The man once known as Clark Rockefeller “planned meticulously over months” to kidnap his 7-year-old daughter, exchanging his 2007 divorce settlement into gold coins and manipulating unwitting confederates well before he absconded from Boston to Baltimore with the girl last summer, Suffolk County’s top child abuse prosecutor told a Superior Court jury today.

Assistant District Attorney David Deakin, chief of the Family Protection and Sexual Assault Unit of the Suffolk DA’s office, told a panel of 16 jurors that CHRISTIAN KARL GERHARTSREITER (D.O.B. 2/21/61) had laid the groundwork for the alleged abduction of his daughter as early as September 2007 – before his divorce from the girl’s mother was even finalized – by telling a Maryland realtor that he was a ship’s captain looking for a home in which he would live with his home-schooled daughter while designing catamarans.

“My name is Charles Smith, but I abhor the name Charles,” he allegedly told the realtor. “Please call me Chip.”

That was but one of the names by which the defendant would be known to investigators, who determined his true identity in the aftermath of the July 27 parental kidnapping for which he is now on trial, and the prevarication was one of several that Deakin detailed during his opening statements.

An investigation last year by Boston Police, State Police, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Suffolk County District Attorney Daniel F. Conley’s office, and other agencies developed extensive information about Gerhartsreiter’s past, revealing that he had arrived in the United States in 1978 as a student, obtained a visa extension the next year, and married a Wisconsin woman for immigration purposes in 1981.

“He asked if she would marry him so he could get a green card,” Deakin said, “and she did.”

It was in 1993 that Gerhartsreiter met the woman who would be the mother of his child. He was living in New York under the Clark Rockefeller moniker at the time and was “instantly taken with her” when they met through the woman’s twin sister, Deakin said.

As she revealed her family and history to him, the prosecutor said, Gerhartsreiter “told her he was working in debt restructuring for tiny, tiny nations. It didn’t bother her that he didn’t seem to have much of an income – she was blown away by his sense of public spirit.”

Gerhartsreiter told one lie after another, Deakin told the jurors and a rapt courtroom audience, claiming to be the offspring of George Percy Rockefeller and child actress Ann Carter and saying that they had died in a car crash on their way to visit him at Yale University. Throughout it all, he displayed an “extraordinary charisma and likeability,” Deakin said.

The pair married, but Gerhartsreiter had no income and the “big payoff” he continually promised never came to pass. Moreover, he refused to live in New York City where his wife worked, forcing her to commute from a series of rustic New England estates in Massachusetts, Vermont, and New Hampshire. By 2000, Deakin said, their marriage had “disintegrated” and they separated from one another.

“What she didn’t know,” Deakin said of the defendant’s wife, “is that she had become pregnant.” Soon, he told the court, Gerhartsreiter “was back to the Clark Rockefeller she believed she knew.”

A few months later, in May 2001, their daughter was born. In 2006, the family moved to Boston, bought a home on Beacon Hill, and enrolled their daughter in a private school. Not even their shared joy in the beautiful young girl could keep the marriage together, however, and in January 2007 Gerhartsreiter’s wife filed for divorce.

“In August 2007 [she] filed an affidavit with the court asking for full custody,” Deakin said. “She filed a motion in which she questioned the defendant’s identity.”

In the aftermath of that motion, Gerhartsreiter gave up his claim to joint custody of his daughter, relinquishing her to his ex-wife except for three supervised visits per year, each to be monitored by a social worker.

“Additionally,” Deakin said, “[she] agreed to pay the defendant $800,000.”

The divorce was finalized in December of that year – three months after Gerhartsreiter had begun scouting locations in Baltimore in which to live with his daughter under an assumed name.

Gerhartsreiter’s first visit with his daughter took place in July 2008 – about a month after he first visited an Arlington precious metals dealer and began changing “hundreds of thousands of dollars in cash into Krugerrands, then those into American Eagle gold coins.”

On July 25, a day before he was to see his daughter for the first time in seven months, Gerhartsreiter contacted a livery driver with a story that he needed to attend a board meeting in New York. The driver took him to Manhattan, waited an hour, and then drove him back to Boston – “stopping for steak tartare along the way,” Deakin said.

Deakin said Gerhartsreiter told the livery driver that he had an opportunity to go sailing that weekend with Senator Lincoln Chafee’s son, but that there was “a complication.”

Gerhartsreiter allegedly spun a yarn about a “clingy” family friend whom he would have to leave in Boston in order to make the sailing trip. Together with the livery driver, he came up with a plan to meet on Marlborough Street in Boston’s Back Bay. The driver would wait in a sport-utility vehicle, Gerhartsreiter would hop in, and they would leave the “friend” – who was in fact the licensed social worker retained to monitor the defendant’s custodial visit – on the street.

That night, Deakin said, Gerhartsreiter called another individual who would unintentionally assist in the abduction – a woman he’d once asked to sail around the world with him. When she declined to do so during that conversation, he instead asked if she would drive him to New York City for $500. She agreed to do it, but not on July 26, as he asked. She told him she would drive him on July 27.

It was on that day, then, that Gerhartsreiter, his daughter, and the social worker strolled down Marlborough Street on the second day of their first post-divorce visitation. As they did so, Gerhartsreiter pointed out a series of brownstones under renovation. As the social worker turned to observe one, Gerhartsreiter put his plan into action.

He pushed the social worker to the ground. He tossed his daughter into a black SUV as the unwitting getaway driver sat behind the wheel. The little girl hit her head on the doorframe and began to cry. Gerhartsreiter jumped in and observed the social worker running toward the vehicle.

“Go, go, go!” he commanded. The driver pulled out and sped away as the social worker tried to keep up. The man tumbled to the ground, Deakin said, and called 911.

Gerhartsreiter instructed the driver to take him to Massachusetts General Hospital, where he quickly moved his daughter out of the SUV and into a taxi. That taxi took him to the waterfront, where his second confederate was waiting to take him to New York. In a moment, they were gone.

Gerhartsreiter’s ex-wife soon arrived at the place from which her daughter was abducted.

“She was hysterical,” Deakin said. “She was frightened. She was upset. For the next six days, she waited in Boston, never knowing when or if she would see her daughter again.”

Despite their best efforts, investigators were unable to determine how Gerhartsreiter and his daughter made their way from New York to Baltimore, but it was there that he was apprehended after his realtor recognized him from the inescapable media coverage of the missing blond girl, and it was there that the child was rescued – “disoriented, surprised, but not hurt,” Deakin said.

“Christian Karl Gerhartsreiter thinks the rules don’t apply to him,” Deakin said. “But in a court of law, the rules apply to us all equally …. He is criminally responsible for his actions.”

In addition to the lead charge, which carries a five-year prison term, Gerhartsreiter is charged with assault and battery on the social worker; assault and battery with a dangerous weapon, a motor vehicle, also on the social worker; and providing a false name to police after his Aug. 2 arrest.

Gerhartsreiter is represented by attorneys Jeffrey Denner and Timothy Bradl. Prosecution testimony is ongoing before Judge Frank Gaziano in courtroom 906 of Suffolk Superior Court.