Spiro Pavlovich had already proved himself to be a skilled forger and impostor, fooling Harvard’s law and business-school admissions offices three times on behalf of himself and his wife and partner in crime, Monnette Caulffield. But in 1980 he upped his game, using the fake letterhead of a Kenner, Louisiana, oil company to order a $1,500 Polaroid ID-4 system, a bulky, gray piece of equipment that included a camera, a laminator, and a die-cutter.
Spiro wrote himself notes on how to use it (“Place this side up into optical reader”), and he and Monnette set to work making dozens of fake IDs. Monnette, who had once wanted to be a doctor, now had an official-looking badge identifying her as chief resident in the psychiatry department at West Jefferson General Hospital, outside New Orleans. She used her real name, as she did for an IBM badge.
I discovered no clear evidence that those IDs, or any of the others in their files, were ever used. But I found phony driver’s licenses from half a dozen states and fake photo IDs with fake names from Stanford; Princeton (“Orange paper or yellow paper,” Spiro scrawled in a note to himself); the University of California, Berkeley; the University of Virginia; the University of Texas; and the University of Colorado. In his ID photos, an unsmiling Spiro was pictured with a suit and tie, while Monnette experimented with her look. On one card, she appeared as an ebullient blonde; on another, a scholarly brunette with glasses.
They had fun creating aliases. One ID showed Monnette as a Southwest Airlines employee named “Marlene Dietrich,” after the German actress who played an imposter in Witness for the Prosecution. (Pavlovich made a playful card for himself with the name “Marlen E. Dietrich.”)
Spiro and Monnette assembled other tools and materials for forgery, including sheets of the special patterned paper (usually green) used for checks and small strips of paper labeled “Cashier’s check,” cut with an X-Acto knife and glued on before scanning. In the pre-Internet 1980s, this was all they needed to forge cashier’s checks from the Chase Manhattan Bank and elsewhere, to kite checks (writing checks to themselves from multiple accounts with insufficient funds), and to fabricate checks for small sums that were easy to cash without detection.
The files include many clippings of obituaries and death notices, which suggests they may have tried to steal the identities of the deceased. And the presence of fraudulent financial statements indicates an intent to use them, possibly to obtain loans. None of this made the couple rich, but it allowed Pavlovich to arrive in New Haven in the fall of 1984 with tens of thousands of dollars in disposable income.
During the years he was grifting in Louisiana, Spiro made up a new life story for himself, starting with his birthday, which as a World War II buff he changed to June 6: D-day. He shaved nine years off his real age, which meant he seemed only 7 or 8 years older than most of his future Yale Law School classmates, not the 15 to 20 that he really was. And he assumed a new identity. For the rest of his life, Spiro Pavlovich would be known as Nicholas Rockefeller.
Nick’s résumé included a B.A. from Oxford, an M.A. from the University of London, positions with NATO in Brussels, the Council for Strategic Studies in London (there’s no such thing, though it sounds like the real-life International Institute for Strategic Studies), and the Bank of Oman in Tehran (conveniently uncheckable after the 1979 Iranian Revolution).
None of it was true, but Nick’s background and adventure stories didn’t sound outlandish at Yale Law School, the breeding ground of two presidents (Gerald Ford and Bill Clinton), a vice president (J. D. Vance), and four current Supreme Court justices. The class of 1987 produced no superstars, though it included several future judges, law professors, and cable-news regulars (George Conway, Richard Painter, and Craig Keshishian), as well as the late Denny Greene (the only Black member of the band Sha Na Na) and Robert Giuffra, who made Trump’s short list for attorney general and is now handling the appeal of his felony conviction in the Stormy Daniels case.
With only around 175 students in the class, everyone knew Nick reasonably well, and wondered about him and his affect, which reminded some of them of Thurston Howell III on Gilligan’s Island. “We always felt there was something off there,” Conway recalls. “But he was nice and likable and his quirks were amusing. If he were a nasty guy, people would say, ‘Let’s investigate him and figure this out.’ But he was an oddity.”
