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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 and keep cod. Everyone, not just the birthday man, kids gifts.
Lin and I only used to come, of course, but now it's for solo who comes with the kids. I'm going to do it on my chest sleeve, here's your jacket. No, no, no. Change it.
Change it. My father always has his wife take a picture of him surrounded by his children, me and my three brothers, and grand children, seven of them, including O&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 examines prison.
I was unplugged, surveyed it the next day. It was the usual Alan stuff, like a note from a travel journal meant to remind me that he was still living a most fascinating life. He name checked some celebrities serving time on the same facility. Sean Didi, he wrote, seems depressed, while the cryptocurrency fraudster Alex Moshinsky is brilliant and fascinating.
But mostly, Alan was asking me to pass on his birthday wishes to my father. He wrote, I missed the visits to Cape Cod when everyone was together, and I missed his duck with apples, horrible and wonderful at the same time, and his marinated mushrooms, the one point of permanence, in an impermanent life. End quote. A ten-year prison sentence isn't as long as it seems, for one thing because it doesn't last in years.
Alan is currently slated to be released in 2030, after spending roughly eight years behind cars. So we're about halfway now, between Alan's arrest and his final release. We're at the point that is, when there can be no denying that in the foreseeable future, Alan will leave prison and will almost certainly want to reach out in the family. I don't think any of us really knows how to address the prospect, and for weeks I didn't know how to respond to Alan's email.
Then I finally figured out what I wanted to say to him. I'm Em Gessen, and from serial productions in The New York Times, this is the fifth and final episode of The Adience. Some songs that I've written, I started on a piano that happened with All In One For Christmas Is You? If you couldn't tell, that is Mariah Carey.
I'm John Caramanica, one of the critics behind The New York Times' 30 Greatest Living American Songwriters Project. We interviewed some of the songwriters on our list, including Taylor Swift, who hasn't sat for a video like this in a long time. These are not ordinary conversations. You're going to watch these videos and learn about intimate approaches to craft in ways that you rarely have access to.
My mom had got me this notebook and I was just writing it really small because I didn't want anybody to read what I was writing. Okay, Jay-Z's teenage notebooks. I need to see those. Watch all the video interviews for free, and check out the entire 30 Greatest Living American Songwriters Project at nytimes.com slash 30 Greatest or In The App.
And let us know if you agree with our picks. I bet you won't. When I set out to report Allen's story, I wanted to understand what he had been thinking. What the hell he had been thinking.
And I wanted to lay out a clear picture of the crime for my family so that they would stop looking for excuses or hoping for a reasonable explanation. In the process, I got to know Allen for the first time really. And I came to feel how much he has missing his kids. His waged battle to be allowed uncles with him.
He's hoping to rebuild a relationship with him once he's released. And judging from his letters to me, he's not just hoping but counting of 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 is 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 someone more sympathetic to Allen, my father had traveled in the opposite trajectory in relationship to Allen and now to. 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 were really sad about losing your sister.
No, that's of course true as well. But I lost her for good. So I don't feel any. Now I just don't have a sister.
I had never heard my dad say anything like this before. It's not that he's sentimental, just the opposite. He's clear-eyed and rational. He knows that people do terrible things and that this can include the people in love.
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 Al-Yoshotu admits his guilt, not to pretend that he's not guilty.
That would be step number one. What should follow? I don't know. The problem is, I think Allen believes that he can't ever admit that he tried to have Priscilla killed because if he does, his kids won't have anything to do with him.
My father for his part has assumed the role of the kid's grandfather. That's what they call him to, and he has a fiercely protective grandfather. He has no patience for Allen's dilemma. So what role do you think he should have in the kid's lives?
No, it don't. As far as my father is concerned, Allen, who took out of his ex-wife, and Leanna, 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 fines, more lived in with the addition of a little black cap named Nible's, but a very different life, and a different Priscilla. Priscilla has retrained as a certified nurse's aide. O who watched her study for her exams was very proud, impressed by how much she had to learn, and he told me Priscilla had gotten much higher marks than the other people in her course.
