David Rossi was sitting at home in Rhode Island one night in early 2022, his prime having all but passed him by. His days as an Engelbert Humperdinck impersonator, of Florida cruise ships, of $2,000-a-week cash payouts, of hanging out with Tom Jones and meeting Elvis, all the girls, the glamour — he’d left it all behind for a woman and her three children. That decision, he believed, ruined his life. There were no opportunities for singers like him in New England, and he’d frittered away his money, eventually ending up in a dank, ground floor apartment that reeked of stale tobacco.

The woman and her children were long gone. A series of subsequent relationships had also failed. Rossi was alone, save for sporadic visits from an ex-girlfriend whom he still deeply cared for, as well as her boyfriend, whom he disliked. He suffered from emphysema, insomnia and diabetes. His cheeks were sunken, cadaver-like, and his beard stubbly. Rossi was puffing on the cheap cigarettes he favours when he looked up at the TV.

A picture appeared onscreen of a man with a moon-shaped face, pockmarked skin and short dark hair. He was in a wheelchair. The man had been arrested in Glasgow, and Scottish police claimed that he fled the US two years earlier to avoid prosecution for a myriad of crimes. The man on television denied everything, insisting that he was an Irish-born orphan and a Glasgow university professor named Arthur Knight.

Rossi, slouching deeper into his sofa, almost couldn’t believe what he was watching. Yes, the man had changed since he’d last seen him. He’d put on a great deal of weight, and he was speaking with a foreign accent. But he was the same boy — now grown — whom Rossi, in part, blamed for the unfortunate turn his life had taken years before. The man was not Arthur Knight, Rossi frothed at the TV, but his stepson, Nicholas Rossi, who he and many others believed died of lymphoma two years before.

Read the rest at the FT Magazine: https://www.ft.com/content/f3f1f551-c53e-4102-9e1c-445915422639