Chapter 5

My father was born in December 25th. So ever since we moved to the United States 45 years ago, his birthday has been a national holiday and the start of winter break for his kids and then grandkids. Everyone gathers at his house and keep cod. Everyone, not just the birthday man, kids gifts. My father always has his wife take a picture of him surrounded by his children, me and my three brothers and grandchildren, seven of them, including O and L. This past December we gathered for my father's 81st birthday. At some point during that party, I got an email from Alan in prison. I was unplugged, so I read it the next day. It was the usual Alan stuff, like a note from a travel journal meant to remind me that he was still living in most fascinating life. He named checked some celebrities serving time in the same facility. Sean Diddy, he wrote, "Seems depressed. While the cryptocurrency fraudster Alex Muschinski is brilliant and fascinating. But mostly Alan was asking me to pass on his birthday wishes to my father. He wrote, "I miss the visits to keep cod when everyone was together and I miss his duck with apples, horrible and wonderful at the same time and his marinated mushrooms, the one point of permanence in an impermanent life." The 10-year prison sentence isn't as long as it seems, for one thing because it doesn't last in years. Alan is currently slated to be released in 2030, after spending roughly eight years behind bars. So we're about halfway now between Alan's arrest and his planned release. We're at the point that is, when there can be no denying that in the foreseeable future, Alan will leave prison and will almost certainly want to rejoin the family. I don't think any of us really knows how to address that prospect. And for a week I didn't know how to respond to Alan's email. Then I finally figured out what I wanted to say to him. I am Em Gessen and from Cheerio Productions in the New York Times. This is the fifth and final episode of The Idiot. When I set out to report Alan's story, I wanted to understand what he had been thinking, what the hell had been thinking. And I wanted to lay out a clear picture of the crime for my family, so that they would stop looking for excuses or hoping for a reasonable explanation. In the process I got to know Alan, for the first time really, and I came to feel how much he's missing his kids. His wage to battle to be allowed phone calls with him. He's hoping to rebuild a relationship with him once he's released, and judging from his letters to me, he's not just hoping but counting and being reintegrated into our family after he gets out. Whether that happens is up to my dad. He is the reason that our families as elastic as it has been. He is the one who has kept in touch and welcomed ex-partners and distant relatives who otherwise would have vanished from our familial horizon. But it turned out that over the years when I grew somewhat more sympathetic to Alan, my father had traveled in the opposite trajectory, in relationship to Alan, and now to, after what happened, I don't want to see them and hear from them at all. I think last time I talked to you, you were really sad about losing your sister. No, that's, of course, true as well, but I lost half a good. So I don't feel any. Now I just don't have a sister. I had never heard my dad say anything like this before. It's not that he is sentimental, just the opposite. He is clear-eyed and rational. He knows that people do terrible things, and that this can include that people one loves. I've never known him to say that something is unforgivable. Outside of war and genocide, anyway. What would it take for them to return to the family? First of all, for Aleusha to admit his guilt not to pretend that he is not guilty, that's would be step number one. What should follow, I don't know. The problem is, I think Alan believes that he can't ever admit that he tried to have Priscilla killed. Because if he does, his kids won't have anything to do with him. My father for his part, has assumed the role of the kids' grandfather. That's what they call him too. And he's a fiercely protective grandfather. His no patience for Alan's dilemma. So what role do you think he should have in the kids' lives? None at all. As far as my father is concerned, Alan who took out a hit on his ex-wife, and Liana, who keeps insisting that he didn't, are off the island, or at least the Cape Cork Peninsula. He hasn't seen either of them in almost four years. He didn't want to talk about the pain of losing his sister. That chapter is closed. But even this kind of closure is a kind of luxury. A luxury that Priscilla doesn't have. This winter, O came to visit my family for a week over the holidays. I brought him back in the early days of January. It was the same house where I had interviewed Priscilla a couple of years earlier, just a bit more cluttered with her flea market fines. Priscilla lived in with the addition of a little black cap named Nibbles, but