Confronting Alan and Closing the Series

My father was born on December 25th. So ever since we moved to the United States 45 years ago, his birthday has been a national holiday, and the start of winter break for his kids and then grandkids . Everyone gathers at his house in Cape Cod. Everyone, not just the birthday man, gets gif ts. Lena and Alan used to come, of course, but now it's Priscilla who comes with the kids. No, no, Chadnik, Chadik. My father always has his wife take a picture of him surrounded by his children, me and my three brothers. And grandchildren. Seven of them. Including O and L. This past December we gathered for my father's 81st birthday. At some point during that party, I got an email from Alan in prison. I was unplugged, so I read it the next day. It was the usual Alan stuff, like a note from a travel journal, meant to remind me that he was still living a most fascinating life . He name-checked some celebrities serving time in the same facility. Sean Diddy, he wrote, seems depressed. While the cryptocurrency fraudster Alex Mashinsky is brilliant and fascinat ing. But mostly Alan was asking me to pass on his birthday wishes to my fat her. He wrote, I miss the visits to Cape Cod when everyone was together, and I miss his duck with apples, horrible and wonderful at the same time, and his marinated mushrooms, the one point of permanence in an impermanent life. End qu ote. A ten year prison sentence isn't as long as it seems. For one thing because it doesn't last ten ye ars. Alan is currently slated to be released in twenty thirty after spending roughly eight years behind bar s. So we're about halfway now between Alan's arrest and his planned rele ase. We're at the point, that is, when there can be no denying that in the foreseeable future, Alan will leave prison and will almost certainly want to rejoin the famil y. I don't think any of us really knows how to address that pros pect. And for weeks I didn't know how to respond to Alan's em ail. Then I finally figured out what I wanted to say to him. I am M Gesson and from Serial Productions and the New York Times. This is the fifth and final episode of the Idi ot. When I set out to report Alan's story, I wanted to understand what he had been think ing. What the hell he had been think ing. And I wanted to lay out a clear picture of the crime for my family, so that they would stop looking for excuses, or hoping for a reasonable explan ation. In the process I got to know Alan, for the first time really, and I came to feel how much he is missing his k ids. He's waged a battle to be allowed phone calls with them. He's hoping to rebuild a relationship with them once he's released. And judging from his letters to me, he's not just hoping but counting on being reintegrated into our family after he gets out. Whether that happens is up to my dad. He is the reason that our family is as elastic as it has been. He is the one who has kept in touch and welcomed ex partners and distant relatives who otherwise would have vanished. But it turned out that over the years when I grew somewhat more sympathetic to Alan, my father had travelled in the opposite trajectory, in relationship to Alan and Nana to o. After what happened, I don't ha want to see them and to hear from them at all. I think last time I talked to you you you were really sad about losing your sister. No, that's uh of course true as well. But uh but I lost her for good. So I don't don't feel any now I just don't have a sist er. I had never heard my dad say anything like this before. It's not that he is sentimental, just the opposite. He's clear eyed and rational. He knows that people do terrible things, and that this can include the people one loves. I've never known him to say that something is unforgivable, outside of war and genocide any way. What would it take for them to return to the famil y? First of all for uh to admit his guilt, not to pretend that he is not guilty . That would be step number one . What sh should follow I don't know. The problem is I think Alan believes that he can't ever admit that he tried to have Priscilla killed. Because if he does, his kids won't have anything to do with him. My father for his, part, has assumed the role of the kid's grandfather. That's what they call him too. And he's a fiercely protective grandfather. He has no patience for Alan's dilemma. So what role do you think he should have in the kids' lives? None at all. As far as my father is concerned, Alan, who took out a hit on his ex wife, and Lena, who keeps insisting that he didn't, are off the island. Or at least the Cape Cod Peninsula. He hasn't seen either of them in almost four ye ars. He didn't want to talk about the pain of losing his sister. That chapter is clos ed. But even this kind of closure is a kind of lux ury. A luxury that