The Tsarnaevs joined a loose-knit social scene made up of the few Chechen families in the Boston area. They’d arrive at picnics in their humble used Hyundai, the gaggle of children in the back. But the appearances of the two parents, Anzor and Zubeidat, spoke of grander visions. “She was very glamorous, very fancy, like she was going to walk down the red carpet,” said Anna Nikaeva, a Chechen who runs a senior care facility outside Boston with her husband. “Anzor was also dressed finely and he was most handsome. They had big plans for their kids in America.”
Their American dreams had taken root years earlier in the chaos of Anzor’s homeland of Kyrgyzstan. The Tsarnaev clan had lived for generations in the foothills of the Caucasus in Chechnya, but they were forced out in 1944 when Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin viciously exiled the Chechen people to Central Asia and Siberia. Tens of thousands starved or froze to death along the journey. Anzor’s father, Zaindy, just eleven years old at the time, was one of those who made it. He built a life in Tokmok, a rambling provincial city in what is now Kyrgyzstan. Like many others trying to scrape by, Zaindy scavenged in a local dump nicknamed the “Golden Pit” for items or scrap to sell. One day in 1988, he threw some promising metal objects into his car, unaware that live ordnance was among them. The car exploded, killing the father of seven—Tamerlan and Dzhokhar’s grandfather.
Like his father, Anzor learned to work with other people’s wreckage and fix junked cars. It gave him a way to make a living, and to support his wife, Zubeidat, whom he had met in the mid-1980s, and their four children. Theirs was an unlikely union: the exotic, dark-haired young woman was an ethnic Avar; her people, from Chechnya’s neighbor to the east, Dagestan, historically had a tense relationship with the Chechens. Zubeidat had already fled an arranged marriage, a shockingly unconventional act in that tradition-bound time and culture. But Anzor and Zubeidat both were strong-willed, and they paid no attention to gossip. She was a dramatic beauty, prone to excess. He was a strapping former boxer and talented raconteur. More than a few envied their seemingly passionate marriage.
In the early 1990s, Anzor took the family to Chechnya, a province of Russia that had declared its independence. In late 1994, the Kremlin sent in Russian troops, in an attempt to put down the rebellion. Tens of thousands died and hundreds of thousands fled. The Tsarnaevs were among them, landing back in Tokmok, Kyrgyzstan. Anzor returned to the business of refurbishing cars. His three sisters and one of his brothers earned law degrees at a university in the capital, Bishkek, according to school records. Anzor would later say that he, too, earned a law degree, but the university had no record of it. He did work in a district prosecutor’s office in Bishkek, likely in a role akin to an unpaid internship. The connection provided Anzor with something perhaps more valuable than a law degree—an ID card from the prosecutor’s office. This credential helped him evade corrupt officials and extortion gangs who sought to muscle in on his true livelihood: “shuttle trading” (moving consumer goods in the ruins of the Communist economy). Anzor and his uncle transported tobacco from a factory in southern Kyrgyzstan to buyers elsewhere in the former Soviet Union. It was a good but risky business.
Their primary motivation for leaving their homeland for America remains murky, but according to a story his wife would tell an associate years later, Anzor had drawn the wrath of the Russian mob. She said her husband had played a role in the prosecution of some mafia members involved in illegal trading. After the case was over, according to Zubeidat’s account, the mob kidnapped Anzor for a week, tortured him to the brink of death, and then dumped him from a truck in the middle of nowhere. Zubeidat said she knew, when she went to the hospital and saw how badly he’d been beaten, that it was time to leave the country. But the mob’s henchmen weren’t finished yet. Before Anzor could leave the hospital, she said, someone took the family’s German shepherd, cut off its head, and left it on the Tsarnaevs’ doorstep. A longtime family friend would later say that Anzor, to win escape from Kyrgyzstan, concocted false stories about persecution of the Chechen people. That would give him political asylum—the status he needed to stay in the United States, a place the Tsarnaevs had idealized from afar. They had watched their share of Hollywood movies. The country looked so beautiful, the life there so promising. “Let’s go to America,” Anzor once told a friend, Bakhtiar Nurmenov. “Why should we sit here and rust?”