Priscilla was working six hours a week, both at her hospital and as a home health aide. It's a far cry from her old life and fashion, and as different as one can imagine from the big fast life she won't stop should live with Alan. The night I brought O back, Priscilla was stuck working until midnight because an elderly man that she works with who was cancer had to be hospitalized, and then his wife, who has dementia, couldn't be left alone. There's a lot of juggling.
Someone had to watch L, someone had to relieve Priscilla, and as all these arrangements fell into place, I saw the Priscilla now as a community. It includes other home health aides, and as a mobbed neighbor, who has a daughter who babysits, and even I realized, their old lady with dementia. Priscilla has built a life in which she and the kids can be stable. O has his music lessons and horseback riding and fencing, along with Russian math lessons.
It's a thing Russian math, and other activities. L 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 Lenna's help or interference. Lenna has other ideas.
Oh, well, okay. Okay, would you like me to start? Oh my goodness. Well, let's start with Lenna suing Priscilla.
So what is the status of that case? How did that go? Okay, so basically, how it started, she actually sued to be able to see or spend time with the kids that had previously been allocated to Alan. So she wanted to take over his parenting time, and the judge obviously said, no, that's not going to happen because you're not a parent.
Then she filed again asking for weekends, the judge said no. Then she tried getting one of Alan's friends to talk to me, almost like bribery. Remember, at his own murder for her trial, Alan testified that he had solved many a life problem with the bribe. As Priscilla describes it, a childhood friend of Alan's, a son of a close friend of Lenna's, a first person with an offer, a monthly stipend in exchange for letting Lenna see the kids.
And I just told him no. I would rather live in my car. Take money and risk something happening to my children. Take money from somebody who's obviously unstable.
Priscilla's talking about Lenna. Obviously, unstable strikes me as an accurate description, because I've now read over 100 pages of court documents related to Lenna's lawsuit, and much of which corroborates what Priscilla told me happened next. Lenna confirmed my name was offered, although she doesn't characterize it as a bribe. The court rejected Lenna's attempt to claim Alan's parental time, but did order monthly supervises.
But Lenna is Lenna. You know, it's incredible to me sometimes when I think about Lenna'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 small.
One time Lenna 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-gushing behaviors.
By this point, Lenna had signed an agreement to speak only English during visits so that the supervisor could understand. Obviously Priscilla had a good reason to fear that Lenna would badmouther to the kids. Lenna still spoke Russian to the children. The judge had specified that Lenna wasn't to give the children gifts, but you guessed it.
The supervisor texted Priscilla asking what to do, and Priscilla said let them keep the gifts, because he wants to take a gift away from a small child. According to court papers one time, when the supervisor wasn't looking, Lenna 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 Walked Up L I asked to read them of course, but he never sent anything. But just a month after we finished the Walked Up L which for a kid is very confusing. Priscilla has continued to take extreme care about talking to the kids about Alan. That was still little, and doesn't remember Alan well at all.
She has just told that her dad works far away. O is 12 now, so there's no hiding from him facts that are easily available on the internet. Priscilla involved O's therapist in telling him that the therapist also handles the letters that Alan writes to O filtering what's appropriate for O to read in a more context. And now Lenna with this book was throwing all of this into disarray.
So no more Lenna visits. More court hearings followed. Lenna 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. Lenna 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 Lenna lying, or apparently attempted to mislead the court. This happens repeatedly. I actually felt really bad that day just listening to her and looking at her and just realizing that instead of facing what has happened and seeing the mistakes that have happened with Alan for starters, the reasons behind her not being able to see the kids, instead of learning from this, she just wanted to continue to fight. And I think everyone understood exactly who she was.
The judge actually eventually said to her, no, I'm sorry, your time is up. We've given you an hour and 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 thought it was insane that she would give a book like that to a 12 year old. Lenna said that she had no idea how the book ended up in the Osbad. The judge's decision ran in part. The court finds the grandmother exerts undue influence over the children, which has been detrimental to their well-being and emotional stability and undermines mother.
