Daily Interesting News

His cap is bleached as white as the bones of a Saharan camel. Is the romance of the French Foreign Legion a cult of death?

The shocking theft of the Mona Lisa, in August 1911, appeared to have been solved 28 months later, when the painting was recovered. In an excerpt from their new book, the authors suggest that the audacious heist concealed a perfect—and far more lucrative—crime.

It was a Monday and the Louvre was closed. As was standard practice at the museum on that day of the week, only maintenance workers, cleaning staff, curators, and a few other employees roamed the cavernous halls of the building that was once the home of France’s kings but for centuries had been devoted to housing the nation’s art treasures.



Also on VF.com: How Jacqueline Kennedy brought the Mona Lisa to America. Read “The Two First Ladies,” by Margaret Leslie Davis.
Photograph by Lewandowski/LeMage/Gattelet/Réunion des Musées Nationaux/Art Resource, N.Y.

Acquired through conquest, wealth, good taste, and plunder, those holdings were splendid and vast—so much so that the Louvre could lay claim to being the greatest repository of art in the world. With some 50 acres of gallery space, the collection was too immense for visitors to view in a day or even, some thought, in a lifetime. In the Salon Carré—the “square room”—alone could be seen two paintings by Leonardo da Vinci, three by Titian, two by Raphael, two by Correggio, one by Giorgione, three by Veronese, one by Tintoretto, and—representing non-Italians—one each by Rubens, Rembrandt, and Velázquez.


News. Hollywood. Style. Culture.
For more high-profile interviews, stunning photography, and thought-provoking features, subscribe now to Vanity Fair magazine.
But even in that collection of masterpieces, one painting stood out from the rest. As the Louvre’s maintenance director, a man named Picquet, passed through the Salon Carré during his rounds on the morning of August 21, 1911, he pointed out Leonardo’s Mona Lisa, telling a co-worker that it was the most valuable object in the museum. “They say it is worth a million and a half,” Picquet remarked, glancing at his watch as he left the room. The time was 7:20 a.m.

Shortly after Picquet departed the Salon Carré, a door to a storage closet opened and at least one man—for it would never be proved whether the thief worked alone—emerged. He had been in there since the previous day—Sunday, the museum’s busiest. Just before closing time, the thief had slipped inside the little closet so that he could emerge in the morning without the need to identify himself to a guard at the entrance.

There were many such small rooms and hidden alcoves within the ancient building; museum officials later confessed that no one knew how many. This particular room was normally used for storing easels, canvases, and art supplies for students who were engaged in copying the works of the old masters. The only firm anti-forgery requirement the museum imposed was that the reproductions could not be the same size as the original.

Emerging from the closet in a white artist’s smock, the intruder might have been mistaken for one of these copyists—or, perhaps, for a member of the museum’s maintenance staff, who also wore such smocks, in a practice intended to demonstrate that they were superior to other workers. If anyone noticed the thief, he would likely be taken for another of the regular museum employees.

As he entered the Salon Carré, the thief headed straight for the Mona Lisa. Lifting down the painting and carrying it into an enclosed stairwell nearby was no easy job. The painting itself weighs approximately 18 pounds, since Leonardo painted it not on canvas but on three slabs of wood, a fairly common practice during the Renaissance. A few months earlier, the museum’s directors had taken steps to physically protect the Mona Lisa by reinforcing it with a massive wooden brace and placing it inside a glass-fronted box, adding 150 pounds to its weight. The decorative Renaissance frame brought the total to nearly 200 pounds. However, only four sturdy hooks held it there, no more securely than if it had been hung in the house of a bourgeois Parisian. Museum officials would later explain that the paintings were fastened to the wall in this way to make it easy for guards to remove them in case of fire.

Once safely out of sight behind the closed door of the stairwell, the thief quickly stripped the painting of all its protective “garments”—the brace, the glass case, and the frame. Since the *Mona Lisa’*s close-grained wood, an inch and a half thick, made it impossible to roll up, he slipped the work underneath his smock. Measuring approximately 30 by 21 inches, it was small enough to avoid detection.

Though evidently familiar with the layout of the museum, the thief made one crucial mistake in his planning. At the bottom of the enclosed stairway that led down to the first floor of the Louvre was a locked door. The thief had obtained a key, but now it failed to work. Desperately, as he heard footsteps coming from above, he used a screwdriver to remove the doorknob.

Down the stairs came one of the Louvre’s plumbers, named Sauvet. Later, Sauvet—the only person to witness the thief inside the museum—testified that he had seen only one man, dressed as a museum employee. The man complained that the doorknob was missing. Apparently thinking that there was nothing strange about the situation, Sauvet produced a pliers to open the door. The plumber suggested that they leave it open in case anyone else should use the staircase. The thief agreed, and the two parted ways.

The door opened onto a courtyard, the Cour du Sphinx. From there the thief passed through another gallery, then entered the Cour Visconti, and—perhaps trying not to appear in a hurry—headed toward the main entrance of the museum. Few guards were on duty that day, and only one was assigned to that entrance. As luck would have it, the guard had left his post to fetch a bucket of water to clean the vestibule. He never saw the thief, or thieves, leave the building.

One passerby noticed a man on the sidewalk carrying a package wrapped in white cloth. The witness recalled noticing the man throw a shiny metal object into the ditch along the edge of the street. The passerby glanced at it—it was a doorknob.

Inside the museum, all was serene and would remain so for quite some time. At 8:35 a.m., Picquet passed through the Salon Carré again and noted that the painting was gone. He thought little of it at the time, since the museum’s photographers freely removed objects without notice and took them to a studio elsewhere in the building. Indeed, Picquet even remarked to his workers, “I guess the authorities have removed it because they thought we would steal it!”

If anyone else noticed during the rest of the day that there were four bare hooks where the Mona Lisa usually hung, they kept it to themselves. Incredibly, not until Tuesday, when the Louvre again opened its doors to the public, did anyone express concern over the fact that the world’s most famous painting was missing from its usual place. When an artist set up his easel in the Salon Carré and noticed that the centerpiece of his intended work was absent, he complained to a guard, who merely shrugged. Like Picquet the day before, the guard assumed the Mona Lisa had been removed to the photographers’ studio. But the artist persisted. How soon would it be returned?

The guard finally went to see a photographer, who denied having anything to do with the painting. Perhaps it had been taken by a curator for cleaning? No. Finally, the guard thought it wise to inform a superior. A search began and soon became frantic. The director of the museum was on vacation, so the unthinkable news filtered up to the acting head, Georges Bénédite: Elle est partie! She’s gone.

“Paris Has Been Startled”

Lisa Gherardini, who married Francesco del Giocondo of Florence at age 16, would have been in her mid-20s when she sat for her portrait with Leonardo da Vinci in 1503. Leonardo worked on the Mona Lisa—or La Joconde, as she is known in France—for four years, but like so many of his works, the painting was never completed. However, it had already achieved fame by the mid–16th century, owing to the innovations that had gone into its production—particularly in material, brush technique, and varnish—and its subject’s famously coy smile, which is said to be the result of musicians and clowns the artist kept on hand to prevent her from growing bored.

When Leonardo traveled to France around 1517, at the invitation of King Francis I, the Mona Lisa left Italy, it seemed, forever. The artist died only two years later, and by the middle of that century the painting—purchased for a considerable sum—had entered the collection of the French monarchy. Louis XIV gave the Mona Lisa a place of honor in his personal gallery at Versailles. But his successor, Louis XV, sent the painting to hang ignominiously in the office of the keeper of the royal buildings. However, in 1797, La Joconde was chosen as one of the works displayed in the nation’s new art museum, the Louvre, which is where she remained—save a brief stay in Napoleon’s bedroom—until someone carried her off in August 1911.


The Louvre, after the Mona Lisa was stolen, May 1912. From Mirrorpix.

Paris during the Belle Époque—the “beautiful time” between the late 19th century and the outbreak of World War I—had become an international center for painting, dance, music, theater, and publishing. The construction of Gustav Eiffel’s tower for the 1889 world’s fair had made it the “city of light”—both literally and metaphorically. The city could boast many of the world’s foremost medical and scientific institutions of the day, and Europe’s most modern manufacturing facilities. The face of the future, many believed, could be seen in Parisian leadership in such brand-new fields as motion pictures, automobile manufacturing, and aviation.

This made the disappearance of France’s most treasured artwork all the more unbearable. In the days and weeks immediately following the theft, anyone carrying a package received attention—including, at one point, a young Spanish artist named Pablo Picasso, who, four years earlier, had purchased several small Iberian stone heads that were filched from the Louvre by the secretary of avant-garde writer Guillaume Apollinaire. (Apollinaire spent a few days in jail, but Picasso had the last laugh—he used the Iberian heads as models for his Demoiselles d’Avignon.) Police at checkpoints on roads leading out of the capital examined the contents of every wagon, automobile, and truck. Fearing that the thief would try to flee the country, customs inspectors opened and examined the baggage of everyone leaving on ships or trains. Ships that departed during the day that had elapsed between the theft and its discovery were searched when they reached their overseas destinations. After the German liner Kaiser Wilhelm II docked at a pier across the Hudson River from New York City in late August, detectives combed every stateroom and piece of luggage for the masterpiece.

In the following days, from Manchester to São Paulo, the crime became front-page news. The Times of London declared, “Paris has been startled.” The Washington Post claimed, “The art world was thrown into consternation.” But perhaps The New York Times most accurately conveyed the enormity of the heist when it asserted that the crime “has caused such a sensation that Parisians for the time being have forgotten the rumors of war.” Nowhere, however, did the media cry out louder than in France itself. “What audacious criminal, what mystifier, what maniac collector, what insane lover, has committed this abduction?” asked Paris’s leading picture magazine, L’Illustration, which offered a reward of 40,000 francs to anyone who would deliver the painting to its office. Soon the Paris-Journal, its rival, offered 50,000 francs, and a bidding war was on.

The theft continued to inspire newspaper stories for weeks; any report on the case, no matter how trivial, found its way into print. One of the most popular conspiracy theories suggested that a rich American had masterminded the theft. The favorite candidate was banking scion J. Pierpont Morgan, known for his avid, not to say avaricious, collecting habits, which frequently took him through Europe on buying sprees. When Morgan arrived the following spring in the spa town of Aix-les-Bains for his annual visit, the Mona Lisa had still not been found. Paris newspapers reported that two mysterious men had come to offer to sell him the Mona Lisa. Morgan indignantly denied the account, and when a French reporter came to interview him, the American wore in his buttonhole the rosette that marked him as a commander of the Legion of Honor—France’s highest decoration. He had recently been awarded it, causing some French newspapers to speculate that he had earned the decoration by offering “a million dollars and no questions asked” for the return of the Mona Lisa to the Louvre.

Early in September, after a brief closing, the Louvre was once again opened to the public, and an even greater number of visitors than usual came to gape at the four hooks on the wall that marked the place where La Joconde once hung. One tourist, an aspiring writer named Franz Kafka, visiting the Louvre on a trip to Paris in late 1911, noted in his diary “the excitement and the knots of people, as if the Mona Lisa had just been stolen.” Some even began to place bouquets of flowers beneath the spot where the painting once resided.

What everyone wanted to know—and speculated on endlessly—was where the thief could have gone with what was probably the most recognizable artwork in the world. But the only clues were a fingerprint and the doorknob, which had been recovered by the police from the gutter outside the museum. The plumber who had opened the stairway door was asked to look at hundreds of photographs of museum employees, past and present. Every sighting or rumor about the painting’s whereabouts had to be checked out—and they came in from places as distant as Italy, Germany, Britain, Poland, Russia, the United States, Argentina, Brazil, Peru, and Japan. But by December, as the trail grew cold, the police had to shift their attention to another spectacular case. A gang of anarchist bank robbers had begun to terrorize Paris, audaciously fleeing their crimes in the first recorded use of a getaway car.

“Our Party Coming from Milan Will Be Here with Object Tomorrow”

A year after the Mona Lisa vanished, the officials of the Louvre were forced to confront the unthinkable: that she would never return. The blank space on the wall of the Salon Carré had been filled with a colored reproduction of the painting. Even that had begun to fade and curl, and many people now averted their eyes as they passed it, as if to avoid the reminder of a tragic death. So, on one December day in 1912, patrons discovered another painting hanging there: also a portrait, but of a man, Baldassare Castiglione, by Raphael.

