From the time he first stole the name, Nicholas “Rocky” Rockefeller knew the storied family had a special connection with China. Most of the half-dozen jerry-built corporations that he used to exploit the Rockefeller name were connected to the country, which he visited more than 20 times.
Among Nick’s proudest possessions was an antique kerosene lamp that he displayed inside a glass case at the entry to his Century City offices, one of around eight million that the Rockefellers offered as promotional gifts to Chinese peasants more than a century ago.
Nick fancied himself an expert on U.S. investment in China. He wrote a semi-scholarly chapter in a book on Chinese business that showed a decent understanding of the tangled forces at work amid the greatest economic boom in human history. But what he really wanted to do was get his cut of the huge Chinese market, as the men he claimed as ancestors had done.
In 2001, one of his Rockefeller-themed companies helped launch Global Agora, a Wuhan-based start-up that promised to be China’s first wireless e-commerce site. Nick had deep-pocketed backers in Wuhan, and the help of the mayor. He even went on Chinese TV several times to sell the idea, a level of public exposure he could never risk back home. His American partner, Nick Matzorkis, took the company public and, for a brief time, the two made millions on paper. But Global Agora had a slight problem: a Chinese competitor called Alibaba, which had entered the market two years earlier and was on its way to becoming the largest online retailer in the world.
Matzorkis was a self-promoting serial entrepreneur best known for helping to discover the bodies of 39 victims of the infamous 1997 “Heaven’s Gate” suicides, in Rancho Santa Fe, California. It turned out that 15 of the dead cultists were his employees. He founded a company called US Search, which was featured on 60 Minutes and elsewhere in the early 2000s for its ability to take small bits of information and track down ancestry and other personal information online. It seems Matzorkis either didn’t put “Nicholas Rockefeller” into his patented search engine or kept what he found about his business partner to himself. I was hardly surprised that he did not respond to my calls.
Among Nick’s other failed Asian development projects were commercial space in Shanghai, a mine in Heilongjiang, a hotel in Bali, housing in Saipan, and a theme park in Wuhan. For the latter, he tried at first to revive an abortive Universal Studios project. His “Paramount Brand Theme Park in Wuhan China” came closer to reality, thanks in part to the Rockefeller name.
“I am pleased that the government is requiring my continued personal involvement as a condition of the new commitment,” Nick wrote one partner, noting that Chinese authorities were pumping $200 million and 7,400 acres of property into the deal. He said that the Chinese recognized that having it “financed professionally” by a Rockefeller gave them a better chance to make “a difficult orchard bear fruit.”
The harvest never happened. “This was a shell game, a game of mirrors,” says Steve Blum, one of Nick’s lawyers, “with everyone vouching based on suppositions and assumptions that no one had any reason to bring to the surface for closer inspection.” Another of Nick’s lawyers, Thornton Davidson, used the same metaphor. “The law was the perfect place for a guy like Nick to dissemble because it’s a perpetual hall of mirrors. If you can stay in the hall, the truth becomes very opaque, and someone who wants to hide can hide pretty well.”
The story of Rockefeller Asia Advisory Group (RAAG), a consulting firm Nick started in the mid-90s, shows how he rolled. He began by creating a bogus backstory. In 1997, he wrote to Matt Fong, the California state treasurer, that RAAG was “the first foreign firm to take special interest in China in 1972, shortly after the famous visit of President Nixon to China,” and that it now had offices in seven Chinese cities. RAAG claimed to have raised more than $20 billion from “some of the world’s largest and most prestigious public and private borrowers and lenders.”
This was all fiction, as were Nick’s claims of pending deals with Hughes Aircraft, TRW, and other major U.S. corporations, not to mention a supposed $200 million joint venture with the powerful Chinese Ministry of Posts and Telecommunications to put financial-advisory services in 250 Chinese post offices. One of his Chinese investors wrote to Nick’s American partner to explain that RAAG had no revenues at all in 1999 and politely pointed out that “Mr. Rockefeller” had never put any cash into their business.