Classmates who came from humble origins were flattered that a Rockefeller would invite them out for coffee. Or for more. On at least one occasion, Nick took a few of his friends and one of his professors to a Connecticut brothel called the Garden of Allah.
Spiro Pavlovich, a.k.a. Jason Cord, a.k.a. Nicholas Rockefeller, was now a more careful con artist than he’d been at Harvard a decade earlier. Steve Blum remembers that Nick never told him explicitly that his mother was a Hapsburg princess; he just let him hear it from someone else.
Nick let it slip once or twice that his maroon Mercedes (repainted since his Harvard days) had come from “Uncle Nelson,” but he didn’t elaborate. He sometimes referred to his dead “Uncle Winnie” (Winthrop Rockefeller, former governor of Arkansas, his classmates presumed). So, was he the son of one of the other two Rockefeller brothers? Or perhaps Nelson’s love child? A few years earlier, Nelson had famously died in the saddle, but who was going to question his nephew about that?
At Mory’s and other Yale haunts, Nick was more expansive when describing his time with NATO, on the staff of British general John Hackett, the real, if long-retired, commander of NATO’s Northern Army Group. Sometimes he claimed that he had worked for several years on a secret NATO project that required him to spend six weeks in a safe house in Communist Romania.
One night over drinks, a classmate asked him about spycraft: What if you suspected the person offering you documents was a double agent? Nick swished his thick scotch glass and in a quick athletic motion rammed it a fraction of an inch from his friend’s face, showing that he could easily drive his nose into his brain. “I had no doubt that he had been some kind of agent,” the friend says.
Classmates watched in wonder as Nick skipped town for days without falling behind in class. What they didn’t know was that their challenging first year of legal education was his fifth. It was no surprise that his grades were mostly good, with plenty of his classes marked H for Honors. But when applying for clerkships, he forged his transcript by changing a few P (Pass) and LP (Low Pass) marks to H.
Monnette moved in for a time with him at the Taft, an apartment building on College Street. She typed his papers and blamed herself—never him—for their fights. Nick convinced Monnette that she was the manipulative one, when it’s clear that the opposite was the case. While visiting family in New Orleans, she bumped into an acquaintance. “He [Nick] told me that if I ever run into anyone to say the following, which I did: ‘Haven’t seen him in years. We’re divorced,’” Monnette wrote in a notebook.
Nick owned a copy of The Story of O, an erotic French novel, first published in 1954, about a beautiful woman who becomes her lover’s sex slave. A friend who briefly house-sat for Nick tells me he found handcuffs in his apartment. But according to Monnette’s notebook, her constant questions annoyed her husband and he lost interest in acting out his sexual fantasies with her. Instead, he began an on-and-off affair with a Chinese classmate.
Monnette seemed to feel as if she were being left behind at Yale, as she had been at Harvard. “I say I want to play the game but when it comes down to it, I’m not big league,” she wrote in a notebook. But just as “Jason Cord” had arranged for “Monica Cabot” to apply to Harvard Business School, now “Nick Rockefeller” would help his wife go to Yale Law School. Monnette moved west to give her fake applications from the University of California, San Diego, a bit more verisimilitude.
Only once, while at Yale, was Nick nearly unmasked. In 1981, Lord Nicholas Hervey, a son of the Marquess of Bristol, established the Rockingham Club, a place for European royalty and wealthy Americans to gather near campus that had been profiled in Andy Warhol’s Interview magazine. When the marquess died, Hervey was disinherited and told members they needed to raise $250,000 or the clubhouse would close.
