Tortured to death by Putin's jackboot state: Inside the rat-infested Gestapo-like Russian prison where eight guards beat lawyer who exposed Moscow's gangster regime

By William Browder

PUBLISHED: 17:00 EST, 3 November 2012 | UPDATED: 17:00 EST, 3 November 2012

I was eating brunch in the fifth-floor restaurant at Harvey Nichols in late October 2009 when we got the first warning, by text. It had been sent from Russia, but the sentiment was American Mafia: ‘If history has taught us anything, it is that anyone can be killed,’ a quote from Don Michael Corleone in The Godfather. We were in no doubt about its meaning.

I was safely in London with the rest of my team. But my Russian lawyer, Sergei Magnitsky, was not. He had been arrested in Moscow a year  earlier on trumped-up charges by the Russian Interior Ministry after exposing a major government corruption scandal. I was worried, and with good reason.

The following month, late at night on Friday, November 13, my phone rang. It was a voicemail and another threat. There were no words. Just the screams of someone being beaten. Badly.

Last farewell: Friends and family say their final goodbyes at the casket of Sergei Magnitsky, a lawyer who had been arrested on a charge of tax evasion and died in prison

I called Sergei’s lawyer the following Monday morning to see if he was all right, but the lawyer said he couldn’t see Sergei that day. The Russian investigator in charge of his case claimed Sergei was not feeling well enough to leave his cell.

At 6.45 the next morning I took a call from a colleague who could barely get his words out. He was calling to tell me that Sergei was dead. He was 37, a married man with two children.

That was three years ago and his death has changed everything. Up to that point I led the volatile and thrill-filled life of an investment manager.

My main concerns were whether markets went up or down and what exciting holiday was next. Now, I have a new priority: I have to find out exactly what happened to Sergei, to get justice for him – and to avoid being killed myself.

How did I end up in this perilous situation? In 1996, I moved from London to Russia to set up a fund to invest in the newly privatised companies of Eastern Europe. Hermitage Capital Management quickly grew to become the largest of its kind in the country, with more than $4 billion of investments.

Call for justice: William Browder next to a picture of his murdered business partner Sergei Magnitsky

But eventually I realised that the companies in which we had bought shares were being robbed blind by their oligarch owners, a scale of theft almost unimaginable in the West. And I decided to do something about it.

My approach was to investigate how the stealing was done and then share our research with the international media including the Financial Times, The Wall Street Journal and The Economist. The scandals that followed our exposés often led to the scams stopping (and the share prices of our companies went up substantially).

It seems obvious in retrospect, but exposing wholesale fraud made me a great many well-placed enemies. There was no attempt to kill me, but they did express their displeasure: on November 13, 2005, after flying back from a weekend trip to London, I was detained for 15 hours and then deported back to London. I was subsequently declared a ‘threat to national security’ by the Russian government and banned from the country.

Eighteen months after I was expelled, on June 4, 2007, the situation became a whole lot worse. First, 50 officers from the Moscow Interior Ministry raided my office and the office of my American law firm in Moscow. They seized our corporate documents and then used them to steal our companies.

Then we established that, through a complicated scheme, the police, working with corrupt tax officials and organised criminals had stolen $230 million (£140 million) of taxes that we had paid to the Russian government a year earlier.

The tax refund to criminals was approved by Russian tax authorities in the space of one day, Christmas Eve 2007, with no questions asked. It was the largest fraudulent tax refund in Russian history.

In our minds, this could hardly have been an ‘approved operation’; after all, the money belonged to the Russian government. We figured that if President Putin knew about this, the ‘good guys’ would get the ‘bad guys’.

So, after filing complaints with every law enforcement agency in Russia, we waited for SWAT teams to swoop in and arrest all the wrongdoers. Instead, the Russian Interior Ministry opened criminal cases against all seven of our lawyers from four different law firms who worked on this case.

I was shocked. The only thing I could think of was getting all the lawyers out of Russia. I asked them to leave Russia and come to London. Six out of the seven agreed.

The one who refused was Sergei Magnitsky, the smartest of them all and the one who had done the most to untangle the web of fraud.

Sergei was 36 and worked for a  boutique American law firm called Firestone Duncan. He was a tall man with dark hair and a soft handshake who could do ten things in the time it took others to do one. He was a man of clarity and precision.

He said he knew the law and that he had done nothing wrong. Moreover, he said these police officers had stolen an enormous amount of money from his country and he wanted to make sure that they were brought to trial. So he stayed.

In fact, Sergei’s belief in justice was so strong that he testified against the police officers, judges, and criminals involved in the $230 million theft – a prospect most Russians would regard with terror.

