The Idiot - Chapter 4

Looking across the line, I've been thinking to Dan my colleague is in your times. That's like another move. She played suit for 36 points. I'm gonna Z, which is 10 points.

I'm guessing Tanga is not aware. Let's see. Tanga is the word. Oh, Dan, please last turn.

Let's see who won. It's so close. But I did win. New York Times Games subscribers get full access to cross-late, our first two player working.

Subscribe now for a special offer on all of our games. In April 24, 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 firing someone to go his ex-wife for so long. The maximum sentence for this time is 10 years.

The cast of characters, the judge, the public defender, the prosecutor, and Allen were back in the same courtroom. All of them seem the same, except maybe Allen. He was contrite, genuinely filled with regret or so sounded to me. He apologized to Priscilla who was a single zone.

He promised that he would never again do anything to hurt other 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 himself as the jury's eye on.

He was embarrassing to listen to the court and he said. Your honor, I prepared to serve any sentence. Allen told the judge. He picked up the maximum, 10 years.

He had gone to 60 when he was released, and it would be hard to start over. But he said he had already suffered the big assumption. His voice cracked. He lost all access to children, and he continued.

The torture I suffered every day comes from my awareness of the impact I had on my mom. He was really choking up now. I felt something well opened my throat too. Allen was no longer dressed like a dipper turned home from work.

For the sentencing he was brought in wearing yellow presents, over a white thermal underweight shirt, and yellow crocs and knuckles. Allen had his back to me. So most of the time I was watching Judge Curly. She was leaning for Allen.

She was nodding to every firm mistake he made. Her face reacted to every word it seemed. Then was her turn to speak. I didn't see it when you were on the stand to trial, but I can see it now.

She said, the account was the harm. The judge had really listened. I mean she had really listened and observed Allen. And so she focused on the irony that's the word she used of the story.

Allen's relationship with his mother was perhaps the strongest bond of his life, and yet he had been willing to deprive his own children of their own mother. So there's that in itself, Judge Curly said. And there were all those times that Allen made the decision to go ahead with a murder fire plan. Not just an upon conversation with the undercar agent which I've said.

You didn't have to meet with him the second time. You could have just not shown up. You don't have to give him the gold coin. Then you didn't have to worry the $23,000 and you didn't have to send the target backage.

And you didn't have to tell him when you were going to get an vacation with the kids. So they wouldn't be there, right? So you had opportunity after opportunity after opportunity, but she went forward because that was your intent. Allen's mother, then that doesn't have people to write letters to the court on Allen's behalf.

All of them tested to Allen's loving, kind, and supported 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 she had been such a generous and helpful person to all these other people she said.

But we see that sometimes with domestic violence. She said there's less to words like, how do I show striking the cattle? 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 us 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 sent us 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 if you were through a range of emotions, and deposited me more or less where I started.

I still had no real understanding of how Allen ended up doing what he did. The court is understanding what people do to the terrible things they do. The court's job is to determine guilt and abortion punishment. But for me to tell the 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 admitted seeing that having his wife killed was a reasonable solution to his problems. For that, I needed to talk to him. I had asked her to dinner, 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 was truly driving 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 what's with the mates, and sent Allen a message asking for an interview. Next, Allen would have to read a correspondence with me, and the prison would have to prevent message. But before he had gotten to have him, Allen reached out to me himself. He was ready to talk.

I'm guessing, and for two productions, and in your times, the state. Some songs that I've written, I started on a piano, that happened with all of my Christmases you. The last time I talked to Allen was a few weeks before he was arrested, almost two years earlier. We never in-clips.

We never even particularly friendly. In fact, in the years since Allen and I moved to the US, I had revved Allen's time for conference. Allen had no reason to trust me, and how he sent Allen's time to stand by 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 had for our conversation. So as soon as I had made sure that we could hear each other, and I was recording, I switched English and asked him to get to the crux of the matter. Well, so I guess what I wanted to start with was actually what was in your note, which was that you feel there was context missing from the case that you consciously decided not to discuss.

Do you want to tell me what it is? Sure. So roughly in 2010, 2009, 2010, that was working closely with Iranian politicians, who was the name of the Dutch, he was a voice ballet. Allen told us someone come with a story spanning about a decade, and about the Russian assets there.

It finally planned to build a bullet for a fast-back to Estonia, and when she was working with an Italian balance case, it opened the FBI was investigating for money laundering. I know that I know that it was just a really small part of the much of the much of the literature. It made me think crazy, but I think that's in general murder for her is a more serious crime than money laundering. So how can it be incidental to the bigger case?

