by Mark Seal
He seemed to find some solace in impressing women, however. “He was always with some pretty girl,” said his friend Sheldon Fish, the art dealer. “He introduced me to one of the Dixie Chicks.” Another friend added, “He loved blondes.” He put the full-court press on my friend Roxane West, the young woman from a West Texas oil family, after she collided with him at a party at an art gallery in Manhattan. After one lunch together, he began “text flirting,” as he called it, proposing meetings while brooding that he was unable to travel from Boston to the city because all of his private clubs’ residential facilities were booked and he, as a Rockefeller, couldn’t stay in a commercial hotel. “I hope you had a good Mother’s Day,” he texted on one occasion. On June 1, he texted, “Please please PLEASE do not feel ignored. Very busy week. Just coming to an end. Would LOVE to see you. Will call tonight. Just returned from Bermuda. Rented summer house there. Excellent time.”
He went to great pains to present an elaborate charade. At one point while on the phone with Roxane, he even acted as if he were speaking to his daughter, who was, of course, already living in London. By the time she received her last text message from him, Roxane was certain that he was a charlatan whom she intended never to see again. “I just thought it was all bullshit, that he wasn’t who he said he was,” she said.
One of his last social appearances in Boston was at a dinner party in the home of Paul and Helen Wessling, on Commonwealth Avenue. During Rockefeller’s trial, a fellow guest at that dinner, the veteran financial portfolio manager Nathan Peltz, took the stand. “We had cocktails, and I was told another guest was coming,” Peltz testified, identifying the guest as “the defendant.” Asked if Rockefeller had disclosed his occupation, Peltz said he had thought he had something to do with investments. “I never got a clear answer as to the name of the company. My understanding was it was probably a private fund. Our host was also in the same business. I’m used to having people say, ‘I work for X, Y, Z company.’ ”
Peltz also testified, “He said he lived on Beacon Hill and had just experienced the loss of his child. He had a little girl, whom he referred to as Snooks, or Snookums. He said he had the child out of wedlock in England, and that the woman who had mothered the child had come to some sort of resolution. He was raising her as a single parent. He said the mother had decided she wanted her child back. He said his child had been taken back to England by a court order by a judge here in Massachusetts. . . . He never said anything about having a wife. It was clear he was distraught and he felt he had been unjustly treated by the court, to the extent that the court had granted the mother custody.”
The cocktail hour had segued into dinner, during which Rockefeller couldn’t get off the subject of Snooks. “He talked incessantly about losing her,” Peltz told the court. “He was very angry about it. I suggested, why couldn’t he go back to the court and talk to the judge? He indicated that if the court couldn’t resolve this he would probably go back to England and bring the child back. I took it to mean the equivalent of kidnapping.”
While one carefully cultivated persona, Clark Rockefeller, was dying, another was being born. The process of reinvention began in November 2007, even before he lost custody of his daughter, with an e-mail to Obsidian Realty in Baltimore. Julie Gochar, an owner of Obsidian Realty, who received the e-mail, later testified during Clark Rockefeller’s trial.
A blond young woman in a white cotton summer dress, Gochar was at least six months pregnant at the time of the trial. After some preamble about her company, which she owned with two partners and ran with twenty-seven independently contracted agents in the greater Baltimore area, she was asked by the prosecutor if she knew the individual sitting with his lawyers at the defense table.
“Yes, I do,” she replied.
“What is the name by which you know him?”
“Chip Smith,” she said, adding, “He sent an e-mail to the office through our general inquiry. He was interested in relocating to Baltimore. It was mid- to late November 2007.”
“In the initial e-mail, did he provide any information about himself at all?”
“Just that he was in Chile and would be at some point in the spring of the following year coming up by boat and staying in Baltimore.”
“Did you respond to his e-mail?” she was asked. Of course, she said. The Baltimore real estate market was red-hot and intensely competitive in the fall of 2007, and any Realtor with a heartbeat would recognize that an e-mail for a relocation from Chile seeking a house in the half-million-dollar range was a slam dunk for a sale. “He asked for help in learning about Baltimore and the neighborhoods, and that’s my job,” she said.
