It was the most horrifying, powerless,
upsetting experience I could describe.
I was just, you know, beyond words.
Sergei Magnitsky was arrested because he was my lawyer,
and he discovered an unbelievable, cynical, complex fraud.
They kept putting him in harsher and harsher places.
Butyrka is considered to be one of the hellish prisons in Russia.
So he found himself in rooms where the sewerage didn’t work,
and where they were giving him dirty water and maggot-infected food.
They wanted to get him to sign a false confession.
We have the most granular, detailed record of human rights abuses
come out of Russia in the last 35 years.
We were the hunted. We were in exile.
But all of a sudden, the hunted became the hunters.
There’s a lot of recipients of this crime who are very angry
because all of a sudden, they’re in the spotlight.
[Investigators]
My name is Bill Browder.
I'm head of the Magnitsky Global Justice Campaign.
I’m Jamison Firestone.
I founded Russia’s first independent foreign-owned law firm.
When I got out to Russia,
it was really the Wild West.
Boris Yeltsin became the president of Russia.
He made a commitment that communism was going to end.
He decided that the best way to do that
was to create a country full of capitalists.
They decided to privatize all property owned by the state.
That created a free for all, if you will.
But it also created little crumbs falling off the table
for people like me,
and I set up an investment fund called the Hermitage Fund.
Firestone Duncan was my law firm that I set up in 1993
to help foreigners do business in Russia.
He had also come from America, settled in Russia,
so we became friends, and he became my lawyer.
We set up their hedge fund, and we ran a lot of it in the background.
In November of 2005, I was expelled from Russia
and declared a threat to national security.
I had been very outspoken and vocal
about challenging corruption in Russian companies.
About 18 months afterwards, on June 4th, 2007,
I get a panic phone call from the secretary in my Moscow office.
And she said, “Bill, there are 25 police officers here
raiding the office.”
I then immediately called Jamison Firestone, my lawyer.
And then the phone rang, so I went,
“Bill, hi! What a coincidence!”
And he said, “There are 25 police officers raiding my office right now
looking for your documents.
I’ll need to get back to you.”
And they’re running through our offices, ripping the files out,
and they’re going through these files, and going,
“Look, we got this company here.
It paid $10 million in taxes. Should we take it?”
“Yeah, take it. Take it.”
Which is strange because normally you’d be looking for
companies that didn’t pay tax, right?
We didn't know what they were up to.
And we hired Sergei Magnitsky,
a lawyer who worked for Jamison Firestone, to investigate.
He was the person who’d defend our clients against tax cases.
So if you were accused of paying too little tax,
it was Sergei Magnitsky who would go to court and defend you.
Sergei Magnitsky was the type of person who could do ten things
in the time it took others to do one.
The combination of his vigilance and his intelligence
made him just an ideal advisor to us.
So Sergei is digging deeper and deeper
and deeper into this matter.
And he discovered an unbelievable, cynical, complex fraud.
The documents that the police had taken from us
were used to change the owners from Hermitage Capital
to convicted criminals and killers.
This group of criminals and police stole our companies,
applied for an illegal tax refund to those companies,
and, on Christmas Eve, received $230 million.
It was the largest tax refund in the history of Russia.
And things start to get, you know, a little hairy
because of what Sergei discovered.
And that’s why he was eventually arrested
for exposing all these people.
When he was arrested, he told his wife, “I’ll be back tomorrow.”
And all of a sudden, the next day,
there are three teams of five officers,
each with search warrants,
at the front doors of three other people who work for me.
Jamison then evacuated everyone else working for his law firm
out of the country
because everybody understood that if they’re going after Sergei,
they’re going to go after everybody.
After Sergei was arrested,
he was taken to pre-trial detention.
In pre-trial detention,
they basically wanted to soften him up.
Everybody has their own way of dealing with adversity in prison,
and for Sergei, the way he dealt with it was to write it all down.
They threw him into a cell with 14 inmates in eight beds
and left the lights on 24 hours a day
to impose sleep deprivation.
So he found himself in rooms where the sewerage didn’t work,
where there were no glass on the windows.
This is Moscow, right?
