The Idiot - Chapter 4

Summary

Serial: "The Idiot" — Chapter 4

Date: March 26, 2026
Host: Masha Gessen (M. Gessen)

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Episode Overview

Chapter 4 of "The Idiot" offers a deep—and at times uncomfortable—exploration into the motivation and personal history of Alan Gessen, recently sentenced to ten years for hiring someone to kill his ex-wife, Priscilla. In the aftermath of his sentencing, Masha Gessen, Alan’s cousin and the podcast’s host, embarks on a series of prison interviews with Alan, attempting to construct a theory for why he committed the crime. The episode balances courtroom narrative, personal family history, and psychological analysis, oscillating between Alan’s own accounts and the host’s reflections—culminating in two potential "theories of Alan" rooted in both personal trauma and familial entanglements.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. The Sentencing: Regret, Responsibility, and Irony

[00:33 – 06:36]

• Setting: Federal court in San Francisco, April 2024, for Alan’s sentencing—almost a year after his conviction.
• Alan’s Apology: Alan, wearing yellow prison scrubs, expresses contrition and regret, apologizes to Priscilla over Zoom, and says the real punishment is losing access to his children and the emotional burden on his mother.
• Judge Curley’s Response:
  • Irony of Alan’s Actions: Judge Curley observes the tragic irony: "Your relationship with your mother was perhaps the strongest bond of your life, and yet you were willing to deprive your own children of their mother." (05:08, Judge Curley)
  • Repeated Choices: The judge lists each intentional step Alan took in the murder-for-hire plot, highlighting his sustained intent.
  • Reflection on Character References: Judge addresses how domestic violence can coexist with displays of generosity and kindness.
• Sentence: Alan is given the maximum—120 months (10 years) in prison, plus three years' supervised release.

2. Initiating Contact: Alan Reaches Out

[08:13]

• After the sentencing, Masha sends Alan a message hoping for an interview; unexpectedly, Alan initiates contact himself, ready to "provide context missing from the trial."

3. The Prison Interviews: Motive, Memory, and Misdirection

[09:37 – 14:06]

• First Interview: Alan attempts to exonerate himself, referencing complex, peripheral circumstances (Russian assets, IRS, business dealings in Estonia) and downplays the murder-for-hire in the scope of his "bigger picture." Quote:

  "I knew that I was just a relatively small part of a much bigger picture." (10:10, Alan)

• Masha’s Frustration: Masha remains skeptical, pushing past Alan’s evasions, especially regarding the alleged kidnapping of their son and the chain of events that led to their move to the US.
• Confrontation: Masha challenges Alan's version of events about taking the child from Moscow:

  "Well, she was pretty desperately looking for where you had taken her child, and she had no idea where you were." (12:16, Masha)

4. Daily Calls: Patterns of Denial and Glimpses of Humanity

[14:06 – 16:53]

• Ongoing Conversations: Their calls become frequent—almost daily.
  • Alan denies responsibility for any misfortune that befell Priscilla, reiterates his intent was never murder, only deportation.
  • He shares mundane details of prison life, from mixing cottage cheese with cookies to noting the political leanings of prison inmates. Notable moment:

  "I have not met a single Democrat in a jail in the U.S. ...fascinating." (15:14, Alan)

• Developing Rapport: Both note the oddity and unexpected depth of their new connection:

  "We're still more in the past week than we have in the previous 50 years." (15:56, Alan)

5. Alan’s Formative Years: Poverty, Immigration, and Outsiderness

[16:53 – 31:19]

• Childhood in Moscow: Alan remembers being "very happy until he was 15," despite poverty—supported by a close-knit family and bohemian, intellectual social circles.
• Immigration to America: Sudden displacement and loss of status after moving as a teen; feelings of alienation, envy (specifically of his successful cousin), and social awkwardness. Quote:

  "I would 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... very much rich man, poor man situation where I was the poor man." (22:47, Alan)

• Bootstrapping: Describes his journey from bagging groceries to starting a lucrative college "tutoring" business, ultimately supporting himself and his mother.
• Early Adult Success: Through law school, failing to break into elite CIA/FBI, then finding validation and status as a consultant with McKinsey in booming post-Soviet Moscow.

6. Interpersonal Relationships: Need to Be Needed & Patterns of Caretaking

[31:19 – 36:09]

• Macho Persona: Alan claims traditional gender roles abroad made him far more attractive and appreciated than he ever was in America.
• Ex-Girlfriend Testimonials: Letters to the court (and Masha’s interviews) portray Alan as generous, attentive, and supportive—attributes that dovetailed with his need to be needed and validated by others. Letter excerpt:

  "I felt like a goddess... He gave me gifts ranging from the best face cream to my dream car." (31:19, Ex-girlfriend’s letter, paraphrased)

7. Family, Trauma, and the Cycle of Problem-Solving

[36:09 – 41:59]

• Birth of O: Alan details the trauma and helplessness of his son’s premature birth and long NICU stay, reflecting genuine parental love but also his compulsion to "fix" every problem.
• Marriage to Priscilla: Alternates between fond memories and close, supportive periods, and deep pain, infidelity, mutual mistrust, and endless cycles of breaking up and reuniting.
• Alan's Emotional Vulnerability:

  "[She] just told me about one of the times like she cheated on me and I started wailing... I was wailing for about 15, 20 minutes... I just couldn't stop." (37:54, Alan)

• Theory #1 (Masha): Alan’s unraveling is linked to trauma, a lifelong drive to be useful, and his inability to solve the "Priscilla problem"—the first situation he couldn’t control or fix.

