You're right about a lot of it, but you chose the wrong constituents. To be a good man is not a complement; it's an infinitive verb phrase. Verbal infinitive object complements are full clauses, and thus have both infinitive subject noun phrases and infinitive verb phrases.
Exactly how they work depends almost entirely on what the main verb is; here the examples are know and persuade.
- I know [him to be a good man].
- I persuaded [him to leave].
I've bracketed the object complement clauses. It turns out that both clauses have him as subject (subjects of infinitives are in the objective case), and both of these subjects lack the for subject complementizer that occurs occasionally
- For him to be elected would be a surprise.
though all of the verb phrases have the characteristic to infinitive verb phrase complementizer. (This is why infinitive complements are also called for-to complements, and gerunds POSS-ing.)
These two clauses are different, however, because the him of (1) is a raised subject (i.e, not only is it the subject of be a good man, it's also become a passivizable object of know -- it can be passivized, for instance:
- He is known (by me) to be a good man.
Whereas persuade is a verb of communication with an indirect object -- there has to be somebody that gets persuaded. So (2) means the same as
- I persuaded him that he should leave.
which has two references to him -- once as persuadee, and once as leaver. So the NP has a role in both clauses, and gets deleted in the complement. This is called Equivalent Noun Phrase Deletion, or "Equi" for short. Both Raising and Equi are common in English and characterize many verbs and their untensed complements.
It's interesting to contrast Equi and Raising verbs. Some of the tests are especially fun:
- The shit has been known to hit the fan there pretty often.
- There is known to be a party somewhere on this floor.
- *The shit has been persuaded to hit the fan there pretty often.
- *There has been persuaded to be a party somewhere on this floor.