When deals fell through, Nick was usually philosophical, despite the hundreds of hours of wasted work. “The mountains are so high and the emperor so far away,” he’d say. “He put on a good show and they wanted the Rockefeller name to attract Chinese investment, but that doesn’t mean the deals get done,” one of Nick’s American partners says. “There’s an old saying in China: ‘You need 100 chops.’ It means 100 stamped approvals. You could have 99, and the last guy had you by the balls.”
One of those fruitless meetings was with Xi Jinping, not long after Xi ascended in 2002 to the powerful post of party secretary and governor of the Zhejiang province, near Shanghai. Nick was there on behalf of Rockefeller Resources International, which hoped to expand liquefied-natural-gas exports to China. Nick’s American business colleague recalled that, at lunch, Xi seemed interested in everything Nick said but remained noncommittal.
Nick’s best hope for making millions was his 2000 “investment” in a Chinese company known as Sinotype, which made Mandarin fonts to sell to Apple, Adobe, and other tech companies. Nick’s company, Rockefeller Technology Investments (Asia), later claimed that its original investment in Sinotype consisted of $10 million in A.I.G. stock. That stock was never transferred to Sinotype, because it never existed. As the deal went south, an associated firm, RockVest, served Sinotype in China by FedEx, alerting the Chinese company to impending arbitration.
When arbitration began, before a retired state-appellate-court judge, RockVest introduced a written expert declaration from a Hong Kong valuation specialist who stated that if Sinotype received one dollar for every iPhone that used its Mandarin fonts, the profits would be immense. RockVest—because it owned 50 percent of the company—would be due $413 million.
This was likely just smoke and mirrors. But with Sinotype a no-show at the arbitration, the retired judge bought the RockVest line and sided with Nick. Sinotype then appealed, claiming that the huge settlement was void because the company had been improperly served; the legal documents should have been sent to the Chinese government first, as required by the Hague Convention. On RockVest’s behalf, Blum argued that the Hague Convention required no such thing and that forcing all legal documents from abroad to go through the Chinese government would sharply reduce foreign investment in China.
In an important victory for companies trying to do business in China, the California Supreme Court ruled in 2020 that the Hague Convention didn’t apply. The $413 million judgment stood.
Nick was exultant. He considered this the greatest legal victory of his career. But he had a problem. Blum’s law partner, Gary Ho, asked some Chinese friends to check out Sinotype so they could collect. They expected a company with a headquarters in a gleaming tower in Shanghai; they found a drab room in Changzhou.
“The essence of it was: There ain’t nothing there,” Blum remembers. At one point, Apple had said it would pay Sinotype $1.5 million for the Mandarin fonts if it fulfilled its contractual obligations, but Sinotype didn’t do so.
Sinotype was just one of dozens of Chinese deals that never came through for Nick. In 2005, he inserted himself into a billion-dollar real-estate project to redevelop the dilapidated but promising riverfront in Shanghai. This deal involved real investors using legitimate Rockefeller-family investment funds, though no family members were directly involved.
Nick smelled opportunity and was willing to risk exposure. According to The Wall Street Journal, he flew to Shanghai and met with the mayor to advise him that his Rockefeller name would help close the deal. When asked about Nick by the Chicago Tribune, David Rockefeller said through a spokesman that he didn’t recall ever meeting him. The relationship “is probably quite distant, seventh or eighth cousins,” the spokesman told the paper.
The multi-billion-dollar redevelopment proceeded without Nick, who had little to show financially for 40 years of interest in China. The con man got conned. As Ho says, “It’s China, Jake.”
It turns out that many of the super-wealthy Chinese businessmen Nick was dealing with were always a few steps ahead of him. They monetized the Rockefeller name as a card to play against other Chinese executives inside China, cutting Nick out. That left little or nothing for Nick except the warm feeling of being a player, even when he wasn’t.
Or was he? After Nick’s death, Craig Keshishian, his friend and Yale Law School classmate, began looking into his Chinese ties. He told me that he suspects Nick was a Chinese-intelligence asset, though he doesn’t yet have proof.
