Bill Browder—part Jason Bourne, part Don Quixote—is ramping up his one-man war on

Vladimir Putin. Marie Brenner takes the measure of the American-born financier who
became a prime focus of that infamous Trump Tower meeting, to understand why he's
so bent on revenge

HOLIDAY 2018/2019 MARIE BRENNER

BENJAMIN RASMUSSEN
Perhaps all you need to know to understand the essence of Bill Browder is what he
carried with him in his briefcase when he lived in Putin's Russia. "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."

Bill Browder's stories are melodramas. They often begin with a ringing phone—or a
knock on a door. 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. "I was frightened this wasn't an arrest but an
illegal rendition to Moscow," Browder said. (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.
"Vladimir Putin wants me dead," he says almost every time he is interviewed.

Is there anyone, by now, who is unaware of Browder's relentless crusade? At 54, he

circles the globe helping governments recover millions that Russian oligarchs have
illegally parked overseas. He has dodged six warrants seeking his arrest. He takes
precautions in his daily routine, wary of possible security threats. His weapons
are judicial and legislative: sanctions blocking the assets and the international
travel of Russian criminals, murderers, and corrupt industrialists who have
plundered their companies.

And he is succeeding. "Now every country knows the names of these guys," he
contends. "Now everyone who thought they could operate under the radar is
discovering that you can't. It started with [Special Counsel] Robert Mueller's
indictment of the 12 G.R.U. agents"—operatives from Russia's military-intelligence
service—"and they discovered that every e-mail they ever sent is available to the
Justice Department. All of a sudden [the authorities] arrested a spy in Norway.
They arrested two people who were getting ready to break into a chemical-weapons
lab.

"Paul Manafort thought he could do all of this dirty shit and get away with it.
Well, you know what? Every single thing he did has come out. If Trump has any
secrets, the truth is going to come out. I don't know if Trump has any secrets. But
there is not going to be a secret left. While Trump is tweeting on his toilet about
what a great guy Putin is, someone in the bowels of the U.S. Treasury is issuing
regulations which basically [list the new names that should be added to the list of
Russians who] should be sanctioned. It is crystallizing everywhere."

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At one time, William Browder was the largest foreign portfolio investor in Russia.
In the 1990s, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, his hedge fund, Hermitage
Capital, made a fortune investing in Russia as the country privatized its state-
owned industries, despite the downside risk that the government, at anytime and
without warning, could seize assets, dilute stock shares, and arrest investors or
their employees.

Browder would refer to the adrenaline rush in those days as the high of "the ten-
bagger"—the euphoria that comes from knowing you've earned 10 times your initial
investment. In 1994, at the age of 30, he had gone from being a scrappy Stanford
grad fighting for a desk at Salomon Brothers to "Bill... could you come and brief
George Soros?"

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. 1. Browder's
narrative is astounding. How Putin, in 2005, barred him from Russia. 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—after
trying to press Browder's case against the officials who he believed were
responsible—Magnitsky was hauled off to prison. And how, in 2009, he would die in a
Moscow detention center, having been denied medical treatment and purportedly
beaten to death.

"My life changed at that moment," Browder has said frequently, "it became my
mission to get revenge." During one of the raids, a lawyer was pummeled and
hospitalized. 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. Such are the perils of operating in Putin's
world—and Browder's.

The political fallout from Magnitsky's killing was profound. In seeking to avenge
his colleague's death, Browder, from his redoubt in London, spent three years
poring over legal documents and financial records. He also lobbied U.S.
legislators, human-rights organizations, and members of the Obama administration.
The result: in 2012, Congress passed and Obama signed into law the Magnitsky Act.
It denied visas to, and froze the holdings of, Russians who were judged responsible
for, or financially benefited from, Magnitsky's demise—as well as others who
committed gross violations of human rights. (In retaliation, the Russian government
halted its program allowing American adoptions of Russian children.) Four years
later, the U.S. expanded the law, which now can be applied globally; Magnitsky
provisions, for instance, are being considered against those who may have played a
role in the murder of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi.

