‘A riveting tale of betrayal and lawlessness by the Russian Government, told by the most successful US investor in Russia’ – Ambassador John Sullivan, US Ambassador to Russia 2020–22 It is dawn on Thursday, 14 February 2019, and armed FSB agents are raiding Michael Calvey’s Moscow apartment. He is being arrested for a crime that never happened. Twenty-eight years earlier, Calvey – a newly graduated, aspiring Wall Street hotshot – made a short trip from America to the recently collapsed USSR to look at potential investments. Sensing huge opportunity, he soon based himself in Moscow, where he lived through the ‘Wild East’ years and went on to build several billion-dollar funds – earning enormous returns for Western investors as Russia opened up to international business. He gained a reputation that would lead to Bloomberg describing him as ‘a legend in the Russian market, with a reputed aversion to any kind of foul play’. But now, he finds himself thrown into Moscow’s notorious
