Amsterdam is a squarely built 52-year-old with dark curly hair. The first day we meet, he’s wearing a blue pinstriped suit with a slightly open white shirt, silver cuff links, and a bright red tie hanging loose around his neck, which seems to be his fashion—dapper but slightly disheveled, like he’s just sprinted the length of a football field. As he goes through the case and the team’s strategies, he speaks 100 miles a minute, frequently employing the word fucking to convey how deeply disturbing the situation is. In conversation, he is didactic, prefacing many statements with “Look...” and often citing one of the half-dozen or more political science and history books he’s currently reading. He is evidently not a self-doubter, which helps in dealing with a country that recently passed legislation sanctioning the assassination of state enemies. Amsterdam seems to behave as if he has a death wish. “Sometimes I wake up and have to check myself,” he says. “Is this a bad dream?”

He was born in White Plains, New York, to Jewish immigrants; his father died when he was six months old. His mother later married a man who sold women’s hats, and the family lived in the Bronx.
Amsterdam grew up with an instinctive sense of outrage and a preternatural political awareness. During the Vietnam War, he took long weekend drives with his stepfather, and they talked about how many soldiers were really dying in the war, compared with what the government reported.

When his stepfather got a new job, in Ottawa, the family moved there— “one cold hell for a New York Jew,” as Amsterdam describes it. He worked at his school newspaper, where he wrote a story in favor of activist Abbie Hoffman; the piece got him suspended. He dropped out but ended up at Carleton University, in Ottawa, where he studied Marx. He then went to Queen’s University Law School.

When Amsterdam wasn’t studying, he traveled. He was drawn to places in transition: He went to Eastern Europe, the Caribbean, and the Soviet Union. In 1975, after being caught in a coup in Ghana, he fled to Lagos, Nigeria, where he stumbled upon a pile of dead bodies on a beach. Before his law school graduation, classmates presented him with a joke postcard: “Wish you were here.”

In 1980, he and a friend, Dean Peroff, set up a legal practice specializing in business disputes in emerging markets. It was risky work, populated by dubious characters. In Nigeria, where Amsterdam represented a Canadian telecom company, 30 government-backed men with AK-47 assault rifles tried to break up a shareholders meeting at which Amsterdam was making a presentation. “I’ve lost track of the number of times my life has been threatened,” he says.

Amsterdam uses the media as much as the courtroom to expose his opponents, stirring up public outrage over the most salacious—and sometimes dangerous—facts of the case, which in turn pressures his targets to rethink or settle. The work requires him to spend weeks abroad.

Amsterdam first heard from Khodor­kovsky in 2003, not long after the Kremlin began its march on him. The two met at the Washington office of a mutual friend. “He wasn’t what I expected,” Amsterdam says. “He spoke in a whisper and looked more like a nuclear scientist than a business guru.”

Khodorkovsky explained that he needed a lawyer. He knew Amsterdam’s history of trying politically tinged cases and asked him what he thought. Amsterdam pitched hard; he felt as if he’d been preparing for this his entire life. “This is going to get extra ugly,” he told Khodorkovsky, looking him right in the eye. “But I have an advantage over other lawyers. I’ll take your fate personally and be there no matter how bad it gets. The people who you think are your best friends now will quit on you. I won’t quit.”

Days later, Amsterdam was in Moscow.

Khodorkovsky was born in 1963. His parents were factory workers, and the family lived in a two-room apartment in Moscow. After high school, he attended the Mendeleev Institute of Chemical Technology, where he rose to a senior post in the Communist Youth League and began to see party connections as useful. In the late 1980s, just as perestroika’s market reforms took off, he established a collective that sold desktop computers and currency. He then opened Bank Menatep, one of the country’s first private banks. Before he turned 30, he was a millionaire.