• • •
Their building stood out for the noise. By 2008, five years after the family of six—Anzor and Zubeidat, along with their sons, Tamerlan and Dzhokhar, and two daughters, Bella and Ailina—had reunited in the United States, the Tsarnaevs were an even larger clan. Their apartment, in a multifamily house packed in among many others on Norfolk Street in Cambridge, near Inman Square, was now as loud as it was cramped. At varying times there were one or two babies—the children of the Tsarnaevs’ two teenage daughters—in the apartment as well, all of them occupying eight hundred square feet of living space. Their shoes spilled down the stairway; their voices rang out from the windows. The babies cried day and night. When the older children were around, the place got even louder, especially when Tamerlan practiced his favorite hip-hop riffs on his keyboard. None of them, however, could match the sheer volume of Zubeidat, the matriarch of the household and a woman not known for restraint. Neighbors had to cover their ears at times to find peace.
In their early years in America, the family had plunged into their new life with gusto. Tamerlan, Bella, Ailina, and Dzhokhar attended local public schools. Dzhokhar thrived at his elementary school, the Cambridgeport School. Initially held back because of his deficiencies in English, he was reading so proficiently by the end of third grade that he was bumped up to fifth grade. His parents had deemed him the brains of the family, destined to be the first to earn a diploma from an American college. Anzor would boast to friends that Dzhokhar was Ivy League material.
It was their firstborn son, Tamerlan, though, who carried the family’s hopes for athletic distinction. Zubeidat was forever musing about his brilliant prospects as he became an accomplished amateur boxer. “Tamerlan was idolized,” Anna Nikaeva said. “Anything he said was right. He was perfect.” Except that he wasn’t. One day when the two women were talking, Zubeidat shared a disturbing secret with Nikaeva, something that Tamerlan had said. “He had told his mother that he felt there were two people living inside of him,” Nikaeva said in an interview with the Globe. “I told her, ‘You should get that checked out.’ But she just said, ‘No, he’s fine.’ She couldn’t accept the tiniest criticism of him.” If they never sought mental health care for their son, the Tsarnaevs regularly saw a psychiatrist themselves, a decision motivated by Anzor’s troubles. Alexander Niss, a psychiatrist now based outside Los Angeles, saw Anzor and Zubeidat during his residency at St. Elizabeth’s Medical Center in Boston. Anzor told Niss that he had been captured by federal troops in Chechnya and repeatedly tortured. He told the doctor that his experience “was interfering with his daily life,” Niss said. “He had trouble sleeping, things like that. He was really a sick person.”
Anzor and Zubeidat both scaled back their professional ambitions as they struggled to build a life in the United States. Although Zubeidat said to many that she had trained as a lawyer, she began providing home health care and would eventually switch to cosmetology, providing facials and skin care at a nearby spa and then in her apartment. Chris Walter, owner of Yayla Tribal Rugs in Cambridge, allowed Anzor to work on cars in a space behind his shop. Able to earn up to $100 a day—ten times what he said he could make back home—Anzor was thrilled at first. As time went on, though, he lost affection for his adopted country. “Life here was tough,” Walter said. “Anzor always said, ‘America, America is a great country.’ But it was sort of a joke. You had to work so hard here.”
• • •
After a couple of years in America, Tamerlan had pounded out a steady record of wins in the ring, becoming one of the better boxers in the region. Among other nicknames,
he was known as “The Russian.” A gifted athlete and sought-after sparring partner, he had an unorthodox style. He did handstands and cartwheels in the ring. Sometimes he showed up with his keyboard and performed an elegant sonata. Then there were the clothes, which were anything but the typical gym-rat wardrobe: silver high-tops, skintight jeans, a white scarf, and his trademark furry hat. He drove a sleek white Mercedes, apparently a perk of his father’s side business in used cars. On special occasions, he was known to sport snakeskin pants and a shirt unbuttoned to the waist. At a Boston gym where he trained, he was teased about his flashy garb. One training partner jokingly called him “Eurotrash.” Tamerlan joked right back.
Tamerlan’s boxing prowess was one of the few bright spots for the Tsarnaev family. With all of them, at times, under one roof, the household began sagging under its own weight. Anzor developed more health problems. His stomach and head hurt constantly. He sought out acupuncture, consulted with a Chinese herbalist, and even swore off his beloved cognac. Both of his daughters’ marriages, meanwhile, ended in divorce. The one thing that buoyed Anzor’s spirits was seeing Tamerlan in the boxing ring.