One evening, as a few members sat around discussing the club’s fate, someone pointed to Nick and said, “You can come up with the $250K, right?” When he demurred, an undergraduate named Stephen Kahn, who would go on to make a fortune in the teen-fashion business, said, “What are you, a fake?” Nick stood and rushed toward Kahn, who took a swing at him. “That’s the only time I ever saw Nick lose his temper,” an eyewitness tells me. Rocky walked away with a black eye, his fake status intact.
Nick seemed to cultivate his eccentricities. On some days, he’d be overdressed; on others, he looked shabby genteel in cords and a rumpled coat from a secondhand store. For a class on real-estate development, he worked on a paper with Julia Mahoney, who recalls that he pulled his weight but seemed to be always flying off to London. “He mentioned once that he was engaged to a woman who died,” Mahoney remembers. “He said it in a tone suggesting he wouldn’t appreciate any follow-up questions, and I wondered why we never heard anything more about the poor woman.” She concluded that he was a troubled guy and probably not a Rockefeller, but kept her suspicions to herself.
Nick was moving up, playing his cards well enough to receive a prestigious clerkship. As a Yale member of the conservative Federalist Society, he might have been expected to clerk for a conservative. But the post he won was with Judge Dorothy Nelson, a liberal Jimmy Carter appointee to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals who would later be short-listed for the Supreme Court. He was headed to California now, just as Monnette had predicted when they were teenage sweethearts. Monnette, meanwhile, showed up in the fall of 1987 for her first year at Yale Law School with a new identity: Mandy Jones. Until Nick’s death, in 2024, almost no one knew that they were married.
The “Other Side” of the Family
After Nick’s clerkship on the Ninth Circuit ended in 1988, Judge Nelson sent him an unusually warm handwritten note praising him as “one of the most outstanding clerks we have ever had.” She admired his “world awareness, concern for humanity and dedication to high ideals,” not to mention his willingness to “bring a chocolate cake when it was needed.”
From then on, Nick’s fraudulence was wrapped in what he thought of as Rockefeller-style largesse. He often sent steaks or oranges (which his actual, Slavic-born father had once grown) to friends for Christmas and flowers to anyone he heard was in the hospital, including lawyers he was stiffing at the time. If certain foreign friends had visa problems, he would use the Rockefeller name to try to fix them. If someone needed a loan, he would vouch for their credit-worthiness. And if he couldn’t afford a proper bonus for his secretary (whom he treated well), he’d compensate with a trip to Hawaii.
For college and law-school applicants, Nick did more than write recommendations on Rockefeller stationery. He spent hours counseling them on their choices and conducting practice interviews as if he were one of those admissions officers he knew how to fool. Did he expect anything in return from their well-connected parents? Probably. Did he want favors from strippers he helped get into law school? Maybe a lap dance.
In 1989, Nick took and passed the bar exam in Pennsylvania, a state he had no connection to (presumably because that state bar association required no fingerprints, and he knew that his prints from his Harvard arrest would be on file with the F.B.I.). Once admitted in one state, he was automatically waived into the D.C. bar, which has no exam. So it was no surprise that his first full-time legal job was as an associate in the Washington office of O’Melveny and Myers, a prestigious corporate firm. Not long after, he transferred to its L.A. headquarters, where his problems began.
At first, the perch at O’Melveny was useful for Nick. It gave him access to trust documents that allowed him to make his own fake versions look highly realistic. Back in New Orleans, his mother, Audrey, who appeared to be in on “the game,” helped by buying a tiny number of shares of dozens of stocks (including one that showed a dividend of 93 cents) to give her son a sense of what those companies’ statements and other documents looked like. He would apparently use forged stock certificates to lure unsuspecting partners into a wide variety of small investments with other people’s money.
Rocky was a lowly O’Melveny associate, but even decades later he pretended to have had a “close bond” with starchy senior partner Warren Christopher, who would soon become Bill Clinton’s first secretary of state. In the meantime, his prospects within the firm diminished when he was spotted having sex in a car in the parking garage.
