transcript

Speaker 1:
[00:03] 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 the jury found him guilty of hiring someone to kill his ex-wife, Priscilla. The maximum sentence for this crime is ten 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 Allen. 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'm 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. Allen 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 underage 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. So she focused on the irony, that's the word she used of the story. Allen's relationship with his mother was perhaps the strongest bond of his life, and yet he had been willing to deprive his own children of their own mother. So there's that in itself, Judge Corley said. And there were all those times that Allen made the decision to go ahead with the Murder for Hire plan, not just in that one conversation with the undercover agent, the judge said. You didn't have to meet with him the second time. You could have just not shown up. You didn't have to give him the gold coin. Then, you didn't have to wire the $23,000, and you didn't have to send the target package, and you didn't have to tell him when you were going to be on vacations with the kids. So they wouldn't be there, right? So you had opportunity after opportunity after opportunity, but you went forward because that was your intent. Allen's mother, Lena, had gotten dozens of people to write letters to the court on Allen's behalf. All of them attested to Allen's loving, kind, and supportive character. Some, including a letter from one of Allen's ex-girlfriends, were over the top and praising him. The judge addressed those letters now. It's so tragic that you have been such a generous and helpful person to all these other people, she said. But we see that sometimes with domestic violence. She said those last two words 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 Allen ended up doing what he did. The court isn't interested in why people do the terrible things they do. The court's job is to determine guilt and apportion punishment. But for me to tell this story, I needed a theory of the crime, or a theory of Allen. I needed to imagine what had been going through Allen'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 Rulena, 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 send Allen a message asking for an interview. Next, Allen would have to agree to correspond with me, and the prison would have to approve my message. But before any of that could happen, Allen reached out to me himself. He was ready to talk. I'm M. Gessen, and from Serial Productions and The New York Times. This is The Idiot.

Speaker 2:
[06:12] Thank you for using GTL.

Speaker 1:
[06:18] Can you hear me? Hello. Can you hear me?

Speaker 2:
[06:22] Hello.

Speaker 1:
[06:24] The last time I talked to Allen 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 Allen and Lena moved to the US with O, I had rebuffed Allen's attempts to become friends. So, Allen had no reason to trust me. And having seen 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. Well, so I guess what I want to start with was actually what was in your note which was that you feel there was context missing from the case that or that you consciously decided not to discuss. Do you want to tell me what it is?

Speaker 2:
[07:37] Sure. So, roughly in 2009, 2010, I was working closely with a Ukrainian politician whose name was Eduard Prutnik. He was a close ally of…

Speaker 1:
[07:54] Allen told a somewhat convoluted story spanning about a decade and involving Russian assets, the IRS, and finally a plan to build a bulletproof vest factory in Estonia, on which he was working with a guy named Alex Kiselyov, whom the FBI was investigating for money laundering.

Speaker 2:
[08:09] I know that I was just a relatively small part of a much bigger picture.

Speaker 1:
[08:15] Maybe I'm crazy, but I think that in general, murder for hire is a more serious crime than money laundering. So how can it be incidental to the bigger case?

Speaker 2:
[08:29] I'm not trying to undermine the seriousness of the charge, I'm just...

Speaker 1:
[08:33] 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 five-year-old O from Moscow to the US. This led nowhere helpful. It wasn't a kidnapping, Allen said. He and Priscilla had made a plan to move to America, and their lease on the giant department of 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.

Speaker 2:
[09:05] So I used her absence to vacate the apartment. I moved all of the 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 the to the United States slightly ahead of schedule.

Speaker 1:
[09:25] 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 were about to hear me run right out of patience. And did you tell Priscilla where you were in the States?

Speaker 2:
[09:47] I did.

Speaker 1:
[09:48] No, you didn't.

Speaker 2:
[09:54] 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 anyway to conceal it, but I said specifically I was in Boston. No, I don't remember. I think I said I was traveling to Boston. I'm pretty sure I did. But if I didn't, I didn't.

Speaker 1:
[10:15] Well, she was pretty desperately looking for where you had taken her child, and she had no idea where you were.

