The Man in the Rockefeller Suit

by Mark Seal

  Chip Smith finally found a suitable place to live in Baltimore, a carriage house behind a large home that had been converted into an apartment building. The address was 618 Ploy Street, in the Mount Vernon neighborhood. Julie Gochar almost didn’t show him the house, because she was certain he would dislike the street name: Ploy. To her surprise, he loved it. The price was $450,000, inclusive of upgrades being completed at the time of the sale, among them a kitchen renovation and new carpeting. Smith insisted that the house be put in the name of his limited liability corporation, P1OY St. Parking, LLC, a corporation he said was registered in the state of Nevada.

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

  “No,” she answered. “He went home to Wisconsin to visit his sisters and his daughter. . . . Both his sisters had been divorced once or twice. . . . My overall impression was that he didn’t believe in their tactics for marriage and getting divorced. They kind of made him a workhorse whenever he got home. So he didn’t want to go home all the time.”

  The original date for the closing on the house was June 27. “But it continued to get postponed for multiple reasons, some from the seller’s side . . . some from our side,” Gochar said. “[Chip] had been traveling through Europe and fell ill and was not going to make it in time for settlement. He was able to get in touch with me via e-mail at one point, when he was well enough to do it and had access.”

  She was asked if she had received word of Smith’s becoming ill while abroad from him or from other sources. “No, it was him telling me. It was either Switzerland or Sweden. . . . It turns out that they couldn’t really identify what the problem was for four days. It was a flu, which turned out to be a reaction to sun-dried tomatoes.”

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

  He told her he had flown in from Chestertown, the private airport just outside of Baltimore, on a private plane he had chartered—and piloted himself. He couldn’t wire the money for the purchase. “Because I can’t wire money out of this trust account,” he explained. So the $450,000 sales price had to be paid via cashier’s check. The sale of the carriage house closed on July 18, 2007. Gochar was asked if he moved in immediately. “I don’t know,” she replied. “I know that he was going home to pack up and make the drive down. He had left some belongings in Boston while he was abroad, so he was going to pick those up and do his formal move throughout that week.”

  “Do you know who helped him move?”

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

  The Boston police detectives who would later work on the case, Ray Mosher and Joseph Leeman, told me about Grinspoon, who was twenty-five, with the greatest admiration. She moonlighted from her real estate job as a waitress and bartender at the Annabel Lee Tavern. She was a triathlete. Her picture on the Obsidian Realty Web site showed a fit, attractive, dark-haired woman in a brown polo shirt and turquoise earrings.

  The agents at Obsidian Realty soon came to know that Chip Smith was cheap, and they recognized that some of his stories—such as the one he told about appearing in a Backstreet Boys video—were a little far-fetched. But he was offering several thousand dollars, plus transportation to the Boston area, where his belongings were stored, so Beth Grinspoon said she would enlist a friend and help him move. He flew them from Baltimore to Boston on AirTran, the cut-rate airline, and put them up in the Royal Sonesta Hotel, in Cambridge. He kept the whereabouts of his storage facility a secret until the next morning, when a cab took the movers to a Boston suburb, to a house with a twocar garage, which was packed with Smith’s belongings.

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

  He rented a twenty-six-foot U-haul truck, but when it became obvious that it was much too small for the load, he returned to rent a five-foot-nine-inch trailer as well. Almost everything was packed in large boxes, which were very heavy.

  “What do you have in these boxes, gold?” Grinspoon asked him, according to the detectives.

  “Books,” Smith replied.

  Soon the owner of the house, whom Smith identified as his aunt, returned home and urged him to finish as quickly as possible. “I’ve expired my welcome on using the garage,” Smith told his moving team, imploring them to hurry. When they had finished loading the truck and trailer, Smith, who remained in Boston, sent Grinspoon on to Baltimore. He still owed her $1,400. On July 23, Beth Grinspoon unloaded the truck at 618 Ploy Street. As per Smith’s instructions, she had a locksmith change all the locks and give her the new keys. All the while, she received regular e-mails and text messages from Smith asking, “Are you done?”