8. The Centrality of Alan's Mother, Lena: Enmeshment & Control

[44:04 – 59:32]

• Family & Interview Testimonies: Multiple sources recount Lena’s central role in Alan’s life—her influence, their symbiosis, and her need for (and practice of) exerting control in every sphere, from etiquette books for girlfriends to rearranging apartments.

  "Lena told people how to behave... [She] provided written instructions to Alan’s girlfriend." (45:13, Masha)

• Priscilla’s Theory: Priscilla and others believe Lena’s drive to control her grandson’s upbringing, and Alan’s need to satisfy his mother, were key ingredients in his decision to try to remove Priscilla from their lives—by any means. Quote:

  "If I wasn't there anymore, [Lena] would be free to do what she wanted, which would also give him the freedom... So I think what motivated him actually to go ahead with this plan was to appease his mother." (49:18, Priscilla)

• Masha and Alan Discuss Mother's Influence:

  "My decisions are very much my own in regard to [kidnapping O and leaving the country]… We have been quite independent for the last 20 years until my arrest." (55:52, Alan)

  • Masha gently challenges this, referencing widespread perceptions of Lena as the covert "mastermind."

9. Theories of Alan: Madness for Two and the "Noise in the Head"

[57:32 – 61:16]

• Psychological Parallel: Masha brings up the psychiatric concept of "folie à deux" ("madness for two")—a shared delusion/enmeshment between Alan and Lena, especially regarding Priscilla.
  • The belief their campaign to remove Priscilla was "just."

  "People do horrible things because the noise in their heads becomes intolerable." (57:32, paraphrased advice to Masha from Harriet Clark)

• Conclusion: Alan’s actions were driven not just by his need for parental love or to "solve Priscilla," but by being caught in an inescapable triangle—trying to please both his mother (Lena) and his love for O, with Priscilla as the obstructing force.

10. Epilogue: The Future, the Kids, and Unanswered Questions

[59:50 – end]

• Alan’s Hope: He insists he’s optimistic about his appeal and wants to reclaim a relationship with his children after release.

  "Once I overcome the legal obstacles... I will be able to rebuild a relationship with them. And that's truly... more important than any other considerations." (60:31, Alan)

• Motivation for Talking: Masha realizes Alan’s real reason for doing these interviews is to reach his children—perhaps for their understanding or forgiveness.
• Final Reflections: Masha admits the evidence remains overwhelming, and Alan’s ongoing denial is transparent—leaving both in the same emotional and narrative place as the start.
• Alan's Final Request:

  "If you see me any reasons for concern, just please stay involved. And to the extent you can... look after [my children]." (63:07, Alan)

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• Judge Curley to Alan:
  "You had opportunity after opportunity after opportunity, but you went forward because that was your intent." (~05:27)
• Alan on social status:
  "It was as much about my social status as it was about the money. Maybe it was more about social status than it was about the money." (27:18)
• Priscilla:
  "I think what motivated him actually to go ahead with this plan was to appease his mother." (49:18)
• Masha’s realization:
  "Alan was still guilty and he was lying. And we were done with our conversations." (62:49)
• Alan’s final words from prison:
  "I haven't known peace and quiet for so long, I can't remember what it's like." (66:06)

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Timeline / Timestamps for Major Segments

• [00:33 – 06:36] – Alan’s sentencing and court scene.
• [08:13] – Alan initiates contact for interviews from prison.
• [09:37 – 14:06] – Their first, combative interview; Alan's evasions.
• [14:06 – 16:53] – Regular daily calls, rapport builds.
• [16:53 – 31:19] – Alan’s childhood, emigration, and pursuit of social status.
• [31:19 – 36:09] – Debrief on relationships, generosity, and validation.
• [36:09 – 41:59] – Marriage, trauma, and Alan’s “unsolvable” Priscilla problem.
• [44:04 – 49:18] – The omnipresence of Lena and family theories.
• [49:18 – 55:34] – Priscilla’s and others’ perceptions of Alan’s mother as catalyst.
• [55:34 – 59:32] – Alan's pushback and self-assessment of independence.
• [57:32 – 61:16] – “Madness for two,” noise in the head, and closing the loop on motivations.
• [62:49 – end] – Alan’s final request and the lingering family dilemma.

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Tone and Language

The episode maintains Masha Gessen’s measured, slightly wry tone—sometimes jaded or direct, often empathetic but unsparing. The interplay with Alan—his self-serving rationalizations, denials, and underlying vulnerability—contrasts with Gessen’s journalistic skepticism and familial proximity, resulting in an intimate, psychological portrait.

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For Listeners: Why This Episode Matters

This episode is a turning point in the narrative—moving from external facts and courtroom drama into the murky territory of motive, psychology, and family history. It threads together the personal and the systemic: how trauma, family dynamics, and emotional need can culminate in devastating decisions. Gessen lays bare not just Alan’s psychology, but that of a family—and, perhaps, asks us to reflect on the very human urge to solve unfixable problems, no matter the cost.

