In 2000, Nicholas Rockefeller arranged for two dozen prominent Californians to board the U.S.S. Portsmouth, a 361-foot nuclear-powered attack submarine, which then submerged off the coast near San Diego. This “Inspection of the United States Submarine Fleet Readiness” was a thrilling day for all on board, a group that included Henry Kissinger’s son, David—a Hollywood producer—and comedian Tim Allen, who even got to steer the sub for a few minutes.
Nick—“Rocky” to certain friends—had convinced the navy to sponsor the “inspection” through his chairmanship of the Committee on Foreign Relations, an organization he founded and that was generally, if wrongly, assumed to be an affiliate of the New York–based Council on Foreign Relations, to which he also belonged.
Nick’s storied surname, sterling credentials, and high-level associations put him in the upper reaches of the American establishment. After graduating from Yale Law School in 1987 and clerking on the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals for Judge Dorothy Nelson, who considered him one of her best clerks ever, he became a partner in the Los Angeles office of Perkins Coie. Nick practiced what he called “investment law” and founded the Rockefeller Asia Advisory Group, RockVest Development, Rockefeller Pacific Ventures, Rockefeller Resources International, and the Rockefeller International Fund.
Nick mingled with George and Barbara Bush, had the Reagans’ private numbers at both their home in Bel Air and their ranch in Santa Barbara, and made a point of writing to President Clinton in 1996 to thank him for “the many courtesies that you have extended to me” since reaching the presidency.
For years, he had invited a rotating list of 20 or so lawyers, judges, actors, journalists, and scholars to a private room at the Peninsula Hotel or Toscana in Brentwood for an intimate evening with former senator John Kerry, or former presidential candidate Gary Hart, or publisher Steve Forbes, or General Wesley Clark. A less glittering session might include the Indonesian ambassador to the United Nations or a member of the National Security Council, but Nick was always eager to go deep in the foreign-policy weeds. He impressed people with his erudite questions. After an evening with Madeleine Albright, one attendee noted, “If you didn’t know better, you would have thought Rockefeller was the secretary of state.”
Nick seemed especially well versed on emerging Chinese capitalism, about which he’d written a chapter in a scholarly book. He was a Davos man, naturally, appearing on an Asia-related panel there with Klaus Schwab, founder of the elite business conclave. He served as a board member, alongside Patrick Soon-Shiong, the owner of the Los Angeles Times, and other major C.E.O.’s, of the Rand Corporation’s Asia Pacific Policy Advisory Board, the Pacific Council on International Policy, and the World Affairs Council. He spent years on the visiting boards of the University of Oregon and Pepperdine law schools, among other nonprofit commitments. He was also a major donor to his alma mater, Yale Law School, to which he pledged a posthumous $5 million dollars in Exxon stock.
Nick traveled often to China, and his Rockefeller-branded investment vehicles spawned several Sino-American projects—as well as suspicions that he was a Chinese-intelligence asset. In 2002, the mayor of Wuhan dedicated a plaque honoring Nicholas Rockefeller as an “international adviser to the Municipal Government.” Shanghai International University put him on one of its boards. And in Zhejiang province, “Mr. Rockefeller” was granted a one-on-one meeting and private lunch with an up-and-coming Communist Party boss named Xi Jinping.
Nick spent much of 2023 and 2024 in the hospital, where he checked in under an assumed name (for personal-security reasons). On October 31, 2024, he died at 78 of endocarditis, kidney failure, and other ailments at Hoag Hospital in Newport Beach. A Yale Law School classmate, Helen Kim, was by his side.
Word spread fast. At 6:30 a.m. P.S.T. on October 31, just a few hours after his death, Rachel Weil, the co–class secretary for the Yale Law School class of 1987, e-mailed all of their classmates with the subject line: “Sad, sad news—Nicholas Rockefeller.” “Nick was a wonderful man,” Weil wrote. “I remember, to this day, how kind he was to me in law school, and the world will be diminished by his absence. Rest in peace, kind friend.”