Speaker 2:
[10:21] But by that time, I know that Priscilla Richie knew where we were.

Speaker 1:
[10:25] No, she didn't. She saw the picture on Facebook and contacted my father.

Speaker 2:
[10:31] Right.

Speaker 1:
[10:31] And then you left, and she once again didn't know where you were.

Speaker 2:
[10:37] I 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...

Speaker 1:
[10:50] I don't think that's true.

Speaker 2:
[10:53] Masha, I wouldn't... I can't tell you. I do not... I don't see any reason why I would try to conceal it.

Speaker 1:
[11:06] I guess that's what I'm trying to figure out. Yeah. I was recording this interview in a borrowed studio and we were running out of time. The conversation had not gone well. Allen 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'd talk to Allen again.

Speaker 2:
[11:27] You have one minute remaining.

Speaker 1:
[11:30] And then Allen surprised me.

Speaker 2:
[11:32] So, should I call you tomorrow?

Speaker 1:
[11:35] What? The prospect of spending more time listening to Allen lie and deflect was unappealing. And still, I'd been waiting to talk to him for almost two years. Yeah, call me tomorrow.

Speaker 2:
[11:47] Okay.

Speaker 1:
[11:47] All right.

Speaker 2:
[11:47] Thanks, man.

Speaker 1:
[11:48] 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 where we left off yesterday? We started to talk almost daily. First, we covered obligatory ground. Ask 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.

Speaker 2:
[12:29] She has a tendency to blame me for everything that happens. Sometimes it's the act of a god, and this time it's the act of Allen every single time.

Speaker 1:
[12:37] When he went to Canada with O, well, that wasn't a kidnapping either.

Speaker 2:
[12:41] I needed a holiday, O needed a holiday, and I thought that...

Speaker 1:
[12:46] And he still denied, of course, that he wanted Priscilla killed. He only wanted her deported. In between rejecting all the accusations, Allen told me about life in prison. He talked about it the way we used to talk about travels when the family hung out on Cape Cod. There was local cuisine.

Speaker 2:
[13:04] So I take the cottage cheese, I mix it with cookies.

Speaker 1:
[13:10] There were the customs and beliefs of the local population.

Speaker 2:
[13:13] I can look at a single Democrat in a jail in the US. Wow.

Speaker 1:
[13:20] That blows my mind.

Speaker 2:
[13:21] I find it fascinating.

Speaker 1:
[13:23] Do you have an explanation for this?

Speaker 2:
[13:27] I don't know if the true publicans are more likely to commit crimes than Democrats.

Speaker 1:
[13:34] Allen was trying to connect with me. That wasn't surprising. I provided a break in his prison routine, a link to the outside world, and at least something of a sympathetic ear. What did surprise me was that after about a week, I was starting to look forward to our conversations too. You know, the more you hang out with someone, the more you just hang out with someone.

Speaker 2:
[13:55] I would still point to the past week when we had them the previous 15 years.

Speaker 1:
[13:59] That is true.

Speaker 2:
[14:03] I could imagine a parallel universe where you and I could be friends.

Speaker 1:
[14:08] I wasn't quite ready to imagine me and Allen 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's a parallel universe in which you and I are friends. And I thought we have such an odd history because 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 talk about your growing up and your experiences. So why don't we go back to the beginning?

Speaker 2:
[14:52] I guess as long as you don't have a preconceived narrative into which you're trying to squeeze into, I'm very happy to go on and trust in judgment.

Speaker 1:
[15:03] 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 Allen 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 Alosha.

Speaker 2:
[15:49] Well, Alosha was very happy until she was 15.

Speaker 1:
[15:52] Fifteen was when Allen immigrated to the US with his mother.

Speaker 2:
[15:56] I remember my childhood is very, very fun. Friends, family, grandma, dacha, basketball, judo, rock and roll. I was taking lessons.

Speaker 1:
[16:09] Still, he said, it was a very poor life.

