David Hampton — a con man who played Sidney Poitier’s son

In New York City in the early 1980s, a young man named David Hampton talked his way into the homes, wallets, and dinner tables of some of Manhattan’s most cultured and affluent residents by claiming to be the son of the actor Sidney Poitier. He was not. Hampton, born in Buffalo in 1964, would appear at a prosperous family’s door, often disheveled and claiming to have been mugged or to have lost his luggage, present himself as “David Poitier,” a friend of the family’s college-age children, and ask to stay the night. Several well-known New Yorkers took him in before the act collapsed. He was arrested and, in 1983, convicted of fraud and ordered to make restitution of roughly $4,500; when he failed to comply with the terms, he served time in prison. His exploits became the basis for John Guare’s 1990 play Six Degrees of Separation and its 1993 film adaptation.

Hampton’s con was small in money and large in meaning. The sums involved were modest — a few thousand dollars, some free meals, a series of free nights — but the people he fooled were precisely those who prided themselves on sophistication: a former Newsweek editor and Columbia journalism dean, the head of a public-television station, figures from the arts and media. The deception worked because Hampton understood that a borrowed famous name, delivered with the right manners and a few plausible personal details, switches off the scrutiny that the same strangers would apply to an ordinary visitor.

The mechanism was social proof manufactured from a single false premise. By presenting himself as both a celebrity’s child and a friend of his hosts’ own children at elite schools, Hampton placed himself inside two trusted circles at once, so that each host assumed someone else had already vetted him. He flattered his targets’ self-image — open-minded, well-connected, hospitable — and that flattery did more work than any document could have, because to doubt him was to seem unworldly or unkind.

The verdict was a conviction, but the figure outlived it. Hampton pursued and harassed the playwright who had dramatized him, demanding a share of the proceeds, and was acquitted of harassment. He never repeated the success of his original con and died of AIDS-related complications in 1983’s long shadow, in 2003, at the age of thirty-nine.