The Man in the Rockefeller Suit

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.

“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: svshenandoah@gmail.com. “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.”

“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.”

“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.

“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.”

“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.”

They set up a meeting in the realty office. When Smith strolled in, Gochar did a double take. “It wasn’t at all what I was expecting. . . . I thought he would be a tall, tanned, sailor-looking guy. . . . He wasn’t at all.” His accent reminded her of Thurston Howell III from Gilligan’s Island, although, she would later admit, she had never heard a Boston Brahmin accent before. The other thing that struck her was that he seemed much too slight to be a sailor, much less the captain of a massive ship. Her husband had attended St. Mary’s College in southern Maryland with a group of real sailors, strong and robust men who were nothing like the fey gentleman who stood before her wearing a baseball cap and thick black-rimmed glasses, with extremely red hair that looked as if it had been dyed. “I certainly wasn’t picturing five foot nothing, pale . . .”

He had warned her in advance that he wouldn’t be tanned, because his trip was spent mostly in the rain. “I can’t believe I’ve been sailing for as long as I have and don’t even have a tan to show for it,” he said.

He was alone. He said his daughter was spending some time with his two sisters in Wisconsin and would be arriving later in the summer. He said he wanted a list of suitable properties to visit. It was April and he needed a home fast so he could relocate immediately to start his new job: he was under contract with a Baltimore boat company, designing, building, and selling a new brand of state-of-the-art catamarans.

Since he lived practically next door, and because Julie Gochar makes it her business to be available “24/7” for her clients, Chip Smith quickly came to be a welcomed regular presence in the offices of Obsidian Realty. Sure, he was a bit odd, in his salmon-colored khaki pants, some embroidered with little fish, and his boat shoes, always worn without socks. But he was a client, and for Julie Gochar the client was king. “He was there even when it wasn’t pertaining to us having a meeting,” she said. “Doing research. Looking at his own properties, property values. Other things. He just kind of came in and hung out in the office.”

“I gave him a key,” meaning a key to the Obsidian Realty offices. “So he could come and go as he pleased. Because there was a lot that he needed to get at. He didn’t have a computer where he was staying. . . . And to be frank, I didn’t want to meet him down there every time he had the need to go and do some research.”

Smith would often spend hours in the office. “It was almost like he was working in the office with us,” said Gochar, adding that he would sit at the computer “looking at designs of boats and values of gold and stock and stuff like that.”

Of course, it didn’t hurt that he had money for a substantial real estate purchase. Gochar realized that early on, when she asked him to complete the standard prequalification loan papers for the half-million-dollar value of the properties he would be seeing. “And he indicated that he would not be financing the transaction, he’d be paying cash.”

“Look, I can trust you now,” he told his Realtor as they prepared to look at properties. “I come from a lot of money. I just don’t want people to know that I have money. Because everybody’s always coming at me with their hands out.”

She was referring to the low-key South Point neighborhood of Baltimore, where money didn’t impress people. “You have to understand that you’re going to be sitting next to a tugboat captain on one side of you and an orthopedic surgeon on the other side. They almost prefer if you have money that you don’t rub it in their faces.” He hardly toned it down, though. When Gochar invited him to an office mixer—“It’s a great way to meet people!” she said—he demurred, saying, “I don’t have any party clothes,” only to show up in a big white floppy sailor’s hat and pinkish pants, which the office staff came to call “Chip Smith’s Party Pants.”

There were other idiosyncrasies. Chip Smith ate only “white” food: things like chicken salad on white bread, white potatoes, white sliced turkey, the whites of hard-boiled eggs. “And don’t put anything on it,” he would tell the waitress when ordering a chicken sandwich at lunch, turning to Julie Gochar to add, “I can’t have tomatoes because I’m allergic.” While they looked at houses, he was always on his cell phone, texting or having loud and animated conversations about things like money and diamond rings and about how his daughter didn’t like her name, “Muffy,” and he might start calling her “TLO—The Little One.” As for his choice of homes, he explained, the name of the street was extremely important. He couldn’t live on Boston Street, he told Julie Gochar, but he could see himself living on Montgomery Street, and they quickly found a house he loved at 10 West Montgomery in the Federal Hill section of the city, which was owned by an attorney, whose library Chip Smith admired.

“He loved the neighborhood and he loved the street name,” said Gochar. But he felt the house needed $100,000 worth of renovations. “I’m going to lowball it,” Chip Smith told his Realtor. “I’m paying cash and I should be able to get it for $100,000 less.”

