Chapter 4

Summary

Podcast Summary: The Idiot, Chapter 4

Host: M. Gessen
Production: Serial Productions & The New York Times
Date: March 26, 2026
Episode Focus: M. Gessen revisits the sentencing and backstory of their cousin, Allen, who has been convicted for hiring someone to kill his ex-wife, Priscilla. The episode explores Allen’s sentencing, delves deep into his personal history, and investigates the roots of his actions through interviews, family history, and psychological analysis.

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Main Theme & Purpose

This episode centers on the aftermath of Allen’s murder-for-hire conviction and seeks to answer why Allen—a man once seen as a braggart and an “idiot,” but not a potential murderer—took such a drastic step. Through courtroom drama, interviews with Allen in prison, and family retrospection, M. Gessen attempts to unravel the familial and psychological motivations behind Allen's crime, piecing together a “theory of Allen.”

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Sentencing Hearing: Allen's Fate Decided

• (00:27–06:43)
  • Allen receives a maximum sentence of 120 months (10 years) for hiring someone to kill Priscilla.
  • The judge, Judge Curley, emphasizes the irony: Allen, raised by a loving mother, tries to deprive his own children of their mother.
  • Judge meticulously lists Allen's incremental decisions in the murder plot, highlighting ample opportunities to turn back.
  • The judge acknowledges numerous glowing character letters but frames Allen’s crime within patterns often seen in domestic violence cases.
  • “You were a barred lawyer...by your own testimony, you thought you were going to bribe an official to have her kidnapped and removed from the United States.” — Judge Curley [04:10]
  • Gessen feels both moved and detached, noting the court fixes on guilt and punishment rather than motive.

2. First Conversations with Allen after Sentencing

• (08:54–17:22)
  • Allen reaches out to Gessen for a post-sentencing interview, promising missing context from the trial.
  • Allen shares meandering stories involving international business, brushes with Russian assets, and a failed business venture—but doesn't discuss the core crime.
  • On his departure from Moscow with his son O: Allen insists it wasn't kidnapping, but Gessen challenges him on whether Priscilla knew where her son was, exposing clear tension and mistrust.
  • “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.” — Gessen [11:55]
  • When asked about Priscilla desperately searching for her son, Allen downplays, evades and obfuscates.

3. Gessen and Allen’s Evolving Conversations

• (14:36–28:14)
  • Daily calls cover Allen’s denials of all accusations: abductions, responsibility for setbacks in Priscilla’s life, and the murder plot (claiming he simply wanted her deported).
  • Allen describes prison life in a deadpan manner, drawing darkly comic comparisons to travel and “local cuisine.”
  • Unexpected bonds form as Gessen and Allen discuss their shared family history, immigration, and adaptation struggles.
  • “We’ve spoken more in the past week than we have in the previous 50 years.” — Allen [16:25]
  • Allen recounts his tough immigrant past, feeling like a “third wheel” to his successful cousin, working his way up from bagging groceries to running a lucrative (but shady) college paper-writing business.

4. Allen’s Need to Be Needed

• (28:14–34:20)
  • Allen’s drive for usefulness and social status, born out of a desire to overcome humiliation and isolation.
  • Allen is depicted as generous, romantic, and indispensable to friends and partners—traits vouched for in letters submitted to the court.

5. Marriage, Fatherhood, and Escalating Family Tensions

• (34:20–43:04)
  • The birth of O (his son) is a pivotal, traumatic event. Allen obsesses over saving and caring for his premature child.
  • Regular cycles of hope and heartbreak in Allen and Priscilla’s tumultuous relationship.
  • Deepening resentment grows as Allen’s solutions to marital crises fail, and Gessen begins to formulate “a theory of Allen”:
    • Allen’s history as a problem-solver, desperate for validation, but faced an unsolvable emotional problem in his marriage.

