Chapter 1: Why does M. dislike Allen?
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My family, if I had to give it an adjective, is elastic. 45 years ago, my parents, my little brother, and I came over to this country from the Soviet Union, extending the family across continents.
Over the decades, the family, my father really, stretched to absorb spouses, in-laws, even though they spoke a different language, children both biological and adopted, ex-spouses who chose to stick around, and eventually grandchildren.
Over those same decades, as in any family, people made bad decisions, said things they hoped no one would remember, got mad at each other, felt grudges, came around, and the family stretched as needed. And then it snapped. Someone did something that bad, that shocking. That person was my cousin Alan. He and his mother, my father's sister Lena, came to the US from Moscow in 1990, when Alan was 15.
They stayed with my parents and brother for almost a year. By the time they arrived, I no longer lived at home, so I didn't have much of a relationship with them. Never really wanted to, because I didn't like my aunt. And as Alan grew up, I realized, even from a distance, that I didn't particularly like him either. Alan is a clown, a blowhard, a pompous ass. 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.
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Chapter 2: What shocking event brings Allen back to Cape Cod?
They were fun. My father loves having family around. The whole reason he lives in a big house on Cape Cod is so that his four kids and five grandkids gather around him. But the house has seen better days, and all the kids and some of the grandkids have busy lives. Alan and Lena and O's arrival on the scene breathed new life into the house and the family.
Lena would come up with ridiculous activities like, let's write the guests and family anthem, and was always taking black and white pictures that made us all look like more stylish versions of ourselves. Alan was always driving up in his Tesla with new gadgets and tales of new business ventures. I found him ridiculous. But my youngest brothers and my oldest son hung on every word.
Alan would sit on the couch with these very young men and scroll through pictures of women on Tinder. They all looked like models. Alan was bald as a billiard ball and had a giant protruding belly. He claimed that he had matched with all of those women. After a while, Alan was eager to talk about why he had taken O. He claimed that Priscilla was a bad mother. She partied all the time.
She did drugs. She cheated on Alan. To me, these sounded like good reasons to get a divorce, not to take your child from his mother. Lena had her own complaints. She said Priscilla didn't read to her child, and perhaps even worse, didn't read books herself. The only book she kept in the house, Lena claimed, was the Bible. I thought, wait, this was why Lena and Alan took Priscilla's son away?
There are few things that I think justify separating a kid from his parent, but Lena and Alan didn't seem to think that much justification was required. I couldn't stop thinking about what Priscilla must be going through. Without telling anyone in the family, I decided to reach out to her. I had met her only a couple of times and barely had a sense of her. I knew that she worked in fashion.
I knew from Lena that Priscilla's father owned a huge farm in Zimbabwe, and I knew that she would have no reason to trust me. I wasn't sure she'd respond. I texted her that I knew only Lena and Alan's side of the story. Priscilla wrote back right away. She was stuck in Russia. Her daughter, whom I'll call Elle, had been born via surrogacy because Priscilla was unable to carry a pregnancy to term.
The baby was eight months old, but Priscilla still didn't have a birth certificate for her, which meant that they couldn't leave the country. We traded short messages back and forth. Our exchange was friendly, but guarded. I didn't want to overstep, and I think Priscilla tried to say only what needed to be said. It was enough for me to sense that she was in anguish, and I was horrified.
How could this woman's child just be taken away from her? How could my family just sit by? And what was going to happen to O now? Priscilla told me that the Russian police would not help her. The Zimbabwean embassy said that she could file a petition under the Hague Convention, a treaty that specifically addresses situations when one parent abducts a child and takes them to another country.
But Priscilla needed legal help in the U.S. I could be useful here. I called a friend who connected Priscilla with a person in the Justice Department who specializes in these kinds of cases. Priscilla also needed Lena Allen and O's physical address in the States so she could begin the Hague process. This I could definitely help with.
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Chapter 3: What suspicions does M. have about Allen's intentions?
And by some sort of miracle, the result wasn't annoying. Always a delight, curious, entertaining without being overbearing, and unfailingly polite. He seemed happy. Whatever damage being separated from his mother had done, I couldn't see it. What I could see was that he was doted on and thriving.
To put it another way, and it wasn't easy for me to admit that I was seeing this, Alan seemed like a great dad. Kind, attentive, devoted, and fun. Two years passed like this. Eventually, Priscilla and Elle, who was now a toddler, made it to the United States.
I hadn't messaged with Priscilla in over a year, but I heard from my father that Priscilla's claim, filed under the Hague Convention, was going to be heard in federal court in Boston. The case would probably drag on for a while, but I assumed that Priscilla would now be able to see her son. And then there it was, on social media.
