Red Notice: A True Story of High Finance, Murder, and One Man's Fight for Justice (2 page)

Before hanging up, he asked, “Mr. Browder, have they given you anything to eat or drink?”

“No,” I answered. He made a little humming noise, and I thanked him before saying good-bye.

I tried to make myself comfortable on the plastic chair but couldn’t. Time crawled by. I got up. I paced through a curtain wall of cigarette smoke. I tried not to look at the vacant stares of the other men who were also being detained. I checked my email. I called Ariel, but he didn’t answer. I walked to the glass and started talking to the officers in my poor Russian. They ignored me. I was nobody to them. Worse, I was already a prisoner.

It bears mentioning that in Russia there is no respect for the individual and his or her rights. People can be sacrificed for the needs of the state, used as shields, trading chips, or even simple fodder. If necessary, anyone can disappear. A famous expression of Stalin’s drives right to the point: “If there is no man, there is no problem.”

That’s when Jude Shao from the
Forbes
article wedged back into my consciousness. Should I have been more cautious in the past? I’d gotten so used to fighting oligarchs and corrupt Russian officials that I had become inured to the possibility that, if someone wanted it badly enough, I could disappear too.

I shook my head, forcing Jude out of my mind. I went back to the guards to try to get something—anything—out of them, but it was useless. I went back to my seat. I called Ariel again. This time, he answered.

“What’s going on, Ariel?”

“I’ve spoken to several people, and none of them are talking.”

“What do you mean none of them are talking?”

“I mean none of them are talking. I’m sorry, Bill, but I need more time. It’s Sunday night. No one’s available.”

“Okay. Let me know as soon as you hear anything.”

“I will.”

We hung up. I called the embassy again. They hadn’t made any progress either. They were getting stonewalled or I wasn’t in the system yet or both. Before hanging up, the consul asked again, “Have they given you anything to eat or something to drink?”

“No,” I repeated. It seemed like such a meaningless question, but Chris Bowers clearly thought otherwise. He must have had experience with this type of situation before, and it struck me as a very Russian tactic not to offer either food or water.

The room filled with more detainees as the clock passed midnight. All were men, all looked as if they had come from former Soviet republics. Georgians, Azerbaijanis, Kazakhs, Armenians. Their luggage, if they even had any, was simple duffel bags or strange, oversize nylon shopping bags that were all taped up. Each man smoked incessantly. Some spoke in low whispers. None showed any kind of emotion or concern. They made as much effort to notice me as the guards did, even though I was clearly a fish out of water: nervous, blue blazer, BlackBerry, black rolling suitcase.

I called Elena again. “Anything on your end?”

She sighed. “No. And yours?”

“Nothing.”

She must have heard the concern in my voice. “It’ll be fine, Bill. If this really is just a visa issue, you’ll be back here tomorrow. I’m sure of it.”

Her calmness helped. “I know.” I looked at my watch. It was 10:30 p.m. in England. “Go to sleep, honey. You and the baby need the rest.”

“Okay. I’ll call you straightaway if I get any information.”

“Me too.”

“Good night.”

“Good night. I love you,” I added, but she’d already hung up.

A flicker of doubt crossed my mind:
What if this wasn’t simply
a visa issue? Would I ever see Elena again? Would I ever meet our unborn child? Would I ever see my son, David?

As I fought these dire feelings, I tried to arrange myself across the hard chairs, using my jacket as a pillow, but the chairs were made for preventing sleep. Not to mention I was surrounded by a bunch of menacing-looking people. How was I going to drift off around these characters?

I wasn’t.

I sat up and started typing on my BlackBerry, making lists of people I had met over the years in Russia, Britain, and America who might be able to help me: politicians, businesspeople, reporters.

Chris Bowers called one last time before his shift ended at the embassy. He assured me that the person taking over for him would be fully briefed. He still wanted to know whether I had been offered food or water. I hadn’t. He apologized, even though there was nothing he could do. He was clearly keeping a record of mistreatment should the need for one ever arise. After we hung up, I thought,
Shit
.

