by Mark Seal
He was brilliant, John Wells added, casting himself as properly eccentric, and he told Wells exactly what he’d told the fourteen-year-old Alice Johnson: that he was “paranoid about security.” “He would walk around with a radio device that he claimed was connected to a security office,” Wells said. “He would carry it around and periodically check in—report where he was, who he was with, what direction he was going. He claimed it was some sort of extra-high-level security service, and he had to report in at all times.”
Casting himself as obsessed with security was a clever means by which Rockefeller could deflect questions about his background. According to Wells, “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.”
The morning after meeting John Wells I attended St. Thomas Church. The service was certainly impressive, with its tuxedoed ushers, its rectors marching paradelike through the pews with enormous candles, its regally attired worshippers. Like Rockefeller, I was there really for the reception held immediately after the service, in which the congregants retired to the church basement. Just as John Wells had described, it was good theater. Women served coffee from silver urns. Men poured wine from bottles with impressive labels. There were hors d’oeuvres and uninhibited conversation—a sense of welcome, fellowship, civility, and trust among those secure in the fact that no evil would dare darken one of God’s grandest earthly homes.
Another early sighting of “Clark Rockefeller” came in February 1992.
By then, he had obviously deduced the credentials that are catnip to the cognoscenti. Paramount among them: a purebred dog; in Rockefeller’s case, the Gordon setter named Yates. Nothing sparks a conversation between strangers faster than a walked dog, and soon Rockefeller was meeting any number of influential people, including, he insisted, Henry Kissinger.
One day, while walking Yates in the Tudor City neighborhood of New York, he met Sharlene Spingler, a young woman who had just downsized that day from a spacious 1905 brownstone to a one-bedroom apartment, having lost her home to her brothers in an estate battle. Sharlene was taking her black shar-pei and red-and-white English setter for a walk. Suddenly, “a short young blond man, looking to be somewhere in his early thirties,” came bounding across the street to greet Sharlene, a stranger to him, and her two dogs.
“I love your dog, that English setter!” said the stranger. “I’ll do anything for you! I’ll walk your dog.”
“I thought that was a little forward,” Sharlene said, but at the same time there was something appealing about it.
We were sitting at a restaurant in Grand Central Station in New York when Sharlene, an extremely intelligent blonde with a rapier wit whose family had arrived in Manhattan in 1643, told me about the encounter. “It was my first day there,” she said of her new apartment. “He just saw me in the street with the dogs. But dog people are like that. They’ll just talk to each other.”
That was, of course, the beauty of it for a striver like Clark. Connected by their dogs, they quickly became, well, if not friends, at least acquaintances. Then came what Sharlene called the infinite tales that the enigmatic young man began telling her. She related them to me one after the other, all improbable upon reflection, but seemingly plausible—for a Rockefeller—at the time: He said he was friends with Henry Kissinger. He said he would take a Learjet with his dog to London, where “the food is so terrible I just bring cereal.” He said he regularly invited friends to run their dogs with him at the storied 3,400-acre Rockefeller estate in Pocantico Hills near Tarrytown. He said his profession was “advising foreign governments on how much money to print.” Once, the socially well-connected Sharlene introduced him to some friends who suggested it would be nice to have a Rockefeller on the board of a satellite company they were launching and asked him what he would like in return. Rockefeller rose from his chair and said, “Gentlemen, there is nothing you can do for me, as I don’t wish to jeopardize my tax status. I am tax exempt by an act of Congress, and Texas is my official residence.” (He also told Sharlene about the various presidential inaugurations he had attended.) If that résumé wasn’t enough, his clothing completed the portrait. “He was always in his bright green corduroy pants with ducks or something flying over them,” said Spingler. “With a pink shirt. And a blue blazer. And a green bow tie. Looking like a typical Yalie.” Soon he was helping her to configure her computer—he was a computer wizard, no doubt about that—and taking the computer to work on in what he said was his office, at the prestigious No. 5 Tudor City Place.