Worse, a senior partner felt he had been evasive when asked whether he was a member of the California bar. In 1993, without probing his background, the firm quietly fired Nick, who briefly considered suing O’Melveny but thought better of it.
By now, Nick’s wife, Monnette, was a lawyer, too. She had worked harder and done better academically as Mandy Jones at Yale Law School than she did as Monica Cabot at Harvard Business School, but still made time for helping Nick with “the game.” While enrolled as Mandy Jones, she used the alias “Madeleine Racine” to send letters of inquiry to real Rockefellers, including Steven Rockefeller, the dean of Middlebury College. She also contacted the Trilateral Commission, an elite international group then chaired by David Rockefeller, chairman and C.E.O. of the Chase Manhattan Bank.
Mandy applied to be an editor at The Yale Law Journal, though the article, or “note,” that she had to write to be elected was at first rejected as poorly written. After she complained about being spurned on sexist grounds, she was finally brought aboard. Mandy served on the law review at the same time as future Supreme Court justice Brett Kavanaugh, though there’s no sign that they knew each other.
“She was very intense and private, and she said she had cut off all contact with all friends before coming to law school because she was driven to work hard there,” says Richard Lucas, the 1990 Yale Law School class secretary. “She was an odd person, and I’m not sure she was personally close to anyone in the class.”
After an externship with Judge Nelson and a 1991 clerkship with U.S. District Judge William P. Gray, Mandy followed in Nick’s footsteps by passing the bar in Pennsylvania and getting waived into D.C., where she worked for a time as an associate in the Washington office of Jones Day.
By this point, Nick had probably seen news stories about the California bar’s huge backlog of unexamined fingerprints, which sharply reduced the odds of being busted. So he and Mandy decided to go together in 1992 to an L.A. police station and risk being fingerprinted, per bar requirements. Nick ended up passing the California bar exam while Mandy, who used a mail drop in a mini-mall as her home address, either didn’t take the exam or failed it. Either way, she never became a member of the California bar.
In his successful bar application, Nick listed himself as five foot 11 and 190 pounds. That was taller than his real height and lighter than his real weight at the time, which a decade later would balloon for a time to around 300 pounds. He claimed that he had attended St. Catherine’s College, Oxford, from 1974 to 1977, when in fact he had in those years been at Harvard Law School and then in a courtroom and, later, a mental hospital.
For his residence history, Nick claimed to have lived on both Fifth Avenue and Sutton Place in New York, on the ritziest streets in Tehran (just before the revolution), Madrid, Paris, Monte Carlo, and Brussels, plus five different addresses in Mayfair and other posh sections of London. He attested that he currently resided at 22653 Pacific Coast Highway in Malibu (actually a storefront), an address he falsely claimed as his home for decades even as he lived most of the time in an ordinary rental on 6th Street in Santa Monica.
Rocky’s friends thought it odd that they were never invited to his Malibu beach house, considering that his e-mail address was RockofMalibu@aol.com. After overhearing secretaries at his law firm wondering why he never had documents sent there by messenger, he started telling some people that the house had burned down in a wildfire.
Nick also led people to believe he was often relaxing with relatives at the Rockefeller villa on the Big Island of Hawaii or on his yacht anchored offshore. To drive home the Hawaii connection, his e-mails often included the footer “Rock Kona,” a reference to the western side of the Big Island.
Nick didn’t know any real Rockefellers in Hawaii or anywhere else, but he did meet David Rockefeller at least once. In the late 1980s, he and a Yale classmate got in an elevator at Rockefeller Center and found David inside. “Hi, I’m Nicholas. Good to see you,” Nick said. David looked at him quizzically before greeting him politely. When they got off, Nick quickly explained to his friend that David was from the “other side” of the family.
Nick appears to have concluded that it was better to steer clear of New York, home of many Rockefellers. When he did go, he’d stay at the Yale Club, where he felt comfortable, and although he was a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, where David Rockefeller was a former chair of the board and four other real Rockefellers were members, he was seldom seen there.
