The plane reached cruising altitude, the lights went out for the night, and I tried to get comfortable in my seat. As I stared at the dim light of the NO SMOKING sign, I suddenly remembered the YouTube video we’d made. Sergei had given us the green light only a week before, and it was ready to go. I thought, Why issue a press release when we have a much better way to tell the story?
When I landed in London, I got in a cab and rushed to the office. I pulled the hard drive with the video on it off the shelf and uploaded the film to YouTube. I named it «Hermitage Reveals Russian Police Fraud», and it quickly spread everywhere. By the end of the first day, it had eleven thousand views; after three days, over twenty thousand; and after a week, more than forty-seven thousand. For a video about a complicated crime and human rights case, these were big numbers. In the past, I’d had to brief people one by one about our case in an endless series of forty-five-minute meetings. Now thousands were learning about it all at once.
As soon as the video was posted, I began fielding calls from friends, colleagues, and acquaintances. Each of them expressed their amazement at just how twisted the tale was. They’d heard about Sergei’s situation, but they didn’t really understand it until they saw that video. Mixed in with these calls were others from reporters. The film quickly became the story. For the first time people understood that the Russian Interior Ministry was not a reputable police organization, but rather a collection of officials abusing their positions to perpetrate massive financial frauds. With this one film, we gained our first foothold in explaining the truth of what had happened and were able to push back against our enemies.
From inside his prison cell, Sergei was also bravely trying to explain the truth even after all the torture he had been subjected to.
On October 14, 2009, he submitted a formal twelve-page testimony to the Interior Ministry in which he documented the full extent of the financial fraud. He provided names, dates, and locations, and left nothing to the imagination. At the end, he wrote, «I believe all members of the investigation team are acting as contractors under someone’s criminal order».
It was a remarkable document, and he was incredibly brave to have filed it. It’s hard to describe to someone who doesn’t know Russia just how dangerous it was for him to do this. People in Russia are regularly killed for saying much less. That Sergei was saying it from jail, where he was at the mercy of the people who had put him there and whom he had testified against, showed how determined he was to expose the rot in the Russian law enforcement agencies and go after his persecutors.
In the middle of all this, I’d committed to giving a big speech at Stanford about the dangers of investing in Russia. I decided to take my son, David, who was twelve at the time. He’d never been to my alma mater, and with all these bad things going on, I wanted to share with him one of the places where I had spent some of the happiest years of my life.
We boarded the flight to San Francisco, and I tried to take my mind off everything going on in Russia. But it didn’t matter what time zone or part of the world I was in. Sergei’s situation followed me everywhere, shrouding me with sadness and guilt. The only thing that would give me any respite was seeing him free.
I gave my speech the day after we arrived. I told the audience my story of doing business in Russia, culminating with the events that had been consuming my life for the past year. I also showed the Hermitage YouTube video, which even elicited a few tears.
David and I left the lecture hall and walked into the warm California air, and in that moment I felt slightly better. Even though the video had been viewed tens of thousands of times on the Internet, I’d never interacted with the people who were watching it. Sharing Sergei’s story with a roomful of people, and then being able to see on their faces and hear in their voices just how appalled they were, made me feel less alone in this fight.
But then, as David and I walked across the campus, my phone rang. It was Vladimir Pastukhov and he didn’t sound good. «Bill, something really awful just happened».
«What is it?»
«I just got a text message on my BlackBerry. It’s in Russian. It says, ‘What’s worse, prison or death?’ »
I began to pace. «Was it directed at you?»
«I don’t know».
«Could it be directed at me, Vadim… Sergei?»
«I don’t know. Maybe».
«Who’s it from?»
«It’s not clear».
«How’d they get that number? Nobody’s got your BlackBerry number».
«I don’t know, Bill».
David stared at me, concerned. I stopped pacing and tried to reassure him with a weak smile. «Can we trace it? Figure out who sent it?»
«Maybe. I’ll try. I’ll call you back as soon as I hear anything more».
«Thank you».
Any positive feelings I had evaporated in that sixty-second call. The return trip to London was long and bleak. I had no idea how to assess this threat, whom it was directed at, or what to do about it. It sounded serious, and it was extremely worrying.
Within days, Vladimir received a second text message, also in Russian. «Trains, trains through the night, trains, trains never stopping». Vladimir explained that it was a line from a famous Russian prisoners’ poem that alluded to trains running endlessly to the gulags in the Urals, their packed cars carrying human fodder to their ultimate deaths.
A few days later I got an unexpected call from an old client named Philip Fulton. He’d been my friend and confidant since the Gazprom days. He and his wife were in London and wanted to see Elena and the kids. We had a lovely brunch at the fifth-floor restaurant at Harvey Nichols, and I managed to put aside my worries for a couple of hours. Philip and his wife fawned over my small children and we had a great visit. I hated to admit it, but for a little while I felt O'kay. I knew our problems weren’t going away, but I also knew that it was acceptable — maybe even preferable — to forget about them for a few moments and pretend I had a normal life.
When we were leaving, though, Vladimir called again. «A new message came in, Bill».
«What is it?»
«It’s a quote from The Godfather: ‘History has taught us that anyone can be killed.’ »
I paused. «Fuck!» I said, my hands starting to shake.
We hung up.
I was completely spooked. Early the next morning I gathered the three messages from Vladimir’s BlackBerry, with time stamps, and reported them to SO15, the antiterrorism unit at Scotland Yard. It sent in a team of investigators to interview me and Vladimir, and its technicians traced the calls. Each call came from an unregistered number in Russia, which was unusual. Steven Beck, our security specialist, later told us that the only people in Russia who had access to unregistered numbers were members of the FSB.
Sergei was due to appear in court on Thursday, November 12, for another detention hearing. Getting to court was never straightforward. It usually started at 5:00 a.m., when the guards pulled the men from their cells and brought them to a prison transport. Twenty or so prisoners were then herded into a van that was designed for half as many people. For the next few hours, the truck would sit in a parking lot as some clerk filled out paperwork in the detention center’s office. Sergei and the other prisoners were forced to stand in this tightly packed van and wait. They had no access to water, fresh air, or a toilet. This same process would be repeated after their day in court, and the men wouldn’t get back to their bunks until after midnight. Throughout the day, they would be given no food, and often prisoners would go without eating for up to thirty-six hours. In essence, going to court was itself a form of torture designed to break and demoralize the prisoners as they fought for their all but nonexistent chance of being acquitted.