The Brothers (7 page)

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THE BIG QUESTION
facing the family was how to make Tamerlan succeed. One look at him and you knew he was destined for greatness—an impression confirmed by people outside the family. The physical grace of his large body, and his sharp features and large dark eyes, turned heads and messed with them. But he had lived in seven cities and attended an even greater number of schools. True, he could play keyboard and aspired to good grades, but with his late start in America, how was he to assert his potential? Anzor and Zubeidat did what immigrants do: they asked others for advice. They were lectured on the relative merits of different colleges, and learned that even the public ones carried a frightening price tag. They sorted through lists of possible professions. Would their golden boy be an engineer, a performer, an entrepreneur?

Khassan Baiev suggested martial arts. It was a terrible suggestion. If Almut Rochowanski, the legal scholar who founded the group for Chechen refugees, were to classify immigrants from the Caucasus, she just might divide them into two groups: those who push their male children into martial arts and those who do not. It is the second group that will succeed; the first group’s assumptions come from the old country. Back in the Caucasus, if you took at least one national title in wrestling, boxing, or any other fighting sport, you were set for life. In return for the honor you brought your region, you would get a gym of your own to run and, more often than not, a seat on one of the so-called legislative bodies. In the United States, a martial-arts career was generally a dead end, one that would leave a man cocky, injured, unemployed, and unassimilated by his late twenties.

Khassan Baiev’s own experience was exceptional, but neither he nor Anzor and Zubeidat knew this. He had been a man with a career in Russia, then a man with money, then, in Chechnya, a man with a mission. In the United States, he was a man with a tragic and glorious past and too much time on his hands. He tried volunteering at a Boston-area hospital and quickly despaired of ever building a medical career in the United States; he also grew profoundly disillusioned with the American medical system. Then a friend suggested he try competing in sambo again—the sport had once helped him overcome discriminatory Soviet university admissions policies and set him on his way to becoming a doctor. Again it worked a miracle. Baiev became a champion in his early forties. It did not exactly lead to making a good life in the United States—he ended up starting a practice in Russia and supporting his family’s neat middle-class Boston life from there—but for him martial arts were a proven magic bullet. What is more, this was the one thing Anzor could do for his son in the new country: he started training Tamerlan in boxing.

Tamerlan was a naturally gifted fighter, if an unconventional one—though it is impossible to tell whether his unusual stance came naturally or was the result of Anzor’s training. Rather than defend his body and face while he boxed, he let his long arms hang down. He could look overconfident if he was winning, which he often was, or vulnerable, literally unguarded, if he was beaten, which happened rarely. After training with Anzor at home, he worked his way through a series of Boston-area gyms to the Wai Kru Mixed Martial Arts center in the neighborhood of Allston, just across the river from Cambridge. When he first showed up, he had no mouthpiece, helmet, or other standard protective gear and insisted that he did not need them. This suggested to the owner that Tamerlan was either a buffoon or a boxing genius; with time, it seems, he concluded that the boy was a bit of each.

One of the few documents of Tamerlan’s life to have become public before his crime and his death is a photo essay shot by a young man named Johannes Hirn in 2009 and published in a Boston University graduate student magazine the next year. Titled “Will Box for Passport,” it offers a tellingly inaccurate narrative: Tamerlan says his goal is to make the U.S. Olympic team and become a naturalized citizen that way—though as an asylee, he should have qualified for citizenship anyway. He also says, “I don’t have a single American friend. I don’t understand them,” though his best friend at the time, former classmate Brendan Mess, was an American. He also claims to be from Chechnya and to have fled it with his family in the early nineties, when the fighting broke out. None of this is gravely untrue, but all of it is a sort of shorthand for a story he had come to tell about himself, one in which he was a stranger in a strange land and boxing his only hope. The photographer seems to have had an inkling that Tamerlan’s self-presentation was not entirely accurate. One large black-and-white picture in the spread shows him wearing high-tops, chinos, and no shirt, smiling while sparring with a young woman. The caption reads: “Tsarnaev says he doesn’t usually remove his shirt when among women at the gym.”

The strange thing about Anzor and Tamerlan’s outsize ambition for Tamerlan’s boxing career—the plans for stardom and for a spot on the Olympic team, if not the expectation of Hollywood-style prosperity to follow—was that it was not entirely unreasonable. With his ability, training, and drive, Tamerlan could have had an Olympic career. But he did not.

