McCain met us at the door with a hearty handshake and a warm smile. He led us into his office—a comfortably furnished room with a leather couch, warm lighting, and a long and full bookcase. It had a definite Americana West feel. If it weren’t for the soaring ceiling and the tall window framing his desk, it could have been mistaken for the comfortable home office of a bibliophile executive in Phoenix.
I sat on the sofa and he perched on a chair at the head of the coffee table. He cleared his throat. “Thanks for coming in, Mr. Browder. I’ve been told you want to tell me about some of the things going on Russia.” He probably expected me to lobby him about some Russian business issue.
“Yes, I do, Senator.”
I then began my story about Sergei, and it quickly became clear to McCain that this wasn’t going to be like his other meetings. Less than two minutes in, he held up a hand to ask the date of Sergei’s arrest. I answered and continued. A short time later he interrupted again to get clarification on Sergei’s prison conditions. I answered and continued until he interrupted me again. We carried on like this until my fifteen minutes were up, when his secretary poked her head in to say that his next appointment was ready. I froze. I couldn’t lose this opportunity to ask him to cosponsor the law.
“I need some more time with Mr. Browder,” McCain said softly. His secretary left and McCain turned his attention back to me. “Please continue.”
I did. More questions, more answers. After another fifteen minutes his secretary reappeared. Again, McCain politely waved her off. We repeated this sequence once more, and by the time I was finished, I’d been sitting in McCain’s office for nearly an hour.
“Bill, Sergei’s story is shocking, truly terrible. I am so sorry for what happened to him, for you and for everybody else involved.”
“Thank you, Senator.”
“Tell me—what can I do to help?”
I told him about Cardin and McGovern and the early drafts of the Magnitsky Act. Then I said, “Since Senator Cardin is a Democrat, it would be hugely helpful to have an important Republican cosponsor on this bill. I was hoping that this could be you, sir.”
McCain leaned back in his chair, his face thoughtful and serene. “Of course I will do that. It’s the least I can do.” He turned to his aide Chris Brose, who’d been sitting there throughout. “Chris, please coordinate with Senator Cardin right away to make sure you get me on that bill.” McCain then turned back to me. “You’ve been a real friend to Sergei. Not many people would do what you’re doing, and I deeply respect that. I will do everything in my power to help you get justice for Sergei. God bless you.”
34
Russian Untouchables
While I was flying back and forth to Washington working the political angles, the team was in London working the Russian angles.
Ever since we’d posted our first YouTube video in October 2009, we’d been receiving unsolicited phone calls and emails from ordinary Russians with tips related to our case. One of these came from a young woman named Ekaterina Mikheeva, who told us a horrifying story.
Kuznetsov and Karpov hadn’t victimized just us. According to her, both officers were involved in a raid on her husband’s office in 2006. After the raid, her husband, Fyodor, was arrested and taken to the same police station where Sergei had been held. But instead of being kept there, Fyodor was escorted to a car outside. He was shoved into the backseat and, without any explanation, driven to a house thirty miles from Moscow. Fyodor soon figured out that he was being held hostage. Ekaterina told us that one of these kidnappers was Viktor Markelov, the same convicted killer who took control of our stolen companies in 2007.
Shortly after arriving at the house, the kidnappers called Fyodor’s boss to issue the terms of his release: $20 million. Ekaterina also got a call from one of the kidnappers. She was warned that if she went to the police, Fyodor would be hurt and she would be visited by some of the kidnappers’ friends and gang-raped.
Ekaterina was terrified, but she bravely defied the warnings. She found a different police unit, which located her husband. They stormed the house and freed Fyodor, taking Markelov and his accomplice into custody.
