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

by Bill Browder

Lawyers, unlike businesspeople, are supposed to be professionals. I had naïvely assumed that once hired, a lawyer, like a doctor, was duty-bound to advocate for their client no matter what. A doctor doesn’t drop a patient because another patient might pay them more for a more elaborate procedure. They treat both patients. The same should be true for lawyers.

While many think of Russia as being completely opaque, it’s actually quite transparent. Every time someone does something in Russia, that information gets filed in quadruplicate with four different ministries. The people working at those ministries make only a few hundred dollars a month. As a result, nearly everything is for sale.

The official motto of the World Economic Forum is “Committed to Improving the State of the World,” but in reality, many attendees are billionaires, dictators, and Fortune 500 executives who have little interest in improving the state of the world. A few are interested in exactly the opposite.

For many, the words “lawyer” and “ethics” are mutually exclusive. As we all know, lawyers have become the brunt of countless jokes. (What’s the difference between a lawyer and a jellyfish? One is a spineless, poisonous blob. The other is a form of sea life. Why won’t sharks attack lawyers? Professional courtesy.) But I thought this disrespect was mostly reserved for ambulance chasers with one-room offices in strip malls, not Ivy League attorneys in glass towers in midtown Manhattan. I was surprised that BakerHostetler, a firm that had been around since 1916, with clients like Ford and Microsoft, would conform to this lowest stereotype.

We knew from working with John Moscow that one of his specialties was using subpoenas as weapons unto themselves. When he first pitched us, he boasted that he liked to identify his opponents’ sensitivities and then demand everything they were uncomfortable handing over.

We’re all led to believe that if you’re a citizen of a powerful country like the United States or Great Britain, and something bad happens to you abroad, your government will bring its full weight and force to protect you.

Nekrasov must have realized how tenuous his position was. He was acting as a de facto defense lawyer for Putin. He had presented himself as a truth-finder, but now that he was debating a real-life truth-finder, he looked weak and ignorant.

Everyone is entitled to a legal defense, but this wasn’t about the law—it was an active Russian disinformation campaign. For these people to use their considerable knowledge, contacts, and skills to assist Putin’s cronies in exchange for nothing more than money was even more contemptible than the actions of the Russians themselves. Many Russians can’t help what they do. But Americans like these can, and they act with full cognizance.

“Yes, well… Glenn’s made himself into the central node of information-trading on Russia and Trump. He and his team have collected loads of information on Trump, and these news organizations are practically prostrate in front of him, hoping he’ll throw them a bone. No one will touch him. Full stop. Which means no one will touch your story, either.”

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.

“An FSB source told me the Russians have been collecting videos of Trump with women since ’87. There’s a ton of these things. And they’re not pretty.”

The upshot was that a bunch of “facts” would find their way into the dossier which, over time, could be disproved. This would then enable the Russians and, not incidentally, Trump himself to claim that everything in the dossier was false, even if something in it turned out to be true.

Nikolai’s wife, Julia, and 13-year-old daughter, Diana, came ahead of him, arriving in August 2015. They were met by Svetlana Angert, a Russian-speaking DHS agent, and placed in an apartment overlooking the Hudson River in Hoboken, New Jersey. When Nikolai arrived two weeks later, the family was moved to a government safe house on Manhattan’s Upper West Side.

Since there’s no such thing as libel in court, they could do this without fear of any consequence.

In my mind, innocent people don’t pay $5.9 million to make their problems go away, and this was on top of the $15 million or so I estimated Prevezon had paid in legal fees. That was a steep price to avoid explaining the provenance of an alleged $1.9 million of dirty money.

June 9, 2016. Why was it so familiar? I checked my calendar. That was the same day of the final disqualification hearing against BakerHostetler at the Second Circuit! The one Veselnitskaya had attended. Glenn Simpson had been there too. Veselnitskaya must have gone straight from court to Trump Tower. I couldn’t believe it.

Before the Trump Tower meeting came to light, I’d planned to drop my middle daughter, Veronica, at sleepaway camp in New Jersey and then go to Washington. But now that Trump Jr., Simpson, and Manafort had been added to the witness list, the hearing had been postponed to July 26, meaning I’d have to make two trips back east.

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.