Red Notice: A True Story of High Finance, Murder, and One Man's Fight for Justice Read Online Free

guilty, my mother allowed me to choose whichever school I wanted. Since I wasn’t interested in academics but was interested in skiing, I looked up schools that were close to ski areas and found a tiny one called the Whiteman School, located in Steamboat Springs, Colorado.
    My parents were so involved in their own academic world thatthey hadn’t bothered to conduct any due diligence on this school. Had they done so, they would have discovered that at the time Whiteman was a less-than-selective school that attracted a number of problem students: kids who had been kicked out of other schools or had problems with the law.
    In order to attend this boarding school I had to skip eighth grade, and so I arrived at the Whiteman School as a small thirteen-year-old, the youngest and smallest student there. When the other kids saw this scrawny boy dressed in a blue blazer, they immediately saw a victim. On my first night, a band of students came to my room and started rummaging through my drawers, taking whatever they wanted. When I objected, they jumped me, held me down, and chanted over and over, “Time for the titty-twisters, Billy Browder! Time for the titty-twisters!”
    This scene played out night after night for the first few weeks. I was bruised and humiliated, and every night when the lights went out, I was terrified of the horrors these kids had in store for me.
    My mother came for a visit at the beginning of October. Out of pride, I hadn’t told her anything about what was going on. I hated all of it, but I thought I could take it.
    As soon as I got in my mother’s car to go to dinner, though, I broke down.
    Alarmed, she asked what was going on.
    “I hate it here!” I yelled through tears. “It’s terrible!”
    I decided not to tell her about getting beat up every night or the titty-twisters, and I didn’t know whether she suspected any of it, but she said, “Billy, if you don’t want to stay here, just say so. I’ll take you back to Europe with me.”
    I thought about it and didn’t give her an answer right away. As we got closer to the restaurant, I decided that while returning to the warm bosom of my mother sounded like the most appealing thing in the world at that moment, I didn’t want to walk away from Whiteman a defeated loser.
    We got a table at the restaurant and ordered our food. I calmeddown as we ate, and halfway through the meal I looked at her and said, “You know, I think I’ll stay. I’ll make it work.”
    We spent the weekend together away from school, and she dropped me off on Sunday night. After saying good-bye, I returned to my room, and as I passed the sophomore bunk area, I could hear a pair of boys hissing, “TTs for BB, TTs for BB.”
    I started walking faster, but the two boys got up and followed me. I was so full of anger and humiliation that, just before turning the corner into my room, I spun and lunged at the smaller boy. I hit him square in the nose. He fell down and I got right on top of him and kept punching him and punching him, blood spattering on his face, until his friend grabbed me by the shoulders and threw me aside. The two of them then gave me a good beating before the housemaster showed up to stop the fight.
    But from that moment on, nobody ever touched me again at the Whiteman School.
    I spent the whole year there and learned about all sorts of things I’d never known. I started smoking cigarettes, sneaking out at night, and bringing hard alcohol back to the dorms. I got into so much trouble that I was expelled at the end of the year. I returned to my family in Chicago, but I was not the same Billy Browder.
    In my family, if you weren’t a prodigy, then you had no place on earth. I was so far off the rails that my parents didn’t know what to do with me. They sent me to a string of psychiatrists, counselors, and doctors to try to determine how I could be “fixed.” The more this went on, the more forcefully I rebelled. Rejecting school was a good start, but if I