The Man in the Rockefeller Suit (38 page)

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, and 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.”

He seemed to find some solace in impressing women, however. “He was always with some pretty girl,” said his friend Sheldon Fish, the art dealer. “He introduced me to one of the Dixie Chicks.” Another friend added, “He loved blondes.” He put the full-court press on my friend Roxane West, the young woman from a West Texas oil family, after she collided with him at a party at an art gallery in Manhattan. After one lunch together, he began “text flirting,” as he called it, proposing meetings while brooding that he was unable to travel from Boston to the city because all of his private clubs’ residential facilities were booked and he, as a Rockefeller, couldn’t stay in a commercial hotel. “I hope you had a good Mother’s Day,” he texted on one occasion. On June 1, he texted, “Please please PLEASE do not feel ignored. Very busy week. Just coming to an end. Would LOVE to see you. Will call tonight. Just returned from Bermuda. Rented summer house there. Excellent time.”

He went to great pains to present an elaborate charade. At one point while on the phone with Roxane, he even acted as if he were speaking to his daughter, who was, of course, already living in London. By the time she received her last text message from him, Roxane was certain that he was a charlatan whom she intended never to see again. “I just thought it was all bullshit, that he wasn’t who he said he was,” she said.

One of his last social appearances in Boston was at a dinner party in the home of Paul and Helen Wessling, on Commonwealth Avenue. During Rockefeller’s trial, a fellow guest at that dinner, the veteran financial portfolio manager Nathan Peltz, took the stand. “We had cocktails, and I was told another guest was coming,” Peltz testified, identifying the guest as “the defendant.” Asked if Rockefeller had disclosed his occupation, Peltz said he had thought he had something to do with investments. “I never got a clear answer as to the name of the company. My understanding was it was probably a private fund. Our host was also in the same business. I’m used to having people say, ‘I work for X, Y, Z company.’ ”

Peltz also testified, “He said he lived on Beacon Hill and had just experienced the loss of his child. He had a little girl, whom he referred to as Snooks, or Snookums. He said he had the child out of wedlock in England, and that the woman who had mothered the child had come to some sort of resolution. He was raising her as a single parent. He said the mother had decided she wanted her child back. He said his child had been taken back to England by a court order by a judge here in Massachusetts. . . . He never said anything about having a wife. It was clear he was distraught and he felt he had been unjustly treated by the court, to the extent that the court had granted the mother custody.”

The cocktail hour had segued into dinner, during which Rockefeller couldn’t get off the subject of Snooks. “He talked incessantly about losing her,” Peltz told the court. “He was very angry about it. I suggested, why couldn’t he go back to the court and talk to the judge? He indicated that if the court couldn’t resolve this he would probably go back to England and bring the child back. I took it to mean the equivalent of kidnapping.”

While one carefully cultivated persona, Clark Rockefeller, was dying, another was being born. The process of reinvention began in November 2007, even before he lost custody of his daughter, with an e-mail to Obsidian Realty in Baltimore. Julie Gochar, an owner of Obsidian Realty, who received the e-mail, later testified during Clark Rockefeller’s trial.

A blond young woman in a white cotton summer dress, Gochar was at least six months pregnant at the time of the trial. After some preamble about her company, which she owned with two partners and ran with twenty-seven independently contracted agents in the greater Baltimore area, she was asked by the prosecutor if she knew the individual sitting with his lawyers at the defense table.

“Yes, I do,” she replied.

“What is the name by which you know him?”

“Chip Smith,” she said, adding, “He sent an e-mail to the office through our general inquiry. He was interested in relocating to Baltimore. It was mid- to late November 2007.”

“In the initial e-mail, did he provide any information about himself at all?”

“Just that he was in Chile and would be at some point in the spring of the following year coming up by boat and staying in Baltimore.”

“Did you respond to his e-mail?” she was asked. Of course, she said. The Baltimore real estate market was red-hot and intensely competitive in the fall of 2007, and any Realtor with a heartbeat would recognize that an e-mail for a relocation from Chile seeking a house in the half-million-dollar range was a slam dunk for a sale. “He asked for help in learning about Baltimore and the neighborhoods, and that’s my job,” she said.

He hadn’t given her his name at that point, just his e-mail address: [email protected]. “There was a lot of information provided back and forth,” said Gochar, the result of “the usual probing questions on my part to get to know him . . . to help him with where he would want to live. . . . He had a daughter. Needed certain housing to accommodate that. Wanted to be in the city and would be working under contract, I believe for some sort of construction, catamarans.”

Gochar was asked what the sailor said about his daughter, whose name he said was Muffy. “I knew he had a seven-year-old daughter. On the boat with him.”

“Did he tell you how he was able to raise a seven-year-old on a boat?”

“Only in the context of schooling. She was homeschooled on the Calvert School Program, actually headquartered in Baltimore. He wanted a city-row-home kind of feel with a roof deck, ideally close to Camden Yards, so he could engage in his passion for baseball.” Because he was sailing around Chile, he said, e-mail service would be difficult and intermittent.”

“What did he tell you about the girl’s mother?”

“The mother was a surrogate, and he had destroyed the papers on her identity,” she said, adding that he had burned the birth records to ensure that his daughter wouldn’t ever discover her mother’s identity. “She doesn’t need to know,” he told the Realtor.

The night after receiving the e-mail, Julie Gochar told her husband about her prospective new client, the ship’s captain named Chip Smith.

“He’s a sailor,” she said. “How does he have the money to buy a house?”

“Those contract captains make a lot of money,” her husband answered. And that was good enough for Julie Gochar, who immediately began searching for suitable properties to show the captain when he arrived in Baltimore.

After e-mailing and instant-messaging for a few months, the captain finally gave Gochar some specific directions. “In early February we were talking logistically how he would be locating from another country and where he would stay. Would he stay in a hotel with enough time to find housing, or would he need some sort of temporary short-term housing? So we set him up in short-term housing . . . two-month lease on a row home around the corner from our office.”

“Why a rental instead of a hotel?”

“He didn’t like hotels,” she said, because, he explained, he didn’t trust them. She set Chip Smith up for a two-month rental at $2,000 per month just behind her real estate office on South Wolfe Street, beginning in April, when he would arrive. She drew up the lease in the name of S. V. Shenandoah, assuming the e-mail address was the captain’s name. “That’s funny,” he e-mailed back. “That’s the e-mail address of my boat. My name is actually Charles Smith.” She testified, “He told me he loathed the name Charles.” He instructed her to call him Chip. Before his arrival, Chip had several boxes of his belongings sent to Julie Gochar’s real estate office, big boxes with a Boston return address, which he explained were filled with clothing, “because I won’t have any northern wear when I arrive.” When she asked him why the boxes were shipped from Boston when he had told her he was originally from Wisconsin, he replied, “Oh, when I was at Harvard, I left some of my personal belongings there, which Harvard alums are allowed to do.”