Chapter 5

I'm Robin and I am excited to open my crossplay app. I'm challenging John, my colleague at the New York Times. Robin played the word grunge, which has a G, which is four points. She got that triple word multiplier. I am going to take fax and make it faxes for 30 points. I might just take another two-letter word.

word here with Woe gets me at 23. I think this will put me back in the lead if my maths are mathing. I like to play it more from a strategic point of view and see where I can block the other player from scoring high. I'm pretty competitive. It's fun to beat friends and Coworkers and also get to learn new words. Crossplay, the first two player word game from New York Times games. Download it for I think he thinks he has this in the bag, but I'm not so sure.

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 Alan used to come, of course, but now it's Priscilla who comes with the kids. Там, наверное, часы или чайник. Ну-на, чайник, чайник. Чарик, чайник. Это что похоже?

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 eighty-first birthday. At some point during that party I got an email from Alan and It 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. John Diddy, he wrote, seems depressed, while the cryptocurrency fraudster Alex Mashinsky is brilliant and fascinating. But mostly Alan was asking me to pass on his birthday wishes. When everyone was together. And I miss his duck with apples, horrible and wonderful at the same time. And his marinated mushrooms.

A 10-year prison sentence isn't as long as it seems. For one thing, because it doesn't last 10 years. Alan 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. We're at the point of 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 problem.

And for weeks I didn't know how to respond to Alan's email. Then I finally figured out. This is the fifth and final episode of This is A. G. Sulzberger. I'm the publisher of the New York Times. And I'm also a former reporter who's watched with a lot of alarm as our profession has shrunk in recent years. Normally, this is where I'd ask you to subscribe to The Times. But today I'm encouraging you to support any news organization. That's dedicated to original reporting. or the New York Times.

Firsthand, fact based. reporting. And if you already do, thank you.

When I set out to report Alan's story, I wanted to understand what he had been thinking. What the hell I 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 is missing his kids.

He's 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 Alan, my father had travelled in the opposite trajectory, in relationship to Alan, and Nana too. After what happened, I don't want to see them and to hear from them at all. I think last time I talked to you, you you were really sad about losing your sister. No, uh that's uh of course true as well. But uh

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? 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. 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 kid's grandfather. That's what they call him too. And he's a fiercely protective grandfather. He has 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 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 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 finds. With the addition of a little black cat named But a very different life and a different persona.

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 sixty hours a week, both at a hospital and as a home health aid. It's a far cry from her old life in fashion, and as different as one can imagine from the big, fast life she once thought she'd live with Alan.

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, who has dementia, couldn't be left alone. There was a lot of juggling. Someone had to watch O, 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 aides and is a mobed 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. 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.

Ale 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 Anna's help or interference. Oh wow, okay. Um where would you like me to start? Oh my goodness. Well, let's start with Lena suing Priscilla. Um so

W what is the status of that case? How did that go? Okay, so basically um 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 gonna happen because you're not a parent. Then she filed again asking for like weekends. The judge said no.

Then she tried uh getting one of Alan's friends to talk to me. Almost like bribery. Remember, at his own murder for hire trial, Alan testified that he had solved many a life problem with a bribe. As Priscilla describes it, a childhood friend of Alan's, a son of a close friend of Lena's, approached Priscilla with an offer, a monthly stipend in exchange for letting Lena see the kids. And I just told him no. I would rather live in my car than

take money and risk something happening to my children. Um take money from somebody who's obviously unstable. Priscilla is talking about Lena. Obviously Unstable strikes me as an accurate description, because I've now read over a hundred pages of court documents related to Elena's lawsuit, and much of it corroborates what Priscilla told me happened next.

Lena confirmed money was offered, although she doesn't characterize it as a bribe. The court rejected Lena's attempt to claim Allen's parental time, but did order monthly supervised visits. But Lena is Lena. You know, it's incredible to me sometimes when I think about Lena's ability to do something that is Completely not rational every single time she would see them. You know, every time there wasn't one single visit that went smoothly with no issues.

These issues started so One time Lena 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 projects.

By this point, Lena 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 Lena would badmouth her to the kids. Lena still spoke Russian 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. 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, Lena slipped a very special gift into O's bag. And inside was this book that Alan wrote.

Yes, in prison Alan wrote a book. It's called the locked up lawyer. Alan used a pseudonym, but Lena advertised the book to friends and family as having been written by him. She also illustrated it. Her name is on the Amazon page next to Alan's pen name. The book is self published.

It's currently number three million nine hundred and sixty thousand five hundred and sixty-two on Amazon, but has eight five-star reviews, including one signed by Alan's ex-girlfriend, the one who says that Alan made her feel like a goddess. During our phone conversations, Alan 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 had 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 Alan presumably met in prison, but the most important story might be the one Alan 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. R 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, etcetera, which for a kid is very confusing.

