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About this Episode
M. Gessen returns to our show with a true-crime story that takes place entirely within their own family. This story comes to us from the producers at Serial Productions—who invented the true-crime podcast more than a decade ago—and from The New York Times.
Visit thisamericanlife.org/lifepartners to sign up for our premium subscription.
- Act One: M Gessen tells Ira Glass about the surprising events that prompted them to begin reporting on their own family for their new podcast, The Idiot. They play the first episode of the series. (14 minutes)
- Act Two: Ira Glass and M Gessen continue to talk through the story of M’s cousin, Allen Gessen. They play more clips from the podcast, and we finally hear about the big, shocking thing that snapped their family apart. (20 minutes)
- Act Three: M Gessen tells Ira Glass about Allen’s trial, and we hear a recording of his conversation with the undercover agent. (21 minutes)
Transcripts are available at thisamericanlife.org
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Transcript
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A quick warning, there are curse words that are unbeaped in today's episode of the show.
If you prefer a beeped version, you can find that at our website,
thisamericanlife.org.
From the BB Easy Chicago, it's this American Life from our Aglass,
and I am joined in the studio by MGuesson. Hello.
Hi, Aaron.
So nice to have you back here.
It's always lovely to be here.
And the story that you're about to tell today
is one that you've been telling for years?
Yeah.
First, it was just, you know, there was something weird going on in my family,
but also of insane ways that my family talks about these crazy events.
And is this story a story that, when you would tell it to friends and loved ones,
was it a funny story?
I hesitate to say it was a funny story, but yes.
Yes, it was a funny story.
And I mean, maybe that's also just the only way that we can deal with things that are unbelievable.
It wasn't until I started reporting it that I realized how horrible the story actually was.
And when you started to report it, this was years ago.
Originally, this was going to be a story for this American Life.
And then at some point, it just got too big.
It was like, we cannot contain this in one episode of our show.
And you turned it into this podcast with serial.
Yes.
And it's now a five-part series with serial that was released this week.
And you've been doing read-throughs of drafts,
have you been writing drafts that have set it on?
And I just want to say, I love this show.
And I feel like this show is so different from other podcasts that I have heard in a bunch of interesting ways.
And what we're going to do today on our program is we're going to walk through enough of the story
so that listeners here can hear what I'm hearing in it.
And then if they want, they can go and listen to the whole thing.
From WB EasyChicago, it's the American Life on our Glass,
that's going to be our show today.
And we're going to begin by playing the first episode of this series,
which is almost like a prologue and sets the whole thing up.
Is there anything else we should say before we play that?
No, I think we can jump in.
Okay. Let's just jump right in with that.
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 meet bad decisions,
said things they hope no one would remember,
got mad at each other, held grudges, came around,
and the family stretched as needed.
And then it snapped.
Someone did something bad, bad, that shocking.
That person was my cousin, Alan.
He and his mother, my father, Sister Lena,
came to the US from Moscow in 1990, when Alan was 15.
They stayed with my parents from brother for almost a year.
By the time they arrived, I no longer lived at home,
so I didn't have much relationship with them.
I 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 blue heart, a pompous ass.
He would call himself an entrepreneur.
He started his first business in college.
He hired students to go strike 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
career character, they couldn't have laid it on any thicker.
Alan married a Zimbabwe 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 Lanna,
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 O.
Alan wrote that they'd come for O to quote,
commends his studies.
I repeat, O was five.
His wife, who 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 a request detrimental to mine and O's interests.
Unquote.
I immediately texted my brother Keith,
who was closer to Alan.
So, our cousin has kidnapped his son
and abandoned his daughter?
The answer would appear to be maybe,
my brother responded.
Just a note.
This isn't the big shocking thing I was talking about earlier.
We were still a few years away from that.
I called my dad.
He told me that Alan had just shown up at his house
and kept caught without warning.
His five-year-old son was with him,
called Lena, my dad's sister.
I asked my dad if we should do something
about the maybe kidnapping,
like, I don't know,
contact the FBI.
This was the wrong thing to say to a guy who grew up
in the Soviet Union.
He would never call the authorities on his sister and nephew.
What he did do was post a picture of Owen Facebook.
Perhaps a message in a bottle for O's mom?
Sure enough, my father immediately heard from her.
Her name is Priscilla.
Priscilla wrote to my dad describing their deal
she was enduring.
She said she had gone on a short business trip to Zimbabwe.
And when she returned,
she discovered that Alan had left with her son.
It had been about a week,
and only now, from seeing my father's Facebook post,
was she learning anything more.
Priscilla wrote,
I beg you please to help me get my son back
or to at least speak to him.
Please do not tell them I have written to you.
If you are unable to help me,
then just ignore my message.
