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Five Best Quotes: ‘Freezing Order’
What happens if you cross Vladimir Putin — and how Twitter saved one man after an invalid overseas arrest
This is the second in an occasional series of Best Quotes posts with memorable lines from new or otherwise worthy books.
In 2009 Sergei Magnitsky was chained to a bed in a Russian prison and beaten to death with rubber batons by riot guards. He was a 37-year-old lawyer who had been investigating Russian financial crimes for Bill Browder, an American-born hedge fund manager who was the largest private investor in Russia before it revoked his visa.
Magnitsky’s murder led Browder to become a driving force behind the landmark Magnitsky Act in the United States and similar laws elsewhere, which allow countries to impose sanctions on human rights violators in Russia, including freezing their assets. Russia responded to its enactment by banning the adoption of its orphans by U.S. citizens.
Browder describes the chilling price he and others paid for trying to expose Putin’s kleptocracy in Freezing Order: A True Story of Money Laundering, Murder, and Surviving Vladimir Putin (Simon & Schuster, April 2022), a sequel to his bestselling 2015 memoir, Red Notice.
