Red Notice is excellent!

My favorite part is where he describes this (paraphrased):

"I couldn't figure out why the oligarchs would do things that hurt both me and themselves. Then I heard about the Russian myth where a farmer finds a genie in a lamp. The genie tells him 'you can have whatever you want but your neighbor will get double'. The farmer thinks and says 'I want you to poke out one of my eyes'."

I read Red Notice and found myself really annoyed by the author's enormous ego and self-righteousness. He talks about how Putin and his cronies have corruptly siphoned of massive amounts of wealth for themselves at the expense of ordinary Russians. Which is probably true. But then, without a hint of self awareness, has paragraphs about his 1990s investments in Russia like:

    “Tell me, Mr. Prutkov—how much does one of those boats cost?” I asked,

    “We got them for twenty million dollars new out of a shipyard in East
    Germany,” he answered.

    “How many do you have?”

    “About a hundred.”

    “And how old are they?”

    “Seven years on average.”

    ...

    I was amazed. These people had hired me to advise them on whether they should exercise their right under the Russian privatization program to purchase 51 percent of the fleet for $2.5 million. Two and a half million dollars! For a half stake in over a billion dollars’ worth of ships! Of course they should! It was a no-brainer. I couldn’t understand why they needed anyone to tell them this. More than anything, I wished I could have joined them in buying the 51 percent.

Where does he think deals like this come from? His buddy Prutkov was obviously paying someone off. He also tries to paint Khodorkovsky as some kind of a saint which is not true at all (the only reason he owned Yukos to begin with was because he bought it for 90% off in a rigged auction). Later I found some reporting from Der Spiegel which casts some doubt on his side of the Magnitsky story too. I don't know if this guy just gets off on writing opeds and getting profiled by the WSJ or what but I get the impression he's not telling everything about his little "adventure" in Russia.

When I first heard there was going to be a movie "Red Notice" on Netflix, I was hoping it was going to be based on Bill Browder's book. Sadly it was not!

If people want to know about financial crime (and regulatory dysfunction) in the US, I absolutely second Markopolos's book with no caveats. It's a bit technical but deserves to be more widely read.

I typically recommend Browder's book with the caveat that he comes off as promotional and I think he exaggerates and makes stuff up in the first half when he was doing relatively tame things like being a consultant. This is unnecessary and hurts credibility somewhat later. However, the book is worth reading because there are extremely good insights in the latter half -- e.g. how he in effect was doing Putin's dirty work in the late 90s / early 2000s by publishing and documenting malfeasance of oligarch companies (short theses) which weakened many oligarchs and helped Putin's position vs them. Once Putin had enough clout he took down Khordokovsky; at this point, someone who pushes transparency (Browder) becomes a hindrance to the Kremlin, and things go downhill from there.

This is one of the most interesting and rather unknown "contribution" of Russia and Putin himself to drugs sales in Europe. At the time when he was associate of Anatoly Sobchak, Mayor of Saint Petersburg he was responsible for making sure that some ships from South America are "overlooked" by the authorities.

In this way Saint Petersburg become one of the central points of drugs smuggling, Putin, Sobchak became one of the most powerfull drug lords.

Years later Sobchak was murdered by Putin (obviously official investigation led to usual heart attack conclusion) since he knew too much about Putin businesses in his "Petersburg era".

contrast to Oliver North in the USA .. interesting stuff

Seconding Red Notice, great book!