Speaker 2:
[16:13] But what I realized in retrospect that you only realize you are poor when you look at it from the side.

Speaker 1:
[16:21] 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. Allen 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 Allen's dad was out of the picture, so they had no money. Allen says he remembers from a very young age, knowing exactly how many roubles and kopecks they had each month and helping feed their tiny family.

Speaker 2:
[17:07] I would go to the stores downstairs when I was three years older than myself, three and four. I knew every saleswoman in the bakery, the bullish men next door. And I would walk into those stores, usually through the back door, go and say hello to my friends and come back with food.

Speaker 1:
[17:26] There's probably some exaggerating going on here, but I think the contours of the story are right. As Allen entered his teens, the Soviet regime began its rapid collapse. Lenin'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 Allen was 15, he and Lena moved to the United States. And suddenly, Allen's happy, scrappy life was over. They stayed with my parents and my brother in Newton, Massachusetts. Both of my parents worked from home. They lived in a three-bedroom, split-level house that was too small for three adults and two teenagers. Plus, Lena and my mom had never gotten along.

Speaker 2:
[18:21] 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.

Speaker 1:
[18:30] 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 Allen, 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, Allen never mentioned my mother's illness and treatment. Allen and Lena and my parents spent those months in two separate cocoons of despair. Allen was lost outside of Moscow.

Speaker 2:
[18:58] Living in Moscow, basically, my life was extremely protected, very secure. I knew everyone, everybody knew me. You know, it was familiar language, familiar culture. Everything made sense. And then sort of losing all of that and finding yourself in a completely unfamiliar environment where you're not understood. With 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?

Speaker 1:
[19:28] I was 14. No, no, I know exactly what you're describing, yeah.

Speaker 2:
[19:32] Right, so you know exactly.

Speaker 1:
[19:35] 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 Allen. And there was Kojta, my younger brother Keith, who was popular and successful and you're five weeks apart in age?

Speaker 2:
[20:07] Right. Kojta was a star because he really was a valedictorian. He was the most popular boy in school. He was truly the biggest star in Newton South High School at the time. He got into Harvard and he used to say he scores above the charts.

Speaker 1:
[20:23] 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 Allen, 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.

Speaker 2:
[20:46] You know, I remember stealing quarters from Koistyev, because Koistyev would have money for lying around, although I was sleeping in the 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 myself chocolate milk in the school cafeteria, because I didn't have a couple of extra quarters. So it was a very much a rich man, poor man situation where I was the poor man. I didn't, when his friends came over, I sometimes tried to hang out with them.

Speaker 1:
[21:35] Third wheel.

Speaker 2:
[21:37] Third wheel, exactly.

Speaker 1:
[21:44] 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. Allen and Lena had been somebodies in the center of Moscow, and now they were nobodies in Newton, Massachusetts. And they didn't even want to be in Newton, Massachusetts. One day, Allen told me, Lena had what sounds like a panic attack.

Speaker 2:
[22:09] Well, she was crying, and she had a shortness of breath. It was very difficult for her. She was used to living by herself, being her own person since she had me. And it was very difficult for her to just to live 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.

Speaker 1:
[22:37] And what did you do?

Speaker 2:
[22:40] 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.

Speaker 1:
[22:55] 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 Liana was scared to be in the house because my mother was dying. What Allen remembers is that he saved the day, saved Liana and saved himself. He took charge.

Speaker 2:
[23:14] At first I was bagging groceries, then I was...

Speaker 1:
[23:16] Beginning with his first job, rising through the ranks at Star Market...

Speaker 2:
[23:20] .became a really fast cashier.

Speaker 1:
[23:21] From bagging groceries to bringing them up, to becoming the fastest cashier.

Speaker 2:
[23:25] I set the store record of being able to scan 36 items per minute.

Speaker 1:
[23:30] Allen 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. Allen, 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 Allen's first successful venture. How big was this business?

Speaker 2:
[24:29] Well, over a thousand clients. Wow. About 25 writers.

Speaker 1:
[24:36] How much money did you make?

