Nicholas Rossi, who has insisted he is an Irishman named Arthur Knight, has been fighting extradition to the US over rape allegations. Photo / Getty Images
Nicholas Rossi, who has insisted he is an Irishman named Arthur Knight, has been fighting extradition to the US over rape allegations. Photo / Getty Images
On the wall of the men’s bathroom in the Wickenden Pub in Providence, Rhode Island, three names have been scrawled in blue pen, each one crossed out. “Arthur Knight”, “Nick Rossi”, “Nick A”. Below them, a fourth name is left uncrossed: “Three Question Nick”. Those names may just be the drunken scribbles of a punter in the wood-panelled dive bar, but anyone who frequented the Wickenden between 2015 and 2017 will have heard of the final one.
Three Question Nick was the name given to one of the bar’s regulars – an oddball with thick-rimmed glasses who used to come in and bend the ear off anyone who would listen. None of his stories appeared to add up; he was a Harvard man who supposedly worked in politics but never seemed to have a job to go to. He was always peddling some get-rich-quick scheme or finding a way to fleece a drinking partner out of a few dollars. He was, by all accounts, more an irritation than an enigma. Nevertheless, people who knew him back then were not surprised to learn years later that he was a conman. “You never really believed what was coming out of his mouth,” says Corey Lamoureux, a bartender at the Wickenden.
Night after night, he would prop up the bar and fire an endless stream of questions at whoever occupied the next stool. “The boss gave him the nickname because he became so annoying. He’d sit there and ask so many questions that our boss said, ‘Listen, you can ask three questions; if you ask a fourth I’m throwing you out’.”
Three Question Nick is just one of at least 16 names US law enforcement believes he has gone by over the years. All of them link back to one man – an American fugitive wanted on two counts of rape and for hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of unpaid debt; a man who, on Friday, after months in an Edinburgh prison, boarded a private flight from Edinburgh Airport after losing his final appeal against extradition to the US.
In Utah, where he is accused of raping two women in 2008, Rossi will be held in a half-empty county jail on the edge of a town called Spanish Fork. The Sheriff’s Office told the BBC it is currently housing just 450 prisoners who are either awaiting trial or serving sentences of less than a year.
The story of Nicholas Rossi, who faked his own death and invented a new identity in Britain in an attempt to shed the trail of alleged criminality he had left behind in the US, is so outlandish a Hollywood producer would deem it far-fetched.
Nicholas Rossi departs Edinburgh Sheriff Court after his extradition hearing in Edinburgh. Photo / Getty Images
Rossi’s most recent alias was Arthur Knight. For a year, in an attempt to avoid extradition, he argued in an Edinburgh court that he had been the victim of a terrible case of mistaken identity. He claimed to be an upper-class English gentleman with Irish heritage (his stilted accent was far from convincing), a university professor and a happily married man who had tragically found himself in poor health despite only being 35. He attended court in a wheelchair, an oxygen mask strapped to his face, the muscles in his legs supposedly so badly atrophied he couldn’t walk or lift his arms above his head — except, conveniently, any time he needed to raise his hand to attract the attention of his barrister.
“Knight” wore either a three-piece suit or a dressing gown to court. For a hearing in June last year he arrived sporting a black barrister’s gown and a yarmulke, having converted to Judaism in HMP Edinburgh, where he had been held since 2022. He claimed to have nothing to do with the alleged fraudster and alleged rapist from Rhode Island, Nicholas Rossi. He claimed the tattoos on his arms which matched those Interpol had on file for Rossi had been added to his arm while he was in a coma; he claimed the fingerprint records that linked him to Rossi had been manipulated and used to frame him.
After some of the most bizarre scenes the Edinburgh Sheriff Court has surely ever seen, Sheriff Norman McFadyen finally ruled in August he could be sent back to America to stand trial. Having finally been extradited, the District Attorney for Salt Lake County told the BBC he will now face separate trials for each allegation.
Nicholas Rossi departs Edinburgh Sheriff Court after his extradition. Photo / Getty Images
Rossi was arrested on December 13, 2021, at the Queen Elizabeth University Hospital (QEUH) in Glasgow, where he had been admitted with Covid. His arrest followed an investigation led by Interpol, with input from police forces from Utah to Essex, that had started in 2017 and concerned allegations of two rapes in Utah, an assault in Massachusetts and another assault (and suspected kidnapping) in Rhode Island. A woman in Essex has claimed a man who went by the name Nicholas Rossi and resembles the man claiming to be Arthur Knight raped her in 2017. Rossi was arrested in connection to the alleged incident last October; last week, he was re-bailed until March 21. Inquiries are ongoing. He is also alleged to have defrauded his foster parents of $200,000.
As his story has gained notoriety more allegations have arisen. His ex-wife, Kathryn Heckendorn, has spoken about the domestic abuse she suffered at Rossi’s hands. They married in 2015 in Dayton six months after meeting at church. She didn’t know of his previous sexual offence until after they were married. She describes him as controlling, manipulative and physically violent. “He broke me down and we got married without telling anybody,” she told the BBC. “It was the first day he hit me, right after we were married.”
She told how she “would be hit on a daily occurrence”. “[I would be] put down verbally [and told] just how stupid, dumb I was. If I didn’t act that way, I wouldn’t have to get hurt.”
When she escaped, a recording she had made of the abuse helped ensure she was believed in court. A judge accused Rossi of “gross neglect of duty and cruelty” and granted her a divorce.
