The political fallout from Magnitsky’s killing was profound. Such are the perils of operating in Putin’s world-and Browder’s. A Browder source named Alexander Perepilichny-who had provided crucial financial documents to aid Browder’s cause-later died mysteriously while jogging on the outskirts of London. “It became my mission to get revenge.” During one of the raids, a lawyer was pummeled and hospitalized.

“My life changed at that moment,” Browder has said frequently. And how, in 2009, he would die in a Moscow detention center, having been denied medical treatment and purportedly beaten to death. How-after trying to press Browder’s case against the officials who he believed were responsible-Magnitsky was hauled off to prison. How authorities raided the offices of Hermitage and its law firm, stole the company’s corporate seals and stamps, and rigged a bogus $230 million tax-rebate fraud, which they tried to pin on Browder’s 37-year-old tax adviser, Sergei Magnitsky. How Putin, in 2005, barred him from Russia. Today, Browder, who wrote a best-selling 2015 memoir, Red Notice, is tireless in recounting the story of how he became Putin’s Public Enemy No. “Vladimir Putin wants me dead,” he says almost every time he is interviewed. (He was let go an hour later.) These moments of crisis are familiar to his 180,000 Twitter followers-“the army of Bill,” they are called-who worry about his safety in his adopted role as both human-rights advocate and financial sleuth, taking on Putin and his kleptocrats. “I was frightened this wasn’t an arrest but an illegal rendition to Moscow,” Browder said. In May of this year, for example, the American-born financier was bundled into a police car in Madrid by the Spanish police, who, acting on an Interpol warrant at the behest of Russian authorities, simply appeared outside his hotel room and took him away. They often begin with a ringing phone-or a knock on a door. “At all times,” he told me not long after we met, “I had $5,000 in cash in case I had to flee for the border and pay off the guards.”īill Browder’s stories are melodramas. Perhaps all you need to know to understand the essense of Bill Browder is what he carried with him in his briefcase when he lived in Putin’s Russia. Bill Browder, photographed in Aspen, Colorado.

Putin's no 1 enemy