Transcript

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[M. Gessen]

In April 2024, my cousin Allen 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. The maximum sentence for this crime is 10 years. The cast of characters the judge, the public defender, the prosecutor and Allen were back in the same courtroom. All of them seemed the same, except maybe Alan. He was contrite, genuinely filled with regret, or so it sounded to me. He apologized to Priscilla, who was listening on Zoom. He promised that he would never again do anything to harm her or the children. 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. Allen told the judge, if he got the maximum 10 years, he would be almost 60 when he was released, and it would be hard to start over. But he said he had already suffered the biggest punishment. His voice cracked. He'd 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 a week over a white thermal underwear shirt and yellow Crocs knockoffs. Allen had his back to me, so most of the time I was watching Judge Curley. She was leaning toward Allen. She was nodding to every affirmative statement he made. Her face reacted to every word, it seemed. Then it was her turn to speak. I didn't see it when you were on the stand at trial, but I can see it now, she said. You acknowledged the harm. The judge had really listened. I mean, she had really listened and observed Allen. And so she focused on the irony. That's the word she used of the story. Allen'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 mother. So there's that in itself, judge Corley said. And there were all those times that Allen 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 $23,000, and you didn't have to send the target package, 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 intent. Allen's mother, Lena, had gotten dozens of people to write letters to the court on Allen's behalf. All of them attested to Allen's loving, kind and supportive character. Some, including a letter from one of Allen's ex girlfriends, were over the top and praising him. The judge addressed those letters. Now, it's so tragic that you have been such a generous and helpful person to all these other people, she said. But we see that sometimes with domestic violence. She said those last two words to Kato like she was striking the gavel. And finally she said, Mr. Gessen, you are a lawyer. You are a barred lawyer. You took an oath to uphold the law, 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 States. The sentence had to reflect this, too. The thing in my throat that had been threatening to make me cry had dissolved. I was following the judge's logic, her righteous outrage. The judge sentenced Allen to the maximum 120 months in prison, followed by three years of supervised release. 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 problems. For that, I needed to talk to him. I had asked Rilena, 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 sent Alan a message asking for an interview. Next, Allen 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 himself. He was ready to talk. I am M. Gessen and from Serial Productions and the New York Times, this is the idiot.

[Alan Gessen]

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[M. Gessen]

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[Alan Gessen (Prison Interview)]

Who is this Yoshi?

[M. Gessen]

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[Alan Gessen]

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[M. Gessen]

The last time I talked to Alan was a few weeks before he was arrested, almost two years earlier. We had never been close. We had never even been particularly friendly. In fact, in the years since Alan and Lena moved to the US With O, I had rebuffed Allen's attempts to become friends. So Allen had no reason to trust 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 trial. 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 asked him to get to the crux of the matter. Okay, well, so I guess what I want to start with was actually 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 discuss. Do you want to tell me what it is?

[Alan Gessen]

Sure. So, roughly, in 2009, 2010, I was working closely with a Ukrainian politician whose name was Eduard Prudnik. He was a close ally of Alan,

[M. Gessen]

told a somewhat convoluted story spanning about a decade and involving Russian assets, the irs, and finally, a plan to build a bulletproof vest factory in Estonia on which he was working with a guy named Alex Kiselov, whom the FBI was investigating for money laundering.

[Alan Gessen]

I knew that I was just a relatively small part of a much bigger picture.

[M. Gessen]

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?

[Alan Gessen]

I'm not trying to undermine the seriousness of the charge. I'm just.

[M. Gessen]

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 Allen took 5 year old O from Moscow to the US this led nowhere helpful. It wasn't a 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 their necks. 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.

[Alan Gessen]

So I used her absence to vacate the apartment. I moved all of our things into storage, and I knew that there would be a huge explosion when Priscilla came back and we would have another violent confrontation. So to avoid it, I traveled with to the United States, slightly ahead of schedule.

[M. Gessen]

Wait, so you moved all of Priscilla's stuff into storage and moved to the United States to avoid having a confrontation with the landlord. I can generally listen sympathetically or at least neutrally to all kinds of bullshit. It's part of the job. But you're about to hear me run right out of patience. And did you tell Priscilla where You were in the States.

[Alan Gessen]

I did.

[M. Gessen]

No, you didn't.

[Alan Gessen]

Well, I said I was in the States, and then I think the next day, we were in Cape Cod and your dad was posting pictures on Facebook. I was not trying any way to conceal it. Whether I said specifically that I was in Boston or not, I don't rem. I think I said I was traveling to Boston. I'm pretty sure I did, but if I didn't, I didn't.

[M. Gessen]

Well, she was pretty desperately looking for where you had taken her child, and she had no idea where you were.

[Alan Gessen]

But by that time. I know that Priscilla. Reggie knew where we were.

[M. Gessen]

No, she didn't. She saw the picture on Facebook and contacted my father. Right, and then you left, and she, once again, didn't know where you were.

[Alan Gessen]

I don't. Don't think that is correct. I think that Priscilla and I were. I was accessible, and we were in touch during that period. But

[M. Gessen]

I don't think that's true,

[Alan Gessen]

Masha. I wouldn't. You know, it's. Can't tell you. I. I do not. Well, I don't see any reason why I would try to conceal it, though.

[M. Gessen]

I guess that's what I'm trying to figure out. Yeah.

[Alan Gessen]

Yeah. No, because it's a. I mean, I

[M. Gessen]

was recording this interview in a borrowed studio, and we're 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.

