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

by Bill Browder

At roughly the same time that the Washington Post article came out, Leutheusser-Schnarrenberger published her report. Like Pan, she went step-by-step through all of the Russian lies, the tax-rebate fraud, and how Sergei had been falsely arrested and mistreated in Russian custody. She concluded, “I cannot help suspecting that this coordinated attack must have the support of senior officials. These appear to make use of the systemic weaknesses of the criminal justice system in the Russian Federation.”

Yet at every turn, no matter how bad it got, he refused to perjure himself. Sergei was religious, and he would not violate God’s ninth commandment: “Thou shalt not bear false witness.” Under no circumstances would he plead guilty to a crime he did not commit, nor would he falsely implicate me. This, it seems, would have been more poisonous and painful to Sergei than any physical torture.

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.

One might think that as Russia entered the twenty-first century, the government would have stopped this type of behavior. But when Vladimir Putin came to power in 2000, instead of dismantling this machine of lying and fabrication, he modified it and made it all the more powerful.

Jonathan rubbed his chin for a few seconds “Well, if you really want to put the cat among the pigeons, I’d ask them to impose Proclamation Seventy-seven Fifty. It allows the State Department to impose visa sanctions on corrupt foreign officials. Bush created it in 2004. It would really get under the Russians’ skin if they were slapped with that.”

This was not what they wanted to hear because ever since Barack Obama had become president in 2009, the main policy of the US government toward Russia had been one of appeasement.

As anyone who has read Chekhov, Gogol, or Dostoyevsky will tell you, and as Sergei himself once reminded us, 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.

Nowhere was safe, especially London, which was rife with Russians. In 2006, Alexander Litvinenko, a former FSB agent and well-known Putin critic, was poisoned by FSB agents at London’s Millennium Hotel, just across the street from the American embassy.

The senators quickly realized that they’d stumbled onto something much bigger than one horrific case. 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.

The revised bill was officially introduced on May 19, 2011, less than a month after we posted the Olga Stepanova YouTube video. Following its introduction, a small army of Russian activists descended on Capitol Hill, pushing for the bill’s passage. They pressed every senator who would talk to them to sign on. There was Garry Kasparov, the famous chess grand master and human rights activist; there was Alexei Navalny, the most popular Russian opposition leader; and there was Evgenia Chirikova, a well-known Russian environmental activist. I didn’t have to recruit any of these people. They just showed up by themselves.

No senator, whether the most liberal Democrat or the most conservative Republican, would lose a single vote for banning Russian torturers and murderers from coming to America.

I got a copy and nervously skimmed the document. It was the height of Washington hypocrisy. The State Department’s main argument was that the sanctions proposed by the Magnitsky Act already existed under executive powers, so why bother passing a new law?

While I’ve learned to be assertive when necessary, to this day I’m still uncomfortable with foisting myself on unsuspecting strangers, especially those who are constantly bombarded by the public.

“I’ll tell you what. We’ll tell the administration that we’ll block Jackson-Vanik repeal unless they stop blocking Magnitsky. I’m sure John, Ben, and Roger1 would join me on this.”

A famous expression goes, “The less people know about how sausages and laws are made, the better they sleep at night.”

I was walking on air. I had spent every day of my life since November 16, 2009, working in the service of Sergei’s memory. On this day in June 2012, it felt as if there wasn’t a person in Washington—the most important city in the most powerful country in the world—who didn’t know the name Sergei Magnitsky.

When I looked up Malkin, I discovered that in 2009 he had been named as a “member of a group engaging in trans-national crime” by the Canadian government and that despite his fierce denials, he was banned from entering Canada. I didn’t understand how someone with this kind of reputation could be leading a delegation to Washington, but then I found a picture of him on the steps of the Capitol shaking hands in connection to a $1 million gift to the US Library of Congress. I guess $1 million buys a certain amount of tolerance in Washington.

Karpov was suing me for libel in Britain’s High Court. The lawsuit alleged that our YouTube videos about Karpov, Kuznetsov, and Stepanova defamed him and caused him moral suffering. I had to laugh. “Moral suffering”? Was he kidding?

“That’s the point, Bill. Now that the election is in full swing, no one wants to talk about things that everyone agrees on. None of these guys can afford to make the others look good.”

There was something almost biblical about Sergei’s story, and even though I am not a religious man, as I sat there watching history unfold, I couldn’t help but feel that maybe God had intervened in this case.

For the previous few years, Putin had sat comfortably in the Kremlin, knowing that whatever happened in the US Congress, President Obama opposed the Magnitsky Act. In Putin’s totalitarian mind, this was an ironclad guarantee that it would never become law. But what Putin overlooked was that the United States was not Russia.

One can criticize Russians for many things, but their love of children isn’t one of them. Russia is one of the only countries in the world where you can take a screaming child into a fancy restaurant and no one will give you a second look. Russians simply adore children.

He then went into a long ramble about Guantánamo, Abu Ghraib, and secret CIA prisons, as if America’s faults somehow made Russia’s own abhorrent actions acceptable.

However, this whole affair cost Putin something much dearer than money: his aura of invincibility. Humiliation is his currency—he uses it to get what he wants and to put people in their place. In his mind, he hasn’t succeeded until his opponent has failed, and he can’t be happy until his opponent is miserable. In Putin’s world, the humiliator cannot, under any circumstances, become the humiliatee. Yet this is precisely what happened in the wake of the adoption ban.

Putting me on trial when I wasn’t in Russia was highly unusual. It would be only the second time in post-Soviet history that Russia would try a Westerner in absentia. But that wasn’t the worst part. Their truly unbelievable move was to also try Sergei Magnitsky.

The same NTV crew made a similar “documentary” trying to tarnish the protest movement after Putin’s reelection in 2012. They made another one about the famous anti-Putin punk band, Pussy Riot. After both films, their subjects were arrested and imprisoned.

It was all a show, a Potemkin court. This is Russia today. A stuffy room presided over by a corrupt judge, policed by unthinking guards, with lawyers who are there just to give the appearance of a real trial, and with no defendant in the cage. A place where lies reign supreme. A place where two and two is still five, white is still black, and up is still down. A place where convictions are certain, and guilt a given. Where a foreigner can be convicted in absentia of crimes he did not commit. A place where an innocent man who was murdered by the state, a man whose only crime was loving his country too much, can be made to suffer from beyond the grave. This is Russia today.

Now the concept of Magnitsky sanctions has been used as the main tool in fighting Russia over its illegal invasion of Ukraine. Perhaps most important of all, Sergei’s story has given everyone in Russia, as well as millions of people around the world, a detailed picture of the true brutality of Vladimir Putin’s regime.

In a highly unusual step the Russian authorities applied again to Interpol to get a Red Notice issued for me, and for a second time they were rejected. Because of the abuses in my case, Red Notice requests from Russia are now no longer automatically accepted at Interpol.

If you asked me when I was at Stanford Business School what I would have thought about giving up a life as a hedge fund manager to become a human rights activist, I would have looked at you as if you were out of your mind.

The Russian government has alternately accused me of being a CIA agent, an MI6 spy, a billionaire who has bribed every member of Congress and the European Parliament, and part of a Zionist conspiracy to take over the world.

The time to acknowledge all of those who have contributed will come, but only when the threat of retaliation from Russian organized crime and the Putin regime subsides.