Priscilla doesn't have. This winter O came to visit my family for a week over the holidays. I brought him back in the early days of Janu ary. It was the same house where I had interviewed Priscilla a couple of years earlier, just a bit more cluttered with her flea market finds, more lived in, with the addition of a little black cat named Nib bles, but a very different life, and a different Prisc illa. Priscilla has retrained as a certified nurse's aide. Oh, who watched her study for her exams, was very proud, impressed by how much she had to learn, and he told me Priscilla had gotten much higher marks than the other people in her co urse. Priscilla is working 60 hours a week, both at a hospital and as a home health aid. It's a far cry from her old life in fashion, and as different as one can imagine from the big fast life she once thought she'd live with Al an. The night I brought O back, Priscilla was stuck working until midnight because an elderly man that she works with who has cancer had to be hospitalized, and then his wife, who has dementia, couldn't be left al one. There was a lot of juggling. Someone had to watch Elle, someone had to relieve Priscilla. And as all these arrangements fell into place, I saw that Priscilla now has a community. It includes other home health aides and is a mobed neighbor who has a daughter who babysits, and even I realized, the old lady with dementi a. Priscilla has built a life in which she and the kids can be stable. Oh has his music lessons again and horseback riding and fencing, along with Russian math lessons, it's a thing, Russian math, and other activiti es. Ale has most of the same activities, along with gymnasti cs. All of this requires an almost superhuman effort from Priscilla, but it's some Oh wow, okay . Uh Okay, so basically um how it started, she actually sued to be able to see or spend time with the kids that had previously been allocated to Alan. So she wanted to take over his parenting time. And the judge obviously said, no, that's not gonna happen because you're not a parent. Then she filed again asking for like weekends. The judge said no. Then she tried uh getting one of Alan's friends to talk to me. Almost like bribery . Remember, at his own murder for higher trial, Alan testified that he had sold many . Letting Lena see the kids. And I just told him, no. I would rather live in my car than take money and risk something happening to my children, um, take money from somebody who's obviously unstable. Priscilla is talking about L ena. Obviously unstable strikes me as an accurate description. Because I've now read over 100 pages of court documents related to Lena's lawsuit, and much of it corroborates what Priscilla told me happened ne xt. Lena confirmed money was offered, although she doesn't characterize it as a bri be. time but did order monthly supervised vis its. But Lena is Lena. You know, it's incredible to me sometimes when I think about Lena's ability to do something that is completely These issues started sm all. One time Lena loaded everyone into her car and drove to her house, without Priscilla's per mission. Priscilla had hired a college student to supervise the visits, so for the next time Priscilla found a professional supervis or. In a court filing, the supervisor offered the following professional assessment of the visits. Grandmother had a variety of boundary pushing behavi ors. By this point, Lena had signed an agreement to speak only English during the visits, so that the supervisor could understand. Obviously Priscilla had good reason to fear that Lena would badmouth her to the k ids. Lena still spoke Russian to the child ren. The judge had specified that Lena wasn't g toive the children gifts, but you guessed it. The supervisor texted Priscilla asking what to do, and Priscilla said let them keep the gifts, because who wants to take a gift away from a small child? According to court papers one time, when the supervisor wasn't looking, Lena slipped a very special gift into O's bag. And inside was this book that Alan wro te. Yes, in prison Alan wrote a book. It's called The Locked Up Lawyer. Alan used a pseudonym, but Lena advertised the book to friends and family as having been written by him. She also illustrated it. Her name is on the Amazon page next to Alan's pen name. The book is self-published. It's currently number three million nine hundred and sixty thousand five hundred and sixty-two on Amazon, but has eight five-star reviews, including one signed by Alan's ex-girlfri end, the one who says that Alan made her feel like a god dess. During our phone conversations, Alan had told me that he was writing a book of short stories and a philosophy book, both intended for O . I asked to read them, of course, but he never sent anything. But just a month after we finished talking, the