If he was indeed a human sponge, absorbing ideas, dreams, identities, and personas from everyone with whom he came in contact, what Rockefeller gleaned from Sharlene Spingler was something huge for what he would become in New York City. Through her, he learned how to gain entry to the portals of some of the world’s most exclusive private clubs.
“He knew how to work the churches, so the obvious next step would be the private clubs,” said Sharlene. “Back in 1993, you could join the India House, a private gentleman’s club on Wall Street, for $850 to $1,200, for which you would get reciprocal memberships at”—and here she listed some of the premier private clubs in the city, among them the Lotos, one of America’s oldest and most esteemed literary clubs and a preferred destination for Vanderbilts, Whitneys, Roosevelts, and Rockefellers since 1870; and the Metropolitan Club, founded by the leaders of New York City in 1891.
These were just the beginning of the bonanza of reciprocal private clubs that the India House membership would include. “He went through the back door,” Sharlene patiently explained to me, just as she had explained to Clark.
Thus, with just a down payment of $850 to $1,200, Rockefeller was not only able to gain membership in the private clubs of the richest and most powerful citizens of East Coast society, but also to take an important first step in making their members think he was one of them.
Shortly after his 1992 reemergence, Clark Rockefeller moved into a one-bedroom apartment at 400 East Fifty-seventh Street, an imposing prewar white-brick art deco building. One day in 2008, I rode the elevator to the seventh floor, where I was greeted by a statuesque and effervescent brunette named Martha Henry, who runs Martha Henry Inc. Fine Art. She lived in 7L, the apartment adjacent to Rockefeller’s. She showed me the door to his apartment, 7M, catty-corner to hers.
“I left mine ajar a lot,” she said, explaining that she was a smoker and needed the cross-ventilation. “He introduced himself as Clark Rockefeller. He never flaunted it or elaborated on it.” He just let it lie there, having its hypnotic effect. “He told me his work was solving Third World debt, particularly on the Pacific Rim.”
She laughed. The door to her apartment was open, and she stared at the door to his as if she could still see him standing there, togged out head to toe in his preppy casual daytime clothing, hair bleached with blond highlights. “When I heard the part about Third World debt I decided, you know, he’s crazy. That’s not a real job. But then I thought, okay, he’s a Rockefeller, he’s eccentric.
“He told me his parents had died when he was sixteen in a car crash, that he had grown up in Cambridge and Boston, that he went to Harvard. I said, ‘If your parents died when you were sixteen, who took care of you?’ And he said, ‘I took care of myself and lived in the town house and went to school myself. But I graduated early.’ And I thought, okay, he’s a mathematical genius and therefore is solving these Third World debts.”
He invited her over for a few of the parties he was soon hosting in his apartment, where young men were dressed just like Clark, “in their madras and khakis and drinking their gin and tonics.” Once, she met his niece, Alice Johnson, whom he introduced as a debutante. As Henry got to know him, his “quirks and oddities and paranoias” multiplied.
“He told me once that he never ate in restaurants,” she said. “So I said, “Clark, this is crazy! Why
wouldn’t you eat in a restaurant?’ He said, ‘Because you can’t trust the kitchen. I only eat in private clubs.’
“He was very particular about his food,” she continued. “He would only eat his little sandwiches—you know, the cucumber and watercress on white bread with the crusts cut off? He would only eat a certain Pepperidge Farm cookie: the Nantucket. He would only drink Earl Grey tea. Oh, and what was his favorite food? Oh, my God. His favorite food was haggis.”
“Haggis?” I asked.
“It’s a Scottish dish,” she said. “And his favorite drink was Harveys Bristol Cream.”
Yet, she added, it all made sense in a strange sort of way, the pieces of the crazy puzzle the man of wealth, taste, and distinction presented to her, because it all was guaranteed sound by the famous name. She repeated, “You just think, ‘Oh, well, he’s a Rockefeller. He’s eccentric!’ ”
One day Clark called to tell her he had inherited some paintings, and asked for her help in determining their value.
