1389: Jamison Firestone | A Wild Ride Through Putin's Corrupt Russia
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How did Russia's justice system turn Sergei Magnitsky into a target?
This episode is brought to you by Zero. That's Zero with an X. Running a small business and managing your finances shouldn't make your day more complicated. Learn more at Zero.com. Welcome to the show. I'm Jordan Harbinger. On the Jordan Harbinger Show, we decode the stories, secrets, and skills of the world's most fascinating people. Our mission is to help you become a better informed, more critical thinker. Through long form conversations with a variety of amazing folks, from spies to CEOs, athletes, authors, thinkers, and performers, even the occasional rocket scientist, hacker, cold case homicide investigator, or tech luminary. If you're new to the show or you want to tell your friends about the show, I suggest our episode.
Starter packs. These are collections of some of our favorite episodes on topics like persuasion and negotiation, psychology and geopolitics, disinformation, China, North Korea, crime and cults, and more. That'll help new listeners get a taste of everything we do here on the show. Just visit JordanHarbinger.com/slash start or search for us in your Spotify app to get started. Today on the show, Russian corruption stops being an abstraction and becomes a price list. Jameson Firestone ran a Law firm in post-Soviet Moscow, where you could apparently buy the full legal package. Investigation, arrest, prison, and conviction for one convenient fee. When fellow attorney Sergei Magnitsky exposed a $230 million tax fraud against the Russian government, Firestone's lawyers were hunted, one fled Russia by overnight train, and justice showed up dressed like organized crime because it was.
Also, his childhood involved crack, contract killers. Manhattan's most expensive brothel and a prostitute arriving at a boarding school in a limo, somehow Russia was not Jameson's weirdest chapter. Here we go with Jameson Firestone. Jameson, thanks for joining me. There's a lot of stories in this book that I want to crack open because Russia is crazy and I think people know Russia's crazy, but nineties Russia and early aughts Russia is extra crazy.
Yeah, it was really something else and something I wasn't quite expecting either.
Yeah, I can imagine. It's Thanksgiving Day, two thousand and eight. I'm probably eating something that I microwaved and you're sitting in hotel. Sergei Magnitsky, who we'll get into later I've talked about on the show, he's locked in a Moscow jail. Several members of your legal team are running for their lives, even though they're lawyers and haven't done anything wrong. And the American Embassy is telling you to essentially get out of there as fast as as you can, I would imagine. So take me and Inside the seventy two hours in which you realize the Russian justice system is not failing, it's actually just being weaponized, and now you're the target.
Yeah, essentially my partner in my law firm, Sergei Magnitsky, an employee of mine, had discovered this massive fraud against the Russian government and he had turned in the people who had done it. And normally, if you reported a crime and you said these people stole a quarter of a billion dollars from the IRS, right? You'd be a famous whistleblower. I'd get a
Presidential Medal of Freedom or something like that. Maybe not quite that heavy duty.
The whole apparatus of government would first of all be looking at the accused here, and then you would become a hero if what you said was true. But what happened in Russia was the opposite. Sergei blew the whistle on a scam like this, and then all of a sudden we found that he was arrested. And me being a lawyer, I thought, okay, this is obviously garbage, and we'll be able to overturn this. And so I Did not get on a plane and run away. I stayed. And then the next morning, the police started sending these search and arrest teams to the homes of three other of my lawyers. And I realized, oh my God, right? Two of them weren't in the homes that the police went to. And one of my lawyers was actually home when the police came.
And she called me. She said, the police are at my front door.
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
How did Russia's justice system turn Sergei Magnitsky into a target?
0:00–11:08
2
How could officials buy an arrest, prosecution, and conviction in Russia?
11:08–20:48
3
How did Jamison Firestone's childhood prepare him to negotiate with Russian mobsters?
20:48–30:48
4
How did Russia's 1990s mafia become absorbed into business and government?
30:48–44:19
5
How did Russia's political crises and privatization pave the way for Putin?
44:19–1:07:01
6
How did officials use Russia's legal system to steal businesses and silence Magnitsky?
1:07:01–1:18:16
7
How did Sergei Magnitsky's death lead to targeted sanctions against Russian officials?
1:18:16–1:27:19
8
What can Russia's history teach Americans about protecting democratic institutions?
1:27:19–1:33:50
Speakers
1 identifiedMore from The Jordan Harbinger Show
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