His first victory came in January 2004, just six months after coming to the United States: he won in the 178-pound novice class in the Golden Gloves amateur competition in Lowell, Massachusetts. He got a trophy and gave an interview to the Lowell
Sun
. “I like the USA,” he said. “You have a chance to make a lot of money here if you are willing to work.” He had not yet seen anyone who had actually made money in the United States, but this was what he had been told. He started climbing quickly but dropped boxing abruptly during his senior year of high school—he needed to concentrate on academics in order to graduate.

In 2006 he started at Bunker Hill Community College, a lonely sixties building perched at the intersection of two highways in Charlestown, near the boundary with Cambridge. This two-year college, which he attended part-time, was not what anyone had imagined in Tamerlan’s brilliant future. He did not return to competing until 2008—but when he did, his boxing prospects again began to shine. In 2009 he made it to the national amateur boxing competition in Salt Lake City. The next year, he got the Rocky Marciano Trophy for winning the New England Golden Gloves competition. He did not, however, go on to the nationals that year: the federation had changed its rules, and noncitizens were now excluded. After that, he let his amateur boxing registration lapse.

There is a footnote to Tamerlan’s boxing career. More than a year after it was over, he called Musa Khadzhimuratov, the paraplegic former bodyguard living in New Hampshire, and said he was traveling to a competition, flying out of Manchester, New Hampshire, and wanted to leave his car with Khadzhimuratov. “He had a cold,” Khadzhimuratov told me later. “I noticed on the way to the airport how bad it was. I said, ‘They are not going to let you compete in that condition, there is no point in getting on the airplane.’” They stopped at a drugstore and loaded up on antihistamines and decongestants. When Tamerlan returned a few days later, he said he had come very close to beating his first opponent but then the judge had noticed he was ill and disqualified him.

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TAMERLAN
had long since dropped out of Bunker Hill. He still planned to be a star, though. He played keyboard. He talked of becoming a performer, a musician and dancer. He often, though not always, dressed ostentatiously: flowing shirts unbuttoned all the way down to his navel, huge scarves, and pointy shiny shoes that accentuated his swagger. He looked like an Italian gigolo, and he told the graduate student photographer that he dressed “European style.” He had two girlfriends, a pretty, white American-born woman named Katherine Russell and an aspiring model named Nadine Ascencao. Tamerlan had gone to Rindge and Latin with Nadine, except there she had been one of the least popular girls in the ESL crowd. Sometime after graduation, she transformed herself: she got the clothes, the hair, and the makeup that she had lacked in high school, and she dropped her Cape Verdean identity, claiming instead to be Italian. She also started dating Tamerlan, who had been the object of desire of so many Rindge girls—while he claimed that boxing was his only “babe.” At some point in 2009, both Nadine and Katherine may have been living at 410 Norfolk Street.

By this time, taking multiple wives had become if not common then at least accepted back in Chechnya, which was in the process of inventing its own form of fundamentalist religious rule. So his parents might not have objected to such an arrangement. Anzor did object strenuously to Tamerlan’s plan to marry Katherine. Boston Chechens gossiped that Anzor told his son, “Look how marrying a non-Chechen woman got me nothing but trouble. Don’t make the same mistake.” The fact that Katherine, who had grown up in Rhode Island, the daughter of a surgeon and a nurse, converted to Islam in order to marry Tamerlan did not convince Anzor. If anything, it irritated him—his wife and son had slowly, in spurts, begun exploring religion, but in Anzor’s mind Islam had nothing to do with being Chechen; it merely obscured the real issue, which was that Katherine was not and could not be one of them.

Like Zubeidat before her, Katherine, who after converting called herself Karima, had to leave the family’s home to have her baby; unlike his father before him, Tamerlan did not accompany her. Karima was staying with her own parents in Rhode Island when she gave birth to a daughter, Zahira, in October 2010. About four months later, Tamerlan moved them to Norfolk Street. Zahira did what babies do: she created family. Soon Zubeidat was spending all her free time with her, and both Anzor and Dzhokhar appeared smitten with the baby and her mother.

