Summary:

Dark triad conman cons his way into the upper class and women's hearts from teenage age, despite having no legal status or financial resources of his own and only gets caught due to his emotional attachment to his daughter in his late 40s.

His life:

Christian Karl Gerhartsreiter (born February 21, 1961) is a German impostor and convicted murderer currently serving a prison sentence in the United States. In his late teens, Gerhartsreiter moved to the US, where he lived under a succession of aliases while variously claiming to be an art collector, a physicist, a ship's captain, a negotiator of international debt agreements, and an English aristocrat.

In 1978, he met an American couple, Elmer and Jean Kelln, who were traveling through Germany. He later used their names to obtain permission to enter the US, falsely declaring that the Kellns had invited him to stay with them in California. He initially made his way to Berlin, Connecticut where he found a family (the Savios) willing to let him live with them and was accepted as a foreign exchange student at Berlin High School in 1979. He told the Savios that he was from a wealthy family in Germany. Eventually he wore out his welcome with the Savios and was told to leave.[3]

Gerhartsreiter intended to become an actor when he arrived in the United States and headed toward California to pursue that career. By the time he had reached Milwaukee, Wisconsin, he had changed his name to "Chris Gerhart." While there, he enrolled in a class at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee. Deciding that he wanted to become a U.S. citizen, he sought a woman who would marry him.[4] He married 22-year-old Amy Jersild Duhnke in 1981 in Madison, Wisconsin, purportedly to obtain his green card. To convince her to marry him, he falsely claimed that if he had to go back to Germany, he would have to go into the Army and would be sent to fight in the Cold War on the Russian front line. The day after the wedding took place,[5] Gerhartsreiter left his wife and headed for California.[4] Duhnke filed for divorce in 1992.[5]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christian_Gerhartsreiter#Custodial_kidnapping_and_assault_conviction

In Connecticut, Christopher Crowe gravitated once more to private clubs and older women. At the Indian Harbor Yacht Club, in Greenwich, into which he walked “pretending to own the place,” as one observer told The Boston Globe, he struck pay dirt: someone who worked at S. N. Phelps and Company, a leading brokerage firm based in Greenwich. Soon the young man got an interview with the well-known venture capitalist Stan Phelps, a graduate of Yale University and Harvard Business School, who had trained junk-bond king Michael Milken, among others. Phelps hired Crowe as a computer whiz, according to a fellow employee at the firm. (Phelps didn’t respond to numerous requests for comment.) “This guy, Christopher Crowe, looked like he was worth a million bucks,” says the employee. “The way he dressed, the way he carried himself, his air. Always had custom-made shirts—with his monogram, CCC, on the pocket—the Burberry raincoat. He said he was a producer from L.A., who had done all of the Alfred Hitchcock remakes, and if you go back 20 years, there was a Christopher Crowe who was a producer.” ADVERTISEMENT

Although he was hired to work in computers, Crowe was frequently in the trading room, talking about Hitchcock or, more often, himself. He would speak about his mother and sister in Paris and show photographs of his mansion in France. The job ended abruptly when someone checked his background through the Social Security number he had written on his application. It reportedly came back as the number of David Berkowitz, known as Son of Sam, the serial killer who had haunted New Yorkers in the 70s. Crowe was promptly fired.

Despite having neither a college degree nor any semblance of experience, Crowe was next hired to head a department in the U.S. offices of Nikko Securities, Ltd., on Wall Street, with an estimated annual base salary of $150,000. “Everyone was flabbergasted,” says his former Phelps co-worker. “We could not even imagine how he got a job he was clearly not capable of handling.” He was hired by a now deceased ex–Goldman Sachs executive, who “was taken by people who seemed to be blue-blooded, and wasn’t the kind of guy who would necessarily check references,” one of Crowe’s fellow employees remembers.

nikko institutes corporate bond department, read a July 13, 1987, press release about the company’s expansion into selling “high-grade bonds, swaps … and distribution of securities” to institutional investors. The department, with offices in the World Financial Center, would consist of five bond salesmen as well as a team of up to 15 traders and analysts. “Christopher Crowe, who formerly ran the Battenberg-Crowe-von-Wettin Foundation, will lead the endeavor as vice president.”

The appointment made headlines in The Bond Buyer, the bond-industry periodical, which reported that Crowe’s department was “participating in a $250 million Chevron Capital USA deal that came to market yesterday, as well as a $150 million Colgate-Palmolive Co. offering.… [Crowe] said the department will work most heavily in the long-term industrial sector.… ‘Customers like industrials,’ he said, adding that ‘they’ve been oversaturated with banks and finance.’”