He hadn’t given her his name at that point, just his e-mail address: [email protected]. “There was a lot of information provided back and forth,” said Gochar, the result of “the usual probing questions on my part to get to know him . . . to help him with where he would want to live. . . . He had a daughter. Needed certain housing to accommodate that. Wanted to be in the city and would be working under contract, I believe for some sort of construction, catamarans.”
Gochar was asked what the sailor said about his daughter, whose name he said was Muffy. “I knew he had a seven-year-old daughter. On the boat with him.”
“Did he tell you how he was able to raise a seven-year-old on a boat?”
“Only in the context of schooling. She was homeschooled on the Calvert School Program, actually headquartered in Baltimore. He wanted a city-row-home kind of feel with a roof deck, ideally close to Camden Yards, so he could engage in his passion for baseball.” Because he was sailing around Chile, he said, e-mail service would be difficult and intermittent.”
“What did he tell you about the girl’s mother?”
“The mother was a surrogate, and he had destroyed the papers on her identity,” she said, adding that he had burned the birth records to ensure that his daughter wouldn’t ever discover her mother’s identity. “She doesn’t need to know,” he told the Realtor.
The night after receiving the e-mail, Julie Gochar told her husband about her prospective new client, the ship’s captain named Chip Smith.
“He’s a sailor,” she said. “How does he have the money to buy a house?”
“Those contract captains make a lot of money,” her husband answered. And that was good enough for Julie Gochar, who immediately began searching for suitable properties to show the captain when he arrived in Baltimore.
After e-mailing and instant-messaging for a few months, the captain finally gave Gochar some specific directions. “In early February we were talking logistically how he would be locating from another country and where he would stay. Would he stay in a hotel with enough time to find housing, or would he need some sort of temporary short-term housing? So we set him up in short-term housing . . . two-month lease on a row home around the corner from our office.”
“Why a rental instead of a hotel?”
“He didn’t like hotels,” she said, because, he explained, he didn’t trust them. She set Chip Smith up for a two-month rental at $2,000 per month just behind her real estate office on South Wolfe Street, beginning in April, when he would arrive. She drew up the lease in the name of S. V. Shenandoah, assuming the e-mail address was the captain’s name. “That’s funny,” he e-mailed back. “That’s the e-mail address of my boat. My name is actually Charles Smith.” She testified, “He told me he loathed the name Charles.” He instructed her to call him Chip. Before his arrival, Chip had several boxes of his belongings sent to Julie Gochar’s real estate office, big boxes with a Boston return address, which he explained were filled with clothing, “because I won’t have any northern wear when I arrive.” When she asked him why the boxes were shipped from Boston when he had told her he was originally from Wisconsin, he replied, “Oh, when I was at Harvard, I left some of my personal belongings there, which Harvard alums are allowed to do.”
They set up a meeting in the realty office. When Smith strolled in, Gochar did a doub
le take. “It wasn’t at all what I was expecting. . . . I thought he would be a tall, tanned, sailor-looking guy. . . . He wasn’t at all.” His accent reminded her of Thurston Howell III from Gilligan’s Island, although, she would later admit, she had never heard a Boston Brahmin accent before. The other thing that struck her was that he seemed much too slight to be a sailor, much less the captain of a massive ship. Her husband had attended St. Mary’s College in southern Maryland with a group of real sailors, strong and robust men who were nothing like the fey gentleman who stood before her wearing a baseball cap and thick black-rimmed glasses, with extremely red hair that looked as if it had been dyed. “I certainly wasn’t picturing five foot nothing, pale . . .”
He had warned her in advance that he wouldn’t be tanned, because his trip was spent mostly in the rain. “I can’t believe I’ve been sailing for as long as I have and don’t even have a tan to show for it,” he said.
