Book review: The Man in the Rockefeller Suit

Authored by Mark Seal in 2011 (ISBN 978-0-670-02274-0).

I very nearly did not read this very enjoyable book. The first couple of pages read with a overdone gasping excitement. Luckily, I had nothing else to read, and the story, to date unfinished, held me.

The author is a Vanity Fair reporter. I first read Vanity Fair a few years ago and liked it, but a few issues later I found myself regarding it as an upscale, liberal-oriented People magazine. Liberal, yet willing to exploit scantily-clad females on the cover.

Seal interviewed over 200 people in writing his book. In his Acknowledgments he thanks his magazine and editor for allowing him to pursue the story. I had not thought of it before, but authors of stories like this one put hundreds of hours of research and investigation into an effort that might not lead to a book. I wonder was the success rate is? 90%? 9%? One-in-a-million? Do they at least have an inkling that the effort might lead to at least a magazine or newspaper article (this story, in abbreviated form, was first published in Vanity Fair.

Christian Carl Gerhartsreiter is a German national (meaning he is originally from Germany but not here permanently) who arrived on United States soil in 1978. The author, despite all those interviews, could not establish his birthdate. Upon arriving he started lying about his name and history, and has not stopped. The author covered six names that Gerhartsreiter has used; perhaps there are others. As he moved from the East coast to California and back he relied on the kindness of strangers and the awe he struck with his tales of fortune. He relied on the truism that the best lies are the most far-fetched.

We was finally arrested in Baltimore for kidnapping his daughter. As part of his divorce settlement he was allowed supervised visitation. He enlisted two innocent helpers to screen (as in basketball) the court-appointed supervisor while he pushed his daughter into a waiting car that drove him to Manhattan. He took another vehicle to Baltimore. The FBI chased several dead-end leads, as Gerhartsreiter had told acquaintances different stories about where he would be: Peru, some Caribbean islands, etc. Upon arrest, and to this day, he insists his name is James Frederick Mills Clark Rockefeller, even though there are no birth records of such a person and his fingerprints match those of Gerhartsreiter upon his entry to the U.S.

He pled insanity at his 2008 trial but was convicted and sentenced to four-to-five years. He will be eligible for parole shortly. However, seven months ago a Los Angeles county Grand Jury indicted him for the 1985 murder of a California woman, where he was living at the time.