The Man in the Rockefeller Suit (16 page)

Having seen Crowe’s first palatial abode, on Rock Ridge Avenue, I asked Samantha to describe his subsequent residence on North Street.

Her eyes brightened, and she said, “Oh, it’s
beautiful
! North Street has all these mansions. North Street parallels Round Hill Road.” Round Hill is the most distinguished district of Greenwich, home to film stars and billionaires, listed on the National Register of Historic Places.

During Crowe’s tenure at S. N. Phelps, which lasted less than a year and ended in the middle of 1987, Samantha recalled, he didn’t have any plans for Christmas 1986.

“Are you going back to Paris to see your mother and sister?” she asked him.

“No.”

“Well, would you like to come to my house for Christmas Eve?”

“Okay.”

“He walks in and says, ‘You know, Samantha, my mother and sister and I looked at the house right next to yours when it was on the market. We could have been neighbors.’”

“The house next door to ours had been on the market for six to eight million,” Samantha told me as we sat outside the green office building. “But Christopher always had a story, and it always concerned wealth. He was better than everybody, more affluent than everybody. It was just arrogance. Although he was shorter than me, he always had the attitude that he was looking down at you. I started thinking to myself I’m really sorry I asked him here to my house.”

Soon this arrogance wore thin with his colleagues, starting with Samantha, who grew tired of his haughty attitude, of his saying to her dismissively, “Well, Samantha,” and then attempting to say something glib or funny. The traders his age in the company were all close friends, and Crowe was never part of their clique. “It’s not that they excluded him, but I don’t think he ever felt included,” said Samantha, adding that finally he began to grate on the man you didn’t dare offend: “Stan didn’t like him anymore. He was annoying, and he got on Stan’s nerves until Stan just didn’t want him around.”

The final straw for Stan Phelps was when Crowe wouldn’t tell him how to access his computer, someone else insisted. For a hands-on business titan who ran a very tight ship, this was blasphemy. Was Crowe trying to make himself invaluable and irreplaceable? Some would later say that was the plan. But Stan Phelps didn’t give him the chance.

Samantha couldn’t remember if she had personally fired Crowe, but she thought she had. She did remember that the aftermath of Christopher Crowe at S. N. Phelps was even stranger than his presence there. That, however, was still several years away. At the time, he merely picked up his personal things, draped his Burberry trench coat over his shoulders, and walked out.

Two years after he left, an interesting item on his job application came to light. In the space provided for his social security number, Crowe had written what would turn out to be a curious number. When it was finally run through the system, it came back as the social security number not of Christopher Chichester Crowe but of a David Berkowitz, the name of the serial killer known as Son of Sam, who had terrorized New York City and murdered at least six people in 1976 and 1977.

CHAPTER 7

Wall Street

I
n the summer of 1987, Nikko Securities was on the move. One of Japan’s “Big Four” brokerage firms, the company was intent on getting into the booming American securities market and planned to increase its U.S. workforce from 250 people to 500. As part of that expansion, Nikko created a corporate bond department, which was announced in a press release on July 13, 1987. After describing the particulars of the new department, the release stated, “Christopher Crowe, who formerly ran the Battenberg–Crowe–von Wettin Family Foundation, will lead the endeavor as vice president.”

The Christopher Crowe who presented himself to the brass at Nikko Securities was, on the surface, a perfect candidate for the roaring 1980s Wall Street. He seemed smart, educated, connected. He knew the lingo of the long bond and the short sell. He had a résumé with experience at one of the East Coast’s most esteemed securities firms, S. N. Phelps and Company, and boasted of running a family foundation with royal names and seemingly deep pockets. Most important, he dressed the part perfectly, impeccably attired in suits from J. Press and Brooks Brothers. In the blizzard of money that typified the time, Christopher Crowe was like so many others dressed for success and ready to make some serious cash.

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He left his failures at S. N. Phelps behind in Connecticut. Not only did he survive, he landed at a bigger, more prestigious firm, in a much more senior position. He would be running an entire department, responsible for trading extremely high-value financial instruments. As one corporate bond trader told me, “The minimum sale you’re dealing with is a million dollars.” According to his former coworkers, Crowe’s annual salary was probably about $125,000, not including perks and bonuses.

