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

by Bill Browder

But then, on December 11, Bernie Madoff was charged in New York with running the world’s largest Ponzi scheme, defrauding investors in his hedge fund of an astonishing $64.8 billion. Why mention Madoff here? Because this scandal was oddly connected to our story. It was right around this time that John Moscow became almost impossible to reach. I would call him, and sometimes it would take weeks for him to respond. Other times he simply never called back. At first, I was confused. We’ve all had friends who’ve stopped speaking to us for unknown reasons, but John Moscow wasn’t a friend. He was my lawyer and I was his client, and I was paying him $600 an hour. My confusion quickly grew into frustration since we needed him. Sergei needed him. When he continued to ignore my calls, my frustration grew to outright anger. It was one of the strangest things I’d ever seen a lawyer do. It was like being ghosted by a teenage crush. Sometime in January, it all became clear. John Moscow’s law firm, BakerHostetler, had become the trustee responsible for unwinding the Madoff bankruptcy. The rumor was that BakerHostetler was going to earn $100 million for this work. (At the time of writing, BakerHosteler has actually earned upward of $1.4 billion for its work on the Madoff bankruptcy.) Next to that, our paltry $200,000 in legal fees wasn’t even a rounding error.