He was alone. He said his daughter was spending some time with his two sisters in Wisconsin and would be arriving later in the summer. He said he wanted a list of suitable properties to visit. It was April and he needed a home fast so he could relocate immediately to start his new job: he was under contract with a Baltimore boat company, designing, building, and selling a new brand of state-of-the-art catamarans.
Since he lived practically next door, and because Julie Gochar makes it her business to be available “24/7” for her clients, Chip Smith quickly came to be a welcomed regular presence in the offices of Obsidian Realty. Sure, he was a bit odd, in his salmon-colored khaki pants, some embroidered with little fish, and his boat shoes, always worn without socks. But he was a client, and for Julie Gochar the client was king. “He was there even when it wasn’t pertaining to us having a meeting,” she said. “Doing research. Looking at his own properties, property values. Other things. He just kind of came in and hung out in the office.”
They let him use an office computer. They even gave him his own e-mail address: [email protected].
“At some point did he have greater access to your computer system?” she was asked in court.
“Yes, he did.”
“How did he get greater access?”
“I gave him a key,” meaning a key to the Obsidian Realty offices. “So he could come and go as he pleased. Because there was a lot that he needed to get at. He didn’t have a computer where he was staying. . . . And to be frank, I didn’t want to meet him down there every time he had the need to go and do some research.”
Smith would often spend hours in the office. “It was almost like he was working in the office with us,” said Gochar, adding that he would sit at the computer “looking at designs of boats and values of gold and stock and stuff like that.”
Of course, it didn’t hurt that he had money for a substantial real estate purchase. Gochar realized that early on, when she asked him to complete the standard prequalification loan papers for the half-million-dollar value of the properties he would be seeing. “And he indicated that he would not be financing the transaction, he’d be paying cash.”
“Look, I can trust you now,” he told his Realtor as they prepared to look at properties. “I come from a lot of money. I just don’t want people to know that I have money. Because everybody’s always coming at me with their hands out.”
“Well, you’re in the right place,” Julie Gochar said. “Because nobody here cares if you have money or not.”
She was referring to the low-key South Point neighborhood of Baltimore, where money didn’t impress people. “You have to understand that you’re going to be sitting next to a tugboat captain on one side of you and an orthopedic surgeon on the other side. They almost prefer if you have money that you don’t rub it in their faces.” He hardly toned it down, though. When Gochar invited him to an office mixer—“It’s a great way to meet people!” she said—he demurred, saying, “I don’t have any party clothes,” only to show up in a big white floppy sailor’s hat and pinkish pants, which the office staff came to call “Chip Smith’s Party Pants.”
There were other idiosyncrasies. Chip Smith ate only “white” food: things like chicken salad on white bread, white potatoes, white sliced turkey, the whites of hard-boiled eggs. “And don’t put anything on it,” he would tell the waitress when ordering a chicken sandwich at lunch, turning to Julie Gochar to add, “I can’t have tomatoes because I’m allergic.” While they looked at houses, he was always on his cell phone, texting or having loud and animated conversations about things like money and diamond rings and about how his daughter didn’t like her name, “Muffy,” and he might start calling her “TLO—The Little One.” As for his choice of homes, he explained, the name of the street was extremely important. He couldn’t live on Boston Street, he told Julie Gochar, but he could see himself living on Montgomery Street, and they quickly found a house he loved at 10 West Montgomery in the Federal Hill section of the city, which was owned by an attorney, whose library Chip Smith admired.
“He loved the neighborhood and he loved the street name,” said Gochar. But he felt the house needed $100,000 worth of renovations. “I’m going to lowball it,” Chip Smith told his Realtor. “I’m paying cash and I should be able to get it for $100,000 less.”
His low-bid offer was rejected and another buyer immediately swooped in to offer almost the asking price. He offered $150,000 more than his original offer. Still the buyer went with the other offer, even though it was $50,000 less, which sent Chip Smith into a rage. “I just don’t lose,” he said. Gochar saw another side of Smith that day. “Kind of a temper tantrum almost. ‘I want that house! I don’t understand why I can’t have that house! I’m paying cash for this house!’ My personal impression was that he was used to getting what he wanted.”
