A Most Proper Con

But of course Rockefeller did have a plan: He would reinvent himself once again. In a document filed in court after his arrest, prosecutors say that Rockefeller contacted a Baltimore real estate firm as early as last October, two months before his divorce was finalized. Introducing himself as Charles "Chip" Smith, he explained that he was a ship's captain relocating from South America with his daughter, who he called Muffy.

Rockefeller had taken a break from working on the sitcom during the worst days of the divorce, but now jumped back into it with a new focus. The tone grew harsher. In these scripts his character, who also calls his daughter by the pet name Snooks, goes through a divorce. In one scene, meeting with his attorney, he wonders why his soon-to-be ex-wife would get custody. "I just so hate to have Snooks have to be with that person. It is just not right," the character says.

Rockefeller was still making the social rounds, but a hint of desperation had begun to show through his boasts. On Valentine's Day, he arrived at the Taj for the opening party of Boston Ballet's Romeo and Juliet. He told a woman there he was an MIT-trained astrophysicist who had worked out a way to predict, with mathematical certainty, the outcome of a coin toss. He invited her to his apartment to see what he said was a collection of Rothkos. She declined, thinking the invitation awfully forward. Three days later at the Algonquin Club, he tried to connect with another woman, again introducing himself as a physicist. He asked if she wanted to go sailing, which struck her as ill timed: It was snowing outside. 

A few weeks later, Rockefeller let his lease expire. He moved some belongings into storage, and sold others. Without a place of his own, he's said to have spent some of his nights at the Algonquin, sleeping in one of the rooms the club makes available for members, and others couch-surfing at the homes of his friends.

He simultaneously began to divorce himself from his fellow members of the Café Society. After telling them he would buy the group tickets for the Taste of Beacon Hill in May, he never followed through. He didn't show up at the event itself, either. "It was one of the first times that he really skipped out on us," Emma says. Ten days later, on May 30, Rockefeller quietly registered a corporation to buy a $432,000 carriage house on Ploy Street in Baltimore. In Boston, he told Emma he was buying a new home—but placed it in New Hampshire. "It was almost like he was giving you hints at the truth," she says, "like he wanted to say what he was really doing."

On the morning of Sunday, July 27, Rockefeller and a social worker arrived to pick up Reigh at the Four Seasons, where she was staying with her mother. It was the first time Rockefeller had seen his daughter in seven months. The three headed to the Algonquin, then to a playground. Walking up Marlborough Street, Rockefeller drew the social worker's attention to some renovations on a building, then tossed Reigh into a waiting SUV and jumped in after her. Just like that, Clark Rockefeller was gone.

Clark Rockefeller may no longer stroll the streets of Beacon Hill, but the stories about him go on. At first, some who knew him best were embarrassed that they had been taken in. That feeling has since largely passed. "Everyone is playing it off like a joke," says one resident. At dinner parties on Brimmer Street or while browsing in the shops on the flat of the hill, people amuse themselves by recounting tales of the times they spoke to him, of how they recognized right away that something wasn't quite right. At least that's the story they tell themselves.

Today, Rockefeller awaits his kidnapping trial in a seventh-floor cell of the Nashua Street jail, which sits just outside Beacon Hill. For some of his former neighbors, his presence there is a reminder of the last time they saw him, at the very place the Nashua Street jail was built to replace.

This past February's Beacon Hill Winter Dance was held at the Liberty Hotel, which is housed in the shell of the former Charles Street Jail. Organizers had decorated the tables with plastic handcuffs, sheriff's badges, and water pistols; some of the trivia cards they'd drawn up for icebreakers mentioned famous former inmates, like Frank Abagnale Jr., whose exploits as a con man were celebrated in the movie Catch Me If You Can. As always, Rockefeller mingled among the black-tie crowd, charming women who had previously known him only by reputation. At one point, he was cajoled into posing for a photo wearing a pair of handcuffs and a Cheshire cat grin. The contrast between the snapshot made that evening and the ones of a cuffed Rockefeller that would later appear in the newspapers was striking. Whatever a Rockefeller is supposed to look like, the sad-faced man on the front page clearly didn't fit the bill.

During a court hearing, Rockefeller's attorney Stephen Hrones argued that his client should be freed on bail until his trial, which is scheduled for March (he's pleaded not guilty). Rockefeller can no longer run, Hrones argued: His face is known all over the country. The judge seemed to agree, but nevertheless set bail at $50 million in cash—a sum far beyond the reach of the man police had unmasked as Christian Karl Gerhartstreiter, but who still insists on being known as Clark Rockefeller. "He's not one of the rich Rockefellers," Hrones protested later, incredulous that the judge somehow seemed to be confusing his client with someone else altogether.