[Alan Gessen]

You have one minute remaining.

[M. Gessen]

And then Allen surprised me.

[Alan Gessen]

So, shall I call you tomorrow?

[M. Gessen]

What? 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 tomorrow.

[Alan Gessen]

Okay.

[M. Gessen]

All right.

[Alan Gessen]

Thanks much.

[M. Gessen]

Thank you. Bye. One way to think of it was that each of us had a job. 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 job. Do you want to pick up?

[Alan Gessen (Prison Interview)]

Yeah, sure.

[M. Gessen]

Where we left off yesterday, we started to talk almost daily. First, we covered obligatory ground. 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 and Zimbabwe. Like when she was evicted, beaten, arrested, jailed.

[Alan Gessen (Prison Interview)]

She has a tendency to blame me for absolutely everything that happened. Sometimes act of God, this time is act of Alan every single time when

[M. Gessen]

he went to Canada with O. Well, that wasn't a kidnapping either.

[Alan Gessen]

I needed a holiday. Needed a holiday. And I thought.

[M. Gessen]

And he still denied, of course, that he wanted Priscilla killed. He only wanted her deported. In between rejecting all the accusations, Alan told me about life in prison. He talked about it the way we used to talk about our travels. When the family hung out on Cape Cod. There was local cuisine.

[Alan Gessen (Prison Interview)]

So I take the cottage cheese, I mix it with cookies.

[M. Gessen]

There were the customs and beliefs of the local population.

[Alan Gessen (Prison Interview)]

I have not met a single Democrat in.

[Alan Gessen]

In. In.

[Alan Gessen (Prison Interview)]

In a jail in the U.S. wow.

[M. Gessen]

I found.

[Alan Gessen (Prison Interview)]

Fascinating.

[M. Gessen]

That blows my mind.

[Alan Gessen (Prison Interview)]

Fascinating.

[M. Gessen]

Do you have an explanation for this?

[Alan Gessen (Prison Interview)]

Republicans are more likely to commit crimes than Democrats.

[M. Gessen]

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 ear. 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.

[Alan Gessen (Prison Interview)]

We're still more in the past week than we have in the previous 50 years.

[M. Gessen]

That is true.

[Alan Gessen (Prison Interview)]

I could imagine a parallel universe where you and I could be friends.

[M. Gessen]

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 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 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 experiences. So why don't we go back to the beginning?

[Alan Gessen (Prison Interview)]

I guess as long as you don't have a preconceived narrative to which you're trying to squeeze it, I'm very happy to go on and trust your judgment.

[M. Gessen]

I often ask people I'm writing about to start from the beginning. 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 wife. Sure, this was going to be an Allen narrative. I expected him to brag and exaggerate, to try to ingratiate himself at times. And I expected him to lie about things that concern Priscilla directly. That's human. 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 light and still all of us want to be known. So yeah, tell me, tell me about little Alyosha.

[Alan Gessen (Prison Interview)]

Alyosha was very happy until he was 15.

[M. Gessen]

Fifteen was when Alan immigrated to the US with his mother.

[Alan Gessen (Prison Interview)]

I remember my childhood as very very fun. Friends, family, grandma, dad, chef, basketball, judo, rock and roll. I was taking lessons still he said it was a very poor life. But what I realized in retrospect that you only realize you are poor when you look at it from the side.

[M. Gessen]

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 privilege 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 Kremlin. Lena had gotten the place from our grandmother. 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 money. Alan says he remembers from a very young age knowing exactly how many rubles and kopecks they had each month and helping feed their tiny family.

[Alan Gessen (Prison Interview)]

I would go to the stores downstairs when I was three years older than myself, three and four, I knew every saleswoman in the bakery, Bullishnaire next door and I would walk into those stores, usually through the back door, go say hello to my friends and come back with food.

[M. Gessen]

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 collapse. 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 altogether. It was a time for taking opportunities. Lena, who had a brother in America, my father, had the opportunity to emigrate and she took it. When Alan was 15, he and Neda moved to the United States. And suddenly Allen's happy, scrappy life was over. They stayed with my parents and my brother in Newton, Massachusetts. 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.

[Alan Gessen]

It was not easy for me or for my mom. I'm sure it was not Easy for your dad or for your mom. And so there was quite a bit of tension.

[M. Gessen]

I was 23 at the time and living in New York. I talked to my mother on the phone most days, but we rarely talked about Leona and Alan because the entire time they stayed at my parents house. My mother was undergoing treatment for metastatic breast cancer. She died in 1992. In our conversations 34 years later, Ellen never mentioned my mother's illness and treatment. Allen and Lena. And my parents spent those months in two separate cocoons of despair. Alan was lost outside of Moscow.

[Alan Gessen]

Living in Moscow, basically. My life was extremely protected, very secure. I knew everyone, everybody knew me. You know, it was familiar language, familiar culture, everything made sense. And then sort of losing all of that and finding yourself in a completely unfamiliar environment where you're not understood. That to me was by so much, so much more disturbing. Here everything was unfamiliar, all the culture. You came here, you came to the states, you were 12, I was 14.

[M. Gessen]

No, no, I know exactly, exactly what you're describing.

[Alan Gessen]

Yeah, right. So you know. Exactly.

