The Man in the Rockefeller Suit (37 page)

“A knife?” I asked. “Why in the world would you feel the need to do that?”

“I didn’t have a good reason. I just thought, ‘I don’t know about this person.’ ”

Back in Boston, Rockefeller complained to one of his Beacon Hill neighbors that he couldn’t even spend $200 to trim the ivy on his Pinckney Street house, which was then on the market, without the approval of his wife and her lawyers. Sandra had “bled” him of his riches, he told anyone who would listen. His carefully cultivated façade of the rich, powerful, and entitled aristocrat slowly began to fall apart. As a final indignity, he had to resign from the Algonquin Club, where he had been a director; he was reduced to entering his beloved club on a reciprocal membership.

“He was talking, for the first six or seven months, [about] a househusband position, and arguing that he should be supported forever and care for Reigh,” Sandra Boss testified. “I obviously knew that that was dangerous for her.”

The divorce proceedings were stalled for a number of months, with motions flying back and forth. Rockefeller threatened his wife with the specter of testimony from their Boston and Cornish neighbors, who had watched him on a daily basis and seen that the vast majority of the time he had been the one lovingly caring for Snooks.

Then, suddenly, a breakthrough for Sandra came from Seattle. Her father, the retired Boeing engineer William Boss, “stumbled upon some information that was very helpful,” as she put it. Rockefeller, who had originally told his wife that his mother was the late Mary Roberts, from southern Virginia, had in recent years changed that story. Two years before the separation, Boss said, he talked about “his mother having been a child actor, Ann Carter.”

She continued, “It’s interesting, because when he started talking about her having been a child actor, I thought it was funny. I hadn’t heard about it before.” When she questioned him about it, he said, ‘I just never brought it up.’

“I said, ‘But that’s not what you said your mother’s name was.’ He said, ‘Don’t be stupid.’ He just insulted me and said I was wrong, and said he’d only mentioned her name once because she was dead. He just said I was an idiot. So what happened was, he had told us all about his mother, Ann Carter, looking so much like Reigh, and blah, blah, blah.”

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.”