884: The Idiot

Support for this American Life comes from Squarespace. The all-in-one platform for creating a fully custom on-brand website. Choose from a wide range of professionally designed award-winning templates with options for every user category. Showcase your offerings with a website designed to grow your business, and manage payments seamlessly with branded invoices and online payments. Visit squarespace.com slash American to get 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. A quick warning, there are curse words that are unbeeped in today's episode of the show. If you prefer a beeped version, you can find that at our website, thisamericanlife.org. From WBEZ Chicago, it's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass, and I am joined in the studio by M. Gessen. Hello. Hi, Ira. 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's 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. Like, it just, 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, which you've been writing drafts that have sat in on. And I just want to say, like, I just, I love this show and 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 listen to the whole thing from WBZ Chicago. It's This American Life. I'm Ira 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 that 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 made bad decisions, said things they hoped 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 that bad, that shocking. That person was my cousin Alan. He and his mother, my father's sister Lena, came to the U.S. 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 go stripe 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 O. 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. 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're still a few years away from that. I called my dad. He told me that Alan had just shown up at his house on Cape Cod without warning. His five-year-old son was with him, as was 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 O on 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 the ordeal 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 their 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, no. I understood that something is wrong with their marriage, 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 father's, everyone acted like, Hey, sometimes men and their mothers just change continents with a five-year-old in tow. And here's the thing. 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 Gessen 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 It turned out a message in the family chat, as 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 bought too 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 had 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. 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 and lights and devices. Solar chargers, rugs, two full mattresses, a treasure trunk with treasors, 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're 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 Altin's 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. What was in the paper? 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? You... 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 PC. 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 in 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.M. Gessen, 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, I mean, obviously, there are some parts of that title that might be appealing to Alan. It's a reference to a classic work of Russian literature, Dostoevsky's novel The Idiot. And I think there's a little bit of kindness in that title. I think that I'm giving him the grace of perceiving what he did as 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 in the end is alive and he's serving only a 10-year sentence. Yeah. So after that, you begin reporting. And as you say at the end of episode one, you start with Priscilla. What happens? I'd 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 who'd come to the U.S. to try to get custody back of her child. But I didn't know how the 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 at a party in Harare, the capital of Zimbabwe. Alan was there on business, scoping out investment opportunities for Ukrainian oligarchs. He was hustling. As my son described him once, he was an egg who knows 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 convenient in a way. Alan wasn't readable to Priscilla the way someone from Zimbabwe might be. She could project her desires onto him, including her desire for success. Priscilla was working at a new lifestyle magazine and had launched the Barbie's annual 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 Joburg. I'm like, okay. And you get up and you go, just like at the drop of a hat. And then we would go here and there and here and there. 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 happen early on in a romance and should raise a giant red flag, but somehow never do. My aunt Lena 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 like these doors that opened outside. I just looked in and I saw him like lying on her bed and she was like lying there, like stroking his hair. I found that, well, his head. I found that so weird. I was like, wow, this is a grown man. And like, it seemed a little too intimate for me. Like in my culture, I guess maybe because we are very distant, you don't even hug. Like you wouldn't Scene at the Montreal airport where they think they're going to board a flight to London and instead Alan gets arrested. And it had been reduced to this ridiculous story that Lena told in this over-the-top way. And I would quote from her wacky Facebook messages to close friends. And hearing the 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 that's his dad who gets tackled by several armed uniformed men and thrown to the ground. He gets dragged off. O gets taken into foster care for two days before Priscilla can come and pick him up. And, you know, and again, she's separated from him. Like 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. The trial didn't happen for another 10 months, which is pretty normal. It's in federal court in San Francisco. So I went to the trial and by that point, I think I fully believed that Alan had taken out a hit on 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 seem like not such a horrible thing. Like maybe it wasn't true or maybe it was true in some way that wasn't quite so bad. Which I can't imagine what it would be, and I'm not sure they could either. But there was sort of holding out hope that something would explain it away. Did you go to 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, that it has this second mission, in addition to the mission of like, Let's Find out the Truth of What Happened. It's so directed at your family to like 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 arranging for the hit, which feel, I have to say, way less like The Sopranos and way more like Parks and Rec. All of that will be in a minute from Chicago Public Radio when our program continues. Support for This American Life comes from Squarespace, the all-in-one platform for creating a fully custom on-brand website. Choose from a wide range of professionally designed award-winning templates with options for every user category. Showcase your offerings with a website designed to grow your business and manage payments seamlessly with branded invoices and online payments. Visit squarespace.com slash American to get 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. Support for This American Life comes from Wise, the app for international people using money around the globe. You can spend, send, and receive in up to 40 currencies with only a few simple taps. Be smart. Get Wise. Download the Wise app today or visit wise.com. Ts and Cs apply. It's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. Today's program, The Idiot. We're playing excerpts from M. Gessen's new podcast, new serial podcast called The Idiot. And M. 