Most children enjoy playing make-believe, but French-born Christophe Thierry Daniel Rocancourt made a profitable career of it.
Rocancourt reportedly had a difficult childhood, then ran away to Paris, where he discovered the joys of large-scale criminal hoaxing.His initial caper involved the "sale" of high-end real estate he didn't actually own.
Moving to the Untied States, he made use of several different aliases and posed variuosly as a film producer, Sophia Loren's son,the nephew of two famous fashion designers, a boxer, and a venture capitalist. The hoax that best captured the public imagination, however, was when he posed as a free-spending French member of the Rockefeller family.
During the height of his hoaxing, Rocancourt married Pia Reyes, a particularly pulcritudinous Playboy model.
His house of cards began to collapse in 1997, and in 2002, he pled guilty to theft, bribery and other charges. He was extradited to New York from Canada, where he had been arrested, and was sentenced to four years. AT the time, he estimated that he had duped people out of more than $40 million.
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