Red Notice: A True Story of High Finance, Murder, and One Man's Fight for Justice (45 page)

In spite of his background, I could imagine how earnest members of Congress would want to learn whatever “new details” this parliamentarian possessed about the Magnitsky case. I knew that Malkin’s presentation would include forgeries and other fabrications from the FSB, but how would a member of Congress be able to understand that in a thirty-minute briefing?

I spent most of the day on July 9 calling different congressional offices, trying to find out who’d agreed to meet the delegation. Kyle told me that Cardin had refused, but that McCain, Wicker, and McGovern had all agreed. Kyle also heard that the delegation would be given an audience at the president’s National Security Council and at the State Department. When these meetings were finished, the Malkin delegation was going to hold a press conference on July 11 at the Russian embassy to announce “new details of the case.”

Most of Malkin’s meetings took place on July 10, and I frantically called everyone I knew in Washington to try to get some feedback on how they went, but I didn’t have any luck. Even Kyle was unavailable that day.

I would have repeated this exercise on the eleventh, but unfortunately I was flying with my family for a trip to San Diego. This couldn’t have come at a worse time, but I wasn’t going to cancel it. As I’d promised Elena when this whole mess started, we weren’t going to let the Russians ruin our lives.

We boarded the flight at noon, and even though I was distracted, I helped Elena with our children in whatever way I could. We settled in, and Jessica and I played a game of make-believe with a pair of stuffed giraffes as the plane taxied and took off. As we climbed higher, she suddenly blurted, “Daddy, who is Magnitsky?”

I’d never explicitly spoken with Jessica about Sergei, but she’d heard his name so many times that it was part of her daily vocabulary. I thought carefully before I answered, “Sergei Magnitsky was a friend.”

“Did something happen to him?”

“Yes. Some very bad people put him in jail and hurt him and asked him to tell a lie.”

“Did he?”

“No, he didn’t. And because of that they made his life hard and kept him from seeing his family.”

“Why did they want him to lie?” she asked, making her giraffe dance on the armrest between us.

“Because they stole lots of money and wanted to keep it.”

She let the giraffe fall in her lap. After a few moments she asked, “What happened to Magnitsky?”

“Well, sweetie . . . he died.”

“Because he wouldn’t lie?”

“Exactly. He died because he wouldn’t lie.”

“Oh.” She then picked up her giraffe and turned it around, saying something inaudible to it in her private child’s language. I sat there for a few seconds with my thoughts before she said, “I hope that won’t happen to you.”

I blinked, fighting back a tear. “It won’t, sweetie. I promise.”

“Okay.” The seat-belt light went off and Jessica got up to talk to Elena about something, but our conversation hit me hard. It saddened me, but more than anything else, it made me angry. I needed to know what was going on in Washington with the Malkin delegation as soon as possible.

As soon as we were on the ground eleven hours later, I switched on my phone and called Kyle, bracing for the worst. He picked up on the first ring with the same casual voice I’d grown accustomed to. “Hey, Bill. What’s up?”

“I’ve been on a plane all day. What’s happening with the Russians? Do we still have a law?”

“Absolutely. Their intervention, if that’s what you can call it, was a complete clusterfuck,” he said with a chuckle. “You should have seen it.”

He told me that the first point Malkin made to the senators was that
Sergei was a drunk and out of shape, and that his death was somehow due to his “alcoholism.” Not only was this offensive, but the senators knew it to be untrue. They were familiar with the independent reports that determined that Sergei died because he was tortured and beaten, and because he hadn’t received proper medical attention.

Malkin’s second point came after he plonked a pile of redacted documents in Russian in front of the senators declaring that these papers constituted “absolute proof” that Sergei and I were crooks and had stolen the $230 million. This ploy didn’t move them either. Many of the senators had seen the Russian Untouchables videos and knew all about the unexplained wealth of Kuznetsov, Karpov, and Stepanova, not to mention the Swiss money-laundering case and the frozen millions belonging to Stepanova’s husband. The senators reminded Malkin of these inconvenient facts, and he responded that the Russian authorities had looked into all of these allegations and found nothing wrong.

