Bill Browder > Quotes

“Seventy years of communism had destroyed the work ethic of an entire nation. Millions of Russians had been sent to the gulags for showing the slightest hint of personal initiative. The Soviets severely penalized independent thinkers, so the natural self-preservation reaction was to do as little as possible and hope that nobody would notice you.”
― Bill Browder, Red Notice: How I Became Putin's No. 1 Enemy

“There’s a famous Russian proverb about this type of behavior. One day, a poor villager happens upon a magic talking fish that is ready to grant him a single wish. Overjoyed, the villager weighs his options: “Maybe a castle? Or even better—a thousand bars of gold? Why not a ship to sail the world?” As the villager is about to make his decision, the fish interrupts him to say that there is one important caveat: whatever the villager gets, his neighbor will receive two of the same. Without skipping a beat, the villager says, “In that case, please poke one of my eyes out.”
― Bill Browder, Red Notice: A True Story of High Finance, Murder, and One Man’s Fight for Justice

“The less people know about how sausages and laws are made, the better they sleep at night.”
― Bill Browder, Red Notice: A True Story of High Finance, Murder, and One Man’s Fight for Justice

“Russian stories never have happy endings.”
― Bill Browder, Red Notice: A True Story of High Finance, Murder, and One Man's Fight for Justice

“If I’m killed, you will know who did it. When my enemies read this book, they will know that you know.”
― Bill Browder, Red Notice: A True Story of High Finance, Murder, and One Man’s Fight for Justice

“It happened in all walks of life: business, real estate, health care, the school yard, you name it. Any where that bad things happened, people would not get involved in order to save their own skin. It wasn't that people weren't civic-minded. It was just that the price for intervention would be punishment, not praise.”
― Bill Browder, Red Notice: A True Story of High Finance, Murder, and One Man's Fight for Justice

“For the previous few years, Putin had sat comfortably in the Kremlin, knowing that whatever happened in the US Congress, President Obama opposed the Magnitsky Act. In Putin’s totalitarian mind, this was an ironclad guarantee that it would never become law. But what Putin overlooked was that the United States was not Russia.”
― Bill Browder, Red Notice: A True Story of High Finance, Murder, and One Man’s Fight for Justice

“The imagination is a horrible thing when it’s preoccupied with exactly how someone might try to kill you.”
― Bill Browder, Red Notice: A True Story of High Finance, Murder, and One Man’s Fight for Justice

“It’s one thing for Russians to act the way they do. Their society is so harsh and unforgiving that in order to get through life, most people are either getting screwed or screwing someone else—and often both. There are few rewards for doing what is right. It takes exceptional individuals like Sergei Magnitsky, Boris Nemtsov, and Vladimir Kara-Murza not to descend reflexively into nihilism, dishonesty, and corruption. In the West, and especially in America, it’s different. There’s no question we have our own issues, but Americans like John Moscow, Mark Cymrot, Chris Cooper, and Glenn Simpson have led charmed lives. They went to the best universities, associated with the highest-caliber people, lived in comfortable homes, and operated in a society that at least aspires to honor good conduct and ethical behavior. Everyone is entitled to a legal defense, but this wasn’t about the law—it was an active Russian disinformation campaign. For these people to use their considerable knowledge, contacts, and skills to assist Putin’s cronies in exchange for nothing more than money was even more contemptible than the actions of the Russians themselves. Many Russians can’t help what they do. But Americans like these can, and they act with full cognizance.”
― Bill Browder, Freezing Order: A True Story of Money Laundering, Murder, and Surviving Vladimir Putin's Wrath

“After Khodorkovsky was found guilty, most of Russia’s oligarchs went one by one to Putin and said, ‘Vladimir Vladimirovich, what can I do to make sure I won’t end up sitting in a cage?’ I wasn’t there, so I’m only speculating, but I imagine Putin’s response was something like this: ‘Fifty per cent.”
― Bill Browder, Red Notice: How I Became Putin's No. 1 Enemy

“if you didn’t get involved in anything controversial—politics, human rights, or anything to do with Chechnya—then you could get on with life and enjoy the fruits of the authoritarian regime. The”
― Bill Browder, Red Notice: A True Story of High Finance, Murder, and One Man’s Fight for Justice