I received a long, long letter from Priscilla,
but I just ignored it.
My father can be quite literal.
So what did you think was going on then?
Did you think she was lying?
Honestly, I didn't pay much attention.
I don't know.
I understood that something is wrong with the image,
but beyond that, no.
Like I said, my family is elastic.
To keep it that way,
my father preferred not to know too much.
And it wasn't just him.
My three younger brothers,
their partners,
my own grown son,
assorted friends of my fathers,
everyone acted like, hey,
sometimes men and their mothers just changed confidence
with a five-year-old until.
And here's the thing.
They were fun.
My father loves having family around.
The whole reason he lives in a big house
is to gather around him.
But the house has seen better days
and all the kids and some of the grandkids
have busy lives.
Alan and Nana and Oz arrive on the scene
read new life into the house
and the family.
Nana would come up with ridiculous activities
like let's write the guessing 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 in every word.
Alan would sit on the couch with these very young men
and scroll through pictures of women on Tinder.
They all look 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 cheered on Alan.
To me, they sounded like good reasons to get a divorce
not to take your child from his mother.
Nana 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 on 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 just
if I'm 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 Nana 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 L,
had been born via surrogacy
because Priscilla was unable to carry a pregnancy to term.
The baby was eight months old
but Priscilla's children
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 English
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 hate convention,
and that the situation
won one parent abducts the child
and takes them to another country.
But Priscilla needed legal help in the US.
I could be useful here.
I called a friend
who connected Priscilla
with a person on the Justice Department
who specializes in these kinds of cases.
Priscilla also needed Liana, Alan,
and O's physical address in the States
so she could begin the hate process.
This I could definitely help with.
I knew that they'd left
I invited my aunt,
cousin, and nephew over for dinner.
Alan was away in business
so Liana arrived with O
who got conscripted him to a human pyramid
by the young people of my household.
As I slid church steaks into the oven
I asked Liana the question
all New York City parents ask
all other New York City parents
where will O go to school?
He was about to turn six.
Liana said that she had no idea
how schools even functioned in the city.
He explained this to you I said
and took out my phone.
What is your address?
Let's see what district that is.
Bingo.
I had their address.
I sent it to Priscilla.
Some weeks later
apparently on the lark
they moved to Massachusetts.
I figured out that address too.
I was a double agent now.
I tracked Liana, Alan,
and O through their Facebook posts
of my father's house on Cape Cod.
When they moved to a new house
I let Priscilla know.
If I had news about O, I texted Priscilla.
Sometimes she just asked for reassurance
that he was alright.
From all the men in my family,
my father, my three brothers, and my son,
I hid the fact that I was in touch with Priscilla.
I thought they'd see what I was doing
as disloyal and might wrap me out to Alan.
My daughter knew.
It was a little bit exciting
but it also gave me an excuse
to have a piece with my newly enlarged family.
But the more I hang out with them,
the more I just hang out with them.
O was growing.
Alan and Liana were building a life.
I watched.
Sometimes I caught myself thinking
that it was a pretty good life.
Alan, Liana, and O moved into a farmhouse
in Concord, Massachusetts.
Liana furnished it stylishly.
They seemed to spend most of their time
actively raising O.
They enrolled him in Jewish school,
working, horseback riding,
and I'm sure I'm still forgetting something.
They dressed O like a tiny little gentleman,
complete with brogues and fedora hats,
and by some sort of miracle
the result wasn't annoying.
O was a delight, curious,
and retaining 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 doded on
and thriving.
He would do 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 L,
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 Fetal 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 incident,
which I need to say,
is still not the big shocking thing
that rock measures family.
That's coming up.
Stay with us.
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To smirk the life,
let's just pick up with them guessing story
where we left off.
Alan, taking O.
Alan was arrested in Montreal
at the airport.
When he, Leanne and O.
were waiting to board a flight to London
to see his 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.
Leanne kept the family updated
with over-dramatic nose
on the Facebook family chat.
And at least one video from Canada
in which Alan wearing a striped uniform
to her Russian prison song.
It looked like a cartoon.
Alan spent a couple of weeks
in Canadian detention.
Then another few weeks in a jail
and upstate New York.
It was finally released on his own
reconnaissance to wait trial
and Massachusetts.
Oh was now living with Priscilla.
Alan got out of jail in February 2022.
A couple of months after that,
Alan got a miss of on the family chat.
It's self-important as the one that began
this whole story.
This time he was telling us that he and Priscilla
had resolved their battle.
Which actually turned out to be true.
They would now have shared custody of both kids.
Alan said he was very pleased.
I thought my god.
Did you have to go through all this
absconding with your son twice
keeping him separated from his mother
for more than two years
just to arrive at a standard 50-50 custody agreement?
