Red Notice: A True Story of High Finance, Murder, and One Man's Fight for Justice (35 page)

We were aware that we were competing with many other Russian victims for her attention. At the time, there were roughly 300,000 people who had been unjustly imprisoned in Russia, so we didn’t have high hopes, but our lawyers contacted her office and she agreed to a meeting. Prior to that meeting, I spent a week putting together a presentation outlining each step of the crime and how it led to Sergei’s being taken hostage and mistreated in detention. When she saw the facts laid out so clearly and with so much evidence, she immediately agreed to take up his case.

In April 2009, she approached the Russian law enforcement agencies
with a long list of questions. It was a positive development because the mere process of the Council of Europe asking the Russian government about Sergei could potentially free him—or at least get him better conditions.

Unfortunately, it did neither.

The Russian authorities refused a face-to-face meeting with Leutheusser-Schnarrenberger, so she was forced to send her questions in writing. After a long silence, she received her answers.

Her first question was simply, “Why was Sergei Magnitsky arrested?”

The answer: “Sergei Magnitsky was not arrested.”

Of course he was arrested. He was in
their
prison. I couldn’t imagine what the Russians were thinking when they said this to her.

Her second question was, “Why was he arrested by Interior Ministry officer Kuznetsov, who he testified against before his arrest?”

She got an equally ridiculous answer. “The officer with such a name doesn’t work in the Moscow Interior Ministry.”

We had proof that Kuznetsov had worked in the Interior Ministry for many years! They must have thought Leutheusser-Schnarrenberger was stupid.

Nearly all the other answers were similarly absurd and untrue.

Leutheusser-Schnarrenberger would put all of these lies and absurdities in her final report, but a draft wouldn’t be ready until August, and Sergei didn’t have the luxury of time. I continued to canvass other organizations and found two powerful legal groups that might get involved: the International Bar Association and the UK Law Society. After hearing Sergei’s story and reviewing our documentation, each organization sent letters to President Medvedev and to General Prosecutor Yuri Chaika, asking for Sergei’s release.

Again, I had high hopes that these interventions would help, but again they fell flat. The General Prosecutor’s Office replied to the Law Society by saying, “We considered your application and found no grounds for prosecutorial intervention.” The Russian authorities didn’t even bother to reply to the other letters.

Continuing my search, I looked to America. In June 2009, I was invited to Washington, DC, to testify in front of the US Helsinki Commission, an independent government agency whose mission is to monitor human rights in former Soviet Bloc countries. At the time, it was headed by the first-term Democratic senator from Maryland, Ben Cardin. The purpose of the hearing was to decide which cases would go into President Obama’s briefing package for an upcoming summit with President Medvedev.

This was the first opportunity I’d had to share Sergei’s case with such a high-profile group in the US political arena. I made my presentation, and the senators and congressmen were appropriately shocked by Sergei’s ordeal. Unfortunately, one of the staffers at the Helsinki Commission, a young man named Kyle Parker, decided not to include Sergei’s story in the commission’s letter to President Obama. Parker thought too many other issues were more pressing.

After this I realized that what we needed most to get Sergei’s story above the fray was media attention. Only a handful of articles about Sergei had appeared, and all of them were written shortly after his arrest. As much as I tried, journalists simply weren’t interested. With all the evil going on in Russia, they didn’t see the newsworthiness of a story about a jailed lawyer. Any attempt to share the complicated details of Sergei’s case just made journalists’ eyes glaze over.

I’d exhausted my list of Russia correspondents when I hit upon a young
Washington Post
reporter named Philip Pan. Unlike the others, he was new to Moscow and wasn’t jaded. He immediately recognized the resonance of Sergei’s story.

From early July until August 2009, he interviewed members of our team, verified our documents, and tried as best as he could to get the Russian authorities to respond. By early August, he had put together a truly damning exposé.

On August 13 the
Washington Post
published his feature story, entitled “3 Lawyers Targeted After Uncovering Seizure of Firms.” He accused the Russian government of a major financial fraud and
explained how it had targeted Sergei, Eduard, and Vladimir to cover up the crime.

Normally, a corruption exposé like this would cause a big stir, but in this case, there was dead silence. The Russians were totally unmoved and unashamed. Even worse, the Russian press didn’t pick it up at all. Journalists in Russia seemed too scared to write about anything to do with me. I was simply radioactive.

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.”

Her report was definitive and damning, but it also had no impact whatsoever. The Russians met it with more deafening silence. The people tormenting Sergei simply didn’t care.

We had a big debate internally about what to do next. We were getting nowhere with traditional advocacy tools and running out of ideas. But then our twenty-four-year-old secretary popped her head in my office and said, “Sorry to interrupt, but I couldn’t help overhearing your conversation. Have you guys ever thought of doing a YouTube video?”

I barely knew what YouTube was in 2009, so she brought in her laptop and showed us how it worked.

Given our lack of success elsewhere, it seemed worth a try. We organized our information about the fraud, wrote a script, and produced a fourteen-minute video. It explained in simple terms how the police and criminals had succeeded in stealing $230 million from the Russian Treasury, and how they’d arrested Sergei when he exposed the crime. We made two versions—one in Russian and one in English. It was clearer and more understandable than anything we’d
done before, and I suspected it would make a big impression when we released it.

I was keen to get it online as quickly as possible, but first I needed Sergei to approve it, since he was the one who was most exposed to any repercussions. I passed a copy of the script to his lawyer and waited anxiously to hear whether I had his blessing.

But Sergei was dealing with more pressing issues.

•  •  •

By the summer of 2009, Sergei’s health had seriously deteriorated. The doctors in the medical wing of Matrosskaya Tishina diagnosed him with pancreatitis, gallstones, and cholecystitis. They prescribed an ultrasound examination and possible surgery for August 1, 2009.