“My heart sank. It’s hard to describe how small $50,000 is to an investment banker. Linda Evangelista, a supermodel from the 1980s and 1990s, once famously declared, “I don’t get out of bed for less than ten thousand dollars a day.” For an investment banker, that number is more like $1 million. But here I was having earned nothing for Salomon, and $50,000 was that much more than zero, so I agreed.”
― Bill Browder, Red Notice: A True Story of High Finance, Murder, and One Man’s Fight for Justice

“but what I’ve learned over the years as an investor is that almost everyone behaves rationally. If someone does something that appears irrational, it just means you don’t have all the information.”
― Bill Browder, Freezing Order: A True Story of Money Laundering, Murder, and Surviving Vladimir Putin's Wrath

“I drew a line from the $230 million fraud to Putin’s proxy, the cellist Sergei Roldugin. I explained that this wasn’t a one-off, but one of thousands of crimes Putin had benefitted from, allowing him to accumulate an estimated $200 billion fortune. I pointed out that nearly all of this wealth was held at financial institutions in the West and at risk of being frozen under the Magnitsky Act. For these reasons, the law was an existential threat to him and his senior officials.”
― Bill Browder, Freezing Order: A True Story of Money Laundering, Murder, and Surviving Vladimir Putin's Wrath

“While these tactics were aggressive and crude, they confirmed that our legislation had touched a nerve. I wasn’t the only one who recognized this. Many other victims of human rights abuses in Russia saw the same thing. After the bill was introduced they came to Washington or wrote letters to the Magnitsky Act’s cosponsors with the same basic message: “You have found the Achilles’ heel of the Putin regime.” Then, one by one, they would ask, “Can you add the people who killed my brother to the Magnitsky Act?” “Can you add the people who tortured my mother?” “How about the people who kidnapped my husband?” And on and on. The senators quickly realized that they’d stumbled onto something much bigger than one horrific case. They had inadvertently discovered a new method for fighting human rights abuses in authoritarian regimes in the twenty-first century: targeted visa sanctions and asset freezes. After a dozen or so of these visits and letters, Senator Cardin and his cosponsors conferred and decided to expand the law, adding sixty-five words to the Magnitsky Act. Those new words said that in addition to sanctioning Sergei’s tormentors, the Magnitsky Act would sanction all other gross human rights abusers in Russia. With those extra sixty-five words, my personal fight for justice had become everyone’s fight. The revised bill was officially introduced on May 19, 2011, less than a month after we posted the Olga Stepanova YouTube video. Following its introduction, a small army of Russian activists descended on Capitol Hill, pushing for the bill’s passage. They pressed every senator who would talk to them to sign on. There was Garry Kasparov, the famous chess grand master and human rights activist; there was Alexei Navalny, the most popular Russian opposition leader; and there was Evgenia Chirikova, a well-known Russian environmental activist. I didn’t have to recruit any of these people. They just showed up by themselves. This uncoordinated initiative worked beautifully. The number of Senate cosponsors grew quickly, with three or four new senators signing on every month. It was an easy sell. There wasn’t a pro-Russian-torture-and-murder lobby in Washington to oppose it. No senator, whether the most liberal Democrat or the most conservative Republican, would lose a single vote for banning Russian torturers and murderers from coming to America. The Magnitsky Act was gathering so much momentum that it appeared it might be unstoppable. From the day that Kyle Scott at the State Department stonewalled me, I knew that the administration was dead set against this, but now they were in a tough spot. If they openly opposed the law, it would look as if they were siding with the Russians. However, if they publicly supported it, it would threaten Obama’s “reset” with Russia. They needed to come up with some other solution. On July 20, 2011, the State Department showed its cards. They sent a memo to the Senate entitled “Administration Comments on S.1039 Sergei Magnitsky Rule of Law.” Though not meant to be made public, within a day it was leaked.”
― Bill Browder, Red Notice: A True Story of High Finance, Murder, and One Man’s Fight for Justice

“was the first to speak after the movie finished. I made my pitch for the Magnitsky resolution, and concluded, “As you can see, there’s now no difference between the Russian government and organized crime.”
― Bill Browder, Freezing Order: A True Story of Money Laundering, Murder, and Surviving Vladimir Putin's Wrath