His low-bid offer was rejected and another buyer immediately swooped in to offer almost the asking price. He offered $150,000 more than his original offer. Still the buyer went with the other offer, even though it was $50,000 less, which sent Chip Smith into a rage. “I just don’t lose,” he said. Gochar saw another side of Smith that day. “Kind of a temper tantrum almost. ‘I want that house! I don’t understand why I can’t have that house! I’m paying cash for this house!’ My personal impression was that he was used to getting what he wanted.”

When he didn’t immediately get it, Chip Smith went around his Realtor and contacted the seller directly, which didn’t hold much sway with the seller, but succeeded in infuriating Gochar. By then, she said, she was beginning to wonder if Chip Smith was worth all the endless time and trouble she was enduring in trying to help him find a house.

By early May, he wanted a sailboat, a catamaran. Not for his job, which he said was designing catamarans, but for other reasons. He began looking at the boats docked at the Anchorage Marina, which billed itself as “Baltimore’s Premier Yachting Center.” As reported by Annie Linskey in the Baltimore Sun: One day in the marina, he met Bruce Boswell, the owner of a twenty-six-foot catamaran. He introduced himself as Chip MacLaughlin and asked Boswell whether he was interested in selling the boat, which, being somewhat dilapidated, was worth half the $10,000 cash the stranger offered. “Chainsaw food” was how the boat would later be described. “I was happy to sell it,” Boswell told the Sun.

They retired to a neighborhood bar, where MacLaughlin spun “a big story,” Boswell was quoted as recalling. He said he had come to Baltimore to be closer to his sister, who lived in the city. He bragged about his membership in the private Century Club in New York and said he planned to buy Baltimore’s historic Mayflower Theater and restore it to grandeur.

As for the purchase of the boat, Chip suggested that they close the deal in his office, Obsidian Realty. It was night when they arrived there. Chip MacLaughlin punched in the after-hours security code and opened the door with his own key. While counting out the cash—$10,000 in twenty- and fifty-dollar bills—he mentioned that he owned Obsidian Realty. If Boswell had bothered to check, he would have discovered that one of Julie Gochar’s partners in the company actually had the name MacLaughlin, but his first name was Henry.

Chip insisted that the boat be registered in the name of Chip Smith, Boswell later said, because “he didn’t like the name MacLaughlin.” The deal was consummated, and the catamaran remained docked in the slip owned by Bruce Boswell’s brother Harry, to whom the new owner would pay $2,200 annual rent.

On June 6, Rockefeller called the owner of Boston Bullion, a preciousmetals brokerage in the Boston suburb of Arlington. “He was looking to purchase some gold,” said the proprietor, Kenneth Murphy. The caller identified himself as Clark Rock, gave his address as 217 Commonwealth Avenue, Boston, and said he wanted to convert the approximately $2 million he’d just won in a patent lawsuit into gold. He said he needed $465,000 in gold immediately, $300,000 more on June 30, and $1.235 million on July 31.

Clark Rock asked Murphy to meet him on June 9 at the Harvard Square Starbucks in Cambridge. “He looked like a college professor to me, kind of preppy, Ivy League,” Murphy remembered. He had wired $465,000 to Boston Bullion that day from his bank account, listed under the name of Clark Rock. Once the funds arrived in Murphy’s bank account, Rock could collect his gold, which he wanted in South African Krugerrands. Ten days later, on June 20, Rock arrived at Boston Bullion to pick up 527 Krugerrands, which weighed almost forty pounds. He put them in his briefcase and asked Murphy for a ride back to Boston.

The next day, June 21, Rock called Murphy again, saying he wanted to sell twenty-four of the Krugerrands. But three days later, Rock called to say he’d changed his mind. “He told me he was unhappy with the Krugerrands altogether and wanted to exchange them for American Eagle gold coins,” the official gold bullion coin of the U.S. Mint, on the face of which is Augustus Saint-Gaudens’s “Lady Liberty.” American Eagles have no IRS or other reporting requirements and are thereby untraceable. On July 7, Clark Rock returned to Boston Bullion with his briefcase full of Krugerrands and left with a briefcase full of American Eagles, which have a face value of $50 each but sell for the going price of gold, making each one-ounce coin worth more than $1,000. A week later, on July 14, Rock wired another $300,000 to Boston Bullion, to order approximately three hundred more American Eagle coins, which he would pick up a week later, on July 21.

