The Man in the Rockefeller Suit (19 page)

Police reports elaborated:

Mr. Boynton contacted the investigator to relate that Chris Crowe was requesting a leave-of-absence from the company for a period of time to exceed two months in order to locate his parents, who were missing in Pakistan or Japan. That Mr. Crowe was making arrangements with the Pakistani Consulate and Japanese Consulate and would be leaving this country on an unknown date to further locate his parents.

The police asked Boynton to attempt to contact Crowe as soon as possible so that Allen could “interview him relative to Mr. and Mrs. Sohus and the vehicle wanted in connection with their disappearance.” Crowe had told Boynton that he would come to the office and meet with him in order to wrap up the things he’d been working on, so Detective Allen went back to Kidder Peabody in the hope of intercepting Crowe there. However, as Allen later wrote in his report, “Crowe re-contacted Mr. Boynton . . . and related that, due to uncontrollable circumstances, he would not be able to meet there [at Kidder Peabody] but requested that Mr. Boynton meet him at a restaurant somewhere on Fifty-second Street.”

Boynton was prepared to meet Crowe at the restaurant, he told me, “but the detectives said, ‘We can’t let you walk in there unprotected. This guy could be dangerous.’ ”

Crowe never showed up at the restaurant, but Allen finally managed to reach him by phone on November 18, 1988, at the home of a friend. Crowe agreed to meet with Allen at police headquarters three days later, on November 21, at 4:30 p.m. When that day came, however, Crowe called Allen to push back their meeting by two days, to November 23. He didn’t appear, and the detective never heard from him again.

“I had taken the case as far as I could from the point of view of locating him and speaking with him,” Allen told me. “I notified California that I hadn’t been able to do so. I had other caseloads to deal with, and I went back to focusing on that.”

There were eleven charges subsequent to November 21 on Crowe’s credit card bill, all at New York City businesses: the bookstore of the high-end publisher Rizzoli, the Japanese bookstore Kinokuniya, Tower Records, Sam Goody Records, Raoul’s Restaurant, the Oyster Bar in Grand Central Station, the Rhinelander restaurant, Zabar’s delicatessen, J. Press (twice), and—the final entry, on December 6, 1988—the Japanese restaurant Hayato.

Then the man whose American Express card identified him as CCC Mountbatten disappeared—simply vanished—not merely from New York City and Greenwich, but seemingly off the face of the earth.

CHAPTER 9

Clark Rockefeller: New York, New York

F
rom December 6, 1988, to sometime in 1992, Crowe wasn’t seen by anyone from his former lives, at least no one who has come forward. Some believed he decamped for Tokyo or Delhi, owing to purchases of airline tickets to those Asian capitals that showed up on his American Express statements. In fact, investigators say, he was hiding in plain sight in New York City, living in an apartment with Rose Mina, the quiet, bright, well-educated Asian woman he had met when she provided translation services for Nikko Securities. He had a computer room set up in the closet of her apartment and would rarely venture out except to walk his dog. He spent his days watching
Star Trek
and fiddling with his computer, pondering his next move, while Rose Mina went to work, steadily rising up the ranks of the New York City financial community. Near the end of the two years, Mina decided that she had had enough of her strange boyfriend and wanted out, but found that it wasn’t easy to extricate herself from the relationship. Finally, she left him in the apartment and moved into her own place.

The mystery man himself would later insist that during this four-year hiatus he was being mentored by a gentleman named Harry Copeland, who he said became his godfather. Later, some people would surmise that he was referring to the former habitué of the Belmont Park racetrack on Long Island. He was known as Harry the Horse for his prowess in predicting the ponies. But that Harry Copeland died in the late 1990s, and neither his daughter nor anyone else I could find knew of any ties he had with Christian Gerhartsreiter, Christopher Chichester, or Christopher Crowe.

Everyone agrees on one thing: if he had been ghostlike in his first decade in America, he became a real ghost for the next four years.

“He was
gone
,” said Boston police deputy superintendent Thomas Lee. The veteran police officer had an almost encyclopedic knowledge of the immigrant’s roller-coaster life, except for the period from 1988 to 1992. “We don’t have good information about where he was during those missing years,” said Lee.

