Portfolio Profile of Robert Amsterdam

The business magazine Conde Nast Portfolio published a glowing profile of Robert Amsterdam - excerpt is below, read it here.

Being around Robert Amsterdam is like living in a spy movie: You sense that you are being watched but can’t exactly prove it. When I first contact him about the case, he responds that it’s better not to talk details on the phone. At his home and office in London, he assumes that his phones are monitored, his emails are read, and that the Federal Security Service agency, or F.S.B.—the intelligence outfit that replaced the K.G.B.—keeps tabs on him. Most people I talk to view the claims as credible, though in time I get the sense that Amsterdam enjoys the looming risk. (...)

Since he moved to Britain, Amsterdam has become the leader of a full-throated campaign to free Khodorkovsky, Russia’s most famous and richest prisoner. At home, Khodorkovsky is perceived as a ghost of mobsters past as well as a sort of martyr for a better, more Westernized future. Few doubt that he did some shady, unethical things in the 1990s, a period of bare-knuckled business replete with insider deals and bribery. But he also helped advance the oil industry. In the end, his mistake seemed to be not only that he made truckloads of money in a time and place in which most didn’t, but that he didn’t know when to keep his head down and stay quiet.