Kyle then told me that the press conference had been an even bigger disaster. When a
Chicago Tribune
reporter asked for a comment about the documents that proved Sergei had been beaten by riot guards, Malkin replied dismissively, “Yeah, maybe he was kicked one time, maybe two, but this is not the reason for his death.”

When news of Malkin’s Washington fiasco reached Moscow, the chairman of Russia’s Foreign Affairs Committee of the Federation Council completely disowned Malkin and his delegation, saying that there had been “no parliamentary investigation. These were his personal views and were not approved by anybody.”

For all the noise and drama that had built up around this last desperate attempt by the Russians, it achieved the exact opposite of its goal. Instead of driving people away from the Magnitsky Act, it drove them even closer. Our support was now rock solid, and there was no way that Magnitsky wouldn’t pass in the Finance Committee.

Without incident, on July 18 the Magnitsky Act did just that. The next step was a full vote in both chambers of the US Congress, which would happen after the summer recess.

Things quieted down during the recess, and I enjoyed a properly relaxing vacation with my kids for the first time in years. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d been able to just let go and unwind. In the middle of our trip, my kids begged me to take them camping. We borrowed a tent and some sleeping bags, and I drove the family to Palomar Mountain State Park, an hour and half drive north of San Diego, where we got a campsite for the night. We brought wood from the ranger station and made a campfire and explored the forest. David cooked and we ate a dinner of spaghetti, tomato sauce, and hot dogs off plastic plates. As night fell, owls hooted and other birds cooed in the treetops, and the smell of burning wood filled the air. It was one of the best evenings I’d had in a long time.

When I returned to London, I was recharged and ready for the final push.

But the Russians were too. On my very first day back, a large, registered-mail envelope arrived. Inside was a 205-page lawsuit,
Pavel Karpov v. William Browder
, on the letterhead of a British law firm, Olswang, one of the UK’s most prestigious and expensive firms. Karpov was suing me for libel in Britain’s High Court. The lawsuit alleged that our YouTube videos about Karpov, Kuznetsov, and Stepanova defamed him and caused him moral suffering.

I had to laugh. “Moral suffering”? Was he kidding?

Moreover, Karpov earned less than $1,500 a month, while the law firm he hired charged around £600
an hour
. This meant that just to have this document drawn up and delivered, Karpov would have burned through several years of his official salary.

This appeared to me to be a last-ditch attempt to silence our campaign, and it fit squarely into Putin’s instructions to his government. Days after he resumed office in May 2012 after having been reelected as president in March, he issued an executive order stating that one of his top foreign policy priorities was to stop the Magnitsky Act from becoming law in America. In my mind, this explained how Karpov could miraculously afford the services of this expensive London law firm.

I’m sure that Olswang was happy to take the case. I could imagine some silver-tongued lawyer lecturing a bunch of unsophisticated Russians on what spending £1 million on this lawsuit would do for all their problems with Bill Browder and the Magnitsky Act. What Olswang might not have realized was that a Russian police officer, who didn’t speak English and had been to the United Kingdom only twice for vacation, hardly had standing in the British libel court.

I hired lawyers to contest the suit, but I didn’t let it distract me from my main objective of getting the Magnitsky Act passed. The summer recess ended at the beginning of September, and I called Kyle as soon as he was back in his office to find out when the bill would be voted on.

Kyle laughed. “Bill, we’re nearing peak political silly season right before the presidential election. Magnitsky is too much of a win-win for the leadership to schedule a vote.”

“But we have full bipartisan support. This seems to be the one thing in Washington that everyone agrees on.”

“That’s the point, Bill. Now that the election is in full swing, no one wants to talk about things that everyone agrees on. None of these guys can afford to make the others look good.”

“What are you saying, then?”

“I’m saying that the earliest Magnitsky can come up is after November sixth.”

I did some mental math. “So that means we’ll only have seven weeks between the election and when Congress ends.”

“Not even seven weeks. With the holidays it’s much less.”

While I was concerned about this delay, I could do nothing but wait. I spent September and October catching up with my staff on the Hermitage investment business, which was a shadow of its former self. To build my fund back to what it had been would have required month after month of marketing trips and investment conferences. When I put the idea of doing this against that of getting justice for Sergei, justice won in a heartbeat.

