transcript

Speaker 1:
[00:03] My father was born on December 25th. So ever since we moved to the United States 45 years ago, his birthday has been a national holiday, and the start of winter break for his kids and then grandkids. Everyone gathers at his house in Cape Cod. Everyone, not just the birthday man, gets gifts. Lena and Allen used to come, of course, but now it's Priscilla who comes with the kids. 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 L and L. This past December we gathered for my father's 81st birthday. At some point during that party, I got an email from Allen in prison. I was unplugged, so I read it the next day. It was the usual Allen stuff, like a note from a travel journal meant to remind me that he was still living a most fascinating life. He name-checked some celebrities serving time in the same facility. Sean Diddy, he wrote, seems depressed. Well, the cryptocurrency fraudster, Alex Maszynski, is brilliant and fascinating. But mostly, Allen was asking me to pass on his birthday wishes to my father. He wrote, I miss the visits to Cape Cod when everyone was together, and I miss his duck with apples, horrible and wonderful at the same time, and his marinated mushrooms, the one point of permanence in an impermanent life. A 10-year prison sentence isn't as long as it seems. For one thing, because it doesn't last 10 years. Allen is currently slated to be released in 2030, after spending roughly eight years behind bars. So we're about halfway now between Allen's arrest and his planned release. We're at the point, that is, when there can be no denying that in the foreseeable future, Allen 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 weeks, I didn't know how to respond to Allen's email. Then I finally figured out what I wanted to say to him. I am M. Gessen and from Serial Productions and The New York Times. This is the fifth and final episode of The Idiot. When I set out to report Allen's story, I wanted to understand what he had been thinking, what the hell he 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 Allen, for the first time really, and I came to feel how much he is missing his kids. He has waged a battle to be allowed phone calls with them. He's hoping to rebuild a relationship with them once he is released, and judging from his letters to me, he's not just hoping but counting on being reintegrated into our family after he gets out. Whether that happens is up to my dad. He is the reason that our family is as elastic as it has been. He is the one who has kept in touch and welcomed ex-partners and distant relatives who otherwise would have vanished from our familial horizon. But it turned out that over the years when I grew somewhat more sympathetic to Allen, my father had traveled in the opposite trajectory in relationship to Allen, and now too.

Speaker 2:
[03:39] After what happened, I don't want to see them and to hear from them at all.

Speaker 1:
[03:47] I think last time I talked to you, you were really sad about losing your sister.

Speaker 2:
[03:54] No, that's of course true as well, but I lost her for good. So, I don't feel any... Now I just don't have a sister.

Speaker 1:
[04:08] I had never heard my dad say anything like this before. It's not that he is sentimental, just the opposite. He's clear-eyed and rational. He knows that people do terrible things, and that this can include the people one loves. I've never known him to say that something is unforgivable, outside of war and genocide anyway. What would it take for them to return to the family?

Speaker 2:
[04:32] First of all, for Alyosha to admit his guilt, not to pretend that he is not guilty, that would be step number one. What should follow, I don't know.

Speaker 1:
[04:47] The problem is, I think Allen believes that he can't ever admit that he tried to have Priscilla killed, because if he does, his kids won't have anything to do with him. My father, for his part, has assumed the role of the kid's grandfather. That's what they call him, too. And he's a fiercely protective grandfather. He has no patience for Allen's dilemma. So what role do you think he should have in the kid's lives?

Speaker 2:
[05:11] None at all.

Speaker 1:
[05:13] As far as my father is concerned, Allen, who took out a hit on his ex-wife, and Lena, who keeps insisting that he didn't, are off the island, or at least the Cape Cod Peninsula. He hasn't seen either of them in almost four 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, Oh 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 finds, more 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. Oh, who watched her study for her exams, was very proud, impressed by how much she had to learn. And he told me Priscilla had gotten much higher marks than the other people in her 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 once thought she'd live with Allen. The night I brought Oh back, Priscilla was stuck working until midnight because an elderly man that she works with who has cancer had to be hospitalized, and then his wife who has dementia couldn't be left alone. There was a lot of juggling. Someone had to watch Elle, someone had to relieve Priscilla, and as all these arrangements fell into place, I saw that Priscilla now has a community. It includes other home health aids and a Zimbabwean neighbor who has a daughter who babysits and even I realized the old lady with dementia. Priscilla has built a life in which she and the kids can be stable. Oh has his music lessons again and horseback riding and fencing along with Russian math lessons, it's a thing, Russian math and other activities. Elle 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 Allen and Lena's help or interference. Lena has other ideas.

Speaker 3:
[07:30] Oh, wow. Okay. Where would you like me to start? Oh my goodness.