a very different life, and a different Priscilla. Priscilla has retrained as a certified nurse's aide. O who watched her study for her exams was very proud, impressed by how much she had to learn, and he told me Priscilla had gotten much higher marks than the other people in her course. Priscilla is working 60 hours a week, both at a hospital and as a home health aide. It's a far cry from her old life and fashion, and as different as one can imagine from the big fast life she wants that she'd live without. The night I brought O back, Priscilla was stuck working until midnight because an elderly man that she works with, who has cancer, had to be hospitalized. And then his wife, his dementia, couldn't be left alone. There was a lot of juggling. Someone had to watch L, someone had to relieve Priscilla, and as all these arrangements fell into place, I saw that Priscilla now has a community. He includes other home health aids, and is a mother and neighbor who has a daughter who baby sits. And even I realized, they're old lady with dementia. Priscilla has built a life in which she and the kids can be stable. O has his music lessons again, and horseback riding and fencing, along with Russian math lessons. It's a thing Russian math, and other activities. O has most of the same activities, along with gymnastics. All of this requires an almost superhuman effort from Priscilla, but it's important to her that she's doing all of this on her own, without Alan and Nana's help or interference. Liana has other ideas. Oh wow, okay. Um, where would you like me to start on my goodness? Well, let's start with Liana suing Priscilla. So what is the status of that case? How did that go? Okay, so basically how it started, she actually sued to be able to. see or spend time with the kids that had previously been allocated to Alan. So she wanted to take over his parenting time. And the judge obviously said no. That's not going to happen because you're not a parent. Then she filed again asking for like weekends. The judge said no. Then she tried getting one of Alan's friends to talk to me. Just like bribery. Remember at his own murder for hire trial, Alan testified that he had solved many life problems with a bribe. As Priscilla describes it, a childhood friend of Alan's, a son of a close friend of Liana's, approached Priscilla with an offer, a monthly stipend and exchange for letting Liana see the kids. And I just told him no. I would rather live in my car. Take money and risk something happening to my children. Take money from somebody who's obviously unstable. Priscilla is talking about Liana. Obviously unstable, strikes me in accurate description. Because I've now read over 100 pages of court documents related to Liana's lawsuit. And much of it corroborates what Priscilla told me happened next. Liana confirmed money was offered, although she doesn't characterize it as a bribe. The court rejected Liana's attempt to claim Alan's parental time, but did order monthly supervised visits. But Liana is Liana. You know, it's incredible to me sometimes when I think about Liana's ability to do something that is completely not rational every single time she would see them. Every time there wasn't one single visit that went smoothly with no issues. These issues started small. One time Liana loaded everyone into her car and drove to her house without Priscilla's permission. Priscilla had hired a college student to supervise the visits. So for the next time, Priscilla found a professional supervisor. In a court filing, the supervisor offered the following professional assessment of the visits. no mother had a variety of boundary-pushing behaviors. By this point, Lena had signed an agreement to speak only English during the visits, so that the supervisor could understand. Obviously, Priscilla had a good reason to fear that Lena would badmouth her to the kids. Lena still spoke a question to the children. The judge had specified that Lena wasn't to give the children gifts, but you guessed it. The supervisor texted Priscilla asking what to do, and Priscilla said let them keep the gifts, because he wants to take a gift away from a small child. According to court papers one time, when the supervisor wasn't looking, Lena slipped a very special gift into O's bag. And inside was this book that Ellen wrote? Yes, in prison, Ellen wrote a book. It's called The Locked-Up Aware. Ellen used a pseudonym, but Lena advertised the book to friends and family as having been written by him. She also illustrated her name on the Amazon page next to Ellen's pen name. The book is self-published. It's currently number 3,960,562 on Amazon, but has eight five-star reviews, including one signed by Ellen's ex-girlfriend, the one who says that Ellen made her feel like a goddess. During our phone conversations, Ellen had told me that he was writing a book of short stories in a philosophy book, both intended for O. I asked to read them, of course, but he never sent anything. But