In the days that followed his death, Kim and another of Nick’s lawyers and Yale Law School classmates, Steve Blum, began making arrangements. Nick’s compartmentalized private life had always been a mystery, even to close friends. Now the compartments began breaking down.
Nick was a convivial bachelor who juggled intense relationships with a half-dozen women. He was generous with all of them, as he was with the strippers he met at Deja Vu, Bare Elegance, and the other nightclubs he frequented in the L.A. area. When strippers he knew applied to local colleges and law schools, he often wrote them lavish recommendations on Rockefeller stationery. Most were admitted.
Nick had informed his lawyers that his 2020 handwritten will—unusual for a Rockefeller, but that was Rocky—could be found in a handbag that he liked to call “the football,” after the briefcase with the nuclear codes carried by a White House military aide. The handbag belonged to Australian-born Philomena Curtis, one of his girlfriends, and the will called for her to receive the bulk of his fortune.
But in mid-2024, Curtis fell down a flight of steps in Nick’s Santa Monica apartment, cracked her head, and died shortly thereafter. Nick wailed in grief when he heard the news and told Kim to take the handbag for safekeeping. Meanwhile, he left a voice message for Blum saying he wanted him “in charge” of the estate, which he said included international holdings, and that with Curtis dead, his fortune should be distributed to the other women in his life, including a longtime business associate, Mandy Jones.
Kim and Blum both knew their friend Nick was having cash-flow problems, which he had long attributed to squabbles with his brother over disbursements from a Rockefeller trust fund. In the last year of his life, these lawyers—especially Blum—were paying his rent, health insurance, and other expenses. Now they discovered that the house in Malibu he had mentioned for years did not exist. Neither did the villa in Hawaii or the collection of classic cars that was “bigger than Jay Leno’s.”
When Kim phoned the Rockefeller Global Family Office, in New York—a call that dozens of people should have made over the previous 40 years—she was told that Nick was “not recognized as a member of the Rockefeller family.”
So who was he? Kim had contacts with Rockefeller Resources International, a Chinese natural-gas company that paid for Rockefeller’s 4,000-square-foot office suite in Century City, which featured clocks on the walls showing the time in six cities around the world where the company’s branch offices were said to be located. Kim convinced the landlord to let her in.
What she found in his desk drawers was “jaw-dropping”: a strange and haphazard collection of false IDs, passports, and birth certificates; an application to Yale Law School in the name of a legendary British aviator; and Nick’s near-perfect LSAT scores from 1983. It seemed as if Rocky hoped that after his death someone would find the evidence of his masterful con artistry.
When Kim and a co-worker visited the Santa Monica apartment, they discovered more incriminating evidence, including an advance directive regarding medical treatment with the signatures of two witnesses—Mandy Jones and Faye Huang, one of Nick’s girlfriends—that Blum later showed had been forged by Nick. Kim excluded Blum from the apartment search, which led to the two Yale Law School classmates briefly squaring off in court over who would be the executor of the Rockefeller estate, with both claiming to have been designated so by Nick.
But was there any real money? Years earlier, Blum had glimpsed a Merrill Lynch statement on Nick’s desk that he now thinks his old friend wanted him to see. The document, which showed Nick with a net worth of more than $300 million dollars, was phony. Another put his assets north of a billion dollars.
Then there was the $413 million that Blum had helped him win in arbitration against a Chinese tech firm—a directed judgement upheld by the California Supreme Court but still uncollected. This was the big fish of Nick’s legal career that he still hadn’t reeled in. While hospitalized in 2024, Nick had moaned, “The 413 … the 413,” like a cross between Charles Foster Kane and Captain Ahab.
Whatever his financial scorecard, this “Rockefeller” did much of what he set out to do. Unlike almost every other modern imposter, he died with his secret intact. For four decades, his friends, girlfriends, classmates, accountants, partners, and adversaries in court never learned the truth. Several had suspicions, but none followed up on them beyond cursory Internet searches.