“Early in this book, I said that the feeling I got from buying a Polish stock that went up ten times was the best thing to ever happen to me in my career. But the feeling I had on that balcony in Brussels with Sergei’s widow and son, as we watched the largest lawmaking body in Europe recognize and condemn the injustices suffered by Sergei and his family, felt orders of magnitude better than any financial success I’ve ever had. If finding a ten bagger in the stock market was a highlight of my life before, there is no feeling as satisfying as getting some measure of justice in a highly unjust world.”
― Bill Browder, Red Notice: A True Story of High Finance, Murder, and One Man’s Fight for Justice

“A famous expression goes, “The less people know about how sausages and laws are made, the better they sleep at night.” Our human rights campaign made strange bedfellows with Montana beef farmers, Russian human rights activists, and Boeing airplane salesmen, but by working together it appeared as if we had the strength to overpower any remaining resistance to getting the law passed.”
― Bill Browder, Red Notice: A True Story of High Finance, Murder, and One Man’s Fight for Justice

“We had a big debate internally about what to do next. We were getting nowhere with traditional advocacy tools and running out of ideas. But then our twenty-four-year-old secretary popped her head into my office and said, ‘Sorry to interrupt, but I couldn’t help overhearing your conversation. Have you guys ever thought of doing a YouTube video?’ I”
― Bill Browder, Red Notice: How I Became Putin's No. 1 Enemy

“one of the main reasons Putin had interfered in the US election was because of the Magnitsky Act.”
― Bill Browder, Freezing Order: A True Story of Money Laundering, Murder, and Surviving Vladimir Putin's Wrath

“While Putin expected a bad reaction from the United States, he had no idea what kind of hornet’s nest he’d stirred up in his own country. One can criticize Russians for many things, but their love of children isn’t one of them. Russia is one of the only countries in the world where you can take a screaming child into a fancy restaurant and no one will give you a second look. Russians simply adore children.”
― Bill Browder, Red Notice: A True Story of High Finance, Murder, and One Man’s Fight for Justice

“In his mind, he hasn’t succeeded until his opponent has failed, and he can’t be happy until his opponent is miserable.”
― Bill Browder, Red Notice: How I Became Putin's No. 1 Enemy

“The first part was to expose the dilutive share issue to Potanin’s Western business contacts.”
― Bill Browder, Red Notice: A True Story of High Finance, Murder, and One Man’s Fight for Justice

“I moved to London in August 1989”
― Bill Browder, Red Notice: A True Story of High Finance, Murder, and One Man’s Fight for Justice

“I finished my walk and got to my desk. A few minutes later Reuters published a red headline: “Hermitage CEO Browder Barred From Russia.”
― Bill Browder, Red Notice: A True Story of High Finance, Murder, and One Man’s Fight for Justice

“Because of their friendship, Prince Albert enthusiastically supported the Russian president and occasionally did his bidding. I’d heard stories about Putin’s enemies checking into Monaco hotels, presenting their passports, and finding themselves arrested within minutes by the local police.”
― Bill Browder, Freezing Order: A True Story of Money Laundering, Murder, and Surviving Vladimir Putin's Wrath

“Amazingly, I found that this anomaly wasn’t restricted to MNPZ. Nearly every company in Russia had preferred shares and most of them traded at a huge discount to the ordinary shares. These things were a potential gold mine.”
― Bill Browder, Red Notice: A True Story of High Finance, Murder, and One Man’s Fight for Justice

“Khodorkovsky had broken Putin’s golden rule: “Stay out of politics, and you can keep your ill-gotten gains.” Khodorkovsky had violated this maxim when he’d sent millions of dollars to the opposition parties for the upcoming parliamentary elections,”
― Bill Browder, Red Notice: A True Story of High Finance, Murder, and One Man’s Fight for Justice

“I was confronted by the most ostentatious mansion I had ever seen. La Leopolda may have been the most expensive house in the world, but Greenacres, which had been built by the silent-film star Harold Lloyd in the late 1920s, was the one of the biggest. The main house was a forty-four”
― Bill Browder, Red Notice: A True Story of High Finance, Murder, and One Man’s Fight for Justice

“In better times, Salomon might have shunned me, but they were as desperate as I was, and after an intense round of interviews, they offered me a position as an associate on the East European investment-banking team in London. It wasn’t exactly what I wanted. My dream was to be an investor—the person deciding what shares to buy—not an investment banker, the guy organizing the sale of shares.”
― Bill Browder, Red Notice: A True Story of High Finance, Murder, and One Man’s Fight for Justice