In the 1990s, Nick occasionally faxed the office of Senator Jay Rockefeller, of West Virginia, sending him analytical pieces he wrote or a heads-up about Chinese friends they had in common who might be visiting the U.S. or hosting American travelers in China. One of Jay’s former chiefs of staff tells me that Jay likely figured that Nicholas was a distant cousin—descended not from his great-grandfather, the original John D. Rockefeller, but from J.D.’s brother William Rockefeller, co-founder of Standard Oil.
Upon entering Nick’s impressive Century City office, it was impossible to miss a 19th-century photograph of William, whose descendants are little known and hard to find online. When suggestible visitors gushed about how much their plump mustachioed host resembled his plump mustachioed ancestor, Nick would modestly chuckle, “Some people say that.”
From the start, Nick worked not just for law firms but for himself. In the 1990s, he hoped to become a movie producer, just as he and Mandy had dreamed in high school, and he took lunch meetings at the Ivy to talk about potential film projects, including one featuring a Playboy Playmate of the Month, Cathy St. George, that never got off the ground. He talked a big Hollywood game, offering to introduce a friend to Marlon Brando and bragging about knowing Elke Sommer.
But show business was peripheral. Nick’s main ambition was to be a major Establishment figure, even as the status of the old WASP aristocracy was fading. In 1993, he stole or dummied up Morgan Stanley stationery and wrote a draft of a long letter of recommendation for what turned out to be an unsuccessful application for membership in New York’s highly exclusive Metropolitan Club. The unnamed recommender (obviously Nick himself) explained how “Mr. Rockefeller” advised Congress on anti-apartheid legislation, while simultaneously counseling the South African government on how to take part in international auto racing. Mr. Rockefeller also deserved membership because he advised China on privatizing its coal ministry and on where to hold the 2000 Summer Olympics, organized Haitian relief, and pursued his scholarly interests in privatization and terrorism while teaching in China, Singapore, England, Germany, Italy, and the Czech Republic.
One fake entry in that fake C.V.—“pro bono counsel to the Olga Havel Medical Foundation”—showed Nick’s attention to detail. The real Rockefeller Brothers Foundation contributes often to that same nonprofit, which was established by the wife of Václav Havel, the renowned dissident and president of the Czech Republic.
Nick had met President Havel in 1991 at a dinner at the L.A. Westin when he broadsided Havel’s conversation with his Yale Law School classmate Craig Keshishian, who had worked briefly for Havel in Prague before becoming a pollster and Fox News commentator. Keshishian tells me that Nick did the same thing when Keshishian was talking to California governor Pete Wilson and again when he crashed the 1990 funeral of William French Smith, a prominent L.A. lawyer and Ronald Reagan’s first attorney general. “On behalf of the entire Rockefeller family, I extend my condolences,” Nick told Smith’s widow, before giving her a hug.
But Nick could also wear his name lightly in ways that enhanced his act. Tom Campbell, a Stanford professor and future member of Congress, first met him at an American Bar Association event and was impressed by his knowledge of anti-trust case law. They became friends. “He was funny and smart, and I never even knew he was related to the family. It never came up,” Campbell tells me.
“Nick was relational, not transactional,” Steve Blum recalls. “He was always building social capital.” Dan Sarnoff, a West Coast entrepreneur, remembers that in 2020 his daughter’s fiancé could not get out of Venezuela to attend his own wedding in the United States. “We had tried for nine months to get the visa,” Sarnoff says. “Two days after I asked Nick, it got done.”
Sarnoff, whose grandfather David Sarnoff founded NBC, says Nick was “everything you expected a lock-jawed, polished, perfectly mannered, Ivy-educated, extremely well-dressed WASP lawyer to be.” His act was so persuasive that he convinced Sarnoff that they had played together as young children.
