by Bill Browder
I busied myself as best I could. I answered some emails as if it were a normal workday. I checked with the embassy. The new consul on duty assured me that once things started opening for the day, they’d take care of me. I got my stuff together and tried once more to talk to the guards. I asked them for my passport, but they continued to ignore me. It was as if that were their only job: to sit behind the glass and ignore all the detainees.
I paced: 9:00; 9:15; 9:24; 9:37. I grew more and more nervous. I wanted to call Elena, but it was too early in London. I called Ariel and he still had nothing for me. I stopped calling people.
By 10:30 a.m. I was banging on the glass, and the officers still ignored me with the utmost professionalism.
Elena called. This time she couldn’t soothe me. She promised we’d figure out my situation, but I was beginning to feel that it didn’t matter. Jude Shao was looming large in my mind now.
10:45. I really began to panic.
10:51. How could I have been so stupid? Why would an average guy from the South Side of Chicago think he could get away with taking down one Russian oligarch after another?
10:58. Stupid, stupid, stupid! ARROGANT AND STUPID, BILL! ARROGANT AND JUST PLAIN STUPID!
11:02. I’m going to a Russian prison. I’m going to a Russian prison. I’m going to a Russian prison.
11:05. Two jackbooted officers stormed into the room and made a beeline for me. They grabbed my arms and gathered my stuff and pulled me from the detention room. They took me out, through the halls, up a flight of stairs. This was it. I was going to be thrown into a paddy wagon and taken away.
But then they kicked open a door and we were in the departures terminal and moving fast. My heart lifted as we passed gates and gawking passengers. Then we were at the gate for the 11:15 London flight, and I was being ushered down the Jetway and onto the plane and hustled through business class and deposited in a middle seat in coach. The officers didn’t say a word. They put my bag in the overhead compartment. They didn’t give me my passport. They left.
People on the plane tried hard not to stare, but how could they not? I ignored them. I was not going to a Russian prison.
I texted Elena that I was on my way home and that I would see her soon enough. I texted her that I loved her.
We took off. As the wheels thumped into the fuselage, I experienced the biggest sense of relief I have ever felt in my life. Making and losing money by the hundreds of millions of dollars didn’t compare.
We reached cruising altitude and the meal service came around. I hadn’t eaten for more than twenty-four hours. Lunch that day was some kind of awful beef Stroganoff, but it was the best thing I had ever eaten. I took three extra rolls. I drank four bottles of water. And then I passed out.
I didn’t wake until the plane hit the runway in England. As we taxied, I made a mental catalog of all the things I was going to have to deal with. First and foremost was working my way through British customs without a passport. But that would be easy enough. England was my home and, ever since I had taken British citizenship in 1998, my adopted country. The bigger picture had to do with Russia. How was I going to get out of this mess? Who was responsible for it? Whom could I call in Russia? Whom in the West?
The plane stopped, the public address system chimed, and the seat belts all came off. When it was my turn, I walked down the aisle to the exit. I was totally preoccupied. I got closer to the exit and didn’t notice the pilot at the front watching the passengers deplane. When I reached him, he interrupted my thoughts by holding out a hand. I looked at it. In it was my British passport. I took it without saying a word.
Customs took five minutes. I got in a cab and went to my apartment in London. When I arrived, I gave Elena a long hug. I’d never felt so thankful for the embrace of another person.
I told her how much I loved her. She gave me a big, doe-eyed smile. We spoke about my predicament as we made our way, hand in hand, to our shared home office. We sat at our desks. We turned on the computers and picked up the phones and got to work.
I had to figure out how I was going to return to Russia.
2
How Do You Rebel Against a Family of Communists?
If you heard me speaking right now, you would probably ask, “How did this guy with an American accent and a British passport become the largest foreign investor in Russia only to get kicked out?”
