The Russian authorities were so wrapped up in their cover-up that they ignored the most emotive aspects of Sergei’s story. He was just a middle-class tax lawyer who bought his Starbucks coffee in the morning, loved his family, and did his tax work in his cubicle. His only misfortune was to stumble across a major government corruption scheme and then behave like a Russian patriot and report it. For that he’d been plucked out of his normal life, incarcerated in one of Russia’s darkest hellholes, and then slowly and methodically tortured to death.