But there was one moment when his abandonment of his old identity cost him. In 1991, his mother, Audrey Pavlovich, was involved in a serious car accident. She was rushed to a New Orleans hospital, then quickly discharged. Hours later, she was dead at 65 of a heart attack that an autopsy found was caused by cardiac contusions.
Nick, joining his half-sister, Laurie Chatelain Smith, who graduated from Yale College shortly after Nick’s second expulsion from Harvard Law School, used his real name to sue the hospital. Their New Orleans attorney thought they had a strong case to win a $500,000 judgment, the maximum in tort liability in Louisiana. But to prevail, Nick would have had to testify. “I need to have your brother here for trial,” the attorney wrote to Smith. He couldn’t do that, because he would have had to swear under oath that he was Spiro Pavlovich, when by that time he had been living for nearly a decade as Nicholas Rockefeller.
The judge granted Smith’s request that Monica Cabot of Glendale, California, become the executor of the estate. I still can’t figure out why Spiro and Monnette continued to employ that name 20 years after “Monica Cabot” was busted at Harvard Business School. In any event, because Spiro didn’t show up for the trial, he and his half-sister had no choice but to settle their case in 1995 for a paltry $9,900.
During this period, there were suspicions about Nick’s true identity. One day around 1992, he approached former governor Jerry Brown, then a candidate for president, who told him to pass along his contact information to “my people” on his staff. As Nick recounted the story to his friend David Schwarz, he informed the governor that if his staff wanted to get in touch with him, “they can talk to my people at 30 Rock!” When Nick ordered oysters Rockefeller at lunch, Schwarz began to think he was a fraud but didn’t follow up.
Kathleen Brown, former California state treasurer and Jerry’s sister, knew him from her 1994 gubernatorial campaign. “She’s good friends with Jay [Rockefeller],” Nick scribbled in a note to Mandy without a trace of worry.
Later, when Brown was at Goldman Sachs, Nick tried repeatedly to convert his social relationship with her into a business one. She demurred. Something about this guy didn’t feel right, Brown tells me. She tried to check him out online and couldn’t find anything.
No one could.
“It’s Only a Million”
From the 1950s through the 1970s, liberals and moderates in the G.O.P. were often called “Rockefeller Republicans,” after Nelson. As the party shifted further to the right, that species went extinct and most of the family turned Democratic. Nick sensed this and adjusted accordingly.
In 1995, he wrangled an invitation to President Clinton’s Pacific Rim Economic Conference, in Portland, and the following year he delivered a brief speech at a Clinton fundraiser held at the home of billionaire Eli Broad. Nick called for “direct communications between those with control over private resources and those with control over public resources.” In a follow-up letter, he thanked the president for sending him to see Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin. But Rubin tells me he has no recollection of any such meeting: “I would have remembered meeting a Rockefeller.”
Plenty of others do remember meeting him and may now wish they hadn’t. In 2002, Nick held a dinner honoring the dean of Yale Law School, Anthony Kronman. Afterward, Kronman, in fundraising mode, thanked him for “hosting once again a marvelous dinner-seminar” that “I really have begun to think of as ‘the Nicholas Rockefeller Yale Law School in Greater Los Angeles Great Talk over Fine Food Seminar.’”
Another Kronman letter began: “Dear Nick: You’re a real hero!” Nick made donations to Yale in the form of complicated annuities hidden behind dozens of pages of convincing trust documents written in thick legalese. It’s unclear whether more than a token amount ever arrived at the law school or if the check was always in the mail. The latter was the case for the $5 million he pledged to help out third-year students at the Yale School of Drama, which let him schmooze with actress Talia Shire and earned him a long letter from Yale president Richard Levin saying his gift would be called “the Nicholas Rockefeller Fund.”