[M. Gessen]

Moving to a new country as a teenager is one of the hardest things a person can experience. 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 Allan. And there was Ko, my younger brother Keith, who was like, popular and successful and you're five weeks apart in age, right?

[Alan Gessen]

Cloister was a star because he really was a valedictorian. He was the most popular boy in school. He was truly the biggest star in South High School at the time. He got into Harvard and his SH scores were off the chart.

[M. Gessen]

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 newspaper. And Alan, who showed up sophomore year, was his unathletic, inarticulate cousin from the old country who wore weird clothes and was always trying to shake people's hands, which people apparently didn't do at Newton South High School. And he was poor, you know, I

[Alan Gessen]

remember stealing quarters from Koesti because Koisti would have money lying around. I would be sleeping in a mattress in his room. And when he came home, he would dump 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. So I would 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 very much rich man, poor man situation where I was the poor man. I didn't, you know, when his friends came over, I sometimes tried to hang out with them, but.

[M. Gessen]

Third wheel.

[Alan Gessen]

The third wheel. Exactly.

[M. Gessen]

That description got to me. The mattress on the floor, the quarters on the floor, and my brother, who was busy being 15 himself, oblivious to the indignity of being a new immigrant. Alan and Lena had been somebodies in the center of Moscow, and now they were nobodies in Newton, Massachusetts, and they didn't even want to be in Newton, Massachusetts. One day, Alan told me Lena had what sounds like a panic attack.

[Alan Gessen]

Well, she was crying and she was. She had, you know, shortness of breath, you know, just kind of just to. It was. It was very difficult for her. She was used to living by herself, you know, being her own person since she had me. And it was very difficult for her to. Just to living under someone else's roof. So I haven't seen my mom cry maybe. I've seen her cry maybe five, six times in my life. So this is one of those times that was. That made a very big impression on me. So.

[M. Gessen]

And what did you do?

[Alan Gessen]

I think that basically I told her the next day that we should probably rent an apartment. And I took initiative. She agreed. We calculated the budget and we were able to find the apartment within the next couple of days. So basically I moved us out.

[M. Gessen]

It's true that they moved out after about eight months. The way my father remembers it was because my mother had become too ill for anyone else to stay in the house. What I remember is my mother telling me that she knew Lena was scared to be in the house. And because my mother was dying. What Alan remembers is that he saved the day, saved Lena, and saved himself. He took charge.

[Alan Gessen (Prison Interview)]

At first, I was bagging groceries.

[M. Gessen]

Then beginning with his first job, rising through the ranks at Star Market.

[Alan Gessen (Prison Interview)]

Then he became a really fast cashier.

[M. Gessen]

From bagging groceries to ringing them up to becoming the fastest cashier.

[Alan Gessen (Prison Interview)]

I set the store record of being able to scan 36 items per minute.

[M. Gessen]

Alan pulled himself up by his bootstraps and pulled and pulled and pulled. He got a job with a roofing company and worked 30, 40 hours a week while attending high school. That may have had something to do with why he was rejected by 19 out of the 20 colleges he applied to. The one that accepted him was Babson. Then a little business college just outside of Boston. The official preppy handbook called it a place for rich kids who have to wait four years to go into daddy's business. 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 business. 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 venture. How big was this business?

[Alan Gessen (Prison Interview)]

Over a thousand clients. Wow. About 25 writers.

[M. Gessen]

How. How much money did you make?

[Alan Gessen (Prison Interview)]

I'm not sure I reported it fully to the irs, so I. I would rather. I would rather not say, but I. It was. It supported me entirely. Comfortable at the time.

[M. Gessen]

You and your mom, Correct? Just give me a ballpark.

[Alan Gessen (Prison Interview)]

I would say that me, during a very good month, I would make about $10,000.

[M. Gessen]

Wow, that's. That's great. That must have felt very different from the first couple of years of being an immigrant.

[Alan Gessen (Prison Interview)]

It was. No, it was. But it also was, I think, social. It was important because I was needed. So it was. I suddenly had something to offer which helped me deal with my insecurities. I was popular. I was on demand. I think that it was as much about my social status as it was about the money. Maybe it was more about social status than it was about the money.

[M. Gessen]

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 needed. 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 Nanda moved to Litchfield and got a job at a law firm in Manhattan after graduation. Then he lost that job. Alan explored several career options, joining the FBI. To think he could have been David rather than being ensnared by David or the CIA. And then he got a job that changed his life. Alan was hired by McKinsey, the international consulting firm, and was launched on his path to becoming the Allen.

[Alan Gessen (Prison Interview)]

I joined McKinsey in Moscow, which was probably a miracle for me because McKinsey in Russia at that time was a very small group of people that was in the center of economic transformation of the post Soviet economy.

[M. Gessen]

I was familiar with what Alan was describing. I was working as a journalist In Moscow at the time, with the 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 1990s. 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 businesses. Less killing, more board votes and stock issues.

[Alan Gessen (Prison Interview)]

And we were doing transformation projects for every company that mattered. And I think we all felt a little like Superman, kind of 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. I felt like I became a character in an adventure book.

[M. Gessen]

Forget law school, the law firm 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 life.

[Alan Gessen (Prison Interview)]

Equally exciting was that I became very popular among women. That strange lack of any interest towards me by American women. It was completely balanced by the women in Russia.