This, child support and shared custody,
is the boring end of this crazy story?
I felt a little relieved and a little dumb.
Like maybe I'd bought two fully
into other people's drama.
Kidnapping charges against Alan were pending.
They would later be dropped.
And still, Priscilla was able to reach
a peace agreement with Alan.
After all he'd apparently put her
and their son through.
Well, maybe this was just the way they did things
with extreme flair.
Then, yeah.
A kind of exotic part started.
Then it happened.
The thing.
The bomb that went off in the middle of my family.
So the day before Alan called me and said
that he promised his kids
to take them camping.
In July 2022.
Under the new custody arrangement,
it was Alan's weekend with the kids.
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,
lights and devices.
Solar charges.
I should trunk with treasures, I guess.
It was very Alan.
Awesome, spectacular, ridiculous.
The 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 of a 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.
And Alan, Liana, and the kids in the tent.
And then, around six the next morning,
the dog, Alten, started going nuts.
Someone was banging on the front door.
So I opened the door a bit
because not to let Alten 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.
But by that time,
because of all this noise and commotion
and Alten's barking,
Alisha woke up.
Alisha is my cousin's Russian diminutive.
Alan, and he came to the house
to see what is going on.
And police figured out
that they are looking for him
and not for me.
If the Asians 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.
Liana 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 Liana about that.
She was
totally lost,
but the only thing she knew
that what was in this paper
they gave here.
What was in the paper?
Well, he's arrested for,
I didn't remember.
But murder for hire was there.
Yes.
And did you have any idea
who he might have hired somebody
to murder?
No,
it didn't take long.
Who's Priscilla?
Alan, it seemed
had hired someone to kill Priscilla.
Equation was
evil, it was
true or not, that's another story.
Some of us took the news
and 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
PC.
I was saying that was obviously
Priscilla, whose last name begins with the sea.
He was saying that was obviously
not Priscilla.
Liana kept telling everyone that Alan had been set up
by business rivals, Russian Asians
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 Liana is 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 asked everyone a lot of questions.
It has allowed me to wrap my mind
around unthinkable things before.
Alan was in jail.
A waiting trial.
So my project had to begin with Priscilla.
Who was, thankfully, alive.
Which 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 guessing,
and this is the idiot.
Okay, so that is the first episode
of your new podcast,
The Idiot.
Does Alan know the name of the show yet?
You know, um,
I mean, obviously,
there are some parts
of that title that might be appealing to Alan.
It's reference to a classic work
in the literature.
That's the old idiot.
So, um,
and I think there's, um,
there's a little bit of kindness
in that title.
I think
that I'm giving him the grace of,
of perceiving what he did
is just an incredibly dumb thing,
and not only a very scary
mean and evil thing.
And also, he's very lucky
that he was bad enough
at trying to hire a killer
that everyone
and then is alive,
and he's serving only 10-year sentence.
Yeah.
So, after that you begin reporting it.
As you say at the end of episode one,
you start with Priscilla.
What happens?
I only met Priscilla a couple of times in my life.
I didn't know her.
I just knew she was this
sort of beautiful
poised woman
who'd been through hell at this point
and had come to the US
to try to get custody
back of her child.
But I didn't know
how this story
had unfolded for her.
So, let me play an excerpt
from that conversation.
I started with something
that had mystified me for a long time.
So,
can you tell me
what you saw in Alan
when you first met him?
Wow.
I think like most people that meet him.
The first time you meet him,
he's very charismatic.
This was 2011.
As a party in Harari,
the capital of Zimbabwe.
Alan was there in business,
scoping out investment opportunities
for Ukrainian oligarch.
And it was how to talk to people.
And did that seem appealing?
It did.
I'll be honest. I was 30
when I met him.
It seemed very appealing.
And it was like very different
from anybody that I had met.
So, different was interesting.
He came from a very different part of the world
which I knew nothing about
which was also exciting
in its own regard.
It wasn't just exciting.
It was incredible to Priscilla,
the way someone from Zimbabwe might be.
She could project her desires on to him,
including her desire for success.
Priscilla was working at a new lifestyle magazine
and had launched the Bobby's Anglo-Fashion Week.
She wanted a life that was big and fast,
like Alan's.
And it's true that Alan seemed to know
how to make big fast money and spend it.
It's like, oh, let's go to Jover.
I'm like, okay.
You get up and you go.
Just like at the drop of a hat.
So, it was very exciting.
The only strange thing that happened
at the beginning of our relationship
when his mom came.
Right.
One of those hiccups
that happened early on on her romance
and should raise a giant red flag
but somehow never do.
When Alan came to visit
a few months into their relationship,
she joined Alan and Priscilla
on a trip to the countryside.
We went on a trip
to Kariba.