I'm not going to try to undermine the seriousness of the church. All of the sudden the substance of the trial was all I could do to hype me disappointment and annoyance. I tried to change the subject. I asked about June 2019 when Allen took five gold over from Moscow to the US.

They said nowhere else. It wasn't kidnapping, Allen said. He himself made a plan to move to America, and there was a chance of working in Moscow was ending, and the landlord was breathing down their necks, and for still having dragging her feet and moving out, so while she was in Zimbabwe for two days, he thought he could go through a few months and put them down. So I used to have some speculative part of the whole thing, some storage, and I knew that there were a few explosions when she came back, and we were having another one confrontation.

So we avoided eye travel to the United States, like the United States. So you moved all the Priscilla stuff into storage and moved to the United States to avoid having a confrontation with the landlord. I can turn it into something like that, or this, usually, to all kinds of bullshit. It's part of the job.

But you were about to hear me run my other patients. And did you tell Priscilla where you were in the States? I did. I did.

I did. And then I think the next day we were in Keep God, and your dad was posting pictures of Facebook. I was not trying to even see what they said, but it wasn't possible. I think it was traveling to Boston, I'm pretty sure I did.

But I didn't end. No, she was pretty desperately looking for where you were taking her child, and she had no idea where you were. But by the time I know that Priscilla was in you, we were. No, she didn't.

She saw the picture on Facebook, and contacted my father. And then you left, and she once again didn't know where you were. I don't think that's correct. I think that's Priscilla and I were, I was accessible and to avoid that during the period.

But I don't think that's true. I would know. I do. I do.

I do. I do. I do. I would try to proceed with them.

I guess that's what I'm trying to figure out. Yeah, I'm going to get it to. I was recording this interview in the viral studio, and we're running out of time. The conversation had not been well.

I only had something I hadn't already heard and say. I just about lost my cool. I wasn't sure when. Or if I talked about it again.

You have one minute. We're not getting it. And then I'll un-surprise me. So, just go tomorrow.

What? The first was spending more time listening to Alan Lyon, if that was an appealing. And still, I've been waiting to talk to him for almost two years. Yeah, go tomorrow.

Okay. Thank you. Bye. I want you to think of it.

What's that? He's just had a job. He's just able to show me. Mine was the trick of the crap.

We have to see which was better at their job. Do you want to pick up? I get sure we're a wireless- We started to talk on the daily. First, we covered a little bit of a ground.

He asked me about the things he was doing. He didn't have everything. He didn't get enough over a muslin. He didn't have anything to do with all the resources that they felt personally in the Bible.

Like when he was affected, he didn't arrest the jail. And then she complained about everything that just happened. She said, she said she had to go at the same exact value. She never seen the time.

But he went to Canada. I need to go to the hotel and I go to the hotel. And his son and I, of course, that he wanted for sell-kill. He only wanted her to order.

In between rejecting all the accusations, Alan told me about the election person. He talked about it the way we used to talk about our travels on the family hanging out in Descartes. There was local cuisine. I think that the country is.

I'm excited. The country is. There were the customs and beliefs of the local population. I should look at the single democratic in India in US.

Wow. I don't know if that blows my mind. That's amazing. Do you have an explanation for this?

It's an interesting question. I'm not sure if we could look at the concurrence and the president. But... Alan was trying to connect with me.

That wasn't surprising. And at least something I was sympathetic here. What did surprise me was that after about a week, I was starting to look forward to our conversations too. You know, the morning hanging out with someone, the morning just to hang out with someone.

I was still going to the past week and we haven't been to the future years. That is true. I can imagine several viewers where you and I could friends. I wasn't quite ready to imagine any and Alan being friends.

But I was no longer feeling patient. And so this went in our conversations. I decided to try different. So I was biking and thinking about our conversations and thinking about your comments that there's a parallel universe in which the United States are friends.

And I thought that we have session odds history because I knew it was a little kid and then I read that to you as a teenager. But not really in position two is to talk about your growing up and your experiences. So why don't we go back to the beginning? I guess it's not as if we can see all our nerves.

We can try to spend some time. We have to go on. I often ask people I'm writing about this start from the beginning. In my experience, people will tell you who we are.

So maybe Alan could tell me how it would be from an intellectual family in Moscow. We can have a man who paid an undercover FBI agent to kill his ex-wife. Sure, this was going to be an Alan narrative. Ex-section of bragging and exaggerating.