Through it all, Browder has paid a steep price for his efforts. Whenever traveling
outside the U.K. (he renounced his U.S. citizenship and became a Brit in 1998), he
is wary of an Interpol warrant. Russian courts have twice tried him in absentia and
both times sentenced him to nine years in prison. Putin's prosecutors have accused
him of tax fraud and, preposterously, of murdering Magnitsky himself.

All of these threats, paradoxically, have given Browder even more of an incentive
to make the rounds, push his crusade. "The more I am out there," he told me, "the
safer I am."

The tale of how Browder made his fortune is worth repeating. The maverick investor,
reportedly worth upwards of $100 million, is the grandson of Earl Browder, the head
of the American Communist Party during F.D.R.'s presidency. But despite that family
history, young Bill became an ardent capitalist. At the height of its success,
Hermitage, which he co-founded in 1996 with the banker Edmond Safra, managed $4.5
billion of client investments in Russian companies.

Hermitage, of course, had its struggles. In 1998, Russia defaulted on its foreign
debt. The ruble crashed. The company's assets plummeted to $100 million. But over
the next seven years the price of oil quadrupled. And Browder, determined to ride
it out, made a killing, thanks to his major stake in Gazprom, Russia's state-owned
oil-and-gas colossus. By the early 2000s, he had decided on a brash move. He
started a campaign to expose the endemic corruption at various Russian firms. He
publicly charged an array of businessmen and officials, accusing them of looting
their companies' assets. Soon, alarmed that the oligarchs might try to assassinate
him, Browder enlisted a security detail and began traveling in a three-car
motorcade.

As Browder's business thrived, so did his hubris. Despite his attempts to curb
corporate graft, Browder spoke out favorably about Putin, telling The New York
Times that he "has turned out to be my biggest ally in Russia." Browder's rationale
for supporting him? "We want an authoritarian—one who is exercising authority over
the Mafia and oligarchs." During our many conversations, Browder would try to put
these statements in context: Putin had promised "that he was going to restore order
and stamp out the abuse by the oligarchs. Everyone was hoping that he was going to
be true to that pitch." Browder, meanwhile, said he was simply "trying to make all
my money back."

He would soon realize, though, that he was being played and that his status as a
foreigner did not insulate him from the authorities' wrath. In November 2005, after
deplaning at Moscow's main airport, he was detained by immigration officers, held
overnight, and deported. He had become yet another wealthy businessman who had
suddenly fallen out of Putin's favor. As Browder recalled, he was literally and
figuratively "the last person waiting for the baggage on the airline carousel."

At our first session, in London, Bill Browder did not act like someone who feared
for his life. I had expected to find elaborate security at his building. Instead, I
was given a perfunctory glance and waved up to the Hermitage offices, which
overlook London's picturesque Finsbury Square. I began to wonder if there was a
hidden security system in place, speculating, as others have, that Browder either
was protected by or had a special relationship with M.I.6, Britain's foreign-
intelligence service. Curious, I asked him, point-blank, "Are you M.I.6?" He
hesitated and then said, cryptically, "I work with so many levels of British law
enforcement, I never know who is working for whom." When I broached the subject
again, months later, he bristled: "I am definitely not under British protection. I
have to protect myself. I am not M.I.6. I am not C.I.A. I am not anything. I bet
there are nine intelligence agencies listening as we speak. But that is because I
am not an agent of anyone's—I am a completely independent operator. If I were
really an agent of M.I.6, why would I be having so many problems opening a criminal
case [in the U.K. against the oligarchs] ? Maybe this is a double fake-out! The
Russians are accusing me of being a C.I.A. agent!"

With the passage of new laws in England, some oligarchs have felt the squeeze. Last
May, Parliament—after the poisoning, in Salisbury, of former Russia spy Sergei
Skripal and his daughter, Yulia passed its own version of the Magnitsky Act. And
yet the government appears ambivalent about investigating the $30 million in
"illicit funds" that Browder contends have been laundered through British banks. "
I have gone to every agency," he said. "No one will take it on. It all stops with
the higher-ups. It's either massive incompetence or collusion."