It's a big lake in Zimbabwe.
And I think it was like
on the second day or something,
we had a disagreement, like a fight.
And he left our room.
And I didn't know that he had done this
but he went to his mom's room.
And I found him later.
I was walking past her room
and she had these doors that opened
outside. I just looked in.
And I saw him lying on her bed
and she was like lying there, like stroking his hair.
I found that while he's head.
I found that so weird.
I was like, wow.
This is a grown man.
And it seemed a little too intimate.
For me, like,
in my culture, I guess maybe
because we're very distant,
you don't even hug.
You wouldn't hug your father
because it's a little too intimate.
So for an adult
to be lying on his mother's bed
and for her to actually be,
it just seemed very peculiar.
I saw that and I was like, okay.
And as the series unfolds,
Lena and Alan's relationship
is one of the things that you talk about more.
Did you talk to Lena for the story?
I didn't.
She didn't want to talk to me.
And so you're interviewing Priscilla.
And the story is that she's telling you
you knew kind of the basic plot points of.
The first time they took
Oh, the second time they took
Oh, what did you learn that you hadn't known?
So, you know,
now I realize that knowing those
two plot points
which were two and a half years apart
is a little bit like knowing
the date the war began and the date the war ended.
And like, I didn't know
about all the carnage
that had happened in between.
At first, she was stranded in Moscow.
She didn't really have any way
to support herself in Moscow.
She is a Zimbabwean woman
who doesn't speak Russian.
And that dragged on for months.
And then she got back to Zimbabwe.
She thought she was getting back to her
regular life from which she was going
to try to make it to the US
to get Oh back.
And then things just start
happening to her in Zimbabwe.
She gets beaten up by thugs.
She gets picked up and drug charges.
She gets picked up again
and thrown to prison for two weeks.
And she thinks
that Alan is behind all of this.
Alan denies that he had any involvement.
And then eventually, like, she goes through all of this
and she eventually gets to the United States, right?
She eventually gets to the United States.
It doesn't mean
that she's going to get
custody even visits
with her son.
Because at this point,
it's been two and a half years.
But to see him
for the first time,
since he was taken from her.
Wait until now he's how old?
So now he is
like eight years old.
So it's from five to eight.
She hadn't seen him.
And also she doesn't know what
his grandmother and his father
have been telling him about her.
Yeah, let's play
an excerpt of this part of the episode.
So this is
Priscilla explaining
about seeing her son for the first time
after that two-year absence.
When did you see him
for the first time?
I saw him that weekend on the Sunday
for the first time.
It was...
It's so strange.
I almost can't remember how I felt.
I know I didn't cry.
I couldn't cry. I think I just looked at him.
I just stared at him.
For a while.
Can you describe that meeting?
I mean, you had to meet
outside, I think, right?
Yeah.
We met at a
little tea house
in the town where
Alan was living.
Concord
is called Concord Tea Cakes, actually.
So he was sitting outside.
I saw him sitting there
and he was sitting by himself.
When Alan was inside the shop
when I approached him,
I could actually see
that he was shaking.
He just seemed so small
and so scared.
What had her little boy been
thinking for the past two years?
Why did he think
his mother wasn't with him?
What had Alan told him?
Oh, knew that Priscilla had been in prison.
What other stories about her had
taken hold in his mind?
I felt helpless in a way, you know?
I just said hi.
I didn't try to touch him
because I could tell
that he was scared.
So I just said hi.
And I just sat next to him
and I let him kind of come to me.
Do you remember anything he said to you?
He asked me for this
porridge that he used to like
kind of, he had loved it since he was
a baby.
And he called it blue parched.
He just said to me,
did you bring blue parched?
I said, yeah.
They make it in some power.
And I had carried it with me.
He asked me to make it for him
like immediately.
And I did like in a little cup
with warm water.
I made it for him.
And he ate it.
And things would get back
to where they were.
If you could remember simple things like that.
Yeah.
You know, that was just
so heartbreaking
to listen to
and to imagine.
Yeah.
And then you also talked about the second time
Alan and I'm going to take
the one for which he was
charged with kidnapping.
This is this
scene at
the Montreal airport
where they think they're going to
board a flight to London instead.
Alan gets arrested.
And it had been
reduced to this
ridiculous story
that Lana told in this
over the top way.
And I would quote from her wacky
Facebook messages
to close friends.
Yeah.
And hearing this story
from Priscilla's perspective,
which is really
O's perspective,
just how absolutely terrifying
it was for him. He's a little boy.
That's his dad
who gets tackled
by several armed
uniformed men
and thrown to the ground.
He gets dragged off.
Oh, gets taken
into foster care for two days
in a row.
And then
it's the distance.