Chip Smith finally found a suitable place to live in Baltimore, a carriage house behind a large home that had been converted into an apartment building. The address was 618 Ploy Street, in the Mount Vernon neighborhood. Julie Gochar almost didn’t show him the house, because she was certain he would dislike the street name: Ploy. To her surprise, he loved it. The price was $450,000, inclusive of upgrades being completed at the time of the sale, among them a kitchen renovation and new carpeting. Smith insisted that the house be put in the name of his limited liability corporation, P1OY St. Parking, LLC, a corporation he said was registered in the state of Nevada.

“No,” she answered. “He went home to Wisconsin to visit his sisters and his daughter. . . . Both his sisters had been divorced once or twice. . . . My overall impression was that he didn’t believe in their tactics for marriage and getting divorced. They kind of made him a workhorse whenever he got home. So he didn’t want to go home all the time.”

The original date for the closing on the house was June 27. “But it continued to get postponed for multiple reasons, some from the seller’s side . . . some from our side,” Gochar said. “[Chip] had been traveling through Europe and fell ill and was not going to make it in time for settlement. He was able to get in touch with me via e-mail at one point, when he was well enough to do it and had access.”

She was asked if she had received word of Smith’s becoming ill while abroad from him or from other sources. “No, it was him telling me. It was either Switzerland or Sweden. . . . It turns out that they couldn’t really identify what the problem was for four days. It was a flu, which turned out to be a reaction to sun-dried tomatoes.”

He told her he had flown in from Chestertown, the private airport just outside of Baltimore, on a private plane he had chartered—and piloted himself. He couldn’t wire the money for the purchase. “Because I can’t wire money out of this trust account,” he explained. So the $450,000 sales price had to be paid via cashier’s check. The sale of the carriage house closed on July 18, 2007. Gochar was asked if he moved in immediately. “I don’t know,” she replied. “I know that he was going home to pack up and make the drive down. He had left some belongings in Boston while he was abroad, so he was going to pick those up and do his formal move throughout that week.”

The Boston police detectives who would later work on the case, Ray Mosher and Joseph Leeman, told me about Grinspoon, who was twenty-five, with the greatest admiration. She moonlighted from her real estate job as a waitress and bartender at the Annabel Lee Tavern. She was a triathlete. Her picture on the Obsidian Realty Web site showed a fit, attractive, dark-haired woman in a brown polo shirt and turquoise earrings.

The agents at Obsidian Realty soon came to know that Chip Smith was cheap, and they recognized that some of his stories—such as the one he told about appearing in a Backstreet Boys video—were a little far-fetched. But he was offering several thousand dollars, plus transportation to the Boston area, where his belongings were stored, so Beth Grinspoon said she would enlist a friend and help him move. He flew them from Baltimore to Boston on AirTran, the cut-rate airline, and put them up in the Royal Sonesta Hotel, in Cambridge. He kept the whereabouts of his storage facility a secret until the next morning, when a cab took the movers to a Boston suburb, to a house with a twocar garage, which was packed with Smith’s belongings.

He rented a twenty-six-foot U-haul truck, but when it became obvious that it was much too small for the load, he returned to rent a five-foot-nine-inch trailer as well. Almost everything was packed in large boxes, which were very heavy.

Soon the owner of the house, whom Smith identified as his aunt, returned home and urged him to finish as quickly as possible. “I’ve expired my welcome on using the garage,” Smith told his moving team, imploring them to hurry. When they had finished loading the truck and trailer, Smith, who remained in Boston, sent Grinspoon on to Baltimore. He still owed her $1,400. On July 23, Beth Grinspoon unloaded the truck at 618 Ploy Street. As per Smith’s instructions, she had a locksmith change all the locks and give her the new keys. All the while, she received regular e-mails and text messages from Smith asking, “Are you done?”

That evening, he called the driver Darryl Hopkins and booked him for a trip the coming Friday to New York City, where Rockefeller said he had to attend a board meeting. “He wanted to leave at seven a.m., shoot down to the board meeting, vote on something, leave, and try and be back in Boston by three or three-thirty,” Hopkins would later testify. Though Hopkins had another corporate client on his schedule that day, he chose to drive Clark, because he was a Rockefeller, and a Rockefeller would “make the phone ring more often.” The charge was $700.

While his driver sped toward New York, Rockefeller made calls on his cell phone in the backseat. “One of them was about spending the weekend in Newport, in particular with Senator Chafee’s son,” Hopkins remembered.