Straighting relationships oftentimes. And I expect him to lie about things that can start to look directly. That's human. I mean, most of us don't try to get our ex-ordioners.

But all of us are like a percent of our lives in the best life. And so all of us want to be known. So yeah, tell me about a little extra. But I know some of us are happy until 2016.

15 was when Alan immigrated to the US with his mother. I remember my child from his very very fun. My friend, Sam Lee, grandma, that chef. I asked him what you do.

I was working on, I was taking the things. Still he said. He was a very poor life. But I was able to be interested in that.

He wanted me to be a poor when you live from the side. The first one was the most people in the 17 were quite poor. But there were so many relations of poor and so many shades of privilege. In the 17 years our family was pretty off.

Alan Groban and her partner in the very center of Alaska. A short walk from the Kremlin. Then I got into the place of my grandmother. It was so good going into a civil loft.

Everyone was always coming over from the parties. But lots of arguing and something in the top playing often crashing the place. But yes, then I didn't have my short and Alan's out of the picture. So they had no money.

Alan says to your members from a very young age, knowing exactly how many rules and cokex they had each month and helping feed their tiny family. I was going to the stores downstairs in the three years over themselves. We had four and you ever see us one of them in the big revolution here in the next store. You had to walk into those stores or usually for the bad work.

I was able to go to my friends and come back with me. There's probably some exaggerating going on here. But I think the country was already right. As Alan entered his teens, the Soviet regime began to grab a collapse.

Leonard was a human circle went over and grabbed an underground writer's third potion. Underground artists had shown everyone started traveling to the West and some people left the country altogether. It was a time for taking opportunities. Leonard heard about America, my father, had the opportunity to generate it.

And she took it. When Alan was 15, he and Leonard moved to the United States. And suddenly Alan's happy scrap your life was over. They saved my parents and my brother and knew the messages.

Both of my parents were from home. They lived in three items with little houses that were still small for three thousand two teenagers. Plus, Leonard and my mom had never gotten along. It was not easy.

I was only three at the time, living in New York. I talked to my mother in the phone in the days, but we rarely talked about the Alan. Because they tired of saying to my parents as my mother was under going to treatment for a metastatic cancer. She died in 1992.

In our conversations 34 years later, Alan never mentioned my mother's illness and treatment. Alan and my parents sent us months into several cases of despair. Alan was lost outside of Moscow. So, Leonard, I'm going to go over the basic of my life with extremely protected, very secure.

I knew everyone, everybody knew me. There's another language and another culture or everything, and then to lose all of that, I find myself in a completely unfamiliar environment where you understood what that to me was so much more disturbing. I was like, oh, I know, I know what you're describing. Moving to the country is a teenager.

It's one of the hardest things that 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 who I would do anything for, to a lonely loser, who filled them all the time. So, they're down.

And there was a question, my brother Keith, who was like popular and successful, and you were five weeks apart, and I just thought about it. And the question was a star, because he really wasn't really going to be the one who was the most popular popular, and he was starting to do the size of the time. He was like, oh, he got into Harvard, and he just scores all the charts. 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 yearbook.

And Alan, who showed us off my year, was his athletic energy collection from the old country, who were weird clothes, and was always trying to shake people's hands, which people are trying to do it in South High School. And he was poor. I remember doing quarters and quarters and quarters because of course he was able to have money to laying around all the load of those issues and then I was in the nursing room, and when he came home to dump the political to change the department and start to explore. So he was having the piles of coins around the room, so he didn't care about it, because he didn't come to money for the money he had to do job.

So I would have to pick up quarters and buy myself a couple of things. He'll get a theory of his medical course. So he was very much a rich men for a mensauation where I was a poor man. I didn't, he was just trying to be more right than trying to hang out with him, but he could just copy it once.

Third wheel. Third wheel exactly. That description got to me. The matter's on the floor.

The quarter's on the floor. And my brother was visiting 15 himself. I believe he was doing the thing he knew and learned. Alan and Alan had been somebody in Central Moscow, and now they're nobody in the masters' and they didn't want to be in the masters' one day, Alan told me, then it was like a penta.

What was your sign and she was, she said, was your difficult to hurt, she was usually in British South, you know, the hero in person since she had me. And it was very difficult to hurt too just to leave it down to someone else's room. So I haven't seen that on price. Maybe I see her cry and she's five to five to five to five.