If true, Nick was taking a big risk, considering that Senator Jay Rockefeller held several hearings on Chinese espionage. If his name had come up in the senator’s investigation, it would have blown his cover. As a practical matter, Nick had long been useful to the Chinese. Many of the Chinese officials and business leaders with whom Nick supped in Los Angeles, Wuhan, Shanghai, and elsewhere were high-ranking Chinese Communist Party officials or their agents, and would likely have reported any tidbits they picked up from the portly aristocrat.
It’s also possible that China’s intelligence services knew he was a fraud and didn’t care. Why ruin their ability to exploit the Rockefeller name? That would explain why, after Nick’s death, the Chinese landlords at his well-appointed Century City office let his Yale Law School classmate Helen Kim search the place.
In his later years, Nick was candid about how he was fronting for the Chinese. Rockefeller Resources International, the Chinese-owned natural-gas company, was paying for the Century City office. But he told a friend that he was fine with his name being rented by the Chinese. Of course, it wasn’t his name they were renting.
“It’ll All Come Out About Me at the Funeral”
For decades, Nick had led a fraudulent life but not a double life. It wasn’t as if he went home at night and suddenly went back to being Spiro Pavlovich; he was a rock-ribbed Rockefeller all the time, fully committed to the character he had created for himself. But there were layers. The “wonderful man” described by the 1987 Yale Law School class secretary shrouded a dark, abusive Mr. Hyde.
Consider his 30-year friendship with the eminent sexologist Dr. Richard Green. In 1973, Green was instrumental in convincing the American Psychiatric Association to change its Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders so that it no longer classified homosexuality as a disease, a landmark moment for the gay-rights movement. He advocated for gay marriage and trans rights decades before these issues became national causes. In the 1980s, nearing 50, he grew fascinated by the intersection of law and medicine and decided to become a lawyer. At Yale Law School, Green became such good friends with Nick—the next-oldest student in their class—that he asked him to be the godfather of his son.
In 1993, Green had a big payday. He represented the actress Elke Sommer in her libel suit against Zsa Zsa Gabor and her husband for saying that Sommer had been reduced to knitting sweaters for a living and that she looked like a “100-year-old grandmother,” among other slurs. Sommer won a $3.3 million judgment, and Green collected a hefty contingency fee, which he gave to Nick to manage. Nick promised his friend that he would financially support his son and leave him $20 million or more after his death.
Green grew up poor in a Brooklyn tenement and, despite his deep knowledge of psychology, he was easy prey for a friendly Rockefeller who knew how to exploit his deep-rooted social and financial insecurities.
Nick slowly pulled Green into an informal protection racket. Usually this took the form of creating a problem, then saying he was the only one who could solve it. He manipulated Green into thinking that his early scholarly writing about pornography made him vulnerable to blackmail, as did his A.C.L.U. amicus brief on behalf of pornographers in the case of Traci Lords, who came to public attention in the 1980s for performing under-age in porn films. A few years later, Nick told Green, who was by then living in London, that a source in the Los Angeles County District Attorney’s Office said that Green was under investigation for sexual improprieties and in danger of being extradited. Both were insidious lies.
When a woman made a bogus claim that she and Green had been secretly married, Green hired the private detective Jack Palladino, who found nothing to back up the allegation. Palladino, well known for his bare-knuckle investigations on behalf of Bill Clinton, Harvey Weinstein, R. Kelly, and others, began suspecting that Nick was the source of his client’s problems. But Green was intimidated by Nick’s bullying claims that Green was in breach of his contract with him, and scared of Nick’s veiled threats to sue Green’s increasingly suspicious wife and son for defamation. So Green wouldn’t let Palladino question Nick. Had Palladino, who was killed by muggers in 2021, done so, Nick’s life as an impostor might have unraveled.
Between inflating dubious legal fees and embezzling funds set aside for his godson, Nick separated his self-described “close friend” from more than a million dollars of his money.