just a month after we finished talking, the locked-up lawyer was published. I think this is the book intended for O. It consists of inyets on the people Ellen presumably met in prison. But the most important story might be the one Ellen tells on the back cover. This collection of notes and observations would never have happened if I wasn't set up by the FBI and charged with a crime I didn't commit. I only had time to read the back, but that was enough to peak his curiosity. As soon as I picked them up, the first thing he said to me was, "Oh, I saw Papa's book, Papa wrote a book," and he was set up by the FBI, etc. Which for a kid is very confusing. Priscilla has continued to take extreme care of what's talking to the kids about Ellen. Ellen is still little and doesn't remember Ellen well at all. She's just told that her dad works far away. O. is 12 now, so there's no hiding from him facts that are easily available on the internet. Priscilla involved O's therapist in telling him that therapist also handles the letters that Ellen writes to O, filtering what's appropriate for O to read, and in what context. And now, Lena, with this book, was throwing all of this into disarray. So no more Lena visits. Record hearings followed. As time went on, Priscilla said, it came across more pathetic than menacing. I was eventually able to listen to a partial recording of a hearing, and I agree. Lena sounds sad. Almost like she still hasn't understood what's happened to her. How is it possible, she seems to be asking, that her life collapsed, that her son is in prison, and that her grandchildren's mother doesn't want the kids to spend time with her, when she has so much to give. Hard to listen to, until the judge catches Lena lying, or apparently attempted to mislead the court. This happens repeatedly. I actually felt really bad that day, just listening to her and looking at her and just realizing that instead of facing what has happened and seeing the mistakes that have happened with Alan for starters, the reasons behind her not being able to see the kids. Instead of learning from this, she just wanted to continue to fight. And I think everyone understood exactly who she was. The judge actually eventually said to her, no, I'm sorry, like your time is up. We've given you an hour. And yeah, I think we've heard enough. But before that happened, a copy of the locked up lower had been entered into evidence. The judge read the cover, and you could see from her demeanor that she thought it was insane that she would give a book like that to a 12 year old. Lena said that she had no idea the book ended up in Osbad. The judge's decision read in part, the court finds the grandmother exerts undue influence over the children, which has been detrimental to their well-being and emotional stability and undermines mother. I think that's the judicial equivalent of, I'm fed up with your shenanigans. The judge ruled that Priscilla was no longer obligated to allow Lena and you visits with the kids. And the judge also ordered Lena to stop criticizing Priscilla on social media. I no longer have access to all of Lena's Facebook posts. But for my past exchanges with Lena, I can imagine what the court decision is aiming to ban. I gather that Lena still convinced that she, and only she, knows the right way to raise these children. Lena has always approached child rearing as a sort of design project. When I was a teenager, she told me that she had chosen Alan's biological father for his hereditary talent, his own father was a famous putt, and for his excellent hair. At the time she said this, Alan was a little kid with an impressive head of hair. But he lost all of it by the time he was 30. And as for literary talent, I mean yes, I found the locked up were pretty engaging, but I think it's fair to say that a self published book written in prison is not what Lena once had in mind. When Priscilla and Alan named their son O, Lena pointed out to me that his name was a sort of mirror image of my own son's name. And when they write a book together, the names will look good on the spine. O was Lena's new project, which is I think why she felt she had to full control of him. Years earlier, when Alan was in jail on kidnapping charges and Priscilla gave full custody of O, my father became a go between. His kite with O regularly and reported back to Lena about how her grandson was doing. She demanded to know which pages of which Russian books O was reading and how many pages, and expressed her dismay regularly, not enough pages, not of all the right books. As a falling short of the daily goal for Mary Poppins and Russian wasn't bad enough, then complained in the family chat that O was not receiving her chocolate or enough chocolate. A fear that O and L are now a Lena's only project. Well really O, because as she acknowledged in court, she barely knows O. She's in her 70s, living alone in a Jewish elderly housing complex. She's been divorced for half a century. She