Reflecting on the Future

In April 2024, my cousin Alan was delivered to federal court in San Francisco for his sentencing hearing. It had been just under a year since a jury found him guilty of hiring someone to kill his ex wife, Priscilla . All of them seemed the same, except maybe Al an. He was contr ite, genuinely filled with regret, or so it sounded to me. He apologized to Priscilla, who was listening on Zo om. He promised that he would never again do anything to harm her or the child ren. He talked about his decision to reject a plea deal and go to trial, and for a minute he didn't sound like Alan at all. He said that the trial had made him see himself as the jury saw him. It was embarrassing to listen to those recordings, he said. Your honor, I am prepared to serve any sentence, Alan told the j udge. If he got the maximum, ten years . He would be almost sixty when he was released, and it would be hard to start over. But he said he had already suffered the biggest pun ishment. His voice cra cked. He had lost all access to his children . And he continued, the torture I suffer every day comes from my awareness of the impact I've had on my mom. He was really choking up now. I felt something welling up in my throat too . Alan was no longer dressed like a dad returning home from work. For the sentencing he was brought in wearing yellow prison scrubs over a white thermal underweight shirt and yellow Crocs knocko ffs. Alan had his back to me, so most of the time I was watching Judge Cur ley. She was leaning toward Alan. She was nodding to every affirmative statement he made. Her face reacted to every word it se emed. Then it was her turn to spe ak. I didn't see it when you were on the stand at trial, but I can see it now, she said. You acknowledged the har m. The judge had really listened. I mean she had really listened and observed Al an. And so she focused on the irony, that's the word she used, of the story . Alan's relationship with his mother was perhaps the strongest bond of his life, and yet he had been willing to deprive his own children of their own mot her. So there's that in itself, Judge Corley said. And there were all those times that Alan made the decision to go ahead with the murder for hire plan . Not just in that one conversation with the undercover agent, the judge said. You didn't have to meet with him the second time. You could have just not shown up. You didn't have to give him the gold coin. Then you didn't have to wire the twenty-three thousand dollars. And you didn't have to send the target pack age. And you didn't have to tell him when you were going to be on vacations with the kids, so they wouldn't be there, right? So you had opportunity after opportunity after opportunity, but you went forward because that was your int ent. Allen's mother, Lena, had gotten dozens of people to write letters to the court on Alan's be half. All of them attested to Alan's loving, kind, and supportive character. Some, including a letter from one of Alan's ex girlfriends, were The judge addressed those letters now. She said those last two words staccato, like she was striking the gav el. And finally she said, mister Gesson, you were a lawyer. You are a barred lawyer. You took an oath to uphold the la w, but by your own testimony, your own testimony, you thought that you were going to bribe some official to have her kidnapped and removed from the United St ates. The sentence had to reflect this to o. righteous outra ge. The judge sentenced Alan to the maximum, 120 months in prison, followed by three years of supervised rele ase. Like an episode of a TV series, the hearing lasted exactly one hour, took me as a viewer through a range of emotions, and deposited me more or less where I'd started. I still had no real understanding of how Alan ended up doing what he did. The court isn't interested in why people do the terrible things they do. The court's job is to determine guilt and apportion punishment. But for me to tell this story, I needed a theory of the crime. Or a theory of Alan . I needed to imagine what had been going through Alan's head that had made it seem that having his wife killed was a reasonable solution to his problem s. For that I needed to talk to him. I had asked through Lena, and she told me that he wouldn't talk. At least not until after the trial, and the sentencing, and the appeals . That last part would surely drag on for months or years more. Still, when I got back to my hotel after the sentencing, I created an account in the system that facilitates correspondence with inmates and send Alan a message asking for an intervie w. Next Alan would have to agree to correspond with me, and the prison would have to approve my message. But before any of that could happen, Alan reached out to me hims elf. He was ready to talk. I am M. Gesson and from Serial Productions and the New York Times. This is the idi ot Thank you for using GTL . Да, привет, ты меня слы шь? The last time I talked to Alan was a few weeks before he was arrested, almost two years a We had never been close. We had never even been particularly fri endly. In fact, in the years since Alan and Nana moved to the US with O, I had rebuffed Alan's attempts to become friend s. So Alan had no reason to tr ust me. And having seen Alan spend hours in the stand bending the truth, I had no reason to trust him. Still I wanted to hear what he had to say. In a message he sent before the call, he promised to give me context that had been missing from the tri al. I wasn't sure how much time we'd have for our conversation. So as soon as I had made sure that we could hear each other, and I was recording, I switched to English and ask him to get to the crux of the mat ter. Okay. Um well so I gu ess what I want to start with was actually was what was in your note which was that you feel there was context missing from the from the case that or that you consciously decided not to disc uss? Do you wanna tell me what it is? Um sure. Um so roughly in two thousand and nine, two thousand ten, um I was working closely with uh Ukrainian politician whose name was Adolf Prutnik. Um he was a close ally of the U. Alan told a somewhat convoluted story spanning about a decade and involving Russia I I know that uh I know that I was just uh uh But maybe I'm crazy, but I think that in general murder for hire is a more serious crime than money laundering . So how