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

by Bill Browder

The meeting was scheduled for 11:00 a.m. the following morning, which in Spain counts as an early meeting.

What saved me was Twitter. My tweets had generated hundreds of phone calls to Interpol and the Spanish authorities, who soon realized the mess they’d waltzed into.

In early December 2007, we filed three separate criminal complaints in Russia, naming the officers involved in the fraud, including Kuznetsov and Karpov. However, instead of launching a real investigation, the Interior Ministry assigned Karpov to the case, effectively to investigate himself. His first “investigative action” was to initiate a criminal case against me. He subsequently placed me on Russia’s domestic wanted list.

The Russian FSB had a lot of things in their tool kit, but to dispatch a major organized crime boss to personally lobby the head of an international political organization? That was a new one.

The refrain of “Russia did a lot of things but to see them do *X* was crazy” is getting tired - there’s nothing Russia won’t do, the end.

By banning Americans from adopting these children, Putin was effectively sentencing some of them to death to protect his own corrupt officials. This was exceptional, even by his own depraved standards.

Nothing is beyond Putin’s depravity, you know this

I was nervous to go on a comedy show, but my friend Juleanna Glover, a Washington, DC, insider who had been instrumental in helping to get the Magnitsky Act passed, assured me that going on this show practically guaranteed Red Notice would be a bestseller.

I went to her house a couple times

One of the most famous threats against Michael had involved a defendant who’d hidden a razor blade in his rectum before a court appearance. The defendant had planned to pull it out and slash Michael’s throat in front of the jury during closing arguments, but he was foiled. Michael now keeps a framed X-ray of this man’s torso on the wall of his office. Whenever he has to berate one of his young associates for not giving their all, he lights up the X-ray, revealing the metal rectangle in this man’s body, and says, “That. That is commitment.”

People who say things like “I am on your side” usually aren’t.

Snowmass is about a 20-minute drive from Aspen, and as I took the back road behind the airport, I was reminded of when I was in boarding school in Steamboat Springs, Colorado. Back then, whenever more than a foot of snow fell overnight, the headmaster would ring a giant bell, call off classes, and declare a “Powder Day” where everybody skied—students, teachers, and staff alike. There was no sweeter sound than him ringing that giant bell.

Can my boss do this?

There is no commodity more valuable than trust.

Dealing with the Russians and their American enablers felt like playing a game of Whac-A-Mole. Every time they got beaten down in one place, they popped up somewhere else.

On the surface, it appeared that Trump was acting irrationally, but what I’ve learned over the years as an investor is that almost everyone behaves rationally. If someone does something that appears irrational, it just means you don’t have all the information.

I would spend the beginning of the trial setting out the facts of the $230 million fraud and telling the court what had happened to Sergei. The government needed this for context so their subsequent arguments about money laundering would make sense to the jury.

Poor jury, I barely understand this

a viral C-SPAN video (such things do exist),

As despicable as Putin and his regime’s behavior is, none of this can happen without the cooperation of Western enablers. Lawyers like John Moscow and Mark Cymrot, spin doctors like Glenn Simpson, politicians like Dana Rohrabacher, and executives like those at Danske Bank—these people, along with many others, lubricate the machine that allows Putin and his cronies to get away with their crimes. Nor can these crimes happen without the acquiescence of timid and ineffective governments that refuse to follow their own laws and stated values. Let’s take Britain, just as one example. The largest amount of money associated with the $230 million crime didn’t end up in New York or Spain or France or Switzerland, but right in my adopted hometown: London. This money has been used to purchase property and luxury goods, and despite all the evidence I’ve presented to British law enforcement, Parliament, and the British press, to this day not a single money laundering investigation connected to the Magnitsky case has been initiated in the United Kingdom.