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How did Russia's mafia become its government? Jamison Firestone, a Moscow lawyer who dealt with both, explains how Putin turned the courts into a racket.
Full show notes and resources can be found here: jordanharbinger.com/1389
What We Discuss with Jamison Firestone:
- How Russia's justice system became a pay-to-play storefront where a rival could buy the whole package — investigation, arrest, jail, and conviction — with one respected opposition paper later pricing Sergei Magnitsky's arrest at $6 million.
- Why Putin's 2004 takedown of oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky was the turning point. Once investigators, prosecutors, and judges learned to railroad someone for the state, they realized they could sell the same service to anyone.
- What growing up around his father's crack habit, contract killers, and Manhattan's priciest brothel taught Jamison about handling mobsters, and how respect, humor, and non-yes-or-no answers helped him fire a Russian protection racket.
- How Magnitsky exposed a $230 million tax fraud, died in custody after being denied medical care, and was then blamed for the very crime he reported, and how the fight for accountability produced the Magnitsky Act's targeted sanctions.
- What Jamison learned from backing Yeltsin's 1993 assault on his own Congress — a crisis that cost him his best friend — and why guarding democratic institutions over any policy of the moment protects all of us, whichever side we're on.
- And much more...
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