Speaker 2:
[24:40] I'm not sure I reported it fully to the IRS, so I would rather not say. But it supported me fairly comfortable at the time.

Speaker 1:
[24:53] You and your mom?

Speaker 2:
[24:55] Correct, yeah.

Speaker 1:
[24:57] Just give me a ballpark.

Speaker 2:
[25:01] I would say that me doing a very good month, I would make about $10,000.

Speaker 1:
[25:08] Wow. That's great. That must have felt very different from the first couple of years of being an immigrant.

Speaker 2:
[25:18] It was, but it also was, I think social it was important because I was needed. So 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.

Speaker 1:
[25:44] Allen 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, Allen continued his pursuit of more money and more social status. After college, he went to law school in Connecticut. He ended the move to Litchfield and got a job at a law firm in Manhattan after graduation. Then he lost that job. Allen explored several career options, joining the FBI to think he could have been David rather than being ensnared by David or the CIA. Then he got a job that changed his life. Allen was hired by McKinsey, the international consulting firm, and was launched on his path to becoming the Allen.

Speaker 2:
[26:31] 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.

Speaker 1:
[26:49] I was familiar with what Allen 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.

Speaker 2:
[27:27] And we were doing transformation projects for every company that mattered. And I think we're all felt a little like supermen, kind of changing the world and changing the economy. Everything we've done was in the newspapers at the time. We were in every company. And it was just, I felt like I became a character in an adventure book.

Speaker 1:
[27:51] For Gilt Law School, the law firm, the unsuccessful bid to join the CIA, Allen 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.

Speaker 2:
[28:05] 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.

Speaker 1:
[28:20] And how do you explain the difference?

Speaker 2:
[28:27] Well, it's either me or the women, right? I think more likely that gender roles in the United States are very different from the rest of the world. As a result, my macho character, which works really well in Europe and Africa, does not work well at all in America.

Speaker 1:
[28:58] And when you say macho, what do you mean?

Speaker 2:
[29:03] That there's a strong man who pays the bills, who opens the doors, who gives lots of gifts, that kind of holds the stronger part in the relationship.

Speaker 1:
[29:18] Really, Allen? This is what you took from your Bohemian upbringing and your intellectual family? It was hard for me to believe. But yes, it seems that Allen took his macho chivalry act very seriously and that it worked. Women loved being dodeon on by Allen. 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. Allen's second serious girlfriend wrote a letter to the court. She wrote, The way I felt with him, I can wish every woman to experience this. Allen supported her when she lost her dog. He was there for the family when her cousin died in a car accident. And he arranged for the best health care when her grandmother and then her grandfather became ill. Quote, 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. Alexia 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, Allen brought him groceries and also figured out how to help the man out of some tax filing predicament. Allen funded a struggling student's 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 design pool for an injured elephant. This was a sight of Allen I'd never really seen. Almost more surprising was that Allen had never bragged about any of this. He portrayed himself to the family as an international man of mystery, a smooth operator at the edges of the legal universe. But secretly, he was a universal benefactor. He volunteered to solve everyone's problems, and people paid him back with love. Allen was 36 when he was in Zimbabwean 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.

Speaker 2:
[31:50] And then I saw a **** for the first time.

Speaker 1:
[31:54] And the hardest months of Allen's life began. How, yeah, what did he look like?

Speaker 2:
[32:03] He looked like a very, very, very, very miniature child, one-seventh, one-eighth 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 was breathing. He was.

Speaker 1:
[32:21] About a third of all babies born this premature don't survive. Another third have profound lifelong disabilities. 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.

Speaker 2:
[32:42] It was just that constant unyielding worry, constant stress, absolute constant stress. And the other sense of helplessness. I find it very difficult to be in situations where I cannot affect the outcome. And for me it was very difficult to accept.

Speaker 1:
[33:04] Allen had to do something. Many things.

Speaker 2:
[33:07] It was a lot of things. It was changing the lighting because all the children in the unit were on the direct, directed a very bright halogen lighting. I worked in the sleep app in the mattress because one of the biggest risks is that they still breathing.

