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.
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.