locked up lawyer was publ ished. I think this was the book intended for O. It consists of vignettes on the people Alan presumably met in prison. But the most important story might be the one Alan tells O Only had time to read the back, but that was enough to pique his curiosity. As soon as I picked them up, the first thing he said to me was, Oh, I saw Papa's book. Papa wrote a book and he was set up by the FBI . She's just told that her dad works far a way. O is twelve now, so there's no hiding from him facts that are easily available on the internet. Priscilla involved O's therapist in telling him. The therapist also handles the letters that Alan writes to O, filtering what's appropriate for O to read and in what conte xt. And now Lena, with this book, was throwing all of this into disarra y. So no more Lena vis its. More court hearings followed. Lena represented hers elf. As time went on, Priscilla said, it came across more pathetic than men acing. I was eventually able to listen to a partial recording of a hearing, and I agree. Lena sounds sad. Almost like she still hasn't understood what's happened to her. How is it possible, she seems to be asking, that her life collapsed, that her son is in prison, and that her grandchildren's mother doesn't want the kids to spend time with her. When she has so much to give. It's hard to listen to. I actually felt really bad that day just listening to her and looking at her and just realizing that, you know, instead of facing what has happened and you know, seeing the mistak es that have happened with Alan for starters, the reasons behind her not being able to see the kids, instead of learning from this, she just wanted to continue to fight and I think everyone understood exactly who she was. The judge actually eventually said to her, No, I'm sorry, like your time is up. We've given you an hour and yeah, I think we've uh heard enough. But before that happened, a copy of the Locked Up Lawyer had been entered into evidence. The judge read the c over. And you could see from her demeanor that she thought it was insane that she would give a book like that to a twelve-year- old. Lena said that she had no idea how the book ended up in Osb ad. The judge's decision read in part The Court finds that grandmother exerts undue influence over the children, which has been detrimental to their well being and emotional stability I think that's the judicial equivalent of I'm fed up with your shenanigans . The judge ruled that Priscilla was no longer obligated to allow Elena any visits with the kids, and the judge also ordered Lena to stop criticizing Priscilla on social med ia. I no longer have access to all of Lena's Facebook posts, but from my past exchanges with Lena, I can imagine what the court decision is aiming to ban. I gather that Lena is still convinced that she, and only she, knows the right way to raise these child ren. Lena has always approached child rearing as a sort of design project. When I was a teenager, she told me that she had chosen Alan's biological father for his hereditary talent. His own father was a famous poet. And for his excellent h air. At the time she said this, Alan was a little kid with an impressive he ad But he lost all of it by the time he was 30. And as for literary talent, I mean yes, I found the locked up lore pretty engaging. But I think it's fair to say that a self-published book written in prison is not what Lana once had in mind. When Priscilla and Alan named their son Oh, Lena pointed out to me that his name was a sort of mirror image of my own son's name. And when they write a book together, the names will look good on the sp ine. Oh was Lena's new project, which is, I think, why she felt she had to have full control of him. Years earlier, when Alan was in jail on kidnapping charges, and Priscilla gained full custody of O, my father became a go-between. He skyped with O regularly and reported back to Lena about how her grandson was doing. She demanded to know which pages of which Russian books O was reading and how many pages, and expressed her dismay regularly. Not enough pages, not of all the right bo oks. As a falling short of the daily goal for Mary Poppins and Russian wasn't bad enough, Lena complained in the family chat that O was not receiving hot chocolate, or enough hot chocol ate. I fear that O and L are now Elena's only proje ct. Well really O. Because as she acknowledged in court, she barely knows El le. She's in her 70s, living alone in a Jewish elderly housing comp lex. She has been divorced for half a century. She had never had a care er. She used to believe that her son, Alan, would become a great man. He's in prison. That leaves O as the one thing that can give her life purpose, and she's continuing to pursue this pur pose. After Alan was arrested, law enforcement