RUTHFULLY YOURS

Perhaps all you need to know to understand the essense of Bill Browder is what he carried with him in his briefcase when he lived in Putin’s Russia. “At all times,” he told me not long after we met, “I had $5,000 in cash in case I had to flee for the border and pay off the guards.”

Bill Browder’s stories are melodramas. They often begin with a ringing phone—or a knock on a door. In May of this year, for example, the American-born financier was bundled into a police car in Madrid by the Spanish police, who, acting on an Interpol warrant at the behest of Russian authorities, simply appeared outside his hotel room and took him away. “I was frightened this wasn’t an arrest but an illegal rendition to Moscow,” Browder said. (He was let go an hour later.) These moments of crisis are familiar to his 180,000 Twitter followers—“the army of Bill,” they are called—who worry about his safety in his adopted role as both human-rights advocate and financial sleuth, taking on Putin and his kleptocrats. “Vladimir Putin wants me dead,” he says almost every time he is interviewed.

Is there anyone, by now, who is unaware of Browder’s relentless crusade? At 54, he circles the globe helping governments recover millions that Russian oligarchs have illegally parked overseas. He has dodged six warrants seeking his arrest. He takes precautions in his daily routine, wary of possible security threats. His weapons are judicial and legislative: sanctions blocking the assets and the international travel of Russian criminals, murderers, and corrupt industrialists who have plundered their companies.

And he is succeeding. “Now every country knows the names of these guys,” he contends. “Now everyone who thought they could operate under the radar is discovering that you can’t. It started with [Special Counsel] Robert Mueller’s indictment of the 12 G.R.U. agents”—operatives from Russia’s military-intelligence service—“and they discovered that every e-mail they ever sent is available to the Justice Department. All of a sudden [the authorities] arrested a spy in Norway. They arrested two people who were getting ready to break into a chemical-weapons lab.

“Paul Manafort thought he could do all of this dirty shit and get away with it. Well, you know what? Every single thing he did has come out. If Trump has any secrets, the truth is going to come out. I don’t know if Trump has any secrets. But there is not going to be a secret left. While Trump is tweeting on his toilet about what a great guy Putin is, someone in the bowels of the U.S. Treasury is issuing regulations which basically [list the new names that should be added to the list of Russians who] should be sanctioned. It is crystallizing everywhere.”

At one time, William Browder was the largest foreign portfolio investor in Russia. In the 1990s, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, his hedge-fund, Hermitage Capital, made a fortune investing in Russia as the country privatized its state-owned industries, despite the downside risk that the government, at any time and without warning, could seize assets, dilute stock shares, and arrest investors or their employees.

Browder would refer to the adrenaline rush in those days as the high of “the ten-bagger”—the euphoria that comes from knowing you’ve earned 10 times your initial investment. In 1994, at the age of 30, he had gone from being a scrappy Stanford grad fighting for a desk at Salomon Brothers to “Bill . . . could you come and brief George Soros?”

Today, Browder, who wrote a best-selling 2015 memoir, Red Notice, is tireless in recounting the story of how he became Putin’s Public Enemy No. 1. Browder’s narrative is astounding. How Putin, in 2005, barred him from Russia. How authorities raided the offices of Hermitage and its law firm, stole the company’s corporate seals and stamps, and rigged a bogus $230 million tax-rebate fraud, which they tried to pin on Browder’s 37-year-old tax adviser, Sergei Magnitsky. How—after trying to press Browder’s case against the officials who he believed were responsible—Magnitsky was hauled off to prison. And how, in 2009, he would die in a Moscow detention center, having been denied medical treatment and purportedly beaten to death.

“My life changed at that moment,” Browder has said frequently. “It became my mission to get revenge.” During one of the raids, a lawyer was pummeled and hospitalized. A Browder source named Alexander Perepilichny—who had provided crucial financial documents to aid Browder’s cause—later died mysteriously while jogging on the outskirts of London. Such are the perils of operating in Putin’s world—and Browder’s.

The political fallout from Magnitsky’s killing was profound. In seeking to avenge his colleague’s death, Browder, from his redoubt in London, spent three years poring over legal documents and financial records. He also lobbied U.S. legislators, human-rights organizations, and members of the Obama administration. The result: in 2012, Congress passed and Obama signed into law the Magnitsky Act. It denied visas to, and froze the holdings of, Russians who were judged responsible for, or financially benefited from, Magnitzky’s demise—as well as others who committed gross violations of human rights. (In retaliation, the Russian government halted its program allowing American adoptions of Russian children.) Four years later, the U.S. expanded the law, which now can be applied globally; Magnitzky provisions, for instance, are being considered against those who may have played a role in the murder of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi.

