DID A JOURNALIST CON THE CON MAN? I have posted several times, including here, about the impostor who posed as “Clark Rockefeller”, a member of the extended Rockefeller family. The series of posts began with a mystery. A friend of mine had mentioned a man named Clark Rockefeller who lived near him. This post told how it had been revealed that the man was not Clark Rockefeller but that nobody knew who he was. Later posts followed the story. The man turned out to a native of Germany named Christian Karl Gerhartsreiter, and he has been convicted of a 1985 murder. Nathaniel Rich reviewed BLOOD WILL OUT, a book by Walter Kirn about Clark Rockefeller, in the New York Review of Books (May 8). He began his review: “BLOOD WILL OUT is an intimate portrait of a professional confidence man. Our hero thinks nothing of assuming false identities, lying strategically, and risking close relationships….”
The beginning sentences grab the reader because Rich says that the “confidence man” they refer to is Walter Kirn, the author of BLOOD WILL OUT.