Speaker 1:
[07:36] Well, let's start with Lena suing Priscilla. So what is the status of that case? How did that go?

Speaker 3:
[07:44] 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 Allen. 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 Allen's friends to talk to me, almost like bribery.

Speaker 1:
[08:20] Remember, at his own murder for hire trial, Allen testified that he had solved many a life problem with a bribe. As Priscilla describes it, a childhood friend of Allen's, a son of a close friend of Liana's, approached Priscilla with an offer, a monthly stipend, in exchange for letting Liana see the kids.

Speaker 3:
[08:36] And I just told him, no, I would rather live in my car than take money and risk something happening to my children, take money from somebody who's obviously unstable.

Speaker 1:
[08:53] Priscilla is talking about Liana. Obviously unstable strikes me as an 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 Allen's parental time, but did order monthly supervised visits. But Liana is Liana.

Speaker 3:
[09:18] 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.

Speaker 1:
[09:40] 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. Grandmother had a variety of boundary-pushing behaviors. By this point, Liana had signed an agreement to speak only English during the visits so that the supervisor could understand. Obviously, Priscilla had good reason to fear that Liana would badmouth her to the kids. Liana still spoke Russian to the children. The judge had specified that Liana 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 who wants to take a gift away from a small child. According to court papers, one time, when the supervisor wasn't looking, Liana slipped a very special gift into Oh's bag.

Speaker 3:
[10:37] And inside was this book that Allen wrote.

Speaker 1:
[10:43] Yes. In prison, Allen wrote a book. It's called The Locked Up Lawyer. Allen used a pseudonym, but Liana advertised the book to friends and families having been written by him. She also illustrated it. Her name is on the Amazon page next to Allen's pen name. The book is self-published. It's currently number 3960562 on Amazon. But it has eight five-star reviews, including one signed by Allen's ex-girlfriend, the one who says that Allen made her feel like a goddess. During our phone conversations, Allen had told me that he was writing a book of short stories and a philosophy book, both intended for O. I asked to read them, of course. But he never sent anything. But just a month after we finished talking, The Locked Up Lawyer was published. I think this was the book intended for O. It consists of vignettes on the people Allen presumably met in prison. But the most important story might be the one Allen 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.

Speaker 3:
[11:48] I only had time to read the back, but that was enough to pique his curiosity. As soon as I picked them up, the first thing he said to me was, oh, I saw Papa's book. Papa wrote a book and he was set up by the FBI, etc. Which for a kid is very confusing.

Speaker 1:
[12:07] Priscilla has continued to take extreme care with talking to the kids about Allen. Elle is still little and doesn't remember Allen well at all. She's just told that her dad works for her wife. Oh is 12 now, so there's no hiding from him facts that are easily available on the Internet. Priscilla involved Oh's therapist in telling him. The therapist also handles the letters that Allen writes to Oh, filtering what's appropriate for Oh to read and in what context. And now, Liana, with this book, was throwing all of this into disarray. So no more Liana visits. More court hearings followed. Liana represented herself. 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. Liana sounds sad, almost like she still hasn't understood what's happened to her. How is it possible, she seems to be asking, that her life collapsed, that her son is in prison, and that her grandchildren's mother doesn't want the kids to spend time with her when she has so much to give? It's hard to listen to, until the judge catches Liana lying, or apparently attempting to mislead the court. This happens repeatedly.

Speaker 3:
[13:18] 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 Allen 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.

Speaker 1:
[14:02] But before that happened, a copy of the locked up lawyer had been entered into evidence.

Speaker 3:
[14:07] 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.

Speaker 1:
[14:24] Lennie said that she had no idea how the book ended up and I was bad. 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 Lennie any visits with the kids. And the judge also ordered Lennie to stop criticizing Priscilla on social media. I no longer have access to all of Lennie's Facebook posts. But from my past exchanges with Lennie, I can imagine what the court decision is aiming to ban. I gather that Lennie is still convinced that she and only she knows the right way to raise these children. Lennie has always approached child rearing as a sort of design project. When I was a teenager, she told me that she had chosen Allen's biological father for his hereditary talent. His own father was a famous poet and for his excellent hair. At the time she said this, Allen 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 lawyer 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 Allen 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 have full control of him. Years earlier, when Allen was in jail on kidnapping charges and Priscilla gained full custody of O, my father became a go-between. He Skyped with O regularly and reported back to Lena about how her grandson was doing. She demanded to know which pages of which Russian books O was reading and how many pages, and expressed her dismay regularly, not enough pages, not of all the right books. As a falling short of the daily goal for Mary Poppins in Russian wasn't bad enough, Lena complained in the family chat that O was not receiving hot chocolate or enough hot chocolate. I fear that O and L are now Allen's only project. Well, really O, because as she acknowledged in court, she barely knows L. She's in her 70s, living alone in a Jewish elderly housing complex. She has been divorced for half a century. She never had a career. She used to believe that her son, Allen, would become a great man. He's in prison. That leaves O as the one thing that can give her life purpose. And she's continuing to pursue this purpose. After Allen was arrested, law enforcement helped Priscilla move to a new neighborhood, where no one was supposed to be able to find her. But...

