A former FBI informant for Staten Island congressman Michael Grimm posed as a fake prince to charm the elderly ex-wife of Standard Oil heir Winthrop Rockefeller out of a prized $80,000 Louis XV antique cabinet that she kept at her lavish E. 67th Street mansion, a new lawsuit charges.
The royal swindle unfolded at the six-story home of the late Barbara “Bobo” Rockefeller in 2005 when a swashbuckling gentleman who claimed to be Prince Josef von Habsburg-Lothringen of Austria cozied up to the 89-year-old and moved into her manse with his family.
Except the prince was really an ex-con scam artist and deadbeat dad from Michigan named Josef Meyers.
Rockefeller’s family discovered the ruse after reading news clippings of Meyers’ bust in a one-bedroom Battery Park apartment in July 2010. He was extradited to Michigan, where he’d abandoned his first family, and was tossed in the clink for unpaid child support.
Meyers was also a former confidential informant for the Republican Grimm, when the Staten Island Republican was an FBI undercover agent. In 2002 Grimm, posing as a dapper mob-connected stock broker dubbed “Mikey Suits,” was using Meyers to probe the illicit manipulation of currency markets.
Now that Meyers is in jail, Rockefeller’s sister-in-law and sole heir to her fortune Lisenne D. Rockefeller, is suing in Manhattan Surrogate’s Court for the return of the 1760 Louis XV Ormolu-mounted Tulipwood, Kingwood and Marquetry Commode, which the con man sold to a London dealer in 2009.
Meyers had taken control of Rockefelller’s household — firing staff, changing the locks and removing the pricey furnishing for “safekeeping” during renovations, according to the suit.
“We were all under the belief that he was a prince and he appeared to be intelligent” a longtime friend of Rockefeller, Salvatore Mule, said in an affidavit.
When Mule noticed the cabinet was missing and had been swapped out with a cheap imposter ‘Von Habsburg’ claimed the piece was in storage and he hadn’t told the frail Rockefeller in an effort not to upset her.
Rockefeller eventually moved to Arkansas to be with her son, the state’s former Lieutenant Governor Winthrop Rockefeller and his wife. The Louis XV’s whereabouts took a back seat to the family’s concerns over Wintrhop’s declining health. He died in 2006. His mother passed away two years later.
But shortly after the Rockefellers had learned about Meyers’ true identity, another family friend in the antique business spotted the missing commode in a Sotheby’s catalog in 2011.
The auction house agreed to take the item off the block, but the family has been unable to negotiate with the London dealer who purchased the purloined piece from Meyers, the suit says.