  That day, July 23, Chip Smith was back in Boston as Clark Rockefeller. Embarking on the most audacious act of his life, he began setting up people like pieces on a chessboard.

  That evening, he called the driver Darryl Hopkins and booked him for a trip the coming Friday to New York City, where Rockefeller said he had to attend a board meeting. “He wanted to leave at seven a.m., shoot down to the board meeting, vote on something, leave, and try and be back in Boston by three or three-thirty,” Hopkins would later testify. Though Hopkins had another corporate client on his schedule that day, he chose to drive Clark, because he was a Rockefeller, and a Rockefeller would “make the phone ring more often.” The charge was $700.

  While his driver sped toward New York, Rockefeller made calls on his cell phone in the backseat. “One of them was about spending the weekend in Newport, in particular with Senator Chafee’s son,” Hopkins remembered.

  “Do you know who Senator Chafee is?” Rockefeller asked Hopkins after hanging up.

  Certainly, he did: he was the former Rhode Island senator Lincoln Chafee, known as a Rockefeller Republican.

  “I’m friends with his son,” Rockefeller said, adding that he and his daughter, Snooks, had been invited to go sailing that weekend with the senator’s son in Newport. Would Darryl be able to drive them?

  “Yes, of course.”

  Rockefeller instructed Hopkins to drop him off on the corner of Central Park South and Sixth Avenue and said he would walk the block or so from there to his board meeting. Fifty minutes later, he called to say he was finished and told Hopkins to pick him up in front of the Plaza Hotel. Next he wanted to zip over to the J.G. Melon restaurant for a take-out lunch—“steak tahr-tahr,” the driver later imitated him saying—and then back to Boston.

  Wolfing down the raw meat with his hands—the restaurant had neglected to include utensils—Rockefeller made phone calls along the way, all the while griping about how he was “sick and tired” of board meetings. He said he didn’t need the headache or the meager fee the company’s directors were awarded for their attendance. Besides, he said, “I don’t work anymore.” When he had worked, he always told Hopkins, it was carrying out high-level duties “for the Defense Department.”

  Another cell phone conversation that Hopkins overheard on the way to Boston concerned a “clingy” friend named Harold, who was certain to be a thorn in Rockefeller’s side during the upcoming weekend of sailing with Snooks and Senator Chafee’s son. “Oh, I’m stuck with him again?” Rockefeller groused loudly on his cell. “Do I have to do this?”

  Once he hung up, Rockefeller talked about how he might ditch Harold. “He said that Harold was a friend of the family, gay, and very—he always described him as being very clingy, very sort of possessive,” Hopkins recalled. “He said that he was a pain in the ass and that he was getting stuck with him again because of some family relationship.”

  Rockefeller didn’t go into details, and the driver didn’t dare to pry. “Why don’t you get a restraining order?” he asked. Rockefeller said, “This guy’s too dangerous. He might hurt me and, God forbid, he might hurt Snooks.”

  Then Rockefeller said, “Darryl, loo
k, I know you’re down on your luck. And you know I can help you out. I’d pay you $2,000—I’d pay you $2,500—if we can get rid of this guy for the day.”

  What could Hopkins say but yes? He later gave his reasoning to the grand jury: “Knowing that I was going to be returning to Florida, that my business was falling apart because of the economy—I mean, I was working in negative territory, not enough to even make car payments and the insurance for livery plates, which is over $5,000 a year. It was summertime, it was really slow, and my wife and I had made the decision: this isn’t working anymore. So if the ship’s going to go down, we’ll go down together as a family.”

  And right there, in the backseat of his car, was the answer to his problems. “I don’t think there’s anybody in America that doesn’t know the name Rockefeller,” said Hopkins. “This guy doesn’t work for a living. He lives on Beacon Hill. His daughter goes to the Southfield School. Everything—the steak tartare, board meetings in New York, there was nothing about this individual that did not say that he was a real honestto-God Rockefeller. Even the way he talked.”

  Hopkins didn’t hesitate to accept the offer. He would have ditched a battalion of clingy Harolds for Clark Rockefeller. “If you want to get rid of somebody, we’ll get rid of somebody,” Hopkins told him. The next day they met to rehearse their plan. Rockefeller even practiced leaping into the limo with Snooks in front of the valet parkers at the Algonquin Club. After dropping him off, Hopkins called his wife. “I couldn’t wait to call her and tell her that Clark Rockefeller was willing to help us out,” he said.