Rockefeller instructed Hopkins to drop him off on the corner of Central Park South and Sixth Avenue and said he would walk the block or so from there to his board meeting. Fifty minutes later, he called to say he was finished and told Hopkins to pick him up in front of the Plaza Hotel. Next he wanted to zip over to the J.G. Melon restaurant for a take-out lunch—“steak tahr-tahr,” the driver later imitated him saying—and then back to Boston.

Wolfing down the raw meat with his hands—the restaurant had neglected to include utensils—Rockefeller made phone calls along the way, all the while griping about how he was “sick and tired” of board meetings. He said he didn’t need the headache or the meager fee the company’s directors were awarded for their attendance. Besides, he said, “I don’t work anymore.” When he had worked, he always told Hopkins, it was carrying out high-level duties “for the Defense Department.”

Another cell phone conversation that Hopkins overheard on the way to Boston concerned a “clingy” friend named Harold, who was certain to be a thorn in Rockefeller’s side during the upcoming weekend of sailing with Snooks and Senator Chafee’s son. “Oh, I’m stuck with him again?” Rockefeller groused loudly on his cell. “Do I have to do this?”

Once he hung up, Rockefeller talked about how he might ditch Harold. “He said that Harold was a friend of the family, gay, and very—he always described him as being very clingy, very sort of possessive,” Hopkins recalled. “He said that he was a pain in the ass and that he was getting stuck with him again because of some family relationship.”

Rockefeller didn’t go into details, and the driver didn’t dare to pry. “Why don’t you get a restraining order?” he asked. Rockefeller said, “This guy’s too dangerous. He might hurt me and, God forbid, he might hurt Snooks.”

What could Hopkins say but yes? He later gave his reasoning to the grand jury: “Knowing that I was going to be returning to Florida, that my business was falling apart because of the economy—I mean, I was working in negative territory, not enough to even make car payments and the insurance for livery plates, which is over $5,000 a year. It was summertime, it was really slow, and my wife and I had made the decision: this isn’t working anymore. So if the ship’s going to go down, we’ll go down together as a family.”

And right there, in the backseat of his car, was the answer to his problems. “I don’t think there’s anybody in America that doesn’t know the name Rockefeller,” said Hopkins. “This guy doesn’t work for a living. He lives on Beacon Hill. His daughter goes to the Southfield School. Everything—the steak tartare, board meetings in New York, there was nothing about this individual that did not say that he was a real honestto-God Rockefeller. Even the way he talked.”

Hopkins didn’t hesitate to accept the offer. He would have ditched a battalion of clingy Harolds for Clark Rockefeller. “If you want to get rid of somebody, we’ll get rid of somebody,” Hopkins told him. The next day they met to rehearse their plan. Rockefeller even practiced leaping into the limo with Snooks in front of the valet parkers at the Algonquin Club. After dropping him off, Hopkins called his wife. “I couldn’t wait to call her and tell her that Clark Rockefeller was willing to help us out,” he said.

“He was a venture capitalist, an entrepreneur, and he was losing $10 million in some deal,” the seemingly innocent, moonfaced Ang testified. He told her he was a single father whose extremely problematic ex-wife worked at Vogue magazine. They had been married in a ceremony on Nantucket, he said, but his witch of a wife “never filed the papers.” She deserted him and his daughter when Snooks was three, and “only comes around when she needs money.” That Clark Rockefeller had money was immediately apparent to Ang. He had so much money, in fact, that he could indulge in things that ordinary people couldn’t even dream about, such as arranging to have a second child at a birthing center in California, which Ang said he had described as an “egg farm,” where his sperm could impregnate an egg from a respectable mother fed a special diet. Such a child, he told Ang, would truly be “all mine.” Women were lining up to date him, he added. “One even tried to trap me in her house and wouldn’t let me go.”

Ang had come to know him quite well in the time they had spent together at the Sailing Center and elsewhere around Boston, always as friends, never intimates. She learned he was developing a television show while “going for his Ph.D. at Harvard . . . astronomy or looking at the stars or something,” she said. Rockefeller told her he wanted to know his stars when he sailed around the world in his new seventy-two-foot sailboat with his daughter. He invited Ang to join them on their trip around the world. She could give Snooks piano lessons on the boat, he said.

On July 25, coming out of a movie theater in Ipswich, Ang discovered that Clark had left her a voicemail. When she returned the call, he asked, “Are you ready to go sailing? I’m not going to be mad at you if you don’t come, but I need to know now.”

