The Man in the Rockefeller Suit (39 page)

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.”

They let him use an office computer. They even gave him his own e-mail address: [email protected].

“At some point did he have greater access to your computer system?” she was asked in court.

“Yes, he did.”

“How did he get greater access?”

“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.”

“Well, you’re in the right place,” Julie Gochar said. “Because nobody here cares if you have money or not.”

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.

“After the offer was accepted, did the defendant continue to spend a lot of time in your office?” the prosecutor asked Gochar.

“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.”

At that, a roar of laughter rose in the courtroom. Gochar remained straight-faced. She still had much more to tell.

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.”

“Do you know who helped him move?”

“Yes, Beth Grinspoon. She’s another agent in our office.”

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.

It was July 22, one day after the man calling himself Clark Rock had picked up his $300,000 in American Eagles from Boston Bullion.

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.