Christophe Rocancourt

Biography

His first big con was made in Paris, where he faked the deed to a property he didn't own, then "sold" the property for USD $1.4 million.

Making his way to the United States, Rocancourt used at least a dozen aliases. He got the rich and powerful to invest in his schemes, he told Dateline, by tapping into their greed. He convinced them that he, too, was rich by paying for their lavish dinners in cash. In Los Angeles, he pretended to be a movie producer, ex-boxing champion or venture capitalist. He dropped names like "his mother" Sophia Loren or "his uncles" Oscar de la Renta and Dino De Laurentiis and was associated with various celebrities. He married Playboy model Pia Reyes; they had a son, Zeus. He lived for a time with Mickey Rourke and apparently convinced actor Jean-Claude Van Damme to produce his next movie.

Beside being married to Pia Reyes, according to the press, he lived with Playboy model Rhonda Rydell for six months. She did not know Rocancourt was married, and said he had told her he was French nobility, the son of a countess.

In 1997 police raided Rocancourt's hotel suite. In 1998 he was arrested for an involvement in a shootout and jumped bail. In 1999 he was freed of charges of forging passports after he had bribed State Department employees to get a passport. He was arrested in 2000 in the Hamptons for an unpaid hotel bill, then jumped bail. On April 27, 2001 he and Reyes were arrested in Victoria, British Columbia, Canada, and charged with defrauding an elderly couple. Reyes was released after convincing authorities that she had no part in the scam, much less any idea of her husband's criminal activities.

While being held in Canada, Rocancourt wrote an autobiography in which he ridiculed his victims. In March 2002 he was extradited to New York and pleaded to charges of theft, grand larceny, smuggling, bribery, perjury and fraud against 19 victims. In September 2003, the plea resulted in a fine of $9 million, an order to pay $1.2 million in restitution and a term of five years in prison. In Switzerland, the police have connected him with a jewel theft and barred him from the country until 2016.

He once estimated to Dateline that his various schemes/ventures netted him at least US$40 million, but this cannot be confirmed. On June 7, 2006, the Associated Press reported that imprisoned former private investigator Anthony Pellicano performed an illegal background check on a law enforcement official who was investigating Rocancourt in a fake passport scheme.

He told Dateline NBC in a 2006 broadcast that his mother sometimes worked as a prostitute and his father was an alcoholic who took Christophe to an orphanage when the boy was 5.

In Paris, Christophe Rocancourt lived with former Miss France Sonia Rolland. They had a daughter together, named Tess. They announced their split on April 10, 2008.

In July 2009, French filmmaker Catherine Breillat accused Rocancourt of scamming her out of 700,000 €. Breillat, who was diagnosed with a cerebrovascular disease in 2004, said that "It's an abuse of weakness." Due to this event, the film Bad Love, with Rocancourt and model Naomi Campbell, was cancelled. Breillat told a French journalist that her first meeting with Rocancourt was the worst day of her life, even worse than the day when she was diagnosed with her cerebrovascular disease.

At Metropolitan Detention Center in New York as well as in other American facilities at later stages, Christophe Rocancourt claimed to be Muslim just to get help and protection from the Muslim brothers like many inmates often do, and had actually participated in all congregation prayers. He told the then imam of Unit 6 that he had a lot of money and that he needed to take some of it to the Middle East, but that was a lie as the seventy thousand dollars he claimed to have transferred to Yemen through his girlfriend, for which he provided a fake Money Transfer Control Number, turned to be just a lie.