Green didn’t see his old classmate with any clarity until his divorce, which his wife says was caused by Green’s irrational allegiance to Nick. When Nick tried to claim that the trust he was managing (and draining) owned Green’s house in London, his largest asset, Green finally saw the truth. The doctor and his family kept the house and, in 2015, broke ties with Nick. Four years later, Green died of cancer.
Nick grifted because it was in his nature, but he also needed the money. For several years, he had legitimately made mid–six figures as a lawyer, but keeping up appearances as a Rockefeller wasn’t cheap. When, for example, he went to Washington at Senator Alfonse D’Amato’s invitation to address Republican members of the Senate Banking Committee at the Capitol Hill Club, he had to play the plutocrat. So after he was fired by Perkins Coie in 2005 for his poor judgment in a legal battle with Seattle entrepreneur Seth Landau, Nick had to scramble.
One possible source of money was his old firm, so between 2007 and 2018 he sued Perkins Coie three times for discrimination and wrongful termination. He claimed that he was a practicing “Christian fundamentalist”—which would have been news to anyone who knew him—and that other lawyers referred to his faith as a “kook religion.”
When this got him nowhere, Nick alleged that a Perkins Coie partner described the bleeding moles and skin discoloration on his neck as “H.I.V. sores” in front of partners and clients. Neither his secretary nor others I interviewed remembered any such moles or other indications that could be mistaken for AIDS.
Nick also alleged that, in 2004, Perkins Coie partners cut a deal with John Kerry’s presidential campaign in which Kerry would send clients to Perkins Coie in exchange for campaign contributions. As with his other allegations, Nick provided no evidence. It was an especially peculiar claim, given that Nick had brought Kerry to his salon not long after the 2004 election for a candid postmortem on the campaign that attendees remember as one of the most informative of all of Nick’s dozens of sessions with dignitaries.
When in 2010 Nick appealed the arbitration decision in one of the Perkins Coie cases, U.S. District Court Judge Stephen Wilson found that “Rockefeller’s contentions [were] unreasonable, illogical, and contrived. Having observed Rockefeller’s appearance, demeanor, and courtroom composure, the Court concludes that his testimony is not worthy of credence.”
In 2007, Nick returned to a grift that had worked well for him in New Orleans in 1980: disability fraud. He alleged without evidence that his insurance company had placed him under surveillance in order to deny his disability claims. He described himself in a letter to a lawyer as weighing 305 pounds (probably accurate) and in “poor” medical condition with a long list of ailments, some of which were real and some contrived. He said he slept no more than two hours at a time and “involuntarily will enter periods of unconsciousness while sitting, talking and even occasionally, standing.” In another letter, he was said to require “regular daily assistance in dressing and grooming.”
Nick claimed he was so disabled that he could read only an hour a week (this at a time of heavy negotiation in China) and passed the time “watching the ocean,” listening to “spiritual texts” on tape, and learning religious songs. He said that he used to enjoy golf, which in truth he never played, and that he sold his yacht, which in truth he never owned.
Nick’s multiple cases involving Perkins Coie didn’t end until 2019, when it was revealed that he had declared personal bankruptcy without disclosing his claims to other assets—a legal no-no. Neither did he reveal the bankruptcy to his attorney in this matter, Thornton Davidson, until mid-case—an ethical no-no.
Davidson had earlier represented “the Rock” in a group disability action in which Nick had failed to appear at mediation because “his yacht was late leaving Hawaii” (or so he told the mediator) but jollied the parties into allowing the case to be resolved over the phone. Davidson, who never met Nick in person, intermittently checked his client’s background on various search engines and was fairly sure that he was not a member of the Rockefeller family, but he never confronted him directly because Nick never brought up the family connection.
Davidson says Nick would offer intriguing if novel and ultimately futile legal theories and harrumph his way through charming conversations on the phone. Even after shorting Davidson on his legal bills, Nick still called him to chat every couple of months until the end of his life. Davidson—like so many others Nick let down over the years—thought of him as a warm and amusing character.