When he didn’t immediately get it, Chip Smith went around his Realtor and contacted the seller directly, which didn’t hold much sway with the seller, but succeeded in infuriating Gochar. By then, she said, she was beginning to wonder if Chip Smith was worth all the endless time and trouble she was enduring in trying to help him find a house.
By early May, he wanted a sailboat, a catamaran. Not for his job, which he said was designing catamarans, but for other reasons. He began looking at the boats docked at the Anchorage Marina, which billed itself as “Baltimore’s Premier Yachting Center.” As reported by Annie Linskey in the Baltimore Sun: One day in the marina, he met Bruce Boswell, the owner of a twenty-six-foot catamaran. He introduced himself as Chip MacLaughlin and asked Boswell whether he was interested in selling the boat, which, being somewhat dilapidated, was worth half the $10,000 cash the stranger offered. “Chainsaw food” was how the boat would later be described. “I was happy to sell it,” Boswell told the Sun.
They retired to a neighborhood bar, where MacLaughlin spun “a big story,” Boswell was quoted as recalling. He said he had come to Baltimore to be closer to his sister, who lived in the city. He bragged about his membership in the private Century Club in New York and said he planned to buy Baltimore’s historic Mayflower Theater and restore it to grandeur.
As for the purchase of the boat, Chip suggested that they close the deal in his office, Obsidian Realty. It was night when they arrived there. Chip MacLaughlin punched in the after-hours security code and opened the door with his own key. While counting out the cash—$10,000 in twenty- and fifty-dollar bills—he mentioned that he owned Obsidian Realty. If Boswell had bothered to check, he would have discovered that one of Julie Gochar’s partners in the company actually had the name MacLaughlin, but his first name was Henry.
Chip insisted that the boat be registered in the name of Chip Smith, Boswell later said, because “he didn’t like the name MacLaughlin.” The deal was consummated, and the catamaran remained docked in the slip owned by Bruce Boswell’s brother Harry, to whom the new owner would pay $2,200 annual rent.
On June 6, Rockefeller called the owner of Boston Bullion, a preciousmetals brokerage in the Boston suburb of Arlington. “He was looking to purchase s
ome gold,” said the proprietor, Kenneth Murphy. The caller identified himself as Clark Rock, gave his address as 217 Commonwealth Avenue, Boston, and said he wanted to convert the approximately $2 million he’d just won in a patent lawsuit into gold. He said he needed $465,000 in gold immediately, $300,000 more on June 30, and $1.235 million on July 31.
Clark Rock asked Murphy to meet him on June 9 at the Harvard Square Starbucks in Cambridge. “He looked like a college professor to me, kind of preppy, Ivy League,” Murphy remembered. He had wired $465,000 to Boston Bullion that day from his bank account, listed under the name of Clark Rock. Once the funds arrived in Murphy’s bank account, Rock could collect his gold, which he wanted in South African Krugerrands. Ten days later, on June 20, Rock arrived at Boston Bullion to pick up 527 Krugerrands, which weighed almost forty pounds. He put them in his briefcase and asked Murphy for a ride back to Boston.
The next day, June 21, Rock called Murphy again, saying he wanted to sell twenty-four of the Krugerrands. But three days later, Rock called to say he’d changed his mind. “He told me he was unhappy with the Krugerrands altogether and wanted to exchange them for American Eagle gold coins,” the official gold bullion coin of the U.S. Mint, on the face of which is Augustus Saint-Gaudens’s “Lady Liberty.” American Eagles have no IRS or other reporting requirements and are thereby untraceable. On July 7, Clark Rock returned to Boston Bullion with his briefcase full of Krugerrands and left with a briefcase full of American Eagles, which have a face value of $50 each but sell for the going price of gold, making each one-ounce coin worth more than $1,000. A week later, on July 14, Rock wired another $300,000 to Boston Bullion, to order approximately three hundred more American Eagle coins, which he would pick up a week later, on July 21.
