Suffolk County prosecutor urgently approached a trial magistrate and spoke in a hushed tone yesterday after the jurist announced that the alleged kidnapper known as Clark Rockefeller was entitled to bail.Assistant District Attorney David Deakin had spent a half-hour painting the 47-year-old defendant as a fabulist extraordinaire who was born Christian Karl Gerhartsreiter in Germany, immigrated to the United States 30 years ago, and has changed identities nearly as often as some people change computer passwords.
Last year, Deakin said, Rockefeller said he was a ship captain named Charles "Chip" Smith and gave his 7-year-old daughter, Reigh Storrow Mills Boss, the alias Muffy.
But any fear Deakin might have had that Suffolk Superior Court Trial Magistrate Gary D. Wilson might set bail that could free Gerhartsreiter from the Nashua Street Jail vanished when Wilson announced the figure moments later: $500 million in property or other surety, or $50 million in cash.
Stephen B. Hrones, Gerhartsreiter's usually voluble defense lawyer, stood silently by his client, absorbing the sum.
"Did I hear right?" Hrones said. "Five hundred million dollars?"
Yes, or $50 million in cash, replied Wilson. There are some Wall Street tycoons making that much in a single year, Wilson said.
"There were, your honor," Hrones quipped.Several veteran defense lawyers said later they cannot recall bail that high in Massachusetts.
As Gerhartsreiter was arraigned in Superior Court yesterday following his indictment on parental kidnapping and other charges, Deakin offered fresh details on the case.
He said Gerhartsreiter and Sandra L. Boss, who divorced in December, had separated in 1999 or 2000, but her husband wooed her back and she became pregnant with Reigh.
Deakin also said the couple moved from New Hampshire to the Back Bay at the insistence of Boss, a senior partner at McKinsey & Co., because her husband was preventing Reigh from having contact with other children.
Last year, Boss, who had hired a private investigator to find out who her husband really was, filed for divorce because she was "no longer able to accept the defendant's emotional and, occasionally, physical abuse," Deakin said in court.
The prosecutor would not elaborate.Gerhartsreiter's lies, Deakin said, "are literally so numerous and varied that they are difficult to keep track of even with a database."
Gerhartsreiter was first arraigned in Boston Municipal Court on Aug. 5 under the name Rockefeller and ordered held without bail.
The indictment Friday transferred the case to Superior Court.
The man who just last month insisted in a jailhouse interview with the Globe that he was Clark Rockefeller said nothing during the arraignment, except for a "not guilty" when asked how he pleaded to custodial kidnapping and other charges relating to his alleged abduction of his daughter on a Back Bay street July 27.
Deakin outlined what authorities described as the defendant's trail of deception and "extraordinarily meticulously planned abduction" of his daughter during a supervised visit. Gerhartsreiter was arrested six days later in Baltimore, and his daughter was reunited with her mother in London.Hrones said the government had already convicted his client, but that the charges were groundless.
"Sure, he's told some tall tales," Hrones said. "A lot of people tell tall tales. That's not a crime."Hrones told reporters after the hearing that his client would have been unable to make bail if it had been set at $1 million, much less $500 million.
"He's not one of the rich Rockefellers," said Hrones, who plans to appeal the bail at a hearing scheduled Thursday.
California authorities have also named Gerhartsreiter a "person of interest" in the disappearance and presumed killings of a newlywed couple, John and Linda Sohus, in San Marino in 1985. Bones found buried at their former home have not been identified.
The charges of assault and battery and assault and battery with a dangerous weapon stem from the defendant's alleged physical confrontation with a social worker who was supervising the visit Gerhartsreiter had in Boston with his daughter.
The father allegedly pushed the social worker to the ground and fled with his daughter in a sport utility vehicle driven by a livery driver.
A tentative trial date has been set March 23.
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