Meet the fake Rockefeller heir who scammed his way into Harvard and fooled world leaders

A high society imposter managed to pull off the hoax of a lifetime, scamming his way into Harvard Law School twice, then Yale, and later consorting with US presidents and world leaders by posing as a fake Rockefeller up until his death, DailyMail.com can reveal. 

For 40 years, Nicholas Rockefeller was known by his closest friends as an eccentric scion of the billionaire Rockefeller family with a Yale degree and partnerships at major US law firms.

He dined with President George H.W. Bush, befriended top White House officials, was pictured with Chinese President Xi Jinping and Bill Clinton, and claimed to control a fund of hundreds of millions of dollars.

But following his death last Halloween, a DailyMail.com investigation can now reveal him as Spiro Pavlovich III, a fraudster who led an extraordinary life of lies.

Pavlovich faked his way into Harvard Law School twice, then into Yale, where he pretended to be a member of the Rockefeller family.

He concocted stories to classmates of being the great grand-nephew of Czar Nicholas of Russia, a relative of Spanish King Juan Carlos, a Rhodes Scholar of Oxford, a NATO intelligence official, and a former Nixon administration employee.

After graduating, he cultivated connections to US presidents and top White House officials, but had links to the Chinese government dating back decades, leading to suspicions that he may have been involved in espionage.

His death on Halloween last year, when he was believed to be age 78, has now sparked a legal battle between top attorneys over his remains – and potential access to his alleged millions.

Pavlovich began his illustrious career by faking his way into the most renowned law school in the country: Harvard Law.

He was accepted to the graduate school under his real name in 1968 after allegedly forging stellar transcripts from Tulane University, in his home state of Louisiana.

Despite his fraudulent credentials, Pavlovich kept up with his classmates and almost completed his degree, only slipping up two and a half years in when he was caught lying about being a scuba diving enthusiast in a job interview with a law firm. 

One of the firm’s partners, an avid diver, spotted his bluff. 

When Pavlovich also claimed to be great grandnephew of Czar Nicholas of Russia, the lawyers decided to report the tall tales to Harvard, which quietly expelled Pavlovich.

Undeterred, he reapplied in 1973 under a new name: Jason Scott Cord.

Not only did he get back in, he also brought along his Louisiana-raised wife Monette, Aka Monica Cord, who also got into Harvard Business School using fake transcripts from the University of New Orleans under a third fake name, Cary Monica Cabot.

The real Cabot family are famously one of the ‘first families of Boston’, with an estate in the 1970s worth more than $1.5billion in today’s money.

In a 1976 report, the Boston Globe described her as a ‘handsome, well-dressed blonde’, and him as a ‘chunky, dark-haired man of average height’.

He often wore tinted glasses, perhaps to hide his face from professors who might remember him from his first round at Harvard.

According to a report by the university’s newspaper The Crimson, students believed him to be ‘an eccentric Southern aristocrat’, who wore three-piece suits to class, drove a silver-blue Mercedes Benz, and bragged of a supposed Rhodes Scholarship.

Classmates heard rumors he was a pilot, a former paratrooper, and even an ex-CIA agent, the Globe story said.

He told friends he had worked ‘undercover’ in the Nixon administration, that he was taking a trip to Spain for dictator Francisco Franco’s funeral and the coronation of Pavlovich’s ‘relative’ then-Prince Juan Carlos, and that he had ‘very substantial resources’ with an uncle who would buy him a $10million foreign investment firm.

But two years in, Pavlovich made the same mistake again, falsely claiming to have been a Louisiana college placekicker in an interview with prestigious New York law firm Cravath, Swain and Moore.

Unfortunately for Pavlovich, his interviewer knew the football team.

He and his wife had both used their fake identities to get federal student loans, so this time the FBI got involved.

Pavlovich was arrested on December 10, 1975, and his wife a month later, on charges of loan fraud.

But after pleading not guilty, he was reportedly hospitalized with stress, and was found by a court-appointed doctor to be mentally incompetent to stand trial, according to a 1977 report by The Crimson.

Monette, meanwhile, cut a plea deal and received a suspended sentence with probation.

Following an apparent recovery, Pavlovich was up to his old tricks again, getting into Yale Law School in 1984 under a new, auspicious name: Nicholas A. Rockefeller.

Classmate and friend Richard Painter, who later served as chief ethics lawyer in the 2000s Bush White House, told DailyMail.com that Rockefeller was sociable and friendly – and always hinting at an intriguing past.

