Episode
Rule Of Lies From Jamison Firestone Corruption Murder And Putins Russia
- Podcast
- Arroe Collins Like It's Live
- Published
- Jun 26, 2026
- Duration seconds
- 1251
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Summary
RULE OF LIES: My Wild Ride Through Chaos, Corruption, and Murder in Putin's Russia by Jamison Firestone (Harper; June 23, 2026) is a true story that reads like a spy thriller-darkly comic, violent, and unnervingly real. Rather than explaining Russia's destruction of rule of law and democracy through politicians or oligarchs, the book tells it from the inside out: how an American lawyer walked straight into chaos and managed to live long enough to expose it.Raised by a multimillionaire conman and crack addict who hung out with mobsters and owned Manhattan's most expensive brothel, Firestone learned early on how to deal with criminals. At twenty-four, fresh out of law school and desperate to escape that world, he struck out for the Wild East, the disintegrating Soviet Union. In 1991, as Russia slid into lawlessness, he founded the country's first independent foreign-owned law firm-an act his law school equated with insanity.What followed was out of the frying pan and into the fire. For nearly two decades, Firestone lived in the maelstrom of post-Soviet Russia, defending himself and his clients against mafia attacks, corrupt police, and armed commandos who raided his office. He was threatened, surveilled, extorted-and at one point forced to raid his own offices with a SWAT team and bug the offices of the Russian police just to stay alive. In a system where the law was a weapon, survival meant learning how to fight back.Firestone soon found himself at the center of Russia's most explosive scandals. He employed Sergei Magnitsky, whose exposure of the largest tax theft in Russian history led to his imprisonment, torture, and murder. Refusing silence, Firestone joined Bill Browder and teamed up with Alexei Navalny to expose Magnitsky's killers and take their blood money.Along…