With the right upper-class cred and enough chutzpah, you can get away with anything — possibly even murder.
That's the lesson in The Man in the Rockefeller Suit, Mark Seal's eye-popping, stranger-than-fiction tale about the impostor who called himself Clark Rockefeller.
His real name is Christian Karl Gerhartsreiter, and he does not belong to one of America's richest families. But he fooled a lot of people for a long time.
In 1978, the then-17-year-old German tourist landed in the USA and started living his own twisted version of the American Dream. For decades, Gerhartsreiter posed as an Ivy League-educated blue blood, until he made world headlines in 2008. That's when "Clark Rockefeller" was arrested in Baltimore for kidnapping his 7-year-old daughter, nicknamed Snooks.
His arrest brought attention to John Sohus, whose remains were discovered in 1994 buried near a guest house in San Marino, Calif., where Gerhartsreiter had lived in 1985. He is now charged with Sohus' murder.
Seal does an excellent job of crisply recounting the tale of this truly talented real-life Mr. Ripley. From the day Gerhartsreiter enrolled in a Connecticut high school, he proved to be a genius at manipulating people. To stay in the USA permanently, he married — and quickly divorced — a Wisconsin woman. Gerhartsreiter then began his odyssey through America's toniest addresses.
With neither money nor a profession, how did he do it? Simple: In each place, Gerhartsreiter would join the Episcopal church to meet the elite. His names got fancier — before Rockefeller, he was a Mountbatten — and his name-dropping about Yale and yacht clubs ever more aristocratic.
The facts are fascinating, but it's Seal's compassionate retelling that makes the book so terrific. He never sneers at Gerhartsreiter's victims, so easily awed by the name Rockefeller. They include Gerhartsreiter's second wife, Sandra, an accomplished Harvard MBA and the mother of the child he kidnapped. (He is in prison for that crime.)
In the end, Gerhartsreiter's decades of deceit were unmasked by the only honest thing in his life— his twisted but genuine love for his daughter.
Forget fiction. Pop this jaw-dropper in your beach bag.
