Read Online The Man in the Rockefeller Suit by Mark Seal - Free Book Online

in a civil service in Madison,” said Lassa. “This is after I knew him three or four weeks. But I said, ‘Sure, I’ll do it.’”
    The lucky bride’s name was Amy Janine Jersild.
    Chris Gerhart had met Amy through her younger sister, Elaine, who must have seemed a miraculous gift to him. She was the twenty-two-year-old daughter of a hardworking middle-class couple, Arthur Jersild and Bertha M. Geiger Jersild, of Elkhart, Indiana. He had met Elaine through a church group. She was not a beauty, but she was very spirited and vivacious. More important, she was an American citizen and thus had the power to obtain for Gerhart what he wanted most at this juncture of his life: a green card, which grants permanent resident status to an alien who marries an American.
    Chris broached the subject of marriage with her, saying that he wanted to stay in America to avoid begin drafted into the German army, where he would surely be put on the front lines, directly in the line of fire in the cold war against the Russians. Elaine sympathized—the cute, friendly, and diminutive Chris Gerhart would seemingly have no chance on the front lines of any war—but she had no intention of helping him. Though Elaine wasn’t game, she said that maybe her older sister, Amy, might be.
    I called Elaine Jersild to get an explanation of what happened next. She responded immediately, sunny, cheerful, but as soon as I mentioned Chris Gerhart, her tone turned cold.
    â€œHonestly, hon, I must say no comment ,” she snapped, adding, “I thought this was over, but I guess it’s not.”
    Amy Jersild, however, could not refuse to comment. She was subpoenaed for the trial in Boston, where all the reporters and spectators in the courtroom eagerly anticipated her entrance. Finally, we would hear evidence from someone who had actually known the strange young man in his early, unstoppable years in America.
    When Amy Jersild Duhnke walked in, the media pack looked at one another as if to say, That’s her? She was fifty, weathered and gray, with a long white braid snaking down the back of her drab business suit. The toll of spending several decades in the food service industry—most recently as a cook in a Milwaukee restaurant called the Twisted Fork— was etched in the deep wrinkles of her face. It was impossible to imagine her as the first wife of the budding bon vivant.
    One would expect that the sight of his first wife reemerging in his life after thirty years would elicit some reaction from the defendant. But he stared straight ahead. He registered no emotion whatsoever.
    â€œDescribe the first time you met him,” asked the prosecutor after Amy was sworn in.
    â€œHe came in with my sister to visit me expressly to ask me to marry him,” she said in a dry midwestern monotone.
    I knew from the documents I’d read that when Amy met Chris, she was earning $5,800 a year as a clerk at a delicatessen called East Side Foods, which meant she had a take-home pay of a little more than $100 a week. I also knew that she was then living in a small apartment near her workplace with her boyfriend. What could have persuaded her to marry a complete stranger? Had he offered her money? In those days, a hungry immigrant would without hesitation have paid for a quickie marriage to a willing young American. Later, the prosecutor would say that Amy didn’t recall whether money was ever offered, but she did recall that she never received a dime from the immigrant.
    â€œWho brought up the idea of you marrying him?” Amy was asked next.
    â€œMy sister, Elaine,” she said.
    â€œAnd did she tell you why she wanted you to marry him?”
    â€œI can’t remember verbatim . . . all the information. But because he wanted to stay in this country. He was a foreign exchange student.”
    Over the course of an hour, she said, she listened to Chris and Elaine explain how Chris could become a