The Man in the Rockefeller Suit (15 page)

Bishop continued, “I’m a pretty good judge of character. I have a pretty good ear for bullshit. But this guy had me completely snowed, just like everybody else. So I drove him and dropped him off at a house in the backcountry of Greenwich.”

It was dark. Nobody seemed to be at home. It was in the middle of nowhere.

“I’d love to meet your mom,” said Bishop.

“Another time,” said Crowe before he bounded off into the night.

I asked Bishop to go on.

“Later on, my relationship with him was fairly sporadic,” he said. “I mean, I enjoyed the guy. He was very bright. He knew the jargon. He knew how screenplays work.”

Then I asked him how he thought Crowe supported himself. “He said he was working,” he replied, “but what he was working at, I never really knew. He did tell me that he had decided to get out of the film business and trade bonds, and I was like, ‘Oh, I’m sure you can do it!’ Because he was a computer whiz.”

Bishop said that whenever he had problems with his computer, on which he wrote his screenplays, he would turn to Crowe. “And zip, zip, zip, he had it fixed,” he said. “He was very fast and ahead of his time. He had a Compaq computer and he just knew it all. That’s the number one thing about Christopher Crowe: he is smarter than hell.”

The mysterious young man was about to use that intellect, coupled with the computer, in his most audacious mission to date. “A bond trader” is what he told Bishop he was about to become. How hard could it be? Of course, he would need the proper connections, but connections came easily to the bright chap with his hands full of prayer books at the back of Christ Church.

Still, his becoming a bond trader seemed like an oceanic leap, especially considering the information in a statement from Lewis Krog, a Greenwich man who later rented a room in
his
large home to the increasingly baffling Christopher Crowe:

“Mr. Krog continued to relate that Mr. Crowe had indicated to him that he was involved in the production of movies, having some association with the late director Alfred Hitchcock,” read a police report in my dossier of papers. “Mr. Krog further related that Crowe worked for a place called The Junk Barn on Milbank Avenue, but left to work for a Japanese firm at the World Trade Center in New York City.”

I had to read the sentence twice: how did Christopher Crowe rise from working at The Junk Barn—which sounded like a secondhand store—to becoming employed in the upper echelons of the financial community of New York City?

For Crowe, the doors to Wall Street began opening at the Indian Harbor Yacht Club in Greenwich. One warm summer night, I visited the club, a white wooden building festooned with yachting flags. The club was throwing its biggest party of the year, but there was no security at the front door, just two valet parkers in Ralph Lauren attire booming “Good evening!” and smiling.

“Imagine hundreds of people here for a regatta,” said my local guide, whom I’ll call Samantha, as we walked in. “You know, nobody would know anything. The guy could sneak in, coming up from the shore.” Crowe could materialize from out of nowhere and start spouting platitudes and pedigrees, and no one would say anything except “Welcome!”

A dance was in progress, with men in white pants and blue blazers and women in chiffon, twirling to classics such as “It Had to Be You,” surrounded by models of ships and portraits of past and present members dating back to the club’s founding in 1899.

Outside was Indian Harbor, which is fed by Long Island Sound, studded with sailboats belonging to the members. It was a picture-perfect setting, home to a small segment of privileged America. How did Crowe have the guts to pick this posh community?

Samantha had a partial answer to my question. She was a member of Indian Harbor, a longtime resident of Greenwich, and a veteran banker and Wall Street player—all of which made her inclusion in the immigrant’s growing list of dupes seem pretty intriguing.

“Press reports explained that Christopher had walked into the Indian Harbor Yacht Club ‘like he owned the place,’” I said. Yes, she responded, that was most likely true. “I’m not exactly sure how he found Greenwich,” she continued as we walked through the wood-paneled club, “but his story was that he lived in L.A. with his dad. Both his mother and his sister lived in Paris. His parents were divorced. For whatever reason, he headed east. There was a bit of arrogance and attitude. I mean, he gave everyone the opinion that he came from incredible wealth.”