Speaker 1:
[33:21] Allen 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 calm and classical music.

Speaker 2:
[33:29] I monitored the oxygen supply.

Speaker 1:
[33:31] Eventually Allen ran out of things that money and enterprise could solve.

Speaker 2:
[33:35] I went through my entire repertoire of Russian and English songs and Polish songs.

Speaker 1:
[33:40] Camped out in the NICU day after day, what did you sing? All he could do was keep vigil.

Speaker 2:
[33:47] And wait.

Speaker 1:
[33:54] 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 five 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. Allen spent 75 days in the NICU with Oh. I knew that before our interviews, of course. But when I listened to Allen talk about it, I heard that fear and that helplessness, that I myself will never forget. So there's some things I believe without qualification. I believe that Allen loves Oh, that he worries about Oh, 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 Allen was now trapped. He loved his tiny son desperately. If he had to stay up nights for the rest of his life, if he had to stay at 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 Allen 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 they were 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.

Speaker 2:
[35:54] Like once, she just told me about it one of the times, she cheated on me, and I started wailing, just this cream 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 scream that was coming out. And I felt it like that time when I felt good, and I felt a little issue, it was fine. And we were back on track, and bam, it was pressing back down. And I would need to take against it almost to recover from it, and to kind of move on, and bam, it happens again. And it just, it was like that for, basically for seven years.

Speaker 1:
[36:46] Still on the whole, Allen's description of the marriage and its ups and downs is pretty similar to Priscilla's. There were good times, but more and more frequently bad times, punctuated by what Allen describes as blowout fights. One difference in their accounts, though, is this. Allen is convinced that Priscilla never loved him. She was in it for his money, his loyalty, perhaps his problem-solving abilities. To be sure, they had a very messed up relationship, but I was genuinely surprised that he had come to this conclusion. I have interviewed Priscilla a little bit, and she talks about you as about someone she loved. Like, I had no doubt in all our conversations that she was talking about somebody that she had loved.

Speaker 2:
[37:38] Well, I guess we should try to find out now. Priscilla, look at me.

Speaker 1:
[37:49] Go ahead.

Speaker 2:
[37:50] Look at me. I'm going to be redialed because I'm not sure how to respond to this.

Speaker 1:
[37:58] 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. Allen 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. In other time, when they reunited after one of their separations, and it turned out that Priscilla was pregnant, Allen proposed to stay together through the birth of the child, and possibly raise the kid as his own. That pregnancy ended in a miscarriage. When she miscarried again and felt desperate, Allen offered the most inventive solution of all, 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 Allen's relationship was Priscilla and Allen'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 Oh with Priscilla forever. So here's a theory of Allen, 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 a story. And because Allen 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 this story here. After the break, my second theory of Allen. When I talk to people about Allen, they often respond by talking about Lena, his mother. They talk about the way Lena brought Allen up to be her sole source of support, in effect, her partner. They talk about Lena and Allen'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 Allen are of one mind. They always had been. Lena and Allen lived together for most of Allen'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 Allen started dating, Lena was there, always. Allen himself told me that his first serious girlfriend, whom he met in law school, had three specific complaints.

Speaker 2:
[41:20] So one was that I would tell him and mom too much about our relationship. One was that I would like to spend more time at home than she should wish. And the third one was that my mother, when she came to visit, had often expressed opinions.

Speaker 1:
[41:42] Expressed opinions. By this, he means that Lena told people how to behave. One time she provided written instructions to Allen's girlfriend, Ann Lor.

Speaker 2:
[41:53] Ann Lor came to see to visit us at our house in Lichfield. And my mom just finished reading Amy Vanderbilt's book on etiquette. And my mom was very impressed with Amy Vanderbilt's thoughts. So there was one chapter specifically about how to receive guests in the country house and how to be a guest in the country house. So Ann Lor 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's book on etiquette, open to the chapter of how to be a proper guest in the country house. So Ann Lor, of course, interprets it as a hint that she's not suggesting herself correctly and that now she needs to read the book on etiquette.