Occasionally, stories appeared about sightings of the Mona Lisa, including one alleging that London art dealer Henry J. Duveen had been offered the painting. Duveen, however, avoided involvement by pretending that the proposal had been a joke. But another international dealer, Alfredo Geri, in Florence, was astonished by a letter he received in November 1913, more than two years after the painting had vanished. The sender, who signed himself “Leonard,” claimed to have the Mona Lisa in his possession.

Leonard said he was an Italian who had been “suddenly seized with the desire to return to [his] country at least one of the many treasures which, especially in the Napoleonic era, had been stolen from Italy.” (The fact that the Mona Lisa had come to France more than two centuries before Napoleon was born didn’t seem to dim the thief’s patriotism.) He also mentioned that, although he was not setting a specific price, he himself was not a wealthy man and would not refuse compensation if his native country were to reward him. Geri glanced at the return address. It was a post-office box in Paris.

Despite his suspicions, Geri took the letter to Giovanni Poggi, director of Florence’s Uffizi Gallery. Poggi had photographs from the Louvre that detailed certain marks that were on the back of the original panel; no forger could be aware of these. At Poggi’s suggestion, Geri invited the seller to Florence, but Leonard proved to be an elusive figure. More than once, he set a date for his arrival and then sent a letter canceling the meeting. Geri came to assume that it was all a hoax, until on December 9 he received a telegram from Leonard saying that he was in Milan and would be in Florence on the following day. The news was inconvenient, since Poggi had gone on a trip to Bologna. Geri sent Poggi an urgent telegram: our party coming from milan will be here with object tomorrow. need you here. please respond. geri. Poggi wired back that he could not arrive by the following day, but would be in Florence the day after that, a Thursday.

Geri prepared to stall. When a thin young man wearing a suit and tie, with a handsome mustache, arrived at the dealer’s gallery the next day, Geri showed him into his office and pulled down the blinds. Eagerly, he asked him where he was holding the painting. Leonard replied that it was in the hotel where he was staying. When questioned about the authenticity of the painting, Leonard replied, according to Geri’s account, “We are dealing with the real Mona Lisa. I have good reason to be sure.” Leonard coolly declared that he was certain because he had taken the painting from the Louvre himself. Had he worked alone?, Geri asked. Leonard seemed to be hiding something. According to Geri, he “was not too clear on that point. He seemed to say yes, but didn’t quite do so, [but his answer was] more ‘yes’ than ‘no.’”

Nevertheless, the discussion got down to the reward. According to Geri, the thief boldly asked for 500,000 lire. That was the equivalent of $100,000 and quite a fortune, though some newspapers had estimated the painting’s value at roughly five million dollars. Geri, holding his breath, thought that he had better agree, so he said, “That’s fine. That’s not too high.” They made a plan to meet the following day.

The next afternoon, after arriving 15 minutes late, Leonard was introduced to Poggi. To Geri’s relief, the two men “shook hands enthusiastically, Leonard saying how glad he was to be able to shake the hand of the man to whom was entrusted the artistic patrimony of Florence.” As the three of them left the gallery, “Poggi and I were nervous,” Geri recalled. “Leonard, by contrast, seemed indifferent.”


Mug shots of Vincenzo Perugia, the man accused of taking the Mona Lisa. From Rue des Archives/The Granger Collection.
Leonard took them to the Hotel Tripoli-Italia, on the Via de’ Panzani, only a few blocks from the Duomo. Leonard’s small room was on the third floor. Inside, he took from under the bed a small trunk made of white wood. When he opened the lid, Geri was dismayed. It was filled with “wretched objects: broken shoes, a mangled hat, a pair of pliers, plastering tools, a smock, some paint brushes, and even a mandolin.” Calmly, Leonard removed these one by one and tossed them onto the floor. Surely, Geri thought, this was not where the Mona Lisa had been hidden for the past 28 months. He peered inside but saw nothing more.

Then Leonard lifted what had seemed to be the bottom of the trunk. Underneath was an object wrapped in red silk. Leonard took it to the bed and removed the covering. “To our astonished eyes,” Geri recalled, “the divine Mona Lisa appeared, intact and marvelously preserved.” They carried the painting to a window, where it took Poggi little time to determine its authenticity. Even the Louvre’s catalogue number and stamp on the back checked out.


Perugia’s hotel in Florence. From Roger-Viollet/The Image Works.
Geri’s heart was pounding, but he forced himself to remain calm. He and Poggi explained that the painting had to be transported to the Uffizi Gallery for further tests. The painting was re-wrapped in the red silk, and the three men went downstairs. As they were passing through the lobby, however, the concierge stopped them. Suspiciously, he pointed to the package and asked what it was. He obviously thought it was the hotel’s property, but Geri and Poggi, showing their credentials, vouched for Leonard, and the concierge let them pass.

At the Uffizi, Poggi compared sections of the painting with close-up photographs that had been taken at the Louvre. There was a small vertical crack in the upper-left-hand part of the panel, matching the one in the photos. Most telling of all was the pattern of craquelure, cracks in the paint that had appeared as the surface dried and aged. A forger could make craquelure appear on a freshly painted object, but no one could duplicate the exact pattern of the original. There could be no further doubt, Poggi concluded: the Mona Lisa had been recovered.

Poggi and Geri then explained to Leonard that it would be best to leave the painting at the Uffizi. They would have to get further instructions from the government; they themselves could not authorize the payment he deserved.

The Uffizi was an awesome setting, and Leonard must have felt overwhelmed by their arguments. How could he doubt two men of such standing and integrity? He did mention that he was finding it a bit expensive to stay in Florence. Yes, they understood. He would be well rewarded, and soon. They shook his hand warmly and congratulated him on his patriotism. As soon as he left, Geri and Poggi notified the authorities. Not long after Leonard returned to his hotel room, he answered a knock at the door and found two policemen there to arrest him. He was, they said, quite astonished.

When a reporter telephoned a curator of the Louvre to tell him the news, the Frenchman, in the middle of his dinner, said it was impossible and hung up. The following day, December 12, 1913, the museum issued a cautious statement: “The curators of the Louvre … wish to say nothing until they have seen the painting.” But when the Italian government made an official announcement confirming Poggi’s assessment, on December 13, the French ambassador made calls on the prime minister and foreign minister of Italy to offer his government’s gratitude. After disagreement within the Italian Parliament about whether the painting should be returned, the minister of public education put the argument to rest. “The Mona Lisa will be delivered to the French Ambassador with a solemnity worthy of Leonardo da Vinci and a spirit of happiness worthy of Mona Lisa’s smile,” he announced. “Although the masterpiece is dear to all Italians as one of the best productions of the genius of their race, we will willingly return it to its foster country … as a pledge of friendship and brotherhood between the two great Latin nations.”

After a triumphal tour through Italy, on January 4, 1914, the Mona Lisa resumed its old place on the wall of the Salon Carré. It had been gone for two years and four and a half months. In the next two days, more than 100,000 people filed past, welcoming back one of Paris’s most famous icons.

The Patriot

The young thief known as Leonard had been born Vincenzo Perugia, in 1881, in a village near Lake Como, in Italy. Having moved to France as a young man, the aspiring artist settled for work as a housepainter. Perugia had very briefly worked at the Louvre, from October 1910 to January 1911, and, it was discovered, even claimed to have helped craft the protective box that encased the Mona Lisa. By the time he stood trial for his crime, in Florence in June 1914, the thief’s hopes of receiving a reward for returning the painting to his native country had been finally dashed.

Alfredo Geri, on the other hand, collected the 25,000 francs that had been offered by Les Amis du Louvre, a society of wealthy art-lovers, for information leading to the return of the painting. The grateful French government also bestowed upon him the Legion of Honor, as well as the title “officier de l’instruction publique.” Geri showed what were perhaps his true colors when he promptly turned around and sued the French government for 10 percent of the value of the Mona Lisa. His contention was based on a Gallic tradition that gave the finder of lost property a reward of one-tenth the value of the object. In the end, a court decided that the painting was beyond price and that Geri had only acted as an honest citizen should. He received no further reward.

Perugia, meanwhile, was growing depressed in jail. Guards reported that he occasionally wept. But by the time his trial began, on June 4, he was again calm and self-possessed, insisting that he had acted as a patriot. Since there was no question of guilt, the legal proceedings functioned more like an inquest intended to establish the truth, if such a thing were possible. Three judges presided in a large room in Florence’s stunning Romanesque Palazzo Vecchio, which had been remodeled to provide space for journalists from around the world. (The French government never attempted to extradite Perugia.) The designer of the room had placed on a cushion, in the middle of a semicircle, a massive silver hemisphere that symbolized justice. A cynical journalist remarked that it would not be prudent to allow the defendant to sit too close to this artistic treasure.

Perugia, now 32 years old, was handcuffed when he entered the courtroom at nine a.m. Nattily dressed in a suit and tie, he smiled graciously at the photographers. Like everyone else, the chief judge was curious to learn how this apparently humble man could have carried out such an audacious crime. Could Perugia describe what happened on August 21, 1911, when he stole the Mona Lisa? Somewhat eagerly, Perugia asked if he could also explain why he had committed the crime, but the chief judge told him that he must do that later. For now, he wanted a description of the act itself.

Perugia offered an abbreviated version that contradicted both his account to Geri and the Paris Prefecture of Police’s reconstruction of the crime. He claimed to have entered the Louvre through the front door early that Monday, wandered through various rooms, taken the Mona Lisa from its place on the wall, and left the same way. A judge pointed out that, during the pre-trial interrogations, Perugia had admitted trying to force the door at the bottom of the little stairwell that led to the Cour du Sphinx. Perugia had no answer for this, and the judge did not press him for one.

It is difficult to understand why Perugia changed his story, or even why he did not tell the full truth about how he had entered and left the museum, given the fact that he freely confessed to the crime itself. Perhaps he was afraid of implicating others, but certainly the motive that he had concocted for himself—that he was a patriot reclaiming one of Italy’s treasures—would have sounded better if he had been the sole actor in this drama.

When Perugia was asked why he had stolen the Mona Lisa, he responded that all the Italian paintings in the Louvre were stolen works, taken from their rightful home—Italy. When asked how he knew this, he said that when he had worked at the Louvre he had found documents that proved it. He remembered in particular a book with prints that showed “a cart, pulled by two oxen; it was loaded with paintings, statues, other works of art. Things that were leaving Italy and going to France.”

Was that when he decided to steal the Mona Lisa? Not exactly, Perugia replied. First he considered the paintings of Raphael, Correggio, Giorgione, and other great masters. “But I decided on the Mona Lisa, which was the smallest painting and the easiest to transport.”

“So there was no chance,” asked the court, “that you decided on it because it was the most valuable painting?”


The Mona Lisa on display in the Uffizi Gallery, in Florence, December 1913. Museum director Giovanni Poggi (right) inspects the painting. From Roger-Viollet/The Image Works.
“No, sir, I never acted with that in mind. I only desired that this masterpiece would be put in its place of honor here in Florence.”

A judge then interrupted to play one of the prosecution’s trump cards: “Is it true,” he asked, “that you tried to sell the Mona Lisa in England?”

Accounts of the trial say that this was one of the few moments when Perugia lost his composure. He glared around the courtroom, clenching his fists as if to do battle with his accusers.

“Me? I offered to sell the Mona Lisa to the English? Who says so? It’s false!”

The chief judge pointed out that “it is you yourself who said so, during one of your examinations which I have right here in front of me.”

Unable to deny that, Perugia claimed, “Duveen didn’t take me seriously. I protest against this lie that I would have wanted to sell the painting to London. I wanted to take it back to Italy, and to return it to Italy, and that is what I did.”

“Nevertheless,” said one of the judges, “your unselfishness wasn’t total—you did expect some benefit from restoration.”

“Ah benefit, benefit,” Perugia responded—“certainly something better than what happened to me here.”

