Freezing Order: A True Story of Money Laundering, Murder, and Surviving Vladimir Putin's Wrath

by Bill Browder

Russian authorities had made another crucial error. In an attempt to make the case appear credible, they included data showing the real bank transfers that had taken place within Russia. If this information was made public, it would exonerate Sergei and expose the real perpetrators of the crime (not to mention, reveal the inner mechanics of the Russian money laundering system). Nikolai needed to make a copy of every single page. Facing the magnitude of this task, he ordered a digital Pentax camera from the United States and bought a special tripod that would allow him to point the lens straight down onto a tabletop. The camera didn’t have a remote, so Nikolai, who was something of a tinkerer, designed one himself. After testing the setup at home, he returned to the courthouse day after day and spent eight hours every day taking a high-resolution photograph of each page. He expected someone to come in at any moment and tell him to stop, so he worked as quickly as he could. After three weeks, he had copied the entire file. The total haul was roughly 27,000 images on seven SD cards. These contained the exact banking information that the Russian government should have provided to the SDNY when the Americans made their mutual legal assistance request.