Priscilla has continued to take extreme care with talking to the kids about Alan. Elle is still little, and doesn't remember Alan well at all. She's just told that her dad works far away. Oh is twelve now, so there's no hiding from him facts that are easily available on the internet.

Priscilla involved O's therapist in telling him. The therapist also handles the letters that Alan 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. More court hearings followed. Lena 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. 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. It's hard to listen to until the judge catches Lena lying or apparently attempting to mislead the court. This happens repeatedly.

Realizing that, you know, instead of facing what has happened and You know, seeing the mistake. that have happened with Alan for start is 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 lawyer had been entered into evidence. The judge read the cover, and you could see. from her demeanor that she I thought it was insane that she would give a book like that to a twelve year old. Lena said that she had no idea how the book ended up in Osbad.

The judge's decision read in part The court finds that 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 any 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 from my past exchanges with Lena, I can imagine what the court decision is aiming to ban. I gather that Lena is still convinced that she, and only she, knows the right way to raise these children. Dana 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 poet. And for his excellent hair. At the time she said this, Alan was a little. With an impressive head. But he lost all of it by the time he was thirty. And as for literary talent, I mean yes, I found the locked up lore 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. Oh was Lena's new project, which is, I think, why she felt she had to have full control of him. Years earlier, when Alan 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 I was reading. And how many pages? And express her dismay regularly. Not enough pages. Not of all the right pages. As a falling short of the daily goal for Mary Poppins and Russian wasn't bad enough. Lena complained in the family chat that O was not receiving her chocolate, or enough hot chocolate. I've heard that O and L are now Lena's only project.

Well really oh. Because, as she acknowledged in court, she barely knows Elle. She's in her 70s, living alone in a Jewish elderly housing complex. She has been divorced for half a century. She'd never had a career. She used to believe that her son, Alan, would become a great man. He is in prison. That leaves O as the one thing that can give her life purpose, and she is 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 aren't usually scooters to school and he has a route that he uses. So um I was driving and I saw her like walking with her dog on the road and I was like, No.

This cannot be her. Um 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 like on a corner where he turns to then come up the road to our house. So so so close. our house I stopped and I recorded her because I 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? Elena 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. Yeah. And 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. 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 a lost 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's there's 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 his son owes Ruth 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. I've seen a photo from the surveillance tape. It's Lena.

Why does she come? Why does she bring her dog? Is she a lonely grandmother who just wants to get a glimpse of O, the apple of her? Is she hoping that O will stop and linger to pet the dog? Or is she the woman who was with Alan both times he took O across international borders without Priscilla's permission? Casing rejoined. There's that fuzzy boundary again.

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. Having security cameras on her house. Priscilla feels that she has to be vigilant at all times.

Mm 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. And this is the level of fear that Priscilla feels, has every reason to feel. while Ellen is in prison.

I worry about what will happen when he's released. He will be a man in his mid fifties, 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, their phileo de. Everyone that they did nothing wrong. When Alan was first convinced Priscilla had this idea. She told me that. Oh practically an adult. Yeah. I was still going to be in high school when his dad comes out of school.

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 on Cape 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 will happen when Alan is released. Finally I decided to do what I hadn't done in the months I'd spent working on this podcast. Tell Alan what I really think. Or, more to the point, what I think I should do.

Hi Alosha. 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 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, entrapped, 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 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. 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 honestly. Alan didn't write back.

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 them to ICE. Aren't they supposed to be deporting immigrants convicted of violence? He could get deported to Russia.

And then and then he could get arrested there, and rot in Russian jail for the rest of the day. 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 I did not. Because I'm not an idiot. The idiot was reported and written by me and And produced by Daniel Gienmet with Andrey Barzenke and Lika Kramer of Libele Studios. Our editor is Julie Snyder. Additional editing by IR

Research and fact-checking by Ben Fahuin and Marisa Robertson Texter. Original score by Allison Leighton Brown. Additional music from Dan Powell and Marion Lozano. The show was mixed by Phoebe Wang with additional mixing by Catherine Anderson. At Serial Productions, N Day Chubu is our supervising producer. Mac Miller is our associate producer. Video production by Sean Devaney. Our direction from Kelly. Art by John Kurram. Credits music by Bob Dylan.

At the New York Times, our standards editor is Susan Wesling, legal review by Alamine Sumer, Dana Green, Jackson Bush, and Tim Tai. Our Senior Operations Manager is Elizabeth Davis Moor, 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 slash serial newsletter. The Idiot is a production of Serial Productions.