The path from losing €1.2 billion in share options to commercial manager of Galway United? Keith Duggan talks to Nick Leeson
In the decade since Nick Leeson briefly became the most notorious person on the planet, the public obsession with him has peaked and waned. Lucrative invitations to appear as the star turn at corporate white-tie evenings or at science convention dinners or old boy reunions have kept him solvent and he always understood there was the element of the carnival attraction about his presence at such gatherings.
It was just human nature, the desire for entertainment and intrigue and gossip and the thrill of hearing a modern fable of an absurdly magnificent fall from grace first hand. He told his story in a straight, Jackanory manner and sometimes played it for laughs. A friend of his used to introduce him as "the only guy who could write a cheque and the bank would bounce."
The unabashed curiosity and discussing his infamy in a forensic, detached manner came with the territory. It is only in recent years, having moved to Ireland with his wife Leona that he has discovered something that rattles him.
"People do treat you differently in Ireland. I think they are more respectful, but then maybe the banking scandal didn't have quite the same impact here. But I think a lot of people - not here but in England and elsewhere - got the impression that by living in Ireland, I was somehow running away. As if I was living like a hermit somewhere out in the west.
"Stories written by people who have never been here. So whatever about misrepresenting me, it was as if Galway and the west of Ireland was also being misrepresented. And that has begun to really offend me."
Leeson's appointment this week as the commercial manager of Galway United makes for the most improbable curriculum vitae leap imaginable. It has stoked an intense revival of the media fascination with Leeson and it is safe to suggest the grassroots professional Terryland club have shipped more interview requests than Real Madrid this week. Most of the major city newspapers from New York to Singapore have already called and four separate television documentary requests have come in.
Galway United represents Leeson's reinstatement to the regulated office stratosphere and to structured working life and his role as the financial whiz of a modest, count-the-pennies Irish soccer club seems typical of the flabbergasting and unpredictable turns that have characterised his working life.
His story has been told in print and on celluloid, but the breathtaking scale of Leeson's misjudgement has not been diminished by time. At age 28, the Watford go-boy borrowed and blew 1.2 billion in share options and caused the collapse of the 233-year-old Barings bank, one of the last vestiges of Empire to hold sway across the Orient. His move from the bright and half-illusory world of international trading to raising money for new goalposts is a fascination in its own right.
"I suppose I'll just have to watch my zeros," he says with a glint in his eye when we meet at his favourite coffee shop in Salthill. "A brand new match ball costs about a hundred euros, flat. Just have to be careful of the zeros."
Like Leeson himself, Galway United are in a transitional phase and although he applied for the position after seeing the post advertised in a local newspaper, he does say that United "sold themselves to me as much as I sold myself to them".
He will be eternally grateful for their gesture of faith, but does not see his taking employment with a soccer club as unlikely as has been perceived. He is, after all, a product of 1970s London suburbia. Soccer was how he defined himself. Understanding Nick Leeson is not about getting to grips with the financial entanglements that brought an antiquated institution crashing down. It is about imagining a typical youngster kicking football " all day, everyday" in Watford and pretending to be Franny Lee of Manchester City.
His father Harry was a plasterer from Nottingham, his mother Ann a nurse from Aberdeen and work took them to the burgeoning terraces of Watford, to the England of Thatcher and Twenty Thousand Streets Under The Sky. Lesson talks of his upbringing as being completely normal, an urban working-class environment where soccer was the vernacular.
"My dad would have taken us to games and he would have supported my brother Richard and me. We played with Parmiter's school and club. Richard was a more skilful player than me, he joined Watford youths for a while, but we were both very keen. Even then, professional soccer was an incredibly tough environment to break into.
"Paul Merson was playing in the leagues around Watford then and he was the only one I can think of who really went on to make it. But soccer was all we did and, in my teens, I began going up to Manchester to see City play and to some of the grounds in London. And you would be scared going into them, half the time. You were just waiting for something to happen."
After school, Leeson went to work in the city. He dossed maths class so much that he blew his A level in that subject, but he had a strong aptitude for numbers and the long working hours at a succession of companies like Morgan-Stanley meant soccer became a weekend pastime. Leeson caught the tail end of the 1980s boom, when the grab-all ethos of the city's pin-striped hucksters was captured in the Pet Shop Boy's anthem, Opportunities.
"I was very hard-working and diligent and very accurate. Very often we would work through the night, go to the gym in the morning, shower and hit the office again. And I was very well paid even in London, but for me it was more about the success. All my mates were labourers or mechanics back home and come Friday night, I was always back in Watford, hitting the clubs and being reckless. Young, I suppose."
Leeson has been out of the city for so long now that he has become a shadow-figure, the Keyser Soze to the generation of bright young things that occupy the same office space as he once did. He laughs at the notion of some day showing up at his old haunts. "Probably be shot on the spot."
But his point is he never truly occupied them to begin with. He always drifted back to the comfortable territory and voices of Watford. Even when his career really soared and Barings took him out to Singapore as their leading options man, he spent his leisure hours trying to recreate the sensations of his youth. Football was the most obvious catalyst. When he first lived there, natural fitness enabled him to give Singapore's top league a go for a couple of seasons. But as the heat began to intensify at Barings and he began to acquire weight, he contented himself with the murky depths of the social leagues.