Then, one month after his testimony, on November 24, 2008, the Russian establishment made its response. Two police officers arrested Sergei in front of his wife and two young children. It later emerged they had worked with one of the policemen against whom he had testified.

Squalid: A look inside a cell at the rat-infested, over-crowded and disease-ridden Butyrka jail in Moscow where Mr Magnitsky was held

The sense of anguish I felt at the news of his arrest is indescribable, but it can hardly match the pain and suffering that Sergei was then subjected to in custody. He was tortured to withdraw his testimony. He was put in cells with 14 inmates and just eight beds. The lights were kept on 24 hours a day to deprive him of sleep.

He was put in cells with neither heating nor window panes – in December in Moscow – so he nearly froze to death. He was put in cells with just a hole in the floor as a toilet and from where sewage would bubble up. The authorities wanted him to withdraw his testimony against the police officers and sign a false confession saying he had  stolen the $230 million.

How do we know all this? Because Sergei wrote it down. In the 358 days he was in detention without trial, he kept a diary, passed out via his lawyers month by month, and filed 450 complaints detailing how he was being mistreated. As a result, his has become the most well-documented human rights abuse case that has come out of Russia in the past 25 years.

His tormentors figured he was a soft professional who would buckle in the first week. Contrary to their expectations, he was so strong and so principled that no matter what they did to him, he refused to perjure himself.

No business career is without a few unpleasant situations, but nothing had prepared me for this. I spoke to every Western government and campaign group who would listen. Many wrote to the president, Dmitry Medvedev, and senior Russian government officials. To no avail. In one response, Russian officials even refused to admit that Sergei was in their custody.

After six months, Sergei’s health began to deteriorate alarmingly. He lost 3st, developed serious stomach pains and was diagnosed as having pancreatitis and gallstones and needed an operation, which was scheduled for August 1, 2009.

One week before the operation, he was abruptly moved to Butyrka, a maximum-security prison considered to be one of the toughest in Russia. At Butyrka, which lacked any proper medical facilities, he suffered constant, agonising pain from his untreated pancreatitis and he was refused medical treatment.

His cellmate banged on the door for hours screaming for a doctor. When one finally arrived, he refused to do anything for Sergei, telling him he should have obtained medical treatment before his arrest. Sergei wrote 20 requests to be treated and every one was either ignored or rejected. The investigators came to him again and again saying all he had to do to end the situation was to sign a false confession.

To increase the pressure, they used what Sergei held dearest: his family. They denied him visits from his wife or mother and the chance to speak to his two children on the telephone.

But they did not know Sergei. The more he suffered from the physical and psychological pain they inflicted upon him, the stronger his spirit became. Investigators tried to suppress his soul, instead they secured his determination to expose their evil.

One month before his death, on October 14, 2009, Sergei gave a  testimony in which he implicated his torturers and repeated his testimony about the police involvement in the theft of $230 million from the Russian government.

On November 11, five days before his death, Sergei filed a complaint with the court exposing the falsification of his case file by police. The corrupt officers had probably never seen such an inconvenient hostage.

On November 13, Sergei was  suffering agonising pain and appealed to prison authorities for medical help. The doctors did not see him until three days later.

On the night of November 16,  Sergei was moved to a different prison with a hospital. But when he arrived, instead of sending him for treatment, they put him in an isolation cell, handcuffed him and allowed eight riot guards to beat him with rubber batons until he was dead.

Since then we, his family and friends, have worked to get further corroborating evidence from the Russian system itself – and we have succeeded. Like the authorities in Nazi Germany, the Russians have kept records of the brutality they inflicted during the last hour of his life. Still, however, we were naive about the true nature of the Russian authorities. Surely, we thought, they would have to prosecute in such a high-profile and well-documented case.

Dark justice: The grim-looking exterior of Butyrka remand prison where Sergei Magnitsky was severely maltreated

They didn’t. The wagons were circled. The key players were promoted, and some even received the state honours. And to add insult to injury, the Russian Interior Ministry announced last summer that they intended to prosecute Sergei in what will be the first ever posthumous prosecution in modern history.

It is hard not to conclude that there has been a cover-up at the highest level of the Russian government into the murder of Sergei Magnitsky and the $230 million theft that he had uncovered – and that Sergei’s treatment is a resonant example of what is really going on inside Russia today.

This is a regime where a man’s life means nothing. Where officials and criminals are allowed to work together to steal from their own people and those who expose them are repressed and killed. We don’t know if President Putin was a direct beneficiary in the $230 million theft or had an involvement in Sergei’s torture and murder, but he is ultimately responsible for the cover-up that ensued.

You don’t have to dig very deep to find numerous other examples.

