A real-life "Talented Mr. Ripley," the unbelievable thirty-year run of a shape-shifting con man. The story of Clark Rockefeller is a stranger-than-fiction twist on the classic American success story of the self-made man-because Clark Rockefeller was totally made up. The career con man who convincingly passed himself off as Rockefeller was born in a small village in Germany. At seventeen, obsessed with getting to America, he flew into the country on dubious student visa documents and his journey of deception began. Over the next thirty years, boldly assuming a series of false identities, he moved up the social ladder through exclusive enclaves on both coasts-culminating in a stunning twelve-year marriage to a rising star businesswoman with a Harvard MBA who believed she'd wed a Rockefeller. The imposter charmed his way into exclusive clubs and financial institutions-working on Wall Street, showing off an extraordinary art collection-until his marriage ended and he was arrested for kidnapping his daughter, which exposed his past of astounding deceptions as well as a connection to the bizarre disappearance of a California couple in the mid-1980s. The story of "The Man in the Rockefeller Suit" is a probing and cinematic exploration of an audacious imposer-and a man determined to live the American dream by any means necessary.
Reading Walter Kirn's Blood Will Out made me curious about you get from German immigrant to passing yourself off as a Rockefeller. Christian Karl Gerhartsreiter pulled off one of the most audacious cons in recent history.
This is one of the those you can't make this stuff up books, Mark Seal follows Gerhartsreiter from the moment he first steps on American soil until his arrest and trial for kidnapping his seven-year old daughter. It is an interesting but creepy tale. I would find keeping up this type of charade exhausting, I wonder if in the end he did believe he was a Rockefeller.
On March 15, 2011, Gerhartsreiter stood trial and found guilty of the murder of a California man in 1985.
