The Man in the Rockefeller Suit: The Astonishing Rise and Spectacular Fall of a Serial Impostor
By Mark Seal

The crime:

In 1978, when he was seventeen years old, Christian Karl Gerhartsreiter came to America from Germany as a foreign exchange student. He had no intention of leaving, and never did. Constitutionally incapable of telling the truth about pretty much anything, the longer he stayed in the U.S. the more bogus identities Gerhartsreiter adopted. Moving from coast to coast and back again, he finally settled on presenting himself as an obscure member of the Rockefeller family, which in turn led to his marrying a successful and wealthy woman with whom he had a daughter. Never able to maintain any of his disguises for long, the marriage broke down and his kidnapping of his daughter led to his ultimate arrest and exposure as a fraud, as well as a conviction for a murder he’d committed years earlier in California.

The book:

One of the reasons we read true crime is to pick up helpful advice on how to avoid becoming victims. Forewarned is forearmed, and in these True Crime Files what I like to focus on are the red flags we should be paying attention to.

Seeing as it’s unlikely we’ll ever cross paths with a serial killer, it’s worth taking more extensive notes on the criminal careers of frauds and con men. Chances are we’re all going to have to deal with these types, not just once or twice but several times throughout our lives. Few of them, to be sure, on the scale of Christian Gerhartsreiter, but it’s the extreme cases that help us better see the warning signs.

With hindsight it’s easy to wonder how anybody could be fooled by what later seems an obvious scam. But nobody is immune. I’ve been suckered a few times in my life, albeit for minor amounts. You should realize that everyone is vulnerable, and identify both general guidelines as well as know your own personal weak points, what might make you a soft target.

One Gerhartsreiter acquaintance puts it well: “A con man gets by because you want to believe what he’s telling you. That’s how a con works. People already have their preconceptions, and he just plays into what they’re thinking.” This is the essential point, and it’s the weakness any successful con is able to sense in others. We all believe in things that aren’t true because they fulfill some need or desire. And as Mark Twain observed, it’s precisely these beliefs that get us in trouble. Find out what those needs and desires are, and you can count on the mark doing most of the work.

For Gerhartsreiter this was made easy because what he could sense other people wanting was the same thing he wanted: Money. Status. Class. So what he was selling was a connection to all of the above, represented in a simple change of name to the overloaded James Frederick Mills Clark Rockefeller. A name that would open a lot of doors, at least among the kind of people who would love to open a door for a Rockefeller.

And so he didn’t even have to get it right. A student of American pop culture but not to the manner or the manor born, he dressed up like a cartoon version of a plutocrat, taking Thurston Howell III from Gilligan’s Island as his model (honest!). Even children mocked his colourful attire, calling him “Purple Pants.” And sometimes the pants were red. And there was a preppy uniform consisting of a Yale cap, a sweater draped over his shoulders and tied at the neck, an Izod shirt (blue or red, with the collar turned up), and always Top-Siders without socks. Tootling about his adopted New Hampshire community on his Segway he must have seemed a total clown, but locals shrugged him off as a wealthy eccentric. “In twenty-twenty hindsight,” one resident later remarked, “there were so many visual hints that it was all wrong, and all phony, and just plain stupid.”

But it worked. One artist thought Gerhartsreiter’s ridiculous preppy persona “reeked of old money, good breeding, and impeccable taste.” But then the same artist, a self-professed expert on abstract expressionism, would be snowed by an apartment full of fake paintings by modern masters. “I was looking at them very closely,” he would explain. “I never had any doubts that they were legitimate, never thought that they were reproductions or anything.”

“Clark knew more about the history of art and aesthetics of art than most artists I meet,” the artist would later say in a released statement. Which is probably true. The death of expertise, indeed our rage against it, is something real, and in some cases can have painful consequences.

