The mystery Samoan in my family tree

When Lennard Davis received an email from a stranger who said Lennard was his closest living relative, he thought it must be a scam. Lennard is a Jewish professor from New York, and the stranger claimed to be from a line of Polynesian chieftains. It took four years and the unravelling of two family secrets to solve the puzzle.
In 1979 Lennard Davis's Uncle Abie told him he had a secret - but he said he couldn't reveal it while Lennard's father, Morris, was alive.
Morris was then in hospital with cancer. When he died, two years later, Lennard reminded Abie about the secret, and asked if he could now be told.
Initially, Uncle Abie was reluctant - he told Lennard to forget all about it, he didn't want to tell him. But Lennard pressed him.
"So, he told me," Lennard says. "He said, 'I'm your father.'"
It was a disturbing revelation - Lennard had been brought up to dislike Uncle Abie and to believe that he was untrustworthy. And with both of his parents now gone - Lennard's mother had died almost a decade earlier - there was no-one left who could explain what had happened.
"My parents had never told me. It was a family secret and probably, on some level, a shameful one," Lennard says.
Years passed before he decided to investigate this secret that his parents had taken to their graves. But at the age of 55, in the year 2000, Lennard decided to take some tests that would verify his paternity.