One week before this scheduled exam, however, Major Silchenko made the decision to move Sergei from Matrosskaya Tishina to Butyrka, a maximum-security detention center that in Soviet times had been a way station to the gulags. The place was infamous throughout Russia. It was like Alcatraz, only worse. Most significantly for Sergei, Butyrka had no medical facilities that could deal with his illnesses.

What Sergei was forced to endure at Butyrka was worthy of Solzhenitsyn’s
Gulag Archipelago
.

As soon as he passed through the doors of Butyrka on July 25, Sergei asked the prison authorities to arrange for the medical treatment he was supposed to receive. But they simply ignored him. For weeks, he languished in his cell, the pain growing steadily with each passing day.

Then, at 4:00 p.m. on August 24, the pain in his stomach became so acute that he couldn’t lie down. Every position sent fiery pains through his solar plexus and chest. The only respite came when he pulled up his knees and rolled into a ball, rocking from side to side.

At 5:30 p.m. that day, his cellmate, Erik, returned from an interrogation. Sergei was on the bed in this balled-up position, whimpering quietly. Erik asked what was wrong, but Sergei was so consumed
with pain that he couldn’t respond. Erik shouted for a doctor. The guard heard him and promised to find one, but nothing happened. Half an hour later, Erik banged on the bars to get the guard’s attention, but still there was no response.

An hour later, Erik heard some male voices: “Which cell?”

Erik shouted, “Two sixty-seven! Please come now!” But no one came.

Sergei’s pain became even more excruciating over the next few hours. He was holding himself tight, tears streaming down his face, when, finally, at 9:30 p.m. two guards showed up, opened the cell door, and took him to the infirmary.

When he arrived, he was made to wait for half an hour while the nurse slowly finished her paperwork. He crouched with his knees close to his chest to alleviate the pain. When the nurse was finally done, she barked in an accusatory tone, “Okay. Why are you here?”

Sergei was practically shaking, and through clenched teeth he said slowly, “I’m in unbearable pain. I’ve asked over and over, but no doctor has examined me since I arrived last month.”

The nurse was visibly annoyed. “What do you mean you haven’t been examined? You were examined at your previous detention center!”

“Yes, and they prescribed treatment and surgery. But nothing has happened here.”

“When did you come to us? Only one month ago! What do you want? To be treated every month? You should have had treatment when you were free.”

“I wasn’t sick when I was free. I developed these illnesses in detention.”

“Don’t tell me fairy tales.” She then dismissed him, without providing any treatment. Her final words were, “If you need medical attention, write another letter to the doctor.”

The guards took him back to his cell. Eventually the pain subsided and he was able to drift into a fitful sleep.

It was now clear that the authorities were deliberately withholding
medical attention from Sergei. They were using illnesses he had contracted in detention as a cudgel against him. They knew that gallstones were one of the most painful conditions anyone could suffer from. In the West, you might last two hours before you crawl to the emergency room, where the doctors will immediately give you a dose of morphine before treating you. Sergei, though, had to deal with untreated gallstones for
four months
without any painkillers. What he had to endure was unimaginable.

Sergei and his lawyer wrote more than twenty requests to every branch of the penal, law enforcement, and judicial systems of Russia, desperately begging for medical attention. Most of these petitions were ignored, but the replies he received were shocking.

Major Oleg Silchenko wrote, “I deny in full the request for a medical examination.”

A Tverskoi District court judge, Aleksey Krivoruchko, replied, “Your request to review complaints about withholding of medical care and cruel treatment is denied.”

Andrei Pechegin from the Prosecutor’s Office replied, “There’s no reason for the prosecutor to intervene.”

Judge Yelena Stashina, one of the judges who ordered Sergei’s continued detention, said, “I rule that your request to review the medical records and conditions of detention is irrelevant.”

While Sergei was being systematically tortured, he began to receive regular visits from a man who refused to identify himself or his organization. Whenever this man came, the guards would drag Sergei from his cell to a stuffy, windowless room. The meetings were short because the man had only one message: “Do what we want, or things will continue to get worse for you.”

Every time Sergei would stare across the table at this man and refuse to do what he wanted.

Nobody knows how much hardship one can endure until one is forced to endure it. I don’t know how I would have handled this situation, and Sergei probably didn’t know either until he faced it. 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.

Here was an innocent man, deprived of any contact with his loved ones, cheated by the law, rebuffed by the bureaucracy, tortured inside the prison’s walls, sick and becoming sicker. Even in these most dire circumstances, when he had the best possible reasons to give his tormentors what they wanted, he wouldn’t. In spite of the loss of his freedom, his health, his sanity, and possibly even his life, he would not compromise his ideals or his faith.

He would not give in.

As Sergei endured this living nightmare, I was living in a daze. Saturday mornings were the worst. I would wake early and roll over to look at Elena in our comfortable king-size bed. Beyond the edge of our bed was a window, and beyond that London. I was free and comfortable and loved. I could still touch and feel what love meant, while Sergei could only remember. It made me feel sick. My desire to reconcile my family’s communist background with my own capitalist ambitions had brought me to Russia, but, naively, I never imagined that this pursuit would result in a human tragedy.

On these days, I would get up, shuffle to the bathroom, turn on the shower, and get in. The hot water was meant to be cleansing, only it wasn’t. The dirt fell free, but the guilt coated me like tar. Sergei got to shower once a week at most, sometimes having to wait as long as three weeks. The water falling over his body was cold, and the soap, if there was any, was rough. His prison cells were rank and his health was failing. More than once I fought back fits of nausea. Even today I can’t step into my bathroom without thinking of Sergei.