It’s a long story, and one that indeed started in America, in an unusual American family. My grandfather, Earl Browder, was a labor union organizer from Wichita, Kansas. He was so good at his job that he was spotted by the Communists and invited to come to the Soviet Union in 1926. Not long after he got there, he did what most red-blooded American men do in Moscow: he met a good-looking Russian girl. Her name was Raisa Berkman. They fell in love and got married. They would have three boys; the first was my father, Felix, who was born in the Russian capital in July 1927.
In 1932, Earl returned to the United States, moving his family to Yonkers, New York, to head the American Communist Party. He ran for president twice on the Communist ticket, in 1936 and 1940. Even though he’d garnered only about eighty thousand votes in each race, Earl’s candidacy focused Depression-era America on the failings of mainstream capitalism and caused all the political players to revise their policies leftward. He was so effective that he even appeared on the cover of Time magazine in 1938, with the caption “Comrade Earl Browder.”
This same effectiveness also drew the ire of President Roosevelt. In 1941, after my grandfather was arrested and convicted for “passport violations,” he began serving four years in the Atlanta Federal Penitentiary in Georgia. Fortunately, due to the Second World War alliance between the United States and the Soviet Union, Earl was pardoned one year later.
After the war ended, Earl spent the next few years in the political wilderness—until Senator Joseph McCarthy started his infamous witch-hunt, trying to rid the country of every last communist. The 1950s were a paranoid time in America, and it didn’t matter if you were a good communist or a bad communist, you were still a communist. Earl was subpoenaed and interrogated for months by the House Un-American Activities Committee.
My grandfather’s political persecution and beliefs weighed heavily on the rest of the family. My grandmother was a Russian Jewish intellectual and had no desire for any of her sons to go into the dirty business of politics. For her, the highest calling was academia, specifically in science or mathematics. Felix, my father, dutifully lived up to and exceeded her expectations, attending MIT at the age of sixteen. Remarkably, he received his bachelor’s degree in only two years, enrolled in Princeton’s math program, and had his PhD by the age of twenty.
Even though my father was one of America’s brightest young mathematicians, he was still the son of Earl Browder. When President Truman instituted the peacetime draft after the Second World War, Felix asked for a deferment, but his employer, the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, refused to write a letter for him. None of his superiors wanted to be on record defending the son of a famous communist. With no deferment on file, Felix was promptly drafted and started serving in the army in 1953.
After basic training, my father was assigned to an army intelligence unit at Fort Monmouth, New Jersey, where he worked for several weeks before his commanding officer noticed his last name. The wheels turned quickly then. Late one night, Felix was yanked from his bunk, thrown into a military transport, and taken to Fort Bragg, North Carolina, where he was assigned to pump gas at a service station on the edge of the base for the next two years.
When he was discharged in 1955, he applied for the first academic job opening he found: a junior-professor position at Brandeis University. The Brandeis faculty couldn’t believe their luck at having a top Princeton mathematician applying for the job. But when they presented their recommendation, the board of trustees balked at the idea of supporting the son of the ex-leader of the American Communist Party.
At the time, Eleanor Roosevelt was chair of
the board, and even though her husband was the one responsible for imprisoning my grandfather, she said that it would be the most “un-American thing we could do to deny a great scientist his profession because of who his father was.” Felix ultimately got the job, which led to positions at Yale, Princeton, and the University of Chicago, where he eventually became chairman of the math department. He had a long and successful career, and in 1999 President Clinton awarded him the National Medal of Science, the top mathematics honor in the country.
My mother’s story was no less remarkable. Eva was born to a Jewish single mother in Vienna in 1929. By 1938 it was obvious that the Nazis were targeting Jews, and any Jew who had the opportunity got as far away from Europe as possible. Because so many people were fleeing, getting a US visa was almost impossible, and my grandmother made the heartbreaking decision to put my mother up for adoption just so she could have the chance of a better life in America.