So this is one of the signs that was the major depression in the show. And what did you do? I think that's going to be something that I do have in British people. I think that's going to be the people who are in the bartender and their medical initiative from she agreed with me because she was in British and we were able to find a part of her in the middle day.

So basically, I'm going to go. It's really the thing we've got after about eight months. The way my father remembers it was because my mother had become too ill for anyone else's name and house. But I remember his mother telling me that she knew that she knew that it was scared to be in house because my mother was dying.

What Allen remembers is that he saved the day, saved him and saved himself. He's a church. The first thing I'm going to do is name him. Beginning with his first job, rising through the ranks of the summer, did they need to be really fast this year from bagging groceries to bring them up to becoming the fastest cashier.

I said the story heard of being able to scamper his big five for a minute. Allen pulled himself up by his bootstraps and pulled and pulled and pulled. He got a job with a roof company and worked thirty-four hours a week while attending high school. The male had something to do with my husband 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 puppy handled a college of place for rich kids who have to wait four years to go into that 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 dad'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 uselessly.

He was more of a business that had students at places like Harvard, right papers for students at Babson. He was Allen's first successful venture. How big was this business? About 4,000 clients?

Wow. About 25 writers. How much money did you make? The tutoring I read was I read was a tutoring student student student student student student student student student offered with the time.

Just give me more. I would say that you need to be very good once I was making $10,000. Wow. That's right.

That must have felt very different from the first place of being a good one. It was my tutoring class but it also was I think social support because I was needed. So I said that we had something to offer on the child and human experience. I was probably where I was in the end.

I think that was much about my social status as it was about the school that was in the middle of the night. I think that was my social status like with the money. Allen loved being useful. He had always been useful to his mother from the time he was a toddler for the week.

But now other people knew him too. And he needed to be needed. From then on Allen continues his pursuit of more money and more social status. After college he went to law school in Connecticut, hitting another move to the field.

And got a job of offering them an admin after graduation. Then he lost that job. Allen sports out of career options during the FBI to think he could have been David rather than being a snare by David or this year. And then he got a job to change his life.

Allen was hired by McKinsey, the international consulting firm. And was launched on his path to becoming the Allen. I joined in the Kansas University, which was probably a miracle for me because I became the Kansas University in Russia at the time, and was very small for people that was in the center of the kind of information about the boat so it was coming. I was familiar with the Columbus Society.

I was working at the University of Moscow at the time, with a word-bices by rocketing, Russia was entering period of unprecedented prosperity, and in the Bentley dealership came to your cars and saw. Man with connections had picked up the latter days of factories and more about world refineries, the Pacifica fires out in the 1990s. Now they found themselves standing top of the leading metaphors, and it's looking at American consultants from Kansas, who are now hand to helping clean up their enterprises, making them less like mob businesses and more like regular businesses, less killing more board-wise and stock issues. We were doing transformation projects by every company that night, and I think it also took a mix of the internet, changing the world and changing the climate everything we done as a new university at the time.

We weren't ever company, and it was just an entity that I felt, and I think I would be trying to keep a part of it and make a trip up. For that also, the law firm, the unsuccessful bit of the journey CIA, Alan was finally living up to the potential of its own college, when he was rich and everyone needed him. Moscow was eight hours for some time. People were excited about this.

I used the tiring block of the mountain building, but strange, a lot of the interest to tourism community by the early ones, because of the mountains by the university. And how do you explain the difference? I think more likely that gender roles in the United States are very different from the university world. As a result, sort of my macho character, which works really well in Europe and Africa.

It doesn't work well in America. And when you say macho, what do you mean? That there's a strong man who pays the bills, who opens the doors, who gives lots of gifts, so that of course there's a strong part in the relationship. Really on.

And what do you mean by bringing your intellectual family? It was hard for me to believe. But yes, it seems that Alan took his much of a show react very seriously, and it worked. Women loved being chosen by Alan.

I interviewed Alan's first year's girlfriend, and she told me that she still thought Alan was one of the best people she had ever met. He made her feel taken care of. Alan's second-series girlfriend wrote a letter to the court. She wrote, the way I felt for them, like a much every woman takes her in this.

Alan supported her when she lost her dog. He was there for the family when her cousin died in the car accident, and he reached for the best health care on her grandmother and then her grandfather became ill. Good. There's only things that I'd say that my grandparents were alive for many years after.

And he was romantic. How did I feel with his woman? He was a stranger from the best day-stream to my dream car, just as a surprise. He made sure I drank more water, and went to the gym.