“What do
you
think?” I asked.

“Again, he was someplace pretending to be somebody. I don’t know who.”

“Four years and not a single clue?” I asked.

“Not for sure, no,” he said. “Nineteen ninety-two may be the first time we have him again, living in an apartment in New York.”

He emerged then, as usual, in church.

St. Thomas Church, founded in 1823, is the epicenter of Episcopalianism in New York City, located on one of the most stellar stretches of Fifth Avenue. The church’s French High Gothic building was completed in 1913, “of cathedral proportions, with the nave vault rising 95 feet above the floor,” according to St. Thomas’s visitor information. At the time of his arrival in the church, he would have seen many of the leaders of New York business, politics, and society, including Brooke Astor, who often attended with her friend Hope Preminger, the former fashion model who became the wife of film director Otto Preminger, as well as piano legend George Shearing and his wife, Ellie.

The church was a magnet for the then thirty-year-old expatriate, who had been driven underground for for years by what to him must have seemed like the uncivilized bleating of law enforcement officers. Its spires must have been a beacon of hope to the immigrant, now washing up as an entirely new person in New York City. “If you do not currently have a church home, or if you are new to New York City and have not yet found a church home, might you consider joining us?” asks one pamphlet.

The man who responded to that summons was no longer Christopher Crowe. When he entered the magnificent Gothic church, he had an equally magnificent name and a meticulously researched persona to go with it. “Hello,” he greeted his fellow worshippers in his perfectly enunciated East Coast prep school accent, wearing a blue blazer and private-club necktie, which he would usually accent with khaki pants embroidered with tiny ducks, hounds, or bumblebees, worn always with Top-Sider boat shoes,
without
socks. His voice was as distinctive as his attire, a deep, hypnotic melody coming from the back of his throat, a voice that, to his mind and those who met him during this defining epoch, was the epitome of good breeding, vast wealth, and impeccable taste. “Clark,” he said, “Clark Rockefeller.”

Where, how, and when he conjured up the name may never be known, but in no time at all he had spread it far and wide, first at St. Thomas and throughout the city. He would later inflate it to James Frederick Mills Clark Rockefeller, but to those he met in the beginning he was just plain Clark Rockefeller, the reluctant scion of the family with the country’s most famous name.

“In the late nineteenth century, St. Thomas was the church of the prominent but much newer money in New York—the Vanderbilt crowd, but not the sort of old Yankee New Yorkers,” said a longtime member I’ll call John Wells, who was one of the first to meet Clark Rockefeller when he arrived at St. Thomas sometime in early 1992, and who would eventually have close ties with him. We were sitting in one of New York’s parks, and before Wells got to Clark, he felt it important to set the grand scene where the wily German debuted his greatest character. “The church has hundreds of millions of dollars in endowments,” said Wells. “Their music program is second to none. Their choir is fantastic. Their main organist used to run the music at St. Paul’s Cathedral in London. The rector, when I started going there, was John Andrew, who had been chaplain to one of the archbishops of Canterbury, and who had an affiliation with the Queen Mother. At the same time the church has attracted a lot of people who like to play at being New York society. The congregation ranged from people who actually
were
members of New York society to people who were totally playing the game.”

It was a Saturday when Wells and I met, and I told him I would be up bright and early for services the next morning, so that I could experience the church where Clark Rockefeller struck gold. “You’ll see tomorrow,” he said. “The ushers wear morning suits every Sunday—you know, the striped trousers and gray jackets? On major Sundays they wear long cutaways, like a tuxedo. St. Thomas is the church around which the whole Easter Parade started. They would carry the altar flowers from St. Thomas Church to St. Luke’s Hospital, when it was still on Fifth Avenue, and people would come out and see it.” As Wells’s oral history confirmed, this was a church where plenty of people pretended to be slightly more—or a lot more—than they actually were. “Back in my time, there was somebody lurking around calling himself a lord, who was nothing of the sort. He would come to church in hunting clothes and jodhpurs. It’s a place where everybody is a little bit preposterous. Clark Rockefeller was just a little more preposterous than anyone else.”

