Browder is the author and central figure of Red Notice. Raised in a brilliant family of mathematicians, Browder studies business and in the 1990s becomes an early investor in newly-freed Eastern European economies. He specializes in Russian companies, only to find endemic corruption there that threatens his firm, Hermitage Capital. His efforts to blow the whistle on corruption lead to his expulsion from Russia, the dismantling of the Hermitage Russian fund, and the arrest and murder of his Moscow tax attorney, Sergei Magnitsky. Browder steps away from his financial career and takes up the banner of human rights activism, successfully lobbying for an American law, the Magnitsky Act, that sanctions the Russian malefactors and inspires similar laws in other countries.

Magnitsky is the Hermitage tax attorney at Firestone Duncan in Moscow. He is in his 30s, married, has one son, and is somewhat idealistic about the changing political situation in Russia. When threats are made against him, he refuses to escape on the grounds that he’s “done nothing wrong” (254). He is imprisoned and systematically mistreated until he becomes ill; the perpetrators expect him to cave in and sign a confession that implicates Browder.