It's the international
border. It's just
just the pain of it
is kind of unbearable.
Yeah.
And so then another thing
that you did in your reporting is
that you went to Alan's
trial for attempted murder.
So the trial didn't happen
for another
year.
And by that point,
I think I fully believed
that Alan had
taken out a hit in Priscilla.
I'd sort of tried and convicted him
in my mind.
But I think most other members
of my family, including Priscilla,
were kind of waiting
for something to emerge
during the trial
that would make it easier to take.
Something that would make
it worse and true,
or maybe it was
true in some way that
wasn't quite so bad.
Which I can't imagine would
have been, and I'm not sure
they could either, but
there was sort of holding out
hope that something would explain it away.
Did you get
Alan's trial partly to
convince your family of his guilt?
Absolutely.
I have to say that makes this podcast
so different from any podcast I've ever heard.
In addition to the mission of
let's find out the truth of what happened.
It's so directed at your family
to nail this down so
everybody can agree on the truth.
Well, it's important in a family
to have a common truth,
especially about your relatives.
But, you know, it got
weirder as it went on.
Okay, so let's just take a break.
And when we come back,
we'll go to the trial,
which includes recordings of Alan
that's like the sopranos
and way more like parks and rack.
All of that will be in a minute
from Chicago Public Radio
when our program continues.
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It's American Life. I'm Eric Glass.
Today's program,
The Idiot,
we're playing excerpts from Em Guesson's new podcast,
new serial podcast called The Idiot.
And Em is here with me.
And so now we get to an incredible part of the story,
which is the trial
because for the first time,
Masha, you get to hear the details
of how Alan arranged for the hit
on his own wife.
And you actually get to hear the undercover recordings
of Alan meeting with the supposed hitman,
who's actually an FBI agent.
And just to explain why
was this FBI man meeting with Alan
in the first place?
So this is something that began
as a money laundering investigation
into this guy named Alex Kislev,
who was one of Alan's business partners.
And then this business partner
asks one of these agents
who he thinks is a mobster
but also maybe connected to the government somehow.
It's not clear what he thinks the guy is.
So the business partner
asks them to help Alan out
because Alan has a problem
with his ex-wife.
And that's how we get
to this meeting
between Alan and the undercover
who is going by the name David.
And so Alan thinks
that he is meeting with David
to arrange to bribe a government official
to get Priscilla deported.
This is UC 4735
and today is
Thursday, June 2nd, 2022.
It's approximately 11.55 AM.
And this is a recording
with Alan Gessen,
the meetings taken place
at the Boca Raton Resort.
The Boca Raton Resort
in Boca Raton, Florida.
David had told Alan to meet him at the Boca Raton
in Boca Raton.
You know those places that added
the to the name of the actual place
to indicate that it's everything you ever imagined
but so much more.
This resort has 19 bars and restaurants
and 4 beach options.
The Boca Raton.
Alan drives up in a white rental car
and I wouldy sedan.
The jury was shown surveillance photos.
He meets David in the lobby
which is like an Italian castle
Florida version.
David is wearing a wire.
Which is your about to hear
is not great for field recording.
Yeah, Alan.
Sorry, Alan.
How are you? How are you doing?
They fist bump.
Alan is wearing
with looks like a black cashmere sweater.
David is dressed in old black,
but they're dressed
to perform their roles.
Alan is being international
in Man of Mystery.
David is going full Mafiosa.
They're macho.
They're gangsters.
They are the Alan and the David
at the Boca Raton.
Yeah, how are you?
Thanks for coming out.
I appreciate it.
No, 100%.
Yeah.
They're going to be in
Earth Towns and the views
beach umbrellas as far as they
I can see.
On the way, Alan summarizes his
very impressive career.
In 2010, I started a massive
diamond mining project
in South Africa.
He sued to Cong on Gola
and maybe it's several miles.
Millions of dollars,
some misadventures,
and a triumph for two later.
Alan gets to the story of his marriage.
And meant this incredibly
beautiful woman,
which was the end of me.
Mr. Celeste?
Yeah.
Listen, I'll always say it's the
pictures that I'll get you.
David testified in court that the
character he was playing was
crass.
He seemed to have that part down.
At the restaurant, it's David's
turn to talk about how impressive
and real he is.
Alex has told you, so my clients
are in Cartagena.
They're all, I'm going to tell you
right now, they're all cartel
level guys, they're all bad asses.
They are a real deal.
When I talk, they don't have
fucking money, they have fuck
everyone. You're talking hundreds of
millions of dollars.
I don't touch the product side.
I don't want to, I don't want to
do anything with any of that shit.
But I just do the money stuff.
I mean, we'll under money.
And that's it. And it's been great.
I've been doing it for 15, 20 years.
