The extraordinary story of Mr Browder\u2019s transformation from hard-nosed capitalist to human rights campaigner, based on his 2015 book Red Notice: How I Became Putin\u2019s Number 1 Enemy is being turned into a film. \u201cThere are a couple of things that are so crazy in the story that the Hollywood screenwriter says, \u2018No one will believe it. They will just think it\u2019s not true\u2019,\u201d he says. Yet the plot is still unfolding. \u201cThe book doesn\u2019t scratch the surface \u2014 it finishes in 2012 and crazy stuff has happened since then: assassinations and cover-ups and western enablers.\u201d<\/p>\n
The grandson of Earl Browder, the former leader of the American Communist Party, he became a capitalist as an \u201cact of rebellion\u201d and spent more than a decade living as a businessman in Moscow, running Russia\u2019s most successful investment fund. He was deported in 2006 after he started to expose corruption, and was blacklisted by the Russian government as a \u201cthreat to national security\u201d. Since then he has been convicted in absentia on what he calls trumped-up charges and sentenced to nine years in jail.<\/p>\n
The death in 2009 of his lawyer, Sergei Magnitsky, who had uncovered details of a $230 million tax fraud, made him only more determined to get to the truth. \u201cThey arrested him, tortured him viciously for 358 days and they killed him at the age of 37,\u201d he says. \u201cTo this day it\u2019s a burden I carry on my shoulders that a young man died in my service to protect me. It\u2019s my duty to get justice for him and make sure that the people who killed him don\u2019t get away with it.\u201d<\/p>\n
Others who have worked with Mr Browder to expose the links between the Russian mafia and the Kremlin have also mysteriously died or been injured. Only last week Nikolai Gorokhov, a Russian lawyer who is representing the Magnitsky family, fell from the fourth floor of an apartment building near Moscow in suspicious circumstances. \u201cHe had come across dramatic and important evidence of collusion and corruption and cover up of the murder by the Russian law enforcement authorities,\u201d Mr Browder says. \u201cHe was going to go to court the day after he plunged four storeys. I believe that he was pushed off the balcony.\u201d<\/p>\n