Dean Kenneth Starr, at Pepperdine Caruso School of Law, and Dean Laird Kirkpatrick, at the University of Oregon Law School, had similar experiences. Both institutions responded enthusiastically to Nick’s offer to help them, then waited in vain for a donation or some other use of the Rockefeller name to raise money. A wealthy member of Oregon Law’s visiting committee complained about the school and wondered whether she should withdraw her financial support from a project. “It’s only a million, Caroline,” Nick told her. That was rich, other board members thought, coming from a Rockefeller who hadn’t coughed up much of anything himself.
To avoid arousing suspicion among those he needed to impress, Nick seemed to have a lifestyle befitting a Rockefeller. He drove a late-model BMW, jetted off to conferences in exotic locales, and picked up pricey dinner tabs with a $5,000-a-year American Express Black Card that he falsely claimed was one of the first awarded by “Jimmy Three Sticks” (the nickname of Shearson/American Express chairman James D. Robinson III), whom he claimed was a friend of his father’s. Nick, who had no dependents, was often happy to pop for $10,000 tables at L.A. foreign-policy banquets, where he could play the beneficent big shot.
Yet Nick never earned big money from Big Law or from his business deals. In the 1990s and early 2000s, he cycled through five corporate-law firms in Los Angeles; none worked out. He was hired serially as a non-equity partner, where you mostly eat (get paid) what you kill (new clients). But for all of his grandiosity, Rocky wasn’t much of a rainmaker. When it came to winning new business for his firms, he routinely overpromised and under-delivered, as his old classmate Craig Keshishian put it, in part because he preferred spending time on his own “investments” to hustling for new clients. So senior partners eased him out, figuring that, as a Rockefeller, he didn’t need the money anyway.
After Nick spent a couple of years at Perkins Coie in the early 2000s, his old paranoia surfaced. He demanded special security protocols when he entered and exited the building and insisted that his assigned parking space not contain his name. Kidnapping and even assassination, he told partners, were constant threats in his life. And he had a weakness for conspiracy theories, including for ones that involved the Rockefellers that he peddled to a Hollywood producer turned conspiracy theorist named Aaron Russo, among others. When Russo repeated Nick’s theories on Alex Jones’s radio show, they went viral, though none of Rocky’s high-hat friends seemed to notice.
Even as he simultaneously dated an Australian woman named Philomena Curtis and, according to a mutual friend, proposed to Dawn Haghighi, another Los Angeles attorney, he kept Monnette Caulffield, a.k.a. Mandy Jones, in his life. He described her to friends as a housewife with a law degree whom he took pity on because she lived in Glendale and was a Gold Star mother. At Nick’s insistence, Mandy was almost never seen with him. She was careful not to visit him at his law office or to speak to him on his office phone, reserving all communications for his private e-mail, which in later years would shed light on their twisted and abusive relationship.
Mandy’s positions at Jones Day and, later, Miller & Chevalier, among other law firms, gave her access to letterhead that was helpful in making her secret husband’s businesses look legitimate. For a time, she must have impressed her bosses by bringing RockVest Development Group and another of Nick’s shell companies, Rockefeller Asia, in as clients. But her formal “Dear Mr. Rockefeller” letters of engagement—like Bonnie hiring Clyde—yielded few if any billable hours for her law firm because these phony “Rockefeller” firms had little or no money to pay for pricey legal services.
After leaving Big Law, Mandy found a new role, stepping in as “Madelaine Jones, senior corporate counsel” at one of Nick’s shell companies when Nick needed a representative of the Rockefeller family to explain why he wasn’t paying legal fees or couldn’t sit for a deposition due to illness. Nick granted her power of attorney over his affairs, as well as over those of his nonexistent nephew and niece, “Peter Rockefeller” and “Nicole Rockefeller,” both of whom were deployed as needed. At least once, Mandy claimed she was writing a business associate on behalf of David Rockefeller, though I found no sign that doing so led to any deal, just more connections to people with a weakness for Rockefellers.