couldn't it be incidental to the bigger case ? I'm not I'm not trying to undermine the seriousness of the charge. I'm just all of this had been discussed at the trial. It was all I could do to hide my disappointment and annoyance. I tried to change the subject. I asked about June 2019 when Alan took five-year-old O from Moscow to the U S. This led nowhere help ful. It wasn't kidnapping, Alan said. He and Priscilla had made a plan to move to America, and their lease on the giant apartment in Moscow was ending, and the landlord was breathing down there next, and Priscilla had been dragging her feet on moving out. So while she was in Zimbabwe for a few days, he thought he could kill a few birds with one stone . So um I used her absence to Becky the apartment, I moved all of the all all of our things into stor age, and uh I knew that uh there would be a huge explosion when pursuit came back and we would have another violent confrontation. So to avoid it I traveled with to the United States uh slightly ahead of sched ule. Wait, so you moved all of Priscilla's stuff into storage and moved to the United States to avoid having a confrontation with the landl ord. I can generally listen sympathetically, or at least neutrally, to all kinds of bullshit. It's part of the j ob. But you're about to hear me run right out of pat ience. And did you tell Priscilla where you were in the States? I did. No, you didn 't. Uh well I said that was in the States and then I think the next day we were in Cape Cod and uh your dad was posting pictures on Facebook or I was not trying anyway to conceal it whether I said specifically I was in Boston or not, I don't rem ember. I think I said I was traveling to Boston, I'm pretty sure I did, but uh if I didn't I didn't know she was pretty desperately looking for where you had taken her child and she had no idea where Right. And then you left and she once again didn't know where you were. Uh I don't uh don't think that is correct. I think that Pristina and I were uh uh I was accessible and we were in touch during that period. Uh but uh I don't think that's true. Uh I wouldn't uh you know it's um can't tell you. Uh I th I I do not well uh I uh don' t uh see any reason why I would try to conceal it though. I guess that's what I'm trying to f to figure out. Ye ah. Yeah no because it's uh uh I mean it's recording this interview in a borrowed studio and we were running out of time. The conversation had not gone well . Alan had told me nothing I hadn't already heard him say. I had just about lost my cool. I wasn't sure when or if I talked to Alan again. You have one minute remaining. And then Alan surprised me. So shall I call you tomor row? W hat? The prospect of spending more time listening to Alan lie and deflect was unappealing. And still, I'd been waiting to talk to him for almost two years. Yeah, call me tomor row. Okay. All right. Thanks, Mr. Thank you. B ye . One way to think of it was that each of us had a j ob. His was to bullshit me. Mine was to try to cut through the crap. We'd have to see which of us was better at their j ob? Do you want to pick up where we left off yesterday? Yep . We started to talk almost da ily. First we covered obligatory gro und. I asked him about the things he was accused of doing. He denied everything. He didn't kidnap O from Moscow and he didn't have anything to do with all the misfortunes that befell Priscilla in Zimbabwe. Like when she was evicted, beaten, arrested, jailed. So uh she has a tendency to blame me for absolutely everything that uh happened. Every single time. When he went to Canada with O, well that wasn't a kidnapping either. And he still denied, of course, that he wanted Priscilla killed. He only wanted her depor ted. In between rejecting all the accusations, Alan told me about life in pris on. He talked about it the way we used to talk about our travels when the family hung out on Cape C od. There was local cuisine. I think the cottage cheese. I mix it with cookies and there are the customs and beliefs of the local population. I have not met a single Democrat in in in a jail in the US. Wow. I can't fcinasating. That blows my mind. I find fascinat ing. Do you have an explanation for this ? Republicans are more likely to commit crimes than Democrats . Alan was trying to connect with me. That wasn't surprising. I provided a break in his prison routine, a link to the outside world, and at least something of a sympathetic e ar. What did surprise me was that after about a week, I was starting to look forward to our conversations too. You know, the more you hang out with someone, the more you just hang out with someone. We've spoken more in the past week than we have in the privileged fifty years That is true . I wasn't quite ready to imagine me and Alan being friends. But I was no longer feeling impatient. And so at this point in our conversations, I decided to try a different approach. So um I was biking and thinking about our conversations and thinking about your comment that there is a parallel universe in which you and I are friends and I thought, you know, we have such an odd history because I don't, you know, I I knew you as a little kid and then I remet you as a teenager, but I'm not really in a position to sort of talk about your growing up and your experien ces. So why don't we go back to the begin ning? I g I guess as long as you don't have a preconceived uh narrative uh into into which I'm trying to squeeze it, I'm very happy to go on and trust your judg ment. I often ask people I'm writing about to start from the begin ning. In my experience, people will tell you who they are. So maybe Alan could tell me how a boy from an intellectual Jewish family in Moscow became a man who paid an undercover FBI agent to kill his ex wi fe. Sure this was going to be an Allen narrative. I expected him to brag and exaggerate, to try to ingratiate himself at tim es. And I expected him to lie about things that concerned Priscilla directly. That's hum an. I mean most of us don't try to get our ex-partners murdered, but all of us try to present our lives in the best lig ht. And still, all of us want to be k nown. So yeah, tell me tell me about uh little Alos ha. Alosha was very happy until he was fifteen . Fifteen was when Alan immigrated to the US with his mother. I remember my childhood as very, very fun. Friends, family , grandma, that chef, basketball, judo, rock