This fall, underlying tensions between Browder and the Brits came into stark relief
when detective Jon Benton, the onetime head of the international corruption unit
looking into these suspicious dealings, made a surprising admission. He said he had
received orders to stop his inquiry—from a more senior official with links to the
Foreign Office. "I was approached and taken for a coffee," Benton told The Sunday
Telegraph, "and basically told Bill Browder is a pain in the neck and to leave it."
Browder was livid but not surprised: certain members of the government have reason
to keep in with the Kremlin; some of the Russian business elite retain strong
connections with England's power players. Earlier this year, according to The New
York Times, billionaire Oleg Deripaska, a Russian aluminum magnate suspected of
having connections to organized crime, retained the lobbying help of a British
lord, Gregory Barker—an associate of David Cameron—hoping to sway U.S. officials to
lighten or remove stiff sanctions on Deripaska and his businesses. "The U.S. won't
respond to this kind of pressure," Browder told me in November. "They'd look like
they're caving." But back in England, Browder said, fuming, We are still trying to
get the U.K. to make a list of sanctioned individuals. They are stalling."

Earl and Raisa Browder became pariahs. In their homes, they hung portraits of
Stalin, Lenin, and Mao.
Browder's office resembles a small trading floor, with analysts sitting in rows of
desks, staring intently at computer monitors. Many spend their time riffling
through complex chains of transactions in far-flung foreign bank accounts to
determine which ones can be traced to corrupt culprits. So far, Browder has sought
to help two dozen nations recover their piece of the $230 million pie—the tax money
paid to the Russian Treasury—that he alleges to have been stolen by Russian
officials, moguls, and mobsters. A handful of countries, including Switzerland,
France, and the Netherlands, have opened investigations. In September, the head of
Denmark's Danske Bank abruptly resigned after authorities, with an assist from
Browder, opened a $234 billion money-laundering probe of its Estonian branch.

When Browder talks one-on-one, he radiates a nervous intensity. He is charming,

abrasive, and tightly wound. His thoughts come so quickly that he often stutters.
His predominant expression is one of steely impatience. While his bald pate and
frameless glasses affect an accountant's mien, his well-tailored suits speak to a
life lived at the pinnacle of privilege.

The ideological fervor that defines his pursuit of Putin is reminiscent of that of
Michael Milken, a number-crunching savant I wrote about in the 90s for Vanity Fair.
Milken's singular belief in the junk-bond market was visionary—and an affront to
the Wall Street establishment. He eventually went to jail for securities fraud and
other crimes. Browder, like Milken, is a chronic self-promoter, who conveys a sense
that he is always playing for an angle, molding his story. Both men can be
patronizing and imperious. Both are financial wizards—and renegades. When I
mentioned to Browder that I saw in him a kind of parallel to Milken—in his sense of
mission and in the seemingly willful blinders he wears as he consumes himself with
financial arcana—he snapped at me: "Not remotely. He was a crook."

Browder can be incurious and opaque, with little small talk and zero equivocation.
In the first minutes we were together, I mentioned a name to Browder and, rather
than answering me, he jumped to his feet and said, "I have a PowerPoint prepared on
this very subject." He disappeared and returned with glossy laminate boards that
featured dazzling illustrations, cartoon thunderbolts, and captions with the whimsy
of a Marvel comic.

Among reporters, Browder's PowerPoint presentations are considered works of such

flair and originality that David E. Hoffman, the former Washington Post Moscow
bureau chief and author of The Oligarchs, still keeps a box of them in his garage.
These slide decks, which enable Browder to shape a narrative as a form of
performance, are his preferred mode of communication. "That was always my secret,"
he told me. "We did PowerPoints. If you can present your case clearly and visually,
anyone can understand it. No one has an attention span."

It is an arduous slog, indeed, to follow a chain of laundered accounts (Russia to

Switzerland to Dubai, for example) linked to various players (a crime syndicate, a
corrupt tax official, an oligarch), linked in turn to a $20 million mansion outside
of Moscow. But that is Browder's metier. And where is all that money that was
swiped from the taxes Hermitage paid to the Russian government? "Some has
disappeared," he said. "Some we are still looking for. But so far we have confirmed
$200 million spread across the globe."