He stopped my English in beating myself. Alex had shown me the world in his possibilities. And it wasn't just the women. Other letters of the court mentioned how generous Alan was and how I built it.

When one of those music teachers offered a stroke, Alan brought him groceries, and also figured out how to help them out with some accidentally pregnant. Alan funded a struggling student soon project. When he founded her, then he found out that a woman's husband was being hurt. He extracted her and her kids, and put them up.

He helped build a custom design pool for an injured elephant. This was a side of Alan I can never really see him. Almost more surprising. It was that Alan had never backed about it on his face.

of us, he portrayed himself as a family as an international and an industry, as a smooth operator at the edges of the legal universe. But secretly, he was a universal fan factor. He volunteered to solve everyone's problems, and people paid him back with love. On the 36th one, he was in some public business and Microsoft for the first time.

He's given big living ways, worked and hurt too. They were together for the moment they met. They year into their relationship for Soviet King pregnant, but in just six months, they're still running into labor. Russia's hospital, she had an emergency session.

And then, uh, she was a bit of a fan. In the hardest one, so Alan's life again. How, yeah, what did he look like? Um, you look like you're here, you're here, you're here, you're here, you're in the church at 1 7 and you're going to make it.

I remember the doctor trying to, uh, she's reading, he was. About a third of all babies born in this room, he's sure it doesn't survive. Another third, he's having life on disabilities, blindness, deafness, other neurological damage, cognitive disability. Only third, recovery fully, and go on to the healthy lives.

It will be weeks, even months before anyone would know which category it was in. He just looks like the constant, uh, uh, unyielding worry, the constant stress, the absolute confidence, and the, uh, the other stuff that's helped with this, and we've seen how you found it very difficult to do the institutions where, um, I can't accept the outcome. And, uh, from each, what's very difficult to go through. Alan had to do something.

Many things. It's a little thing. It's a change in the life of because all the children in the unit were on the direct direct delivery, right? So they're helping you.

I think I put in a fleet gap in your mattress because only this risk is going to be stuff. Alan fits Robert's unit in the store so they don't slam and wake the babies up. Keep running in the ecosystem, and play common class on music. They're like, when they want to get a problem with just the money.

Eventually Alan ran out of things that money enterprise itself. Uh, I went to my direct door for Russian engine, and he was on French, and for the stomps. Camped out of the NICU day after day, what did you say? Well, he could be able to keep it all.

Oh, they didn't make that way. and wait. After two and a half months, he sunk him on. He weighed just over four pounds, but he wasn't directly healthy.

No, I said problems or breathing issues, or it's gradually became clear to all the pencil shoes. On my own daughter was my big soul, she landed in the NICU for 36 hours, and then I spent a week in the hospital with her recovering. That was only four years ago, and yet every time I think about it, I feel scared as I have ever been in my life. Alan spent 75 days in NICU with L.

I knew that before interviews of course, but when I listened to Alan talk about it, I heard that fear and the helplessness that I myself will never forget. So there's something to believe without qualification. I believe that Alan loves them, but he worries about it. And his heart, oh, they've been very low time for her.

You never forget what your child looked like, they're smallest and sickest, and you never stopped worrying. And this meant that Alan was not trapped. He loved his name son desperately. If he had to stay up next with her with her life, he had to stay outside and sing students songs forever, he would.

He couldn't really him. But the next to over ever, with me and being stuck forever, it emerged that was making Alan increasingly miserable. Much of what Alan had to say about the marriage seemed to me pretty self-being and blany. Alan accused us for still not in freaking competing on him.

Given how often they broke up in that back together, I think it's fair to say that there's a lot of disagreements about playing exactly that was cheating and when they were on a break. That said, I do think that especially in the later years, he had moments when he was genuinely distraught. In a lot of our conversations he described a moment of emotional pain that it seemed to me, he still himself didn't quite understand. Like one submission, she just told me about one of the one the times that she didn't, and that's her wailing.

Just a scream of pain. I think that was a wailing for what she was doing. She was like, she was freaking going scared. She was just going to stop and and felt like it's a tiny thing.

I felt good and it felt like it was a good, a lot of initial flying and we were back in the background, and it was like, I'm just like, I'm just like, I'm just like, I'm just like, I'm trying to come to form and ban it happens again. And I'm like, it's just because like that's four, it's been four, seven years. So on the whole Island description of marriage and substance dance is pretty similar to episodes, but we're good times but more and more frequently about times. I'm sure to buy what Island describes as blowout fights.