The weeks passed slowly, and finally the US presidential election took place on November 6. Obama easily defeated Mitt Romney, and the day after the election I called Kyle and asked again when Magnitsky would come up for a vote.

To my surprise, he said, “I was just going to call you—the House just announced it’s going to vote a week from Friday.”

“Are you serious?”

“Yes. It’s finally happening!”

I looked at my calendar. “That’s November sixteenth. . . .”

Kyle paused as he realized the significance of this date. November 16, 2012, would be the third anniversary of Sergei’s death. “Yes,” he said quietly. “It is . . . but there’s one more problem. The House is insisting that Magnitsky go back to a Russia-only bill, and that’s what they’re going to vote on.”

When Senator Cardin made it a global human rights bill, he had become so enthusiastic about its historic, precedent-setting nature that he was ready to risk the whole deal to keep it a global piece of legislation.

“Does that mean Cardin won’t accept the Russia-only version in the Senate?”

“He might not.”

If the Senate had a different version of a law than the House, then they would have to reconcile them, and this would take more time—the one thing we didn’t have. If Cardin didn’t back down, then there was a good chance that we would have no law at all.

Naturally, I wanted Cardin’s global version of the bill to pass. Having Sergei’s name on a piece of legislation as broad and meaningful as what Cardin had proposed would have been an ideal way to honor him. But more than that, I wanted the bill to get passed into law, and if that meant going with this Russia-only version, then I thought it was the right thing to do.

I hoped Cardin would too.

Finally, November 16 arrived. It was due to be a big day. Not only
was the US House of Representatives going to vote on the Magnitsky Act, but that night, I was hosting the London premiere of a play entitled
One Hour Eighteen Minutes
, an independent, award-winning production by Russian playwright Elena Gremina that detailed the last one hour and eighteen minutes of Sergei’s life.

In the late afternoon every single person in the office logged on to C-SPAN’s website for the live feed from the US House of Representatives. Before the vote began, members of Congress came to the floor and gave speeches, beautifully telling and retelling Sergei’s story, and calling for justice. This watershed moment was happening right before my eyes in this cavernous room steeped in American history. This was the same chamber where the amendments to abolish slavery and give women the right to vote were passed, and where landmark civil rights laws were approved. I was awed to think that everything that happened had led to this.

Finally, the voting commenced. One by one, the votes trickled in—nearly all were in favor. Whenever there was a vote against, I would hear boos in the office, but these outbursts were few and far between. The bill was going to sail through the House.

When the roll call was about halfway done, my phone rang. Without looking at the caller ID I picked it up, thinking it was Elena or some other well-wisher wanting to talk about what was happening in Washington.

“Bill, it’s Marcel.” I recognized the voice as that of an accountant we’d introduced to Alexander Perepilichnyy, the Russian whistle-blower who’d exposed the Swiss accounts.

I was surprised to hear from Marcel because he had nothing to with the Magnitsky Act or anything else I was working on at that moment. “Hey, Marcel. Can this wait? I’m a bit busy right now.”

“Sorry to bother you, Bill, but it’s important.”

“Okay, what is it?”

“Bill, I’m not even sure I should be telling you this,” he said cryptically.

I swiveled away from the C-SPAN feed. “Telling me what?”

“You have to promise not to share it with anyone—not even the guys in your office.”

“Depends. What is it?”

“Alexander Perepilichnyy is dead.”

Marcel told me that Perepilichnyy had dropped dead in front of his house in Surrey during an afternoon jog, but that he had no other information.

It took several minutes for this news to sink in. Surrey was not more than twenty miles from where I sat. If this was foul play, which it appeared to be, then our enemies had brought their terror to us.

Marcel’s request to keep this to myself was totally unreasonable, and I immediately pulled Vadim, Vladimir, and Ivan into my office. I told them the bad news, and they were utterly shocked—especially Vadim and Vladimir, both of whom had gotten to know Perepilichnyy well in the last year. As we spoke, Vladimir dropped into a chair and said something quietly to himself in Russian that I couldn’t understand.