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

In Russia the gangsters are running the government, according to this fascinating firsthand story of state criminality and persecution. Browder, founder of the hedge fund Hermitage Capital Management (and grandson of American Communist Party leader Earl Browder), made his fortune investing in underpriced, privatized ex-Soviet companies and prodding their corrupt managers to divulge the truth about their assets. The enmity of Russian oligarchs—and, eventually, Vladimir Putin—got him expelled from the country, whereupon his companies were seized by a group of police officials and used to steal $230 million from the Russian Treasury. When Browder’s Moscow lawyer Sergei Magnitsky unmasked the officials behind the conspiracy, Magnitsky was arrested, denied medical attention, and finally murdered in prison. Browder’s narrative lays out in vivid detail the often murky mechanisms of Russia’s kleptocratic economy, culminating in an engrossing account of what would surely be the heist of the century were it not so representative of business as usual. It’s also a chilling, sinister portrait of a society in which the rule of law has been destroyed by those sworn to enforce it. The result is an alternately harrowing and inspiring saga of appalling crime and undeserved punishment in the Wild East. Photos. [em]Agent: Patrick Walsh, Conville and Walsh Literary Agency (U.K.). (Feb.) [/em]