By 2011, Tamerlan was neither a boxing champion nor a music star nor even a college student, but a twenty-four-year-old father living with his parents, his siblings, and his own family in a three-bedroom apartment. What was he doing for work? Since his first year at Bunker Hill, he had made some change delivering pizza. He had done some van driving for Max Mazaev, who had started his senior-care center and was rapidly expanding it. In 2009, Tamerlan got an arrest record when Nadine called the police to Norfolk Street after he slapped her. Though she eventually dropped the charges, this may be why he did not have his U.S. citizenship, for which he should have been able to apply in 2009 or 2010—and this helps explain both the unexpected discovery, on the part of the Golden Gloves association, that he was not a citizen, and the almost magical thinking evident in what he told the photographer about “boxing for a passport.” At some point, Tamerlan had also started dealing pot. He was small-time, a runner—an occupation that often goes hand in hand with delivering pizza, so it is not clear which came first.

Pot was the scourge of Cambridge Rindge and Latin. Some kids would just start fading out, and by the time they graduated they seemed to have no presence. Brendan Mess, Tamerlan’s best friend, had been like that. His grades had tanked and his college ambitions had evaporated. But a few years later, he seemed to get his act together. He had been accepted to college, he was boxing—his friend Tamerlan had been taking him to the gym—and he looked more pulled together than he had since junior year in high school. Then he was dead: on September 12, 2011, Mess, thirty-one-year-old Erik Weissman, also a Rindge graduate, and thirty-seven-year-old Raphael Teken were found in Mess’s apartment in Waltham, a western suburb of Boston. Their throats had been slit. Their bodies were strewn with loose cash and loose marijuana—thousands of dollars’ worth. When Mess and Weissman were buried in a joint ceremony, Tamerlan did not show up. A whisper kept shuffling through the crowd: “Where is Tam?” or “Where is Timmy?” depending on who was asking.

Tamerlan might in fact have been at his mysterious boxing tournament—the one from which he claimed to have been disqualified because of a cold—or, with his registration as a fighter expired for more than a year, the entire exercise might have been a ruse invented for the purpose of getting himself and his car out of town for a few days. After the murders, he stopped going to the gym where he had been training with Mess.

The murders were never solved or, really, investigated. The police appeared to write them off as just more drug-related crime, even though Boston’s drug dealers had not been known to settle scores in ways so gruesome and so bizarre. It was in the course of talking to people who had known Tamerlan or Mess, however, that I discovered that Tamerlan had also been dealing.

How was it possible for the adults not to notice that Tamerlan was not so much delivering pizzas or senior citizens as making money selling marijuana, which is what kept him in his flashy clothes? The answer is, there was no one around to notice. The household’s relationship with money had created a mess of debts.The family’s federal benefits were revoked and reinstated at irregular intervals. Unanticipated, sometimes catastrophic medical expenses became a regular occurrence, creating more debts covered by impossible promises. No one was thinking straight about money—or about anything else. Each member of the Tsarnaev family was descending into a separate personal hell.

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AILINA’S TROUBLES
started out small. In eighth grade she began getting into fights, especially with one girl. The school required counseling, and the Tsarnaevs complied. Joanna suggested that instead of going on to Cambridge Rindge and Latin, where the social dynamics might follow her, Ailina apply to a newly formed charter school. She did, as did Dzhokhar, and both were admitted. (Dzhokhar was two grades behind Ailina, but there was no division between middle and high school levels at this school; after he finished middle school, though, he enrolled at Rindge and Latin.) The girl with whom Ailina had been fighting also entered the school, but, much to the relief of everyone at 410 Norfolk Street, she was expelled within a month.

The summer before ninth grade, Ailina joined Bella on a trip to Washington state to stay with Uncle Ruslan, who had returned from Almaty, and his family. Ruslan’s wife had a younger brother, Elmirza Khozhugov, who was studying at a nearby college. It seemed like a good idea for him to marry one of the Tsarnaev girls. Bella would not hear of it, so this left Ailina. To most Americans, the looming arrangement would have looked disturbing. Ailina was a rising high school freshman, a slight girl with typical American teenage speech and a gaggle of friends from her hip-hop class; she liked to lead people to believe she was Latin American. Joanna probably saw more of the nuance: Ailina was slightly older than her classmates, and by the time of the wedding, she would be around the age her own mother had been when she married Anzor. And unlike their own mother, Ailina and Bella did not have parents trying to force marriage matches on them. Anzor, for example, accepted Bella’s refusal to marry Elmirza—as long as she accepted the fact that she would be allowed to marry only another Chechen.