One difference in their account that was this. Island's convinced that Priscilla never loved him. She was in her for his money, his loyalty, perhaps as problem solving abilities. To be sure, they had a very master relationship, but I was genuinely surprised that he had come to this conclusion.

I happened to be a Priscilla little bit and she talks about you as about someone. She loved. Like I had no doubt in other conversations that she was talking about something that she loved. Um, well, I guess, uh, we can try to define that now.

And then, do you want me to, we don't need to go to, because I'm sure how to respond to this. Um, he's going back after he clicked himself. He said, okay, maybe I'm still dead, love him in her own way, but it wasn't enough. He never felt cared for or supported.

Allen had never never had a problem he couldn't solve. We 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 goes to meet with the man and decides she really wants to make a life of him.

She's leaving that time. Another time, when they reunited after one of their separations and turned out the Priscilla was pregnant, Allen proposed to stay together through the birth of the child and possibly raise a kid of his own. That brings the ended on his carriage. And when she was scared again and thought that's right, Allen offered the most in the solution of all.

Move to Russia and have a baby by surgery. There's only one problem that leaves solutions. They didn't solve anything. At the end of the day, Priscilla and Allen's relationship was for silly and Allen's relationship and all the non-solution solutions only had a fuel to their fights.

By the summer 2019, Allen was separated from Priscilla, but he was condemned to co-parenting over the Priscilla forever. So here's a theory of Allen. The traumatized kid, the guy who's known loneliness and humiliation, and is made up for it by making himself useful. The 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 the chit-in-let him. And couldn't figure out a way to be with a son here door, but that also constantly being reminded that he had failed to earn her love.

So he took the child and ran him and 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. Industry is where he 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 interest, too, with family members and friends of the family, and of course, for someone. 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, the often respond by talking about Yana his mother. They talk about the way that Allen ought to be resolved to support, in effect for a partner. They talk about Yana Allen's symbiotic relationship.

One friend described having a conversation with him as a kint watching intelligence show, which he co-hosts who seamlessly headlines after each other. Like Yana and Allen are one-mind. They always happen. Yana and Allen live together for most of Allen's life, even when he was in college, and in law school, and working for somebody who's after law school.

So when Allen started dating, and then I was there, always. Allen himself told me that his first year is going for him, who he met in law school, had three specific complaints. So one was that I would tell him on 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 continued to decide that one expressed opinions. Express opinions. By the same means that they don't tell people how to behave. One time she provided written instructions to Allen's girlfriend, Anne Lauren.

Anne Lauren came to see the specific, I said, our house is a wish-go. And my mom just finished reading, the main event was book, one day to catch. And my mom was very impressed with the main event of those drugs. So there was one chapter specifically about how to receive just in the country house, and how to be just in the country house.

So Anne Lauren arrives at a guest, and not just all the way away with this amusement, book we should be to step her into your hands. My girlfriend told me that I could get hold in the picture of how to be from a guest in the country house. And more of course, in terms of how to be as a hint, that she'd be in the picture of the person who has a record in the country to read book together. Next up, Anne Lauren.

And she confirmed that yes, she was very, very upset by being handed a book on how to behave. Allen and Anne, she was a five-piece mother's intervention to music, and basically her arms. Even though as Allen will be older and more independent, at least in the surface, Anne has been willing to become even more pronounced. When he was in his 30s, Allen will dimmer the girlfriend for the first time, a Ukrainian inconsequential.

The dynamic can do is it, and sockeye's collection of tiny decorative houses. Some of which end to conclude where this is directly from Allen, not decorative enough, and kind of destroyed the punch way of the house. Then I called the collection, leaving on the exhibition for your hands on display. They were supposed to be that to someone thousand and one thousand and three, but they had to fill the exhibition in the position.

And then years later, when the event came to us at Allen and Fiscilla, she went further, rearranging the furniture and the garden. We're going to go to the same amount of as she was very surprised to find a house change, so that's what I was talking about, because she was a very nice musician. I know that Allen's would give it to the word in position. I think of my parent in terms of being my wife and rearranging the furniture, I would use a different word, a word like I got you a teller.

How did you handle it? I think of the person that if you do enough to arrange the furniture back, I'm going to go to the project earlier and perhaps we don't need to make it to the issue. I don't necessarily think that she agreed. I told them it might be that it's not too taken as much as I don't think I'm on harm.