His stepfather, David Rossi, has also spoken out, saying that his stepson suffers from mental health problems and visited psychiatric wards as a child. According to reports, Rossi, who grew up in Rhode Island, became a ward of the state in 1999, aged 12, and spent several years in care in Nebraska, Florida and Ohio.
In 2008, he was found guilty of sexual imposition and public indecency after luring a woman called Mary Grebinksi into the stairwell of a building on a college campus in Dayton, Ohio, pressing his body weight against her and touching her against her will. “I saw his dark eyes behind his dark-rimmed glasses and they were void of any emotion, any human feeling, it was like looking into something dead,” Grebinski said in a video she posted on YouTube in July.
After his conviction, he spent years trying to make Grebinski pay by flinging new evidence at the courts and eventually suing her (unsuccessfully) for defamation and mental distress.
Then, in 2011, he re-emerged in Rhode Island. By this stage, he was in his twenties and using the surname Alahverdian, his biological father’s name. He spoke publicly of the abuse he had suffered in care and campaigned for a children’s bill of rights.
The patrons of the Wickenden Pub, in Providence, Rhode Island, only began hearing about Rossi’s crimes in 2017. “We had found out about his first conviction because one of our friends was a police officer,” says Corey Lamoureux. But, by then, he had disappeared, after making noises about getting married and moving abroad.
In the three years that followed, Lamoureux only heard about Rossi via another pub regular, Stephen O’Shea, an author who once described Rossi as “hard to shake off, like a wet shirt.”
“Stephen said he spoke to him a couple of times on the phone,” says Lamoureux. “He owed [him] a lot of money and had made promises to pay him. And then we all got the call that he was dead.”
Rossi with his ex-wife Kathryn Heckendorn, who made a recording of the abuse she endured. A judge accused Rossi of “gross neglect of duty and cruelty” and granted her a divorce.
In the spring of 2020, a woman claiming to be Rossi’s wife phoned Lamoureux. “[She told me] Nick always looked up to you, he was really glad you guys were friends, he talked highly of you, would you please come to the memorial service?” He said he would make it if he could.
“Even at that point, no one at the pub thought he was dead.”
Father Bernard Healey, of Our Lady of Mercy in East Greenwich, Rhode Island, received a call too, asking if he would hold a memorial service for Rossi. “It was strange, because the woman sounded like Hyacinth Bucket,” Healey has said.
His body, the wife said, had been buried in Switzerland (odd, given an obituary on a memorial website had said his remains had been scattered at sea), but she wanted to host a memorial for him. He agreed. “I then started getting emails about setting the times and date for the service, and I recall she became a little obsessive.”
The invitations went out, then Healey got a call from the police. Detectives told him they thought Rossi had faked his death, that he was wanted by Interpol, the federal government and other state authorities. “They said he was using some sort of voice distorter over the phone,” Healey said. He wrote to the wife to postpone the memorial.
Rossi was very much alive and living in Britain. In early 2020, around the same time as people in Rhode Island began receiving calls about a terminal illness, Nafsika Antypas hired Rossi (or Nicholas Brown as she knew him) to do PR in the UK for her Canadian vegan food brand. She had found his profile on Upwork, a site that connects companies with freelancers. “He said he was experienced in PR and marketing and had a little TV experience, a Harvard graduate. I decided to have a call with him that very day.” Antypas recalls how he “seemed a little odd”. “He had a stutter. I thought maybe just because he was nervous to speak to me.”
In the three months Rossi worked for her, Antypas says she paid him £17,500 (NZ$35,700), while he failed to deliver the work she had set him. She would chase him constantly, but recalls how every time she questioned him he would tell her she was “being paranoid”.
“He kept coming up with these excuses,” she says over the phone from Montreal. “He was in the hospital, and then his wife was in the hospital, and then his dogs were in the hospital, and then he was on his second honeymoon.”
When she issued him with an ultimatum, refusing to pay any more until she saw evidence of his work, he threatened her. He created a smear campaign against her, writing articles and creating a fake website. He sent legal letters threatening to sue her and harassed her parents on the phone. Antypas has had little success in bringing her case to the attention of authorities in the UK or Canada. Between the money she paid him and the money she has spent trying to clear up the trail of destruction he left, she has lost an awful lot in the ordeal.
Nicholas Rossi's wife Miranda Knight walks from Edinburgh Sheriff Court during his extradition hearing. Photo / Getty Images
Interpol finally tracked Rossi down to a flat in Glasgow’s West End in December 2021. When they arrived, they found his new wife, Miranda Knight. Arthur, she said, was in hospital. At the QEUH, the officers were told they had better act quickly: Rossi had been trying to leave in a private ambulance. When he was arrested he said: “I am Arthur Knight. I’ve never even been to the US.”
Back home in Rhode Island, Nicholas Rossi is a constant source of amusement in the pub where he spent three years of his chequered life. “At one point we wanted to fly overseas and just sit in a courtroom and yell at him because we know it’s him,” says Lamoureux, whose assessment of Rossi is less that he is mentally ill and more that he “thinks he’s smarter than anyone else”.
In the coming months, Rossi will have to face the charges that have brought him back to the US. Lamoureux suspects he’ll keep up his bizarre story of mistaken identity until the end. “He’s going to go down swinging with this Arthur Knight character. It wouldn’t shock me if he’d tried to sell the rights to this story already.”
If a team of producers is already scouting out characters and locations for the Netflix series, they could do worse than to start in the men’s bathroom of a Rhode Island dive bar, where the names of a local fugitive are scrawled on the wall, and above them the message: “I faked my own death at the Wickenden Pub.”