Having established their gangster
bonafides, Alan and they
undercover talk business.
There are two items on the agenda,
the bulletproof vest factory, Alan
wants to build, and Priscilla.
Like, I understand, you know,
through Alex that you have some
problems. You know, I get it.
You know, we have a solution for
you, but I guess the question is
like, in a perfect world,
tell me what you want.
Tell me what you like.
And there's a blank slate.
Just tell me what you want.
Alan says he wants Priscilla
to port it. He needs this
for peace of mind.
And he will be as it comes in the rest.
Okay. All right.
It doesn't want her to quote
be able to come and harass us
ever again. He then explains
what he means by harass.
A few months earlier, Priscilla had the
police that he had kidnapped O.
But he had, in fact, been arrested
for taking O across the border to
Canada and spent five weeks in jail
and was now waiting trial and kidnapping
charges. He tells David, let's just say
that I'm a little bit pissed off.
We just say that I'm a little pissed off.
Yeah, yeah. I get it.
It's a woman who will go
towards the length of the world
to make my life easier.
But it's a woman who will go the length
of the world to make my life miserable.
Women. Am I right?
Yeah, I'm telling you, man.
Yeah, like I said, you know, historically
over time, men have made the worst
decisions, you know, when it comes to women.
You know, it's, uh, I don't know what it is.
They're that after easy act, you know,
they, it's that weakness or
Achilles heel. But, uh,
yeah, I understand that.
I wish I had known you earlier because, you know,
a lot of that shit we could have cleaned up.
You know, there's no doubt about that.
Let's just put it this way.
That would never have happened in my family.
Amid all this broy gangstri hot air,
the vaguest outlines of a plan appear.
A bribe will be paid.
Some government officials will pull some strings
and Priscilla will be ordered to leave the country.
And it will cost $100,000.
At first, Alan seems taken aback by the price tag.
Okay.
Now, um, I'll need to get that to Alan.
Okay.
A group who would have handled the material side of the thing.
Okay.
Because he never mentioned to me any of the things that he didn't mention to me.
Kisilev didn't discuss the money with Alan, he explains.
But he quickly recovers from the sticker shock.
The price is evident that we've seen it.
Okay. But what it's worth.
And there's no question that it's a good investment.
Right.
A good investment.
Let's just hit pay more in child support.
I'll pay more in child support.
Oh, yeah, you would.
Yeah.
After everything Priscilla had gone through to get to the US
to see her son again,
Alan was going to send her back to Zimbabwe.
After everything Oh had gone through,
being separated from his mother for two and a half years,
meeting her again,
watching his father get arrested,
going to live with his mother in a sister he barely knew.
Alan was going to yank him away from Priscilla again.
And he was going to deprive Elle,
who was three,
of the only parent she had ever known.
All for the eminently reasonable price of $100,000.
And we hadn't even gotten to the murder for a higher plot yet.
On the tape,
Alan and David move on to the details
of the bulletproof vest factory scheme.
This part of the conversation
goes a little later on.
This part of the conversation goes a little less smoothly.
Alan had it all figured out
that get US government funding
and build a factory,
and he thought David was in a position to get him that money.
David, though, is much more interested in the bribe part.
In court, he testified that he went to the meeting
expecting to talk about the deportation scheme,
not the factory.
But he is nimble.
He tells Elle that he could bring in money
from the Colombian drug cartels to invest in the factory.
Remember,
the FBI has been trying for years to get Kiselev
and now Alan on money laundering.
But Alan isn't really incriminating himself.
He actually expresses some concerns about the drug money.
After an hour or so,
the conversation turns back to Priscilla.
Alan says, quote,
the first order of business
is to get her the fuck out of here.
End quote.
To get Priscilla deported.
Or,
and this is where he suddenly,
turns the conversation in a different direction.
This is the heart of the prosecution's case.
Let's listen carefully.
Yeah.
I've been friendly.
There's a cheaper way to get rid of her.
I mean,
I have, listen.
I have family in your area.
Remember,
David is supposed to be a Mafioso.
That's the kind of family he's talking about.
A minute later,
he will refer to friends in the North End.
Historically, an Italian neighborhood in Boston.
He's opening for Alan,
a door to the underworld.
So,
I don't know how to say this,
but like,
there is a cheaper way
and probably a more permanent way to do it.
A more permanent way.
In case Alan didn't understand what David was getting out.
Is this?
Yeah.
I mean, that's up to you.
Alan would like to proceed.
Okay.
The time that elapses between the agent saying,
that's up to you.
And Alan's agreement to proceed
with the more permanent option
is a fraction of a second.
He doesn't take a breath.
He doesn't pretend to consider the decision.
He doesn't double-check that he understood the agent correctly.
