Suddenly, Rockefeller pushed his pursuer away, put his daughter down, yanked the car door open, and pulled the child into the limo so fast that she hit her head on the doorframe. “Go! Go!” he shouted, and the driver stepped on the gas, dragging the social worker, who had hold of the back-door handle, several yards before he let go and fell to the pavement.

Within minutes, according to Rockefeller’s indictment, he told the driver to pull over. Then he hailed a cab, explaining to the limo driver that he wanted to take his daughter to Massachusetts General Hospital in order to make sure the bump on her head was not serious. He instructed the limo driver to wait for him in a nearby parking lot. The driver did as he was told, and waited approximately two hours, but his $3,000 customer never showed up. Meanwhile, Rockefeller had taken the taxi to the Boston Sailing Center, where one of his many female friends was waiting for him. She had agreed to drive him to New York in her white Lexus for $500. “Hurry!,” Rockefeller implored her, saying that he and Snooks had to catch a train that would get them to a boat launch on Long Island by eight p.m.

Soon after they arrived in Manhattan, they got stuck in traffic near Grand Central Terminal. In a flash, Rockefeller swept up his daughter, threw an envelope full of cash onto the front seat, and took off without even saying good-bye. Then the woman’s cell phone rang. It was a friend asking if she had seen the Amber Alert concerning Clark Rockefeller’s abduction of his daughter. That was when she realized that she had been fooled into providing the transportation for what the Boston district attorney would later charge was a custodial kidnapping. (Rockefeller has also been charged with assault and battery by means of a deadly weapon [the limo], assault and battery, and furnishing a false name to the police.)

Back in Boston, in a suite at the Four Seasons Hotel, Rockefeller’s ex-wife, Sandra Boss—a Harvard Business School graduate earning an estimated $1.4 million a year as a senior partner at McKinsey & Company, the global management-consulting firm—was informed that her ex-husband had disappeared with their daughter. At the same time Boston police were entering Rockefeller’s name into national databases and finding … nothing.

“Can you please give us his driver’s-license number?” an officer asked Boss.

She said he didn’t have one.

“Do you know if Clark has a Social Security number?”

“No.”

“Is he on your tax returns?”

“No.”

His credit cards were on her accounts. His cell-phone number was under the name of a friend. To each of the investigators’ questions about her ex-husband’s identification papers, Boss responded in the negative. He didn’t have any identification at all.

Twenty-four hours after his disappearance, the curious case of Clark Rockefeller was being handled by Special Agent Noreen Gleason, a tough, blonde, 17-year veteran of the F.B.I. assigned to the Boston field office. Her first call was to the Rockefeller family, she remembers. “They said, ‘Under no circumstances is there a link We are not connected.’”

Plenty of other people had heard of him, however. For five days Gleason and a battalion of F.B.I. agents and police officers in the United States and abroad were taken for a ride. Like the limo driver and the friend Rockefeller tricked into driving him to New York, the authorities soon realized that they had been set up. Before the extraordinarily well-planned vanishing act, Rockefeller had devised an equally elaborate escape plan, telling many of his well-heeled friends his destination, which in every case was different, and in every case a lie. He told one he was sailing to Peru; he informed others he was going to Alaska, the Turks and Caicos, the Bahamas. “It was fascinating,” says Gleason. “We would start going down one avenue, one lead, and we would get to the end of it, and nothing would be there.”