and roll I was taking lessons. Still his son. It was a very poor life. Um but uh but I realized in retrospect that y y y you only realize you have poor uh when you look at it from the s By first world standards, most people in the Soviet Union were quite poor. But there were so many gradations of poor and so many shades of privil ege. In the Soviet Universe, our family was pretty well off . Alan grew up in an apartment in the very center of Moscow, a short walk from the Krem lin. Lena had gotten the place from our grandmot her. It was the Soviet equivalent of a Soho Loft. Everyone was always coming over for impromptu parties, with lots of arguing and some singing and guitar playing, often crashing at the place. But yes, Lena didn't have much work, and Alan's dad was out of the picture, so they had no m oney. Alan says he remembers from a very young age, knowing exactly how many rubles and co-becs they had each month and helping feed their tiny famil y. I would go to the stores downstairs when I was three years older than myself, three and four. Um I knew every saleswoman in the bakery bullish now next door. And I would walk into those stores uh usually through the back door, uh go say hello to my friends and come back with fool There's probably some exaggerating going on here, but I think the contours of the story are right. As Alan entered his teens, the Soviet regime began its rapid collap se. Lena's Bohemian circle went into overdrive. Underground writers started publishing. Underground artists started showing. Everyone started traveling to the West. And some people left the country altoget her. It was a time for taking opportunities . Lena, who had a brother in America, my father, had the opportunity to emigrate, and she to ok it. When Alan was fifteen, he and Lena moved to the United St ates. And suddenly, Alan's happy, scrappy life was over. They stayed with my parents and my brother in Newton, Massachuset ts. Both of my parents worked from home. They lived in a three-bedroom split-level house that was too small for three adults and two teenagers. Plus Lena and my mom had never gotten along. It was not easy, uh for me or for my mom. No, I'm sure it was not easy for your dad or for your mom. And so there was quite a bit of t ens I was twenty three at the time and living in New York. I talked to my mother on the phone most days, but we rarely talked about Lena and Allen, because the entire time they stayed at my parents' house, my mother was undergoing treatment for metastatic breast cancer. She died in nineteen ninety two. In our conversations thirty four years later, Alan never mentioned my mother's illness and treatment. Alan and Nina and my parents spent those months in two separate cocoons of desp air in UME, um you know it was familiar language, familiar culture, everything made sense. And then sort of losing all of that uh and finding yourself in a completely unfamiliar environment where you're not understood with that to me was so by so much so much more d d disturbing. Uh here everything was unfamiliar, all the cultural you came here, you came to the state you were twelve? I was fourteen. No no no I I know exactly what you were describing. Ye ah. Right. So so you know exactly . Moving to a new country as a teenager is one of the hardest things a person can experien ce. It's certainly one of the hardest things I've ever lived through. I went from being cool and articulate and having a friend group I would do anything for to a lonely loser who felt dumb all the time. So did Al an. And and there was coista my younger brother Keith, who was like popular and successful and and you're five weeks ap art in age but right and no well Koyster was a star because he really was a valid doctor and he was the most popular boy in school. He you know he was truly the biggest star in student South High School at the time. Uh you know, he got into Harvard and he used to say he scores above the char ts. My brother was the captain of the hockey team and the football team, and an editor of the yearbook, and an editor of the school newspap er. And Alan, who showed up sophomore year, was his unathletic, inarticulate cousin from the old country, who wore weird clothes and was alwa ys would have money for lying around all uh I was sleeping in a mattress in his room. And uh when he uh came home he would dump the like all the change from his pockets onto the floor. So he would have the piles of coins around the room that he didn't care about because he didn't count the money, he never thought about the money, he never had to have a job. Uh so I would uh pick up a couple of quarters and buy myself chocolate milk in the school cafeteria because I didn't have a couple of extra quarters. So it was a very much a rich man poor man situation where I was the poor man. Um I didn't you know when his friends came over I sometimes tried to hang out with them but uh uh yeah um third wheel the third wheel ex actly That description got to me. The mattress on the floor, the quarters on the floor, and my brother who was busy being fifteen himself, oblivious to the indignity of being a new immig rant. Alan and Lena had been somebodies in the center of Moscow, and now there were nobodies in Newton, Massachusetts. And they didn't even want to be in Newton, Massachuset ts. One day Alan told me Lena had what sounds like a being her own person since she had me and uh it was very difficult for her to just to live in under someone else's roof. So I haven't seen my mom cry uh maybe I seen her cry maybe five, six times in my life. So this was one of those times that was uh that made a very big impression on me. So and what what did you do? Um I think that basically I told her the next day that we should probably rent an apartment and um I took initiative. Um she agreed we we calculated the budget and we were able to find the apartment within the next couple of days. So basically I uh I moved us out. It's true that they moved out after about eight month s. The way my father remembers it, it was because my mother had become too ill for anyone else to stay in the ho use. What I remember is my mother telling me that she knew Lena was scared to be in the house because my mother was dy ing. What Alan remembers is that he saved the day, saved Lena, and saved himself. He took charge. At first I was bagging groceries, then um beginning with his first job, rising