When I returned to Browder's offices a couple of days later, I was confronted with
a scene reminiscent of mathematician John Nash's shambolic shed in the movie A
Beautiful Mind. For my benefit, Browder had taken piles of research data and
PowerPoint printouts and covered every square inch of a 15-foot-long conference-
room table. Pride of place was given to an intricate chart that outlined a scheme
by an organized-crime ring to strip tax assets from the Russian Treasury. Nearby
were boxes filled with photos of the thieves' alleged collaborators: men from
Russia's Federal Security Service (the F.S.B.) and the Ministry of the Interior,
and the Prosecutor General's office, as well as an array of lawyers, dubbed
"Criminal Executors."

Another PowerPoint deck bore the image of the cellist turned conductor Sergei
Roldugin, head of the St. Petersburg House of Music. In 2015, when the Panama
Papers were released (unearthing reams of leaked attorney-client documents that
revealed various foreign shell companies), Roldugin's yearly income was reported to
be about $10 million and he was linked to offshore companies with cash flows of up
to $2 billion. This drew attention to his close friendship with Vladimir Putin and
the fact that Roldugin is the godfather of Putin's daughter Maria. One of Browder's
investigators asked me, "How does a cellist get $2 billion in his bank account?"

"Do you know the myth of the firebird?" I asked Browder, referring to the classic
folktale that for over a century has helped convey the Russian character. He did
not. The story revolves around a "firebird," which arrives from a distant land,
glowing with promises and blessings yet carrying a portent of doom. "A friend named
his fund Firebird," Browder replied. "Now I get it."

Before arriving in Russia, he had never read a word of Dostoyevsky nor any of the
nation's great literary works, which might have illuminated him about the Russian
soul, its darkness, its fierce nationalism. He told me that when he met his current
wife—whom he has referred to publicly by the pseudonym Elena, to protect her
identity—she tried to get him to read a Chekhov story or two, to no avail.

At the top of her class at Moscow State University—Russia's Harvard—Elena worked

for an American P.R. firm representing the oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky, the
chairman of Yukos, one of Russia's larger oil companies. She met Browder in January
2000. At the time, the Russian ruble had crashed and the oligarchs had embarked
upon what Browder recalled as "an orgy of stealing." Yukos—even amid all the
embezzlement going on—stood out as one of the country's most scandal-plagued
companies. And Browder, trying to expose the widespread malfeasance ("I was the
only person in Moscow crazy enough to speak publicly"), gave a presentation at the
American Chamber of Commerce. Elena came to hear him.

He was intrigued by her and pursued her, and on their second date Browder mentioned
an article he'd read in Foreign Affairs suggesting that U.S. authorities revoke the
visas of Russia's most corrupt businessmen. Browder pointed out that one guy they
should go after was her company's client, the head of Yukos. "The oligarchs are
monsters, and you have to start somewhere," he told her.

Despite his bold approach, they soon fell in love and got married, and not long
after, Khodorkovsky, who was supporting some of Putin's political opponents, was
arrested. The government would seize Khodorkovsky's 36 percent block of Yukos. He
would be placed on trial and sent to prison. (In 2013, he was pardoned and
released. He now lives in London, where he runs a foundation that supports
journalists, some of whom have been targeted by Putin. "We've gone from being
enemies to allies," Browder said.) The oligarchs, Browder later noted, would loll
around on their yachts, look at their TVs, and see their former peer— "a man far
richer and smarter" than they were, in Browder's estimation—sitting in a cage in a
Russian courtroom. Browder and many others believe that, shortly thereafter, each
oligarch made his way to the Kremlin to offer—or accept—a cut to government
insiders. And as a result Putin became, by certain estimates, the world's
wealthiest man.
Last July 16, Browder was in Colorado, where he owns a vacation home. He was
working on a new book about his campaign against Putin's kleptocracy, and he needed
some time for uninterrupted concentration. At 9:30 that morning, Browder told his
young children, "Please, do not disturb me, no matter what." Then, to avoid
distractions, he put his mobile phone facedown. But before long, he noticed the
phone come alive, shimmying silently on his writing desk.