Nick could embezzle money from the Greens, file frivolous lawsuits, and stiff his lawyers without much fear of being unmasked. Only his wife, Mandy, and his half-sister, Laurie Chatelain Smith, who told a Louisiana court in 1995 that she was in frequent touch with Spiro, had the knowledge to ruin him, and both knew that doing so would harm them too. Understanding that, Nick felt free to psychologically torture Mandy.
After washing out of corporate law, Mandy had assumed résumé-enhancing positions with various “Rockefeller” companies, which required little real work. Mostly she was Nick’s de facto personal assistant (he had lost his secretary after being fired from Perkins Coie), making travel arrangements for him, his business associates, and sometimes for his girlfriends.
One night in 2004, Mandy and Nick had a long discussion in the car. It was “about us,” according to an e-mail Mandy later sent him. They were not a couple: “That is THE problem. We are not together.” Ever hopeful of reconciling with her husband of 33 years, she berated herself in an e-mail to him: “How to fix the problem. Don’t interrupt N, don’t say stupid things, don’t ask questions, particularly stupid questions.”
By this point, Nick had long since taken up with other women, more than one of whom expected gifts befitting a boyfriend who was a Rockefeller. One year, Nick asked his secretary to pick out an Hermès bag for him to give to one of his girlfriends, but he said it must be ordered from Paris, where the quality was higher than on Rodeo Drive. The secretary witnessed Nick in his convertible presenting the bag to his Chinese-American paramour, who flung it back in his face and screamed that it was the wrong color.
Nick began gaslighting Mandy. He attacked her father, William, and he called her bright, diabetic sister, Melanie, who had died in 1994, a “retard.” But most of his venom was reserved for Mandy and her late mother, Beverly Gallo Caulffield.
Nick, who after his mother died had apparently broken his ties with New Orleans, was contemptuous of Mandy for not doing the same and accused her of taking orders from her dead mother. “What is the problem nutso—did dago [Beverly] forbid? I can’t be your memory when da dago orders you to forget,” Nick e-mailed, employing a slur against Italians while playing on Mandy’s guilt over disappointing her mother, who had tried for years to bring her back to New Orleans but was hardly a domineering woman.
When Mandy secured a job interview to return to her old law firm, Shearman & Sterling, she couldn’t discern the job specifications, which was possibly an early sign of the dementia that would soon afflict her. Nick claimed Mandy was faking her ineptitude and receiving messages from the grave: “You seem to have trouble saying that you have a difficult recent assignment and travels…. Did da dago get you to mention this? She must be crackin’ the whip again. Dance. Dance. Dance. Did you forget about [an earlier] email? [Poor] memory and carelessness are convenient tools for you.”
In 2010, Mandy brushed up on her forgery skills (or indulged her 45-year crush as part of her obsessive-compulsive disorder) by practicing the signature “Nicholas Rockefeller” dozens of times on a legal pad. But no matter how faithfully she scribbled his name, Nick was unwilling to trust her to execute scams without his full attention or do much of anything but apply for low-level legal jobs that might bring in some much-needed cash.
Because they had married in 1971 as Spiro Pavlovich and Monnette Caulffield, they couldn’t divorce as Nicholas Rockefeller and Madelaine Jones. But he didn’t mince words. “We have been apart for 25 years and I do not have any money for you,” Nick wrote to Mandy in 2013. “And very shortly my $2.5 million death benefit insurance will lapse for lack of payment so that won’t be there for you.” By 2014, Nick was ramping up the psychological abuse, calling her a “lazy shit head.”
Late in my research, I learned that, 30 years earlier, when Nick was at Yale Law School, he was already referring to Beverly Caulffield as a “dago” and brainwashing Mandy into believing that she was from a lower social class than his in New Orleans, when the opposite was the case. In 1984, she scrawled in a notebook: “[He’s saying] I’m a dago. I come from dagos—poor white trashy people from Dumaine Street [a poorer part of the French Quarter].... They have no plans, no goals, nothing except their back fences. So that’s my heritage and I must work hard to overcome it. Otherwise I’ll be even worse off than they are—I won’t even qualify for Dumaine St. I’ll be on the grate.”