I think that's the judicial equivalent of I'm fed up with your shenanigans. The judge ruled that Priscilla was no longer obligated to allow Lenna any visits with the kids. And the judge also ordered Lenna to stop criticizing Priscilla on social media. I no longer have access to all of Lenna's Facebook posts, but for my past exchanges with Lenna, I can imagine what the court decision is aiming to ban.
I gather that Lenna still convinced that she, and only she, knows the right way to raise these children. Lenna 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 kid with an impressive head of hair. But he lost all of it by the time he was 30. And as for literary talent, I mean yes, I found the locked up or pretty engaging, but I think it's fair to say that a self-published book written in prison is not what Lenna once had in mind. When Priscilla and Alan named their son, Oh, Lenna 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 Lenna's new project, which is I think why she felt she had to full control with him. Years earlier, when Alan was in jail and kidnapping charges and Priscilla gained full custody of Oh, my father became a go-between. His Skype with Oh regularly and reported back to Lenna about how her grandson was doing.
She demanded to know which pages of which Russian books Oh was reading and how many pages and express her dismay regularly, not enough pages, not of all the right books. As a falling short of the daily goal for Mary Poppins and Russian wasn't bad enough, Lenna complained in the family chat that Oh was not receiving her chocolate or enough hot chocolate. I fear that Oh and Oh are now Lenna's only project. Well, really Oh, because as she acknowledged in court, she barely knows Oh.
She's in her 70s living alone in a Jewish elderly housing complex. She has been divorced for half a century. She never had a career. She used to believe that her son, Alan would become a great man.
He's in prison. That leaves Oh is the one thing that can give her life purpose and she's continuing to pursue this purpose. After Alan was arrested, law enforcement helped her still 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, usually scooters to school and he has a route that he uses. So I was driving and I saw her like walking with her dog on the run. I was like, no, this cannot be her. So I drove to his school, picked him up quickly and then looped back to make sure.
And sure enough, it was her and she was waiting like on a corner where he turns to then come up the road to our house. So, so, so close to our house. I stopped and I recorded her because I didn't want to know. No, I wasn't there.
Yes. Oh, you know, he said she said. So I recorded her. I was like, Lana, what are you doing here?
Lana, what are you doing here? I'm saying, what are you doing here? I'm asking what you're doing here? Yes.
She's like, Oh, you know, I acted surprised to see me. Like, Oh, Priscilla, is that you? Oh, so good to see you. Blah, blah, blah.
I'm waiting for a friend. I'm like waiting for a friend here. Okay. 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 rode to Lana, warning her to stay away. Lana rode 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 Lana lives a couple of towns away, and because the corner Lana was standing on is the intersection of two minor residential streets, unremarkable, except for the fact that it's on O's route from school. Also, this was in the first time Lana had been spotted in the neighborhood.
A few months earlier, O told Priscilla that he thought he had seen his grandmother outside of school. Priscilla asked the school to check security camera footage, and they showed her what they found. Lana, with O going right past her on his scooter. Lana denied to Priscilla that she'd been there.
I've seen a photo from the surveillance tape. It's Lana. 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 eye? Is she hoping that O will stop on the linker 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 the joint? There's that fuzzy boundary again between pathetic and menacing.
Lana wouldn't talk to me for this podcast and decline to answer your 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 him from school. This is in addition to tracking O's phone, having security cameras on her house. Priscilla feels that she has to be vigilant at all times.
You can't trust a person who does things like this because, you know, at some point, as a grown-up person, you think logically, okay, you know what, this is a little too much, maybe let me take a step back. But she seems to have none of those boundaries. Like nothing like that crosses my mind, she'll do whatever. And that is the most frightening part of it all.
And this is the level of fear that Priscilla feels. Has every reason to feel, even while Alan is in prison. I worry about what will happen when he's released. He will be a man in his mid-fifties.