I don’t think Gerhartsreiter was as smart or well-read as he was made out to be, but he was a quick study and had, consciously or not, targeted a demographic where smarts didn’t matter because the people he came into contact with weren’t very smart or well-read either. He didn’t have a deep knowledge of anything, but in almost every situation he found himself in his interlocutors had even less. Before he adopted the Rockefeller mantle he claimed to be a member of the English peerage, a baronet and scion of the Mountbatten family who owned Chichester Cathedral. He even said he was thinking of moving the cathedral to the United States. People thought that was a wonderful idea. He had cards printed claiming to be the thirteenth baronet of Chichester. People were impressed. But “If the citizens of San Marino had been motivated to do some research, they might have discovered then and there that the eleventh baronet, Sir Edward John Chichester, was still alive, which meant that a thirteenth baronet cold not yet exist.” He could boast about having produced the TV series The Prisoner, despite the fact that it had broadcast when he was seven years old. He also boasted of producing the television show Alfred Hitchcock Presents, but again the dates didn’t match up. He claimed to be the daughter of the actress Ann Carter, and talked about her death, when she was in fact very much alive. Perhaps the funniest moment though was when, claiming to have sailed for the America’s Cup team, he took some friends out on Boston’s Back Bay and didn’t have a clue how to handle the little sailboat he’d rented (he said his yacht was in the shop). They had to get towed back to shore by a kayaker.

So how hard is it to hang around people who don’t know much about anything? Not hard at all. And indeed, the higher Gerhartsreiter climbed the ladder the easier it got. Rich enclaves of inherited wealth are full of privileged dummies who “fall upward” (as Gerhartsreiter continually did) and are only interested in keeping up appearances. Being old money is mostly a performance, an act. You have to walk the walk, talk the talk, and dress the dress. But you don’t have to actually do anything. Gerhartsreiter was a despicable phony, but he was moving through a world of phonies. In what sectors is it easiest to fake it until you make it? Art and finance come to mind. And so he never stood out, even when dressing like a complete idiot. His very phoniness was perfect camouflage in the circles he moved in. Because if everyone around you is a phony then chances are pretty good you’re a phony too. Which means it’s best to not say anything.

Of course, the big con here, the whale that really made everything else possible, was his marriage to Sandra Boss, a very upwardly mobile, high-earning woman who was a graduate of Harvard Business School and a partner at the ultra-high-powered McKinsey & Company. How did Gerhartsreiter manage to sucker her and turn her into a cash cow for years? It’s something that his defence counsel drove hard at during his trial. It just didn’t make sense. Her excuse was that “One can be brilliant and amazing in one area of one’s life and really stupid in another.” Which is true, but the even easier explanation is that she wanted the name. She wanted to believe the pack of lies he was telling her. As one of her friends put it, “Everybody knew she was married to a Rockefeller, and she could be all modest about it, like she didn’t care. But she cared.” If he turned out to be a bully and a fraud, well, the name would make it worth it. Women have put up with far worse for less. And Boss did stick with him for a very long time, despite the fact that in most cases people grew sick of him quickly. Like a lot of people with superficial charm he made good first impressions but had no depth, so it was hard to make any relationship last.

Gerhartsreiter wasn’t a subtle or sophisticated fraud but a firehose of bullshit, flooding every zone he entered with lies. Would he have fooled me? I don’t think so, but not because I’m immune to bullshit. It’s just that if he really was everything he said he was I would have still despised him. Even as a college student he was dropping lines like “Do you know who I am?” In later years he would adopt the pose of “a very famous person” (who nobody knew) and threaten people with lawsuits for talking about him.

Clearly he was a narcissist. At trial his defence tried to paint him with “delusional-disorder, grandiose-type insanity” but all along he knew what he was doing. Even his daughter was only a pawn, someone he tried to mold into the snob he so enjoyed playing. He wanted money more than custody, but his need for attention, for recognition of what he felt was his superiority, kept driving him on. In reality he was just a useless twerp who was full of himself. These people usually give themselves away, and they’re becoming a lot easier to expose now that you can check their claims immediately online. We can thank the Internet for something, I guess.

Noted in passing:

The curator of a museum holding many of the works of the Cornish Colony describes “two great intellectuals” who lived in Cornish, J. D. Salinger and Salman Rushdie, who wanted to arrange a private showing. “Both Salinger and Rushdie asked me to open the museum on days when there would be no one here,” she said, “so they wouldn’t see people. And I opened the museum so they could go through.”

Oh please. They actually said, not that they didn’t want to face a crowd (which I would have thought highly unlikely), but that they didn’t want to “see people.” They didn’t want to avoid people seeing them (and I don’t know who would have even recognized the reclusive and camera-shy Salinger), but didn’t want to see other people. This is celebrity privilege dialed up to the max. And again you can see how Gerhartsreiter would fit right in.

Takeaways:

We all believe things that aren’t true. But you have to be aware of this natural predisposition, and always be asking yourself why you want to believe in something that you know is bullshit.

True Crime Files