helped Priscilla move to a new neighborhood where no one was supposed to be able to find her. But I caught her in my neighborhood. It was a day that I think I didn't go to work that day, so I just decided to pick the kids up from school. Myself aren't usually scooters to school and he has a route that he uses. So um I was driving and I saw her like walking with her dog on the road, and I was like, no , this cannot be her. Um, so I drove to his school, picked him up quickly, and then looped back to make sure and sure enough it was her and she was waiting like on a corner where he turns to then come up the road to our house. So so so cl ose to our house. I stopped and I recorded her because I I didn't want, you know, no I wasn't there. Yes, you know he said she said. So I recorded her. I was like, L ena What are you doing here? Elena, what are you doing here? I'm saying what are you doing here? Priscilla? I'm asking what you're doing here. Priscilla, that's you. Hello. Yes. And she's like, oh, you know, acted surprised to see me. Like, oh, Priscilla, is that you? Oh, so good to see you. Blah blah blah. I'm waiting for a friend. I'm like, waiting for a friend here? Okay. Okay, okay, I'm awaiting for a friend. In my neighborhood, I don't know where you l ive. And she's not supposed to know where you live, right? She's not supposed to know where we live, but I think at this point that's totally a lost cause. She knows where he goes to school. I'm sure this was not the first time she has followed him. She's probably followed him all the way home because she was so close to our house, like it's there's absolutely no way she doesn't know where our house is. Priscilla's lawyer wrote to Lena, warning her to stay away. Lena wrote to her own lawyer, claiming that she had come to the neighborhood to pick up something that she had bought from Facebook Marketpla ce. Priscilla doesn't believe her because Lena lives a couple of towns away, and because the corner Lena was standing on is the intersection of two minor residential streets, unremarkable, except for the fact that his son O's route from school. Also, this wasn't the first time Lena had been spotted in the neighborho od. A few months earlier, O told Priscilla that he thought he had seen his grandmother outside his school. Priscilla asked the school to check security camera footage, and they showed her what they'd found. Lena, with O going right past her on his scoot er . I've seen a photo from the surveillance tape. It's L ena. Why does she come? Why did she bring her dog? Is she a lonely grandmother who just wants to get a glimpse of Oh, the apple of her eye? Is she hoping that O will stop and linger to pet the dog? Or is she, the woman who was with Alan both times he took O across international borders without Priscilla's permission, casing the jo int. There's that fuzzy boundary again between pathetic and menac ing. Lena wouldn't talk to me before this podcast, and declined to answer a list of questions sent to her, calling them inappropriate and saying that they were quote, numerous unfounded assertions, without specifying which assertions were unfound ed. Priscilla started having O take the school bus instead of using his scooter to get to and from school. This is in addition to tracking O's phone, having security cameras on her house. Priscilla feels that she has to be vigilant at all tim es. You can't trust a person who does things like this because you know at some point as a grown-up person you think logically okay you know what this is a little too much maybe let me take a step back but she seems to have none of those boundaries like nothing like that crosses her mind. She'll do whate ver. And that is the most frightening part of it all. And this is the level of fear that Priscilla feels, has every reason to feel, even while Alan is in pris on. I worry about what will happen when he is rele ased. He will be a man in his mid fifties, a disbarred attorney, who has lost many of his professional and social connecti ons, a man with nothing to do but rejoin his mother in their project. Their Phile oda. Are you concerned for your saf ety? I am . And um you know I think it would be foolish not to be. This is someone who is still trying to convince everyone that they did nothing wr ong, knowing that nobody believes them any way. When Alan was first convicted, Priscilla had this idea, she told me at the time, that when he was released, the kids would be older, O practically an ad ult, and she wouldn't have to worry for their safety, or her own. But in fact, O was still going to be in high school when his dad comes out of pris on. And then there's all that force and desire and charm that Alan will bring to winning him back. I kept thinking about how to respond to the email I got from Alan on my dad's