Half a world away, in Helsinki, Trump and Putin were holding a joint press
conference after their two-hour summit meeting. At one point, Trump made an
assertion that stunned the world. He said he did not believe the Russian government
had interfered in the 2016 U.S. election: "My [intelligence] people came to me.
They said they think it's Russia. I have President Putin; he just said it's not
Russia. I will say this: I don't see any reason why it would be." Putin made an
equally puzzling statement. He said he would be willing to allow Mueller's
investigators to question the 12 Russians already indicted in his inquiry if
Russia's investigators were allowed to interrogate people they considered "of
interest"—including none other than Bill Browder.

Putin's overture, while novel, was hardly surprising. During the presidential race,
Russian representatives had approached Donald Trump Jr. and dangled the offer of
some juicy kompromat on Hillary Clinton. Then there had been a fateful June 2016
session at Trump Tower between Donald junior; his brother-in-law, Jared Kushner;
Trump-campaign chairman Paul Manafort; and several Russian representatives,
including attorney Natalia Veselnitskaya, a longtime Browder bete noire with ties
to the Kremlin.

The main topic at the meeting: Bill Browder and what had been his relentless
pursuit to push through the Magnitsky Act. Browder and some of the investors in his
fund, Veselnitskaya later admitted, were "the one and only subject matter of my
discussion with Donald Trump Jr." Manafort's notes from the meeting refer to "Bill
Browder" and "adoption." It was clear that the Magnitsky sanctions had put a
financial crimp in the bank accounts of Putin's compatriots.

Browder's eldest son, Joshua, was monitoring the Helsinki press conference from
Palo Alto. The 21-year-old, who helps oversee his father's digital operation, was
taken aback when Putin, with an expression of feline self-satisfaction, declared:
"Business associates of Mr. Browder have earned $1.5 billion in Russia. They never
paid any taxes.... We have a solid reason to believe that some intelligence
officers accompanied and guided these transactions, so we have an interest in
questioning them." Joshua immediately texted his father: "Nowyou have truly made
it." He heard nothing back. Then Joshua felt gut-punched. He saw Trump nod at Putin
and call the idea of both sides questioning the other's suspects as "an incredible
offer." The younger Browder recalled being "shocked. I was really concerned. I was
picturing Department of Homeland Security agents coming for him."

That bizarre morning, Browder finally answered his vibrating phone. "There were
ladders of texts," he remembered, "hundreds of tweets. I went on Twitter trying to
assess what was happening." Then, instinctively, he did what he always does at
times like these: he booked himself on every TV show that checked in with him.

A week and a half after the summit, Browder was lying low. He would give the
occasional speech, but for the most part he was "in hiding," as a close aide
described it, at his retreat in Colorado—city undisclosed. He agreed to meet me on
the terrace of the Aspen Institute.

We talked about his upbringing as a descendant of Communists. "How much had that
'red seed' of your background," I asked, "affected what you are doing now?" Browder
paused before responding. In his book he had offered a jokey answer: "I would put
on a suit and a tie and become a capitalist. Nothing would piss my family off more
than that." But was he, instead, deeply identifying with his family's political
past? Is that what drew him to Russia? "No," he answered quickly. "I wanted to make
money."

He grew up, he said, in "a strange, academic, left-wing family." He had longed for
a close relationship with his father, a bond which eluded him. Felix Browder, who
died two years ago, had been a mentor to many of the most influential math minds of
the 20th century. He was renowned for his work in the abstract field of nonlinear
partial differential equations. "My father didn't throw the baseball around,"
Browder recalled. He got his dad's attention, he said, only "when my fund made its
first billion." In his basement, Felix kept 35,000 books. "We would go out for ice
cream," Bill Browder once observed, "and then we would go to the bookstore."