through the ranks at the star market, then he became a really fast cashier. From bagging groceries to ringing them up to becoming the fastest cashier. Alan pulled himself up by his bootstraps and pulled and pulled and pulled. He got a job with a roofing company and worked thirty, forty hours a week while attending high school. That may have had something to do with why he was rejected by nineteen out of the twenty colleges he applied to. The one that accepted him was Bab son, then a little business college just outside of Bost on. The official Preppy Handbook called it a place for rich kids who have to wait four years to go into daddy's busin ess. Many students had a lot of money and not a whole lot of interest in doing college work. Alan, on the other hand, had no money, no daddy's business to go into, but a lot of interest in everyone's college work. He organized what he called a tutoring busin ess. I mean the word business was accurate. Tutoring was used loosely . It was more of a business that had students at places like Harvard write papers for students at Babson. It was Alan's first successful vent ure. How big was this business ? About over a thousand fines. Wow. About about twenty-five writers. How m how much money did you make? Uh I'm not sure I reported the truly to the IRS so I I would rather not I would rather not say but uh I it was uh it it's it supported me fairly comfortable at the time. You and your mom Correct, yeah . Just give me a ballpark . I would say that maybe in a very good month I would make about ten thousand dollars . W ow. That's um that's great. That must have um felt very different from the first couple of years of being an immigr ant. It was. No, it were it was, but it also was um I think social it was important because I was uh I was needed. So it was uh I suddenly had something to offer um which helped me deal with my insecurities. Uh I was popular, I was in demand. I think that uh it was uh as much about my social status as it was about uh the money. Maybe it was more about social status than it was about the mone y. Alan loved being useful. He had always been useful to his mother, from the time he was a toddler if we believe that story, but now other people needed him too, and he needed to be need ed. From then on, Alan continued his pursuit of more money and more social status After college, he went to law school in Connecticut. He and then the moved to Lichfield and got a job at a law firm in Manhattan after gradu ation. Then he lost that j ob. Alan explored several career options, joining the FBI, to think he could have been David rather than being ensnared by David, or the CI A. And then he got a job that changed his li fe. Alan was hired by McKin,se they international consulting firm, and was launched on his path to becoming the Al len. I joined a McKinsey in Moscow, which was probably a miracle for me because Mc McKinsey in Russia at that time was a very small group of people that was in the center of economic transformation of the opposed Soviet economy. I was familiar with what Alan was describing. I was working as a journalist in Moscow at the time. With oil prices skyrocketing, Russia was entering a period of unprecedented prosperity. A new Bentley dealership couldn't keep cars in stock. Men with connections had picked up dilapidated factories and moribund oil refineries at the post-Soviet fire sale in the 1990 s. Now they found themselves sitting atop ballooning mega fortunes, and the slick young American consultants from McKinsey were in hand to help them clean up their enterprises, make them less like mob businesses, and more like regular business es. Less killing, more board votes, and stock issu es. And we were we were doing transformation projects for every company that mattered. And I think we all felt a little like supermen. Um kind of uh changing the world and changing the economy. Everything we'd done was in the newspapers at the time. We were in every company. And it was just and it i I felt like I bec I became a part of a character in an adventure bo ok forget law school the law firm the unsuccessful bid to join the CIA. Alan was finally living up to the potential he had shown in college when he was rich and everyone needed him. Moscow was the adult version of that li fe. Equally exciting was that um I became very popular among uh women. Uh but strange lack of any interest to towards me by American women of completely balanced by the women in Russ ia. And how do you explain the differen ce well is I I I I it's uh I uh it's either me or the women, right? Um so uh the I I I think more likely that uh gender roles in uh in the United States are very different than from the from the rest of the world. Uh as a result, uh sort of my macho um character, which works really well uh in Europe and Africa, does not work well at all in America. And when you say macho, what do you mean? Um that uh there's a strong man who you know who pays the bills, who opens the doors, who gives lots of gifts, uh that kind of Really, Alan? This is what you took from your Bohemian upbringing and your intellectual famil y? It was hard for me to belie ve. But yes, its seem that Alan took his macho chivalry act very seriously, and that it wor ked. Women love being doted on by Alan . I interviewed Alan's first series girlfriend, and she told me that she still thought of Alan as one of the best people she had ever met. He made her feel taken care of. Alan's second serious girlfriend wrote a letter to the court. She wrote, The way I felt with him, I can wish every woman to experience this. Alan supported her when she lost her dog. He was there for the family when her cousin died in a car accident, and he arranged for the best health care when her grandmother and then her grandfather became ill. Quote It is only thanks to Alexey that my grandparents were alive for many years af ter. And he was romanti c. How did I feel with him as a woman? the ex girlfriend wrote in her letter to Judge Corley. It's fun to imagine Judge Curley reading this one. I felt like a goddess. He gave me gifts ranging from the best face cream to my dream car, just as a surprise. He made sure I drank more water and went to the gym. He taught me English and faith in mys elf. Alexei showed me the world and its possibiliti es. And it wasn't just the w omen. Other letters to the court mentioned how generous Alan was