6. A Second Theory: The Power of Lena (Allen’s Mother)

• (43:30–55:04, 55:34–57:32)
  • Gessen explores the idea of Allen as shaped and controlled by his mother, Lena—a dominant, insistent figure with a symbiotic relationship with her son.
  • “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.” — Gessen [48:10]
  • Priscilla and others suspect Lena’s pervasive influence motivated Allen to try to “fix” the problem of Priscilla for Lena’s benefit.
  • The concept of “folie à deux” (shared madness) is introduced: Lena and Allen reinforce each other’s beliefs, acting in concert.
  • Allen defends his independence, but even he admits, “My mom does come through as a pretty strong and insistent personality who knows how others should live.” [57:32]
  • Gessen posits that Allen’s noise—the internal, psychological cacophony—comes from trying to satisfy Priscilla, Lena, and himself, eventually pushing him to desperate acts.

7. Closure, Ongoing Denial, and Allen’s Future

• (59:50–63:35)
  • Allen expresses hope for his appeal and future relationship with his children, denying any intent to harm Priscilla.
  • During Gessen’s own wedding, Allen’s longing for contact and connection with his kids peaks.
  • Gessen reflects on Allen’s motive for participating in the interviews: a last attempt to communicate with his children and reshape his legacy.
  • “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 ... that he never wanted to kill their mother.” — Gessen [61:16]
  • Despite moments of doubt, Gessen ultimately concludes Allen is guilty and lying—but intent as ever on reclaiming his role as father.

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On the paradox of Allen’s character:
  “It’s so tragic that you have been such a generous and helpful person to all these other people ... But we see that sometimes with domestic violence.” — Judge Curley [04:10]
• On Allen’s emotional spiral:
  “She just told me one of the times she cheated on me and I started wailing, just this scream of pain ... I just couldn’t stop.” — Allen [38:25]
• On the shadow cast by Lena:
  “She wanted it done her way, which was the right way, and Priscilla was in the way.” — Gessen [48:10]
• On Allen’s motivation:
  “He’d do anything to make his mother happy. This came up in a lot of my conversations.” — Gessen [54:50]
• Allen on his crime and his family:
  “Once I overcome the legal obstacles ... I will be able to rebuild a relationship with [my children]. And that’s probably ... more important than any other considerations.” — Allen [60:31]
• Gessen’s conclusion:
  “There was no way around it. Alan was guilty and he was lying, and we were done with our conversations.” — Gessen [62:39]

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Timestamps for Key Segments

• [00:27–06:43] – Judge Curley’s detailed sentencing and courtroom reactions
• [08:54–14:36] – First prison interview with Allen: setup and initial evasions
• [14:36–17:22] – Daily calls begin, Allen’s denials, introduction to family and personal history
• [18:19–28:14] – Allen’s immigration story, struggles, first entrepreneurial efforts
• [29:01–34:20] – Allen’s early career, McKinsey, rise in post-Soviet Russia, romantic relationships
• [34:20–43:04] – Priscilla, fatherhood, marriage breakdown, first “theory of Allen”
• [43:30–55:04, 55:34–57:32] – Lena’s influence, family roles, rival theories, confrontation with Allen
• [59:50–63:35] – Closure: Allen’s hopes, children, self-defense, and Gessen’s summing up

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Tone & Style Reflections

The episode shifts between dark humor, steely journalistic skepticism, family empathy, and courtroom drama. Gessen’s voice is both intimate and analytical—probing Allen’s evasions, exasperated with his self-exoneration, and deeply reflective about their shared family wounds.

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Conclusion

Chapter 4 of The Idiot provides a riveting, layered exploration of Allen’s crime—not merely as a tale of guilt and punishment, but as a study in family psychology, trauma, and the limits of self-understanding. As Gessen peels back the layers of Allen’s character, the episode lands on the inescapable: Allen may wish to be the misunderstood “idiot,” but the evidence and his own stories betray a more disturbing truth.

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Next episode preview: What will Allen’s release mean for the family—and for Priscilla?

Transcript

[Alan]

Nemo, Emo and Doug. There's nowhere I wouldn't go to help someone customize and save on car insurance with Liberty Mutual.

[EM Gessen]

Even if it means sitting front row

[Alan]

at a comedy show.