He doesn't even ask how much money he'll save
by going for the cheaper option.
He jumps right in with both feet.
And then it gets worse.
Alan says that he had looked into this more permanent option before.
That he talked to Israelis
and Eastern Europeans and Italians
and the lowest estimate he got
was $120,000.
The prosecutor stopped the tape
and repeated what Alan had said.
I researched my sources.
The lowest price was $220.
And then that is run through the Israelis
and Eastern Europe and Italy.
She asked the undercover agent
but he had understood Alan to be saying.
The agent answered,
my understanding was that Mr. Guesson
had already researched the option to kill his wife.
And had been in conversation
or had done some research with other organized crime syndicates.
In this case, Israelis
were Eastern Europe
for the price of $220,000.
The agent who had worked on murder for higher cases before
testified in court that it hit his cheek.
Hit scene people agreed to kill someone
for his little is $200.
On the tape, David assures Alan
that his friends in the North end
are more dependable and affordable
than those other guys.
The Israelis are the Eastern Europeans
and as that they can get the job done quickly.
Alan likes this
and he clarifies
more definite.
The prosecutor asked,
when you heard Mr. Guesson say
and more definite,
what was your understanding of that?
The agent answered,
more definite as permanent,
dead.
I'd seen FBI agents
testify in court before.
Often I've been skeptical.
Their interpretations of what people say
to them can be far-fetched.
Their entrapment techniques are often crude and mendacious.
I've seen cases
where they undercover agent talks a person
into a crime they had no intention of committing.
But this was different.
I couldn't imagine
annual alternative interpretation of the tape
had just heard.
Alan wanted Priscilla Killed
and he wanted David to know that he wanted Priscilla Killed.
He said that with the bribery's game
he was worried that Priscilla could fight her
deportation in court
and maybe even win.
Murder is better than deportation that way.
Of course.
We can handle that.
I just didn't know what your appetite for that was.
But if you feel that way
we can make that happen and it will be very clean.
It'll be quick.
And it will be final.
But you've got to tell me you have played that
to the route that you want to play.
My secret concern is
I used to be sure that we'd come up
after the end of Priscilla Killed.
This is the only thing that gives Alan pause.
He doesn't want the kids to see their mother getting killed.
No, no, no. God does the police.
No, no, no.
We're all family men.
This is strictly business.
It's strictly business.
You know, it was like,
wouldn't you make sure to do the quiver?
No, no, no, no.
No, this would be very clean professional jobs.
Reassured, Alan asks about the cost.
I think it's probably half the cost to sell your truth.
Yeah.
Much easier.
Okay.
Very happy to proceed with it.
What a productive meeting for their undercover agent.
He came for bribery
and was leaving with murder for hire.
Now he just needed Alan to confirm
that he intended to go through with it
so that when Alan eventually went to trial
he couldn't say that he was misunderstood.
And now here we were.
At that trial,
listening to and looking at all the times
and all the ways,
Alan said that yes, he really meant it.
He wanted Priscilla Killed.
When you have to be sure
that this is when you're okay.
This is the first time.
The agent asks Alan if he's sure.
And Alan says,
I'm sure.
And he adds.
I'm sure.
This sounds like it's been well thought out.
Listen, yeah.
I didn't want to.
I'm glad we have talked about it
because honestly that's the way I would have handled it.
But that's the guy that you got to become.
Okay.
Alan says that this is not an emotional decision.
Not spur of the moment.
He's comfortable with it.
Sometimes they dig around fucking crazy.
Right, yeah.
Don't fuck with me.
There's a bit more back and forth.
David will need pictures of Priscilla,
location, everything for the people who do the job.
And then, just like that,
Alan is showing David pictures of the kids.
Ah, what's his name?
Oh, ****.
Oh, man.
I'm the one who made you a daughter.
Beautiful.
Of course, we can give you the movie footage.
Yeah, gorgeous.
On there.
Beautiful kids.
Beautiful poodle.
Beautiful life.
The only problem is Priscilla.
Surely after seeing these photos,
David would see what a great father Alan was.
He'll even better about helping Alan get rid of the fly in the ointment.
But David has a question.
What is this going to do to the kids emotionally?
How do we protect the kids?
Like, I guess they're too young to, they're young too.
But how do we protect the kids?
Look, they're going to lose their mother, right?
She's fucking gone.
How do we protect the kids?
As long as they're not witness to violence,
that's the word he used.
Violence.
No, they won't be.
Yeah, they won't be.
I mean, she'll be taken out without them present.
Then I guess you can explain it, how you explain it.
But just know that, you know, like,
I now that I'm seeing pictures of that,
I just want to make sure that they're okay.
I got a heart, too, you know, like, I ****.
You know, don't get me wrong.
I'll put the white switch when I need to.