It is Bart 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 forleo doh. Are you concerned for your safety? I am.
And, you know, I think it would be foolish not to be. This is someone who is still trying to convince everyone that they did nothing wrong, knowing that nobody believes them anyway. When Alan was first convicted, Priscilla had this idea she told me at the time that when he was released, the kids would be older, over-act clean adult. And she wouldn't have to worry for their safety or her own.
But in fact, it was still going to be in high school when his dad comes out of prison. And then there's all that force and desire and charm that Alan will bring to winning him back. I kept thinking about how to respond to the email I got from Alan on my dad's birthday. I didn't want to ask him about prison life.
I didn't want to send a report on the birthday celebration on Cape Cod. I certainly no longer felt like telling Alan anything about his kids. After Priscilla told me about Alan's behavior, I felt sick to my stomach every time I imagine what will happen when Alan is released. Finally, I decided to do what I hadn't done in a month since I'd been working in this podcast.
Tell Alan what I really think. Or, more to the point, what I think he should do. Hi, Lushion. 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 as possible. It seems that your strategy has been to keep denying that you hired someone you thought was going to kill Priscilla. I understand that you have hoped that your kids and our family would believe that you were framed and trapped, misinterpreted, whatever, and you would be able to repair relationships when you're out.
This strategy has clearly failed. Instead of coming across as innocent, you come across as someone who continues to lie and to foreclose the possibility of actual repair. I honestly don't know if repair is in fact possible, but I do know that your only chance of it is to start by acknowledging what you did. I know I told you in the past that I was starting to have some doubt about your guilt.
This was true at the end of our series of conversations. Then I went back over the evidence, listened to all the tapes made by the undercover agent. They leave no doubt. No room for interpretation.
Your continuing to insist that this isn't so comes across as what it is, lying, and lying in the end, shut-self 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 when she was a baby, so when I say her whole life, I mean it. She told me some things that I find very useful in thinking about you, but sometimes people do truly terrible things, and this includes people in our families, people who in somewhere in other 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 your fault, how it seemed to you that any way out was justifiable. When I think about it, I do feel compassion.
Perhaps other members of our family can come to see this too, but again, this would have to begin with honesty on your part. That's the end of my letter. Alan didn't write back to me. Instead, he filed a lawsuit trying to stop the release of the podcast.
In his filing and a letter to The New York Times, he accused me of pursuing what he called a decades-long family feud, and of all sorts of other things I'm not going to repeat. These were lies, and they made me very angry. For a full 24 hours, I fantasized about taking revenge. I could report him to ICE.
Aren't they supposed to be deporting immigrants convict to a violent crime? He could get deported to Russia, and then he could get arrested there, and Rod and Rushin jail for the rest of his life, and then Priscilla and the kids would finally be free of him, and the fear he brings. And then, did I go looking for a way to actually get Alan deported? I did not, because I'm not an idiot.
The idiot was reported and written by me, and Gessen, and produced by Daniel Guimet, with Anne-Vaziente, and Lika Guimet of Liberty of the Studios, our editor's Julie Snyder, additional editing by Hourglass, and Sarri Keynig. Research and fact-checking by Ben Faehwin and Marisa Robertson-Texter. Original scored by Allison Lavin Brown, additional music from Dan Powell, and Mary and Lozano. The show was mixed by Phoebe Wang, who was additional mixing by Katherine Anderson, additional production by Phoebe Bennett, its serial productions, and Dave Chubu, is our supervising producer, Mac Miller's our associate producer.
Video production by Sean Devaney, our direction from Kelly Doe, hard by John Perm, credits music by Bob Dylan. At the New York Times, our standards editor is Susan Wesley, legal review by Alameen Sumer, Dana Green, Jackson Bush, and Tim Ty. Our senior operations manager is Elizabeth Davis-Mourner, and Sam Dolnick is deputy managing editor of The New York Times. To find out about our upcoming shows and more about the show, sign up for the news letter at nytimes.com.
The idiot is a production of serial productions and The New York Times.