There were taboo subjects in the Browder household: most notably, his grandparents'
avid support of Joseph Stalin. Rarely, if ever, did the elder Browder entertain his
son's questions about Grandpa Earl. "He was not the easiest of fathers. What he
talked about, mainly, was what crooks most people were. And if you asked him a
question, it was just the facts." Browder believed that it was the inviolate
integrity of numbers that had driven his father and his siblings to pursue careers
in mathematics. Felix became the chairman of the math department at the University
of Chicago; his two brothers led the math departments at Princeton and Brown.
(Bill's older brother, Thomas—who entered the University of Chicago at age 15—is a
pre-eminent particle physicist.)

Bill Browder's were no ordinary grandparents. Earl Browder, a Kansas native who was
active in the American Communist movement, was invited to the Soviet Union to
provide assistance as a labor organizer after the Bolshevik Revolution. There, he
met Raisa Berkman, one of the first Jewish women to attend law school in Leningrad.
In the 1920s, Raisa was tasked with condemning counterrevolutionaries. The couple
eventually married and made their home in the States, where Earl Browder became
head of the American Communist Party and twice ran for president, appearing on the
cover of Time in 1938.

That history is described in Bill Browder's autobiography. What he doesn't mention,

however—and didn't investigate until recently—is the fact that his grandparents
were more than merely important allies of Stalin's regime. It turns out that in
their first decade together in America, Earl Browder—according to the Venona
Papers, the U.S.-British intelligence community's reports on the U.S.S.R.'s
internal coded wartime cables—was a top recruiter of American spies for the K.G.B.
(Raisa and Earl's sister may have been recruiters as well. The family nanny was
supposedly spying on the Browders and reporting back to the Russians.) Though
Senator Joe McCarthy and others didn't know all this, they interrogated Earl
Browder nevertheless during the Red Scare of the 1950s.

While we were together I told Browder a fact that I learned from his cousin,
historian Laura Browder, who is writing a book on their family: Earl and Raisa hung
portraits of Stalin, Lenin, and Mao in their home despite the fact that Stalin had
ordered the assassination of Raisa's first husband, the former editor of Pravda. "I
am hearing this for the first time," Bill responded. "I don't know what to make of
it." The couple became McCarthy-era pariahs in their Yonkers, New York, community.
According to Laura Browder: "The dentist would no longer treat them. Their
neighbors turned their back."

Such was the atypical American home in which Felix was raised. (As Hitler came to
power, Felix's future wife, Eva—Bill's mother-had been put up for adoption in
Austria and sent to America. She later reunited with her mother in the U.S. Eva
would eventually become one of the first women to be accepted at M.I.T.) Bill
Browder told me, "I would have liked to ask my father, 'Why did your father not
renounce the atrocities of Joseph Stalin? What did it feel like to you when he was
smeared in the McCarthy era?' My father was not the kind of person you could ever
ask about any of that. He was a genius. Geniuses are lopsided. He had an I.Q, of
200 and an E.Q. that was a lot less. We were not a family that ever discussed
feelings."

The armchair psychologist's view of Browder's inner life might be seen as a

Freudian tangle: a grandson yearning to eclipse the family patriarch's notoriety; a
son seeking the approval of a distant father; a man hoping to prove his own worth
by succeeding on his own terms. In the end, Browder, like his grandfather, would
become largely defined by his ties to a cold-blooded Russian despot.

When I explored this with Browder, he insisted that his motivations for making
Russia his home were much less complicated. "You want to put a family overlay on
it?" he said. "I was looking to go back to my roots. I did not feel that I belonged
anywhere in America. We were never really a family that belonged." And so he
followed in his forebears' footsteps. "My grandfather was a justice fighter. I go
to Russia and I find worse injustice than he had ever discovered. My task was
investing people's money. But this was far beyond that. I became this sort of
crusader." I pointed out that his grandfather had worked for Stalin and suborned
treason. Browder agreed. "For me, the most disturbing thing was that he was
supporting Stalin. Stalin was a genocidal maniac." And what of his father's double
life? "My father did not see it as a double-identity household. It wasn't like it
was a version of The Americans and he was the daughter aware her parents were
spies. All of this stuff has come out only recently."