  After Hopkins dropped him off at the Algonquin Club, Rockefeller called Aileen Ang, his friend from the Boston Sailing Center. Like Darryl Hopkins, she believed everything Clark Rockefeller told her.

  “He was a venture capitalist, an entrepreneur, and he was losing $10 million in some deal,” the seemingly innocent, moonfaced Ang testified. He told her he was a single father whose extremely problematic ex-wife worked at Vogue magazine. They had been married in a ceremony on Nantucket, he said, but his witch of a wife “never filed the papers.” She deserted him and his daughter when Snooks was three, and “only comes around when she needs money.” That Clark Rockefeller had money was immediately apparent to Ang. He had so much money, in fact, that he could indulge in things that ordinary people couldn’t even dream about, such as arranging to have a second child at a birthing center in California, which Ang said he had described as an “egg farm,” where his sperm could impregnate an egg from a respectable mother fed a special diet. Such a child, he told Ang, would truly be “all mine.” Women were lining up to date him, he added. “One even tried to trap me in her house and wouldn’t let me go.”

  Ang had come to know him quite well in the time they had spent together at the Sailing Center and elsewhere around Boston, always as friends, never intimates. She learned he was developing a television show while “going for his Ph.D. at Harvard . . . astronomy or looking at the stars or something,” she said. Rockefeller told her he wanted to know his stars when he sailed around the world in his new seventy-two-foot sailboat with his daughter. He invited Ang to join them on their trip around the world. She could give Snooks piano lessons on the boat, he said.

  On July 25, coming out of a movie theater in Ipswich, Ang discovered that Clark had left her a voicemail. When she returned the call, he asked, “Are you ready to go sailing? I’m not going to be mad at you if you don’t come, but I need to know now.”

  She couldn’t possibly, she told him, adding, “I enjoy my life on land.” He told her he and Snooks needed to go to their new sailboat, which was docked in New York, the next day. Could Aileen drive them to New York City for $500? Of course, she said, but not on Saturday. She’d be helping out with a fund-raiser for a friend’s charity, she explained. “Well,” Rockefeller said, “I really want to go on Saturday, but let me try to rearrange my schedule.”

  He called the next morning to say that Sunday would work. “How about we leave at noon from the Boston Sailing Center?”

  “I’ll meet you there,” Ang told him.

  When Rockefeller called Ang Saturday morning, he was minutes away from moving the third pawn in the chess game he was playing into position: the court-appointed veteran social worker he had described to Darryl Hopkins as the “clingy friend,” whose name he told Hopkins was Harold (instead of Howard) Yaffe. Rockefeller had advised the social worker that he “was traveling up from Florida,” and Yaffe had no reason to disbelieve him. He knew that Rockefeller was an extremely busy man. He had canceled the first potential visit with his daughter after his divorce, scheduled for April. Finally, the day of his first supervised visit with Snooks—Saturday, July 26—had come.

  At 11 a.m., Howard Yaffe picked up Snooks from Sandra Boss on the corner of Commonwealth Avenue and Exeter Street and walked the little girl across the street to meet her father at the Algonquin Club. Later, it would become clear that Aileen Ang and her charity work had thrown a monkey wrench into Rockefeller’s plans. Therefore Rockefeller, Snooks, and the social worker ambled leisurely around the Algonquin for a couple of hours.

  After leaving the club, Rockefeller bought stamps at the post office, and then the trio went to a bookstore. At 3:30, they were at Fenway Park, presumably to see a Red Sox game, but when Rockefeller went to pick up the tickets he had ordered, he said they wouldn’t give them to him without a picture ID. Later it would be revealed that there were no tickets waiting for him. It was all a ruse. The real plan for the day, foiled by Aileen Ang, would have to wait until the following day’s visitation, Sunday, July 27.