[EM Gessen]

Hey, everyone, Check out this guy and his bird. What is this, your first date? Oh, no.

[Alan]

We help people customize and save on car insurance with Liberty Mutual together. We're married. Me to a human, him to a bird.

[EM Gessen]

Yeah, the bird looks out of your league anyways.

[Alan]

Only pay for what you [e-mail] Liberty.

[EM Gessen]

Liberty. Liberty. Liberty. 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 Allen 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 had lost all access to his children. And he continued, the torture I suffer every day comes from my awareness of the impact I've had on my mom. He was really choking up now. I felt something welling up in my throat, too. Alan was no longer dressed like a dad returning home from work for the sentencing. He was brought in wearing yellow prison scrubs over a white thermal 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 she 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 staccato, like she was striking the gavel. And finally she said, Mr. Gessen, you were a lawyer. You were 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 is an interest 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 Riulena, 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. Alan would have to agree to correspond with me, and the prison would have to approve my message. But before any of that could happen, Alan reached out to me himself. He was ready to talk. I am M. Gessen, and from Serial Productions and the New York Times, this is the idiot.

[Alan]

And Doug. There's nowhere I wouldn't go to help someone customize and save on car insurance with Liberty Mutual if.

[EM Gessen]

Even if it means sitting front row

[Alan]

at a comedy show.

[EM Gessen]

Hey, everyone. Check out this guy and his bird. What is this, your first date? Oh, no.

[Alan]

We help people customize and save on car insurance with Liberty Mutual together. We're married. Me to a human, him to a bird.

[EM Gessen]

Yeah, the bird looks out of your league.

[Alan]

Anyways, only pay for what you [e-mail] Liberty.

[EM Gessen]

Liberty. Liberty. Liberty. Since my mom was diagnosed with advanced endometrial cancer, it's been hard for her. There's so much she needs to understand. What are her treatment options? How can she talk about them with her care team? Learning about an available treatment [e-mail] can help her feel ready to have an informed conversation with her doctor. The doctor will see you now. That's us, Mom. You too can visit advancedendometrialcancer.com and learn more about a treatment option. Hey, I'm Joelle.

[Alan]

And I'm Juliette from New York Times

[EM Gessen]

Games, and we're out here talking to people about games. You play New York Times games? Yes, every day. Do you have a favorite connections? It just makes you think. I feel like it gives me elasticity. Create four groups of four. Hmm. This is actually a pretty cool game. What's your favorite game?

[Alan (Interviewee)]

The crossword.

[EM Gessen]

The crossword.

[Alan (Interviewee)]

I do it with my brother.

[EM Gessen]

We get Thursday sometimes, but I don't think I couldn't do Thursday on my own. I feel like I'm learning. I feel like I'm accomplishing something. I like the do do do do do do do do.

[Alan]

When you finish it.

[EM Gessen]

My family does wordle and we have a huge group chat. Like my grandma does wordle. Your grandma does wordle oh, every day. Yeah. Do you have a wordle Hot take? You should start with a word that's strategically bad to make it more fun. All of these games are so fun. Cause it's like a little 5 to 10 minute break.

[Alan]

I love these games.

[EM Gessen]

Yeah. New York Times subscribers get full access to all our games and features. Subscribe [e-mail] games for a special offer.

[Alan (Interviewee)]

Thank you for using GTL.

[EM 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 Alan had no reason to trust me. And having seen Allen 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 was what was in your note, which was that you feel there was context missing from the. From the case that or that you consciously decided not to discuss. Do you want to tell me what it is?

[Alan (Interviewee)]

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

[EM Gessen]

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

[Alan (Interviewee)]

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

[EM 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 (Interviewee)]

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

[EM 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 (Interviewee)]

So I used her absence to vacuum 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.

[EM 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 (Interviewee)]

I did.

[EM Gessen]

No, you didn't.

[Alan (Interviewee)]

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 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.

[EM Gessen]

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

[Alan (Interviewee)]

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

[EM 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 (Interviewee)]

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

[EM Gessen]

I don't think that's true.

[Alan (Interviewee)]

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.