“There are plenty of perfectly nice people there as well; it’s not as if the whole parish is caught up in some head game,” Wells continued. “But there is definitely a certain element of people trying to live out their fantasies.”

These were presumably the people the newly christened Clark Rockefeller intuitively knew would open their arms wide to him, hoping that some of the dynastic Rockefeller magic might rub off on them and raise them to a higher plane. John Wells would play a key role in connecting Rockefeller to some of the young, impressionable parishioners, who would in turn help him climb the ladder of social success.

“I remember meeting Clark at one of the coffee hours,” he continued. “The coffee hour is just a reception after the Sunday service. They would have a long table with silver coffee urns and two ladies of the parish pouring coffee and that sort of thing. The church did theater well. Clark introduced himself, or I was introduced to him. I think I might have even asked, ‘Are you one of the Rockefeller cousins?’ His response was, ‘No, I’m one of the cousins’ cousins.’ ”

Wells took that to be a very subtle way of conveying,
Yes, I am a Rockefeller, but I don’t take my famous family or myself too seriously
.

Rockefeller would soon take up with Wells’s crowd of friends, who often socialized after church. Brunching with the young lions of St. Thomas Church, the newcomer had quite a tale to tell, one that would have been absolutely impossible to believe if a mere mortal were telling it, but coming from a Rockefeller it sounded not only wild and crazy but also improbably
true.

“He intimated that he was from the Percy Rockefeller branch of the clan—not John D. ultra-rich, but plenty rich,” continued Wells. “He even had an old painting that he said was Percy Rockefeller. He claimed to have grown up on Sutton Place,” he said, indicating an East Side enclave of some of the grandest town houses and most prominent names in the city. “He said that he would see the steeples of Queens from his backyard, peeking out over his fence. He claimed to have gone to Yale at something like age fourteen. He had the Yale college scarf with the blue stripes on it. He said he had one of the J-boats from his grandparents—you know, the classic 1920s, 1930s sailing yachts.”

He was referring to the big yachts built during the Great Depression for the likes of Vincent Astor and Cornelius Vanderbilt. “I wish I could summon his voice,” Wells said, indicating that it reeked of being to the manor born. He told Wells that his J-boat was named
True Love
, and that the family was miffed that the producers of the 1940 film
The Philadelphia Story
, starring Cary Grant and Katharine Hepburn, had lifted the name to use for the yacht in the film.

“He said, ‘The family was highly irritated,’ ” said Wells. But then Rockefeller added that he had recently sold
True Love
to the pop star Mariah Carey and her husband, Sony Music CEO Tommy Mottola, “who wanted it for a fancy yacht to watch the fireworks from.” Wells recalled Rockefeller saying this with “Utter disdain” for the nouveau riche couple. “And he was laughing at the idea of them using it as a pleasure boat, because, he said, ‘A J-boat is a racing boat and not a proper place to host parties.’ ”

As always, the bonfire had begun with these tiny sparks, one or two well-placed individuals impressed by the friendly stranger with the colorful life. In the case of the newly minted persona of Clark Rockefeller, one of these was a fourteen-year-old girl walking her dog in Dag Hammarskjöld Plaza in affluent Midtown Manhattan. She was a student at Spence, the premier all-girls private school, her parents worked very long hours—her mother as a doctor, her father as a lawyer—and not one in a string of thirteen different nannies could succeed in keeping her cloistered inside her family’s apartment at the prestigious United Nations Plaza.

Seeking companionship, she would escape to the park with her English pointer and her homework. It was here in early 1992 that she met the charming older man, then thirty-one, with the enormous eyeglasses walking a black-and-tan Gordon setter, the four-hundred-year-old breed favored in Great Britain for hunting pheasant, grouse, partridge, and woodcock, which he named Yates, after the obscure nineteenth-century British novelist and dramatist Edmund Hodgson Yates. They struck up a conversation, and the girl, whom I’ll call Alice Johnson, was immediately taken. He was
so
friendly, so smart, and, best of all, he cared about
her
. Almost immediately, he was helping her with her homework and they were walking their dogs through the park together.