That drew a laugh from the spectators. The next day, the chief judge announced a sentence for Perugia of one year and fifteen days. As he was led out of the courtroom, he was heard to say, “It could have been worse.”

It actually got better. The following month, Perugia’s attorneys presented arguments for an appeal. This time, the court was more lenient, reducing the sentence to seven months. Perugia had already been incarcerated nine days longer than that since his arrest, so he was released. A crowd had gathered to greet him as he left the courthouse. Someone asked him where he would go now, and he said he would return to the hotel where he had left his belongings. When he did, however, he found that the establishment’s name had changed. No longer was it the Tripoli-Italia; now it was the Hotel La Gioconda—and it was too fancy to admit a convicted criminal. Perugia’s lawyers had to vouch for him before the staff would give him a room.

But most spectators had already moved on. Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria had recently been assassinated in his touring car in the streets of Sarajevo. Soon the nations of Europe would be at war, and Perugia’s crime—and the ensuing hysteria—would seem rather trivial by comparison.

The Mastermind

In January 1914, months before Perugia’s trial began, a veteran American newspaperman named Karl Decker was on assignment in Casablanca. While having a drink with an elegant confidence man who went by the name Eduardo, he overheard an interesting story that would shed new light on the disappearance of the Mona Lisa. Eduardo had many aliases, but to his associates he was known as the Marqués de Valfierno or the “Marquis of the Vale of Hell.” With a white mustache and wavy white hair, he looked the part. He had, wrote Decker, “a distinction that would have taken him past any royal-palace gate in Europe.”

Decker had crossed paths with Valfierno in a number of exotic places, and the two had developed a friendship. After the police arrested Vincenzo Perugia, Valfierno commented casually to Decker that Perugia was “that simp who helped us get the Mona Lisa.” When Decker pressed him for details, Valfierno offered to confide his version of the events as long as the journalist promised not to publish them until he gave permission, or died. It was the latter event that allowed Decker to reveal what he had been told, nearly 20 years later, in 1932, in The Saturday Evening Post.

After years of success selling fake artworks, Valfierno moved his operation from Buenos Aires to Paris, where, he said, “thousands of Corots, Millets, even Titians and Murillos, were being sold in the city every year, all of them fakes.” He added people to his organization, including a well-connected American whom he refused to name. Valfierno was selective in choosing those he wished to fleece, concentrating on wealthy Americans who could pay highly for “masterpieces” that had supposedly been stolen from the Louvre.

But Valfierno and his gang never took anything from the Louvre. “We didn’t have to,” he said. “We sold our cleverly executed copies, and … sent [the buyers] forged documents [that] told of the mysterious disappearance from the Louvre of some gem of painting or world-envied objet d’art.… The documents always stated that in order to avoid scandal a copy had been temporarily substituted by the museum authorities.”

Eventually, Valfierno peddled the ultimate prize: the Mona Lisa itself, in June 1910. Not the genuine painting, but a forged copy, along with forged official papers that convinced the buyer (an American millionaire) that, in order to cover the theft, Louvre officials had hung a replica in the Salon Carré. The buyer, unfortunately, had been a little too free in bragging about his new acquisition, which prompted the newspaper Le Cri de Paris to publish an article—a year before the actual theft—stating that the Mona Lisa had been stolen.

Still, it had been a disturbing experience, one that Valfierno was determined to avoid a second time: “The next trip, we decided, there must be no chance for recriminations. We would steal—actually steal—the Louvre Mona Lisa and assure the buyer beyond any possibility of misunderstanding that the picture delivered to him was the true, the authentic original.”

Valfierno never intended to sell the real painting. “The original would be as awkward as a hot stove,” he told Decker. The plan would be to create a copy and ship it overseas before stealing the original. “The customs would pass it without a thought, copies being commonplace and the original still being in the Louvre.” After the Mona Lisa had been stolen, the imitation could be taken out and sold to a buyer who was convinced he was getting the missing masterpiece.

“We began our selling campaign,” recalled Valfierno, “and the first deal went through so easily that the thought ‘Why stop with one?’ naturally arose. There was no limit in theory to the fish we might hook.” Valfierno stopped with six American millionaires. “Six were as many as we could both land and keep hot,” he told Decker. The forger then carefully produced the six copies, which were sent to America and kept waiting for the proper time to be delivered. Valfierno said that an antique bed, made of Italian walnut, “seasoned by time to the identical quality of that on which the Mona Lisa was painted” provided the panels that the forger painted on.

Now came what Valfierno thought was the easy part: “Stealing the Mona Lisa was as simple as boiling an egg in a kitchenette,” he told Decker. “Our success depended upon one thing—the fact that a workman in a white blouse in the Louvre is as free from suspicion as an unlaid egg.” Recruiting someone—Perugia—who actually had worked in the Louvre was helpful because he knew the secret rooms and staircases that employees used.

Perugia did not act alone, Valfierno said. He had two accomplices who were needed to lift the painting, with its heavy protective container and frame, from the wall and carry it to a place where the frame could be removed. Valfierno did not name them either.

The one hitch in the plan was that Perugia had failed to test the duplicate key Valfierno ordered to be made for the door at the bottom of the staircase. At the moment he needed it, the key failed to turn the lock. While he was removing the doorknob, the trio heard footsteps from above, and Perugia’s two accomplices hid themselves. The plumber appeared but, seeing only one man in a white smock, had no reason to be suspicious. He opened the door and went on his way, soon followed by Perugia and the other two thieves. At the vestibule, the guard stationed there had temporarily abandoned his post.

An automobile waited for the thieves and took them to Valfierno’s headquarters, where the gang celebrated “the most magnificent single theft in the history of the world.” Now the six copies that had been sent to the United States could be delivered to the purchasers. Because each of the six collectors thought he was receiving stolen merchandise, he could not publicize his acquisition—or even complain should he suspect it wasn’t the genuine article.

Perugia was paid well for his part in the scheme. However, he squandered the money on the Riviera, and then, knowing where Valfierno had hidden the real Mona Lisa, stole it a second time. “The poor fool had some nutty notion of selling it,” Valfierno told Decker. “He had never realized that selling it, in the first place, was the real achievement, requiring an organization and a finesse that was a million miles beyond his capabilities.”

What about the copies?, Decker wanted to know. Someday, speculated Valfierno, all of them would reappear. “Without those, there are already thirty Mona Lisas in the world,” he said. “Every now and then a new one pops up. I merely added to the gross total.”

Characteristically, perhaps, reports of the date of Perugia’s death vary. It is known, however, that he died in France—an odd end point for a man who had once so vehemently asserted his Italian patriotism. Whatever secrets he knew about the theft were carried to the grave. The Decker account is the sole source for the existence of Valfierno and this version of the theft of the Mona Lisa. There is no external confirmation for it, yet it has frequently been assumed to be true by authors writing about the case. If indeed it is true, Valfierno had carried out the perfect crime.

 On a sunny Sunday last July, Clark Rockefeller left his stately accommodations in Boston’s venerable Algonquin Club, the gentlemen’s establishment founded in 1886. Dressed in khakis and a blue Lacoste shirt, he was carrying his seven-year-old daughter, Reigh Storrow Mills Boss, whom he called Snooks, on his shoulders, walking toward Boston Common, where they were going to ride the swan boats in the Public Garden.

“Good morning, Mr. Rockefeller,” people greeted him, for he was well known in this Beacon Hill neighborhood. He had lived here for a year and a half in a $2.7 million, four-story, ivy-covered town house on one of the best streets. But that was before his wife, Sandra, left him and dragged him through a humiliating divorce, taking not only the Boston house but also their second home, in New Hampshire. In addition, she won custody of their daughter, moving her to London with her, and restricting him to three eight-hour visits a year, in the company of a social worker, who was tagging along that morning like a third wheel.



Read about another fame-seeking impostor in “The Counterfeit Rockefeller,” by Bryan Burrough. Above, Christopher Rocancourt. Courtesy of the East Hampton Village Police Department.

Nevertheless, he was still Clark Rockefeller. At 47, he still had his name, his intelligence, an extraordinary art collection, close friends in high places, and his memberships in clubs up and down the Eastern Seaboard, where he could sleep and take his meals, having long ago decided that hotels and restaurants were for the bourgeoisie. He also had a divorce settlement of $800,000, at least $300,000 of which he had converted into Krugerrands and then into gold U.S. coins, keeping the rest in cash. And now he had his beloved daughter with him again, for a blissful day together.

As they approached Marlborough Street, a tree-lined avenue on which Edward Kennedy has a house, a black S.U.V. limousine cruised to the curb. Rockefeller had told the driver that he and Snooks had a lunch date in Newport, Rhode Island, with a senator’s son, and that he might need help getting rid of a clingy friend (the court-appointed social worker), who might try to get into the limo. Having assured Mr. Rockefeller that nobody would get into the car without his consent—the ride, after all, was costing him $3,000—the driver wasn’t surprised, as he looked in his rearview mirror, to see Rockefeller with Snooks on his shoulders and a clingy sort of guy right behind them.

Suddenly, Rockefeller pushed his pursuer away, put his daughter down, yanked the car door open, and pulled the child into the limo so fast that she hit her head on the doorframe. “Go! Go!” he shouted, and the driver stepped on the gas, dragging the social worker, who had hold of the back-door handle, several yards before he let go and fell to the pavement.

Within minutes, according to Rockefeller’s indictment, he told the driver to pull over. Then he hailed a cab, explaining to the limo driver that he wanted to take his daughter to Massachusetts General Hospital in order to make sure the bump on her head was not serious. He instructed the limo driver to wait for him in a nearby parking lot. The driver did as he was told, and waited approximately two hours, but his $3,000 customer never showed up. Meanwhile, Rockefeller had taken the taxi to the Boston Sailing Center, where one of his many female friends was waiting for him. She had agreed to drive him to New York in her white Lexus for $500. “Hurry!,” Rockefeller implored her, saying that he and Snooks had to catch a train that would get them to a boat launch on Long Island by eight p.m.


Soon after they arrived in Manhattan, they got stuck in traffic near Grand Central Terminal. In a flash, Rockefeller swept up his daughter, threw an envelope full of cash onto the front seat, and took off without even saying good-bye. Then the woman’s cell phone rang. It was a friend asking if she had seen the Amber Alert concerning Clark Rockefeller’s abduction of his daughter. That was when she realized that she had been fooled into providing the transportation for what the Boston district attorney would later charge was a custodial kidnapping. (Rockefeller has also been charged with assault and battery by means of a deadly weapon [the limo], assault and battery, and furnishing a false name to the police.)

Back in Boston, in a suite at the Four Seasons Hotel, Rockefeller’s ex-wife, Sandra Boss—a Harvard Business School graduate earning an estimated $1.4 million a year as a senior partner at McKinsey & Company, the global management-consulting firm—was informed that her ex-husband had disappeared with their daughter. At the same time Boston police were entering Rockefeller’s name into national databases and finding … nothing.

“Can you please give us his driver’s-license number?” an officer asked Boss.

She said he didn’t have one.

“Do you know if Clark has a Social Security number?”

“No.”

“Is he on your tax returns?”

“No.”

His credit cards were on her accounts. His cell-phone number was under the name of a friend. To each of the investigators’ questions about her ex-husband’s identification papers, Boss responded in the negative. He didn’t have any identification at all.

Twenty-four hours after his disappearance, the curious case of Clark Rockefeller was being handled by Special Agent Noreen Gleason, a tough, blonde, 17-year veteran of the F.B.I. assigned to the Boston field office. Her first call was to the Rockefeller family, she remembers. “They said, ‘Under no circumstances is there a link We are not connected.’”

Plenty of other people had heard of him, however. For five days Gleason and a battalion of F.B.I. agents and police officers in the United States and abroad were taken for a ride. Like the limo driver and the friend Rockefeller tricked into driving him to New York, the authorities soon realized that they had been set up. Before the extraordinarily well-planned vanishing act, Rockefeller had devised an equally elaborate escape plan, telling many of his well-heeled friends his destination, which in every case was different, and in every case a lie. He told one he was sailing to Peru; he informed others he was going to Alaska, the Turks and Caicos, the Bahamas. “It was fascinating,” says Gleason. “We would start going down one avenue, one lead, and we would get to the end of it, and nothing would be there.”