[M. Gessen]

And how do you explain the difference? Well,

[Alan Gessen (Prison Interview)]

okay, so it's either me or the women, right? So I think more likely that gender roles in the United States are very different than from the rest of the world. As a result, sort of my macho character, which works really well in Europe and Africa, does not work well at all in America.

[M. Gessen]

And when you say macho, what do you mean?

[Alan Gessen (Prison Interview)]

That there's a strong man who pays the bills, who opens the doors, who gives lots of gifts that kind of close the stronger part in the relationship, really.

[M. Gessen]

Alan, this is what you took from your bohemian upbringing and your intellectual family? It was hard for me to believe, but yes, it seems that Allen took his macho chivalry act very seriously and that it worked. Women love being doted on by Alan. I interviewed Alan's first serious 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. Allen'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. Allen 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. It is only thanks to Alexei that my grandparents were alive for many years after. And he was romantic. 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 Corley 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 myself. Alexei showed me the world and its possibilities. And it wasn't just the women. Other letters to the court mentioned how generous Alan was and how empathetic. 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. Allen funded a struggling students film project. 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 designed port for an injured elephant. This was a side of Allen I'd never really seen. 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 benefactor. He volunteered to solve everyone's problems 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 big living ways worked on her too. They were together from the moment they met. A year into their relationship, Priscilla became pregnant. But at just six months, Priscilla went into labor. Rushed to the hospital, she had an emergency C section.

[Alan Gessen (Prison Interview)]

And then I saw for the first

[M. Gessen]

time and the hardest months of Alan's life began. How. Yeah. What did he look like?

[Alan Gessen (Prison Interview)]

He looked like a very, very, very, very miniature child. 1/7, 1/8 of the normal birth weight. I honestly didn't think he was going to make it. I remember the doctor trying to see if he's breathing. He was.

[M. Gessen]

About a third of all babies born this premature don't survive. Another third have profound lifelong 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.

[Alan Gessen (Prison Interview)]

It just, it was just that constant unyielding worry, like constant stress, like absolute constant stress in the utter sense of helplessness. And I find it very difficult to be in situations where I cannot affect the outcome. And for me, it was very difficult to affect.

[M. Gessen]

Alan had to do something. Many things.

[Alan Gessen (Prison Interview)]

It was a lot of things. It was changing the lighting because all the children in the unit were under directed very bright halogen lighting. I brought in a sleep apnea mattress because one of the biggest risks is that they stop breathing.

[M. Gessen]

Alan fixed rubber to the unit's 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.

[Alan Gessen (Prison Interview)]

I went through my entire repertoire of Russian and English songs and Polish songs,

[M. Gessen]

Camped out in the NICU day after day. What did you sing? All he could do was keep vigil and wait. 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 issues. When my own daughter was 5 weeks old, she landed in the NICU for 36 hours. And then I spent a week in the hospital with her, recovering. That was 24 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 NICU with O. I knew that before our interviews, of course. But when I listened to Alan talk about it, I heard that fear and that helplessness that I myself will never forget. So there are some things I believe without qualification. 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 worrying. And this meant that Alan was now trapped. 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 miserable. 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 break. That said, I do think that especially in the later years, he had moments when he was genuinely distraught. In one of our conversations, he described a moment of emotional pain that it seemed to me he still himself didn't quite understand.

[Alan Gessen (Prison Interview)]

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 this scream of pain and I think I was wailing for about 15, 20 minutes to the point of actually postulating becoming scared and I just couldn't stop. It was like this, like this, like this scream that was coming out and I felt that like that times when I felt good and like I was like, like I felt a relationship of spine and we were back on track and like bam. Like pressing back down and I would. Then it would take again several months to recover from it and to kind of move on and. And bam. It happens again and like it's. It just. It was like that for basically for.

[Priscilla]

Still.

[M. Gessen]

On the whole, Allen'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 Allen is convinced that Priscilla never loved him. She was in it for his money, his loyalty, perhaps his problem solving abilities. To be sure, they had a very messed up relationship. But I was genuinely surprised that he had come to this conclusion. I have interviewed Priscilla a little bit and she talks about you as about someone she loved. Like I had no doubt in all our conversations that she was talking about somebody that she had loved.

[Alan Gessen (Prison Interview)]

Well, I guess it's a tragedy I find out now.

[M. Gessen]

Pasha, let me go ahead.

[Alan Gessen (Prison Interview)]

Let me maybe redial you because I'm not sure how to respond to this.

[M. Gessen]

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 enough. He never felt cared for or supported. Alan had never met a problem he couldn't solve or couldn't at 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 miscarriage and when she miscarried again and felt desperate, Allen offered the most inventive solution of move to Russia and have a baby by surrogacy. There was only one problem with all these solutions. They didn't solve anything. At the end of the day, Priscilla and Alan's relationship was Priscilla and Alan's relationship and all the non solution Solutions only added fuel to their fights. By the summer of 2019, Alan was separated from Priscilla, but he was condemned to co parenting o with Priscilla forever. 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 useful. A guy who earned people's love by helping them by solving problems. 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 again. And when she caught up with him again, he decided to have her killed. This is a perfectly workable theory, and it's true as far as it goes. But there's always more to his story. 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 break, my second theory of Alan.

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[M. Gessen]

When I talk to people about Alan, they often respond by talking about Lena, his mother. They talk about the way Leonard brought Alan up to be her sole source of support, in effect, her partner. They talk about Leona 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 Allen 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 Nana, was there always. Alan himself told me that his first serious girlfriend, whom he met in law school, had three specific complaints.

