M. Gessen

He would call himself an entrepreneur.

He started his first business in college.

He hired students to ghostwrite papers for other, wealthier students.

He went to law school and got fired from his first job.

He later told me this was because his fine legal mind made the other lawyers insecure.

Then he lived in Russia, Ukraine, Zimbabwe, working a series of increasingly shady jobs.

In Africa, he was involved with diamonds and worked with an Israeli company that provided security for mining.

If someone had set out to write an unlikable international huckster character, they couldn't have laid it on any thicker.

Alan married a Zimbabwean woman.

Word in the family was that she had been that country's beauty queen.

They had two kids.

Last I knew, all of them, including my Aunt Lena, were living in Moscow.

And then, in the summer of 2019, everyone on the American side of the family got a Facebook message from Alan, informing us that he had arrived in the U.S.

with his five-year-old son, who I'm going to call Owe.

Alan wrote they'd come for O to, quote, commence his studies.

I repeat, O was five.

His wife, he wrote, was still in Russia with their baby daughter.

They had separated.

Alan added ominously, quote, things are less than amicable.

She might make attempts to contact you with requests detrimental to mine and O's interests, unquote.