Modifié le 30-oct-00 à 18h22 (New Jersey)Le New-York Times a aussi publie un article sur l'affaire Rocancourt. Allez vous les accuser aussi d'avoir une attitude "criminelle"?
The New York Times
Section B; Page 1; Column 1; Metropolitan Desk
Hunted Man Is No Rockefeller, but Plays One in Hamptons, the Police Say
By ALAN FEUER and CHARLIE LeDUFF
He cut a wide swath through the Hamptons this summer. His name was sterling: Christopher Rockefeller. His pitch was gold: "I can double your money in a month." Women threw themselves at his feet; men threw cash.
But the longer he stayed, the less the details made sense. If he was heir to an American fortune, why did he speak with a French accent? He slouched, and slurped his soup. He wore tattoos. He sniffed at a glass of jug wine and praised its bouquet. He could not remember whether his Manhattan apartment was on 57th or 59th Street. Was it a Lear jet or a helicopter? An apartment or an oceanfront estate?
His schemes, the police say, were simple and always the same: stock deals, easy loans, dine and dash. His targets were from New York's anonymous moneyed class -- not the A-listers, but people of position and wealth, people who should have known better: stockbrokers, business owners, restaurateurs, Upper East Side socialites, landlords, real estate agents.
When he skipped bail in August, charged in East Hampton with impersonation and running out on his $19,000 bed-and-breakfast tab, Christopher Rocancourt left behind a trail of more than a dozen angry acquaintances who felt as confused as they did betrayed.
Now, a frustrated crew of pursuers, from the Federal Bureau of Investigation to the Los Angeles County district attorney's office to a New York private eye, are looking for Mr. Rocancourt, who they say has duped the rich on both coasts and abroad.
Some say Mr. Rocancourt (pronounced ROH-can-court) is nothing more than a common thief, a modern-day mountebank who used his Continental charms to pry nearly $900,000 from the hands of wealthy New Yorkers over the course of a single season. Others say he is a ruthless killer, one of the most dangerous criminals the public has never heard of.
But a complicated portrait of Mr. Rocancourt has emerged from interviews with those who thought they knew him best. By turns, he has been described as a bon vivant in love with the artful con and as a confused man searching his spiritual path. He could quote philosophers, calling Kierkegaard a messiah and Kant a crank, but also spent time reading trashy self-help books. He lived on other people's money, spending lavishly on friends, but was often miserable after nights out on the town.
He had an unimposing look -- short, slight and nervously intense -- but frequently traveled with beautiful women on his arm. He claimed he had been born to wealth, but once told a confidant that he was a doctor who considered it his job to "cure the rich of greed."
The authorities have been tracking Mr. Rocancourt, 33, on four continents for more than a decade. He is suspected of bilking the well-to-do out of millions in East Hampton, Beverly Hills, Miami, San Francisco and Hong Kong. Investigators say they have tied him to a diamond-smuggling ring in Zaire and a violent jewelry store robbery in Geneva. The police say they believe he shot the bodyguard of a dangerous drug dealer during a wild highway shootout in West Hollywood. They say he is often armed and always one step ahead of the law.
"He's a criminal, a fugitive on the run, and he needs to go to jail," said George Mueller, the supervising investigator for the Los Angeles district attorney's office, who said he became so familiar to Mr. Rocancourt that the suspect once taunted him by asking after his children and quoting his home address.
But when Mr. Rocancourt himself was asked last week, through an intermediary, to assess his chances of being caught, the intermediary quoted him as saying: "I'm in Venezuela. I'm doing fine. I'll be back."
It was already deep in barbecue season this summer, the police say, when Mr. Rocancourt started working on the residents of a four-bedroom home with a tennis court, swimming pool and acre plot a mile from the Atlantic Ocean in Water Mill, N.Y.
Tom Gregory, who owns the home, remembers when his housemate, Corine Eeltink, brought Mr. Rocancourt around, introducing him as Christopher Rockefeller.
"I thought, 'Of the Rockefeller Rockefellers?' " Mr. Gregory, a Manhattan stockbroker, recalled. "I knew that Corine gave massages to the rich and infamous out in the Hamptons, so I figured it was all right."
Mr. Gregory was having trouble paying for his home and was thinking of selling it to cut his losses. He said he told Mr. Rocancourt as much over a leisurely lunch and several games of tennis.
Though Mr. Rocancourt had to borrow a set of tennis whites and was clumsy on the court, Mr. Gregory said he never thought twice when his guest offered to lend him money to buy the house. He was American aristocracy. Every time his cell phone rang, his obsequious right-hand man, who called himself Joseph Dante, answered. It was always another Kennedy or English royal on the line.
The loan called for Mr. Rocancourt to wire $500,000 into Mr. Gregory's bank account in exchange for $50,000 cash up front. The deal was celebrated that night over Asian cuisine at the Hamptons restaurant Tsunami and continued in the V.I.P. room of the adjacent nightclub N/V, where Dom Perignon and top-shelf Cognac were poured with a generous hand.
In the end, Mr. Rocancourt never forwarded the $500,000, the authorities say, although he made off with Mr. Gregory's cash. He also took Ms. Eeltink for $14,000, she claims. He even left the $7,000 restaurant and nightclub tab unpaid.