In 1987, she wrote in a notebook that Nick’s verbal abuse had turned physical: “Today he beat me with a strap … He has beat me, shouted at me and done everything he can to prevent me from asking one question after another. He now asks is there anything else he can do besides killing me to stop me. Nothing else has worked.”
For 20 years, Mandy often returned to the New Orleans house where she was raised in order to check in on her parents. She took care of her mother, Bev, who died in 2008, and of her father, Bill, when he developed Alzheimer’s, and arranged for hospice care and his burial in 2012. She did this all as Monnette Caulffield, but by 2015 she was showing signs of dementia and disappeared from New Orleans.
Her parents’ house on Robin Lane in the River Ridge neighborhood sat empty for eight years. In 2023, a potential buyer hired a detective to track down the owner. He failed to find Mandy but finally connected with an older cousin, who, with her husband, had left Louisiana for Houston after Hurricane Katrina. When the couple entered the house to prepare it for sale, they found clothes, boxes of papers and files that Mandy had hoarded, and snakes in the swimming pool.
Nick’s half-sister, Laurie, assuming her married name, Cary Smith, contacted Monnette Caulffield’s cousin and the cousin’s son-in-law, a New Orleans attorney handling the Caulffield estate. For a time, she claimed to be Monnette’s lawyer, then ceased communication. Did Nick actually believe he could snag his late in-laws’ house? In 2023, he told Steve Blum that he stood to inherit some property in Louisiana. I suspect this is connected to a tantalizing entry still posted on Ancestry.com: “Born in New Orleans Orleans, Louisiana to William Michael Caulfield and Beverly Rita Gallo. Monette Caulffield passed away in Metairie Jefferson Louisiana.” No date is given for either the death or the post.
Given the misspelling of her first name, the repetition of “Orleans,” and the awkward inclusion of “Jefferson” (Parish) in between the city and state, my first guess was that Monnette, weakened by dementia, had faked her own death as part of an effort to bury her original identity. But I now think it was more likely a careless post by Nick or an underling in an effort to improve his chances of getting his hands on the Caulffield house, despite having no claim to it.
The house was finally sold in 2023, for $285,000, and the money was put in escrow. Mandy’s cousin and her husband have tried to find Mandy to let her know of the money waiting for her, but so far they have been unable to do so.
About seven years ago, Nick sought to off-load responsibility for Mandy onto a lawyer he knew, suggesting that he was just trying to help a friend who suffered from dementia. Nick told the lawyer that he didn’t want his brother—the imaginary Bill Rockefeller—to know he was supporting Mandy, and needed someone else to pay the rent on her Santa Monica apartment; he said he would provide reimbursement but never did. The lawyer soon felt Mandy was “making my life miserable,” leaving rambling voice messages in the middle of the night. When Mandy got sick, it was this lawyer—not Nick—who took her to the hospital.
In 2019, Mandy turned on the gas on her stove and forgot to turn it off. “People had to bang down her door and turn the gas off, she was inside breathing it and had no idea what was going on,” the landlord of her apartment building wrote Blum, who was now handling Nick’s contacts with Mandy. “She just came very close to blowing our building up and killing her neighbors.” Around that time, Mandy told Blum in passing, “I am Nicholas’s wife,” but Blum thought it was the dementia talking.
Later that year, Mandy suffered a fall in the common area of her apartment building. She now faced eviction for endangering her neighbors with the gas incident. Blum thought she might end up homeless and offered to intervene to keep her in her apartment, which he successfully did for a time. Nick told Blum he feared that Mandy had secured the services of attorney Gloria Allred and might #MeToo him. This was just another fantasy.
Nick e-mailed Blum: “She is a good person her whole life and has been a help to many with the most sensitive of matters. She has had a difficult life and always took care of not only herself but was too loving and too generous with her rotten family members who are deceased finally and with her landlord.”