So it’s like, you know, minus 20 outside.
They kept putting him in harsher and harsher places
where they were giving him dirty water
and maggot-infected food.
And their intention in softening him up,
they wanted to get him to sign a false confession.
They would be like, “Look, all you have to do
is say that this crime never happened
or that Bill Browder did this crime
or just anything where you withdraw your testimony against the police
and the tax inspectors and the lawyers who work with them.”
And what they didn’t anticipate
was that although he looks like a refined, high level lawyer,
for him, the idea of perjuring himself
and bearing false witness was more painful than
any kind of physical discomfort they inflicted on him,
so he refused.
And he got really, really sick finally
and lost something like 40 pounds of weight,
had problems with gallstones and had pancreatitis,
and they just wouldn’t treat him.
As a matter of fact, they put him in Butyrka
simply so that he wouldn’t get medical treatment.
Butyrka is considered to be one of the hellish prisons in Russia.
His health broke down.
He went into terrible, constant, agonizing,
ear-piercing pain.
Eventually, things got so bad that he was doubled over in pain,
and his cellmate is slamming on the door,
saying, “You’ve got to get somebody. You’ve got to get someone.”
And so they put him in an ambulance
and sent him back to Matrosskaya Tishina,
which had a medical wing.
When he arrived there,
instead of putting him in the emergency room,
they put him in an isolation cell.
They handcuffed him. They put a straitjacket on him.
And eight riot guards with rubber batons beat Sergei Magnitsky
until he died.
He was 37 years old. He left a wife and two children.
I couldn’t have imagined in my worst nightmare
that they would kill him.
It was like a knife going right into my heart.
I said, “Sergei’s dead.”
Yeah, he just started to cry. He just started to cry on the phone.
I was crying on the phone.
He just said, “I can’t go in the office.”
I said, “Don’t. Just go home.”
And I called the rest of the office and told them.
But, yeah, it was really terrible.
It was obvious that I had only one choice in my life going forward,
which was to put aside everything else I was doing
and devote all of my time,
all of my resources, and all of my energies
to go after the people who killed him.
We were the hunted. We were in exile.
But all of a sudden the hunted became the hunters.
What do people do when they get money?
They start buying things, right?
So we just thought, “Let’s go look at these people
and see if they’re buying anything
that they shouldn’t be able to afford.”
And wow, millions of dollars coming to the police officers.
Then we found out later there was $40 plus million
came to the tax officers who signed off on this.
We found that money going to about 24 different countries.
There are 16 criminal investigations open.
There’s about $40 million
that’s been frozen by different law enforcement agencies.
And the people who stole this $230 million,
they don’t keep that money in Russia.
They keep that money in the West.
We can't get justice in Russia. Let's get justice here.
I told that story to Senator John McCain, Republican from Arizona,
and Senator Benjamin Cardin, Democrat from Maryland.
And I said, “Can we freeze the assets and ban the visas of
the people who killed Sergei Magnitsky?”
And they said, “Yes.”
It was a bill and now it’s a law that essentially allows us to say,
“If you’re a human rights abuser or you’re massively corrupt,
then our country is closed to you.
And by the way, everything you have here has been confiscated,
and more than that, it is a crime to do business with you.”
Is this enough? No.
Look, first of all, all the people who did this to Sergei
are living lovely lives.
Some of them can't travel anymore,
but they’re rich and they’re living great.
What we have been able to do
is build a legal monument to Sergei Magnitsky
in the form of the Magnitsky Act.
Vladimir Putin hates the Magnitsky Act
more than just about anything else out there.
Because if your business depends on dealing with the West, you’re done.
I feel that it’s very, very important
to give the Russians as much help as they can
to throw off this terribly odious regime and dangerous regime,
so I’m not done.
And if his death saves lives,
then that is a meaningful legacy.
[Today 31 countries have the Magnitsky Act:]
[US, UK, Canada, Kosovo, and the 27 member states of the EU.]
[More than 250 individuals and entities]
[have been sanctioned so far, not just in Russia but around the world.]
[Despite repeatedly receiving death threats,]
[Bill Browder continues to pursue justice for Sergei.]