Red herrings popped up all over the globe before the fugitive’s true identity was finally revealed, in part by a wineglass. The night before Rockefeller fled, he had had a glass of wine at a friend’s house. When investigators arrived there the next day, the friend still hadn’t washed the glass, so they lifted fingerprints and sent them off to the F.B.I. lab in Quantico, Virginia.

While the alleged kidnapper’s prints were being analyzed, the bureau, in hopes that someone might recognize him, released pictures to the media, and soon a lifetime of carefully constructed identities began emerging. Some people knew him as Chris Gerhart, a University of Wisconsin film student. Others said he was Christopher Chichester, a descendant of British royalty, who had charmed the residents of a wealthy Los Angeles suburb in the 1980s, only to vanish after being sought for questioning in the disappearance of a California couple and their possible murder. Still others remembered him as Christopher C. Crowe, a TV producer, who had worked for at least three Wall Street investment firms in the late 1980s before suddenly vanishing. Scores of people knew him as Clark Rockefeller, a Boston Brahmin and scion of industry whose friends included important artists, writers, producers, physicians, financiers, and members of prestigious private clubs.

“Now, we’re thinking that we’re dealing with a person who might have committed two homicides,” says Gleason. “We’ve tracked this person for a week, and we really don’t know who he is. Statistically speaking, parental kidnappings can go very bad. A lot of times people say, ‘If I can’t have her, she’s not going to have her, either.’ We’ve seen time and time again that the person who has kidnapped the child will kill himself and the child. You don’t want to get to the point where he knows he’s caught and he has possession of her, because that’s when the game is going to be over.”


When the results came back from the print lab, one thing became clear: the alleged kidnapper was not a Rockefeller. He was Christian Karl Gerhartsreiter, a 47-year-old German immigrant who had come to America as a student in 1978, and who had disappeared into a complicated existence that the Boston district attorney would call “the longest con I’ve seen in my professional career.”

A.k.a. Christopher Gerharts Reiter

Once Rockefeller’s flight hit the headlines, reporters joined the manhunt in order to discover who the suspect was and where he had gone. The trail began in Bergen, Germany, a small resort town in the Bavarian Alps, where Gerhartsreiter grew up a misfit, and where no one had heard from him in 30 years. He was a short, skinny, fantasy-obsessed boy, whose father was a housepainter and an amateur artist, and whose mother was a seamstress. “He was like Batman … always going into different roles,” a friend of the family told the *Boston Herald’*s Jessica Van Sack. “Like his dad, he was an artist. And he always had crazy ideas.”


Rockefeller and Snooks in Boston shortly before the alleged kidnapping. By Don Harney.
On a train trip, he met and charmed a family from America, who told him that if he was ever in the United States he should look them up. Seeking a fresh start in a new country, he arrived unannounced on the family’s doorstep in Meriden, Connecticut, in 1978. After living with them for a short time, he posted an ad for lodging in the local newspaper, and eventually landed with the Savio family in nearby Berlin. “He said he was an exchange student, and he was going to finish high school in the States,” says the eldest son of the family, Edward Savio, now a San Francisco–based screenwriter and novelist. In the Savio home, and in Berlin High School, Christopher Gerharts Reiter, as he was calling himself by then, began a process of re-invention. He practiced his English and cultivated his appearance—tight European clothing, long hair, white sunglasses. “He said his father was an industrialist,” says Savio, “something to do with Mercedes.”

“He was fascinated with Gilligan’s Island and the character Thurston Howell III,” says Boston deputy police superintendent Thomas Lee, referring to the character played by Jim Backus, an ascot-wearing millionaire member of the northeastern elite who is so rich that he will take tens of thousands of dollars in cash and multiple changes of clothing for a three-hour tour. The superintendent groans. “I wouldn’t make this up,” he says of the German student’s fascination with the wealthy character. “He mimicked his speech pattern.”

Chris slept on the Savios’ couch, and each day when he awoke he expected his breakfast to be prepared and his clothing laundered. “He made it clear that living in this manner was beneath him,” says Savio. The final straw came one winter afternoon when he refused to get up from the couch to unlock the door for Edward’s little sister. “We kicked him out,” says Savio.

He gave himself a new name. “He’d become Chris Kenneth Gerhart by the time he left us,” says Savio. Soon he was at the University of Wisconsin, on the Milwaukee campus, where he studied film, and where, he told the Savios in a phone call, he planned to vote for Ronald Reagan in the 1980 presidential election. “But you’re not an American citizen!” one of them exclaimed. Not a problem, he said; he would soon have a green card and become a legal resident.


“We were in a class together, studying film noir,” remembers Todd Lassa, now a writer for Motor Trend, who was a witness at Chris Gerhart’s quickie courthouse wedding, in 1981, when they were both undergraduates. The bride was a woman Gerhart didn’t know well, and they were divorced soon after he got his green card. Several weeks after the wedding, he stopped showing up for his classes. Soon his old friend Edward Savio, who was living in Los Angeles, got a phone call from the immigrant his family had kicked out of their house. He had just arrived in L.A., he said, and wanted to say hello. He was going into the film business.

A.k.a. Christopher Chichester

Having mastered English, the young man who now called himself Christopher Chichester—the name stolen, according to Savio, from one of his teachers at Berlin High School, Joan Chichester—was ready to launch his most impressive identity to date, not in L.A., where there’s a poseur on every corner, but 18 miles to the east, in the wealthy suburb of San Marino. He became a regular at the local business and social clubs, where free lunches were served to members; at the prominent churches, where weddings with bountiful buffets were easily crashed; and at the libraries, where he could loiter for hours and improve his mind. Soon, with his Ivy League clothes, impeccable manners, and aristocratic accent, he was squiring the town’s elderly widows around, enjoying their big houses and their lavish lifestyles. He flashed an oversize calling card, embossed with what he claimed was the Chichester family crest—a heron, its wings spread, with an eel in its beak—and the family motto, “Firm en foi,” meaning firm in faith. The card read, “Christopher Chichester, XIII Bt [for 13th baronet], San Marino, CA.”

“Oh, he said he was of royalty in England,” remembers San Marino hairdresser Jann Eldnor, who cut Chichester’s hair every two weeks. “Although he was only in his 20s, he acted like he was 40. Every time he’d meet a lady, he’d take her hand and kiss it.”

Chichester employed his charm not only on women but also on men. He could talk about anything, Eldnor says—business, politics, society, royalty, especially royalty, because, he said, he was descended from British royalty, specifically Lord Mountbatten, the British naval officer and last British viceroy of India.

“I was impressed by him!” says a longtime resident. “I thought he was very important!” says another. “He told us he was the descendant of Sir Francis Chichester, who took his sailing ship, the Gipsy Moth, around the world,” recalls one woman. “And we all thought, Wow, this is exciting—he has credentials! One day he brought me a newspaper from a neighboring community—not San Marino.” The headline was all about Sir Francis Chichester, complete with a picture of him and the Gipsy Moth, and the story mentioned that the young Christopher Chichester, incredibly, was “living in our area!” the woman continued. “Now I’m wondering if he had it dummied up somehow.”

“This is a small town where people volunteer, and in the process of that, he met people, and people had daughters, and the daughters were volunteering,” says another resident, Wray Cornwell. “He was paying attention all the time.”

Soon he was a Rotarian and a member of the City Club, the darling of the city fathers and their wives and daughters, including Carol Campbell, who accepted a lunch date. She was surprised to find the esteemed nephew of Lord Mountbatten driving a “nerdy” tan Datsun, the interior of which was completely plastered with yellow Post-It notes “to himself.” The date turned out to be a round of errands, with Chichester talking about himself all the way. “Oh, like he was from nobility, the second duke of something, a film producer,” remembers Campbell. “And I came home and said, ‘Mom, that guy is lying! He’s creepy!’”

Most locals, however, were completely snowed. They even gave him his own television show, Inside San Marino. “It was public-access, Channel 3,” says Peggy Ebright, who was the interviewer on the show. The crew consisted of a part-time teenage cameraman and the producer, Christopher Chichester. “He told me he was a student at the U.S.C. film school,” recalls Ebright, who still marvels at how Chichester got the Who’s Who of San Marino—as well as Los Angeles luminaries such as then police chief Daryl Gates—to sit down for a cable-TV show that very few people ever watched.

Nine miles down the freeway from San Marino is the University of Southern California, with its celebrated film school. Here, Christopher Chichester also became a familiar presence. “It seemed that he knew everybody and everything at U.S.C.,” remembers Dana Farrar, a film-and-journalism student at the time. Although no records list Chichester as a student of the film school, he always seemed to have a screenplay from its library under his arm. Farrar adds, “He acted like he was a T.A. [teacher’s aide] at Arthur Knight’s class [a prestigious introduction-to-film course, in which guest speakers have included Alfred Hitchcock, Orson Welles, and Clint Eastwood], where all the big stars would come and debut their films for the students.”

He said he was working toward an M.F.A. in film, and he invited Dana Farrar and her friends to be his guests at a U.S.C. party attended by directors Steven Spielberg, George Lucas, and Robert Zemeckis and a number of Hollywood stars to celebrate the opening of the Marcia Lucas Post-Production Building, a state-of-the-art multi-media facility. “I’m getting you passes,” Chichester said, and, sure enough, he did. At the party, he knew everybody, according to Farrar, who shows me snapshots of Chichester from that time, a skinny bon vivant, wearing tight slacks and a V-necked sweater, staring pensively into a glass of wine in one picture, striking a giddy pose with three cone-shaped paper birthday hats on his head in another. His passion was film noir.

“He’d say, ‘Day-naaah, you just must see Double Indemnity with me! It’s just the best film!’”

And here, the film of Christopher Chichester’s life turns to noir.

Enter John and Linda Sohus

‘This town is divided into three,” says Jann Eldnor. “Super Marino, on the hill, with houses $5 million and up; San Marino, on the flats, good, big houses for doctors and professionals; and Sub Marino, where the houses are cheaper, for engineers, schoolteachers, and lower-income.” Chichester was living squarely in Sub Marino, rent-free in a guest dwelling behind the main house of Ruth “Didi” Sohus, known to everyone as a reclusive alcoholic.

The drama began when Didi’s adopted son, John, a geeky man in his 20s who had a low-level job in the computer department of Jet Propulsion Laboratory in nearby Pasadena, moved in with his mother. He arrived with his wife, Linda, a vivacious redhead and aspiring artist who worked as a clerk at the Dangerous Visions science-fiction bookstore. “They made an odd couple,” Lili Hadsell, who was then on the San Marino police force, told me. “He was short, curly-haired, and dorky. She was tall, big-boned, attractive.” Jann Eldnor, who got to know John well when Didi would bring him in for haircuts, adds, “They came with four cats and a horse.”

More than 20 years later, after Clark Rockefeller allegedly kidnapped his daughter, investigators came upon an astonishing video about the years he had lived in San Marino: a July 1995 segment of the Unsolved Mysteries television series, called “San Marino Bones,” which begins with a scene of workers digging a pit for a swimming pool. They discover three plastic bags containing human skeletal remains.

“Immediately, speculation turned to a couple who went missing from the house in 1985 … John Sohus and his wife, Linda,” the actor Robert Stack says in the voice-over. “Though married for two years, John and Linda still lived with John’s mother, Didi Sohus, by all accounts an alcoholic. However, the most intriguing character would prove to be a mysterious young man who went by the name Christopher Chichester.” As Stack says this, a photograph of a suave, bespectacled young man wearing a suit and tie fills the screen.

In early 1985, according to the program, John and Linda told friends they had landed an important job with a U.S.-government satellite program. Although they were sworn to secrecy, Linda let it slip to a friend that they both had to report immediately for duty in New York, but that they would return to San Marino in two weeks to pack up their things. Eight weeks later, since there had not been a word from them, Linda’s sister called Didi Sohus for an explanation.