Through it all, Browder has paid a steep price for his efforts. Whenever traveling outside the U.K. (he renounced his U.S. citizenship and became a Brit in 1998), he is wary of an Interpol warrant. Russian courts have twice tried him in absentia and both times sentenced him to nine years in prison. Putin’s prosecutors have accused him of tax fraud and, preposterously, of murdering Magnitsky himself.

All of these threats, paradoxically, have given Browder even more of an incentive to make the rounds, push his crusade. “The more I am out there,” he told me, “the safer I am.”

The tale of how Browder made his fortune is worth repeating. The maverick investor, reportedly worth upwards of $100 million, is the grandson of Earl Browder, the head of the American Communist Party during F.D.R.’s presidency. But despite that family history, young Bill became an ardent capitalist. At the height of its success, Hermitage, which he co-founded in 1996 with the banker Edmond Safra, managed $4.5 billion of client investments in Russian companies.

Hermitage, of course, had its struggles. In 1998, Russia defaulted on its foreign debt. The ruble crashed. The company’s assets plummeted to $100 million. But over the next seven years the price of oil quadrupled. And Browder, determined to ride it out, made a killing, thanks to his major stake in Gazprom, Russia’s state-owned oil-and-gas colossus. By the early 2000s, he had decided on a brash move. He started a campaign to expose the endemic corruption at various Russian firms. He publicly charged an array of businessmen and officials, accusing them of looting their companies’ assets. Soon, alarmed that the oligarchs might try to assassinate him, Browder enlisted a security detail and began traveling in a three-car motorcade.

As Browder’s business thrived, so did his hubris. Despite his attempts to curb corporate graft, Browder spoke out favorably about Putin, telling The New York Times that he “has turned out to be my biggest ally in Russia.” Browder’s rationale for supporting him? “We want an authoritarian—one who is exercising authority over the Mafia and oligarchs.” During our many conversations, Browder would try to put these statements in context: Putin had promised “that he was going to restore order and stamp out the abuse by the oligarchs. Everyone was hoping that he was going to be true to that pitch.” Browder, meanwhile, said he was simply “trying to make all my money back.”

He would soon realize, though, that he was being played and that his status as a foreigner did not insulate him from the authorities’ wrath. In November 2005, after deplaning at Moscow’s main airport, he was detained by immigration officers, held overnight, and deported. He had become yet another wealthy businessman who had suddenly fallen out of Putin’s favor. As Browder recalled, he was literally and figuratively “the last person waiting for the baggage on the airline carousel.”

At our first session, in London, Bill Browder did not act like someone who feared for his life. I had expected to find elaborate security at his building. Instead, I was given a perfunctory glance and waved up to the Hermitage offices, which overlook London’s picturesque Finsbury Square. I began to wonder if there was a hidden security system in place, speculating, as others have, that Browder either was protected by or had a special relationship with M.I.6, Britain’s foreign-intelligence service. Curious, I asked him, point-blank, “Are you M.I.6?” He hesitated and then said, cryptically, “I work with so many levels of British law enforcement, I never know who is working for whom.” When I broached the subject again, months later, he bristled: “I am definitely not under British protection. I have to protect myself. I am not M.I.6. I am not C.I.A. I am not anything. I bet there are nine intelligence agencies listening as we speak. But that is because I am not an agent of anyone’s—I am a completely independent operator. If I were really an agent of M.I.6, why would I be having so many problems opening a criminal case [in the U.K. against the oligarchs]? Maybe this is a double fake-out! The Russians are accusing me of being a C.I.A. agent!

With the passage of new laws in England, some oligarchs have felt the squeeze. Last May, Parliament—after the poisoning, in Salisbury, of former Russia spy Sergei Skripal and his daughter, Yulia, passed its own version of the Magnitsky Act. And yet the government appears ambivalent about investigating the $30 million in “illicit funds” that Browder contends have been laundered through British banks. “I have gone to every agency,” he said. “No one will take it on. It all stops with the higher-ups. It’s either massive incompetence or collusion.”