Both Tamerlan and his father were hopeful that Tamerlan’s boxing skill would take him to the big time, possibly even the Olympics. His prospects were otherwise cloudy. After graduating from high school in 2006, Tamerlan had enrolled at two community colleges but attended fitfully. Eventually he had dropped out. Although he was a voracious reader—his personal library included Sherlock Holmes and the writings of Gandhi—school did not come easy. Much of the time he spent smoking pot and listening to music with friends. Dzhokhar, meanwhile, was increasingly left to make his own way. He found community in the social scene at his high school, Cambridge Rindge and Latin, developing a diverse group of friends who seemed destined for good things. Cambridge was a famously welcoming environment. Immigrant success stories were many. One of the few cracks came around his junior year, when he was sitting with friends at a local restaurant. They were talking about religion, Islam, and the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Dzhokhar suggested that acts like that were sometimes justified by US actions around the world. Cambridge harbored plenty of dissenting views of American foreign policy, but Dzhokhar’s more extreme opinions stood out. In school, he took honors classes and worked hard at wrestling. At home, he was largely an obedient child and often agreed to watch his sisters’ babies. Underneath, however, Dzhokhar was a freewheeling teenager, smoking marijuana regularly and drinking more than ever.
Concerned about her children, Zubeidat decided to act. She confronted Tamerlan first, the Koran in her hand. As with many Muslims from the former Soviet Union, the Tsarnaevs had practiced a relaxed form of their Muslim faith at home and attended mosque only occasionally. But as the stress of life in their adopted country began to take its toll, the family turned to religion with mounting fervor, Zubeidat the most forcefully. Only Anzor, the patriarch, remained stubbornly secular. Tamerlan, sometimes accompanied by his brother, occasionally attended the Friday service at the Islamic Society of Boston’s small blue-and-silver mosque in Cambridge, a short walk from their house. Tamerlan eventually gave up drinking alcohol, although he continued to smoke weed. He also began poring over Islamic websites, and began to moralize to his brother. If Dzhokhar announced that he was going out, Tamerlan would get on his case, insisting that he stop drinking and come home early.
• • •
It was Team New England’s last fight of the night. Tamerlan had just landed a crushing blow in the first round of his bout. His opponent, Lamar Fenner, fell to the ground as the crowd let out a roar of approval. But Fenner rose to fight on, and when it was all over, the judges at the 2009 national Golden Gloves boxing tournament delivered a stunning verdict: They named Fenner the victor in his division. After a moment of shocked silence in the Salt Palace Convention Center, the crowd booed loudly. A year later, Tamerlan would become the New England Golden Gloves heavyweight champion of the year for the second time. It should have earned him a second chance at the national title he had been denied a year before in Salt Lake City. But because of a change of rules that prohibited noncitizens from participating in the Golden Gloves national tournament, Tamerlan was blocked from continuing. With that, another door slammed shut. Tamerlan’s once-promising boxing career had come to an abrupt halt, and with it the family’s hopes for his Olympic success. Rudderless and uncertain what was next, Tamerlan sought grounding in his faith. It would not, however, set him back on course.
The family’s downward spiral accelerated. Tamerlan had been charged with assaulting a girlfriend. During a separate altercation with patrons at a Boston restaurant, Anzor was severely injured when he was struck in the head with a steel pole. With Anzor unable to work full-time because of his health problems, the family was granted food stamps for the next couple of years and, for ten months, cash assistance from the government. Even with that, money was always tight. A bright spot was Katherine Russell, a young woman from Rhode Island whom Tamerlan had met at a downtown club. Raised a Catholic, Katie was already questioning her faith in light of the clergy sex abuse scandals; she found herself intrigued by Tamerlan’s commitment to Islam. For Tamerlan, dating a woman who was neither Chechen nor Muslim was problematic. When he decided to move in with her, it caused considerable distress in the family. But when Katie became pregnant, Anzor and Zubeidat warmed to their son’s mild-mannered girlfriend. The family was pleased when Katie agreed to convert to Islam and take the name Karima. In June 2010, the couple married in a brief ceremony at the Masjid Al-Qur’aan mosque in Boston’s Dorchester neighborhood. Not long afterward, their daughter, Zahira, was born. The young family moved into the Norfolk Street apartment. Katie supported them with her work as a home health aide. Tamerlan’s job was to care for Zahira.