[EM Gessen]

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

[Alan (Interviewee)]

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

[EM 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 (Interviewee)]

You have one minute remaining.

[EM Gessen]

And then Allen surprised me.

[Alan (Interviewee)]

So should I call you tomorrow?

[EM 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 (Interviewee)]

Okay.

[EM Gessen]

All right.

[Alan (Interviewee)]

Thanks much.

[EM 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]

Yeah, sure.

[EM 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]

She has a tendency to blame me for absolutely everything that happens. Sometimes it's act of God. This time it's act of Alan. Every single time.

[EM Gessen]

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

[Alan (Interviewee)]

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

[EM 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]

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

[EM Gessen]

There were the customs and beliefs of the local population.

[Alan]

I have not met a single Democrat in Nigeria.

[EM Gessen]

In the U.S. u.S. Wow.

[Alan]

I can't f. That blows my mind, I find fascinating.

[EM Gessen]

Do you have an explanation for this?

[Alan]

Republicans are more likely to commit crimes than Democrats.

[EM Gessen]

Allan 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 air. 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]

We've spoken more in the past week than we have in the previous 50 years.

[EM Gessen]

That is true.

[Alan]

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

[EM 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 re met 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]

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

[EM 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]

Alyosha was very happy until she was 15.

[EM Gessen]

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

[Alan]

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

[EM 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 kopeks they had each month and helping feed their tiny family.

[Alan]

I would go to the stores downstairs when I was three years older than myself, three and four. And you every saleswoman in the bakery bullishnair 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.

[EM 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 Lena moved to the United States. And suddenly Alan'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 (Interviewee)]

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.

[EM 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 Lena 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, Alan never mentioned my mother's illness and treatment. Alan and Nana and my parents spent those months in two separate cocoons of despair. Allen was lost outside of Moscow.

[Alan (Interviewee)]

Living in Moscow, basically. My life was extremely protected, very secure. I knew everyone, everybody knew me. 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 so much more disturbing. Here everything was unfamiliar, all the culture. You came here, you came to the states, you were 12, was 14.

[EM Gessen]

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

[Alan (Interviewee)]

Yeah, right, so. So you know, exactly.

[EM 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 Alan. And. And there was Koister, my younger brother Keith, who was like popular and successful and you're five weeks apart in age, right?

[Alan (Interviewee)]

Quaestor 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 he said his scores above the chart.

[EM 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.

[Alan (Interviewee)]

You know, I remember stealing quarters from Koesti because Koesti would have money lying around. I would be sleeping on 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.

[EM Gessen]

Third wheel.

[Alan (Interviewee)]

The third wheel. Exactly.

[EM 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 there 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 (Interviewee)]

Well, she was crying and she was. She had shortness of breath. You know, just kind of just. 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 adjust 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 made a very big impression on me.

[EM Gessen]

And what did you do?

[Alan (Interviewee)]

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.

[EM Gessen]

It's true that they moved out after about eight months. The way my father remembers it, 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 because my mother was dying. What Alan remembers is that he saved the day, saved Lena, and saved himself. He took charge.

[Alan]

At first, I was bagging groceries.

[EM Gessen]

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

[Alan]

Then I became a really fast cashier.

[EM Gessen]

From bagging groceries to ringing them up to becoming the fastest cashier, I set

[Alan]

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

[EM 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]

Over a thousand clients.

[EM Gessen]

Wow.

[Alan]

About 25 writers.

[EM Gessen]

How much money did you make?

[Alan]

I'm not sure. I reported it fully to the irs, so I would rather. I would rather not say. But it supported me fairly comfortably at the time.

[EM Gessen]

You and your mom?

[Alan]

Correct.

[EM Gessen]

Just give me a ballpark.

[Alan]

I would say that maybe in a very good month, I would make about $10,000.

[EM Gessen]

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

[Alan]

It was. No, it was. But it also was, I think, social. It was important because I was. 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.

[EM 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. Allen was hired by McKenzie, the international consulting firm, and was launched on his path to becoming the allan.

[Alan]

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.