How did he wind up in such a position? As usual, his entrée came through a single impressionable individual, in this case a man named Don Sheahan. Now deceased, Sheahan had worked in the securities business for years, and Nikko’s Japanese executives entrusted him with assembling much of their New York team. “Apparently Crowe met Sheahan at a cocktail party and sold him a bill of goods,” said Richard Barnett, who worked under Crowe at Nikko.

Another Wall Street veteran who worked with Sheahan and Crowe at Nikko told me of Sheahan, “He wasn’t some kid, wet behind the ears. Don was a former Air Force pilot, he’d been with Goldman Sachs—he was not a dope.” So how did he get taken in by a charlatan? “This guy, Crowe, had a fantastic gift about him,” said the Wall Street veteran. “He was like that character Tony Curtis played in
The Great Impostor
, passing himself off as an airplane pilot, a doctor, and everything else. I think the reason Don fell for it was because Don seemed to be impressed by anybody that was either extremely wealthy or had some type of family background. A name like Mountbatten would have caught his attention immediately.” (Although Gerhartsreiter had left his San Marino identity behind, he hadn’t abandoned the names he had invented for himself; according to my sheaf of documents, the birth certificate he presented to Nikko identified him as Christopher Chichester Crowe Mountbatten, born in Los Angeles.)

“Don Sheahan was taken by people who seemed to be blue-blooded,” said Bob Brusca, who worked for the New York Federal Reserve before becoming chief economist at Nikko during Sheahan’s tenure. “He wasn’t the type of guy who would necessarily check references. Someone may have told him that Christopher was a good person, and that would have been enough for him.”

But, I asked, would Sheahan’s hunch have been enough for Nikko? Didn’t his Japanese bosses have any say in the hiring of this rank amateur? “The Japanese have this thing called shadow management, where for just about every position in the firm where there was an American, there was a Japanese who looked over his shoulder,” said Brusca. “Don Sheahan was allowed to run the operation subject to the oversight of the Japanese. That meant Akira Tokutomi [an executive vice president at Nikko] shadowed Sheahan, and he would have had to have said yes to the hire of Christopher Crowe.”

His appointment was the subject of an article in the
Bond Buyer
, a trade periodical, under the headline NIKKO SECURITIES INTERNATIONAL ENTERS CORPORATE ARENA WITH INDUSTRIAL FOCUS:

Christopher Crowe, who will head the new corporate bond department as vice president, said the department is currently testing the syndicate waters, participating in a $250 million Chevron Capital USA deal that came to market yesterday, as well as a $150 million Colgate-Palmolive Co. offering that was scheduled for pricing last evening. Further down the road, he said, he hopes to lead the department into corporate underwriting.

He said the department will work most heavily in the long-term industrial sector and will structure its portfolio more or less according to the following mix: 65% industrials, 25% utilities, and the rest a mixture of banks and finance and transportation. “Customers like industrials,” he said, adding that “they’ve been oversaturated with banks and finance.”

To date, the department’s staff numbers just five, including Mr. Crowe, who formerly ran the Battenberg–Crowe–von Wettin Family Foundation. . . . By the end of the year, Mr. Crowe said, the department should total 15 staff members.

Not yet out of his twenties and with little experience or knowledge, Crowe was in charge of staffing Nikko’s new department, and he sought out seasoned finance professionals. Richard Barnett, who had just left a research analyst job at the respected brokerage firm E. F. Hutton, was one of Crowe’s first hires. “The head of research at Merrill Lynch gave my name to Christopher Crowe,” Barnett told me, and soon he met the well-dressed young supervisor, whom he described as “erudite” with “an aristocratic air.” “We met in the lobby of the Grand Hyatt on Forty-second Street. He told me, ‘The Japanese are assembling a corporate bond operation. They’ve asked me to put together an operation rather quickly.’ The interview lasted twenty minutes, and I was hired on the spot. He said there was the potential for a lot of money, and he told me what the plans were: to create a full trading operation in corporate bonds and also research. He told me I’d be hiring a number of analysts.”

They worked in a trading room in Nikko’s offices in the World Financial Center, adjacent to the World Trade Center in downtown Manhattan. As at S. N. Phelps, the quarters were tight, and everyone knew nearly everything about everyone else—except their boss, who usually sat alone, often staring into space, in his sizable office.

“I remember he came up to me one time and asked, ‘Do you know anybody who buys this type of Eurobond?’” said Bob Brusca. “I just looked at him and said no. I thought it was so odd. That was supposed to be his job! It would be like somebody who is supposed to be a dentist coming up to you and asking, ‘Do you know what a bicuspid is?’”