By then it was two or three in the morning. I turned off my BlackBerry to conserve its battery and tried again to sleep. I threw a shirt from my bag over my eyes. I dry-swallowed two Advil for a headache that had started. I tried to forget about it all. I tried to convince myself that I’d be leaving tomorrow. This was just a problem with my visa. One way or another, I’d be leaving Russia.

After a while, I drifted off.

I woke at around 6:30 a.m., when there was a crush of new detainees. More of the same. No one like me. More cigarettes, more whispering. The smell of sweat increased by several orders of magnitude. My mouth tasted foul, and for the first time I realized how thirsty I was. Chris Bowers had been right to ask if they’d offered me anything to eat or drink. We had access to a rank toilet, but these bastards should have given us food and water.

All the same, I’d awakened feeling positive that this was just a bureaucratic misunderstanding. I called Ariel. He still hadn’t been able to figure out what was going on, but he did say that the next flight to
London left at 11:15 a.m. I had only two alternatives: I would either be arrested or deported, so I tried to convince myself I’d be on that flight.

I busied myself as best I could. I answered some emails as if it were a normal workday. I checked with the embassy. The new consul on duty assured me that once things started opening for the day, they’d take care of me. I got my stuff together and tried once more to talk to the guards. I asked them for my passport, but they continued to ignore me. It was as if that were their only job: to sit behind the glass and ignore all the detainees.

I paced: 9:00; 9:15; 9:24; 9:37. I grew more and more nervous. I wanted to call Elena, but it was too early in London. I called Ariel and he still had nothing for me. I stopped calling people.

By 10:30 a.m. I was banging on the glass, and the officers still ignored me with the utmost professionalism.

Elena called. This time she couldn’t soothe me. She promised we’d figure out my situation, but I was beginning to feel that it didn’t matter. Jude Shao was looming large in my mind now.

10:45. I really began to panic.

10:51.
How could I have been so stupid? Why would an average guy from the South Side of Chicago think he could get away with taking down one Russian oligarch after another?

10:58.
Stupid, stupid, stupid! ARROGANT AND STUPID, BILL! ARROGANT AND JUST PLAIN STUPID!

11:02.
I’m going to a Russian prison. I’m going to a Russian prison. I’m going to a Russian prison.

11:05. Two jackbooted officers stormed into the room and made a beeline for me. They grabbed my arms and gathered my stuff and pulled me from the detention room. They took me out, through the halls, up a flight of stairs. This was it. I was going to be thrown into a paddy wagon and taken away.

But then they kicked open a door and we were in the departures terminal and moving fast. My heart lifted as we passed gates and gawking passengers. Then we were at the gate for the 11:15 London flight, and I was being ushered down the Jetway and onto the plane
and hustled through business class and deposited in a middle seat in coach. The officers didn’t say a word. They put my bag in the overhead compartment. They didn’t give me my passport. They left.

People on the plane tried hard not to stare, but how could they not? I ignored them. I was
not
going to a Russian prison.

I texted Elena that I was on my way home and that I would see her soon enough. I texted her that I loved her.

We took off. As the wheels thumped into the fuselage, I experienced the biggest sense of relief I have ever felt in my life. Making and losing money by the hundreds of millions of dollars didn’t compare.

We reached cruising altitude and the meal service came around. I hadn’t eaten for more than twenty-four hours. Lunch that day was some kind of awful beef Stroganoff, but it was the best thing I had ever eaten. I took three extra rolls. I drank four bottles of water. And then I passed out.

I didn’t wake until the plane hit the runway in England. As we taxied, I made a mental catalog of all the things I was going to have to deal with. First and foremost was working my way through British customs without a passport. But that would be easy enough. England was my home and, ever since I had taken British citizenship in 1998, my adopted country. The bigger picture had to do with Russia. How was I going to get out of this mess? Who was responsible for it? Whom could I call in Russia? Whom in the West?

The plane stopped, the public address system chimed, and the seat belts all came off. When it was my turn, I walked down the aisle to the exit. I was totally preoccupied. I got closer to the exit and didn’t notice the pilot at the front watching the passengers deplane. When I reached him, he interrupted my thoughts by holding out a hand. I looked at it. In it was my British passport. I took it without saying a word.