Frank Abagnale, of Catch Me if You Can fame, lied prolifically about his scams in the nearly half-century since he was caught, but Nick left thousands of documents that shed rare light on the truth of an imposter’s life. It turns out that dead men tell fewer tall tales than live ones do.
As the story of Nick’s false identity spread, some friends recalled the celebrated case of “Clark Rockefeller,” the German immigrant who 20 years ago used the illustrious name to fool his wife, a Boston club, and the writer Walter Kirn before he was convicted of kidnapping and murder. Others were more familiar with “Christopher Rockefeller,” the French immigrant who also pretended to be related to Dino De Laurentiis, Oscar de la Renta, and Sophia Loren before his arrest. As serial imposters and criminals, Clark and Christopher had the edge, but as a “Rockefeller” who penetrated the American establishment, Nick made his fellow con men look like pikers. The same goes for Anna Delvey and other pretenders to the throne of pretenders.
While all great con artists believe their own cons, they differ in their motivations. Nick’s scamming reflected his hunger for more than just another grift. He craved social status, legitimate business success, and the warm feeling that comes from being a depositor in the informal favor bank (recommendations, introductions) that certifies one’s place in the global elite. He knew at some level that he was always better at brokering social capital than stealing or legally amassing the real kind. The lies were his grease. Some were epic bullshit, a habit he developed early; others—such as his ever changing C.V.—were customized with sophistication to impress his marks, whom he considered friends even as he bilked them.
Nick was smart enough to ascend on his own, but from an early age he preferred what he called “the Game”—the frisson of successful subterfuge—to the rewards of playing by the rules. Embedded in the upper echelon of society, he was a spy for the working class who never reported back to the home office—a man out for himself but also for a lost world of wise men in wood-paneled conference rooms. He got so close to the glimmering juncture of meritocracy and aristocracy that he almost belonged there.
In high school, his besotted future wife called him “James Bond,” and the story of the rest of their lives has the feel of a movie mash-up: The Talented Mr. Ripley meets Catch Me if You Can, with traces of Bonnie and Clyde, The Carpetbaggers, The Wolf of Wall Street, and Alex Gibney’s documentary The China Hustle, where the Chinese con the con men.
Nick’s story had comic aspects as well as darker ones, encompassing not just fraud but betrayal, S&M, psychological abuse, and evidence of a faked death. Rocky knew he could be exasperating and told Blum that he sometimes saw himself as the endlessly demanding houseguest Sheridan Whiteside from the 1941 Kaufman and Hart classic, The Man Who Came to Dinner. But the film he truly loved was Alfred Hitchcock’s immortal North by Northwest, in which Cary Grant is mistaken for a man who turns out not to exist.
Nicholas Rockefeller has surely earned his place in the pantheon of American imposters, but his story is about more than petty grifting and serial impersonation. He hacked the American elite so thoroughly that he managed to fool admissions offices at Harvard and Yale at least five times. He inhabited his role so fully that he defied the odds favoring his exposure. And he made his delusions of grandeur so real that they now hardly seem to be delusions at all, just the career ambitions of a sociopathic social climber.
I heard nothing of any of this until January, when I received an e-mail from Richard Painter, an anti-Trump conservative ethicist I know slightly. He attached a link to a 1976 article in The Harvard Crimson. Was I the same Jonathan Alter who wrote it? When I said yes, Painter, a close friend of Nick’s from Yale Law School, suggested we talk.
I soon learned that Kim had arranged for a sheriff to lift Nick’s fingerprints at the Orange County Coroner before his remains were shipped to a mortuary on Canal Street in New Orleans for cremation. When the F.B.I. fed the prints into its database, they matched those of a Louisiana man named Spiro Pavlovich.
Spiro Pavlovich. I hadn’t thought of him in 49 years.