He had pictures, she added, of what he said was his home in Los Angeles, but the photos seemed devoid of personal touches. “It was almost as if he had gone to the Vanderbilt estate in Hyde Park,” she said, suggesting that he had purchased pictures from a gift shop and claimed that they were photographs of his own home. “He seemed very impressed with himself. Besides, he looked like he walked out of a magazine. He always had his Burberry winter coat, the Burberry umbrella, the very fine cotton button-down white shirts, with CCC monogrammed on his pockets. Always pristine, always perfect.”

“CCC?” I asked, interrupting her.

“Yes, for Christopher Chichester Crowe,” she said. “Always the part.”

I looked around the yacht club. Many of the men were dressed exactly in the style she was describing. But the newcomer had sucked them in by acting as if he were even
better
than they were. “He’s talking to you as if he’s smarter than you, more wealthy than you, more connected, more
everything
than you—no matter
who
you are!” said Samantha. “So he comes into S. N. Phelps and Company, and he’s going to be our technology guy. He’s this whiz with technology.”

I recognized the company name, as most people familiar with the world of finance would. Samantha, a graduate of the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, was a vice president at S. N. Phelps at the time Crowe finagled his way into the respected firm. She directed me to a 1990
Forbes
magazine story about its founder, Stan Phelps, entitled “Pay up . . . Or Else”:

Meet Stanford N. Phelps, 56, owner of a thriving investment business headquartered modestly in Greenwich, Conn. Phelps is reveling in the junk bond mess like a pig in a mudhole. He has brought bondmail to a fine art. He will go into the market, buy a bunch of the distressed bonds and then tell the issuer: Pay up or I’ll throw you into bankruptcy, and you’ll lose the company. It often works. The folks who control the company give Phelps—and sometimes all the bondholders—a better break. If not, Phelps drags the company into a long and painful bankruptcy. Among the companies that have felt his wrath: MGF Oil Corp., MCorp., SCI Television Inc. and AP Industries Inc. . . .

One of the more colorful characters in the bondmail business, Stan Phelps is also one of the toughest and meanest. His usual tactic is to seek to control strategic blocks of bonds . . . Phelps then says: Change the terms to give my bonds a better deal or I’ll tie you up in the courts. Indefinitely . . .

Phelps is a member of the old Eastern Establishment. Born to a father who was a prominent accountant and a mother whose family owned a shoe manufacturing company in Rochester, N.Y., Phelps was educated at Exeter, Yale and Harvard Business School. After getting his M.B.A. in 1960, Phelps headed for Wall Street, which at the time was dominated by men of his background and breeding.

The story went on to detail how Phelps had established the bond department of the firm that would soon be called Drexel Burnham Lambert, which virtually created the roaring junk bond business of the 1980s:

Phelps was fired in mid-1972 . . . Stan Phelps is a man obsessed, not only with making money, but also with getting back at his former Drexel associates. He often speaks of the latter in terms that are offensive to decent people. His personal vendettas are of little interest to the world, but in helping redress the balance in favor of the world’s much abused junk bond holders and against the powerful dealmakers, he is rendering a public service.

The story noted that Phelps had hired a brilliant young man named Michael Milken straight out of Wharton, only to have his young protégé take over.

“So how did the great, brilliant, and powerful Stan Phelps come to hire the absolutely inexperienced Christopher Crowe?” I asked Samantha.

She said she wasn’t sure exactly, but she was certain of how Crowe had found his way to Phelps. It wasn’t through past jobs or Ivy League connections. It was through a woman who worked at S. N. Phelps, a woman named Catherine.

“Catherine met Chris at Indian Harbor,” Samantha continued. “I heard that she introduced him to Phelps and Company with the idea that he was going to be a computer jock.”

“Just like that?” I asked. Someone with no background in finance whatsoever was hired by a major East Coast brokerage firm and allowed entrée into its computer system, where reams of confidential information were stored?

She seemed at a loss for words.

“Yeah . . . but . . . um . . . Stan had flavors of the week. Stan was like Baskin-Robbins. And to tell you the truth, Catherine convinced Stan to hire Christopher. Somebody that’s going to be a techie is maybe one step above an amoeba. Somebody who’s going to be doing technology—who cares?”