Is Putin, I asked, a 21st-century Stalin? "No," he insisted. "I see him as a

modern-day Pablo Escobar. Putin has no ideology whatsoever. Putin is pedestrian.
All he wants is money and to hurt his enemies. He is straightforward. That is what
makes him so vulnerable."

It is one of the strangest chapters in the Bill Browder saga—one that encapsulates
the whole narrative. In 2013 federal prosecutors, prompted by research supplied by
Browder, lodged a civil suit against a Russian corporation called Prevezon
Holdings, registered in Cyprus but owned by a mysterious real-estate kingpin named
Denis Katsyv—the son of a former Moscow-area transportation minister. Katsyv was
advised by the ubiquitous Natalia Veselnitskaya. "They had 20 lawyers on their
side," Browder recalled, "but she was the lead warrior, the scowling alligator."

The Prevezon case, a byzantine legal thicket, is as knotty as Crime and Punishment.
Several years ago, Browder met Bill Alpert, the redoubtable investigative reporter
for Barron's, who specializes in money-laundering. Alpert would spend late hours
feeding long spreadsheets of mysterious fund transfers into his database of New
York's private and commercial properties. "I keep all kinds of data banks of
possible smelly transactions," Alpert told me. "I stare at my screen and try to
figure out where the dirty money flows. These kinds of shell-company transactions
are like the ones used to purchase many apartments in Trump properties."

One day, Alpert happened to be on his computer, working with the Organized Crime
and Corruption Reporting Project, a network of investigative news outlets, to scour
leaked bank documents showing Russian money routed through Moldova. "Suddenly,"
Alpert remembered, "up popped 20 Pine Street, in Manhattan's financial district.
This one was like, 'Bingo.' Not only was Prevezon named as the owner of [condos at]
20 Pine, but also the officers of the company." He came to believe, and informed
Browder, that the $4.7 million used to buy the units had come from the $230 million
Hermitage swindle.

In the fall of 2008, Browder had researched the most renowned legal experts on
money laundering. One name came up repeatedly: a New York attorney who had had an
impeccable reputation working for Manhattan district attorney Robert Morgenthau.
His name: John Moscow, a partner at Baker-Hostetler, whom I've reported on in the
past. "A money laundering expert with a last name of Moscow," Browder recounted,
shaking his head. "I said, 'Are you kidding me?' " Moscow, Browder said, came up
with a strategy to obtain financial documents to take to Manhattan prosecutors. Two
months later, Magnitsky was arrested and thrown in prison.

Not long after that, according to Browder, Moscow stopped returning his calls.
(Moscow declined to comment to Vanity Fair.) Undeterred, Browder brought in new
attorneys to represent him. And as the case moved toward trial, Browder received
word that Moscow and Baker-Hostetler had been hired by Prevezon to defend the
Russian firm against the government's legal action.

What followed were four years of claims and counterclaims, and blizzards of
subpoenas. (Eventually, a federal appeals court ruled that Moscow and Baker-
Hostetler would be disqualified from participating in the case due to "a conflict
of interest.") The New Yorker would report that over the course of the litigation
Veselnitskaya's client Denis Katsyvwould fork over some $40 million to argue what
would have been, at best, a $14 million civil suit. A portion of that money went to
Baker-Hostetler and the opposition-research firm Fusion GPS, headed by former Wall
Street Journal reporter Glenn Simpson. Simpson, effectively on the payroll of
Katsyv and Prevezon (through Baker-Hostetler), helped create a 600-plus-page
dossier about, yes, Bill Browder.

When word later emerged that Veselnitskaya and Simpson were both basically working
for the same client, eyebrows were raised among Russia hands, journalists, and
legal watchdogs. This was the same Natalia Veselnitskaya who would meet in Trump
Tower with representatives of the president-to-be's campaign. This was the same
Glenn Simpson who had hired former M.I.6 agent Christopher Steele to investigate
Trump's alleged Russian connections (and, as it turned out, possible sexual
adventures). Indeed, in an effort to bash Bill Browder, great sums were being
lavished on legal teams on both sides of the Atlantic.