Like her husband’s, Zubeidat’s romance with America had soured. Her chaotic household became even more unsettled as her husband’s health problems worsened. Anzor’s stomach pain had been diagnosed as possible cancer, and his anxiety provoked night terrors. Many nights he screamed into the darkness, making sleep impossible for everyone. In August 2011, the Tsarnaevs began divorce proceedings. A few months later, Anzor departed for Dagestan. With his father gone and both Zubeidat and Katie working long hours, Tamerlan often found himself alone. He spent hours cruising the Internet for websites associated with Islamic militants in his homeland. Around this time, Tamerlan posted, on Facebook, a link to an article from an online Chechen news agency, which claimed that US leaders were engaged in an “all-out war against Islam” and urged Muslims to fight against America. By this point, Tamerlan’s apparent radicalization had drawn the attention of the FBI, whose agents had probed his Internet activity, investigated potential associations with militants, and interviewed him and his parents. Investigators concluded that he posed only a minimal threat.
For his part, Dzhokhar had graduated from Cambridge Rindge and Latin in June 2011, one of forty-five students granted a $2,500 city scholarship for college. He was named to the National Honor Society. He was also awarded the MVP trophy by his high school wrestling team. While each of the other team members who received awards was accompanied by a family member or friend, Dzhokhar had neither. His coach was not surprised. During the three years that Dzhokhar had wrestled, his family members had not come to watch him compete. Nearly a decade after they had arrived in the United States, the Tsarnaev family had come apart, adrift in a culture to which they never fully adapted.
• • •
In January 2012, Tamerlan traveled to Dagestan, where his father and other close relatives lived. But his true purpose seemed to be more personal: He was looking to immerse himself further in his faith—and possibly to make contact with its radical followers. He found the southern Russian republic in the midst of an Islamic revival. Friday prayers drew crowds of worshippers, which spilled out into the street from dozens of new mosques. The revival had its violent side, too. The Islamic insurgency that failed in neighbori
ng Chechnya had moved to Dagestan, where a jihadist underground was staging deadly raids on police and the secular government they protect. Police responded, at times, with summary executions of suspects, human rights advocates charged. The clash of cultures was apparent in the frenetic capital, Makhachkala, where Tamerlan stayed. Heavily armed police checkpoints separate streets dotted with wireless cafes, sushi bars, and glistening shopping hubs. Everyone knows someone, or knows of someone, who has been shot passing through these checkpoints on suspicion of being part of the underground. Young women in dark veils walk the city hand in hand with friends in short skirts and designer sunglasses, past walls with warnings scrawled in red paint:
Fear Allah, cover yourselves!
Allah sees all!
Know, you dogs, there will be jihad before judgment day!
Tamerlan hooked up with members of the Union of the Just, an organization of young Muslims led by a third cousin on his mother’s side. Some members follow a strict interpretation of Islam, believing in the establishment of an Islamic state governed by sharia law that would span the region. They are sharply critical of US interventions in Muslim countries and believe the US government condones the burning of Korans. They do not openly espouse violence, but their beliefs have drawn accusations from Russian authorities that they belong to an outlawed Islamic group. Tamerlan arrived with many questions about Islam; he wanted to learn how to better express his faith. He spent time praying, studying the Koran, and playing soccer with Union of the Just members. “He was at the beginning of his path,” said Mukhamad Magomedov, deputy leader of the group. “He was mostly a listener, a searcher. He was looking for answers.”
But if Tamerlan was hoping to fit in, he did not succeed. Part of it was, yet again, his curious appearance. He wore a long shirt of the type favored by Pakistanis. He combed his hair with olive oil and darkened his eyes with kohl shadow, practices of devout Sunnis in some cultures, but not in Dagestan. He also began praying at a mosque attended by Salafi Muslims, a strict, orthodox Sunni sect whose members, authorities believe, often aid the armed insurgency. It was there, Russian authorities would later contend, that Tamerlan met with the insurgents he had come seeking, though that assertion would be questioned and a Globe investigation found strong reason to doubt such a connection ever occurred. Tamerlan left Dagestan in the summer of 2012, just as two members of the insurgency were killed by security forces. He promised to come back.
Long Mile Home: Boston Under Attack, the City's Courageous Recovery, and the Epic Hunt for Justice Page 5