But then I think of Sergei’s children, and especially about how his young son, Nikita, will never see his father again. And I think of Sergei, who was in a far more precarious situation than me, but wasn’t prepared to back down. What kind of man would I be if I did back down?
«I have to see this through, Jean. Otherwise, the poison of not doing anything would eat me up from the inside».
I certainly don’t do this out of bravery, though; I’m no braver than anyone else and I feel fear as much as the next person. But what I’ve discovered about fear is that no matter how scared I am at any particular moment, the feeling doesn’t last. After a time it subsides. As anyone who lives in a war zone or who has a dangerous job will tell you, your body doesn’t have the capacity to feel fear for an extended period. The more incidents you encounter, the more inured you become to them.
I have to assume that there is a very real chance that Putin or members of his regime will have me killed someday. Like anyone else, I have no death wish and I have no intention of letting them kill me. I can’t mention most of the countermeasures I take, but I will mention one: this book. If I’m killed, you will know who did it. When my enemies read this book, they will know that you know. So if you sympathize with this search for justice, or with Sergei’s tragic fate, please share this story with as many people as you can. That simple act will keep the spirit of Sergei Magnitsky alive and go further than any army of bodyguards in keeping me safe.
The final question that everyone asks is how I feel about the losses I’ve incurred as a result of this quest for justice. I’ve lost the business I so painstakingly built; I’ve lost many «friends» who distanced themselves from me for fear of how my campaign might affect their economic interests; and I’ve lost the freedom to travel without the worry that I might be arrested and handed over to the Russians.
Have these losses weighed heavily on me? Strangely, the answer is no. For everything I’ve lost in certain areas, I’ve gained in others. For all the fair-weather friends who’ve abandoned me as a financial liability, I’ve met many inspired people who are changing the world.
If I hadn’t done this, I would never have met Andrew Rettman, a political reporter in Brussels who has unrelentingly taken up Sergei’s cause. Despite being disabled, for over five years he has hobbled to the most mundane meetings about the Magnitsky case at the European Commission and vigilantly reported on them to make sure that the bureaucrats there don’t sweep this issue under the carpet.
Nor would I have met Valery Borschev, the seventy-year-old Russian prison rights advocate who, within two days of Sergei’s death, had used his independent authority to enter the prisons where Sergei had been kept and compelled dozens of officials to answer his questions. In spite of the extreme risks to his safety, he exposed the glaringly inconsistent statements and the lies of the Russian authorities.
I would have never met Lyudmila Alexeyeva, the eighty-six-year-old Russian human rights activist who was the first person publicly to accuse Russian police officers of murdering Sergei Magnitsky. She stood by Sergei’s mother and filed criminal complaints, and even when those complaints were ignored, she wouldn’t let it go.
In this mission I’ve met literally hundreds more people who have given me a whole new perspective on humanity that I would never have gotten from my life on Wall Street.
If you asked me when I was at Stanford Business School what I would have thought about giving up a life as a hedge fund manager to become a human rights activist, I would have looked at you as if you were out of your mind.
But here I am twenty-five years later, and that’s exactly what I’ve done. Yes, I could go back to my previous life. But now that I’ve seen this new world, I can’t imagine doing anything else. While there is nothing wrong with pursuing a life in commerce, that world feels like watching TV in black and white. Now, all of a sudden, I’ve installed a wide-screen color TV, and everything about my life is richer, fuller, and more satisfying.
This doesn’t mean that I don’t have profound regrets, though. The obvious one is that Sergei is no longer with us. If I could do it all over again, I would never have gone to Russia in the first place. I would gladly trade all of my business success for Sergei’s life. I now understand how completely naive I was to think that as a foreigner I was somehow immune to the barbarity of the Russian system. I’m not the one who’s dead, but someone is dead because of me and my actions, and there is nothing I can do to bring him back. But I can carry on creating a legacy for Sergei and pursuing justice for his family.
In early April 2014 I took Sergei’s widow, Natasha, and his son, Nikita, to the European Parliament to watch the vote on a resolution to impose sanctions on thirty-two Russians complicit in the Magnitsky case. This was the first time in the history of the European Parliament that a public sanctions list was ever to be voted on.
A year earlier, I had relocated the Magnitsky family to a quiet suburb of London where Nikita was able to attend a prestigious private school and where Natasha could stop looking over her shoulder every day. They felt safe for the first time since Sergei’s murder, and I thought that it would help their healing to watch more than seven hundred European lawmakers from twenty-eight countries condemn the people who killed Sergei.
On the afternoon of April 1, 2014, we got on the Eurostar from London to Brussels. As we emerged from the Channel Tunnel in Calais, France, I received an urgent call from an assistant at the European Parliament. «Bill, the president of the Parliament has just received a letter from a major US law firm on behalf of some of the Russians on the sanctions list. They’re threatening legal action if the vote is not canceled. They claim that the Parliament is violating the rights of these Russians».
«What? These guys are the rights violators! That’s ridiculous».
«I agree. But we need a legal opinion to present to the president of the Parliament by ten tomorrow morning or the vote may not happen».
It was already six o’clock in the evening, and I couldn’t imagine being able to find a top lawyer who would change his plans and stay up all night to write a convincing legal opinion.
I would have given up without even trying, but then I looked at Nikita, his face pressed against the train’s window as he stared out at the fast-moving French countryside.
He looked exactly like a little Sergei Magnitsky.
«O'kay, let me see what I can do», I said to the assistant.
I went to the space between the cars, the same place where I had sat with Ivan seven years before when we discovered that our Moscow offices had been raided. I started making calls and leaving messages, but after an hour and thirteen calls, I still hadn’t been able to reach anyone. I made my way back to my seat agonizing about how I was going to explain all this to Sergei’s widow and son.
But just before I reached my seat, my phone rang. It was Geoffrey Robertson, QC, a London-based lawyer who’d received one of my messages.
In the world of human rights, Geoffrey is a god. As a QC he was a member of a highly select group of English barristers known as the Queen’s Counsel, who take on the most complex and difficult cases in the English courts. From the start, he had been one of Britain’s most outspoken and ardent supporters of a global Magnitsky Act.
I explained the situation and prayed that we wouldn’t get cut off by a poor mobile-phone connection. Thankfully we didn’t, and at the end of our call he asked, «When do you need this by?»