But Christopher Crowe was no amoeba. The brilliant swindler could morph into whatever he wanted to be. Having worked his wiles on Catherine, he would speedily go to work on the other affluent young men and women at S. N. Phelps. Catherine just happened to come first.

“He was going to marry some girl in Greenwich,” Chris Bishop told me, “some Wall Street woman. I had met her a bunch of times. Yeah, that was Catherine. I remember at one point he showed up with this diamond—not a ring, just a big diamond.”

That night at the Indian Harbor Yacht Club, I asked Samantha where the S. N. Phelps and Company offices were.

“I can show you,” she said. “It’s right up the street.”

We retrieved her car from valet parking and drove around the corner to a modest little building painted green. Not only was the outside of the building green, Samantha said, the inside was green too—walls, ceiling, even the desks. Everything was the color of money.

Crowe not only had to get through his personal interview with the shrewd Stan Phelps but also had to pass difficult tests. Everyone who works at a broker-dealer company must get certain accreditations. “We were regulated by the SEC and the North American Securities Administrators Association, so of course I had a file on him,” said Samantha. “You have to fill out what’s called a U4. The U4 form has your name, address, social security number. Then you have to give your history: Where did you work over the last ten years? What are the dates and what was your job there?”

Samantha added, “Often, Stan would have you take a personality test too.”

“Did Crowe take one?” I asked.

“I think he did.”

Samantha continued, “Your job history is on the first page. On the next page you have all the other questions:
Have you been arrested? Have you ever been convicted?
A whole page of questions, and hopefully you are able to answer no to all of them. That’s just for you to be associated with a broker-dealer; that has to go through the SEC.”

She assured me that he had dutifully filled out all of his forms and that his personnel file was in order—although since she had left the firm it was no longer obtainable. But the forms were just a preamble to the tests, she said, the Series 7 and Series 63 tests, which consist of more than seven hours of questions, and which an applicant must pass before being allowed inside a firm that deals with securities.

The Series 7 test, which has 250 multiple-choice questions, alone takes about six hours to complete; Crowe most likely took his test at One Police Plaza in New York City. “In those days, you took it by hand. Two three-hour parts, with a one-hour break. That’s for your Series 7. Some people take it two or three times, because they don’t pass it the first time. I’ve taken this test. It’s not easy.”

Did she remember how Crowe had done on his Series 7?

“He passed,” she said. “He might have been odd. He might have been arrogant. But he wasn’t stupid. He’s
smart
.”

After passing the stringent tests, facing his colleagues at S. N. Phelps must have seemed easy. “It was very close quarters,” said Samantha. “Everybody’s friends with everybody else. Some were childhood friends. They went to Brunswick [the exclusive Greenwich Prep School for boys, dating back to 1902] or Country Day [an equally exclusive Greenwich prep school that opened in 1926, in a barn on the property of William A. Rockefeller]. They would go skiing together. It was a club.”

“And Christopher Crowe?” I asked.

“Christopher was odd. It was like the ugly duckling waiting to become the swan, but in his mind he thought he already
was
the swan.”

He let Samantha and everyone else at S. N. Phelps know that in addition to being a techie he was also the producer of the new
Alfred Hitchcock Presents
series. “And if you looked at the credits, you would see Christopher Crowe,” said Samantha. “I asked him one time, ‘Christopher, it’s illogical to me. You’re a
producer
. And you become a techie at a junk bond shop making $24,000 a year?’ He said, ‘I wanted to try something different.’”

He would regale her with stories of his glory years as a Hollywood producer, giving her the inside dirt on his favorite
Hitchcock
episodes. What Samantha found strange, however, was his behavior in the tech department. “When I walked into his room, he would always hide his screens. Every time I walked in there, he did this. And I thought, ‘He’s doing something that has nothing to do with what he is supposed to be doing.’ Later, when the detectives came and started asking all their questions, the first thought that came into my mind was, he was going into people’s accounts and skimming off a half cent in volume, and that’s how he was supplementing his income. Because he always had this stuff. Stuff that costs money! It was Burberry this and Brooks Brothers that, and all these tall tales. He told me he lived in rooms above a garage on North Street. So I’m thinking, ‘How?’”