Embezzlement

The central figure of The Family Man, the lawyer Alex Murdaugh (pronounced ‘Murdock’), spends his life getting implicated in so many heinous, melodramatic crimes that he seems cobbled together by a cabal of tabloid and commercial publishers, crime podcasters and providers of big budget cinematic sleaze. Memorably referred to by psychopathologists and public prosecutors as a ‘family annihilator’ (imagine a little bit of Medea, a little bit of the Menendez brothers and a whole lot of Oedipus Rex), he was arrested in 2021 for slaughtering his wife Maggie and their youngest son Paul with the same sort of high-tech military weaponry that he enjoyed wielding around his family compound to hunt hogs, and which visitors often found lying randomly about his home and gardens.

Imagine: it’s 16 December 2004 and you are a middle-ranking banker living in Moscow – prosperous but ordinary, a long way below oligarch level. You are looking forward to a New Year’s trip with your family to Prague – the hotel is booked; your young son is excited. Your phone rings while you are at lunch: an investigator whom you’ve never heard of asks you to come and answer a few questions. You ask if tomorrow will do. ‘No, you must come today,’ insists the caller. ‘It’ll take around 20 minutes.’ What do you do? If this were the beginning of a thriller, Vladimir Pereverzin would have instantly made his way to the secret lock-up with the false identity documents and gone on the run.