Unsolved Mysteries re-created a scene of Didi, in a pink housecoat, with a drink in her hand, grabbing the phone and slurring, in a half-whisper, “John and Linda went to Europe on a top-secret mission! For the government!” She told the police, who had been contacted by Linda’s family, that she had a “source.” This source was giving her updates on her son and daughter-in-law, who, except for two postcards purportedly from Linda and postmarked Paris, France, were never heard from again. Five months after their disappearance, Didi Sohus filed a missing-persons report on the couple, suddenly wise to her so-called source. “He’s gone, too,” she told police. “Just disappeared!” Robert Stack tells the TV audience, “According to Didi, the mysterious contact was none other than her guesthouse tenant, Christopher Chichester. However, he had recently moved, leaving no forwarding address.”

The skeletal remains were uncovered in May 1994. Immediately questions arose regarding Chichester, who, according to a neighbor, had borrowed a chain saw from him about the time John and Linda were leaving for New York, in spite of the fact, Edward Savio says, that he had “never picked up a fucking tool in his life.” Investigators interviewed Dana Farrar, who recalled the day she accepted Chichester’s invitation for a game of Trivial Pursuit. The whole backyard was dug up. “What’s going on in the yard, Chris?” she asked. “Oh, I’m having some plumbing problems,” he said.

Along with the human bones, investigators found a flannel shirt and blue jeans, John Sohus’s standard dress. (Using the chemical luminol, they also detected traces of blood on the floor of Chichester’s apartment.) But what about Linda? “When John and Linda moved back into Didi’s house, they discovered the man in the back, Christopher Chichester,” says Jann Eldnor. “And John now started to put his nose in what Chichester was doing. He sees his mother’s condition, and he’s thinking this Chichester maybe is taking money from his mother. So he might have started to question Chichester. Also, Chichester had his eye on all the ladies, young and old. So right away he must have had his eye on John’s wife, Linda. It might not take long for Linda to start having a liking for the guy. And John, well … “

“The authorities would like to speak to the young man known as Christopher Chichester,” Robert Stack says at the end of the segment about the case. “They now know that his real name is Christian Gerhartsreiter, a native of Germany.”

Before skipping town, Chichester had gone to get a last haircut at Jann of Sweden. “A family member has died in England, and I have to go back and take care of the estate,” he said. He had gotten all he could out of San Marino, including the pickup truck that belonged to the missing couple.

In late 1988, the truck turned up in Greenwich, Connecticut. A man calling himself Christopher Crowe had tried unsuccessfully to sell it to the son of a local minister. In the course of their investigation police discovered that Christopher Chichester and Christopher Crowe were one and the same. By then the strange young man had vanished again.

A.k.a. Christopher Crowe

In Connecticut, Christopher Crowe gravitated once more to private clubs and older women. At the Indian Harbor Yacht Club, in Greenwich, into which he walked “pretending to own the place,” as one observer told The Boston Globe, he struck pay dirt: someone who worked at S. N. Phelps and Company, a leading brokerage firm based in Greenwich. Soon the young man got an interview with the well-known venture capitalist Stan Phelps, a graduate of Yale University and Harvard Business School, who had trained junk-bond king Michael Milken, among others. Phelps hired Crowe as a computer whiz, according to a fellow employee at the firm. (Phelps didn’t respond to numerous requests for comment.) “This guy, Christopher Crowe, looked like he was worth a million bucks,” says the employee. “The way he dressed, the way he carried himself, his air. Always had custom-made shirts—with his monogram, CCC, on the pocket—the Burberry raincoat. He said he was a producer from L.A., who had done all of the Alfred Hitchcock remakes, and if you go back 20 years, there was a Christopher Crowe who was a producer.”

Although he was hired to work in computers, Crowe was frequently in the trading room, talking about Hitchcock or, more often, himself. He would speak about his mother and sister in Paris and show photographs of his mansion in France. The job ended abruptly when someone checked his background through the Social Security number he had written on his application. It reportedly came back as the number of David Berkowitz, known as Son of Sam, the serial killer who had haunted New Yorkers in the 70s. Crowe was promptly fired.

Despite having neither a college degree nor any semblance of experience, Crowe was next hired to head a department in the U.S. offices of Nikko Securities, Ltd., on Wall Street, with an estimated annual base salary of $150,000. “Everyone was flabbergasted,” says his former Phelps co-worker. “We could not even imagine how he got a job he was clearly not capable of handling.” He was hired by a now deceased ex–Goldman Sachs executive, who “was taken by people who seemed to be blue-blooded, and wasn’t the kind of guy who would necessarily check references,” one of Crowe’s fellow employees remembers.

nikko institutes corporate bond department, read a July 13, 1987, press release about the company’s expansion into selling “high-grade bonds, swaps … and distribution of securities” to institutional investors. The department, with offices in the World Financial Center, would consist of five bond salesmen as well as a team of up to 15 traders and analysts. “Christopher Crowe, who formerly ran the Battenberg-Crowe-von-Wettin Foundation, will lead the endeavor as vice president.”

The appointment made headlines in The Bond Buyer, the bond-industry periodical, which reported that Crowe’s department was “participating in a $250 million Chevron Capital USA deal that came to market yesterday, as well as a $150 million Colgate-Palmolive Co. offering.… [Crowe] said the department will work most heavily in the long-term industrial sector.… ‘Customers like industrials,’ he said, adding that ‘they’ve been oversaturated with banks and finance.’”

The staff he led was unimpressed. “It was obvious he had no experience,” says one. He certainly knew how to act the part, however, living in a guest dwelling on an estate in Greenwich, where he was staying, he said, while renovating the main house. He also claimed to be related to Mountbatten and the Battenberg family from Germany—whose name was at the center of his family foundation—which he reportedly said had a collection of Rolls-Royces and Italian sports cars. According to another colleague, “Every article of clothing, from his slippers to pajamas, was monogrammed CCC.”

“He was hired as sales manager of corporate bonds, but he had never sold a corporate bond,” says Richard Barnett, who was hired by Crowe as Nikko’s director of corporate-bond research. “He had no idea what he was doing.”

Fired once again, Crowe soon found another responsible position, in the Manhattan offices of the prestigious securities firm Kidder, Peabody and Co. By then Connecticut state troopers were searching for him, having received the paperwork on John Sohus’s missing truck. Possibly tipped off, Crowe quit his new job shortly after having started it, on the pretext that his parents were missing in Afghanistan and he had to rush off. When the authorities arrived at his former places of business and his rented guest quarters, Crowe was gone. When he next resurfaced, he had grabbed an even higher rung on the ladder to success. After several as yet unaccounted-for years, about which the authorities haven’t been able to learn much, he devised his greatest persona yet: Clark Rockefeller.

For this new life, he would need money—not a lot, but a fair amount. Some say he had hoarded his $150,000-a-year (not including bonuses) Wall Street salary. Others point to a statement he made later, that he had been given his new name, Clark Rockefeller, by Harry Copeland, his “godfather,” who died in the late 1990s. A New York businessman, Copeland also happened to be a habitué of Belmont Park racetrack, on Long Island. Did Rockefeller possibly make his money betting on the ponies? His attorney Stephen Hrones says Rockefeller never had “substantial money to change his life” until he met his future wife. But friends insist that he had cash, as well as a credit card emblazoned with the name Rockefeller. With his smart wardrobe and Eastern prep-school accent, he was ready to begin the greatest act of his lifetime. Naturally, there was only one place to unveil his masterpiece: New York City.

A.k.a. Clark Rockefeller

Moving into an apartment at 400 East 57th Street, he determined never to set foot in Connecticut again. He told friends it was because his parents had been killed there. He was so adamant about this that he once “threw a fit” when he realized that the car he was in was about to cross the state line. “Before we crossed the border into Connecticut, Clark made everybody stop and use the bathroom, because he wouldn’t let us stop at all after that,” says one friend. As they entered the state, Rockefeller allegedly turned up his collar, put on a hat, and hunkered down low in his seat. Connecticut, California, Wisconsin, and Germany were all far behind him now.

He began to be known in Manhattan in late 1992 or 1993, proudly displaying two of the credentials that are catnip to the cognoscenti: a fancy dog, a Gordon setter named Yates—nothing sparks a conversation between strangers faster than a walked dog—and a major collection of modern art. Once again, he gained entry into the higher echelons through the church, in this case Saint Thomas Church, on Fifth Avenue, the epicenter of Manhattan Episcopalianism.

“He intimated that he was from the Percy Rockefeller branch of the clan—not John D. ultra-rich, but plenty rich,” one friend remembers. And he cleverly cast himself as properly eccentric, “paranoid about security and walking around with a radio device that he claimed was connected to a security office,” to which he regularly had to report his whereabouts. Thus, questions about his background could be dismissed as plebeian probes. “In Clark World, you were always trying to find out how rich he was, because once he had established how maniacally private he was, he could take the position that he could decline questions that impinged on his privacy.”

“He told me his work was solving Third World debt, particularly in the Pacific Rim,” says art dealer Martha Henry, president of Martha Henry Inc. Fine Art, who met Rockefeller when he moved into the apartment next to hers, on East 57th Street. Her door abutted his, she says, adding, “I left mine ajar a lot.” She and her “neurotic, paranoid, odd” neighbor soon became friends. He told her about his parents’ death in a car accident when he was 16, just before he went off to Harvard. She also learned that he never ate in restaurants, “because you can’t trust the kitchen”; that his diet consisted mainly of cucumber-and-watercress tea sandwiches—only on Pepperidge Farm bread with the crusts removed—and Pepperidge Farm cookies, preferably the Nantucket variety; that his favorite food was haggis, the Scottish dish, and his drink of choice was Harveys Bristol Cream sherry. “You just think, Oh, well, he’s a Rockefeller, he’s eccentric,” says Henry.

One day he asked if she would help him determine the value of some paintings he had inherited. “O.K., Clark, tell me the names of the artists,” Henry responded. “Well, I’ve got a Jackson Pollock, a Mondrian, somebody named Rothko, and I think Twombly or something,” he said, mispronouncing the names.

The art dealer cut him short and rushed right over, “doing the math,” she remembers, as she stared at what she estimated was a multi-million-dollar collection, haphazardly hung on walls and sitting on the floor. (Rockefeller would later give several estimates of the collection’s value, telling Dateline, for instance, that it was worth $1 billion.) “He said he had inherited them from his great-aunt Blanchette [the Museum of Modern Art benefactor and widow of John D. Rockefeller III], who ‘started that little old museum on 53rd Street.’

“It all made sense,” says Henry. “Blanchette Rockefeller died in 1992, so there could have been an estate settled. And I thought, He is a Rockefeller. What else could he be?” She also thought a $300,000 Adolph Gottlieb from Knoedler & Company, the esteemed Upper East Side gallery, would be a prudent addition to his collection. But when they got to Knoedler, Rockefeller balked. “I don’t buy pictures with green in them,” he said.

Later, Rockefeller enlisted Henry’s help in finding a larger apartment. She suggested Alwyn Court, the turn-of-the-century building with the most intricate terra-cotta façade in the city. “Oh, I would never live there,” said Rockefeller. “It’s dreary and depressing.” Besides, he told her, he had to rent in a Cushman & Wakefield building, “because those are the family buildings, Rockefeller buildings, and I can get a very low rent.” He needed a spacious place, he told Henry, with plenty of room for his art, his Gordon setter, and—oh, yes—his bride. He was getting married, he said, and the lucky girl was named Sandra Mills Boss.

Enter Sandra Boss

Among all the people Clark Rockefeller met at Saint Thomas Church, Julia Boss would turn out to be the critical key to his future. She was smart, stylish, attractive, and engaged to be married, and she had a twin sister named Sandra, a Stanford graduate who was attending Harvard Business School for her M.B.A. Would Clark like to meet her? Of course, he said. In fact, he would like to throw a party for her in his apartment. It would be a Clue party, based on the board game in which the players are guests at a mansion who try to determine which one among them killed Mr. Boddy, their millionaire host. Rockefeller instructed each guest to come costumed as a character from the game and to tell the doorman they were there to see Mr. Boddy. Rockefeller played the role of Professor Plum, a Harvard archaeologist who always becomes uncomfortable when asked about his past. Sandra Boss came as Miss Scarlett, the femme fatale Hollywood actress, whose career is in shambles and whose desire to “marry rich” has brought her to Boddy Mansion.