This fall, underlying tensions between Browder and the Brits came into stark relief when detective Jon Benton, the onetime head of the international-corruption unit looking into these suspicious dealings, made a surprising admission. He said he had received orders to stop his inquiry—from a more senior official with links to the Foreign Office. “I was approached and taken for a coffee,” Benton told The Sunday Telegraph, “and basically told Bill Browder is a pain in the neck and to leave it.” Browder was livid but not surprised: certain members of the government have reason to keep in with the Kremlin; some of the Russian business elite retain strong connections with England’s power players. Earlier this year, according to The New York Times, billionaire Oleg Deripaska, a Russian aluminum magnate suspected of having connections to organized crime, retained the lobbying help of a British lord, Gregory Barker—an associate of David Cameron—hoping to sway U.S. officials to lighten or remove stiff sanctions on Deripaska and his businesses. “The U.S. won’t respond to this kind of pressure,” Browder told me in November. “They’d look like they’re caving.” But back in England, Browder said, fuming, “We are still trying to get the U.K. to make a list of sanctioned individuals. They are stalling.”

Browder’s office resembles a small trading floor, with analysts sitting in rows of desks, staring intently at computer monitors. Many spend their time rifling through complex chains of transactions in far-flung foreign bank accounts to determine which ones can be traced to corrupt culprits. So far, Browder has sought to help two dozen nations recover their piece of the $230 million pie—the tax money paid to the Russian Treasury—that he alleges to have been stolen by Russian officials, moguls, and mobsters. A handful of countries, including Switzerland, France, and the Netherlands, have opened investigations. In September, the head of Denmark’s Danske Bank abruptly resigned after authorities, with an assist from Browder, opened a $234 billion money-laundering probe of its Estonian branch.

When Browder talks one-on-one, he radiates a nervous intensity. He is charming, abrasive, and tightly wound. His thoughts come so quickly that he often stutters. His predominant expression is one of steely impatience. While his bald pate and frameless glasses affect an accountant’s mien, his well-tailored suits speak to a life lived at the pinnacle of privilege.

The ideological fervor that defines his pursuit of Putin is reminiscent of that of Michael Milken, a number-crunching savant I wrote about in the 90s for Vanity Fair. Milken’s singular belief in the junk-bond market was visionary—and an affront to the Wall Street establishment. He eventually went to jail for securities fraud and other crimes. Browder, like Milken, is a chronic self–promoter, who conveys a sense that he is always playing for an angle, molding his story. Both men can be patronizing and imperious. Both are financial wizards—and renegades. When I mentioned to Browder that I saw in him a kind of parallel to Milken—in his sense of mission and in the seemingly willful blinders he wears as he consumes himself with financial arcana—he snapped at me: “Not remotely. He was a crook.

Browder can be incurious and opaque, with little small talk and zero equivocation. In the first minutes we were together, I mentioned a name to Browder and, rather than answering me, he jumped to his feet and said, “I have a PowerPoint prepared on this very subject.” He disappeared and returned with glossy laminate boards that featured dazzling illustrations, cartoon thunderbolts, and captions with the whimsy of a Marvel comic.

Among reporters, Browder’s PowerPoint presentations are considered works of such flair and originality that David E. Hoffman, the former Washington Post Moscow bureau chief and author of The Oligarchs, still keeps a box of them in his garage. These slide decks, which enable Browder to shape a narrative as a form of performance, are his preferred mode of communication. “That was always my secret,” he told me. “We did PowerPoints. If you can present your case clearly and visually, anyone can understand it. No one has an attention span.”

It is an arduous slog, indeed, to follow a chain of laundered accounts (Russia to Switzerland to Dubai, for example) linked to various players (a crime syndicate, a corrupt tax official, an oligarch), linked in turn to a $20 million mansion outside of Moscow. But that is Browder’s métier. And where is all that money that was swiped from the taxes Hermitage paid to the Russian government? “Some has disappeared,” he said. “Some we are still looking for. But so far we have confirmed $200 million spread across the globe.”