  Sunday morning began just as Saturday had: Snooks and Howard Yaffe left Sandra Boss to meet Rockefeller at the Algonquin. They walked around the club for a bit, then strolled over to Clarendon Park so that Snooks could play for a while. “We pushed her on the swings,” said Yaffe. As usual, Rockefeller had calls on his cell phone. “About a deal that was going through in Florida,” Yaffe recalled. Around 12:30, the social worker suggested that it was time to get Snooks some lunch.

  At 12:45, they were walking down Marlborough Street, Snooks on her father’s shoulders, Yaffe close behind. When Rockefeller put Snooks down, complaining that his back was hurting, and pointed out something on a historic building to Yaffe, who turned to look, Rockefeller’s plan was set into motion. “I remember being shoved and pushed by Clark,” Yaffe would recall. “It was sort of a body block. As I got up and turned around, I saw a black SUV with the door open.”

  As Rockefeller had practiced the night before, father and daughter leaped into the limo. Snooks’s doll and backpack flew out of her hands, and Rockefeller screamed to the driver, “Go, go, go!”

  “I had my hand on the open back door,” said Yaffe. “I’m trying to climb in, and then the SUV started to take off.”

  Everything was going precisely the way Rockefeller had planned it. Clingy “Harold’s” hands slipped off the door handle and he crashed to the pavement, where he lay dazed and bloody in the street. Darryl Hopkins expertly followed Rockefeller’s directions—“Right, left, right, left!”—Until he was ordered to drop them in front of a White Hen Pantry grocery, where a cab was waiting, ready to ferry Rockefeller and Snooks to the Boston Sailing Center, where Aileen Ang was in position in her SUV to drive them to New York. At last they made it through the crowded freeways and into the city, only to be stuck in traffic in front of Grand Central Terminal, where Rockefeller threw an envelope with $500 in cash in it on Ang’s front seat and, without saying goodbye, grabbed his daughter and disappeared into the traffic.

  Within hours, Darryl Hopkins and Aileen Ang would realize that they had been duped into being accomplices in a parental kidnapping. Back in Boston, Howard Yaffe, possibly with a concussion, was still muttering, “He got the girl.” And Sandra Boss, whose divorce settlement of $800,000 had financed the events of that frenetic day, was crying hysterically, telling police, “You’ll never find them now!”

  En route to Baltimore that evening, Rockef
eller, having reverted to being Chip Smith, called Beth Grinspoon.

  “Where are my keys!?” he asked. “I need them. I’m desperate!”

  “Where’s my money?” snapped Grinspoon.

  “I have it, but I won’t get in until midnight,” he said.

  She knew how tense and anxious he could be when he was not getting his way, so she agreed to deliver the keys to Ploy Street before he arrived. He texted her at 9:17: “Beth, terribly sorry. But I had to get in tonight. Gladly pay for the cab [to Ploy Street]. Mission accomplished?”

  “Yes, jackass, on my way,” Grinspoon texted back.

  Within two minutes, Smith responded, “Did I ever tell you I think of you as really great?” Later: “Left Pittsburgh 7 p.m., will probably arrive at midnight. Do keys to the door work?”

  “Jackass,” Grinspoon texted him.

  “Thanks for all your help,” he texted back.

  “Stop it,” Grinspoon replied. “You’re making me mad. On my bike. Keys in the box. Piss off.”

  The next day Grinspoon texted him again about the outstanding $1,400: “Am I going to see you today?”

  “Yes, this evening,” he replied.

  “I’m at work at the Annabel Lee Tavern,” she texted him at 5 p.m.

  He didn’t respond until 9:52: “Just returned. Are you still at the Annabel Tavern? If not, where do I find you?”

  “Still here.”

  “See you soon.”

  He arrived at 10:10. The tavern was jammed. He strode up to Grinspoon, who was still on duty, gave her a hug and $1,400 in cash. “Are you going to stay for a drink?” she asked.

  “I’m in a big hurry,” he said and left. “You look gorgeous,” he texted her once he was in a taxi, headed back to Ploy Street, where, unbeknownst to Grinspoon, his daughter, Reigh “Snooks” Boss, was waiting for him. Also unbeknownst to Grinspoon and a long list of others whom he had snared in the events of that day, he was the subject of an Amber Alert.