CHAPTER 18

“Find Out Who He Is”

In December 2006, four months after the Rockefeller family had moved to Boston, Sandra Boss decided to leave her husband. The last straw, she told the grand jury, was an incident involving their daughter.

“The school called Clark and me into a parent-teacher conference on, I think, December 2, 2006. They said they had been trying to get ahold of me and hadn’t been successful. It turned out that Clark had given them a fake cell phone number for me, and had been preventing me from seeing them.” She added, “He had been telling me that they didn’t do parent-teacher conferences.”

When Reigh’s teachers finally got her mother and her father in the same room, they expressed some serious concerns.

As Boss recalled, “They said that she, while very intellectually impressive, was having a temper tantrum practically every day. She was really struggling socially. She was five at this time. She would go to the teachers and say, ‘Please tell me what to play.’ She really had been harmed at that point by his excessive control of her. I spoke to Clark the day after this event and said, ‘We really need to follow the teachers’ instructions to get some behavioral help for Reigh, and this is proof that we have to change how we’re caring for her.’ He screamed at me. He threatened me. He told me that I could never talk to the school again. He just went psycho.”

“Just to be clear,” the prosecutor asked, “what was his position about getting a therapist or a counselor for Reigh to address some of the issues that were raised at school?”

“Unequivocal refusal. He wouldn’t allow it under any circumstance.”

Leaving Clark Rockefeller was no simple matter, however. It would require careful planning if she wanted to exit the marriage with her daughter, and she was determined not to allow the child to remain in her husband’s custody. She spent a week trying to find suitable legal representation.

“It took a lot of strategy to figure out how to get me out,” Boss said. “I was quite worried about my safety, and, frankly, he was stalking me in the night and doing a lot of crazy stuff before I left. It was very, very dangerous. I was advised by a psychotherapist brought in by my lawyers that I couldn’t take [Reigh] out right away—that it would result in severe danger for all of us.”

She wasn’t asked to elaborate on the “crazy stuff” that her husband was doing, and she didn’t. Instead, she outlined her plan of attack to regain control of her daughter and of her own life. He was taking care of their daughter two-thirds of the time. Sandra immediately claimed two days a week. “Then we started the procedure to get her out. The only thing I focused on was taking care of Reigh. My obsession was her safety. I immediately expressed my concern that he would kidnap her.”

On January 17, 2007, almost two months after she had determined to leave Clark, her attorney filed the divorce petition. Both parties’ lawyers quickly filed a child custody claim (Sandra paid all of Clark’s attorney’s fees). Thus began what would turn out to be a full year of contentious negotiations. Sandra moved into an apartment in a building across from what is now the Taj Boston hotel. “I was able to see Reigh two days a week, and the defendant was seeing her five days a week at that time,” she said.

Rockefeller was like a wounded lion. When he wasn’t tending to his daughter, he roared about the various sins he said his wife had committed against him. He moved into a small apartment overlooking the school bus stop on Beacon Street (the town house on Pinckney Street was to be sold) and entered his financially struggling singlefather phase. It wasn’t pretty. “He was furious!” said one friend. A fellow Southfield parent remembered, “When they were going to get divorced, I asked him, ‘How are you going to divide things up?’ He said, ‘Everything is going to have to be sold. I can’t believe this is happening. I can’t believe she’s doing this.’ Looking back on it now, his whole cover was about to be blown. Sandra was the money that allowed him to have the antique cars, the artwork, the clubs, and when she pulled the plug, he was incredibly distraught.”

Rockefeller vowed to interview every divorce lawyer in Boston so that Sandra wouldn’t be able to hire any of them due to conflict-of-interest restrictions. But she had secured a lawyer, and a good one. Strapped for cash, he asked people to buy back the antique cars they’d sold him or buy furniture that he’d received from Sandra after their split. Don MacLeay, the elderly Cornish excavator, was the recipient of one such request. “I had sold him a ’91 Buick, and he called me up and said Sandy was getting a divorce. He said, ‘Gee, Don, I want you to go down and pick up the Buick and send me the money.’ It was $4,500. I’m thinking, ‘Somebody who has been spending all this money, why the hell is he worried about $4,500?’ By this time my wife was seriously ill. I said, ‘Clark, I’ve got a lot of problems.’ Two or three nights later, he called me: ‘Did you pick up the car?’ I said, ‘No. I’m not going to. I’ve got troubles too!’ ”

Rockefeller snapped, “Well, you’re no longer my friend!”

Rockefeller also spoke to the art dealer Sheldon Fish, another friend, about his divorce. “He told me, ‘Sandy only wanted my money. She married me because I’m a Rockefeller,’ ” Fish recalled. “He said, ‘She used my name, and now she wants everything. Maybe I can trade the paintings for custody of Reigh.’ ” Soon after that he made a second call to Fish, who was then living in Peru. “He said, ‘I had to give Sandy all the paintings for custody of Reigh. I don’t have anything. I’m down to my last two million, which is nothing today. I’m in bad shape.’ I said, ‘Come down to Peru. Two million here is worth a lot more than two million there.’ He kept changing the stories. He told so many, and twisted them all around.”

His writing partner, Amy Patt, also noticed the change during Rockefeller’s divorce proceedings. First, he said he was looking for a job and his search wasn’t limited to the weaponry or ballistics fields. “He mentioned that the Dexter Southfield School was talking with him about hiring him as a publicist for the school,” she told the grand jury. He was so distraught about the divorce and the prospect of losing his daughter that he couldn’t concentrate on writing the sitcom anymore. Finally, they decided to abandon the project, but not before Rockefeller confided to Amy what he planned to do if indeed Sandra was successful in moving Snooks to London: interview for a job with overseas companies, he said. In fact, the Chinese government had recently approached him to work for their missile department.

“That’s what I do, Amy,” he told her, alluding to his background in ballistics and adding that the Chinese had offered him a three-year contract worth $1 million a year. And if things got rough in the divorce, he assured her, his powerful friends in the Chinese government would step in “and help me take care of the situation.”

When she asked what he meant by “the situation,” he would only say, “It was something about his daughter, something like ‘to get my daughter back.’ ”

Later, he asked Amy to lie to his daughter’s guardian ad litem, the person designated by the court to protect and oversee visitation rights with a child in a divorce case. “To say that I was his girlfriend,” Amy explained. “He felt that it would show him in a good light, that he was in a stable relationship.” Amy refused.

Even the architect Patrick Hickox, Rockefeller’s most ardent defender of all the people I met, noticed a disturbing change in him after Sandra cut him off. Hickox told me about a trip the two of them took to visit Rockefeller’s home in Cornish around the time of his divorce. “We went driving up in my little sports car,” Hickox said. “He put me up in this guesthouse that he had.” The genteel architect blanched the moment he set foot into his lodgings. The house was vacant, mattresses sitting on the bedroom floor. “There were sheets that had never been used that he took right out of the plastic bags. I drove him up the hill and dropped him off at his house, and when I went down it was a little bit after midnight. I went around the house and systematically checked all the windows and all the doors and locked everything. I have a knife that I kept under my pillow.”

“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.”

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.”