When I returned to Browder’s offices a couple of days later, I was confronted with a scene reminiscent of mathematician John Nash’s shambolic shed in the movie A Beautiful Mind. For my benefit, Browder had taken piles of research data and PowerPoint printouts and covered every square inch of a 15-foot-long conference-room table. Pride of place was given to an intricate chart that outlined a scheme by an organized-crime ring to strip tax assets from the Russian Treasury. Nearby were boxes filled with photos of the thieves’ alleged collaborators: men from Russia’s Federal Security Service (the F.S.B.) and the Ministry of the Interior, and the Prosecutor General’s office, as well as an array of lawyers, dubbed “Criminal Executors.” Another PowerPoint deck bore the image of the cellist turned conductor Sergei Roldugin, head of the St. Petersburg House of Music. In 2015, when the Panama Papers were released (unearthing reams of leaked attorney-client documents that revealed various foreign shell companies), Roldugin’s yearly income was reported to be about $10 million and he was linked to offshore companies with cash flows of up to $2 billion. This drew attention to his close friendship with Vladimir Putin and the fact that Roldugin is the godfather of Putin daughter Maria. One of Browder’s investigators asked me, “How does a cellist get $2 billion in his bank account?”

“Do you know the myth of the firebird?” I asked Browder, referring to the classic folktale that for over a century has helped convey the Russian character. He did not. The story revolves around a “firebird,” which arrives from a distant land, glowing with promises and blessings yet carrying a portent of doom. “A friend named his fund Firebird,” Browder replied. “Now I get it.”

Before arriving in Russia, he had never read a word of Dostoyevsky nor any of the nation’s great literary works, which might have illuminated him about the Russian soul, its darkness, its fierce nationalism. He told me that when he met his current wife—whom he has referred to publicly by the pseudonym Elena, to protect her identity—she tried to get him to read a Chekhov story or two, to no avail.

At the top of her class at Moscow State University—Russia’s Harvard—Elena worked for an American P.R. firm representing the oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky, the chairman of Yukos, one of Russia’s larger oil companies. She met Browder in January 2000. At the time, the Russian ruble had crashed and the oligarchs had embarked upon what Browder recalled as “an orgy of stealing.” Yukos—even amid all the embezzlement going on—stood out as one of the country’s most scandal-plagued companies. And Browder, trying to expose the widespread malfeasance (“I was the only person in Moscow crazy enough to speak publicly”), gave a presentation at the American Chamber of Commerce. Elena came to hear him.

He was intrigued by her and pursued her, and on their second date Browder mentioned an article he’d read in Foreign Affairs suggesting that U.S. authorities revoke the visas of Russia’s most corrupt businessmen. Browder pointed out that one guy they should go after was her company’s client, the head of Yukos. “The oligarchs are monsters, and you have to start somewhere,” he told her.

Despite his bold approach, they soon fell in love and got married, and not long after, Khodorkovsky, who was supporting some of Putin’s political opponents, was arrested. The government would seize Khodorkovsky’s 36 percent block of Yukos. He would be placed on trial and sent to prison. (In 2013, he was pardoned and released. He now lives in London, where he runs a foundation that supports journalists, some of whom have been targeted by Putin. “We’ve gone from being enemies to allies,” Browder said.) The oligarchs, Browder later noted, would loll around on their yachts, look at their TVs, and see their former peer—“a man far richer and smarter” than they were, in Browder’s estimation—sitting in a cage in a Russian courtroom. Browder and many others believe that, shortly thereafter, each oligarch made his way to the Kremlin to offer—or accept—a cut to government insiders. And as a result Putin became, by certain estimates, the world’s wealthiest man.

Last July 16, Browder was in Colorado, where he owns a vacation home. He was working on a new book about his campaign against Putin’s kleptocracy, and he needed some time for uninterrupted concentration. At 9:30 that morning, Browder told his young children, “Please, do not disturb me, no matter what.” Then, to avoid distractions, he put his mobile phone facedown. But before long, he noticed the phone come alive, shimmying silently on his writing desk.

Half a world away, in Helsinki, Trump and Putin were holding a joint press conference after their two-hour summit meeting. At one point, Trump made an assertion that stunned the world. He said he did not believe the Russian government had interfered in the 2016 U.S. election: “My [intelligence] people came to me. They said they think it’s Russia. I have President Putin; he just said it’s not Russia. I will say this: I don’t see any reason why it would be.” Putin made an equally puzzling statement. He said he would be willing to allow Mueller’s investigators to question the 12 Russians already indicted in his inquiry if Russia’s investigators were allowed to interrogate people they considered “of interest”—including none other than Bill Browder.