“Born Different”
My first break in journalism came courtesy of Spiro Pavlovich. In the winter of 1976, I was an 18-year-old Harvard freshman “comping”—competing—to win a place on The Harvard Crimson, a well-trod path for aspiring journalists. It was a rough process. Nicholas Lemann (future dean of the Columbia Journalism School), Jim Cramer (future host of Mad Money), and Steve Ballmer (future C.E.O. of Microsoft) were among the upperclassmen who ran the paper, and they were not easily impressed.
But I was lucky enough to spot a short A.P. story about the arrest of a Harvard student and his wife. The story said a New Orleans native named Spiro Pavlovich had faked his way into Harvard Law School not once but twice, and that his wife, Monnette Caulffield, had faked her way into Harvard Business School. Both had lied on their applications for federally insured student loans, which led to their arrests by the F.B.I.
The long feature I wrote passed muster with the Crimson editors, and it gave me a window on status ambition in America. The story of Spiro and Monnette showed that no matter where you come from, you can fake it till you make it—all the way up to the highest rung.
Spiro’s journey upward was a twisted one. The son of a onetime Plaquemines Parish orange farmer of Slavic extraction who was crushed to death on a construction site when Spiro was only four months old, he was raised in a tiny house in the Gentilly section of New Orleans. His mother, Audrey, a scrappy and ambitious teacher, remarried and had a daughter, Laurie Chatelain, but Spiro’s stepfather, Verdun Chatelain, deserted the family when Spiro was eight and paid his ex-wife a mere $145 a month in alimony. Spiro—a Cub Scout and good student—scored in the 98th percentile on a standardized test, which helped him get into Jesuit High School, one of the best schools in the city, where he was active in the drama club and performed in a one-act play that won first prize in a statewide competition.
Spiro was considered the coolest guy in his class when he met a stunning blonde at a dance in 1964. Monnette Caulffield was a student at the all-girls Ursuline Academy who lived in a comfortable ranch-style home with a pool in River Ridge, an upper-middle-class neighborhood at the time. Her father, Bill, was the C.F.O. of an oil supply firm, and her Italian-American mother, Beverly, a homemaker, was a fragile beauty who reminded Bev’s cousin of Blanche DuBois in A Streetcar Named Desire.
Spiro was from one of the poorer families at Jesuit, but he somehow cruised around in a new Thunderbird with a big smile while the other kids drove junk heaps from the 50s. He and Monnette were considered “fast.” Their friend Maureen Hanemann remembered being shocked when they were spotted out on a levee, zipped up in a sleeping bag together. “At that time, you just didn’t do that,” she told me in 1976.
This year, I obtained many of Monnette’s love letters, among other documents. In 1964, she wrote Spiro, with perfect penmanship:
“We’re somewhat lazy—definitely spoiled—that’s us, the great pair, we can outdo all others—you see my darling—they’re only regular, poor ordinary people. They’re just here, nothing really important ever happens to them. Oh, they’re born, married, and they eventually die. The same is not true of us. I’m so glad we were born different. Everything we (especially you) do is exceptional. People are going to know about us—you, the great actor, Moni—perhaps a great doctor.”
On the day she turned 17, Monnette wrote Spiro that she loved not just “the unruly curl” on his forehead but his “depth of character.” She added: “I love my Mustang very much and can hardly wait to drive you around in it—first I have to learn to drive the Mustang though.
“Love to my boy, Mustang Moni”
By 1964, Spiro was already cheating on her, a pattern he would continue through various identities for the next six decades. She sent him a telegram: MY FEELINGS ABOUT YOU ARE THE SAME BUT LOVE CANNOT EXIST WHERE THERE IS DECEIT. UNTIL THE LAST. MONNETTE.
Monnette sometimes addressed Spiro in her letters as “James,” as in James Bond. “I will never leave you, 007—you can never get away. I want to be wild with you forever,” she wrote.