birth day. I didn't want to ask him about prison life. I didn't want to send a report on the birthday celebration on Cape C od. I certainly no longer felt like telling Alan anything about his k ids. After Priscilla told me about Lena's behavior, I felt sick to my stomach every time I imagined what will happen when Alan is releas ed. Finally I decided to do what I hadn't done in the months I'd spent working on this podcast Hi Alos ha. It took me a while to decide to write this note, but since you' re Episode, he made it clear that he doesn't want to hear from you. I think you should know this and should know why. He said that unless you admit what you did and try to make amends, no contact is possible . It seems that your strategy has been to keep denying that you hired someone you thought was going to kill Prisc illa. I understand that you have hoped that your kids in our family would believe that you were framed, entrapped, misinterpreted, whatever, and you would be able to repair relationships when you were out. This strategy has clearly fail ed. Instead of coming across as innocent, you come across as someone who continues to lie and to foreclose the possibility of actual rep air. I honestly don't know if repair is in fact possi ble, but I do know that your only chance of it is to start by acknowledging what you did. I know I told you in the past that I was starting to have some doubt about your guilt. This was true at the end of our series of conversations. Then I went back over the evidence, listened to all the tapes made by the undercover ag ent. They leave no doubt. No room for interpret ation. You're continuing to insist that this isn't so comes across as what it is: ly ing. And lying in the end shuts off communication and precludes compass ion. I have a friend who has spent many years, her whole life in fact, thinking about people who have committed horrible cri mes. Her own mother was sentenced to life in prison when she was a baby, so when I say her whole life, I mean it. She told me some things that I find very useful in thinking about you. But sometimes people do truly terrible things, and this includes people in our families, people who in some way or another will always be connected to us. And that people do these terrible things when the noise in their heads gets unbear able. I think I can imagine the noise in your head. How stuck you felt, how it seemed to you that any way out was justifia ble. When I think about it, I do feel compass ion. Perhaps other members of our family can come to see this too. But again, this would have to begin with honesty on your part . That's the end of my letter. Alan didn't write back to me . Instead he filed a lawsuit trying to stop the release of this podc ast. In his filing and in letters to the New York Times, he accused me of pursuing what he called a decades-long family feud and of all sorts of other things I'm not going to re peat. These were lies, and they made me very ang ry. For a full twenty four hours, I fantasized about taking reven ge. I could report him to ICE. Aren't they supposed to be deporting immigrants convicted of violent cri me? He could get deported to Russia, and then And then and then he could get arrested there and rot in Russian jail for the rest of his life. And then Priscilla and the kids would finally be free of him and the fear he brings. And then Did I go looking for a way to actually get Alan deported? I did not. Because I'm not an i diot. Got it in for me, they're planting stories in the praise. Whoever it is, I wish they cut it out quick, but they will I can only guess. They say I shot a man named Gray and took his wife to Italy. She inherited a million books, and when she died The idiot was reported and written by me, M. Gessen, and produced by Daniel Gilmet with Andrey Barzenke and Lika Kramer of Lieber Lieber Studi Our editor is Julie Snyder. Additional editing by Ira Glass and Sarah Koenig. Research and fact-checking by Ben Faylon and Marisa Robertson Texter. Original score by Allison Layton 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 Phoebe Bennett. At serial productions, and Day Chubu is our supervising producer, Mac Miller is our associate producer . Video production by Sean Devaney, our direction from Kelly Doe. Art by John Perm. Credits Music by Bob Dill on. At the New York Times our,ard Stands Editor is Susan Wesling, legal review by Alamine Sumer, Dana Green, Jackson Bush, and Tim Tai. Our Senior Operations Manager is Elizabeth Davis Moor, and Sam Dolnik is Deputy Managing Editor of the New York Times. To find out about our upcoming shows and more about this show, sign up for the newsletter at nytimes.com slash serial newsletter . The Idiot is a production of serial productions and the New York Times . It's a one letter you still know how to breathe