Freezing Order

A True Story of Money Laundering, Murder, and Surviving Vladimir Putin's Wrath

Bill Browder

• Publisher: Simon & Schuster
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN:
  9781982153328
• eBook ISBN:
  9781982153335
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Political Biographies
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Following his explosive New York Times bestseller Red Notice, Bill Browder returns with another “explosive and compulsive” (Stephen Fry) thriller chronicling how he became Vladimir Putin’s number one enemy by exposing Putin’s campaign to steal and launder hundreds of millions of dollars and kill anyone who stands in his way.

When Bill Browder’s young Russian lawyer, Sergei Magnitsky, was beaten to death in a Moscow jail, Browder made it his life’s mission to go after his killers and make sure they faced justice. The first step was to uncover who was behind the $230 million tax refund scheme that Magnitsky was killed over. As Browder and his team tracked the money as it flowed out of Russia through the Baltics and Cyprus and on to Western Europe and the Americas, they were shocked to discover that Vladimir Putin himself was a beneficiary of the crime.

As law enforcement agencies began freezing the money, Putin retaliated. He and his cronies set up honey traps, hired process servers to chase Browder through cities, murdered more of his Russian allies, and enlisted some of America’s top lawyers and politicians to bring him down. Putin will stop at nothing to protect his money. As Freezing Order reveals, Browder’s campaign to expose Putin’s corruption was a factor behind Russia’s intervention in the 2016 US presidential election.

At once a financial caper, an international adventure, and a passionate plea for justice, Freezing Order is “mandatory reading for anyone who wants to understand the tactics of modern autocracy,” (Anne Applebaum, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Twilight of Democracy). It is a stirring morality tale about how one man can take on one the world’s most ruthless villains—and win.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Author’s Note
• Epigraph
• Chapter 1: The Madrid Arrest
• Chapter 2: The Flute
• Chapter 3: John Moscow
• Chapter 4: Footprints in the Snow
• Chapter 5: The Roadmap
• Chapter 6: The Finrosforum
• Chapter 7: The Cambridge Crime Conference
• Chapter 8: Blame the Dead
• Chapter 9: The Swiss Complaint
• Chapter 10: Alexander Perepilichnyy
• Chapter 11: The Honey Trap
• Chapter 12: The Moldovan File
• Chapter 13: Hôtel Le Bristol
• Chapter 14: The New York Nexus
• Chapter 15: The SDNY
• Chapter 16: John Moscow Returns
• Chapter 17: The Aspen Stakeout
• Chapter 18: Judge Griesa
• Chapter 19: ‘The Daily Show’
• Chapter 20: Boris Nemtsov
• Chapter 21: Arrow in Your Neck
• Chapter 22: Vladimir Kara-Murza
• Chapter 23: The Diplomatic Pouch
• Chapter 24: The KGB Poison Factory
• Chapter 25: The Seagull
• Chapter 26: The Writ of Mandamus
• Chapter 27: The Cellist
• Chapter 28: ‘Dezinformatsiya’
• Chapter 29: Strike Magnitsky
• Chapter 30: Whac-A-Mole
• Chapter 31: FARA
• Chapter 32: The Dossier
• Chapter 33: The Khlebnikov File
• Chapter 34: Senator Grassley
• Chapter 35: Trump Tower
• Chapter 36: Senate Judiciary Committee
• Chapter 37: Global Entry
• Chapter 38: Danske Bank
• Chapter 39: An “Incredible Offer”
• Chapter 40: 98–0
• Chapter 41: $234 Billion
• Epilogue
• Afterword
• Appendix: Links and Legal Documents
• Acknowledgments
• About the Author
• Index
• Copyright