She couldn’t possibly, she told him, adding, “I enjoy my life on land.” He told her he and Snooks needed to go to their new sailboat, which was docked in New York, the next day. Could Aileen drive them to New York City for $500? Of course, she said, but not on Saturday. She’d be helping out with a fund-raiser for a friend’s charity, she explained. “Well,” Rockefeller said, “I really want to go on Saturday, but let me try to rearrange my schedule.”

When Rockefeller called Ang Saturday morning, he was minutes away from moving the third pawn in the chess game he was playing into position: the court-appointed veteran social worker he had described to Darryl Hopkins as the “clingy friend,” whose name he told Hopkins was Harold (instead of Howard) Yaffe. Rockefeller had advised the social worker that he “was traveling up from Florida,” and Yaffe had no reason to disbelieve him. He knew that Rockefeller was an extremely busy man. He had canceled the first potential visit with his daughter after his divorce, scheduled for April. Finally, the day of his first supervised visit with Snooks—Saturday, July 26—had come.

At 11 a.m., Howard Yaffe picked up Snooks from Sandra Boss on the corner of Commonwealth Avenue and Exeter Street and walked the little girl across the street to meet her father at the Algonquin Club. Later, it would become clear that Aileen Ang and her charity work had thrown a monkey wrench into Rockefeller’s plans. Therefore Rockefeller, Snooks, and the social worker ambled leisurely around the Algonquin for a couple of hours.

After leaving the club, Rockefeller bought stamps at the post office, and then the trio went to a bookstore. At 3:30, they were at Fenway Park, presumably to see a Red Sox game, but when Rockefeller went to pick up the tickets he had ordered, he said they wouldn’t give them to him without a picture ID. Later it would be revealed that there were no tickets waiting for him. It was all a ruse. The real plan for the day, foiled by Aileen Ang, would have to wait until the following day’s visitation, Sunday, July 27.

Sunday morning began just as Saturday had: Snooks and Howard Yaffe left Sandra Boss to meet Rockefeller at the Algonquin. They walked around the club for a bit, then strolled over to Clarendon Park so that Snooks could play for a while. “We pushed her on the swings,” said Yaffe. As usual, Rockefeller had calls on his cell phone. “About a deal that was going through in Florida,” Yaffe recalled. Around 12:30, the social worker suggested that it was time to get Snooks some lunch.

At 12:45, they were walking down Marlborough Street, Snooks on her father’s shoulders, Yaffe close behind. When Rockefeller put Snooks down, complaining that his back was hurting, and pointed out something on a historic building to Yaffe, who turned to look, Rockefeller’s plan was set into motion. “I remember being shoved and pushed by Clark,” Yaffe would recall. “It was sort of a body block. As I got up and turned around, I saw a black SUV with the door open.”

Everything was going precisely the way Rockefeller had planned it. Clingy “Harold’s” hands slipped off the door handle and he crashed to the pavement, where he lay dazed and bloody in the street. Darryl Hopkins expertly followed Rockefeller’s directions—“Right, left, right, left!”—Until he was ordered to drop them in front of a White Hen Pantry grocery, where a cab was waiting, ready to ferry Rockefeller and Snooks to the Boston Sailing Center, where Aileen Ang was in position in her SUV to drive them to New York. At last they made it through the crowded freeways and into the city, only to be stuck in traffic in front of Grand Central Terminal, where Rockefeller threw an envelope with $500 in cash in it on Ang’s front seat and, without saying goodbye, grabbed his daughter and disappeared into the traffic.

Within hours, Darryl Hopkins and Aileen Ang would realize that they had been duped into being accomplices in a parental kidnapping. Back in Boston, Howard Yaffe, possibly with a concussion, was still muttering, “He got the girl.” And Sandra Boss, whose divorce settlement of $800,000 had financed the events of that frenetic day, was crying hysterically, telling police, “You’ll never find them now!”

She knew how tense and anxious he could be when he was not getting his way, so she agreed to deliver the keys to Ploy Street before he arrived. He texted her at 9:17: “Beth, terribly sorry. But I had to get in tonight. Gladly pay for the cab [to Ploy Street]. Mission accomplished?”

“I’m in a big hurry,” he said and left. “You look gorgeous,” he texted her once he was in a taxi, headed back to Ploy Street, where, unbeknownst to Grinspoon, his daughter, Reigh “Snooks” Boss, was waiting for him. Also unbeknownst to Grinspoon and a long list of others whom he had snared in the events of that day, he was the subject of an Amber Alert.