In 2016, Fusion GPS finalized its voluminous document, portions of which began to
circulate in the press. Around this time, I asked an expert on Russian politics I
knew for his opinion of Browder. "A total crook," he told me. "Don't believe a word
he writes in Red Notice. He stole the money from his company and had Magnitsky
murdered." Such allegations were absurd, but people spread the dirt. An anti-
Browder memo made its way to Dana Rohrabacher, the Republican congressman voted out
in the midterms—who is sometimes called Putin's closest Washington ally. It had
reportedly come from Russia's deputy prosecutor, Viktor Grin, whose superior is
close to Veselnitskaya. "That memo," Browder told me, "had talking points that had
been prepared by Glenn Simpson." (Simpson declined to comment.)

At the same time, Browder's chief public relations adviser, Juleanna Glover, said
she began to get probing phone calls: "Reporters were asking me strange questions
about Bill's businesses. It soon became clear that he was being smeared by a group
of people who wanted to undo the Magnitsky Act." Browder had become the target of
an organized defamation campaign, stoked by Prevezon and extending to a coterie of
lawyers, accountants, and others with Russian ties.

To counter the attack, Browder prepared yet another PowerPoint. But the man who had
been so adept at getting press attention couldn't persuade journalists to write
about his assertion that he was being framed. His story sounded far-fetched and
self-obsessed.

Some believed that Browder had had it coming. For years, he had played a double
game with the Russians: lambasting the oligarchs yet profiting from the corrupt
system. He had made his name as an American hedge-fund savant, then renounced his
citizenship. He had enriched himself and his clients by skating on the gray ice of
arcane tax shelters, property deals, and other vehicles used by the wealthy. And
yet he had always managed to remain aboveboard, his reputation intact. "I had
thousands of investors, and everything we do has to pass a strict legal review for
the regulators," he told me. Outside of Russia, "no one has ever brought a
successful court action against me."

Increasingly isolated, he was surprised in early July 2017 when his cell phone rang
while he was changing planes in Chicago. It was Jo Becker, from The New York Times.
"She said to me, 'Do you know a lawyer named Natalia Veselnitskaya?' 'Do I ever!' I
said. It was a gift from God. I spent a long time on the phone with her and then
asked her, 'What are you going to do with this?' She said, 'You'll see.' " Within
hours, Becker and two Times colleagues broke the story of the 2016 Trump Tower
meeting, at which Veselnitskaya had gone on at length about Browder and the
sanctions.

She had also come to New York then as part of her ongoing defense of Prevezon. And
a year later the Justice Department quietly offered a deal that Prevezon's lawyers
jumped at: the company agreed to pay a modest fine of $6 million, without admitting
fault. ("You could connect the dots from a bunch of banks in Russia to Moldova to
New York," Browder says. "That was the conclusion that the Justice Department came
to. And their evidence was admitted into court and eventually they paid a fine
rather than plea-bargain.") Veselnitskaya played it as a win. "This is almost an
apology from the government," she told the Russian newspaper Izvestia.

Browder remains a marked man. He knows that over the last four years at least 14
Putin detractors have died in suspicious ways in the U.K. alone. Nonetheless, his
thirst for vengeance has not been slaked. In a final, follow-up meeting in New York
City, we talked at his hotel, and he asserted that every major Russian money-
launderer—and their many proxies in the West—was "on our radar." He was heading to
Washington later that day, in fact, to try to get additional culprits added to the
Magnitsky list.

"Basically," he said, "we are going to make them pay dearly for what they have
done. There need to be consequences for these enablers"—meaning the oligarchs'
circle of surrogates, lawyers, legislators, and P.R. people in America, Britain,
and elsewhere. "I have more disdain for the enablers than for the villains. If you
want to go work on the other side—and if the U.S. government is not going to do
anything—we will."

"Have you told all of this to Robert Mueller?" I asked him. Again, Browder
hesitated. " I am not addressing that," he said. It was the only time we were
together that he refused to answer a question.

Browder checked the time and apologized for having to rush off. I watched him as he
departed, pushing two small wheelie bags along the slick marble floor of the Park
Hyatt. He then vanished into the crowd on West 57th Street