and how empathet ic. When one of O's music teachers suffered a stroke, Alan brought him groceries and also figured out how to help the man out of some tax filing predicament. Alan funded a struggling student's film proje ct. When he found out that a woman's husband was beating her, he extracted her and her kids and put them up He helped build a custom design pool for an injured eleph ant. This was a sight of Alan I'd never really se en. Almost more surprising was that Alan had never bragged about any of this. He portrayed himself to the family as an international man of mystery, a smooth operator at the edges of the legal universe. But secretly, he was a universal benefac tor. He volunteered to solve everyone's problem s, and people paid him back with love . Alan was 36 when he was in Zimbabwe in business and met Priscilla for the first time. His gift-giving busin ess Rushed to the hospital. She had an emergency C sec tion. And then I saw for the first time. And the hardest months of Alan's life beg an. How yeah, what did he look like? Um he looked like a very, very, very, very miniature child, one seventh, one eighth of the normal birth weight. Um I honestly didn't think he was going to make it. About a third of all babies born this premature don't surv ive. Another third have profound lifelong disabilities blindness, deafness, other neurological damage, cognitive disability. Only a third recover fully and go on to live healthy lives. It would be weeks, even months, before anyone would know which category O was in It just it was just that constant uh uh unyielding worry, like constant stress, like absolute constant stress. In the in the utterish sense of helplessness and and be I I found find it very difficult to be in situations w where um I cannot affect the outcome. And uh for me it was uh very difficult to accept. Alan had to do something. Many things. It's a lot of things. It was uh changing the lighting because all the children in the unit were under direct directed uh a very bright uh halogen lighting. I brought in a sleep nap in the mattress because one of the biggest risks is that they stopped breathing. Alan fixed rubber to the units' doors so they wouldn't slam and wake the babies up. He brought in a speaker system and played common classical music. Eventually Alan ran out of things that money and enterprise could solve. Uh I went through my entire repertoire of Russian and English songs and Polish songs. Camped out in the NICU day after day. What did you sing? All he could do was keep it After two and a half months, his son came home. He weighed just over four pounds. But he was miraculously healthy. No eyesight problems or breathing issues. Or as it gradually became clear, developmental issu es. When my own daughter was five weeks old, she landed in the NICU for thirty-six hours, and then I spent a week in the hospital with her recover ing. That was twenty-four years ago, and yet every time I think about it, I feel as scared as I have ever been in my life. Alan spent 75 days in the Nikyu with O. I knew that before our interviews, of co urse. But when I listened to Alan talk about it, I heard that fear and that helplessness that I myself will never for get. So there's some things I believe without qualific ation. I believe that Alan loves O , that he worries about O and his daughter Elle, though he has spent very little time with her. You never forget what your child looked like at their smallest and sickest, and you never stop worry ing. And this meant that Alan was now tra pped. He loved his tiny son desperately . If he had to stay up nice for the rest of his life, if he had to stay bedside and sing stupid songs forever, he would. He could never leave him. But being next to O forever would mean being stuck forever in a marriage that was making Alan increasingly miser able. Much of what Alan had to say about the marriage seemed to me pretty self-pitying and blamey. Alan accuses Priscilla of not infrequently cheating on him. Given how often they broke up and got back together, I think it's fair to say that there is a lot of disagreement about when exactly there was cheating and when they were on a bre ak. That said, I do think that especially in the later years, he had moments when he was genuinely distra ught. In one of our conversations he described a moment of emotional pain that, it seemed to me, he still himself didn't quite understand . Um like once like she she just told me about one of the one of the times like she cheated on me and I started wailing. Just the the scream of pain. And I think I was wailing for about fifteen, twenty minutes to the point of actually becoming scared. And I just couldn't stop it. It was like this like this like this this scream that was coming out. And um I felt that like that that took time when I felt good and like I was like like I felt a relationship was fine and we were back on track and like damn it like the press and back down and I would need then it would take 10 several months to recover from it and to kind of move on and and bam it happens again. And like it's it's just it was like that for basically for seven years . Still on the whole, Alan's description of the marriage and its ups and downs is pretty similar to Priscilla's. There were good times, but more and more frequently bad times, punctuated by what Alan describes as blowout fights. One difference in their accounts though is this . Alan is convinced that Priscilla never loved him. She was in it for his money, his loyalty, perhaps his problem solving abiliti es. To be sure, they had a very messed up relationshi p, but I was genuinely surprised that he had come to this conclus ion. I have interviewed Priscilla a little bit, and um she talks about you as about someone she loved. Like I had no doubt in all our convers ations that she was talking about somebody that she had l oved. Um well I guess uh it's a tragedy I find out now. And then uh let me uh let me think you redial me because uh because I I I'm not sure how to respond to this. Um, he called me back after he had collected himself. He said, okay, maybe Priscilla did love him in her own way, but it wasn't en ough. He never felt cared for or suppor ted. least try to solve. He offered ingenious creative solutions. Once he told me, when Priscilla was going to leave him for someone else, he suggested that she go spend a week with the man and