By this time, Spiro was in college—first at Loyola University, then Tulane—and apparently not inclined to write back. But that didn’t deter her. “We will be a famous couple all over and we will reside in our great land of California,” she wrote. “Just think what awaits us there! It is the only place we belong—in Calif. and one day we will be there—on TOP!”
Spiro had a reputation as an operator. At Loyola, he sponsored a formal dance, promising that Aretha Franklin would be there. When the evening arrived, he explained that she had been forced to cancel but he had arranged for a local nightclub singer to perform in her place. Maureen Hanemann’s husband, Ardley, saw Spiro after he transferred to Tulane and noticed that there were signs in his car promoting another Aretha dance. “Spiro, what are these signs?” asked Hanemann. Spiro’s inner Music Man surfaced. “No, no,” he assured him. “This time she really is coming.”
Spiro didn’t study much, and he left Tulane a year short of graduation, which his attentive mother must have known about. A prescient fraternity cartoon sketch of him from the period shows a sideburned Spiro wearing a button reading, bad risk, and clutching dollar bills behind his back as he peers at a sign that says, Forecast: More Snow. The date was November 17, 1967, just before he first snowed Harvard Law School.
The following year, Spiro was in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where he called himself “Bud” in recognition of the unpopularity of Richard Nixon’s vice president, Spiro Agnew. Monnette’s parents were appalled that she followed her boyfriend to Harvard for a time, even if they didn’t know the details.
Spiro did well enough in his first two years that no one at Harvard found anything amiss. It was a law firm that caught him. In an interview for a job as a summer associate with the New Orleans offices of King and Spaulding, Spiro claimed that he was the great-grandnephew of Czar Nicholas of Russia. When the conversation turned to his home state, he said that another uncle “owned most of lower Louisiana,” and that he was the godson of Leander Perez, the legendary boss of Plaquemines Parish.
By this time suspicions were mounting, but Spiro didn’t sink himself until he claimed to be an avid scuba diver. A partner with a lot of diving experience fooled him into betraying his complete ignorance of the subject, then alerted Tulane and Harvard Law, which asked King and Spaulding if it wanted to press charges. The firm declined, but in February of 1971, Spiro was quietly expelled from Harvard.
Pavlovich returned home and almost immediately began plotting his comeback. He changed his name to Jason Scott Cord. This was an homage to “Jonas Cord,” a Howard Hughes–like aviation magnate and Hollywood tycoon in Harold Robbins’s best-selling novel The Carpetbaggers, which became a 1964 hit film starring George Peppard. In the film, Cord seduces, marries, and abandons an heiress named Monica, who pines for him for years. In Cambridge, Spiro had paid little attention to Monnette, but now they reconnected in New Orleans and began a life of crime together. Her new pseudonym: Monica Cabot.
After nearly missing the deadline, Spiro Pavlovich, now Jason Cord, was admitted in July of 1971 to the summer session of Louisiana State University in New Orleans as a straight-A transfer student from Tulane. This was his second faked Tulane transcript in three years. Until the 1990s, most colleges and graduate schools did little or nothing to tamper-proof their records, which left talented forgers like Pavlovich to cut and paste “A’s” and dates into old transcripts, then take them to the same kind of offset printers used by the colleges themselves.
Monnette, meanwhile, took a job at a real-estate agency in New Orleans and informed friends that she was now married to a Tulane medical-school student. In the summer of 1972, she told Maureen Hanemann that her teenage romance with Spiro was a part of her life “she’d rather forget.”
In truth, Spiro and Monnette had by that time been married for about a year, though even many family members didn’t know it.
With his new name, Spiro legitimately graduated from the University of New Orleans with honors in 1973. In an act of chutzpah or foolishness or some combination, he applied to Harvard Law School again, this time as Jason Cord, and again he was admitted, with a transcript the school’s registrar later told a reporter was “one of the best we’ve ever seen.” Most likely, it was good but not superb until he doctored it. His extra-curricular activities and work history were almost certainly fraudulent. The LSAT scores were real, but by that time he had already attended two and a half years of law school.