"I played on this team with Essex traders and the like and the standards were just rough. I think some guys were inebriated to begin with. We were known as 'the Pinkies' because of the colour our skin would turn in the sun. But because of my working-class background my philosophy was to work hard during the week and then burn it off at the weekend. And culturally, Singapore was very different."
After a soccer game one weekend, he was drinking and mooned a girl he knew in a club. It was juvenile, silly behaviour. He was 26. He was arrested and was told he faced a year in jail. Only his position saved him: he could fork out the $40,000 in legal fees to get the charge filed down to a misdemeanour. On Monday morning, he was back at the desk, the weekend life of the soccer scamp far behind.
What happened at Barings meant, of course, that his visit to Singapore's prisons was just postponed. If there was something Walter Mitty-esque about the first part of Leeson's downfall, his period of atonement is genuinely dark. Three and a half years in a maximum-security prison were punctuated by the dissipation of his first marriage and the diagnosis of cancer.
"There was a time of about six months when I had no contact with my ex-wife and therefore I had nothing to cling on to, no starting point or no absolute. Getting cancer, and worrying I was suddenly going to die was at least that. Close your eyes and it was still there so it was a position from which I could move."
So he moved, inched by inch. He learned the system, becoming the white, polite oddity in a hardcore Asian prison dominated by Triad gangs. His infamy gave him a ready-made status and many inmates wanted to believe he had a hoard of cash hidden away.
"It gave me a kind of aura in there that was useful and I suppose I didn't exactly deny their claim. It helped propagate a myth that just helped you get by."
The place was severe. The prison punishment for misdemeanours was being tied to a tress and flogged with one hundred bamboo shoots. Ever the class clown, Leeson came within an inch of experiencing it - but not, he clarifies, for mooning. "Nah. Nah mate. Not the kind of people you want to moon."
Each Sunday, they got to play soccer by weighing a rattan ball down with newspaper and using the metal posts on the basketball court as goals. He tried to keep in touch with City and the phenomenal success of the Premiership. When he was released, broke and uncertain and wiser, attending soccer games was a therapy of sorts. It was normal, the smells and sounds of a previous life.
He met Leona in a nightclub in Watford when she was over visiting her sister and was pleasantly surprised that she didn't really have the faintest idea who he was. Shortly after they started going out, they went up to Manchester to see City play and to visit the ex-Maine Road professional Gary Owen, a friend of Leeson's.
It was pre-season and when they visited a Chinese restaurant in Manchester, Alex Ferguson happened to be eating there and came over to say hello. The Scot knew Owen from his playing days and knew Leeson by reputation. And having bought men like Juan Sebastian Veron, he could empathise with the perils of bad international trading.
"He was very friendly, just asked me what I was doing and stuff. But the funny thing was that because it was pre-season, he was tanned and relaxed and actually looked quite different. Leona wasn't sure it was him until he left and then she was looking to phone her Dad in Meath to tell him she just met Alex Ferguson."
After "much chasing" Nick moved to Galway and married Leona. His stepchildren, Kirsty and Alex, are settled there and the couple have a seven-month-old baby, McKensey.
Barna is the first place Leeson can call home since Watford. He still attends games at Maine Road regularly and enjoys the dog nights in Galway and summer championship games at Pearse Stadium. Hurling blows his mind, but he allows he does not understand it.
Offers to speak at expensive dinner engagements still flood in from all over the world - he heads off to Taiwan shortly to fulfil his next booking. But Galway United gives him stability and the good wishes have come in from guys he knew back in the Barings days before the game turned bad.
He talks about that time as "an outer-body experience" and sometimes struggles to reconcile his 38-year-old self with that old London kid who nearly shook the world of its axis one day in 1995. And as he sits within view of the sunny Salthill promenade picking at a piece of chocolate cake, friendly and engaging and optimistic, it is easy to understand how far away he must sometimes feel himself to be from his alter ego as the rogue trader extraordinaire.
Still, everything is relative. Living in Barna, he sometimes drinks pints with Hector Ó hEochagáin and marvels at how the flame-haired Meath man has become such public property. Leeson can walk around his adopted home place in peace and that means everything.
Potential sponsors in the city and beyond will be getting phone calls from one of the most loaded names in the history of international finance over the coming weeks and months.
Leeson does not ever expect to fully escape the consequences of those lost months in Singapore. Although he accepts what happened was preposterous and wrong, he never felt as if he had behaved in a malevolent way and it is not difficult to believe him.
"There was never any criminal intent there," he says seriously. "I was never set out to hurt anyone and never fully understood how dramatic the consequences of my behaviour. I didn't ever know Barings was only worth £250 million yet when I requested £500 million from them, they gave it to me, no questions. What I did was downright stupid and I was prepared to take responsibility for my actions. I think I did do that."
And he has paid a fair old price. Nobody is begrudging him this shot at redemption. So begins his second act.
Terryland is not Maine Road, but it is about football. Football and money, same as it ever was. The boy Leeson is back in the game and, as the pundits are fond of saying, he's a bit special.