‘He was very approachable, more so than you’d think someone would be from a well-known family,’ Painter said.

‘Nobody ever got a handle on who exactly he was related to, though he made references to Nelson Rockefeller,’ referring to the late New York Governor and Vice President to Jimmy Carter.

‘That seemed right because Nelson had a reputation for various relationships,’ he added.

‘I think at one point he said a car he had, a red Mercedes, once belonged to the Vice President.

‘He implied he had been at Oxford for his undergraduate, something about a Swiss boarding school he went to, and had also been in Europe with a military NATO force. He implied he had maybe been in an intelligence role.’

Another classmate, Craig Keshishian, told DailyMail.com that ‘Rockefeller’ was charming but odd.

‘In the cutthroat world of Ivy League law schools like that, you pick your friends carefully. And he was very friendly to me,’ Keshishian said. ‘He was very pleasant, very humble, very nice.

‘We always wondered why he did so well at law school. He was leisurely in his actions. 

‘He’d disappear for weeks on end, coming back with these big thick papers that he’d give to professors. And it’s because he’d done it before, twice, at Harvard Law School.’

Keshishian, a DailyMail.com guest columnist and political strategist who worked in the Reagan Administration, said he felt ‘betrayed’ when he learned, only after Pavlovich’s death four months ago, about his false identity.

‘We were shocked at how he was able to carry this on for over 50 years,’ he said.

Rockefeller graduated and wrangled a coveted job as clerk for federal Ninth Circuit Judge Dorothy Nelson, a judicial position second only to the US Supreme Court.

And he soon began to solidify his connections to real-life elites.

‘When I worked for President Reagan, he would come to White House events and bamboozle his way in to talk to the VIPs,’ former White House aide Keshishian said.

‘I was talking to the then-sitting governor of California, he just came up to me and I was forced to introduce him.’

Keshishian, who says that he has started working on a book about his former classmate, said that Pavlovich also crashed the 1990 funeral of Reagan Attorney General William Smith.

‘I’m at his funeral with President Reagan and Mrs. Reagan,’ he said. ‘This Rockefeller guy shows up. He extends a hand to the grieving widow, Jean Smith.

‘She’s crying. He goes, ‘On behalf of the Rockefeller family, we extend our condolences. I’m an emissary of the family.’ She hugged him.’

Friend and Yale Law classmate Steven Blum filed an application with a Los Angeles court in November to be designated as ‘Nicholas Rockefeller’s executor.

He included letters from friends revealing Rockefeller’s deep ties to the highest political officials.

California lawyer Dawn Haghighi wrote a letter supporting Blum’s application, saying she met ‘Rockefeller’ at a 2003 bar association dinner in LA, where the fraudster sat at the ‘head table’ with then-US President George H.W. Bush and First Lady Barbara.

Top George W. Bush White House lawyer Richard Painter also wrote a letter, saying Rockefeller was ‘a good friend’ and ‘an usher in my wedding’ in 1987.

Rockefeller got himself appointed to influential think tank the RAND Center for Asia Pacific Policy Advisory Board alongside real members of billionaire and blue-blooded families including Hyatt Hotel heir Anthony Pritzker and LA Times owner Patrick Soon-Shiong.

But his high-flying ties also included links with the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).

A slide deck for his company, Rockefeller Resources International, pictures him sitting at an official one-on-one meeting with Xi Jinping, who later became the Chinese premier.

The firm facilitated ‘the sale of liquefied natural gas from the United States to China’, according to legal documents obtained by DailyMail.com.

Blum wrote in his recent probate court filing that ‘from review of documents and discussions with Nicholas’ the firm was ‘run by Chinese nationals’, who paid the $30,000-a-month rent at Rockefeller’s swanky, 4,000 sq ft offices in the Fox Plaza tower near Beverly Hills, where Ronald Reagan also kept an office.

According to a Chinese TV news bulletin, Rockefeller partnered with CCP-controlled company the Wuhan Department Store Group in 2001 on a ‘wireless internet phones’ project.

A business partner described it as ‘the first U.S. based technology company to launch operations in mainland China’.

And a 2005 article in the Chicago Tribune references Rockefeller’s high-level meeting with then-Shanghai mayor Han Zheng over a stalled billion-dollar real estate development project.

His own website, NicholasRockefeller.net, claims his ‘China practice includes transactions with China’s largest banks, energy companies, communications entities and real estate enterprises as well as with China’s principal cities and leading provinces.’