Yet Crowe led the department, at least for a while. Things soon began to stall, however. “Nothing was being done—there was no trading going on whatsoever,” Barnett told me. “We were just sitting and twiddling our thumbs. He went out with me on one account. He tried to bullshit, and you can’t do that when you’re dealing with people who have been in the industry for ten or fifteen years.”

Yet the men who worked with him at Nikko agreed that a certain amount of swagger was an important asset for bond salesmen in those days, and Christopher Crowe had swagger in spades. The ability to tell high-flying, almost inconceivable stories about one’s business experience and personal life “frankly can be a great quality for a salesman,” said Brusca. “They’ll say things that are just utterly fantastic and ridiculous, but they’re able to be successful as salesmen.”

No one called Crowe out, however, at least not at the beginning, because either they believed him and his story to be real, or they were all busy worrying about their own careers, according to another of Crowe’s Nikko colleagues, Stan Forkner. “I was concerned with my own stuff, not really paying him much attention,” he said. “I suppose he did what he could to get up to speed and sort of play the role.”

Central to the role was making money, and Crowe must have realized that in order to do that he would need help. He got it in the person of a finance pro I’ll call Jim Rivers.

“Jim’s a character,” said Richard Barnett. “One of the trade magazines did a piece on him. They called him the Mayor of Wall Street. We’d go out and a homeless guy would ask him for money, and Jim would put him up in a hotel for the night. Jim knew every bartender in Manhattan—not only knew them, he knew their kids. He was an ex-Marine, and as soon as he would walk into a bar they would start playing the Marine Corps Hymn.”

I called Jim Rivers, and, sure enough, he asked me to meet him in a bar. There was no Marine Corps Hymn playing, just a big, affable fellow nursing a drink and dolefully recalling the man nobody really knew.

“I was hired to run the corporate trading desk in August 1987, and he was there,” Rivers said of Crowe. “He was supposedly in charge of the three salespeople. They were all pretty inexperienced, but he was the most inexperienced of all.” By then Nikko had brought in Mary Clarkin, who had spent twenty-seven years at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, to help oversee the operation, and her job eventually included overseeing the sales manager, Christopher Crowe.

“He reported to Mary, but he sat directly across from me,” Rivers said. “I used to joke with him. He never took his jacket off, and he’d make announcements about his clothes: ‘Look at my new suit from J. Press,’ or wherever—always a top-quality company.”

Two months after Rivers went to work at Nikko, the world’s stock markets crashed on the day known as Black Monday, October 19, 1987. It was the largest percentage drop in a single day in stock market history, and by the end of the month the markets had fallen by 45.5 percent in Hong Kong and 22.68 percent in the United States.

The crisis made the executives in Nikko’s Tokyo headquarters “petrified of any kind of risk after that,” said Rivers. But Black Monday was just another day for Crowe. “He just sat there in his office calling people up,” Rivers remembered. “That’s all he used to do. He’d sit there all day long. Who he was calling, I don’t know. Half the time he’d be speaking German to people.”

While playing the part of a high-flying Wall Street executive, Crowe also continued to impersonate a fabulously wealthy aristocrat, making liberal mention of his relatives Lord Mountbatten and the Battenberg family, and of the Battenberg–Crowe–von Wettin Family Foundation, which he had formerly run, supposedly. He said the foundation owned a huge collection of luxury cars and European castles. (In truth, the foundation did not exist.)

One evening, Rivers told me, he and the boss, Don Sheahan, were heading to Sparks Steakhouse on East Forty-sixth Street to interview prospective salesmen. “We had a limousine waiting for us, and Crowe asked if he could hitch a ride. I said, ‘Fine.’ It was right before Thanksgiving, and Don and I were talking about our plans. I said to Crowe, ‘What are you planning on doing?’ And he said, ‘I’m going to stay at home and read prospectuses’ ”—detailed business reports and analyses of securities. “I said, ‘That sounds like a
great
Thanksgiving. You don’t have anywhere to go?’ He said no, so I invited him to my house. He took up the invitation as fast as a greyhound, and he said, ‘I’m going to come down in one of my cars.’ I asked, ‘How many cars have you got?’ He said, ‘I’ve got a whole car collection—Ferraris, Alfa Romeos, Lamborghinis.’ I said, ‘All right, pick one out and come down. I’d like to see it.’ ”