I think the beauty is absolutely there for if you have beauty, there's nobody in the comfort zone. You've probably heard the cliche, beauty is an either-builder. Then I asked, she knows that she's right, and I think for the most part, Allen agrees. Plus, you come up with the furniture back and she's gone.

And I guess the bushes that she had brought in us head down with her back and video, right? It was a very big deal to herself. It was clear to her that she wasn't beauty, it was control. And then I 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 matters to you 20-something year old 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 it was born, it seems to herself that then I wanted to control O2, his schooling, the books he read, the languages were the clothes you wore. She wanted it on her way, which was the right way.

And for Silla was in the way. And then this was a personal thing to all of those, aren't you? I think I am the single bad thing that probably existed that stops them from doing what they wanted to do, which was my merrily, is not the one 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 do just function. And I think he felt like he could 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 the partner who keeps drilling and you had that I hate this, I 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.

Granted, personalization was on her own, how he was specific experience of Canada. But personalization alone was my father concurs. He thinks that when Alan took a head out of a persona, it was a solution to persistent problem. What do you think the problem that he was trying to solve was?

To make my sister happy, so she would have all the time and she would not hear from Priscilla ever. And what makes you think that that's the root cause? I know that there was a relationship and I know that there was a relationship to make happy and if that was the way to do it, okay? So let's go that way.

He didn't do anything to me, he's my happy. This came up in a lot of my conversations. It should happen that Larry Allen's first series go from route to the judge. She wrote that Allen's quote, main purpose was to make sure his mother, Leonard, was well and comfortable.

His world began with her, unquote. And it seems that he was endless. This young woman ultimately accepted that there was no place for her in this close world. Too clear, Leonard was never charged with any crime.

She was barely even mentioned during Allen's trial and I don't have everything to think that Leonard knew about the Plattsico Priscilla before Allen was arrested. But my own conversations with Leonard supported my second theory of Allen. It was Leonard first mentioned to me that he was needing to do something about Priscilla. This was several years before Allen and I first ago.

At the time of this conversation it was a toddler. Allen and Priscilla were separated and then I were family gathering in Moscow, helping carry food from kitchen to dining room. Leonard paused holding a platter and said, I want to ask you advice on something. How do I get Priscilla out of his life?

It was clearly an invitation to gather my culture no matter and give an advice later. An invitation that assumed I was on top. You know what I said? Meaning you don't get Priscilla out of his life.

I said, she says mother, we continue carrying food. She didn't raise her question again and I don't think about it again until 2019 when the family got the Facebook message from Allen. And now I'm seeing what he and I have taken over today, and I've seen none of the last vacation last in my mind. What struck me the most wasn't question itself.

It was the guylessness what Buchill was asked. The certainty that as Allen and the Blackjack's undercover agent are caused is just. There's a constant psychiatry, Pilarda, which means madness for two in French. It's when two people shared delusion, reinforced the belief in each other and act accordingly.

The belief in an Allen shared was that Priscilla was a bad mother and was there right, they're due to even to get her out of his life. Though again, there's no indication that none of them were selected. After Allen's rest of the first time in Canada, Leonard wrote to the family chat about what a terrible parent was so was. It's that justified taking over her.

And less than a month before Allen was arrested than murder for high charges. Leonard Allen met up with her acquaintance and talked to a link about going to Priscilla gone. Not about going here, just about supporting her. The friends said that Leonard Allen were finishing each other's sentences, talking about how after Priscilla had gotten Allen arrested in Canada, this is how they saw.

The gloves were re-off, their cause was just. I needed to ask Allen about his mother's role in a series of events that caused me to land a time in federal prison. I needed to tell him that Priscilla's defense that is needed to please Leonard, later to grow, and I needed to get his reaction. But I wasn't sure how to broch this subject.

I thought I might leave it to our last conversation. But to my surprise, Allen brought it up himself. We're talking about the two times he took away from Priscilla to different country. She very much blames my mom for those decisions.

And she's her project onto my mom, my decision, so that's when I was hurt. So I think that it's as much as I think my decision is they, I'm not traveled with me, but it was not because she made a decision. It's just a decision to be decision to go after the government. And she went, and said that there's something that might be my job.

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. Maybe. I mean, I don't know why, but I don't know.

My decision is very much my own regard to what and so it's a, but it's just a decision. I think that a lot of the time people don't understand who is, who decides what, but we've been waiting to spend for the last 20 years until my risk and I'm surprised that people perceive it that way. Well, we just have to be one. I'm not surprised because I think that they're, they're guided by their experiences with your mom, which are not dissimilar from what you were just saying.