‘He was chosen as a board member of the Central China Construction and Development Commission and as a director of the Xiwai International School of Shanghai International University,’ the site says.

The foreign links and fraudulent past have made old classmate Keshishian suspicious that Pavlovich may not have always been on team America.

‘There’s an interesting pattern here of ensconcing himself in national security-related affairs. I have my suspicions,’ he said.

‘Being exposed to those circles for 40 years, as a White House aide, I know officials on the intelligence side. This started to smack of something odd.’

Keshishian said that among Pavlovich’s documents recovered after his death were ‘multiple IDs, multiple passports’, and he believes the trickster ‘might have been a foreign intelligence asset’.

His murky past has prompted a Los Angeles judge to order an investigation over his true identity, amid a legal struggle for control of his estate after his death from apparent heart failure.

Yale classmate Blum filed a petition to take control of Pavlovich’s remains and be officially appointed executor of his estate on November 4.

He told Judge Lynn Scaduto that ‘he happened to see account statements years ago showing that the decedent had hundreds of millions of dollars’ according to court documents.

His November 4 filing included a transcript of a September 30 alleged cryptic voicemail from ‘Rockefeller’ to Blum, saying: ‘if things go very bad though, as you know, I put you down as the executor’.

But on December 19 a partner at top law firm Norton Rose Fulbright, Helen Kim, filed an objection, saying she is a close friend of ‘Rockefeller’ and accusing Blum of hiding the fact that she holds the power of attorney for health care for the late trickster.

The top attorney also accused Blum of falsely stating in a sworn statement that ‘no person of closer kinship to Rockefeller than Petitioner has come forward to claim Rockefeller’s remains’.

But Blum hit back with his own claims of duplicity, suggesting in a filing the same day that signatures of witnesses on Kim’s power of attorney form were ‘obviously forged’.

He said one supposed witness, Madelaine Jones, was a longtime client of his, that her signature doesn’t match authentic copies, her name is spelled wrong, and that she has had severe dementia since 2018 so could not have traveled to Rockefeller’s Santa Monica office or acted as a competent witness.

Blum said he knows the other signer, Rockefeller’s business partner Faye Huang, and has documents with her signature that do not match.

The crossfire of allegations left the judge nonplussed.

‘[Kim] contends that she has located numerous conflicting documents like birth certificates and driver’s licenses in his residence,’ Judge Scaduto wrote in the minutes of a December 19 hearing.

‘Steven Blum, contends that he happened to see account statements years ago showing that the decedent had hundreds of millions of dollars while he was working at two of the most high profile law firms in Los Angeles.

‘There are serious questions around his identity which the court understands Kim has brought to the attention of law enforcement.

‘All of this prompts the court to again refer this matter to the public administrator and ask the public administrator to seek appointment as special administrator to determine whether there was a Nicholas Rockefeller.’

This month, Kim filed documents claiming Pavlovich’s estate is worth just $35,000, but also revealing she went to the lengths of hunting down his half-sister to sign a representation agreement.

In a February 7 hearing, Judge Scaduto prized from Kim’s attorney the real reason the $1,000-per-hour lawyer is pursuing this case.

‘I’m a bit at a loss as to why your client wants any part of this, has taken the step to find the half-sister,’ Judge Scaduto asked Kim’s attorney Lawrence Lebowsky.

‘Mr. Blum thinks that there is mischief afoot here. If I were in either of their shoes, candidly, I’d say good riddance to this fellow.

‘What’s really going on here Mr. Lebowsky?’

Lebowsky replied that they were interested in a whopping $414million judgement that ‘Nicholas Rockefeller’ won against a Chinese font company called SinoType.

Blum, who secured the default judgment in a battle that went up to the California Supreme Court in 2020, had been unable to collect any money on it for Rockefeller so far.

He handed over the job of hunting down the cash to Kim and her firm Norton Rose, at Rockefeller’s direction, one month before he died, according to a letter included in one of Blum’s legal filings.

According to his filings, Kim also represented Rockefeller’s Chinese gas company, Rockefeller Resources International, in whose presentation deck he was pictured with Xi Jinping.

‘Ms. Kim has told me that she represents an entity called Rockefeller Resources International (RRI), which I understand from review of documents and discussions with Nicholas, is a company run by Chinese nationals in the liquified natural gas business,’ Blum wrote.

Blum said he had been to RRI’s Fox Plaza office ‘a number of times’.

‘Nicholas had a large office there and within the past year he told me that the Chinese nationals were paying the rent.’