I Am Not Nicholas: Chilling podcast seeks to solve riddle of fraudster’s identity

Nicholas Alahverdian, an American wanted on charges of fraud, sexual assault and rape, seems to have started from similar principles. He kept variants of his first name through many cycles of surname, until later changing his name to Arthur and alternating some of the surnames he used before. According to the police, Alahverdian became Nicholas Rossi from Rhode Island, who later morphed into Irishman Arthur Knight.

In 2020, ‘Nicholas Rossi’, a children’s rights campaigner who had written about his time in care, announced he was terminally ill. Many gushing online obituaries soon followed. Yet a week earlier, ‘Arthur Knight’, supposed survivor of a difficult institutional childhood in Dublin, got married in the UK. In December 2021, Knight was arrested while on a ventilator in a Covid-19 hospital ward. Last year, a Scottish court ruled that Rossi and Knight were one and the same man. He is in custody in Edinburgh, awaiting potential extradition to the US.

BBC journalist Jane MacSorley first heard the story in 2021, and her excellent podcast I Am Not Nicholas (BBC Studios) is the culmination of a year-long investigation. (Nicholas Alahverdian was also the subject of theIndo Daily podcast on Tuesday May 2nd.)​

MacSorley begins by turning up announced at the building where Knight lives, saying, “I love door-knocking… you just don’t know how they’re going to react!”. She finds Arthur and wife Miranda, and gets herself invited for dinner. Within the course of that single evening, MacSorley goes from being fairly confident that Knight is faking his identity and really is Rossi, to believing the police have made a terrible mistake: Knight doesn’t have the same arm tattoos as Rossi, claims to have never visited America, and his Bristol-born wife vouches for his identity.

But doubts soon set in. Knight gets the date of the 7/7 London bombings wrong, despite claiming he was there. He tells MacSorley he spent his childhood in Ireland, but becomes strangely vague when asked to recall details of his life here. MacSorley’s commentary on her interviews with him is often hilarious: “Arthur is a millennial and from the way he’s talking, you’d think he grew up in the days of horse and cart…it’s almost like his memories come from a 1970s tourist board advert!” She also interviews Miranda, to try and discover who she really is: victim, dupe, or loyal wife of an alleged fugitive?

Whether interviewing a victim or getting annoyed with herself about her own reactions, MacSorley comes across as disarmingly honest and sincere.

Chilling, compulsive listening.