[EM 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]

And we were. 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. And it was just. I felt like I became a character in an adventure book.

[EM Gessen]

Forget law school, the law firm, the unsuccessful bid to join the CIA. Alan was finally living up to the potential he had shown in college when he was rich and everyone needed him. Moscow was the adult version of that life.

[Alan]

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

[EM Gessen]

And how do you explain the difference?

[Alan (Interviewee)]

Well,

[Alan]

okay, so it's either me or the women, right? So I think more likely that gender roles in, in the United States are very different than from the. 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.

[EM Gessen]

And when you say macho, what do you

[Alan]

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

[EM Gessen]

relationship, really, 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 Alan took his macho chivalry act very seriously and that it worked. Women love being doted on by Alan. I interviewed Allen's first serious girlfriend and she told me that she still thought of Allen as one of the best people she had ever met. He made her feel taken care of. Alan's second serious girlfriend wrote a letter to the court. She wrote, the way I felt with him, I can wish every woman to experience this. 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 healthcare 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. Alexi showed me the world and its possibilities. And it wasn't just the women. Other letters to the court mentioned how generous Allen 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. Alan 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 pool 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 necessary. 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]

And then for the first time and

[EM Gessen]

the hardest months of Alan's life began. How? Yeah, what did he look like.

[Alan]

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.

[EM 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]

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.

[EM Gessen]

Alan had to do something. Many things.

[Alan]

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

[EM 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 calming classical music.

[Alan]

Oxygen supplied.

[EM Gessen]

Eventually, Alan ran out of things that money and enterprise could solve.

[Alan]

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

[EM 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. Oh, 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 Allen had to say about the marriage seemed to me pretty self pitying and blamey. Allen 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]

She just told me one of the times she cheated on me and I started wailing, just this scream of pain and I think I was wailing for about 15 times a minute to the point of actually 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 time when I felt good and like I felt the relationship was fine and we were back on track and like bam, like pressing back down and I would take again several months to recover from it and to kind of move on and. And bam. It happens again and like it just, it was like that for basically for seven years.

[EM Gessen]

Still. On the whole, Alan's description of the marriage and its ups and downs is pretty similar to Priscilla's. There were good times, but more and more frequently bad times punctuated by what Alan describes as blowout fights. One difference in their accounts though is Alan 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]

Well, I guess it's a tragedy I find out now. Let me maybe redial you because I'm not sure how to respond to this.

[EM 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, Allen was separated from Priscilla, but he was condemned to co parenting o with Priscilla forever. So here is a 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 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.

[Alan]

And Doug. There's nowhere I wouldn't go to help someone customize and save on car insurance with Liberty Mutual.

[EM Gessen]

Even if it means sitting front row

[Alan]

at a comedy show.

[EM Gessen]

Hey everyone, check out this guy and his bird. What is this your first date? Oh no.

[Alan]

We help people customize and save on car insurance with Liberty Mutual together. We. We're married. Me to a human, him to a bird.

[EM Gessen]

Yeah, the bird looks out of your league.

[Alan]

Anyways, only pay for what you [e-mail] Liberty.

[EM Gessen]

Liberty. Liberty. Liberty. I'm Dane Brugler. I cover the NFL draft for the Athletic. Our draft guide picked up the name the Beast because of the crazy amount of information that's included. I'm looking at thousands of players putting together hundreds of scouting reports. I've been covering this year's draft since last year's draft. There is a lot in the Beast that you simply can't find anywhere else. This is the kind of in depth, unique journalism you get from the Athletic and the New York Times. You can [e-mail] subscribe when I talk to people about Alan, they often respond by talking about Lena, his mother. They talk about the way Lena brought Alan up to be her sole source of support and affect her partner. They talk about Lena and Alan's symbiotic relationship. One friend described having a conversation with them as akin to watching a television show with two co hosts who seamlessly hand lines off to each other. Like Lena and Alan are of one mind, they always had been. Lena and Alan lived together for most of Alan's life, even when he was in college and in law school and working in the first couple of years after law school. So when Alan started dating Nana, was there always. Alan himself told me that his first serious girlfriend, whom he met in law school, had three specific complaints.