never had a career. She used to believe that her son, Alan, would become a great man, he's in prison. That leaves O is the one thing that can give her life purpose, and she's continuing to pursue this purpose. After Alan was arrested, law enforcement helped Priscilla move to a new neighborhood, where no one was supposed to be able to find her. But I caught her in my neighborhood. It was a day that I think I didn't go to work that day, so I just decided to pick the kids up from school, myself, I'm actually scooters to school, and he has a route that he uses. So I was driving and I saw her, like walking with her dog on the runner, I was like, no, this cannot be her. So I drove to his school, picked him up quickly and then looped back to make sure, and sure enough it was her, and she was waiting on a corner where he turns to then come up the road to our house. So, so, so close to our house. I stopped and I recorded her because I didn't want, you know, no, I wasn't there, yes, you know, he said, she said. So I recorded her, I was like, what are you doing here? Lena, what are you doing here? I'm saying, what are you doing here? I'm asking what you're doing here. You're still there, that's you, hello. Yes. And she's like, oh, you know, I acted surprised to see me. Like, oh, Priscilla, is that you? Oh, so good to see you, blah, blah, blah. I'm waiting for a friend. I'm like, waiting for a friend here. Okay, okay, I'm waiting for a friend. In my neighborhood. I don't know where you live. And she's not supposed to know where you live, right? She's not supposed to know where we live, but I think at this point that's totally our last cause, she knows where he goes to school. I'm sure this was not the first time she has followed him. She's probably followed him all the way home because she was so close to our house. Like, it is absolutely no way. She doesn't know where our house is. Priscilla's lawyer wrote to Lena, warning her to stay away. Lena wrote to her own lawyer, claiming that she had come to the neighborhood to pick up something that she had bought from Facebook Marketplace. Priscilla doesn't believe her because Lena lives a couple of towns away and because the corner Lena was standing on is the intersection of two minor residential streets, unremarkable, except for the fact that it's on O's root from school. Also this was in the first time Lena had been spotted in the neighborhood. A few months earlier, O told Priscilla that he thought he had seen his grandmother outside of school. Priscilla asked her school to check security camera footage and they showed her what they'd found. Lena, with O going right past her on his scooter. Lena denied to Priscilla that she'd been there. I've seen a photo from the surveillance tape at Slana. Why did she come? Why did she bring her dog? Is she a lonely grandmother who just wants to get a glimpse of O, the apple of her eye? Is she hoping that O will stop on Linger to pet the dog? Or is she, the woman who was with Alan Bowt times he took O across international borders without Priscilla's permission, casing the joint? There's that fuzzy boundary again between pathetic and menacing. Lana wouldn't talk to me for this podcast and declined to answer a list of questions sent to her, calling them inappropriate, and saying that they were, quote, "numerous and founded assertions" without specifying which assertions were unfounded. Priscilla started having O take the school bus instead of using his scooter to get to and from school. This is in addition to tracking O's phone, having security cameras on her house. Priscilla feels that she has to be vigilant at all times. You can't trust a person who does things like this because, you know, at some point, as a grown up person, you think logically, "Okay, you know what, this is a little too much, maybe let me take a step back." But she seems to have none of those boundaries, like nothing like that crosses her mind, she'll do whatever, and that is the most frightening part of it all. And this is the level of fear that Priscilla feels, has every reason to feel, even while Alan is in prison. I worry about what will happen when he is released. He will be a man in his mid-50s. It is barter attorney who has lost many of his professional and social connections. A man with nothing to do but rejoin his mother in their project, their Falea Doe. Are you concerned for your safety? I am, and, you know, I think it would be foolish not to be. This is someone who is still trying to convince everyone that they did nothing wrong, knowing that nobody believes them anyway. When Alan was first convicted, Priscilla had this idea, she told me at the time, that when he was released, the kids would be older, or practically an adult, and she wouldn't have to worry for their safety or her own. But in fact, it was still going to be in high school when his dad comes out of prison. And then there's all that force and desire and charm that Alan will bring to winning