The Rockefeller Foundation says there is no family member named Christopher. The French authorities say Christopher Rocancourt was born on July 16, 1967, in Honfleur, France, a tiny fishing village on the Normandy coast where local legend holds that buried treasure lies, forever out of reach, at the bottom of the murky bay.
From 1987 to 1992, Mr. Rocancourt was investigated in Paris in connection with crimes ranging from check-kiting to forgery while using the name Prince Galitzine Christo. The Swiss authorities say they believe he helped arrange the armed theft of gems worth more than 400,000 francs from a jewelry store in Geneva in 1991.
On June 9, 1993, Mr. Rocancourt was arrested by the F.B.I. in Las Vegas and extradited to Switzerland, where he was detained for a year. Unable to prove his involvement in the jewel theft, the Swiss authorities eventually banished him until Feb. 28, 2016.
It was a few years later, the authorities in Los Angeles say, that Mr. Rocancourt landed in Beverly Hills, taking an opulent suite in the Regent Beverly Wilshire Hotel. He cruised Sunset Strip in a gray Ferrari. The authorities say he passed himself off as the son of Dino De Laurentiis, the Italian movie mogul who produced "King Kong."
Mr. Rocancourt was often seen with his wife, a former Playboy playmate named Pia Reyes, with whom he has a son, Zeus. His entourage included a right-hand man and bodyguard, Ali Amghar, a former Algerian military officer known as Benny.
Mr. Amghar eventually wound up cooperating with the authorities. Among the schemes the Los Angeles district attorney's office says he revealed was a plan to smuggle diamonds out of a mine in Zaire.
Although the United States Customs Service investigated Mr. Rocancourt for more than a year, they could never make anything stick. "He's definitely good at what he does," said Special Agent Thomas Chumley, who ran the case. "He's smooth."
It took until Dec. 5, 1997, for Mr. Mueller of the Los Angeles district attorney's office to file a case against Mr. Rocancourt. He was not charged with smuggling, but with printing false passports with the help of two State Department employees and a woman who is the niece of the president of Gabon. He was freed on $100,000 bail in March 1998, and never returned to court.
Associates said Mr. Rocancourt spent the next two years gallivanting across the globe. He had no problem making money wherever he went. "You could drop him into Nigeria, and in three weeks he would own the place," one friend said.
Mr. Rocancourt managed to fly beneath the radar until this summer, when rumors began to circulate around the Hamptons about "Rockefeller." The jilted lovers and bounced checks and broken promises were catching up to him. Perhaps the most absurd encounter came at a Southampton soiree given by the Spanish painter Gines Serran-Pagan.
It was late July when Mr. Rocancourt, wearing someone else's tennis clothes, dropped by Mr. Serran-Pagan's gallery. Within 20 minutes, he had picked out six paintings priced altogether at more than a half-million dollars, waxing poetic about one particular piece, "Sunrise Over Quilin." All he needed, he said, was the number of Mr. Serran-Pagan's overseas bank account to make the deposit, according to Mr. Serran-Pagan.
The Spaniard demurred, but offered to discuss it over wine and was mortified to discover that his good stock was depleted. All he had left was some cheap red in a clay vessel.
"I was so embarrassed," Mr. Serran-Pagan said. "I said: 'Oh, my God! And a Rockefeller.' Well, he sniffed it once or twice and called it exquisite.
"That and the French accent. I knew he wasn't a Rockefeller."
Nonetheless, Mr. Rocancourt charmed the Spaniard, and over the next several weeks they met often to discuss Sartre and Nietzsche. Mr. Rocancourt spoke intelligently about the economic future of China. He knew the work of the Spanish painter Pissaro.
But cracks began to show in Mr. Rocancourt's mask. In the guest book, he signed two different addresses. He ate like a Neanderthal. "He had a street edge about him," the painter said. "I was suspicious, but I liked him. He was a dreamer, a surrealist like Dali."
Mr. Serran-Pagan wanted in on the masquerade. So he arranged a dinner party: the artist turning the tables on the con artist. The guest list included the daughter of Sony's president, two heiresses to a Greek shipping fortune and an international art dealer. In reality, the daughter of the Sony president was Natsuko Utsumi, a Japanese photographer. The art dealer was Peter Fazio, an electrician. And one of the shipping heiresses was Maria Eftimiades, a reporter for People, who wrote an article about the encounter for the Aug. 21 issue of New York magazine.
Mr. Rocancourt brought a buxom blonde and his assistant, Mr. Dante. By candlelight, Mr. Serran-Pagan said, he talked up some hot stock deals, until the Greek heiress snapped his photo. Mr. Dante shielded his boss as if a grenade had just been tossed onto the table. He pulled out a wad of $100 bills and tried in vain to buy the film.
The party broke up early in the morning, with Mr. Rocancourt promising to return to buy "Sunrise Over Quilin." He was arrested four days later.
"He hated the nouveau riche," Mr. Serran-Pagan said. "They were cave men, a dirty new species, and he derived pleasure by cheating them with their own greed."
When the police picked up Mr. Rocancourt on Aug. 2, they already suspected him of being a flimflam man, but they had yet to discover his true identity. Within hours, he was free on $45,000 bail. He left traveling on a passport with the name Fabien Ortuno.
"He was charming and fascinating and living his own movie out there on the edge," Mr. Serran-Pagan said. "He's committing suicide in the most beautiful way."