Speaker 1:
[42:43] I talked to Ann Lor and she confirmed that yes, she was very, very upset by being handed a book on how to behave. Allen, on the other hand, seems to have found his mother's interventions amusing and basically harmless. Even though as Allen grew older and more independent, at least on the surface, Lena's meddling became even more pronounced. When he was in his 30s, Allen moved in with a girlfriend for the first time, a Ukrainian named Katya. Lena came to visit and saw Katya'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 called the collection, leaving only the sufficiently pretty ones on display.

Speaker 2:
[43:31] There was some truth to that, some of the houses were not necessarily pretty, but Katya felt it was a bit of an insolation.

Speaker 1:
[43:38] And then years later, when Lena came to visit Allen and Priscilla, she went further, rearranging the furniture and the garden.

Speaker 2:
[43:46] When Priscilla came out, she was very surprised to find how it changed. So Priscilla found it became a mother's initiative to be a bit of an imposition.

Speaker 1:
[43:56] I noted Allen's repeated use of the word imposition. I think if my parent came to visit me and my wife and rearrange the furniture, I would use a different word, a word like, I got you a hotel room. How did you handle it?

Speaker 2:
[44:12] 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 duty is absolute, and therefore, if you can have use of it, there is no reason to compromise on it.

Speaker 1:
[44:39] You've probably heard the cliché, 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. 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 Allen'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 on 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.

Speaker 3:
[45:47] 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 24-7 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 know anything becomes an option. So I think what motivated him actually to go ahead with this plan was to appease his mother.

Speaker 1:
[47:06] 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 Allen 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?

Speaker 4:
[47:25] To make my sister happy, so she would have all the time and she will not hear from Priscilla ever.

Speaker 1:
[47:37] What makes you think that that's the root cause?

Speaker 4:
[47:42] I know Lennas 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.

Speaker 1:
[47:59] 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 year's girlfriend wrote to the judge. She wrote that Allen's, quote, main purpose was to make sure his mother, Lena, was well and comfortable. His world began with her, unquote. And it seems ended with her. This young woman ultimately accepted that there was no place for her in this closed world. To be clear, Lena was never charged with any crime. She was barely even mentioned during Allen's trial. And I don't have a reason to think that Lena knew about the plot to kill Priscilla before Allen was arrested. But my own conversations with Lena supported my second theory of Allen. It was Lena who first mentioned to me the idea of needing to do something about Priscilla. This was several years before Allen 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 you 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 Lena had taken O 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 Allen would later text the undercover agent, our cause is just. There's a concept in psychiatry, Faleur Deux, which means madness for two in French. It's when two people share a delusion, reinforce this belief in each other and act accordingly. The belief Lena and Allen 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 Lena 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 higher 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 Allen were finishing each other's sentences, talking about how, after Priscilla had gotten Allen arrested in Canada, this is how they saw it. The gloves were really off. Their cause was just. I needed to ask Allen 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 Lena 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, Allen brought it up himself. We were talking about the two times he took Oh away from Priscilla to a different country.

Speaker 2:
[51:34] She very much blames my mom for those decisions, and she projects onto my mom my decisions that were not hers. So I think that as much as they were my decisions, my mom traveled with me, but it was not because she made the decision to do so, or not to make the decision to go. I asked her to come, and she went. But that was just something I wanted to point out.

Speaker 1:
[52:04] 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.

Speaker 2:
[52:22] Maybe. I mean, I don't know why, but my decisions are very much my own in regard to all of them. But it's interesting what you just said, because I think that a lot of the time, people don't understand 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, I'm not actually.

Speaker 1:
[52:53] We disagree a lot. I'm not surprised because I think that they're guided by their experiences with your mom, which are not dissimilar from what you were just saying. Like whenever she is somewhere, she is teaching people how to live, how to take care of their children, telling them what to do. And so, you know, I think that that's where their minds went when they learned about older troubles. True, true.