But, you know, when I look at those kids like that,
you know, they're beautiful to me.
The undercover agent is methodical.
He keeps coming closer to saying she will be killed,
and he keeps pushing Alan to consider
the hypothetical stakes.
The children will lose their mother forever.
Alan blindly keeps incriminating himself.
As long as the kids wouldn't see the murder happen,
he didn't have other concerns.
They wrap up their meeting.
Alan has a plan to catch.
The undercover agent has a lot to work with.
This is UC 4735.
And today is Thursday June 2nd, 2022.
And this is the conclusion of a recorded conversation
with Alan Gessen.
So that all sounds very damning and very conclusive.
Yeah.
And then a few other people testified against Alan,
including Priscilla.
And then Alan took the stand.
Which is also very unusual for a criminal trial.
Usually people don't testify in their own defense.
And he tried to convince the jury
that he had only wanted Priscilla to port it
and that he did not want her killed.
And so he went through with his attorney.
All those exchanges on tape and on text,
trying to argue that all of them were just,
the tabular misunderstandings.
And they were just misunderstanding each other somehow.
They were just talking at cross purposes.
And so has it go over with the jury?
The jury doesn't buy it.
The jury convicted him pretty fast of murder for hire.
And then almost a whole year later,
he was finally sentenced.
And at the sentencing hearing,
his lawyer again tried to say
that he was only trying to get Priscilla to port it.
At which point the judge said,
you know, that crime that you're describing
is actually called kidnapping.
And it's punishable by up to 20 years in prison.
So maybe just stop.
And then she sentenced him to the maximum,
which is 10 years of prison.
And there's this whole other chapter to the story.
Because once he was incarcerated,
you started talking to Alan.
You finally talk to Alan.
Which I feel like when we started on the story,
we didn't even know if that would ever happen.
We assumed he probably would never talk to you.
Yeah, I can't even describe how excited it was
when I got an email from him saying that he was happy to talk.
And it was interesting because once you started talking,
I remember this so vividly,
you were genuinely surprised
where the conversations went and how they nudged your own ideas
about Alan and who he is.
So at first it didn't.
At first he was just trying to sell me what the jury didn't buy.
Which was that he was framed.
He was only trying to get prosciutto-ported.
But then I think we both proved to be very stubborn.
And I was like, okay, well, you know,
maybe his job is to try to bullshit me.
And my job is to try to cut through the bullshit.
And 35 hours of conversations later,
and genuinely felt compassion for him.
And then you ran by Alan,
and you went for the audience too,
your own theory of the case.
Which is not Alan's theory.
And not exactly the undercarriage in David's theory either.
And we will leave it at that.
If people want to hear what that theory is,
then they need to listen to the show,
the show again.
And then they need to listen to the show.
The show again is called The Idiot.
It's from serial productions in the New York Times.
And you can get it wherever you get your podcast.
I'm not sure thank you so much for doing this.
Thank you, Aaron.
I'll just say before we go to all of you who are listening,
you may remember how serial productions basically invented and launched
the True Crime podcast genre.
Back in 2014, with its first season,
and the story of Agnan Sayad,
which is kind of a global phenomenon.
20 million people downloaded every episode.
This new show The Idiot
takes serial back to their True Crime Roots.
But with this very personal story
from end-guessing added to it,
we're dead so much.
All the episodes are out right now.
The Idiot was produced by Daniel Gehmett,
with Fia Benin, an android boy Zenko,
and Wicked Kremmer,
of Lebow Lebow Studios.
The series was edited by Julie Snyder,
a research and fact-checked by Ben Falen,
and Marisa Robertson Texter,
squaring by Alison Wighten Brown,
with additional music from Dan Powell,
and Mary Anglesano.
Phoebe Lang and Catherine Anderson
mixed the show.
The people helped put together
this episode of The Idiot.
The people helped put together
this episode of our program today,
include Cassie Howley,
Seth Lindt, Tobin Lowe,
Stone Nelson, and Alyssa Shipp,
a managing editor-saurant,
or senior editor-david-custom-bound,
or executive editor-manual-barry.
Our website,
thisamericanlife.org.
We can stream our archive
of over 850 episodes for absolutely free.
Have you visited?
Again, thisamericanlife.org.
Thanks to the public radio exchange.
Thanks as always to our program's co-founder,
Mr. Tori Malatia.
You know, he's telling me this week,
about this time,
long ago, his dad took him to see the circus
in Queens, in New York.
As they left the venue,
he overheard another kid,
this kid with a puff of blonde hair,
just amazed.
They brought some huge, huge tent,
I never saw such a tent.
I'm Aaron Glass.
That's it for the family.
You got it on my knee.
You got it on my knee.
That's it for the family.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
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