Unfortunately, her story didn’t end there. A month later, Fyodor was arrested again by the same group of officers and thrown into a cell with one of his former kidnappers. We don’t know what happened to him there or who was involved, but we do know that Fyodor was eventually convicted of fraud and sentenced to eleven years at a prison camp in the Kirov region, five hundred miles from Moscow. Ekaterina was thirty-four years old, and she and Fyodor had two small children. Their family was torn apart. Suddenly, this young woman was forced to take care of herself and raise the children on her own, while her husband wasted away in jail.
I knew we were dealing with some nasty people, but when I heard her story, it became that much more imperative to see that corrupt officers like Kuznetsov and Karpov were stopped.
From that point on, our team focused all of its energy on finding anything they could about Kuznetsov and Karpov. They rummaged through bank statements, court filings, judgments, registration documents, letters, and briefs, trying to identify any assets belonging to these two officers. We were sure we’d find something. Kuznetsov and Karpov dressed in expensive suits, wore fancy watches, and drove luxury cars, even though they each earned less than $1,500 a month. Finding any evidence of their extravagances would give us a big advantage in our battle with these two men.
We began our investigation by running their names through the same type of databases we used during our corporate governance campaigns in Russia. Unfortunately, nothing came up using their specific names. However, searching for their parents’ names in the databases generated a number of direct hits. Kuznetsov’s and Karpov’s lack of discretion was remarkable, especially considering that they were police officers.
One of the most interesting discoveries was a property registered to Kuznetsov’s mother, a 1,660-square-foot condominium in the prestigious Edelweiss high-rise just off Kutuzovsky Prospekt, the Champs-Élysées of Moscow. It had views over Victory Park and was worth about $1.6 million.
We also found that Kuznetsov’s father was the registered owner of a nine-hundred-square-foot condominium that had a market value of roughly $750,000, in a building called the Capital Constellation Tower.
In addition to these upscale properties, Kuznetsov’s mother had three land plots in her name located in the Noginski district just outside Moscow, which were worth almost $180,000.
Theoretically, the ownership of all this real estate could have been legitimate, but Kuznetsov’s parents’ monthly income was only $4,500, which wasn’t nearly enough to account for these properties. In our minds, there was only one possible explanation: the properties had been paid for by their son, Artem.
The Kuznetsov family didn’t just own expensive real estate. According to the records of the Moscow Traffic Police, Kuznetsov’s mother had a brand-new $65,000 Land Rover Freelander, while Kuznetsov’s wife owned a $115,000 Range Rover and an $81,000 Mercedes-Benz SLK 200.
The Russian Border Control database presented an even more interesting glimpse into Kuznetsov’s lifestyle. In 2006, Artem and his wife started traveling the world like global jet-setters. Over five years they made more than thirty trips to eight different countries, including Dubai, France, Italy, and the United Kingdom. When they went to Cyprus, they even flew by private jet.
According to our research, the total value of assets owned by the Kuznetsov family was roughly $2.6 million. To put this in perspective, Kuznetsov would have had to work for 145 years on his official Interior Ministry salary to make this sum of money.
The information we dug up on Karpov was equally shocking and followed the same pattern: a $930,000 luxury condo registered to his pensioner mother; a brand-new Audi A3, a Porsche 911 registered in his mother’s name, and a Mercedes-Benz E280 in his name. His travel records showed that since 2006 he had gone to the United Kingdom, the United States, Italy, the Caribbea
n, Spain, Austria, Greece, Cyprus, Oman, Dubai, and Turkey. He frequented the best and most expensive nightclubs in Moscow, having his picture taken with gorgeous girls and well-dressed friends. Clearly he wasn’t shy about sharing any of this, because he had posted pictures of his grinning face all over the Internet.
These guys were disgusting. If an ordinary Russian person could see images of Kuznetsov’s and Karpov’s lives—the houses, the vacations, the cars—they would be apoplectic. The images would go further than any newspaper article or radio interview ever could. We had to show how these midlevel police officers profited from what they did. They couldn’t have it both ways. They couldn’t get to ruin lives in the morning and go to Michelin star restaurants at night.
