The Man in the Rockefeller Suit

The Man in the Rockefeller Suit is a story about Chris Kenneth Gerhart (a film student at the University of Wisconsin) and Christopher Chichester, a member of British Royalty descended from Lord Mountbatten. It also involves Christopher Crowe, who was hired as a computer whiz for a Connecticut brokerage firm… and later hired as a department head at Nikko Securities, Ltd., on Wall Street, with an estimated annual base salary of $150,000.

The story also involves Clark Rockefeller, art collector and New York City resident. He was a husband to Sandra Boss, a Harvard graduate who earned an estimated $1.4 million annually as senior partner at McKinsey & Company, a global management-consulting firm.

All of the people mentioned are aliases, and are in fact the same person: Christian Karl Gerhartsreiter, a German immigrant who came to America as a student in 1978 and eventually passed himself off as a member of the prestigious Rockefeller family.

In July, 2008, Gerhartsreiter kidnapped his own daughter, Snooks. He’s also a person of interest in the missing persons case of John and Linda Sohus, who disappeared in 1985 and whose skeletal remains police believe they’ve found.

A Boston District Attorney described Gerhartsreiter’s existence as “the longest con I’ve seen in my professional career.”

[via MetaFilter]