutor asked. The entire courtroom seemed to take a deep breath in anticipation of Boss’s response.

“No,” she said.

The prosecutor pressed her. Did she believe him to be so intellectually superior that he could enter Yale at fourteen?

“Yes,” she said.

“Why?”

“Two reasons: one, he was very intelligent—he was one of the most intelligent people I had ever known; and because I myself had been asked as a young child to go to college early, I knew that it was possible for intelligent children to occasionally be taken into university early, even though I didn’t do that.”

Boss’s relationship with Rockefeller progressed quickly, she told the grand jury. “He was well read. He had read a lot of classic literature, which I liked. He was quite interested and dedicated to the church. We had a lot of similar philanthropic values and aspirations. He was very attentive, very polite, very kind—very complimentary of me.”

She said she loved the fact that he didn’t seem concerned about material wealth—it didn’t seem to bother him that the “fortune” he said his father had left him was “sadly” encumbered by a lawsuit. Rockefeller explained to her that his father was “perceived” to have embezzled money while employed by the Navy. She also loved that he shared “a lot of my values about kind of changing the world” and, according to what he told her, devoted his life to helping others.

“He told me he was doing debt renegotiation for small countries,” Boss said in court, explaining that he helped developing nations reduce and renegotiate their debts to banks.

By the time she moved to New York in the summer of 1993, working in debt markets with Merrill Lynch (“pricing derivatives,” she testified), “We were definitely seeing each other as boyfriend and girlfriend.” And when the summer job was over and she returned to Massachusetts to begin her second year at Harvard Business School, the relationship continued long distance. Boss would drive down to New York at least twice a month to pick him up—“he said he did not have a driver’s license” due to an eye issue.

Although they had known each other only a matter of months, Boss said, “It was already, you know, quite romantic, and so it was a continuation of that vein. . . . We were talking quite seriously about getting married.”

He had his quirks, but what smart, wealthy, well-bred person didn’t? “He really liked
Star Trek
,” she told the grand jury, “and made sort of a big fuss about always seeing
Star Trek
at a special time on Sunday night or whenever it was. He was sort of a little bit of a Trekkie. He was very eccentric in what seemed like a cute and lovable way about his dog. You know, he’d cook for the dog, brush the dog’s hair every day. He made a big deal about ‘I can’t go to that party or that event unless I can bring my dog.’ It seemed kind of endearing, but it was also eccentric.”

The endearing outweighed the eccentric, and Sandra Boss fell in love with Clark Rockefeller. In the spring of 1994, he took her to the island of Islesboro, off the coast of Maine, a secluded spot where many wealthy people have summer homes. He brought along a ring with three simple diamonds from Tiffany & Co., which he knew would fit Sandy because he had gone shopping for it at the flagship Tiffany store on Fifth Avenue with her twin sister, Julia, who had tried it on, Boss later learned. He would later contend that he spent “every last penny” he had on the engagement ring.

Clark proposed and Sandra accepted, and not long after that the couple flew out to Seattle so that Clark could ask Sandra’s father for her hand in marriage. William Boss found that both old-fashioned and endearing, and of course he said yes. As for Sandra’s meeting Rockefeller’s family, there was hardly anyone to meet. He was an only child, and his parents were dead. There was the woman he called his aunt, and her daughter, Alice Johnson, whom he called his niece, and of course he had taken Sandra over to meet them in their apartment in the United Nations Plaza. And, of course, they fell all over Clark as if they were indeed family, which by then Alice and her mother felt as if they were. “This is my cousin Alice, and my aunt,” Clark said, and Alice and her mother quickly came to love Sandra as deeply as they loved Clark. “This is the kind of woman I want to be: smart, beautiful, independent,” Alice Johnson would later say, adding that when Sandra’s mother and father met her family, they were also duly impressed and absolutely convinced that their daughter was indeed marrying a Rockefeller. “They were a constant fixture in our lives for a couple of years,” Sandra Boss told the grand jury of the Johnson family.

None of this made Boss suspicious, but there were some warning signs that Rockefeller might not make an ideal husband. “For the two years before we got married, he was almost always the nice, sweet, smart person who I had met,” she continued. “A couple of times, though, I saw that he could get very angry, which made me nervous. One time I even said, ‘I see that temper and I’m not sure about this.’ And he said, ‘Well, you’ve already made a commitment, because I’ve already settled my lawsuit for you.’ ” He was referring to the supposed embezzlement claim that the U.S. Navy had filed against his late father; he told her that the settlement had cost him $50 million, his entire inheritance. “He chose to settle the lawsuit . . . rather than putting me at risk financially over this situation,” said Boss. “He explicitly stated that love was more important than money, and that he wanted to protect me.”