Spiro returned to Cambridge in the fall of 1973, this time in Harvard’s elite joint law-and-business program. To escape notice, “Jason” grew a goatee, wore tinted glasses indoors, and sat in the back of the classroom. But he couldn’t help himself. He bragged that he had been a Rhodes Scholar (or sometimes a Marshall Scholar) and had won the Einstein Prize in mathematics. And he often challenged professors after class—a bold move for a first-year student, though no big deal for someone who had taken the classes before. Professor Detlev Vagts told me in 1976 that he had “a vague feeling of familiarity” when he saw Jason Cord at a cocktail party, but he figured he must just be another “old-timer.” He called Spiro’s decision to enroll in his seminar for a second time “a death wish.”
In December 1973, Monnette wrote, “I will never leave you. I am so happy and proud just to be married to you and share your apartment. Do not let those fights or break ups between other married couples affect you. I want you on top of me. You are the boss. You are in charge. I am your slave, your mistress.”
Spiro spent his second year across the Charles River at Harvard Business School, where he could be more active without fear of exposure. He chaired the H.B.S. social committee and sent out Christmas cards. Classmates thought of him as an international man of mystery. He hinted that he was a pilot and former paratrooper who worked for the C.I.A. Or went undercover in the fight between “the branches of government.” Or helped Nixon in retirement at San Clemente. He told friends that he was jetting off to Spain for the coronation of King Juan Carlos.
“Jason” told classmates that he had “very substantial resources” and an uncle who was helping him buy a $10 million investment fund. He drove a used silver-blue Mercedes with California plates and wore an expensive suit, which he apparently paid for with the proceeds of his small grifts.
Cutting a figure as an aristocrat, he introduced Monnette as his wife, “Monica Cord from New York.” Two recipes by Monica Cord appeared in the Business School Wives Association’s 1974-1975 cookbook. One of them, for “kitchen donuts,” included this annotation with a not-so-subtle hint about her social status: “The late Dwight Eisenhower delighted in personally making these for family and friends.”
That year, Monnette decided that she wanted to go to Harvard Business School, too. With Spiro’s help, she applied as Cary Monica Cabot and was admitted thanks to her faked straight-A transcripts from the University of New Orleans, a college she had in fact only attended for a brief time and left without receiving any credit. In the business-school yearbook, Monica Cabot listed a degree in biophysics from Radcliffe, which offered no such undergraduate major.
As Monica Cabot, she told dorm-mates that she was from Boston, which strongly implied that she was one of those Cabots, the oldest of the old Brahmin families, the one of whom it was said, “The Lowells speak only to the Cabots, and the Cabots speak only to God.” Classmates thought it peculiar that a Cabot spoke with a southern accent.
One day, “Jason Cord” came over to Chase Hall, where “Monica Cabot” lived, but it wasn’t to see her. He was bringing Chinese food to a new girlfriend. When he realized that he had forgotten to bring wine, he went down the hall to his wife’s room, knocked on her door, and she gave him a bottle. After that, Monnette briefly dated a classmate, but he later told other students that she was only interested in three things: money, ballet, and Jason Cord. Monnette had no math background, and business-school classmates unimpressed by her attempts to analyze case studies later told me they thought she would have flunked out if she hadn’t been caught.
A few top firms offered “Jason Cord” summer-associate positions for 1976. His first choice was Cravath, Swaine and Moore, which was then arguably the most prestigious corporate-law firm in the country. Once again, it was a law firm—not Harvard—that tripped him up. This time it was because he claimed that as a placekicker for Louisiana State University (whose New Orleans campus had become the University of New Orleans in 1974) he had kicked the longest field goal in Southern Conference history. Unfortunately for him, one of the Cravath partners knew his college football.
