Red Notice: A True Story of High Finance, Murder, and One Man’s Fight for Justice

by Bill Browder

There’s a famous Russian proverb about this type of behavior. One day, a poor villager happens upon a magic talking fish that is ready to grant him a single wish. Overjoyed, the villager weighs his options: “Maybe a castle? Or even better—a thousand bars of gold? Why not a ship to sail the world?” As the villager is about to make his decision, the fish interrupts him to say that there is one important caveat: whatever the villager gets, his neighbor will receive two of the same. Without skipping a beat, the villager says, “In that case, please poke one of my eyes out.”

Sergei, on the other hand, was thirty-six years old and had come of age at a time when things had started to improve. He saw Russia not how it was but how he wanted it to be.

My desire to reconcile my family’s communist background with my own capitalist ambitions had brought me to Russia, but, naively, I never imagined that this pursuit would result in a human tragedy.

Sergei Magnitsky was killed for his ideals. He was killed because he believed in the law. He was killed because he loved his people, and because he loved Russia. He was thirty-seven years old.

Russian stories don’t have happy endings. Russians are familiar with hardship, suffering, and despair—not with success and certainly not with justice. Not surprisingly, this has engendered in many Russians a deep-seated fatalism that stipulates that the world is bad, it will always be bad, and any attempt to change things is doomed.

We’d hit the criminals in the place they cared about most—their bank accounts.

They had inadvertently discovered a new method for fighting human rights abuses in authoritarian regimes in the twenty-first century: targeted visa sanctions and asset freezes.

This meant that in addition to punishing American families who were waiting for Russian children to join them, Putin was also punishing, and potentially killing, defenseless orphans in his own country. To say that this was a heartless proposal doesn’t even qualify as an understatement. It was evil, pure and simple.

Putin rarely projects his intentions and is one of the most enigmatic leaders in the world. Unpredictability is his modus operandi.

I now understand how completely naive I was to think that as a foreigner I was somehow immune to the barbarity of the Russian system.