Customs took five minutes. I got in a cab and went to my apartment in London. When I arrived, I gave Elena a long hug. I’d never felt so thankful for the embrace of another person.

I told her how much I loved her. She gave me a big, doe-eyed smile. We spoke about my predicament as we made our way, hand in hand, to our shared home office. We sat at our desks. We turned on the computers and picked up the phones and got to work.

I had to figure out how I was going to return to Russia.

If you heard me speaking right now, you would probably ask, “How did this guy with an American accent and a British passport become the largest foreign investor in Russia only to get kicked out?”

It’s a long story, and one that indeed started in America, in an unusual American family. My grandfather, Earl Browder, was a labor union organizer from Wichita, Kansas. He was so good at his job that he was spotted by the Communists and invited to come to the Soviet Union in 1926. Not long after he got there, he did what most red-blooded American men do in Moscow: he met a good-looking Russian girl. Her name was Raisa Berkman. They fell in love and got married. They would have three boys; the first was my father, Felix, who was born in the Russian capital in July 1927.

In 1932, Earl returned to the United States, moving his family to Yonkers, New York, to head the American Communist Party. He ran for president twice on the Communist ticket, in 1936 and 1940. Even though he’d garnered only about eighty thousand votes in each race, Earl’s candidacy focused Depression-era America on the failings of mainstream capitalism and caused all the political players to revise their policies leftward. He was so effective that he even appeared on the cover of
Time
magazine in 1938, with the caption “Comrade Earl Browder.”

This same effectiveness also drew the ire of President Roosevelt. In 1941, after my grandfather was arrested and convicted for “passport
violations,” he began serving four years in the Atlanta Federal Penitentiary in Georgia. Fortunately, due to the Second World War alliance between the United States and the Soviet Union, Earl was pardoned one year later.

After the war ended, Earl spent the next few years in the political wilderness—until Senator Joseph McCarthy started his infamous witch-hunt, trying to rid the country of every last communist. The 1950s were a paranoid time in America, and it didn’t matter if you were a good communist or a bad communist, you were still a communist. Earl was subpoenaed and interrogated for months by the House Un-American Activities Committee.

My grandfather’s political persecution and beliefs weighed heavily on the rest of the family. My grandmother was a Russian Jewish intellectual and had no desire for any of her sons to go into the dirty business of politics. For her, the highest calling was academia, specifically in science or mathematics. Felix, my father, dutifully lived up to and exceeded her expectations, attending MIT at the age of sixteen. Remarkably, he received his bachelor’s degree in only two years, enrolled in Princeton’s math program, and had his PhD by the age of twenty.

Even though my father was one of America’s brightest young mathematicians, he was still the son of Earl Browder. When President Truman instituted the peacetime draft after the Second World War, Felix asked for a deferment, but his employer, the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, refused to write a letter for him. None of his superiors wanted to be on record defending the son of a famous communist. With no deferment on file, Felix was promptly drafted and started serving in the army in 1953.

After basic training, my father was assigned to an army intelligence unit at Fort Monmouth, New Jersey, where he worked for several weeks before his commanding officer noticed his last name. The wheels turned quickly then. Late one night, Felix was yanked from his bunk, thrown into a military transport, and taken to Fort Bragg, North Carolina, where he was assigned to pump gas at a service station on the edge of the base for the next two years.

When he was discharged in 1955, he applied for the first academic job opening he found: a junior-professor position at Brandeis University. The Brandeis faculty couldn’t believe their luck at having a top Princeton mathematician applying for the job. But when they presented their recommendation, the board of trustees balked at the idea of supporting the son of the ex-leader of the American Communist Party.

At the time, Eleanor Roosevelt was chair of the board, and even though her husband was the one responsible for imprisoning my grandfather, she said that it would be the most “un-American thing we could do to deny a great scientist his profession because of who his father was.” Felix ultimately got the job, which led to positions at Yale, Princeton, and the University of Chicago, where he eventually became chairman of the math department. He had a long and successful career, and in 1999 President Clinton awarded him the National Medal of Science, the top mathematics honor in the country.