[Alan Gessen (Prison Interview)]

So one was that I would tell my mom too much about our relationship. One was that 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 expressed opinions.

[M. Gessen]

Expressed opinions. By this he means that Lena told people how to behave. One time, she provided written instructions to Alan's girlfriend, Ann Lohr.

[Alan Gessen (Prison Interview)]

Ann Laure came to visit us at our house in Lisbon. And my mom just finished reading Amy Vanderbilt's book on etiquette. And my mom was very impressed with Amy Vanderbilt's 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 mom says, oh, by the way, I read this amazing book. He should read this. And she hands my girlfriend Oakland Etiquette open to the chapter of how to be a proper guest in the country house. So Laura, of course, interprets it as a hint that she's not conducting herself correctly and that now she needs to re read the poconet together.

[M. Gessen]

I talked to Ann Laura, and she confirmed that, yes, she was very, very upset by being handed a book on how to behave. 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 pronounced. When he was in his 30s, Allen moved in with a girlfriend for the first time, a Ukrainian named Katya. Lena came to visit and saw Kaisa'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 house. Lena culled the collection, leaving only the sufficiently pretty ones on display.

[Alan Gessen (Prison Interview)]

There was some truth to that. Some of the houses were not necessarily pretty, but Katya felt it was a bit of an imposition.

[M. Gessen]

And then years later, when Lenny came to visit Alan and Priscilla, she went further, rearranging the furniture and the garden.

[Alan Gessen (Prison Interview)]

When Priscilla came out, she was very surprised to find how it's changed. So Priscilla found again my mother's initiative to be a bit of an imposition.

[M. Gessen]

I noted Alan's repeated use of the word imposition. I think if my parent came to visit me and my wife and rearrange the furniture, I would use a different word. A words like I got you a hotel room. How did you handle it?

[Alan Gessen (Prison Interview)]

I think I told Priscilla that 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 don't think my mom agreed. She thinks that beauty is absolute and therefore if you can have beauty, there is no reason to compromise on it.

[M. Gessen]

You've probably heard the cliche beauty is in the eye of the beholder. Lena hasn't. She knows that. She sees. Right. And I think for the most part Allen agrees. 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 away. Especially when he was living thousands of miles away. Teaching manners to your 20 something year old's girlfriend is funny. Overbearing Jewish mother stuff. Having furniture removed from your married son's house is highly unusual and I would venture, not funny. 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 done 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.

[Priscilla]

I think I am the single 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 247 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 option. So I think what motivated him actually to go ahead with this plan was to appease his mother.

[M. Gessen]

Granted, Priscilla is basing this on her own highly specific experience of Lana, but Priscilla is not alone in this view. 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 cause? I know Leona's and Alyosha's relationship, and I know that Alyosha would do anything to make her happy. And if that was the way to do it, okay, so let's go that way. He'd do anything to make his mother happy. This came up in a lot of my conversations. It showed up in the letter. Allen's first serious girlfriend wrote to the judge. She wrote that Allen's, quote, main purpose was to make sure his mother, Lena, was well and comfortable. His world began with her, unquote, and, it seems, ended with her. This young woman ultimately accepted that there was no place for her in this closed world. To be clear, Lena was never charged with any crime. She was barely even mentioned during Allen's trial. And I don't have a reason to think that Lena knew about the plot to kill Priscilla before Allen was arrested. But my own conversations with Lena supported my second theory of Alan. It was Lena who first mentioned to me the idea of needing to do something about Priscilla. This was several years before Allan and Lena first took O. At the time of this conversation, O was a toddler. Allan 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 oh's life, I said. She's his mother. We continued carrying food. She didn't raise her question again, and I didn't think about it again until 2019, when the family got that Facebook message from Alan announcing that he and Nana had taken Ode to the United States. 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 which means madness for two in French. It's when two people share a delusion, reinforce this belief in each other and act accordingly. The belief Nana and Alan shared was that Priscilla was a bad mother and it was their right, their duty even, to get her out of O's life. Though, again, there's no indication that Nana wanted Priscilla dead. After Allen was arrested the first time in Canada, Lena wrote to the family chat about what a terrible parent Priscilla was, as though that justified taking O from her. And less than a month before Allen was arrested on murder for hire charges, Lena and Allen 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 Allen 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 prison. I needed to tell him that Priscilla suspects that his need to please Leanna played a big role, and I needed to get his reaction, but I wasn't sure how to broach the subject. I thought I might leave it to our last conversation, but to my surprise, Alan brought it up himself. We were talking about the two times he took O away from Priscilla to a different country.

[Alan Gessen]

She very much blames my mom for those decisions, and she sort of projects onto my mom, my decisions that were not hers. So I think that it's as much as they were my decisions. My mom traveled with me, but it was not because she made the decision to do so, to make the decision to go. I asked her to come. And she went. But that was just something I wanted to point out.

[M. Gessen]

You know, I think Priscilla is not the only one who imagines that your mom was sort of the mastermind of these. I actually think it's true of a lot of your mom's friends or former friends,

[Alan Gessen]

maybe. I mean, I, I don't know why, but I'm. My decisions are very much my own in regard to. And so it's a. But it's interesting what you just said, because I think that a lot of the time people don't understand who is, who decides what. But we have been quite independent for the last 20 years until my arrest. And I'm surprised that people perceive it that way. Well, we disagree a lot.