Cravath notified Harvard, which launched an investigation. After matching the handwriting in Jason Cord’s exam books with that in letters that Spiro Pavlovich sent to the law school years earlier, the university alerted the F.B.I.
In December 1975, Spiro was arrested and charged with fraudulently applying for $9,300 in federally insured student loans (none of which he ever paid back). After his arraignment, he told reporters, “Sure, I’m scared about maybe going to jail for 15 years. I’ve never even had a parking ticket.” Harvard’s general counsel announced that from then on, only high schools and colleges—not students—would be allowed to submit transcripts. (Yale, as Spiro and Monnette would soon learn, didn’t get Harvard’s memo.) Monnette was soon arrested, too, which prompted Free Monica Cabot T-shirts at the business school.
The next month, during law-school exams, Spiro showed up “in disguise,” as a student told me then, with a stocking cap pulled down over huge glasses. “He thought if he could swing a few faculty votes to his side, he might ultimately prevail,” the friend said. Some classmates noted that his case showed that you didn’t need to go to private schools and the Ivies to make it at Harvard Law School.
But then his mood turned a little paranoid. Spiro “thinks he’s got the whole world against him,” one student said. It was as if he finally realized that Aretha Franklin wasn’t coming this time.
Soon, he was hospitalized for depression at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, awaiting the resolution of his case. Monnette was back at her parents’ house in New Orleans.
At 2:30 a.m. one night she wrote him a letter that read in part, “I have always loved you and been loyal. Yet now I feel as if I’ve brought this catastrophe upon us. You have put the weight on my small shoulders. Day by day I grow more weary of life. I am slipping. I will do almost anything you say. But I will not be without you.”
“I ache for the way I’ve hurt you.”
Had Monnette hurt Spiro in some way—perhaps by talking to the F.B.I.? Or was he just blaming her for his crimes? It’s unclear.
Spiro pleaded not guilty to defrauding the government. His lawyer later told the press, “It’s rather tragic. He just doesn’t get out of bed. He doesn’t want to do anything.” The Massachusetts judge placed him under the supervision of a Louisiana court.
In New Orleans, Monnette pleaded guilty. Her father found her top counsel and repaid her $2,500 in loans; her mother made sure she apologized to Harvard. Monnette received a suspended sentence and probation.
Meanwhile, Spiro passed the time watching two mini-series on network television: the 12-part Rich Man, Poor Man, which followed two brothers who take different paths; and the eight-part Captains and Kings, a story about a rags-to-riches business and political dynasty. Nearly three decades later, when his Yale friend Jon Liebman, co-C.E.O. of Brillstein Entertainment, sent him advance screeners of Season Four of The Sopranos, the man now known as Nick Rockefeller told him how much those 1970s TV epics meant to him.
Spiro was sick, but probably not as sick as he pretended to be. Back in New Orleans, his mother convinced a court to grant her legal supervision of her ailing son. Her aim—and his—seemed to be to win him maximum medical benefits without institutionalizing him. During a court-ordered medical examination, Spiro was entirely unresponsive, and one doctor, perhaps unfamiliar with his life story, found him to be “mentally retarded.” Another doctor testified that he was “suffering from chronic paranoid schizophrenia,” telling the judge that Spiro was much too thin, “not in touch with reality.” A family services official later concluded that “the definitive diagnosis cannot be established” because of the patient’s habitual “evasiveness.”
Audrey testified that her son was “extremely disruptive of attempts to move him involuntarily…. At any provocation his behavior reflects a belief that he may be ‘assassinated or kidnapped.’” She said that he was reluctant to step into the free community-assistance van but he couldn’t afford a private paramedical service. One court document listed his assets as less than $1,000.
The judge found Pavlovich “mentally incompetent” to stand trial and “incapable of managing his affairs” and granted Audrey’s request that her son be treated with therapy on an out-patient basis.
Soon, Spiro Pavlovich would prove perfectly capable of managing his own affairs. In fact, he became a highly capable criminal.
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