“Well, I’ve got a Jackson Pollock, a Mondrian, somebody named Rothko, and I think Twombly or something,” said Rockefeller, mispronouncing the names of these masters of modern art. “I was literally almost on the floor!” said Henry. “A Rothko alone would have been eight million dollars back then. Today, Rothkos sell for thirty, forty million.”
The art dealer cut Rockefeller short and rushed from her apartment to his, “doing the math” along the way. When she entered 7M, she was stunned by what she calculated to be a multimillion-dollar, irreplaceable, museum-quality collection of paintings, haphazardly hung on walls and sitting on the floor. She blurted out, “You need an insurance policy immediately, and you should probably get an alarm system! We’re coming out of an art recession, but, Clark, these are very expensive paintings!” Then she asked him, “Where did you get all of this?”
“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, Rockefeller threw in, “started that little old museum on Fifty-third Street.” Henry was stunned.
“He then said, ‘I’m really disappointed because I wanted to inherit the Bierstadt,’ ” meaning he wished his great-aunt had left him a work by the German-born nineteenth-century Western landscape painter Albert Bierstadt and not “all this modern stuff.”
“It all made sense,” said Henry. “I did a little research, and Blanchette Rockefeller indeed died in 1992, so there could have been an estate settled. And so I thought, ‘He’s a Rockefeller! What else could he be?’ You don’t go out onto Madison Avenue and pick up any of these paintings! You just can’t do that in an afternoon!” The art had her convinced.
Next she got upset, not with Rockefeller but with herself for blowing what she felt had been a major opportunity. “I was living next door to somebody—right under my nose!—who had the means, being a Rockefeller, to purchase major works of art, and I had somehow missed this,” she said. “I am an art dealer, so I was very upset about this.”
She immediately reverted from neighbor to art dealer. She had to do a deal to stake her claim on Clark Rockefeller. This became immediately clear when she invited him to an opening in a gallery she had rented; as soon as his famous name floated through the air, the other dealers surrounded him like bees to honey. “He calls me the next day and says, ‘I’m being bombarded by all of these art dealers!’” Martha Henry remembered. “I said, ‘Well, you can’t go to an art opening and tell everybody that you’re Clark Rockefeller! If you want to keep a low profile, you need to leave that part out.’”
Henry had found him first, after all, and soon it was time for her to take him shopping for a major piece of art. First stop: Knoedler & Company, the esteemed Upper East Side gallery that had been in existence since the Civil War, and where John D. Rockefeller had been a client. Here, Henry showed him a work from the estate of Adolph Gottlieb, a historically significant painting from the 1950s. They agreed that, at $300,000 to $400,000, it would be an extremely prudent addition to his collection. “It’s a perfect provenance for someone like Clark,” Henry said. “The Gottlieb estate was allowing this picture out. They would not necessarily sell it to anyone. But to a Rockefeller they would do it.”
Rockefeller kept returning to Knoedler, sometimes alone, to inspect the Gottlieb. I spoke to a woman who repeatedly showed him the painting. She had been chief of staff of the Whitney Museum of American Art, the preeminent museum for contemporary art on Madison Avenue in New York City. So she was an expert in contemporary art, and, she quickly discovered, Rockefeller was too. “He knew his art history,” she remembered. “He talked about the other art in his collection.” While debating whether or not to purchase the Gottlieb, he invited the woman from Knoedler to see his other pieces. Like everyone else, she was dazzled by the large and iconic works of the greats of American contemporary art. “Honestly, it never occurred to me for a second that those paintings weren’t right,” she said.
When it came to buying the Gottlieb, however, Rockefeller kept balking. Things came to a head one day in Knoedler when he studied the painting for the umpteenth time with his dealer, Martha Henry. They looked at the Gottlieb this way and that way, until the scion of the great family finally spoke. “That painting has green in it,” he said. “I don’t buy pictures with green in them.”
“What are you talking about?” asked Henry.