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 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 Kiselev, 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's 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 a.m., and this is a recording with Alan Gessen. The meeting's taking place at the Boca Raton Resort, Boca Raton, Florida. David had told Alan to meet him at the Boca Raton in Boca Raton. You know those places that add a "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 four beach options. The Boca Raton. Alan drives up in a white rental car, an Audi 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, as you're about to hear, is not great for field recording. Yeah, Alan. Sorry, how are you? How are you doing? Good. Fist bump. Alan is wearing what looks like a black cashmere sweater. David is dressed in all black, polo shirt, shiny pointy black shoes. They're not dressed for Florida. Everyone around them is wearing light colors, but they're dressed to perform their roles. Alan is being international man of mystery. David is going full mafioso. They're macho. They're gangsters. They are the Alan and the David at the Boca Raton. Yeah, how are you? Excellent. Thanks for coming up. I appreciate it. No, 100%. I really my picture a bit a longer beard. I was like, what's going on? They take a shuttle to one of the Boca Raton's restaurants, the Marisol, where the seating is couches in earth tones and the view is beach umbrellas as far as the eye can see. On the way, Alan summarizes his very impressive career. In 2010, I started a massive diamond mining project in South Africa. We sued to Congo, Angola, Namibia. Millions of dollars, some misadventures and a triumph or two later, Alan gets to the story of his marriage. But I went to Zimbabwe once to explore some opportunities there and met this incredibly beautiful woman, which was the end of me. Ms. Priscilla? Yeah. Listen, I always say it's the bitches that'll get you. Sounds like your problem. Yeah. David testified on 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. So we have a lot obviously business in South America. I'm sure Alex has told you. So, you know, 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 badasses. They are the real deal. When I talk, they don't have fuck you money. They have fuck everyone money, right? Like you're talking hundreds of millions of dollars, you know. I don't touch the product side. I don't want to have any fucking deal with the fucking coke. I don't want to do anything with any of that shit, but I just do the money stuff. E establish their gangster bona fides. Alan and the undercover talk business. There are two items on the agenda, the bulletproof vest factory Alan wants to build and Priscilla. Look, 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 deported. He needs this for peace of mind. OK. He 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 nerve to tell 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 awaiting trial on kidnapping charges. He tells David, let's just say that I'm a little bit pissed off. Let's just say that I'm a little bit pissed off. Yeah, yeah, no, I get it. Yeah. It's a woman who will go the length of the world to make my life miserable. But it's a woman who will go the length of the world to make my life miserable, Alan says. Women, am I right? Yeah, I'm telling you, man. Uh, 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 are that aphrodisiac, you know, it's that weakness or Achilles heel. But 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 bro-y, gangstery hot air, the vaguest outlines of a plan appear. A bribe will be paid. Some government officials will pull some strings and Prisc He said that with the bribery scheme, he was worried that Priscilla could fight her deportation in court and maybe even win. Murder is better than deportation that way. This is the only thing that gives Alan pause. He doesn't want the kids to see their mother getting killed. This was the only thing that gives Alan pause. He doesn't want the kids to see their mother getting killed. This is the only thing that gives Alan pause. He doesn't want the kids to see their mother getting killed. Alan says that this is not an emotional decision, not spur of the moment. He's comfortable with it. Sometimes they dig their own fucking grave. 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. This is my son. Ah, what's his name? This is my daughter. Beautiful. Gorgeous. We can get you to know each other. Yeah, gorgeous. 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. Surely, he would feel 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? I guess they're too young too, they're young too, but how do we protect the kids? Look, they're going to lose their mother, right? She's fucking gone, right? How do we protect the kids? As long as they're not witness to violence. That's the word he used, violence. No, they're not. They won't be. Yeah, they won't be. I mean, she'll be taken out without them present. And I guess you can explain it how you explain it, but just know that, you know, 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 fucking, you know. Don't get me wrong, I'll flip the light switch when I need to, but when I look at those kids like that, you know, they're beautiful to me and I just want to make sure they're okay. 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 blithely 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 plane to catch. The undercover agent has a lot to work with. This is UC4735, and today is Thursday, June 2nd, 2022. And this is the conclusion of the 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 deported 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 vocabulary misunderstandings. And that they were just misunderstanding each other somehow. They were just talking at cross purposes. And so how does 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 deported, 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 talked to Alan, which I feel like when we started on the story, like 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 I 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 Priscilla deported. But then I think we both proved to be very stubborn. And I was like, OK, 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, I genuinely felt compassion for him. And then you ran by Alan and you read for the audience too, your own theory of the case. Which is not Alan's theory and not exactly the undercover agent 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 is called The Idiot. It's from Serial Productions and The New York Times. And you can get it wherever you get your podcasts. Masha, thank you so much for doing this. Thank you, Ira. 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 Adnan Syed, which was 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 M. Guessin added to it, which adds so much. All the episodes are out right now. The Idiot was produced by Daniel Giedmet with Fia Bennen and Andrey Boychenko at Ligo-Ligo Studios. The series was edited by Julie Snyder with research and fact-check by Ben Phelan and Marisa Robertson-Texter. Scoring is by Alison Leighton Brown with additional music from Dan Powell and Marion Lozano. Phoebe Wang and Kathryn Anderson mixed the show. The people who helped put together this episode of our program today include Cassie Howley, Seth Lind, Tobin Low, Stone Nelson, and Alyssa Shipp. Our managing editor is Saurabh Dhiraman. Our senior editor, David Kestenbaum. Our executive editor, Emanuel Barry. Our website, thisamericanlife.org, where you can stream our archive of over 850 episodes for absolutely free. Have you visited? Again, thisamericanlife.org. This American Life is delivered to public radio stations by PRX, the Public Radio Exchange. Thanks, as always, to our program's co-founder, Mr. Tori Malatia. You know, he was 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 Ira Glass. Back next week with more stories of This American Life. The flagship of the family. You got me on my knees. The flagship of the family. The flagship of the family.