him back. I kept thinking about how to respond to the email I got from Alan on my dad's birthday. I didn't want to ask him about prison life. I didn't want to send a report on the birthday celebration and keep cod. I certainly no longer felt like telling Alan anything about his kids. After Priscilla told me about Lana's behavior, I felt sick to my stomach every time I imagined what would happen when Alan is released. Finally I decided to do what I hadn't done in a month since I'd been working on this podcast. Tell Alan what I really think. Or more to the point, what I think he should do. Hi, I lost you. It took me a while to decide to write the snout. And since you're going to hear this on the podcast, should you decide to listen to it? I thought I should. I didn't pass on your birthday wishes to my father. Because when I interviewed him this time on Cape Cod for the closing episode, he made it clear that he doesn't want to hear from you. I think you should know this and should know why. He said that unless you admit what you did and try to make amends, no contact is possible. It seems that your strategy has been to keep denying that you hired someone you thought was going to kill Priscilla. I understand that you have hoped that your kids in our family would believe that you were framed and trapped, misinterpreted, whatever, and you would be able to repair relationships when you were out. This strategy has clearly failed. Instead of coming across as innocent, you come across as someone who continues to lie and to foreclose the possibility of actual repair. I honestly don't know if repair is in fact possible, but I do know that your only chance of it is to start by acknowledging what you did. I know I told you in the past that I was starting to have some doubt about your guilt. This was true at the end of our series of conversations. Then I went back over the evidence, listened to all the tapes made by the Ender Cover Agent. They leave no doubt. No room for interpretation. Your continuing to insist that the Sizz and So comes across as what it is, lying. In lying in the end, shuts off communication and precludes compassion. I have a friend who has spent many years, her whole life in fact, thinking about people who have committed horrible crimes. Her own mother was sentenced to life in prison when she was a baby, so when I say her whole life, I mean it. She told me some things that I find very useful in thinking about you. But sometimes people do truly terrible things, and this includes people in our families. People who in some way or another will always be connected to us. And that people do these terrible things when the noise in their heads gets unbearable. I think I can imagine the noise in your head. How stuck you felt. I would seem to you that any way out was justifiable. When I think about it, I do feel compassion. Perhaps other members of our family can come to see this too. But again, this would have to begin with honesty on your part. That's the end of my letter. Alan didn't write back to me. Instead he filed a lawsuit trying to stop the release of this podcast. In his filing and in letters to The New York Times, he accused me of pursuing what he called "a decades-long family feud" and of all sorts of other things I'm not going to repeat. These were lies, and they made me very angry. For a full 24 hours, I fantasized about taking revenge. I could report him to ICE. Aren't they supposed to be deporting immigrants convicted of violent crime? He could get deported to Russia. And then he could get arrested there and rot in Russian jail for the rest of his life. And then, pursuing the kids would finally be free of him and the fear he brings. And then. Did I go looking for a way to actually get Alan deported? I did not. Because I'm not an idiot. [Music] The idiot was reported and written by me and guest him and produced by Daniel Gimeth with Andrei Barzemke and Lika Kramer of Librelybos studios. Our editor is Julie Snyder, additional editing by Ira Glass and Sarah Keneck. Research and fact-checking by Ben Falen and Marisa Robertson Texter. Original score by Allison Latelyn Brown, additional music from Dan Powell and Mary and LaZana. The show was mixed by Phoebe Wang with additional mixing by Catherine Anderson, additional production by Fia Bennett. At serial productions, Andrei Chubu is our supervising producer, Mack Miller's our associate producer. Video production by Sean Devaney, our direction from Kelly Doe, hard by John Purne, credits music by Bob Dylan. The New York Times are a standard editor of Susan Wesley, legal review by Alamine Sumar, Dana Green, Jackson Bush and Tim Tai. Our senior operations manager is Elizabeth Davis Mourner and Sam Dolenick is deputy managing editor of The New York Times. To find out about our upcoming shows and more about this show, sign up for the newsletter at nytimes.com/serialnewsletter. The edit is a production of serial productions and The New York Times. [BLANK_AUDIO]