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

Bill Browder

Feb 2015 · Recorded Books · Narrated by Adam Grupper

About this audiobook

November 2009. An emaciated young lawyer, Sergei Magnitsky, is led to a freezing isolation cell in a Moscow prison, handcuffed to a bed rail, and beaten to death by eight police officers. His crime? To testify against the Russian Interior Ministry officials who were involved in a conspiracy to steal $230 million of taxes paid to the state by one of the world's most successful hedge funds. Magnitsky's brutal killing has remained uninvestigated and unpunished to this day. His farcical posthumous show-trial brought Putin's regime to a new low in the eyes of the international community. Red Notice is a searing exposE of the wholesale whitewash by Russian authorities of Magnitsky's imprisonment and murder, slicing deep into the shadowy heart of the Kremlin to uncover its sordid truths. Bill Browder - the hedge fund manager who employed Magnitsky - takes us on his explosive journey from the heady world of finance in New York and London in the 1990s, through his battles with ruthless oligarchs in the turbulent landscape of post-Soviet Union Moscow, to his expulsion from Russia on Putin's orders. Browder's graphic portrait of the Russian government as a criminal enterprise wielding all the power of a sovereign state illuminates his personal transformation from financier to human rights activist, campaigning for justice for his late lawyer and friend. With fraud, bribery, corruption and torture exposed at every turn,Red Notice is a shocking but true political roller-coaster that plays out in the highest echelons of Western power.

Ratings and reviews

Reads like a thriller! Could not stop listening. Extraordinarily prescient. One can draw a line from Putin's rage and humiliation at the passage of the Magnitsky Act to Russia's war on liberal democracies the world over -- Trump's rise as the prime exemplar. Bill Browder experiences the sordid underbelly of the New Russia as few have. While he ventures to Russia for raw capitalistic pursuits, his push for basic corporate governance soon makes him the enemy of Putin cronies rising to power around the same time. With his own life in danger -- the events described here mostly occur before Putin begins killing his detractors abroad such as Litvinenko and Skripal -- Browder carries forward the memory of Sergey Magnitsky, the tragic heart of the story whose determination and courage are something few would exhibit in similar circumstances.

I was listening to a forty-five expose about his books on Bloomberg postcast and I am in process of reading it now. As a person born and raised for half of a life in Eastern Europe I was struck by Mr Browder nativity. Nothing in those countries was allowed to happen without the approval of Secret Police or the mafia like organizations that came after it. Surprised that assests were undervalued for sham privatisations of their economy and can get privatizations coupons at a steep discount at a black market? Dear Mr Browder if you didn’t realized it yet, this was the plan! This is how you, Solomon Brothers and western money have created the oligarchs. They bought the Russian undervalued economy for kopecs and then borrowed again and again against those then overvalued assets with again western money to get richer. You and others were allowed to do business in Russia and it wasn't only because your economical prowess, duh I will return with more comments once I get through the book

Riveting...as well as educational. Browder exposes the unbelievable state of affairs in Russia today, and how we got there.

About the author

William Felix "Bill" Browder (born 23 April 1964) received a BA in economics from the University of Chicago and an MBA from Stanford Business School. He was vice president at Salomon Brothers before becoming the founder and CEO of Hermitage Capital Management, which was the largest foreign investor in Russia until 2005. Since his lawyer, Sergei Magnitsky, died in prison after uncovering a $230 million fraud committed by Russian government officials in 2009, Browder has been leading a campaign to expose Russia's endemic corruption and human rights abuses. His first book, Red Notice: A True Story of High Finance, Murder, and One Man's Fight for Justice, was published in 2015 and became listed on the New York Times bestseller list that same year. Also in the same year his title Red Notice: How I Became Putin's No. 1 Enemy made The New Zealand Best Seller List.