Priscilla posted a picture of herself embracing O. I liked the picture. I figured my job was done. My time as a double agent, long over. About four months later, Alan was arrested for kidnapping O. Not for the time he took O from Russia. This was new. That's after the break.
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Alan was arrested in Montreal at the airport when he, Lena, and O were waiting to board a flight to London without, apparently, Priscilla's knowledge. This time Alan went to jail. But no, this arrest and what Alan did to get himself arrested weren't the things that shocked my family. We didn't exactly act like Alan's arrest was normal. We acted like it was absurd.
I entertain my friends with stories of my serial kidnapper cousin. Lena kept the family updated with overdramatic notes on the Facebook family chat and at least one video from Canada in which Alan, wearing a striped uniform, sings her Russian prison song.
It looked like a cartoon.
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Chapter 4: How does M.'s family react to Allen's arrival?
He asked my dad, hey, do you mind if me, my mom, and the kids camp out in your backyard on Cape Cod? I said, of course. So they came.
They brought some huge, huge tent. I never saw such a tent before with a lot of furniture and lights and devices.
Solar charges, rugs, two full mattresses, a treasure trunk with treasures, I guess. It was very Alan. Awesome, spectacular, ridiculous. Though later it occurred to me that this time at least, there may have been a point to this. He wanted everyone to remember his camping trip to my father's backyard. Because it was summer, my father's house was full.
Two of my younger brothers, one of them with his girlfriend, were there. Everyone had a nice dinner together and then went to bed, some people in the house, and Alan, Lena, and the kids in the tent. And then, around six the next morning, the dog, Altin, started going nuts. Someone was banging on the front door.
So I opened the door a bit because not to let Altin out. Also, I didn't put my trousers on yet. And the guy, the policeman said, we are state police.
Could you step out with your phone? My dad is surprised, but he's not panicking. He goes to get his pants and his phone.
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Chapter 5: What evidence suggests a potential kidnapping?
But by that time, because of all this noise and commotion and all this barking, Alyosha woke up. Alyosha is my cousin's Russian diminutive. And he came to the house to see what was going on. And police figured out that they are looking for him and not for me.
FBI agents go around the house banging on doors and make everyone sit down on the couches in the living room. No one understands what's going on. But soon, through the picture windows that look out on the backyard, they see two male FBI agents take Alan away in handcuffs. Then a female agent escorts the kids to another car. They all drive off. State troopers follow. Lena leaves too.
And did you know what, once everybody left, did you have any idea what he had been arrested for?
Not immediately, but then I learned from Lena about that. She was totally lost, but the only thing she knew that what was in this paper they gave her.
Chapter 6: How does Priscilla describe her ordeal to M.?
What was in the paper? Oh, that he's arrested for, I don't remember, but murder for hire was there, yes.
And did you have any idea who he might have hired somebody to murder? It didn't take long. It was Priscilla. Alan, it seemed, had hired someone to kill Priscilla. The question was if it was true or not.
That's another story.
Some of us took the news in faster than others. The day after Alan's arrest, my brother Keith and I had a fight over the Justice Department press release, which identified the target only as P.C. I was saying that it was obviously Priscilla, whose last name begins with a C. He was saying that it was obviously not Priscilla.
Lena kept telling everyone that Alan had been set up by business rivals or Russian agents or the FBI or someone. But over the course of a few days, it sank in. My cousin had been caught hiring someone to murder his ex-wife, the mother of his children. This was when it felt like we snapped. I certainly snapped. I was shocked at how shocked I was.
It's not that I felt bad for Alan or Lena, it's just, how does something like this happen? How had it happened right here in my family, in between our silly dinners and chess games and kids' birthday parties? In theory, I knew that this kind of thing can happen in any family. Anyone's first cousin could be plotting murder. Upstanding citizens are always turning out to be secret criminals.
And I wouldn't even call Alan an upstanding citizen. But it's one thing to know and another thing to understand. I'm a reporter. At some of the hardest times of my life, like when I faced a dire medical diagnosis, I put on my reporter's hat and ask everyone a lot of questions. It has allowed me to wrap my mind around unthinkable things before. Alan was in jail, awaiting trial.
So my project had to begin with Priscilla, who was, thankfully, alive. What she told me was so much worse than what I thought I knew. That's next time. From Serial Productions and The New York Times, I'm M. Gesson, and this is The Idiot.
Someone's got it in for me They're planting stories as they pray Whoever it is, I wish they'd cut it out quick But when they will, I can only guess
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