I decided to make some more YouTube videos, this time starring Artem Kuznetsov and Pavel Karpov. We got right to work, and they were ready by June 2010, just as the Magnitsky Act was being drafted in Washington. All we were waiting for was the right moment to launch them.
That moment came when Oleg Logunov, the Interior Ministry general who’d authorized Sergei’s arrest, began a publicity campaign to justify Sergei’s arrest and death. When he was asked by a popular radio station whether Sergei was pressured while in custody, Logunov stated blandly, “The fact that investigators are interested in obtaining testimony is normal. They do it in all countries,” as if what had happened to Sergei were the most mundane thing in the world.
Their cover-up was gaining momentum and we had to do something, so on June 22 I uploaded the Kuznetsov video to YouTube. At the same time, our campaign launched a new website called www.russian-untouchables.com, where we provided the documents and evidence supporting our allegations of the unbelievable lifestyles of these officials for the world to see.
In its first day, the Kuznetsov video got more than fifty thousand views, which was more than the total number of views for the first YouTube video we did about the fraud. Within a week, 170,000 people had seen the Kuznetsov video, and it was the top political video in Russia on YouTube. The New Times magazine (a Russian opposition weekly) wrote a big story entitled “Private Jets for the Lieutenant Colonel.” Kuznetsov’s wealth was such a sexy story that it even got a write-up in the UK tabloid the Sunday Express, which almost never reports on things occurring outside Britain.
While everyone talked, wrote, and blogged about the video, a group of Russian activists took matters into their own hands. They showed up at Kuznetsov’s building and pasted a picture of Sergei on every apartment door with the words Kuznetsov murderer! below his face. They also unfurled a massive banner on the high-rise facing his apartment with the same words.
To keep the pressure on the Russian authorities, just before releasing the movie, Jamie Firestone also filed criminal complaints with the General Prosecutor’s Office and the Internal Affairs Department of the Interior Ministry, challenging Kuznetsov’s unexplained wealth.
In spite of the overwhelming evidence, the authorities circled the wagons around this midlevel police officer. They trotted out Deputy Interior Minister Alexei Anichin, who said it was “not part of our remit” to investigate Kuznetsov’s wealth.
In spite of the official nonreaction to the video, it clearly touched a nerve. On July 11, 2010, Pavel Karpov filed a criminal defamation complaint in Russia against my colleagues and me. In his complaint he said, “William Browder, Eduard Khayretdinov, Jamison Firestone, and Sergei Magnitsky conducted an information campaign to discredit me and Artem Kuznetsov, and also to cover up the traces of their own criminal activity.” He went on to say, “The only person who stood to benefit by the theft of his own companies, the tax refund, and the death of Magnitsky was William Browder.”
That’s right: Karpov was now saying that I was responsible for Sergei’s death.
Maybe Karpov thought that if he attacked me, I would back down, but it had the exact opposite effect. The day after we learned of his complaint, we released the movie starring him. Cinematically, this one was even better than the Kuznetsov video. It had all the images of property and cars, and also lots of Karpov’s own photos from nightclubs, restaurants, and discotheques that had been taken all over Moscow. If you were an honest, middle-class Russian and saw how this ordinary cop lived, you would have been shocked—and they all were.
Jamie also filed another set of criminal complaints against Karpov. This time the Internal Affairs Department of the Interior Ministry actually questioned Kuznetsov and Karpov, but in the end claimed that the department lacked the authority to check their parents’ incomes and found nothing wrong.
Kuznetsov and Karpov may have been untouchable by Russian law enforcement, but they were anything but untouchable in the court of public opinion. Within three months, more than four hundred thousand people had watched the videos. No matter how many lies the Russian authorities told, a person could always hold up a finger and say, “Yes, but if Kuznetsov and Karpov are not corrupt, then how did they get so rich? Can you answer that? How did they get so rich?”