Immediately, Professor Plum and Miss Scarlett were attracted to each other, initially through their mutual love of business and their admiration of each other’s intelligence. In addition, friends say, Sandra fell in love with Clark because he made her laugh. Like Rockefeller, Sandra Boss was on her own journey of re-invention. Her father was a Boeing engineer, and she had grown up upper-middle-class in Seattle, “in a nice two-story Cape Cod house with a finished basement,” says a friend. There, she started to develop what would become her defining trait. “She is one of the most competitive people I know,” says the friend, adding that she competed most doggedly against her fraternal twin, Julia. “Julia and Sandra, seniors at Blanchet High, are the only sibling Merit scholars from this area,” read a 1985 article in The Seattle Times. “They’ve never spent more than three days apart.… Nonetheless, when Julia announced, ‘I want to go to Yale,’ Sandra replied, ‘Okay, I want to go to Stanford.’”


Sandra Boss and Snooks, London, 2008. By Stuart Griffiths.
“Julia and Sandy used to play this crazy game that dates back to when they were growing up,” says someone who knows them both. “They would find a point of competition, and they would confer on who won that particular round.” In childhood, it was selling cookies; in school, it was scholarship; in young adulthood, it was, to give an example, “if one of them had an Hermès scarf, and the other one had Christian Louboutin shoes, they would have to figure out which one was better, because they both cost about the same.” After graduating from Yale, Julia worked as an assistant to the publisher at Algonquin Books and was engaged to be married to a fellow Yalie from an upper-middle-class family in Coral Gables, Florida.

As Sandra moved through increasingly impressive jobs—an elite private-equity program that attracted the best and brightest to a Dallas real-estate giant; a position in debt markets with Merrill Lynch—people found her sharp but shy, eager for success but socially, according to one observer, “on the outside looking in.” Then she met the enigmatic young man with the famous name and fell in love with him. He was, she told friends, the brightest man she’d ever met. He knew the works of the obscure 20th-century novelists she loved, and spoke several languages fluently, including Klingon, the language of the Star Trek warrior race. He was charming, witty, and worldly, and had once been rich, he said, before his late father’s fortune was wiped out by a lawsuit. She loved the fact that he wasn’t concerned about material wealth; he not only shared her altruistic passion for setting up nonprofits for international poverty relief and development but also worked in debt re-structuring for emerging nations.

Soon his primary occupation was being the perfect man for Sandra Boss. When he asked her to marry him, at an Episcopal church in Isleboro, Maine, she said yes. They announced their engagement with a Stilton-and-sherry party at Clark’s apartment. Clark and Sandra were married at the Quaker Meeting House on Nantucket, near a house they were living in, at 1 Kite Lane. He said his parents—his mother was the child star Ann Carter, known for her starring role opposite Humphrey Bogart in The Two Mrs. Carrolls, the 1947 film noir—had both died in a car crash (a clear reference, some say, to the fatal December 1979 car crash in Darien, Connecticut, of Avery Rockefeller Jr., a descendant of John D.’s). However, other Rockefellers were due to attend the nuptials, the groom told everyone, but at the last minute a problem arose and he disinvited them. Not to worry. Sandra would meet them all in the future, he said. Until then, his dog, Yates, named for the British novelist Edmund Hodgson Yates, would serve as “best dog.” Then there was the matter of the paperwork. “If you want to have a marriage where you don’t have to deal with legal stuff, Quaker is the way to go,” says a friend. Sandra had signed all the necessary marriage documents, entrusting the task of filing them to her husband; he never did. “Not only didn’t they have a license, I don’t believe they have a marriage certificate,” says Rockefeller’s lawyer, who insists the marriage wasn’t valid.

They settled into married life in New York and Nantucket. Rockefeller ran Asterisk, L.L.P., advising Third World countries on their finances. He didn’t make any money in the job, he explained, because the nations were dirt-poor; charging them a consulting fee would be unconscionable. While it’s now clear that his job was a sham, Sandra actually had a real career going. After graduating from Harvard Business School, she accepted a position with McKinsey & Company, the ultra-discreet consulting firm which advises the world’s leading businesses, governments, and institutions, and whose staff has included former C.I.A. operatives and future Enron executives.

She was happy with her husband then, friends say. If she ever had doubts about who he was, she didn’t express them. At the same time, she was busy moving up the McKinsey ladder—leading the company’s work for New York’s Senator Charles Schumer and Mayor Michael Bloomberg regarding the global competitiveness of New York and U.S. financial services, for instance—which Rockefeller would later claim was partially owing to the unspoken influence of his name “whenever it was to her advantage,” as he told the Today show after his capture. “She usually did so in a very understated way, calling special attention to it by keeping it extra quiet. Sort of the, quote, ‘Psst, she is married to a Rockefeller.’ She is the youngest woman ever to be elected to being a director of McKinsey & Company. And many of her colleagues, who were friendly with me, believed it had a lot to do with me and my name.” A friend adds, “Everybody knew she was married to a Rockefeller. And she could be all modest about it and act like she didn’t care, but she cared.” (Through her spokesman, Sandra Boss insists that she never used her husband’s name to advance her professional standing.)

Their apartment, at 55th Street and Sixth Avenue, was a showcase for their art. Furnishings were minimal, and Clark’s dog was given free rein. “We celebrated our first art purchase, a large painting by Rothko, on a cold, wet New York City afternoon,” Sandra wrote in Artnews. “Our dealer and a Rothko expert had just arrived at our apartment when Yates, our 85-pound Gordon setter, returned from his walk, jumped on his usual spot on the sofa, and shook his head. A four-inch-long swath of saliva emerged from his mouth.” Naturally, it landed on the Rothko, and the art expert carefully wiped if off with a paper towel. Sandra wrote that the incident was evidence of her husband’s insistence that fine art and purebred dogs could live together harmoniously, despite their “slight incompatibilities.”

Mr. and Mrs. Rockefeller were similarly different yet compatible, at least in the beginning. “They were both very stiff, very formal.… She was very distant in some ways … but she was equally awkward,” says a friend who went to dinner with them on several occasions, always beginning with cocktails at one of Rockefeller’s clubs, usually the Lotos, the tony literary club housed in a Vanderbilt mansion, whose membership directory listed Clark’s name just below that of the billionaire philanthropist Laurance Rockefeller. Then they would go to dinner at another private club, sometimes the Metropolitan, on East 60th Street, founded by J. P. Morgan, where the staff always greeted their host with a chorus of “Good evening, Mr. Rockefeller.” Once, they went to a club that had a grand view of the skyline. Gazing out the window, the friend exclaimed, “Oh, look, Clark, you can see Rockefeller Center from here!”

“And he reached into his pocket and pulled out a key, and he said, ‘Yes, I have the key right here!’ That’s really the first moment I smelled bullshit,” the friend remembers. “I just thought, There’s no fucking way there’s one key to Rockefeller Center.” Of Sandra the friend says, “She’s a very quiet woman.… I just remember the way she would say his name, absolutely two syllables: ‘Oh, Cla-aaaark!’ And he would call her Sahn-dra.” Their friend wasn’t impressed. “I was repulsed by the name-dropping and the excessive wealth and the khaki pants and the polo shirt. Also, they weren’t really people that you wanted to be around. They weren’t warm. I think other people were excited to be with a Rockefeller. It didn’t matter how awkward it was to be with them. It was worth it, because they were Rockefellers.”

Among their friends, questions increasingly arose as to the mysterious man’s background. The grandiose career, the silk ascots, and the museum-quality art collection (Robert Motherwell, Clyfford Still, Piet Mondrian, and several Mark Rothkos, whose authenticity was never questioned, not even by a former chief of staff of the Whitney Museum of American Art) were all too much for some. “It was like a parlor game: Hey, what do you think Clark’s real story is?” says one. “I think Sandra wanted to believe him. I asked her about it once; I said, ‘How do you know he’s really Clark Rockefeller and not some ax murderer on the lam?’ ‘He’s my fiancé!’ she said. ‘I think that he would tell me more about his past than he would tell you!’”

As her position with McKinsey grew, Sandra was away from her husband more and more, which left him with plenty of time to walk Yates in Central Park, where, he would later say, “my dog was very much in love with Amelia, Henry Kissinger’s dog.” Broadway producer Jeffrey Richards crossed paths with Rockefeller while walking his dog through the park one day. They got to talking, and Richards told him he was producing a new play by David Ives, who had written All in the Timing. Rockefeller exclaimed, “I’ve seen that play six times!” He then hinted that he might like to become a backer on Ives’s next play. “It would look quite wonderful to have a Rockefeller on one’s résumé,” says Richards, who arranged to meet with his new potential investor and Ives, after which Rockefeller offered the playwright a ride on his private jet. However, neither the jet nor the investment ever materialized.

New York: Rockefeller’s Center

Sharlene Spingler, a writer and P.R. executive, met Rockefeller while walking her Shar-Pei and English setter in Tudor City, and soon they began walking their dogs together. He told her how he flew his setter with him on his Learjet to London, where, he added, “the food is so terrible I just bring cereal,” and how he regularly invited friends to run their dogs at Pocantico Hills, the storied 3,400-acre Rockefeller estate near Tarrytown, New York. He said his profession was “advising foreign governments on how much money to print.” She introduced him to her friends and took him to the private clubs to which she belonged, and to which he would soon belong as well. “He knew how to work the churches, so the obvious next step would be private clubs,” says Spingler. “Back in 1993, you could join the India House, a private gentlemen’s club on Wall Street, for $850 to $1,200, for which you would get reciprocal memberships at the Lotos, the Metropolitan Club, and many others. If you joined the Metropolitan outright, they would probably hit you up for $35,000. Knowing Clark, with his pathology, wouldn’t you find the cheapest way in?”

“You’re walking your dog with a Rockefeller? Wow!” the noted New York–based artist William Quigley, whose work is collected by politicians, entertainers, and business leaders, asked a friend one day. Not only is he a Rockefeller, the friend replied, but he loves your work. Within a month, Quigley was summoned to Rockefeller’s apartment, where he was staggered by his collection of modern art. The connoisseur promptly promised to buy some of Quigley’s paintings, and told him he wanted to introduce him to a great friend of his, Larry Gagosian, one of the world’s foremost dealers. First, however, came a series of lunches and dinners, usually at the Lotos, where Clark would exclaim, “Let’s have the oysters Rockefeller!” Once, when the dish of oysters baked in spinach arrived, he said, in his East Coast lockjaw, “Quigley, do you know why they call them oysters Rockefeller?” No, the artist answered. “Because they’re green.”

Sometimes, Sandra would join them, but usually she was at work. Clark loved to dine at the 7th Regiment Mess, the historic restaurant in the Park Avenue Armory, where, he told Quigley, “we’ve been members for years,” and where “Uncle David,” meaning the only surviving grandchild of John D. Rockefeller, loved to dine as well. “Clark always used the word ‘grand,’” remembers Quigley. “Everything we ate, or everything we talked about, he would say, ‘Oh, isn’t this grand?’” At the end of many a meal of beef ribs and succotash at the armory, Rockefeller would exclaim, “Isn’t this grand!,” and if it was an extra-grand evening, he would add, “It’s a peach-melba night!” Quigley recalls, “And then he would order peach melba, and here we were, two grown men, sitting there eating parfaits.”

Although Rockefeller hadn’t yet purchased a Quigley painting—they were then selling for approximately $10,000—he wanted to ensure that others did by enlisting Larry Gagosian to represent the artist. “Some people are after that guy and he never calls back. With me, he calls too much,” Rockefeller said.

He called the Gagosian Gallery and said he wanted to buy a Quigley. Gagosian immediately had one of his associates contact the artist, and, just like that, Quigley was asked to send over transparencies of his work. “Tomorrow, Sandy and I will go to Gagosian in New York and look at your portfolio,” Rockefeller wrote in an e-mail to Quigley on October 11, 1998. “We will take along a very important person from the Whitney Museum, and we will place an order for twelve paintings.… This operation should impress Gagosian quite a bit.”

