On Aug. 13, 2021, Marc and Jane Fogel pulled away from their white colonial-style home in Oakmont to drive to New York City.
There, they boarded a plane to Moscow to begin their final year teaching at the Anglo-American School, an elite institution built for the children of western diplomats.
But when the couple landed, Russian authorities detained Marc, seizing from him less than an ounce of marijuana he had been prescribed in Pittsburgh to alleviate severe back pain. A judge convicted Marc of drug smuggling and sentenced him to prison.
So began an excruciating ordeal that kept him in Russian custody for 1,277 days.
On Feb. 11, President Donald Trump’s administration secured Marc’s release and brought him home.
This is Marc’s story.
Chapter One: The Arrest
Marc Fogel just wanted to get home.
For the past nine years, he and his wife, Jane, had lived amid the bustle of downtown Moscow, just a half-hour walk from the Kremlin and nearly 5,000 miles from where they were raised in Butler County.
The Fogels were international teachers, having hopscotched around the world for decades with stops in Mexico, Asia, South America and the Middle East. They lived a life of adventure few could dream of.
After a summer break in Pittsburgh, the pair arrived at Moscow’s Sheremetyevo International Airport late in the morning of Aug. 14, 2021. They were ready to start their 10th and final year teaching at the elite Anglo-American School.
Marc was eager to return to their apartment in the city of nearly 13 million. He and Jane had come to love Moscow even as relations soured between the U.S. and Russia.
They also were looking forward to the adventure awaiting them after getting through the school year: retirement, finally, and travel in the U.S.
Soon, a devastating miscalculation by Marc would derail those plans, plunging the Fogel family into a yearslong nightmare and triggering an international incident that spurred an American president’s extraordinary intervention.
In the moments before everything went sideways, though, they were just two American expats arriving in Russia’s capital, weary from the nine-hour flight.
A feeling of dread
It had been an excruciating trip for 60-year-old Marc. Wracked with chronic, severe back pain, he paced the cabin of the Aeroflot jetliner as it crossed eight time zones on its journey from New York City. When he stepped off the plane, he felt exhausted.
The Fogels didn’t know it then, but they were being watched. Someone had tipped off authorities that Marc would be carrying contraband.
He grabbed his suitcase from the luggage carousel and got in line to clear customs. Marc could have passed for an American tourist, with his cream-colored camp shirt, gray shorts, black ankle socks and sandals.
As he waited his turn at an X-ray machine, a yellow Labrador retriever working with airport security stopped at his bag.
Security officers pulled Marc out of line. They unzipped his suitcase and butterflied it open on the floor to search. Jane stood while Marc sat on a table, legs dangling. They could only watch.
Another K-9 came over. Marc, a dog lover, put out his hand to be sniffed. He appeared nonchalant, but inside he filled with dread as an airport employee plucked from his luggage a blue plastic bag containing a sneaker.
Reaching into the shoe, the worker removed a handful of white and green contact lens cases. The K-9 grew excited, climbing onto the table and pawing the bag before being rewarded with a toy.
Marc hadn’t told Jane about the contact cases, about how he had packed his prescription medical marijuana inside them to bring it into Russia, a country with strict drug laws.
Marc glanced at his wife.
“That’s an image I have now of her,” Marc said recently, “seeing her sitting there and how devastating that was.”
Their life abroad
Marc and Jane’s international lifestyle came rooted in humble origins.
They met as teens in 1975 at Butler Intermediate High School. She was Jane Miller then, the baby in a family of four.
Marc was part of a big family, too, one with 39 first cousins on his mom’s side. He grew up in a comfortable, red-brick house in Butler Township, sandwiched between sisters Lisa and Anne. His mother, Malphine, a first-generation American, was one of eight kids whose father had emigrated from Italy.
Marc and Jane had other things in common. Both had working fathers who were veterans — Marc’s dad was with the Navy in the Korean War, while Jane’s father served in the Pacific Theater in World War II.
They ran in the same social circle. They dated briefly during freshman year, and even after breaking up, remained friends.
As seniors in 1979, they joked about finding each other in 15 years.
“Jane, don’t ever forget ’94. A promise should always be kept,” Marc wrote on the back of the wallet-sized senior picture he gave her.
She returned the favor on the flip side of her portrait, inscribed to “a good looking and crazy guy who I always have fun with. Always remember me when you need help with your geometry homework! If you ever want to talk, just give me a call! Love, Jane.”
The years passed, and Marc and Jane drifted apart. They went to separate colleges, married other people and mostly fell out of touch.
Marc majored in education at Indiana University of Pennsylvania. He had grown up listening to stories about his dad’s travels to places like Hawaii and Japan while in the Navy, and to tales from his father’s friend, a petroleum engineer in Norway.
Those yarns instilled in him a wanderlust, as did stories of his grandfather’s adventures coming to the United States.