decide if she really wants to make a life with him. She didn't leave him that time. Another time, when they reunited after one of their separations and it turned out that Priscilla was pregnant, Alan proposed to stay together through the birth of the child and possibly raise the kid as his own. That pregnancy ended in a miscarri age. And when she miscarried again and felt desperate, Alan offered the most inventive solution of all move to Russia and have a baby by surrogac y. There was only one problem with all these solutions. They didn't solve an ything. At the end of the day, Priscilla and Alan's relationship was Priscilla and Allen's relationship, and all the non-solution solutions only added fuel to their fig hts. By the summer of 2019, Alan was separated from Priscilla, but he was condemned to co-parenting O with Priscilla fore ver. So here's the theory of Alan, a traumatized kid. A guy who has known loneliness and humiliation and has made up for it by making himself use ful. A guy who earned people's love by helping them, by solving problem s. But he couldn't solve his Priscilla problem, couldn't make his wife love him, couldn't bear that she didn't love him, and couldn't figure out a way to be with the son he adored without also constantly being reminded that he had failed to earn her love. So he took the child and ran. And when Priscilla caught up with him, he ran aga in. And when she caught up with him again, he decided to have her k illed. This is a perfectly workable theory, and it's true as far as it go es. But there's always more to a stor y. And because Alan is my cousin, I know what the more is. It kept coming up in my interviews too, with family members and friends of the family, and of course Priscilla. So I don't think I can end the story here. After the bre ak, my second theory of Al an When I talk to people about Allen, they often respond to the sam They talk about the way Lena brought Alan up to be her sole source of support, in effect her partner. They talk about Lena and Alan's symbiotic relationship. One friend described having a conversation with them as akin to watching a television show with two co hosts who seamlessly hand lines off to each other. Like Lena and Alan are of one mind. They always had been. Lena and Alan lived together for most of Alan's life, even when he was in college, and in law school, and working in the first couple of years after law school. So when Alan started dating, Lena was there, alwa ys. Alan himself told me that his first serious girlfriend, whom he met in law school, had three specific complain ts. So one was that I would tell my mom too much uh about our relationshi p. One was that uh I would like to spend more time at home than she should wish. And the third one was that my mother when she came to visit had often express ed Expressed opin ions. By this he means that Lena told people how to beh ave. One time she provided written instructions to Alan's girlfriend, Anne Laura. And Laura came to see to visit uh us at our house in Lichfield, and my mom just finished reading Amy Vanderbilt's book uh on etiquette. And uh my mom was very impressed with Amy Vanderbilt's uh thoughts. So there was one chapter specifically about how to receive guests in the country house and how to be a guest in the country house. So and Laura arrives as a guest and Mum says, Oh by the way, I read this amazing book. You should read this chapter and she hands uh my girlfriend open uh etiquette open to the chapter of how to be a proper guest in the country house. So An Laura of course interprets it as a hint that she is not conducting herself correctly and that now she needs to re-read the book and etiqu ette I talked to Anne Laura, and she confirmed that yes, she was very, very upset by being handed a book on how to beh ave. Alan, on the other hand, seems to have found his mother's interventions amusing, and basically harmless. Even though, as Alan grew older and more independent, at least on the surface, Lena's meddling became even more pronoun ced. When he was in his thirties, Alan moved in with a girlfriend for the first time, a Ukrainian named Kaita . Lena came to visit and saw Kaiser's collection of tiny decorative houses. Some of which Lena concluded were, this is a direct quote from Alan, not decorative enough and, kind of destroyed the feng shui of the ho use. Lena called the collection, leaving only the sufficiently pretty ones on display . But I just felt it was a bit of an incis ion. And then years later, when Lenny came to visit Alan and Priscilla, she went further, rearranging the furniture and the garden. So when Priscilla came out, she was very surprised to find how it's changed. So Pursua found became a mother's initiative to be a bit of an impos ition. I noted Alan's repeated use of the word impos ition. I think if my parent came to visit me and my wife and rearranged the furniture, I would use a different word. Of words. Like, I got you a hotel room. How did you handle it? I think I told Priscilla that uh it would be easy enough to arrange the furniture back after my mom's departure a couple of weeks later and that perhaps we don't need to make it into a big issue. I don't necessarily think she agreed. I told my mom that it might be better not to take initiative. But I I don't think my mom um uh agreed. She thinks that beauty is absolute and therefore if you can have beauty there is no reason to compromise on it. You've probably heard the cliche beauties in the eye of the behol der. Lena hasn't. She knows that she sees right. And I think for the most part, Alan ag rees. Plus, you can always put the furniture back when she's gone. And I guess the bushes that she had gardeners cut down would grow back no big deal, right? It was a very big deal to Priscilla. It was clear to her that the issue wasn't beauty. It was control. Lena wanted to control Alan's life, including his physical surroundings, even when he lived thousands of miles a way. Especially when he was living thousands of miles a way. Teaching manners to your twenty something year old's girlfriend is funny overbearing Jewish mother stuff. Having furniture removed from your married son's house is highly unus ual. And I would venture not fun ny. After O was born, it seemed to Priscilla that Lena wanted to control O too. His schooling, the books he read, the language he spoke, the clothes he wore. She wanted