The staff he led was unimpressed. “It was obvious he had no experience,” says one. He certainly knew how to act the part, however, living in a guest dwelling on an estate in Greenwich, where he was staying, he said, while renovating the main house. He also claimed to be related to Mountbatten and the Battenberg family from Germany—whose name was at the center of his family foundation—which he reportedly said had a collection of Rolls-Royces and Italian sports cars. According to another colleague, “Every article of clothing, from his slippers to pajamas, was monogrammed CCC.”

http://www.vanityfair.com/style/2009/01/fake_rockefeller200901

They were lovers for seven years, but Mihoko Manabe told jurors at her former fiance's murder trial that she never knew the true identity of the man who called himself multiple names including Clark Rockefeller until he was charged with murder.

Manabe today told a story elicited by a prosecutor to show that by the time she met the man whose true name was Christian Gerhartsreiter he had a terrible secret to hide.

Manabe said she met her boyfriend in 1987 when they worked at a New York brokerage firm. She was a translator; he was head of the bonds desk. She knew him as Christopher Crowe until he began using the Rockefeller pseudonym.

'He was an unusual person,' she said, but after police began calling to interview him, she said he became downright odd.

'After the call, he was markedly different,' she said.

Her fiance quit his job at another major brokerage house and never worked again. She said she supported him while he stayed home and took care of bills and household chores. She got him a credit card in the name Clark Rockefeller.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2300245/Clark-Rockefeller-lover-tells-court-murder-suspect-fooled-seven-years-fake-identity-changed-police-began-investigating-him.html

The name worked beautifully, e-mailed a woman named Candice Leit, who is one of the first to be introduced to Rockefeller as Clark Rockefeller. They met at Saint Thomas Church, the most privileged Episcopal church in midtown Manhattan, a sanctuary that would serve as a key to the young man's ascent in Manhattan society and investment circles.

l was working as a children's book designer at Grosset & Dunlap, which is now an imprint at Penguin,” she wrote to me.

“One evening I was killing time before a dance class uptown and I went to a weekday Evening Prayer service at Saint Thomas. This preppy young man struck up a conversation with me afterward. Within minutes, he extracted some vital information from me. He asked whether I was a member of Saint Thomas. I replied no, but offered that I was on the vestry of a church downtown, the Church of the Holy Apostles.

With that, I now realize I became a target but was ultimately fortunate that I did not have the amount of money or earning potential that he was seeking.”

It was October 1989, less than a year after he disappeared as Christopher Crowe, but he was hardly hiding out. “What really struck me is how he played up the Rockefeller connection," she said, adding that he crowed about being a Rockefeller even in front of her aunts and uncles, who knew David Rockefeller.

“Clark showed no concerns about dropping his 'Uncle David's' name and talking about the Rockefeller Estate," she said.” Clark made a point of going to the Metropolitan Museum of Art with me and touring what he called his 'cousin's' [the late Michael C. Rockefeller's] collection.

She sent me pages from her diary, filled with notations about Clark: “He finished his physics degree at Harvard, sold his place in Maine, and will be fixing up his early 18th-century home in Massachusetts. He replaced the main summer home with one in Nantucket. After that conversation, I dreamed of receiving a red Christmas card from Clark.”

https://books.google.com/books?id=5mX47ef7Hb0C

In 1995, using the name "Clark Rockefeller," Gerhartsreiter married Sandra Boss, a high-earning McKinsey senior executive who had graduated from Stanford University and Harvard Business School, in a Quaker ceremony that had no legal status.[3] Boss later testified that Gerhartsreiter was charming and that she believed the stories he told her at the beginning of their relationship. Later, however, he became emotionally abusive and there was a "lot of anger and yelling" in their household. Although Boss earned all of the family income, she testified that Gerhartsreiter had complete control of the family's finances and other aspects of her day-to-day life.

Boss testified in June 2009 at his trial that Gerhartsreiter agreed to give her custody of their daughter following the divorce. She testified that he also agreed to supervised visits three times a year with their daughter in return for an $800,000 settlement, two cars, her engagement ring, and a dress that he had given her. Boss moved with their child to London following the divorce.[3]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christian_Gerhartsreiter#New_identity_and_second_marriage

Conclusion:

  • Networking and being bold works for jobs. I don't advocate doing anything illegal like making fraudulent claims, but white and grey lies can help a lot for jobs that you know you could do but aren't totally qualified for / that aren't matching your resume / that you'd get rejected for due to long periods of unemployment.

  • Networking and being bold also works to get upper class women.

  • Women like to buy into fantasies of rich and powerful men. I don't advocate playing to those fantasies via false claims for multiple reasons aside from rape by deception laws, but it works none the less.

  • Most women don't question too much and will follow you as long as you have a strong frame.

  • I'm sure you can come up with some more. :)