Why are we so drawn to frauds like Nicholas Rossi?

But the hardened swindlers, the dedicated crooks, those human beings who have such an unstable sense of self that they’re capable of wishing themselves in and out of existence – they seem to interest us strangely.

In the Sheriff Court in Edinburgh last week, the court cleared the way for Nicholas Rossi – or Arthur Brown, or Arthur Knight, or Nicholas Alahverdian – to be extradited to the United States to face trial for serious sexual offences.

Despite the seriousness of the criminal charges he faces, his extradition has been among the most colourful and absurd Scottish justice has seen in recent years, in great part because of the brazen, shameless and wildly improbable nature of his defence.

It is fashionable to talk about the idea politics has entered a “post-truth” phase. You don’t need to look far – even in the mainstream media – to find Covid cranks, vaccine sceptics and climate deniers selling anxieties to the credulous. But the Rossi case takes the question “Who are you going to believe, me or your lyin’ eyes?” to a new level.

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Our culture has a surprising amount of time for confidence tricksters. But the fact a character is complex doesn’t mean it has any depth. Watching Rossi’s antics in court this week, I was reminded of John Le Carré’s fragmented memoir The Pigeon Tunnel (2016). In one essay, Le Carré describes his “crisis addict” father Ronnie as an unscrupulous gentleman con-man and fantasist “who spent his life walking on the thinnest, slipperiest layer of ice you can imagine”.

In an age before credit card guarantees, Ronnie would routinely book into expensive hotels, befriending the porters with generous tips – before doing a runner leaving his substantial bills unpaid. Bryllcreamed and besuited, he ran to be an alcohol-abolitionist Liberal MP with a car boot full of champagne. Superficial propriety and an easy smile were combined with a complete lack of scruple. He looked plausible. He knew he looked plausible. And he exploited that gap between appearances and realities for all it was worth.

Ronnie saw no contradiction with being on the wanted list for crimes of dishonesty and turning up at Royal Ascot in a grey topper. He made a point of sending his kids to expensive private schools – conscious that you don’t lose British establishment gloss even if you’ve got empty pockets and a police warrant out for your arrest.

Undisclosed in Le Carré’s account, his siblings have since revealed that abuse was among the other secrets and lies Ronnie cultivated in their family. You can understand how a child marinaded in this kind of family environment might develop an outsized awareness of the differences between appearances and realities.

Given his subsequent connections with spycraft – and characters living double and triple lives – Le Carré was as interested as anyone in what this inheritance of deception had done to his sense of reality. He later described himself as “a liar, born to lying, bred to it, trained to it by an industry that lies for a living, practiced in it as a novelist”.

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And Le Carré, of course, is a pen name – a much more polite term for changing your name than our society usually applies to people who burn through identities like match sticks.

Arthur Knight is Nicholas Rossi’s latest pen name. He has several more. The character he has created has all the plausibility of an EL James novel set in an English country house. “Arthur Knight” was initially arrested in a Scottish hospital after receiving treatment for Covid-19 during the pandemic.

Distinctive tattoos on his arms connected him with an outstanding Interpol warrant to Nicholas Rossi – a wanted man and convicted sex offender who manufactured reports of his own death of non-Hodgkin lymphoma in 2020, leaving behind a grieving widow and two kids.

There were post-mortem tributes in the state legislature. His tragic passing was reported on local telly. But there was no body, of course, and no widow, and no kids. Because Rossi was winging his way across the ocean, first to Dublin, then to Scotland where he acquired yet another wife and settled down in the Woodlands district of Glasgow.

“Arthur Knight’s” defence is that he is the victim of an inexplicable case of mistaken identity. He maintains that the matching tattoos were dug into his arms on the Covid ward as part of a sinister conspiracy led by the US attorney seeking his extradition. The matching fingerprints are more of a mystery. Because, in the words of Sheriff McFadyen, he maintains he is “an Irishman, adopted at birth, long resident in the United Kingdom and who has never set foot in the United States”.

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This orphaned Dubliner affected the style of Toad of Toad Hall, stoating around West End bars pretending he was somehow connected to Glasgow University and picked up his education and affected English accent at Cambridge.

He was, in short, just the kind of American caricature of an upper-class Edwardian gentleman that you rarely encounter in the wild – even in the West End of Glasgow.

If anything, the costumes have grown increasingly stranger as the extradition case has progressed. In the effort to project an appearance of infirmity and physical collapse – as well as to disguise his similarities with the younger man’s mugshots – there’s the ubiquitous oxygen mask and wheelchair which no medical evidence suggests he needs or requires.

But he’s also toured international TV studios in Churchillian homburgs and heavy three-piece tailoring before graduating into Sebastian Flyte’s silk pyjamas for one court appearance last year – all that was missing was Aloysius the teddy bear.

Rossi's latest incarnation has been as an orthodox Jew, decked out in yarmulke and a kind of black gown he insisted was a bekishe – a sort of frock coat associated with the Hasidic community.

If you found yourself facing accusations that you are essentially a Mr Ben figure – rooting around in the costume box of other people’s lives for new and even more implausible masks to pull on – this late conversion to Judaism while in custody might strike you as a counter-productive stunt to pull. His crocodile tears need work.

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Authorising Rossi’s extradition this week, Sheriff McFadyen’s judgment was dripping in contempt – and understandably so. The judge characterised his evidence as so unreliable he “would not be prepared to accept any statement of fact made by him unless it was independently supported”.

He concluded that Rossi “is as dishonest and deceitful as he is evasive and manipulative”, suggesting these “unfortunate facets of his character have undoubtedly complicated and extended what is ultimately a straightforward case”. Fingerprints, tattoos, facial recognition by witnesses who have known him for years – the case against him is overwhelming. But it also shaded into the absurd.

“His claim that he could not lift his arms above his head and keep them there because of atrophy in his arms was contradicted by his behaviour during the proceedings when he regularly raised and kept his hand raised during the hearing as he tried to engage the attention of the court,” Sheriff McFadyen observed dryly.

Rossi’s case made me think of some of the other frauds I’ve known over the years. I once met a guy who conducted all of his romantic transactions using what was effectively a fake persona. Which persona he went with depended on his mood.

With a difficult-to-place mid-Atlantic accent – easily explained by stints in international schools or time spent on either side of the pond – he morphed into different people with different backgrounds and different backstories for his assignations, before moving on to the next date in his next character.

I’m not sure I’ve met a more terrifying person before or since. What they sometimes call the “dark triad” of personality traits – narcissism, psychopathy and Machiavellianism – this guy had all three in spades, smoothly transitioning from one identity to the next without thought or care that people he’d spent intimate time with might feel stung and disturbed to discover that more or less everything he’d told them about himself was a lie. He just ghosted and moved on. Which was easy, because in most material senses, the person they met never existed.

Literature and drama tell us the devil has all the best tunes. As the philosopher Simone Weil observed, “fictional good is boring and flat, while fictional evil is varied and intriguing, attractive, profound and full of charm”. The opposite is true in reality. Despite the outsize media coverage of their games and excesses, frauds like Nicholas Rossi aren’t really interesting or compelling. There’s a whole lot of nothing at their centre. And as everyone who falls within their orbit eventually discovers, they’re sad, mad, and dangerous to know.