The Applebaums, a nice Jewish family from Belmont, Massachusetts, agreed to take in Eva. At the age of nine, she traveled alone across Europe by train, got on a steamship, and sailed to America to meet her new family. When she got there, she was amazed at the sanctuary into which she’d stumbled. For the next few years my mother lived in a comfortable house with her own room, a cocker spaniel, a mowed lawn, and no genocidal war raging around her.
As Eva was adjusting to her new life, my grandmother Erna managed to escape Austria, getting as far as the United Kingdom. The separation from her daughter was unbearable, and she spent every day trying to get a US visa so she could reunite with Eva. After three years, the visa finally came. She traveled from England to Boston and showed up on the Applebaums’ doorstep in Belmont, expecting a joyful reunion. However, my grandmother was greeted by a child she barely knew, an American girl who had become so comfortable with the Applebaums that she didn’t want to leave. After a traumatizing struggle, my grandmother prevailed, and the two of them moved into a one-room tenement in Brookline, Massachusetts. My grandmother worked eighty hours a week as a seamstress to support them, but they were so poor that their main luxury was sharing a tray of roast beef and mashed potatoes once a week at a local cafeteria. Going from poverty to comfort and then back to poverty was so traumatic that, to this day, my mother collects sugar packets and sneaks rolls from restaurant breadbaskets into her handbag. In spite of her meager teenage life, my mother excelled academically and was offered a full scholarship to MIT. She met Felix there in 1948, and within a few months they were married.
I was born in 1964 into this strange, academic, left-wing family. The main topics of conversation at the dinner table were mathematical theorems and how the world was going to hell because of crooked businessmen. My older brother, Thomas, followed in my father’s footsteps and attended the University of Chicago—at the age of fifteen. He graduated (Phi Beta Kappa, of course) with a degree in physics. He went straight into a PhD program at the age of nineteen, and is now one of the world’s top particle physicists.
I, on the other hand, lived on the opposite end of the academic spectrum. When I was twelve, my parents announced that they were taking a yearlong sabbatical and gave me the option of joining them or going to boarding school. I chose the latter.
Feeling guilty, my mother allowed me to choose whichever school I wanted. Since I wasn’t interested in academics but was interested in skiing, I looked up schools that were close to ski areas and found a tiny one called the Whiteman School, located in Steamboat Springs, Colorado.
My parents were so involved in their own academic world that they hadn’t bothered to conduct any due diligence on this school. Had they done so, they would have discovered that at the time Whiteman was a less-than-selective school that attracted a number of problem students: kids who had been kicked out of other schools or had problems with the law.
In order to attend this boarding school I had to skip eighth grade, and so I arrived at the Whiteman School as a small thirteen-year-old, the youngest and smallest student there. When the other kids saw this scrawny boy dressed in a blue blazer, they immediately saw a victim. On my first night, a band of students came to my room and started rummaging through my drawers, taking whatever they wanted. When I objected, they jumped me, held me down, and chanted over and over, “Time for the titty-twisters, Billy Browder! Time for the titty-twisters!”
This scene played out night after night for the first few weeks. I was bruised and humiliated, and every night when the lights went out, I was terrified of the horrors these kids had in store for me.
My mother came for a visit at the beginning of October. Out of pride, I hadn’t told her anything about what was going on. I hated all of it, but I thought I could take it.
As soon as I got in my mother’s car to go to dinner, though, I broke down.
Alarmed, she asked what was going on.
“I hate it here!” I yelled through tears. “It’s terrible!”
I decided not to tell her about getting beat up every night or the titty-twisters, and I didn’t know whether she suspected any of it, but she said, “Billy, if you don’t want to stay here, just say so. I’ll take you back to Europe with me.”
I thought about it and didn’t give her an answer right away. As we got closer to the restaurant, I decided that while returning to the warm bosom of my mother sounded like the most appealing thing in the world at that moment, I didn’t want to walk away from Whiteman a defeated loser.
We got a table at the restaurant and ordered our food. I calmed down as we ate, and halfway through the meal I looked at her and said, “You know, I think I’ll stay. I’ll make it work.”