35
The Swiss Accounts
That August, I took David for a father-son trip to the English countryside. One day, as we were hiking up a cliffside trail in Cornwall, an unexpected gift fell in my lap. It came in the form of a phone call from Jamie Firestone.
Jamie was so excited he could barely get the words out. “Hey, Bill—can I make your day?”
“Always ready for that.” I caught my breath from the steep trail while David stopped in a patch of shade to drink some water. “What’s happening?”
“I just got an email from someone who claims to have proof that a woman at Moscow Tax Office Number Twenty-eight got millions from the fraud.”
“Who sent the email?”
“Someone named Alejandro Sanches.”
“That doesn’t sound very Russian. How do you know it’s not bullshit?”
“I don’t. But he sent me some Swiss bank statements and some offshore company documents in his email.”
“What do they say?”
“They show a bunch of wire transfers going to bank accounts that seem to belong to the husband of Olga Stepanova, the lady at the tax office who signed the refund check.”
“That’s amazing! Do you think they’re real?”
“I don’t know. But Sanches said that if we’re interested, he’s willing to meet.”
“Are you comfortable doing that?”
“Sure,” Jamie said almost dismissively. Even after all that had happened, Jamie hadn’t lost his optimism. “Don’t worry, Bill.”
We hung up and I took a few sips of water. David and I put our heads down and kept walking up the trail, but I hardly noticed the beautiful views over the beach. My head was spinning. The campaign needed a break like this, but I was worried about sending Jamie into harm’s way.
Nowhere was safe, especially London, which was rife with Russians. In 2006, Alexander Litvinenko, a former FSB agent and well-known Putin critic, was poisoned by FSB agents at London’s Millennium Hotel, just across the street from the American embassy.
Jamie and Sanches exchanged a few more emails and agreed to meet each other on August 27, 2010. The plan was for them to sit down, and if Sanches appeared legitimate, Jamie would call Vadim to join them to go over the documents.
Sanches suggested the Polo Bar at the Westbury Hotel in Mayfair, which was ominously close to where Litvinenko had been poisoned. Terrified that something awful would happen, I called our security guy, Steven Beck, to come up with a plan.
Steven surveyed the location and decided to bring in four men to watch over Jamie and Vadim. Two were ex–Special Forces and two were former British intelligence officers. At 2:30 p.m. on the twenty-seventh these men began to show up in the Polo Bar one at a time. They took up strategic positions—two by the exits, one near the table where the meeting would occur, one at the end of the bar. They blended in seamlessly. One carried a device that could detect and jam any surveillance equipment similar to the kind that we thought Sagiryan might have used for
the meeting at the Dorchester Hotel. Another did a discreet walk-through with a Geiger counter to check for any radiation, since Litvinenko had been poisoned with a highly toxic radioactive isotope of polonium.
There were no guarantees, but I knew that if things got ugly, Steven’s guys would get Jamie and Vadim out of there in a hurry.
Jamie got to the Polo Bar early, entering through one of the steel-and-glass double doors. He walked through the low-ceilinged art deco lounge to the reserved table. He sat in one of the blue velvet club chairs with his back to a wall, a picture of the Empire State Building hanging over his shoulder. The position was strategic, deemed by Steven to be the safest place in the room. Jamie tried to pick out the guards from the crowd of tourists but was at a loss. He looked along the length of the green-and-black marble bar as the bartender shook a martini and poured it into a frosted glass. A waitress brought him a small tray of complimentary snacks, and he eyed the smoked almonds before thinking better of it. He ordered a Diet Coke with a slice of lemon. When it arrived, he let it sit on the table untouched.
Anything could be poisoned.
Sanches arrived fifteen minutes late. In his early forties, he was about five feet ten inches and had a paunch. He was wearing a tan sport jacket, dark slacks, and a white shirt with no tie. His brown hair was unkempt. His skin was milky, his eyes nervous and intense. As soon as he spoke, it was evident that he was no Alejandro Sanches.