As I reported this article, I grew concerned about Mandy’s whereabouts. “Madelaine P. Jones” was admitted in January 2024 to West Hills Hospital, in Los Angeles. Her contact at the time was Philomena Curtis, one of Nick’s girlfriends and the beneficiary of his will, which he asked her to keep in her handbag. But Curtis died in early 2024, and that spring the county Department of Public Social Services closed its file on Mandy Jones because—ironically—it could not verify her identity. Internet searches and checks with assisted-living facilities in L.A. have yielded no leads. Neither has a missing-person report nor inquiries to county health officials.
Was she “on the grate”?
Helen Kim, who became the court-appointed special administrator in the Pavlovich-Rockefeller case and has represented Chatelain in court, has had trouble getting to the bottom of the case. Kim and Chatelain declined to comment for this story. More than 40 others provided important details with the understanding that their names would not be used.
In and out of the hospital in the last year of his life, Nick still couldn’t resist telling a few more tall tales. He lied about plans to host a cocktail party in his Century City office for J. D. Vance and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. When Blum brought him a copy of a new biography of F.B.I. Director J. Edgar Hoover, Nick told Blum that as a child he had been with “the governor” (Nelson Rockefeller) when he spoke to Hoover about the Kennedy assassination. It never made sense that a descendant of William Rockefeller had such a strong connection to Nelson. But Blum didn’t give it too much thought. “I figured, ‘What do I know? Maybe they married cousins, like the Roosevelts.” Blum also didn’t linger on Nick having said offhandly, “It’ll all come out about me at the funeral.”
In early 2024, Nick asked Blum to cover the $5,000 in annual dues for his American Express Black Card, even though he was too sick to use it. Blum balked, but he did pay Nick’s monthly medical-insurance premium. He figured that refusing to do the latter would be a death sentence for his friend of 40 years. Blum was perplexed by Nick’s cash crunch and lack of Medicare coverage but was willing to accept the story about the Rockefeller siblings not releasing trust money to the self-described “black sheep of the family.”
That sense of himself, or who he thought he was, haunted him. In his later years, Nick saw a psychotherapist, and he confided to a friend that he had told her of his personal pain in being a big disappointment to his family. He had hoped to be the leading Rockefeller of his generation.
Nicholas Rockefeller died on October 31, 2024, with $35,000 in the bank. Could he have socked away some money overseas? Perhaps, but not likely.
In May of this year, I got a chance to hear a few of Nick’s final voicemail messages. “My head feels like it got hit with a baseball bat,” he said. His deep, authoritative baritone still dripped of money, or what he thought it sounded like, but in his final days, ailing and with his defenses down, a tiny trace of a New Orleans accent came through.
In the end, Spiro Pavlovich was fabulously successful at what he did, conning everyone about his identity except a pair of law-firm recruiters in the 1970s and a Yale undergraduate in the 1980s; it was Nicholas Rockefeller who failed. Spiro had a talent for opening doors that, had he been normal and honest, might not have been available to him. But Nick couldn’t walk all the way through them. Unable to monetize his fraud, he had to settle for rubbing shoulders with genuinely accomplished people. He died broke, an actor who fully inhabited the role but lost himself within it.
And yet he got away with his impersonation until the day he died, a feat accomplished by no other major impostor in modern history. Pavlovich’s ability to do so lends at least a little credence to the anti-elitism coursing through our era. How can highly credentialed Americans be smarter than everyone else if they’re so easily fooled?
In his final months, cycling through hospitals and dialysis centers, Nick experienced some rough generational justice, though he might not have known it. Still paranoid, he was often admitted under assumed names. At the U.C.L.A. Medical Center, his grandiosity intact, he asked the nurses to address him as “Judge.” When a couple of young hospital orderlies there learned that he was a Rockefeller, it meant little to them. “Rockefeller” was a name they and many others of their generation found only vaguely familiar. They thought of it as a Manhattan tourist destination where Tina Fey performed.
Jonathan Alter is a longtime journalist and the author of several books, including, most recently, American Reckoning: Inside Trump’s Trial—and My Own. He writes the Old Goats newsletter on Substack