Just two weeks ago Leonid Razvozzhayev, a prominent member of the opposition, was kidnapped in Ukraine by Russian secret policemen, threatened that he and his family members would be killed and then forced into signing a false confession.

This follows the arrest and jailing for two years of two young mothers from the Pussy Riot punk group for releasing a 40-second song on YouTube criticising Putin.

According to a major Russian think-tank that advises the president, one out of every six businessmen has been subject to a criminal investigation. The lawlessness has reached epidemic proportions.

Blamed: William Browder says Putin was ultimately responsible for the coverup of Mr Magnitsky's fate

Every time reporters or foreign heads of state bring up the Magnitsky story with Putin, however, his retort is that the West has human rights problems as well.

More recently, we have looked for ways to obtain justice outside Russia. In April 2010 we started a campaign seeking to impose visa sanctions and asset freezes against the 60 officials who played a role in this case.

It gathered a rapid and unexpected momentum. The American government imposed visa bans and there is legislation going through the US Congress called the Magnitsky Act, which will also freeze the assets of Magnitsky’s killers and impose visa sanctions and asset freezes on other human rights violators in Russia.

The Foreign And Commonwealth Office announced that from April, human rights abusers would be barred from Britain. It is not yet clear if this will include Sergei’s killers, but it is an important step in the right direction.

In July 2012, the Organisation For Security And Co-operation In Europe (OSCE) Parliamentary Assembly, an influential gathering of parliamentarians from 55 countries, called for all its member parliaments to pass similar legislation banning visas and freezing assets of Russian officials in the Magnitsky case.

Last month, a similar resolution was adopted by the European Parliament calling on the Council of Ministers to enact it.

This is the Achilles heel of the mafia-style regime in Russia. The betrayers of human rights in Iran, Belarussia and North Korea tend to stay at home; the people at the head of the regime in Russia go on holiday to St Tropez and shop at Harrods.

Their aim is to steal money at home and invest it in Western banks and real estate. Now we have a tool to deal with them in the West.

It is not true justice, but it gives hope to all those fighting the cause of corruption in Russia.

A play by leading Russian playwright Elena Gremina will help to keep the case in the public eye. One Hour Eighteen Minutes, which will open at the New Diorama Theatre, London, on November 16, is based on Sergei’s diaries.

The title refers to the time during which prison guards prevented two civilian medics from entering Sergei’s cell to save him from death. Sir Tom Stoppard will host a gala performance of the show.

Many people ask me why I continue to insist on justice now I have received threats to my own life. The answer is because I have a duty to Sergei. Most people, if faced with a far lesser hardship than Sergei in custody, would have given in.

Sergei was an ordinary man who became an extraordinary hero. If we all could show a fraction of his bravery and fortitude, the world would be a much better place.

Magnitsky's martyrdom makes Russia ask: What is to be done?

By Sir Tom Stoppard

In the darkest pages of Russia’s historical catalogue of state murder – the period of the Stalin show trials – there is a recurring moment of intense poignancy.

Typically, some comrade with years of loyal service to the Bolshevik cause, suddenly finding himself under arrest and charged ludicrously with working to sabotage the USSR, would beg his accusers to make one quick phone call to Stalin; that’s all it would take, he thought, for the hideous misunderstanding to be cleared up. Little did he know.

I thought of this when Bill Browder told me his story of the events that ultimately led to the cruel death of Sergei Magnitsky.

The criminal acts that Magnitsky had been investigating as Browder’s lawyer were so brazen that, as Browder put it to me: ‘I thought there was no way Putin would let such things happen if he got to know about them.’ Little did Bill Browder know, but he knows now.

What is to be done? In retrospect, Lenin’s question seems to have been hanging over that great intractable country for two centuries, since the ‘officers’ revolt’ against Tsarist absolutism in the wake of the Napoleonic wars.

It hung over the generations of radicalised intelligentsia who came after, and, during the short 20th Century of Soviet communism; the same question, with a reverse twist, was being asked by the victimised children of the Russian Revolution, the generation of Solzhenitsyn and Sakharov. In the end, it seemed that the question would be answered by the movement of history.

For a short, heady, chaotic time after 1989, it looked possible that something like a just society could put down roots in Russia for the first time. The Magnitsky case is one of many that tell a different story.

It is fitting enough that the story of this brave and honest man is being brought again to public attention by a writer and playwright.

There is no country where literary culture is more saturated by political nightmares and dreams of a just society. The abuses of power have done that for Russia. What Is To Be Done? was the title of a novel by a revolutionary in the 1860s. Lenin picked up on it.

A century after Lenin, alas, the question is still there, hanging over the martyrdom (there is no other word) of Sergei Magnitsky.