Rockefeller repeatedly assured Quigley that price was no object when it came to purchasing art. “I have always paid with a blank check and asked my banker never to bother to tell me the amount,” he wrote in a letter of recommendation for the artist. However, neither Rockefeller nor the Whitney Museum ever bought a Quigley painting from Gagosian. Rockefeller did acquire three Quigley works, though: he bought one from the artist, got one as a gift, and picked up the third at an estate sale for a nominal sum.

None of Rockefeller’s new friends, who included a respected female Park Avenue physician and a top Japanese female executive at Moody’s Investors Service, probed too deeply into the stories he told them. They were all too content to bask in his glow. “He came up to the house and said that his great-uncle had founded the University of Chicago,” says the husband of one smitten friend. “I looked it up: John D. Rockefeller was the founder of the university. He didn’t say he was a descendant of John D., but John D.’s brother. He had on a University of Chicago tie.”

At the end of 1998, Rockefeller sent out a mass e-mail to his growing circle:

First, I must tell you why you’ve not heard from me. While I’m in a meeting at the U.N. the Friday before Labor Day, I stared at some papers a delegate handed to me.… I remembered nothing until I woke up at a New York hospital five hours later. The hospital discharged me shortly afterwards and the doctors told me that I suffered from severe exhaustion. In short, a “burnout.” The obvious cause: too many 19-hour days. During June, July and August, I generated 1,085 billable hours, about 400 hours more than persons in comparable working situations.… On the advice of my doctor, I have decided to change my lifestyle. My plan: I will take a sabbatical from my work and go to stay at my cousin’s villa in Cap Ferrat.

Soon stresses arose in his marriage: he was controlling, difficult, paranoid. In early 2000, Sandra left him, having had enough of what David Deakin, the assistant district attorney in Boston, called “his emotional and occasional physical abuse,” but he eventually wooed her back. He became the old Clark again, and during this period she became pregnant. Determined to keep the marriage together for the sake of their unborn child, she resolved to work things out.

One day he came home to say he’d had an unpleasant altercation with a woman in Central Park while walking the dog. Soon the police came to the apartment to speak with Rockefeller about the incident. Shortly after that he announced that he didn’t want to live in Manhattan anymore. “We’re moving to New Hampshire,” he said.

Again he chose an enclave of wealth: Cornish, New Hampshire (population 1,800), made famous by the 19th-century American sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens and such part-time residents as the artist Maxfield Parrish and Woodrow Wilson, whose Cornish home was considered his summer White House. The community’s most famous current resident is the reclusive novelist J. D. Salinger, which is, some say, what attracted Clark Rockefeller to the place. He told people that he had chosen Cornish because of its location, halfway between Sandra’s job in Boston and his company in Canada. “He said he was a scientist, and his company, Jet Propulsion something, made jet engines for rockets, the space shuttle, or the satellite,” one Cornish local remembers.

Sandra Boss paid $750,000 for Doveridge, the former estate of the famous U.S. jurist Learned Hand and the artists Thomas and Maria Dewing. Rockefeller immediately embarked on an extensive restoration, taking it down to the studs and digging up the backyard for a swimming pool. While Sandra was away on business, he began making quite a splash. There was a welcoming party for the new arrival at the home of two noted New England lawyers. “My recollection is of a fellow in chinos, a sweater tied around his neck or maybe an ascot—that was Clark Rockefeller, as he let everybody know,” remembers New Hampshire state senator Peter Burling.

The newcomer started chatting up Senator Burling’s wife, Jean, a veteran judge and one of the first women appointed to the New Hampshire bench. “He began to lecture her about Abstract Expressionism,” remembers Senator Burling. “What’s the word I want? Hauteur? Arrogance? He was assuming Jean knew nothing about art.” Jean Burling detected a fraud from the start, and the Cornish gossip mill began churning: Who the hell is this guy?

“My name is Clark Rockefeller, and I can put an injunction on your little book,” he told Alma Gilbert, director of the Cornish Colony Museum, who wanted to include pictures of Doveridge in A Place of Beauty, about the homes and gardens of Cornish artists. “He later sent me an e-mail saying, ‘I work for the U.S. Defense Department, and I cannot have it known where I live,’” Gilbert remembers. Rockefeller eventually backed down, “when I informed him that my publisher was in California,” Gilbert says, adding that she now realizes the “relevance” California had for Rockefeller. By then he’d turned Doveridge into a construction site, keeping his art in storage tubes and a collection of Rockefeller memorabilia—pennants, neckties, campaign bumper stickers, “things I’ve had most of my life”—in his upstairs office, all of which he would show off to visitors.


Rockefeller playing Mars, Cornish, New Hampshire, 2005. By Jon Gilbert Fox/Polaris.

For someone who claimed to be avoiding attention, he actually seemed to court it, becoming a standout in this quiet New England town, where pockets are deep but money is never mentioned, much less displayed. Rockefeller would grandly ride through the village streets on a Segway, wearing a Yale baseball cap. He parked some of what he claimed was a 21-car collection, including a number of antiques, on his 25-acre property, and an old police car he had bought at an auction, on whose sides he had stenciled doveridge security, at the entrance. Since he didn’t have a driver’s license, he was chauffeured around town in an armored Cadillac. He let drop that guests he entertained included former German chancellor Helmut Kohl and the astrophysicist Stephen Hawking.

But the most important change in Clark Rockefeller’s life came on May 23, 2001, when Sandra Boss went into labor. A friend drove Clark and Sandra to Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center, where, on the following day, Reigh Storrow Mills Rockefeller was born. With her arrival on the scene, Rockefeller acquired an anchor, the one person he couldn’t cheat, con, or escape. “The one real thing in his life was his daughter, and his love for his daughter. Everything else has been a fraud,” says Boston deputy police superintendent Thomas Lee.

Enter Snooks

As Rockefeller had done elsewhere, he gravitated to a place of worship, in this case Trinity Church, the 1808 wooden structure that Walker Evans had photographed and the National Register of Historic Places had listed as critical to preserve. Peter Burling had spent 20 years and a considerable amount of money restoring the church—much to Rockefeller’s apparent distaste. Jean Burling had been among the first to gently question his identity, and, Senator Burling says, Rockefeller decided to get back at the couple. First, he bought the fire engine that Burling had once owned. Then he began a campaign to take over Trinity Church. After buying the crumbling church in 1984, the senator had promised the Bishop of New Hampshire that he would donate it to the town in 20 years, which meant 2004. “Clark had other plans and stirred up virulent opposition,” says Burling.

It all came to a head at a town meeting, called in 2004 to vote on spending $110,000 for a new police station. As always, Senator Burling served as moderator. Sitting in the front row in his Yale baseball cap, Rockefeller raised his hand. “I recognized him to speak, and he stood up and pulled what appeared to be a check from his pocket and said, ‘I have here a check for $110,000. If the town will accept Burling’s donation of Trinity Church and sell it to me for a dollar, I will donate the money to build the police station.’

“At that point there were 410 mouths hanging open,” says Burling.

Rockefeller got the historic church with $110,000 of Sandra’s money, as well as the attention of the Valley News, a daily newspaper covering parts of New Hampshire and Vermont. On July 3, 2004, reporter John Gregg wrote of the new buyer’s plans for the church, adding that the supposed scion “declined repeatedly” to say if he was directly related to the John D. Rockefeller family. “Maybe I am, maybe I’m not,” Rockefeller told the newspaper. “It’s not something I would confirm or deny.”

The issue seemed to go away as Rockefeller audaciously charged forward. He took the role of Mars, the god of war—with Snooks as a nymph—in a play at the Saint-Gaudens National Historic Site, and he signed his name to a series of articles in the town newsletter, one of which appears to have been plagiarized from a speech by best-selling author Michael Crichton.

His Cornish charade ended in 2006, when Snooks turned five and was ready to enter kindergarten. Until then, he had been home-schooling her, but now Sandra insisted that Snooks needed to be around other children. Rockefeller told friends that he could get her into Spence, the private girls’ school in New York, “with one phone call.” Instead, she was accepted at Southfield School for girls, in Boston, which shares a campus with Dexter, the boys’ school of which John F. Kennedy was an alumnus. The Rockefellers took off for Boston, leaving behind in Cornish their unfinished house, the historic church, and many unanswered questions.

In the fall of 2006, Sandra paid a reported $2.7 million for a town house in Boston, on Pinckney Street, where Senator John Kerry has a house. In this Beacon Hill neighborhood, Rockefeller entered his improbable Mr. Mom phase, the stay-at-home father whose wife was forever away at her high-powered job. “He said he’d sold his jet-propulsion company to Boeing for a billion dollars and that was the last time he’d worked,” remembers a Southfield parent whom Rockefeller took to lunch at the Harvard Club and told that he was positioned exclusively in “Treasuries.” “He said Sandy only made $300,000 to $400,000 a year, and, judging from what they had, I thought he had a lot of his own money. He said he was going to donate a planetarium to our daughters’ school.”

Every morning he would walk Snooks to the bus stop in front of Cheers, the bar that became the basis for the popular 1980s television show. As soon as she was safely on the bus, he would stroll down the street to Starbucks, where he soon found a new constituency—who called themselves Café Society—of Beacon Hill lawyers, Harvard researchers, a celebrated architect, and successful businesspeople, on their way to work.

One day, the aristocrat in the Lacoste shirt was breathless when he arrived at the bus stop. After putting Snooks on the bus, he said, “I’ve just pushed an armoire up to the fifth floor of my house.” Bob Skorupa, a local lawyer and Starbucks regular, says, “That’s how he integrated himself. Immediately you knew he had a five-story house.”

The Starbucks group also learned very soon that he was a Rockefeller, as well as a director of the ultra-private Algonquin Club, down the street, to which he soon invited his newfound circle for breakfast. “When you walked into his fancy-schmancy club, his name was on the wall,” says John Greene, a businessman. He knew everybody, his friends agree, and he was so entrenched in the club, with its 20-foot ceilings and rooms named for Calvin Coolidge and Daniel Webster, that he once reportedly introduced the consul general of Germany to the membership in German. “Now, many people have said, ‘Oh, yeah, we knew,’ but believe me, he had them fooled,” Thomas Lee says of Rockefeller’s sway at the Algonquin. “Oh, absolutely!” adds John Greene. “At a club like that—very Yankee, old-boys, blueblood—people get a hard-on over the name.”

Everything was swell until the check arrived. “You’d think he’d pay for breakfast, since non-members can’t pay. But the next day he wanted his money,” says Greene. “He invited several of us to a New Year’s party at the Algonquin,” says Bob Skorupa. “We all assumed it was an invitation, but afterward he hit us up for a hundred bucks apiece.”

Nevertheless, according to the architect Patrick Hickox, Rockefeller soon won people over and proved himself to be very impressive, “a true connoisseur.” He would design Web sites for people he liked, and he once played nine recordings of Cole Porter’s “From This Moment On” for a group to see which of them could identify the various vocalists. “Clark’s the only person I may ever know who could play the didgeridoo, this extraordinary aboriginal wind instrument,” says Hickox.

He spent his free time at the Boston Athenaeum, one of the oldest and most exclusive private libraries in America, to which he gained membership through the intervention of his neighbor John Sears, a Harvard Law graduate and former Suffolk County sheriff. Sears suggested that the library’s directors “look with kindness on an application,” and the man with the famous name was immediately accepted. “On Saturday mornings, even when we’d been out late the night before, he’d make it a practice to read to children at the Athenaeum,” says Hickox. “He was an excellent reader who could perform in a number of accents. I heard him recite Robert Burns—long pieces from memory—in a flawless Scottish brogue.”

He now directed his attention toward his daughter, who he insisted go by his wife’s last name—Boss, instead of Rockefeller—to avoid reverse discrimination. Almost every day, says a Boston friend, “he would take Snooks to the Athenaeum and read to her, and she could read by the time she was two.” Rockefeller said that he once read Tennyson’s poem “The Daisy” to her 25 times in a single evening, and that she was reading aloud from the scientific journal Nature by the time she was three. When a neighbor suggested that Clark bring Snooks over for a playdate, the precocious little girl said, “Oh, no, I don’t do playdates; playdates are for children!” According to the friend, “She really was very bright. The first time she met one of the neighbors, she said, ‘And what’s your name?’ And he said, ‘My name’s Elwood Headley.’ And she said, ‘Hmm, let me see. E-L-W-O-O-D H-E-A-D-L-E-Y.’ She spelled his name. And she was five then! There was a picture of her on the cover of The Beacon Hill Times.” It was a photograph of Snooks with a diagram she had made. “She drew the entire periodic table of the elements on the corner of Charles and Beacon Streets, right on the sidewalk! I said to Clark, ‘Does she know what it means?’ And he said, ‘Oh, yes.’ I never learned the periodic table in high school, and here she is five or six at this point.”

