 for defamation and mental distress. Nine months after he assaulted Grebinski, he is alleged to have attacked a former girlfriend. 'I have spent the last 15 years being a shell of a person,' Grebinski said in July, as the Scottish court case brought Rossi back into the news. 'I isolated myself from all my friends. Even ones I've known for years, after the attack, I felt marked – I still feel marked – as if I have a dark cloud following me. It makes you feel so different from anybody else.' By the time people in Providence had caught wind of Rossi's prior offences, he was on manoeuvres. 'We looked up his first conviction online to find out what he did,' says Lamoureux. 'After that I probably only saw him one or two more times and that was when he took off to England. I think in his mind his cover was blown.' In the three years that followed, he 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 sometimes; he'd stick to you'. 'Stephen said he spoke to him a couple of times on){kind=link}
Nicholas Rossi, who faked his own death to escape a trail of criminality will now be sent back to the US to stand trial
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 several counts of rape and for hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of debt; a man who, until this week, was on remand in a Scottish prison as he attempted to evade an extradition order to the US.