After earning a master’s degree and teaching stateside for a time, Marc made his first full-time foray abroad when a school in Guadalajara, Mexico, hired him as a history teacher. He spent four years there, becoming fluent in Spanish, before jetting around the world to Southeast Asia for his next teaching assignment: the International School of Kuala Lumpur in Malaysia.
When the summer of 1994 rolled around, Marc returned to the U.S. for vacation. He came alone, having separated from his wife.
While visiting friends in Washington, D.C., a buddy from Pittsburgh called to offer an extra ticket to the MLB All-Star game the next day at Three Rivers Stadium. Marc hitchhiked to Pittsburgh.
He was about to keep a long-ago promise.
On July 12, Marc walked into the Clark Bar on the North Shore and spotted a familiar woman. Even with her back to him, he recognized Jane. He walked over and tapped her shoulder.
“Excuse me,” he said, “don’t I know you?”
They shared an intimate hug before Jane pushed him away.
“You really blew it,” she told him. “I saw you got married a couple years ago, and I just got separated.”
Marc told her he had, too.
They made plans to go out the next night, and for the rest of the summer, they dated. When Marc flew back to Malaysia, they kept in touch by phone and fax.
By the next summer, Jane committed to taking a chance on the good-looking, crazy guy who made everything fun.
She remembers standing in Malphine Fogel’s kitchen right after making her decision. Malphine pulled her aside.
“Jane, are you sure? Marc’s very persuasive,” her future mother-in-law said.
She was.
Jane quit her job, packed four boxes and moved halfway around the world to be with Marc.
The couple married at the Kuala Lumpur courthouse in 1996 and had both of their children, first Ethan, then Sam, in Malaysia.
Jane started tutoring and eventually became a full-fledged teacher.
It was a magical time in their lives.
“When you live as an expat, your community is your family, and you find those people that are like-minded,” Marc said.
For the next 26 years, they would be each other’s constant companions as they circled the globe, occasionally taking a break from their foreign assignments with stints in the U.S.
They were inseparable — until Russia broke them apart.
Marc and Jane appreciated the opportunity to raise their sons around the world, exposing them to different cultures, cuisines, climates and lifestyles.
In Medellín, Colombia, the family settled into a life they loved on a 2-acre mountain farm. The Fogels grew avocados, mandarins and lettuce. The school where they taught provided live-in help with their children. They rode horses. The boys, 3 and 5, became bilingual, serving as translators when their grandparents visited.
In 2003 they swapped lush and temperate Medellín for the desert climate of the Middle East, moving into a beach house on the Gulf of Oman.
Although they enjoyed the exotic locales they had chosen, the Fogels also wanted their boys to experience living in the United States. In the summer of 2006, they bought a home on Crystal Drive in Oakmont, where Marc’s sister, Lisa, lived.
Sam and Ethan attended Tenth Street Elementary School, while their parents took jobs in Shadyside — Marc at Winchester Thurston School and Jane at the Ellis School.
But after four years in Pittsburgh, after enjoying a Steelers Super Bowl victory and a Penguins Stanley Cup championship, after taking pleasure in their boys making friends and riding bikes, the travel bug came back.
Their next overseas posting took them to Caracas, Venezuela. But the couple quickly realized that the country was starting to change, becoming more violent and unstable. Neighbors warned them it was not safe for the boys to be outside by themselves.
After about a year, Ethan and Sam staged a coup one night at the dinner table.
“We want to go,” they said. “We want some snow. Can we have a change of seasons?”
Russia beckoned.
The Anglo-American School
By the fall of 2011, Marc and Jane were highly regarded in the international teaching community.
Both were hired by the Anglo-American School in Moscow for the 2012-13 school year. The move would afford the Fogels their first crack at a European teaching experience.
Founded in 1949 by the American, British and Canadian governments, the school educated about 1,200 students from dozens of countries. They were children of privilege, born to diplomats, businessmen and wealthy Russians.
The family quickly fell in love with Moscow, with its size and sophistication.
“The city’s dynamic. You just feel it on the streets,” Marc said.
The Fogels kept busy. They befriended the U.S. ambassador, whose children attended the school, and dined at his official residence, Spaso House, which had been gifted to the United States by Joseph Stalin in 1933.
American teachers at the school had access to the U.S. Embassy in Moscow, a vibrant building that, at the time, had 1,200 employees. There was an American restaurant and bar, and they could take advantage of the commissary and sports facilities.
“It was a little slice of home,” Jane said.
Living in Moscow afforded them easy travel throughout Europe. The Fogels made the most of it. They went to Italy seven times. Jane occasionally spent weekends in Paris with friends. Marc toured Málaga, Spain, by bike.
At school, they led the speech and debate club. Jane founded a robotics program. Marc supervised Model U.N. and coached the girls’ softball team, which he named the Penguins.
