Around Town
New Canaan Connection Brings ‘Red Notice’ Author Bill Browder To Library Talk
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Town resident Ellen Crovatto, prior to joining New Canaan Library as its development director, spent a career in investment banking. She worked 12 years on Wall Street and the last part of her career was spent raising private equity capital for investing in the former Soviet Union. “My role was to invest and raise half a billion dollars for the very first early stage investment in Russia in vouchers,” Crovatto recalled on a recent morning. And in that role, she crossed paths—at conferences, for example—with Bill Browder, the founder and CEO of Hermitage Capital Management who would go on to publish the nonfiction bestseller “Red Notice,” subtitled “A true story of high finance, murder, and one man’s fight for justice.”
An absorbing book that is, as the back cover says, part “financial caper,” as well as “crime thriller” and “political crusade,” “Red Notice” tells the story of Browder’s intrepid and freewheeling professional entry into post-Soviet Russia, launch of Hermitage and subsequent clashes with corrupt Russian government officials and oligarchs, punctuated by the death of his own attorney, Sergei Magnitsky (whom Browder calls “the bravest man I have ever known” in a photo caption). Next month, thanks to Crovatto’s connection to him, Browder will come to New Canaan for a special library-organized event.