“He was so devoted to that little girl,” says John Sears. Father and daughter would stroll through Beacon Hill, dine together, and read books for hours on end. The carefree child, whose favorite book and movie was The Little Princess, was so happy that she would literally hop or skip every fifth step. And forever at her side, or carrying her on his shoulders, was the adoring father. “I love you too much, Daddy,” Snooks would often say.

He loved her too much as well, perhaps, at least too much for discipline. At a parent-teacher conference, Clark and Sandra met with school administrators to discuss how Snooks was acting in class. But he refused to take any advice. When the couple returned home, according to friends, Sandra confronted him. She may not have questioned his identity, but she vehemently disagreed with his ideas on how they should raise their daughter. “She went off on a business trip, and a short time after she left, Clark was served with the divorce papers,” says a close friend from Cornish. “He said he was in complete shock.”

The divorce and custody battle were extremely contentious, with Sandra living at the Boston Ritz, Rockefeller moving in with European friends a few blocks away, and Snooks shuttling between the two. “Sandy was the money that allowed him to have the antique cars, the artwork, the clubs, and when she pulled the plug on it he was incredibly distraught,” says a Southfield parent. Financially cut off by his wife, Rockefeller asked people to buy back the antique cars they’d sold him. He even tried to sell some of his art. As a final indignity, he had to resign from the Algonquin Club. He told friends that his wife had bled him of his riches. “He told me, ‘Sandy only wanted my money. She married me because I’m a Rockefeller. Now she wants everything,’” says the art dealer Sheldon Fish. He said he was going to interview every high-powered attorney in Boston so that Sandra wouldn’t be able to hire any of them, because of conflict-of-interest restrictions.

But she did get a lawyer, a good one. Once the divorce was under way, her father, William Boss, decided to investigate his son-in-law, since he and other members of the family had come to suspect that Clark was either siphoning off money from Sandra or hiding Rockefeller money from her. First, Boss went on the Wikipedia Web site to check out Rockefeller’s late mother, Ann Carter, the former child star who had supposedly died in a car wreck. According to Wikipedia, Ann Carter was very much alive. The deeper Boss dug, the more inconsistencies he found, and he reported them all to Sandra. Finally, she saw the light: if Clark would lie about his mother, what else had he lied about?

“Could Sandy be conned?” asks Tony Meyer, her boss when she worked at Trammell Crow Company in Dallas. “Perhaps. She had a certain naïveté to go along with her smarts. But here’s the question: You get seduced by it, you get married to it, but what do you do when you wake up one day and you find out that he’s not really a Rockefeller?”

She hired a private investigator to find out who her husband really was. From that point forward, Rockefeller, unwilling to risk exposing his past and unable to produce documentation to prove his current identity, never stood a chance. Sandra Boss got everything: the historic house and church in Cornish, as well as the town house in Beacon Hill. She also won custody of Snooks, and the judge approved her request to take the child with her to London, where she now lives in Knightsbridge, limiting the doting father to only three court-supervised visits a year.

“On the day of the hearing, he sent me a text message: ‘I’ve just signed the Treaty of Versailles,’” says Bob Skorupa. “It was a few days before Christmas that he lost the case,” adds John Greene. “He gave up all rights to his kid in return for $800,000—plus there would be no due diligence”—that is, no investigation of his true identity. “We were in here at Starbucks, and his kid was gone, legally taken by his ex-wife to London. I think he took the money from her and then had regrets. I think the moment he took that money he started planning on how to get his daughter back.”

A.k.a. Chip Smith

‘He told me he’d spent $800,000 on the custody fight, and also had to pay Sandy’s attorney 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,” says one friend. “He called me and said, ‘I don’t have anything. I had to give Sandy all of the paintings, and I’m broke. I’m down to my last two million,’” says Sheldon Fish.

The truth was, he was down to his last $800,000, the sum he’d gotten from his wife in the divorce settlement. “There’s nothing going on there for Clark,” says Noreen Gleason of the F.B.I. “There aren’t any jobs. There isn’t any money coming in. He’s one big con. He’s getting his money because he married it. She was the breadwinner.”

“I may have had a nervous breakdown,” he once wrote in an e-mail, and if it ever really happened it was after his divorce. No more Snooks, no more Algonquin Club. For Christmas 2007, he wore his green pants, embroidered with candy canes, to a Yuletide celebration with William Quigley and his family. But his mood was far from festive. He’d fought for Snooks with every ounce of energy he had, he told Quigley. “He kept saying, ‘I just miss her so much.’ He was completely devastated and ripped apart.”

He seemed to find solace in impressing women. He told one that he was the model for the effete and phobic Dr. Niles Crane character on Frasier. And he put the full-court press on Roxane West, a young woman from a West Texas oil family who travels between New York and Texas frequently, after she collided with him at a party at the Lawrence Steigrad Fine Arts gallery on East 69th Street in New York one evening last May. He told her he was 40, a Yale graduate, and a single parent with a seven-year-old daughter, produced by a surrogate mother. He was on his way to China on a business trip for his work as a nuclear physicist, and had just come from giving his daughter’s class a one-hour tour of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. She accepted his invitation to lunch the next day, where his stories got even wilder, after which he began sending her a flurry of text messages, which he referred to as “text flirting.”

“Problem: I cannot get you out of my head. What to do? Argh!” he wrote in one message. “Just gazed at Saturn for the last ten minutes. Viewing excellent tonight in Brookline. Wish you could see this. Wish I could see you.” In another: “In a submarine. Crowded. Strange. Thought of you a minute ago.” In a third: “Sipping strange tropical drinks on Nantucket now. Would love to see you. This coming week perhaps go to Central Park and kiss. Sound good?”

By now there were cracks appearing in his fictional armor; his stories didn’t make sense. The façade was falling apart. “I just knew it was all bullshit, that he wasn’t who he said he was,” says West.

Normally he would have moved onward and upward, into a new life, a more elaborate ruse. Now, however, he was hopelessly frozen in his identity as a caring father. On July 27, in the midst of a long and lonely summer, he snatched his beloved Snooks off Marlborough Street in Boston and launched his carefully orchestrated escape plan, leading what quickly grew into a 20-officer F.B.I. and Boston Police task force on a five-day goose chase.

Eventually the investigators got a break: a real-estate agent in Baltimore recognized Rockefeller’s picture on television and called the F.B.I. The agent said he’d sold someone resembling the man on the wanted poster a carriage house on Ploy Street in Baltimore for $432,000, which the man had paid for the previous week with cashier’s checks. The agent said that the buyer, identifying himself as Chip Smith and his daughter as Muffy, said he was a single parent and a ship’s captain, and he was relocating from Chile.

Noreen Gleason got the news in Boston at one a.m., and one hour later a team of investigators had surrounded the house on Ploy Street. Through the windows they could see an opened case of sherry and paintings leaning against the walls, but they could detect no movement inside, which Gleason, knowing Rockefeller to be an insomniac who often worked at his computer throughout the night, thought was a bad sign. “We’d gone down so many avenues, we were afraid that maybe he had been there and then left,” she says. Since their first priority was getting the girl out safely, they decided to try to trap the fugitive Clark Rockefeller–style. “We wanted her to remain inside the house, but we wanted him to come out,” remembers Gleason. “That’s where the ruse came in.”


Rockefeller at his arraignment in Boston, August 5, 2008. *By Essdras M. Suarez/*The Boston Globe.

Investigators had previously discovered Rockefeller’s “yacht,” a run-down 26-foot Stiletto catamaran, which he had kept docked in a Baltimore marina two miles away. Through a window of the boat, they were able to see a file labeled “Chip Smith,” presumably the plans for the new identity he was setting up, so they knew they had their man. They got the manager of the marina to call Rockefeller on his cell phone and say that his boat was taking on water. “I’ll be there,” he said. Investigators saw movement in the house, and soon he walked outside.

“Hey, Clark!” a plainclothes agent called. Rockefeller turned around. “Where you going, Clark?” asked the agent.

“I’m going to get a turkey sandwich,” he said. It would be the last lie he told before 20 agents with assault rifles wrestled him to the ground, while others stormed the house and got the little girl.

Back in Boston, Noreen Gleason told Sandra Boss that her daughter was safe and her ex-husband was in custody. “She literally collapsed,” says Gleason. After she was revived and had spoken on the phone to her daughter, Sandra turned to the agents and asked, “Who is he?”



Read about another fame-seeking impostor in “The Counterfeit Rockefeller,” by Bryan Burrough. Above, Christopher Rocancourt. Courtesy of the East Hampton Village Police Department.
“He is a mystery man, a cipher,” a spinner of stories “literally so numerous and varied they are proving to be difficult to keep track of, even using a database,” said Assistant District Attorney Deakin during Rockefeller’s bail hearing. His trial for parental kidnapping is set to begin in March. Meanwhile, the Unsolved Cases Unit of the L.A. County sheriff’s homicide department recently conducted extensive soil analysis of the San Marino backyard where the bones believed to have been John Sohus’s were buried almost 24 years ago, hoping to find evidence to bring that case to a close. Thus far, Rockefeller has declined to meet with investigators regarding the Sohus case, and he still hasn’t satisfactorily answered the question asked by his ex-wife, “Who is he?” Not for Stephen Hrones (“He told me he’s Clark Rockefeller … and he was raised in New York”). Not in a jailhouse interview with the Today show (“I have a clear memory of once picking strawberries in Oregon,” he told Natalie Morales, who asked him about his childhood. “I remember clearly going to Mount Rushmore in the back of a woody wagon.… I believe it was a ‘68 Ford”). Not for The Boston Globe, whose reporters he met in jail wearing tasseled loafers with his prison scrubs (“Peppering his speech with verbal filigrees such as ‘quite so’ and ‘rather,’ he rambled on about the ‘five or six or seven’ languages that he speaks, the historical novel about the roots of Israeli statehood he is writing, and his work as a researcher of ‘anything from physics to social sciences,’” wrote one of the reporters). And not for police and F.B.I. investigators in a two-hour interrogation after his arrest (“He talks about his amnesia, and how he can’t remember certain things,” says Noreen Gleason. “For a sharp guy, he’s got a very sketchy memory,” adds Thomas Lee).

In early November, Rockefeller retained the firm of criminal-defense attorney Jeffrey Denner, who has this to say regarding his client: “There’s nothing about this case that takes it out of the ordinary range of a fairly straightforward parental-kidnapping allegation. As far as his being an alleged person of interest in a potential California criminal prosecution, we don’t believe for a second that it’s going to result in any criminal conviction or liability for him, and he absolutely denies any wrongdoing whatsoever in connection with his purported stay in California.” Asked about the various names his client has assumed over the last three decades, Denner says, “He’s certainly not the first immigrant who’s come to this country and Anglicized himself for purposes of adjustment to life here. Nor is there anything illegal about the use of aliases or other names per se, unless there is an indication they were used for some fraudulent purpose, which we do not believe is the case here.”

As for Sandra Boss, is she an innocent victim or a simple enabler? She insists through her spokesman that she is the former, the ultimate dupe in an elaborate web of lies, living for 12 years with a man she knew only as Clark Rockefeller. How could this high-powered Stanford graduate and Harvard M.B.A. not have known? How could she marry, and remain married to, a Rockefeller who had no identification, employment history, or visible means of support? She must now realize it was all a farce: the famous name, the distinguished career, the maniacal security, even the incredible collection of modern paintings that hung on her walls, which Rockefeller’s attorney Stephen Hrones now says are fakes—“derivatives, worthless basically.”

She’s doing her best to forget all that. She has a new life in London, and she wants to leave her former life behind, just as her ex-husband so often did.