Nick liked to describe himself as an investment attorney. In 1997, he and two partners set up a merchant bank in Newport Beach called the Trenwith Group and announced that it would invest $100 million in small and medium-size businesses. The press release said the new company was capitalized by RockVest, a $600 million fund run by Nicholas Rockefeller with investments in bigger companies around the world. The New York Times reported that this Rockefeller scion planned to buy the 500-room Meliá Bali hotel, in Indonesia, just one of several big real-estate deals that he never consummated.
Other investments followed a similar trajectory. “Rocky would show me papers from Arab guys once in a while that would indicate we could do a huge business in oil and gas,” says Donald Bourassa, an Orange County lawyer. Whether those documents were real or fake, the deals mostly didn’t come through.
Nick opened a separate “Offices of Nicholas Rockefeller,” which promised to introduce high-net-worth individuals to high-ranking officials, foreign and domestic. Potential clients were told that the consulting firm was “negotiating toward $1 billion in joint ventures,” a statement that was neither true nor technically a lie. And his expertly forged business documents made it seem as if Rockefeller was just moments away from closing deals. When one project collapsed, it was on to the next one, with the blithe assumption that, this time, the business would come.
At some point in each of these deals, it finally became clear that Nick wasn’t one of the rich Rockefellers. The business deals and legal cases usually ended with him stiffing his own lawyers, often with the explanation that his brother Bill was in a fight over a family trust with their sister (in Nick’s telling, a liberal psychiatrist and Stanford graduate who lived for a while in Tiburón). As soon as that vague conflict was resolved, he swore, “the family trust” would pay whatever he owed.
In 2003, Perkins Coie fired Nick, in part because he insisted on suing a client, a Seattle entrepreneur named Seth Landau, for purportedly abusive language on a voicemail message that was deleted, per company policy, before it could be introduced into evidence. Landau had recently sued Nick and another Perkins attorney for malpractice after they didn’t read a contract carefully enough, destroying his business.
Landau, a bridge partner of Bill Gates’s, tells me that his obsession with this Bleak House–like case cost him his marriage and his peace of mind. He wrote the University of Oregon, Pepperdine, and other institutions to tell them that Rockefeller was a bad guy. They ignored him, in part because Mandy worked effectively to spread the word that Landau was deranged and out to get the whole Rockefeller family. Landau, who now admits that he should have contacted the true Rockefeller family office to determine whether his bête noire was a fraud, worried that he was bankrupting himself fighting a Rockefeller with deeper pockets than he had.
Nick’s two witnesses to the contents of the deleted voicemail were a pair of female Chinese interns with suspiciously similar affidavits; they were likely concocted by Nick. Eventually, a Seattle court ruled in Landau’s favor and ordered Nick to pay Landau’s $500,000 in legal fees and damages. To dodge that, Nick declared personal bankruptcy and changed his residency to Arizona, hiding out in a hotel there to avoid being served with a subpoena. During this period, Nick had disappointing news for his alleged fiancée, Dawn Haghighi. He couldn’t marry her until the Landau litigation was finished, which, in effect, meant never. The fact that he was still technically married (to Monnette Caulffield) didn’t come up. (Dawn Haghighi did not respond to air mail’s multiple requests for comment.)
One of Nick’s attorneys, Yale Lewis, who years earlier had handled Jimi Hendrix’s estate, was strung along for so long that he had to borrow money from a bank to keep his small Seattle law firm afloat. In his experience, some clients “are guarded and tell the truth, while others are unguarded and don’t. Nick was in the latter category, but with a certain charm.” Nick told Lewis a variation on his well-rehearsed story about trouble among Rockefeller siblings. In this telling, David Rockefeller once had a falling-out with his sister, Abby, but they had worked it out, just as he hoped to do soon with his own Rockefeller siblings, after which Lewis would get paid.
He never was, of course. Nick convinced otherwise savvy American lawyers and investors that he could be trusted, then fleeced them. His Chinese business partners would be wiser to the ways of the world.
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