Speaker 2:
[53:24] That's right. So, yeah, no, I've grown quite resistant to some of those instances. But, no, I see what you're saying, yes. But anyway, no, so those decisions were mine and rather than my mom's. Yeah, so anyway, I was just... But it's interesting. Yeah, yeah, you're right. You're right. My mom, that country is a pretty strong and insistent personality, who knows how others should live.

Speaker 1:
[54:01] That was a lot of hemming and heiming. It's understandable. Allen 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, uh, 20 years? So since he was about 30? Jokes aside, it's true that by the time Allen 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 Clarke, 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 has stayed with me. When I was looking for a theory of Allen, and the other theory of Allen, 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 Allen loved so much. On the other hand, there was Priscilla, the first woman whose love Allen 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 Allen also needed to earn. And the way to earn it was to give her control over, well, everything, but particularly O. Allen could live peacefully, even thrive, when it was just him, Lena, and O. I suspect he could have managed if he had to deal only with Priscilla and O. But trying to figure out a way to co-parent O with both Priscilla and Lena turned the noise in his head up to an intolerable level. Allen and I spent a total of more than 35 hours talking about his life, his kids, and his crime. And then we were done. Um, so we may have gotten to the end of the story as it exists now. What do you think?

Speaker 2:
[56:19] Well, I think so. I think so, yeah. I guess that people wouldn't have guessed what the future might look like.

Speaker 3:
[56:28] But, uh, yeah.

Speaker 1:
[56:32] Tell me, tell me what you're thinking about the future.

Speaker 2:
[56:39] Um, I am reasonably optimistic about the appeal, and the appeal is...

Speaker 1:
[56:48] Reasonably optimistic is Allen's peak for Hope Springs Eternal. At that point, Allen 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.

Speaker 2:
[57:00] Once I overcome the legal obstacles and then sure it will take some time for the children to come to terms with them back in their lives and to digest and absorb and somehow get over the entire criminal story that I will be able to rebuild a relationship with them. And I'm not sure if that's probably at this point more important, well actually it is by far more important than any other considerations they have in terms of my post-release plan. That is actually one of the main reasons why I didn't agree to plead guilty, which is I did not want to be that piece of paper out where I'm saying I want to be a mother dead.

Speaker 1:
[57:45] 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 Allen. I talked to him briefly the morning after the actual wedding too. He asked about his kids. Had they been there? How had they seemed? Yes, they'd been there. They 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 Oh in his nice shirt to send to Allen. 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. Oh 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 Allen 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 one twelfth was wavering. Then I reviewed the evidence. There was no way around it. Allen was guilty and he was lying. And we were done with our conversations.

Speaker 2:
[59:16] Thank you so much. Yes, well, it's been a jury.

Speaker 1:
[59:21] It's been fascinating. And I really appreciate you're doing this. Before we quit our weeks-long habit, Allen had one final request.

Speaker 2:
[59:36] You see my kids don't make it much more now than I do. So if you see any reason for concern, just please stay involved. And to the extent you can help look after them during this time, I can't say enough how I appreciate that.

Speaker 1:
[60:04] We were done, and we were, we are, once again, stuck where we began. Allen is still guilty of hiring someone to kill Priscilla. He's still lying about it. And he's still intent, as intent as he has ever been, on claiming his place as O's and L'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. The Idiot was reported and written by me, M. Gessen, and produced by Daniel Guillemet, with Andrey Barziente and Lico Kramer of LibreLibo 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 Marion Lozanoff. The show was mixed by Phoebe Wang, with additional mixing by Katherine Anderson. Additional production by Hiei 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 Kern. Credits music by Bob Dylan. At The New York Times, our standards editor is Susan Wesley. Legal review by Alamin Soumar, Dana Greene, Jackson Bush and Tim Tai. Our senior operations manager is Elizabeth Davis-Morner, and Sam Dolnik is deputy managing editor of The New York Times. To find out about our upcoming shows and more about this show, sign up for the newsletter at nytimes.com. Special thanks to Alex Robertson-Texter, Sabrina R. The Idiot is a production of Serial Productions and The New York Times.