“Well, Mondrian only painted in primary colors, and he would never have put green in a canvas,” Rockefeller said huffily.
“ ‘Oh, Clark, you’ve got to get past primary colors,’ ” Henry told him. “‘We’re not in kindergarten anymore.’ But he would not budge, and we could not do the sale.”
Meanwhile, strange things were always going on in 7M. Clark baked a loaf of fresh bread for a neighbor he barely knew, and Henry thought it odd. Most New Yorkers don’t have time to toast bread, much less bake it. But Rockefeller seemed to have all the time in the world, especially for leisure pursuits. “Obviously he didn’t work, but didn’t seem to be broke,” said Henry, who would occasionally go out to lunch with him. “He paid,” she said, “in cash.”
“One day he called and wanted to know if I knew any young men that could escort this teenage cousin of his to debutante balls,” Henry continued. “He said, ‘The family will pay for everything. Her date’s dropped out.’ ” Henry pulled a little prank on him. She did know someone who had indeed just told her that he would love to go to a real New York City debutante ball. It was actually her own boyfriend, although she didn’t tell Rockefeller that at first.
“Where did he go to school?” Rockefeller asked.
“St. Paul’s,” she said, referring to the prep school in New Hampshire.
“Oh, perfect.”
When Henry said, “Oh, by the way, he’s forty-three,” Rockefeller said, “That’s not funny, Martha.”
Another person in his life during this period was Rose Mina, the investment firm star whom Clark had met while working at Nikko as Christopher Crowe. I found her name on the list of credit card charges Rockefeller made under his former alias: “October 14, 1988: Airline ticket for [MINA/R] via Pan American World Airways from JFK to London to Delhi purchased at Thomas Cook Travel.” There was also a return ticket: “For [MINA/R] via United Airlines from Delhi to Tokyo Narita to JFK.” In addition, he had purchased tickets for a Henry Mina with an equally complicated itinerary, from Pittsburgh to Delhi. That ticket had been refunded and reticketed.
Why was Crowe flying Rose and Henry Mina to Delhi and Tokyo? Later, Rose Mina would be identified in the media as his business partner and the trustee of his estate. But despite queries from the media—and dozens of e-mails and hand-delivered letters from me—Rose Mina has remained stoically silent on the subject of Clark Rockefeller.
Mina clearly played a role in his rise in New York City. “I’ve been trying to figure it out,” Martha Henry told me, sitting in her apartment. “Because there was a time, when he lived here, that every ni
ght during the week somebody would come into that apartment, arriving between, let’s say, eleven-thirty and one a.m. And every morning they would leave between, say, five-thirty and seven, something like that. I would hear the door open and close. If I was sleeping, it would wake me up. And it was very regular.”
We stood up and looked through the peephole, which afforded an excellent view of the hallway. “At one point, I looked to see who was going in and out,” she said. “It was an Asian woman. And she was dressed businesslike—a suit and a briefcase.
“At one point I said to him, ‘Clark, you have a girlfriend!’ He said, ‘No, no, no! She’s not my girlfriend. She manages my money.’ ”
Henry thought, “They’re friends, and she’s crashing on his sofa, because investment bankers really do work long hours.” But she kept teasing Rockefeller about her, and he kept insisting that she was just his money manager. Then something strange happened. “She never stayed there again,” said Henry.
Soon Clark Rockefeller was gone too. Approximately two years after he moved into the apartment adjacent to Henry’s, he mentioned to her that he was looking for larger accommodations, and perhaps she could help. She called a friend specializing in residential real estate, who suggested Alwyn Court, the turn-of-the-century building on West Fifty-eighth Street with the most intricate terra-cotta façade in the city. “He said, ‘Oh, I would never live there. That building is so dreary and depressing. The apartments are dark.’ Blah, blah, blah.” Besides, he added, he had to rent in a Cushman & Wakefield building. “Because those are the family buildings—the Rockefeller buildings—and I can get a very low rent.”