But there was something about Moscow that didn’t sit right with them.
In their other assignments, the Fogels made friends, learned the language, absorbed the culture.
Not so in Russia. Contact with people outside the school was limited. When they walked down a street in Moscow, Marc said, no one smiled back.
“They still have the Soviet mentality of, ‘Why are you smiling at me? Are you watching me? What do you want from me?’” he said.
Marc and Jane had originally sketched out a five-year plan for Russia. But they realized it would be too difficult for Sam to finish high school while they looked for a new international post.
Landing in a new country could be exhilarating but also draining.
“Every time you move, you have to reinvent yourself,” Jane said.
They decided to stay.
By the time Sam graduated in 2017, the environment had changed for the worse. Three years earlier, Russia had invaded the Crimean peninsula. The U.S. embassy staff shrank to just 100 people.
The Fogels and their fellow teachers felt the changes. The Russian government under President Vladimir Putin had become highly critical of the school and in late 2016 started making noise about wanting to shut it down, alleging it was a bad influence on Russian youth.
Then in 2019, the Russian Foreign Ministry denied visas to 30 teachers and stripped the school of its diplomatic status.
The ramifications would ultimately be disastrous for the Fogel family.
Without diplomatic visas, teachers would no longer be immune from arrest, nor would they have the protections for their luggage reserved for diplomatic travelers.
Faced with deteriorating relations between the U.S. and Russia, teachers were beginning to leave the school. By 2020, administrators were offering large bonuses to woo staff to stay.
Jane wanted the 2020-21 school year to be the couple’s last teaching in Moscow, but Marc was game to stay for one more year.
Each would get $7,000 extra for returning.
“Money clouds judgment,” Marc said. “We were making good money. We were saving good money.”
The Fogels spent their 2021 summer vacation in Pittsburgh. And when it was time to return to Moscow that August, they both felt apprehensive.
Right before flying back, they visited Malphine, who was then 92.
“When we pulled out of my mother’s driveway, she was standing there, kind of not really waving. She looked so old and feeble,” Marc said. “We felt our hearts just descend.
“We were not keen on going back. Thirty-seven years I taught, that was the only time I didn’t want to go back to school.”
Jane cried on their drive to John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York City. Marc leaned over.
“I know,” he told her. “I don’t want to go back either.”
‘He walked into a trap’
Marc never did return to the school. Instead, he found himself in the worst trouble of his life: under arrest in Russia for trying to smuggle in marijuana.
The diplomatic visa that once could have saved him no longer existed.
To this day, Marc insists he believed his prescription provided a measure of protection that would allow him to use the controlled substance to ease his back pain.
Marc’s attorneys would later assert Russia targeted the Anglo-American School for political and economic reasons, including retaliation against U.S. sanctions.
“They could not have set Marc up if he had a diplomatic visa and diplomatic passports,” said Eric Rubin, the former deputy chief of mission for the U.S. Embassy in Moscow during the Obama administration.
Rubin knew the Anglo-American School well. He had served as chairman of its board before the Fogels arrived, and his two daughters studied there.
He believes the tip to authorities was, in part, revenge for Marc criticizing the Russian government. For a long time, Marc suspected he and his fellow teachers were being spied on.
“Clearly, he walked into a trap,” Rubin said. “This was payback.”
Sasha Phillips, an attorney who worked with the Fogel family in the U.S. to free Marc, said it was clear that after the diplomatic visas changed, teachers at the Anglo-American School were not aware of the potential consequences for breaking Russian laws.
“The State Department had an obligation, a duty, to its employees to protect the people that they were bringing to the country, to tell them specifically what protections they now have, how different they are from what they had before and how to prepare for it — what to do, what not to do,” she said.
Marc agrees.
“We felt like the school and the embassy were not really clear on some things that were going on,” he said. “The school was collapsing, the embassy was collapsing, and they wanted to keep that school open come hell or high water.”
Whatever the reason behind Marc’s arrest, whatever the politics, he was a U.S. citizen without diplomatic protection who had illegally brought drugs into Russia.
After discovering the marijuana, security officers marched Marc out of the terminal and into an office on airport property. He remained there for 24 hours, lying on a dirty floor because the two office chairs were so uncomfortable.
Marc was allowed to use his cellphone with internet access, so at least he could tell Jane where he was.
He was worried, but not overly so.
The day after he was detained, a lawyer the family had contacted met Marc at the Fogels’ apartment, which Russian investigators planned to search. The lawyer told Marc to give him his wedding ring, phone, wallet and computer. Then he gave him some advice.
“Get a coat. It’s cold,” Marc remembers the lawyer telling him.
“It’s August,” Marc replied. “I think I’m going for a night.”
“Yeah, get a coat,” the lawyer answered. “It’s going to be cold.”