[Alan]

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, often expressed opinions.

[EM 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, and Laura came

[Alan]

to visit us at our house in Lisbon and my mom just finished reading Amy Vendor Builds Book 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, you should read this chapter. And she hands my girlfriend Brooklyn Etiquette. He 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 is not conducting herself correctly and that now she needs to reread the book and etiquette.

[EM 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. Ellen, on another 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, Alan moved in with a girlfriend for the first time, a Ukrainian named Katya. Lena came to visit and saw Kaeta's collection of tiny decorative houses, some of which Lena concluded were. This is a direct quote from Allen, 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]

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

[EM Gessen]

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

[Alan]

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

[EM 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 or words like I got you a hotel room. How did you handle it?

[Alan]

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.

[EM 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. 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. 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 Lena'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 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 Alan was arrested. But my own conversations with Lena supported my second theory of Allen. It was Lena who first mentioned to me the idea of needing to do something about Priscilla. This was several years before Alan and Lena first took O. At the time of this conversation, O was a toddler. Allen and Priscilla were separated, and Lena and I were at a family gathering in Moscow, helping carry food from the kitchen to the dining room. Lena paused, holding a platter, and said, I want to ask your advice on something. How do I get Priscilla out of O's life? It was clearly an invitation to gather my thoughts on the matter and give Lena advice later, an invitation that assumed I would want to help. You don't, I said, meaning you don't get Priscilla out of O's 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 Allen 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, polloda, which means madness for two in French. It's when two people share a delusion, reinforce disbelief 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 sat. 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 Leana 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 (Interviewee)]

She very much blames my mom for those decisions, and, you know, 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. They. 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. Search is something I wanted to point out.

[EM 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 (Interviewee)]

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, it's a. But, 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, I'm not disagree a lot.

[EM Gessen]

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

[Alan (Interviewee)]

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

[EM 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, he hurt 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 do horrible things because the noise in their heads becomes intolerable. That idea is 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, Lena, whose love Alan also needed to earn. And the way to earn it was to give her control over, well, everything. But particularly O. Alan could live peacefully, even thrive when it was just him, Lena and O. I suspect he could have made 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]

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

[EM Gessen]

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

[Alan]

I am reasonably optimistic about the appeal

[EM Gessen]

and the appeal is reasonably optimistic is Alan's peak. For hope springs eternal. At that point, Alan hadn't even spoken to the lawyer who had taken on his appeal. But he was sure he'd be getting out soon and then he would start reclaiming his life.

[Alan]

Once I overcome the legal obstacles and I'm sure it will take some time for the children to come to terms with that 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 probably at this point more important by far more important than any other considerations they have in terms of my post release plan. That is actually probably one of the main reasons why I didn't plead guilty, which is I did not want there to be that piece of paper where I'm saying I wanted their mother dead.

[EM 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. It 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 the 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.

[Alan]

Well, it's been a journey.

[EM Gessen]

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

[Alan]

You see, my kids don't talk to make it much more now than I do. So if the senior 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 can say enough how I appreciate that.

[EM 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 Oz and El'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. Someone's got it in for me. They're planting stories in their pr. Whoever it is, I wish they cut it out quick. But when they will, I can only guess.

[Alan]

They say I shot a man named Grave.

[EM Gessen]

And the Idiot was recorded and written by me, EM Gessen and produced by Daniel Guillemet with Andrei Barzemka and Lika Kramer of Liberliba Studios. Our editor is Julie Snyder. Additional editing by Ira Glass and Sari Koenig Research and fact checking by Ben Phelan and Marisa Robertson. Texter Original score by Alison Layton Brown Additional music from Dan Powell and Marian Lozano. The show was mixed by Phoebe Wang with additional mixing by Katherine Anderson. Additional production by Fia Bennett. At Serial Productions, Ende 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 music by Bob Dylan. At the New York Times, our Standards editor is Susan Wesling Legal review by Al Amin Sumar, Dana Green, Jackson Bush and Tim 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] serial newsletter. Special 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.