it on her way, which was the right way. And Priscilla was in the way. In the end, this is what Priscilla thinks it all boils down to. I think I am the sing le bad thing that probably existed that stopped them from doing what they wanted to do, which was primarily his mother wanted to raise my kids the way that she wanted. She wanted to teach them, she wanted to do everything, and I stood in her way. And if I wasn't there anymore, she would be free to do what she wanted, which would also give him the freedom that he needed to just function. Yeah, and I think he felt like he couldn't function at all as long as I was around because she was constantly nagging him about it and she lived with him. So it was like a twenty four seven problem. You know how it is when you're like with a partner who keeps drilling it into your head that they hate this, they hate this or whatever. You start trying to figure out how to fix it and no anything becomes an op tion. So I think what motivated him actu ally to go ahead with this plan was Granted, Priscilla is basing this on her own highly specific experience of L ana. But Priscilla is not alone in this vie w. My father concurs . He thinks that when Alan took the hit out on Priscilla, it was a solution to a persistent problem. What do you think the problem that he was trying to solve was? To make my sister happy so she would have all the time and she will not hear from Priscilla ever. And what makes you think that that's the root ca use. I uh know uh Lenas and Alyosha's relationship, and I know that Alosha would do anything to make her happ y . Alan's first series girlfriend wrote to the judge. She wrote that Alan's quote main purpose was to make sure his mother, Lena, was well and comfortable. His world began with her, unqu ote. And it seems ended with her. This young woman ultimately accepted that there was no place for her in this closed wor ld. To be clear, Lena was never charged with any crime. She was barely even mentioned during Alan's tri al, and I don't have a reason to think that Lena knew about the plot to kill Priscilla before Alan was arres ted. But my own conversations with Lena supported my second theory of Al an. It was Lena who first mentioned to me the idea of needing to do something about Priscilla . This was several years before Alan and Lena first took O. At the time of this conversation, O was a todd ler. Alan and Priscilla were separated, and Lena and I were at a family gathering in Moscow, helping carry food from the kitchen to the dining room. Lena paused, holding a platter, and said , I want to ask your advice on something. How do I get Priscilla out of O's life? It was clearly an invitation to gather my thoughts on the matter and give Lena advice later. An invitation that assumed I would want to help. You don't, I said. Meaning you don't get Priscilla out of O's li fe. I said she his mot's her. We continued carrying food. She didn't raise her question again. And I didn't think about it again until twenty nineteen, when the family got that Facebook message from Alan, announcing that he and Nina had taken ode to the United St ates. Then that scene in the Moscow kitchen flashed in my mind. What struck me the most wasn't the question itself. It was the guilelessness with which it was asked, the certainty that, as Alan would later text the undercover agent, our cause is just. There's a concept in psychiatry, pholeo de, which means madness for two in French . It's when two people share a delusion, reinforce this belief in each other, and act according ly. The belief Nana and Alan shared was that Priscilla was a bad mother, and it was their right, their duty even Though again, there is no indication that Lena wanted Priscilla de ad. After Alan was arrested the first time in Canada, Lena wrote to the family chat about what his terrible parent Priscilla was, as though that justified taking O from her. And less than a month before Alan was arrested on murder for higher charges, Lena and Alan met up with an acquaintance and talked at length about wanting Priscilla gone. Not about killing her, just about deporting her. The friend said that Lena and Alan were finishing each other's sentences, talking about how after Priscilla had gotten Alan arrested in Canada. This is how they saw it. The gloves were really off. Their cause was just. I needed to ask Alan about his mother's role in the series of events that ultimately landed him in federal pris on. I needed to tell him that Priscilla suspects that his need to please Liana played a big role, and I needed to get his re action. But I wasn't sure how to approach the sub ject. I thought it might leave it to our last convers ation. But to my surprise, Alan brought it up hims elf. We were talking about the two times he took O away from Priscilla, to a different country . So I think that it's um uh as much as uh they were my decisions, they uh you know my I my mom traveled with me, but uh it was not because uh she made the decision to do so. I mean to to make the decision to go. Uh I asked her to come and she w ent. But um that was sort of something I wanted to point out. You know, um I think Priscilla is not the only one who imagines that your mom was sort of the mastermind of these. Um I actually think it's true of a lot of uh your mom's friends or former friend s. Uh maybe. I mean I I don't know why, but uh I'm uh uh my decisions are very much my own uh in regard to or and uh so it's uh um it's uh uh uh but but it's interesting what you just said because I think that a lot of the time um people don't understand who is who who decides what. But we have been quite independent for the last uh twenty twenty years until my arrest and uh I'm surprised that uh people perceive it that way . Well we disagree a lot. Um I'm not surprised because I think that they're um they're guided by their experiences with with with your mom, which are not dissimilar from what you were just saying, right? Like whenever she is somewhere, she's teaching people how to live, how to take care of their children, uh telling them what to do. And and so you know, I think that that's that's where their minds w ent uh when they learned about uh old. No, I've I've I've uh uh grown quite to quite resistant to some of those instances. So it's uh um but uh no I I see what you're saying, yes. Um but anyway, no, so so those decisions uh uh were mine and r rather than my mom 's. Yeah, so but anyway, I was uh just uh but it's interesting. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, you're right, you're right. My my mom uh that's country is a pretty strong and instead of personality who knows how others should live. That was a lot of hemming and howing. It's understand able. Alan wasn't just trying to defend his mother. He didn't see himself as doing his mother's bidd ing. He had been independent for well, he hurt the man, uh twenty years. So since he was about thir ty? Jokes aside, it's true that by the time Alan was in his thirties, he had solidified his identity as a problem solver. For oligarchs, colleagues, beautiful women, and their grandparents, but most of all, for his mother . And his mother had a problem with Prisc illa. The writer Harold Clarke, who has thought deeply about prisons and has spent a lot of time talking to inmates, told me once that people do horrible things because the noise in their heads becomes intoler able. That idea has stayed with me. When I was looking for a theory of Alan and the other theory of Alan, I was looking for the source of that noise, that thing that made him feel like he would do anything to make it end . I think I found it. On the one hand, there was O , the little boy Alan loved so much. On the other hand, there was Priscilla, the first woman whose love Alan had failed to earn despite all his problem solving, and every time he saw her, he was reminded of his humili ation. But that's not all. Contrary to the laws of nature, there was a third hand, L ena, whose love Alan also needed to ear n. And the way to earn it was to give her control over well everything, but particularly O. Alan could live peacefully, even thrive, when it was just him, Elena, and O . I suspect he could have managed if he had to deal only with Priscilla and O. But trying to figure out a way to co-parent O with both Priscilla and Anna, turn the noise in his head up to an intolerable level. Alan and I spent a total of more than 35 hours talking about his life, his kids, and his crime . And then we were d one. Um so we may have gotten to the end of the stor y as it's as it exists now. What do you think? But um uh yeah tell me tell me what you're thinking about the fut ure. Um I am reasonably optimistic about the appeal. Um and if the appeal is Reasonably optimistic is Alan's peak for Hope Springs Eternal. At that point, Alan hadn't even spoken to the lawyer who had taken on his appeal. But he was sure he'd be getting out soon . And then he would start reclaiming his life. um come to terms with them back in their lives and to digest and absorb and somehow get over the entire criminal story. Um uh that uh I will be able to rebuild a relationship with them and that's sure if that's uh probably at this point more important. Well, actually it's just by far more important uh than uh any other considerations they have, uh, in terms of my post through these plans. That is actually what uh that is probably one of the main reasons why I By the time we were having this conversation, it was early June 2024. And I was on my honeymoon, spending two hours every morning talking to Al an. I talked to him briefly the morning after the actual wedding, to o. He asked about his kids. Had they been there? How had they seem ed? Yes, they'd been there. It seemed gre at. Elle come indeed the microphone at one point to sing a song, or what she seemed to think was a song. Before going upstairs to join some of our wedding guests I logged onto my computer and looked through some photos people had taken the night before, picking out pictures of El in her red dress and O in his nice shirt to send to Al an. There had been such longing in his voice when he asked about the k ids. At some point I realized that the kids were the reason he decided to talk to me, to make his case to me, and through me and the broadcast medium to his kids, that he never wanted to kill their mother . O was just about old enough to look up his father's case on the internet. A jury had concluded that his father had hired someone to kill his mot her. But what if a trusted adult made a podcast that said it wasn't quite so b ad. Wouldn't that be n ice? Then maybe Alan could have a relationship with his kids after he got out. And at some point in our conversations, I did begin to w onder. Like in the jury of my mind, maybe one twel Then I reviewed the evidence. There was no way around it. Alan was guilty, and he was lying. And we were done with our convers ations. Before we quit our weeks long habit, Alan had one final requ est. And you see my kids didn't talk to make it much more now than than I do, so uh if uh if uh you see me in your reasons for concern, just uh uh please stay involved um and uh to the extent you can help me look you can help look after them um during this time can stay enough how I appreciate it . We were done. And we were, we are, once again stuck where we beg an. Alan is still guilty of hiring someone to kill Priscilla. He's still lying about it. And he is still intent, as intent as he has ever been, on claiming his place as O's and Elle's father . And he is going to be out of prison in just a few ye ars. What is my family going to do? What is Priscilla going to do? What can anyone do ? That's next time on the idi ot. Someone's got it in for me, they're planting stories in the praise Whoever it is, I wish they cut it out quick. But when they will I can only guess They say I sh ot a man named Gray The idiot was reported and written by me, I'm guessing, and produced by Daniel Guillemet with Andrey Barzente and Lika Kramer of Lieber Liber Studios. Our editor is Julie Snyder. Additional editing by Ira Glass and Sari Koenig. Research and fact checking by Ben Phelan and Marisa Robertson Texter. Original score by Allison Leighton Brown. Additional music from Dan Powell and Marion Loz ano. The show was mixed by Phoebe Wayne with additional mixing by Catherine Anderson. Additional production by Fea Bennett. At Serial Productions, and Dave Chubu is our supervising producer. Mac Miller is our associate producer. Video production by Sean Devaney. Our direction from Kelly Do. Art by John Kern. Credit music by Bob Dyl an. At the New York Times, our standards editor is Susan Wesley. Legal Review by Alamine Sumar, Dana Green, Jackson Bush, and Tim Ty. 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