We spent the weekend together away from school, and she dropped me off on Sunday night. After saying good-bye, I returned to my room, and as I passed the sophomore bunk area, I could hear a pair of boys hissing, “TTs for BB, TTs for BB.”
I started walking faster, but the two boys got up and followed me. I was so full of anger and humiliation that, just before turning the corner into my room, I spun and lunged at the smaller boy. I hit him square in the nose. He fell down and I got right on top of him and kept punching him and punching him, blood spattering on his face, until his friend grabbed me by the shoulders and threw me aside. The two of them then gave me a good beating before the housemaster showed up to stop the fight.
But from that moment on, nobody ever touched me again at the Whiteman School.
I spent the whole year there and learned about all sorts of things I’d never known. I started smoking cigarettes, sneaking out at night, and bringing hard alcohol back to the dorms. I got into so much trouble that I was expelled at the end of the year. I returned to my family in Chicago, but I was not the same Billy Browder.
In my family, if you weren’t a prodigy, then you had no place on earth. I was so far off the rails that my parents didn’t know what to do with me. They sent me to a string of psychiatrists, counselors, and doctors to try to determine how I could be “fixed.” The more this went on, the more forcefully I rebelled. Rejecting school was a good start, but if I really wanted to upset my parents, then I would have to come up with something else.
Then, toward the end of high school, it hit me. I would put on a suit and tie and become a capitalist. Nothing would piss my family off more than that.
3
Chip and Winthrop
The only problem was that since I was such a poor student, every university I applied to rejected me. Only after the intervention of my high school’s guidance counselor did I get a place at the University of Colorado in Boulder on appeal. While barely getting into Boulder was humiliating, I recovered pretty quickly when I realized the school had been ranked as the number one party school in the country by Playboy magazine.
Based on countless viewings of the movie Animal House, I decided that if I was going to go to a party school, I might as well do it right and join a fraternity. I pledged the Delta Upsilon fraternity and, after the requisite hazing, was accepted as a member. Everyone had a nickname there—Spa
rky, Whiff, Doorstop, Slim—and mine, on account of my curly, black hair, was Brillo.
Being Brillo was fun, but after a few months of too much beer, chasing girls, ridiculous pranks, and watching countless hours of sports on TV, I started to think that if I kept it up, then the only kind of capitalist I was going to be was the kind who collected tips as a parking lot attendant. It all came to a head when one of my fraternity brothers, and someone I idolized, was caught robbing the United Bank of Boulder to fund an out-of-control coke habit. After he was sentenced to a long stretch in federal prison, I had something of a wake-up call. I realized that if I kept it up, then the only person who would suffer from this particular form of rebellion would be me.
From that moment forward I stopped partying, spent every night in the library, and began to get straight As. At the end of my sophomore year, I applied to top universities around the country and was accepted to the University of Chicago.
I worked even harder at Chicago, and my ambition grew. But as I approached graduation, I felt an overriding need to figure out what I was going to do with my life. How was I going to go about being a capitalist? As I mulled this over, I came across an announcement for a lecture by the dean of the graduate business school. Since my plan was to go into the business world in some capacity, I decided to attend. The speech he gave was about the career paths of Chicago MBA graduates, all of whom seemed to be doing important things and getting paid well to do them. Business school, it seemed, was the obvious next step for me.
According to the dean, the best way to get accepted at one of the top business schools was to get into one of the two-year pre-MBA programs at McKinsey or Goldman Sachs, or at one of the twenty-five other firms with similar programs. I bombarded all of them with letters and phone calls asking for a job. But of course it wasn’t as simple as that, because every other college senior with similar ambitions was doing the exact same thing. In the end, I received twenty-four rejection letters, along with a single offer from Bain & Company in Boston, one of the top management-consulting firms in the country. It wasn’t clear how I’d slipped through their filter, but somehow I had, and I grabbed their offer with both hands.