[M. Gessen]

I'm not surprised because I think that there, they're guided by their experiences with, with your mom, which are not dissimilar from what you were just saying. Right. Like whenever she's somewhere, she's teaching people how to live, how to take care of their children, telling them what to do. And, and so, you know, I think that that's, that's where their minds went when they learned about. All true.

[Alan Gessen]

Right. So, yeah, no, I've grown quite resistant to some of those influences. But no, I see what you're saying. Yes. But anyway, no, so. So those decisions were mine and rather than my mom's. Yes. Anyway, I was just. But it's interesting. You're right. You're right. My mom, that country is a pretty strong and insistent personality clue. Who knows how others should live.

[M. Gessen]

That was a lot of hemming and hawing. It's understandable. Alan wasn't just trying to defend his mother, he was defending himself. He didn't see himself as doing his mother's bidding. He had been independent for, well, you heard the man 20 years. So since he was about 30. Jokes aside, it's true that by the time Alan was in his 30s, 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 Priscilla, The writer. Harriet Clark, who has thought deeply about prisons and has spent a lot of time talking to inmates, told me once that people, people do horrible things because the noise in their heads becomes intolerable. 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 humiliation. But that's not all. Contrary to the laws of nature, there was a third hand, Leanna, whose love Alan also needed to earn. And the way to earn it was to give her control over, well, everything. But particularly, oh, 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 turned 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 done. So we may have gotten to the end of the story as it exists now. What do you think?

[Alan Gessen (Prison Interview)]

Oh, I think so. I think so, yeah. I guess that we have already discussed what the future might look like. But

[M. Gessen]

yeah. Tell me what you're thinking about the future. Okay.

[Alan Gessen (Prison Interview)]

I am reasonably optimistic about the appeal.

[M. Gessen]

And the appeal is reasonably optimistic is Allen'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.

[Alan Gessen (Prison Interview)]

Once I overcome the legal obstacles and ensure it will take some time for the children to come to terms with them back in their lives and to digest and absorb and somehow get over the entire criminal story, that I will be able to rebuild a relationship with them. And that's truly, at this point, more important, which is by far more important than any other considerations they have in terms of my post release plan. That is actually one of the main reasons why I didn't be to plead guilty, which is I did not want there to be that piece of paper where I'm saying I wanted their mother dead.

[M. Gessen]

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 Alan. I talked to him briefly the morning after the actual wedding too. He asked about his kids. Had they been there? How had they seemed? Yes, they'd been there. They'd seemed great. Elle commandeered 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 for brunch. I logged onto my computer and looked through some photos people had taken that night before, picking out pictures of Elle in her red dress and O in his nice shirt to send to Alan. There had been such longing in his voice when he asked about the kids. 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 mother. But what if a trusted adult made a podcast that said it wasn't quite so bad? Wouldn't that be nice? 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 wonder. Like in the jury of my mind, maybe 1/12th was wavering. Then I reviewed the evidence. There was no way around it. Alan was guilty and he was lying. And we were done with our conversations. Thanks, Nash.

[Alan Gessen]

Wow.

[Alan Gessen (Prison Interview)]

It's been a journey.

[M. Gessen]

It's been fascinating and I really appreciate your doing this. Before we quit our weeks long habit, Alan had one final request.

[Alan Gessen (Prison Interview)]

My kids don't talk to my kids much more now than I do. So if you see me any reasons for concern, just please stay involved. And to the extent you can help me look, you can help look after them. During this time, I can say enough how I appreciate that.

[M. Gessen]

We were done and we were. We are once again stuck where we began. Alan is still guilty of hiring someone to kill Priscilla. He's still lying about it and he's still intent. As intent as he has ever been on claiming his place as O's and Elle's father. And he's going to be out of prison in just a few years. What is my family going to do? What is Priscilla going to do? What can anyone do? That's next time on the Idiot.

[Alan Gessen]

Whoever it is, I wish they cut it out quick.

[M. Gessen]

The Idiot was reported and written by me, EM Gesten and produced by Daniel Guillamet with Andrei Barzemka and Lica Kramer of Liber Liba Studios. Our editor is Julie Snyder. Additional editing by Ira Glass and Sari Koenig. Research and fact checking by Ben Phelan and Marisa Robertson. Textbook original score by Alison Layton Brown. Additional music from Dan Powell and Marion Lozano. The show was mixed by Phoebe Wang with additional mixing by Katherine Anderson. Additional production by Fie Bennett at Serial Productions. Nde Chubu is our supervising producer. Mac Miller is our associate producer. Video production by Sean Devaney art direction from Kelly Doe art by John Curran credits for music by Bob Dylan. At the New York Times, our Standards editor is Susan Wesling legal review by Alameen Sumar, Dana Green, Jackson Bush, and Tim Tai. Our senior operations manager is Elizabeth Davis Moorer and Sam Dolnick 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 [e-mail] serialnewsletter. Special thanks thanks to Alex Robertson, texter, Sabrina Artel, Radio Kingston and Harriet Clark. The Idiot is a production of Serial Productions and the New York Times.

[Alan Gessen (Prison Interview)]

I haven't known peace and quiet for so long, I can't remember what it's like.