Speaker 3:
[17:16] I caught her in my neighborhood. It was a day that I think I didn't go to work that day, so I just decided to pick the kids up from school. Myself aren't usually scooters to school, and he has a route that he uses. So, I was driving, and I saw her walking with her dog on the road, and 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, Lena, 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. Priscilla, that's you, hello. Yes. She's like, oh, you know, acted surprised to see me. Like, oh, Priscilla, is that you? Oh, so good to see you. Blah, blah, blah. I'm waiting for a friend. I'm like, waiting for a friend here.

Speaker 1:
[18:41] 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?

Speaker 3:
[18:51] She's not supposed to know where we live, but I think at this point, it's totally our last course. She knows where he goes to school. I'm sure this was not the first time she has followed him. She's probably followed him all the way home because she was so close to our house. Like, it's, there's absolutely no way she doesn't know where our house is.

Speaker 1:
[19:15] 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 route from school. Also, this wasn't 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 his school. Priscilla asked the school to check security camera footage, and they showed her what they'd found. Lena, with O going right past her on his scooter. Lena denied to Priscilla that she had been there. I've seen a photo from the surveillance tape. It's Lena. 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 and linger to pet the dog? Or is she the woman who was with Allen both times he took O across international borders without Priscilla's permission, casing the joint? There's that fuzzy boundary again between pathetic and menacing. Lena wouldn't talk to me before this podcast, and declined to answer a list of questions sent to her, calling them inappropriate, and saying that they were, quote, numerous unfounded assertions, without specifying which assertions were 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.

Speaker 3:
[20:58] You can't trust a person who does things like this because 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. Nothing like that crosses her mind. She'll do whatever, and that is the most frightening part of it all.

Speaker 1:
[21:23] This is the level of fear that Priscilla feels. She has every reason to feel, even while Allen is in prison. I worry about what will happen when he is released. He will be a man in his mid-50s, a disbarred attorney, who has lost many of his professional and social connections. A man with nothing to do, but rejoin his mother in their project. They're Falea O'Doe. Are you concerned for your safety?

Speaker 3:
[21:48] I am, and 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.

Speaker 1:
[22:07] When Allen 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, I was still going to be in high school when his dad comes out of prison. Then there's all that force and desire and charm that Allen will bring to winning him back. I kept thinking about how to respond to the email I got from Allen 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 in Cape Cod. I certainly no longer felt like telling Allen anything about his kids. After Priscilla told me about Liana's behavior, I felt sick to my stomach every time I imagine what will happen when Allen is released. Finally, I decided to do what I hadn't done in the months I'd spent working on this podcast, tell Allen what I really think, or more to the point, what I think he should do. Hi, Aleksei. It took me a while to decide to write this note. But 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 wish list 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 and our family would believe that you were framed, entrapped, misinterpreted, whatever, and you would be able to repair relationships when you're 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 undercover agent. They leave no doubt. No room for interpretation. Your continuing to insist that this isn't so comes across as what it is, lying. And 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. That 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. How it seemed 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. Allen 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 Priscilla and the kids would finally be free of him, and the fear he brings, and then... Did I go looking for a way to actually get Allen deported? I did not, because I'm not an idiot. The Idiot was reported and written by me, M. Gessen, and produced by Daniel Guillemet with Andrei Barzienka and Liko Kremer of LibraLibo Studios. Our editor is Julie Snyder. Additional editing by Ira Glass and Sarah Koenig. Research and fact checking by Ben Phelan and Marisa Robertson-Texter. Original score by Alison Leighton-Brown. Additional music from Dan Powell and Marion Lozano. The show was mixed by Phoebe Wang with additional mixing by Katherine Anderson. Additional production by Fiyah Bennett. At Serial Productions, Ndei 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 Wesley. Legal review by Alameen Sumar, Dana Green, Jackson Bush, and Tim Tai. Our senior operations manager is Elizabeth Davis-Morner, 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 newsletter at nytimes.com/serialnewsletter. The Idiot is a production of Serial Productions and The New York Times.