Like whenever she's someone she's 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 all the different things. Right. So, yeah.

So, I'm going to take care of some of those instances. Because it's a, um, but, uh, no, I think it's a, it's a, anyway. So those are the decisions, uh, were mine and rather than my mom's. So, anyway, I was just, uh, but it's interesting.

You can hear everything here. My mom, uh, that's my experience from the reason I'm going to listen to people. People know how I actually live. That was a lot of having fun.

It's understandable. Allen wasn't just trying to defend his mother. He was defending himself. He didn't seem self-dosing he was on his own, he didn't independence for, well, he heard 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 all guards, colleagues, people went in their grandparents, but most of all, for his mother. And his mother had a problem with her son. The right of her clerk has not deeply by business and has spent a lot of time talking to him to hate.

He 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 out.

I think I found it. On the one hand, there was a little boy Allen not so much. On the other hand, there was Priscilla. The first one was Allen failed to earn despite all his problems of him.

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. Lehman.

Those laws of Allen also needed to earn. And the way to earn it was to give her control over, well, everything. But particularly, Allen could live easily. He would thrive when it was just him, Lehman, and oh.

As a suspect he could have managed if he had to deal on the facility now. But trying to figure out a way to go down to a bus for a little end, during the noise in his head, I'm too intolerable. Allen and I spent a total of 35 hours talking about his life as kids and his crime. And then we were done.

So we may have gotten to the end of the story as it's now. What do you think? I think so. I think so.

I think that's a good way to go to the first one. The first one, the first one. Yeah, tell me what you're thinking about the future. Oh.

So it's my reason that Mr. Godardin and the debut year. The reason we have to Mr. Godardin is Allen's peak for hopes ring the term.

At that point Allen had been spoken to the lawyer who had taken on his appeal. But he was sure he'd be coming up soon. And then he was start complaining his life. It was a close-in that she would take some time for the children to come to terms of their back of their life and to digest and to work in them.

I'll take over the diagonal board that I would be able to register for them. That's the first one. The first one was one promotion. That was a big problem.

One wouldn't. Then the other situation they had. I think that my close-to-be spot. This is actually a problem that maybe it's going to be a good video to be guilty.

We should have a couple of people to be a good video to be a good video to be. I'll be around saying I don't think I'm gonna be out of debt. By the time we're having this conversation, it was early June 2024. And I was on my head.

It's been two hours every morning talking to Allen. I talked in briefly the morning after that. I was already waiting to ask about his kids. Have they been there?

Have they seen me? Yes, they've been there. It's in great. I'll come in here at the microphone to sing a song or what you seem to think of a song.

Before I get upstairs to join some of our wedding guest, I'll punch a lot of my computer and look for some photos people I've taken the night before. Picking out pictures of Elle and her red dress and Owen has my shirt to send to Allen. They've been such a long and his voice when he asked about the kids. It's something I realized that the kids were the reason he decided to talk to me.

To make his case to me and drew me in the broadcast meeting, just kids that he never wanted to kill their mother. Owen was just about golden after the look at his father's case on the internet. The jury had concluded that his father had hired someone to go his mother. But what if it crossed the adult, made a podcast that said it wasn't quite so bad?

Wouldn't that be nice? Then maybe Allen could have released a couple of these 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's worth worth wavering.

Then every youth evidence. There was no way around it. Allen was guilty, and he was lying. And we were done with our conversations.

Don't you tell me all the time? Well, it's been fascinating. It's been fascinating. And I really appreciate what you're doing with us.

Before we could our weeks long habit, Allen had one final request. And then he'd be too much as a public, as much as one hour. And then I'd be too, or if we were to be senior, I could be just a concern just to be single. And if that could help you look at it, it can help you go to the jury this time.

And say no, I'm for sure. We were done. And we were. We are.

Once again stuck where we began. Allen still got to have someone to go to Switzerland. He's still lying about it. And he still intent.

As intent has ever been. I'm claiming his place as an old father. And he's going to be out of prison just a few years. What is my family going to do?

What is pursuing to do? What can I do? That's next time. I'm the idiot.

The idiot was recording by me and doesn't. And produced by Daniel King, but then they were sent to the Anglican of the Indigenous Indigenous students. Our editor is really excited. It is not added by our glass and sorry, Kneke.

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