FOUR bottles of Champagne down inside a strip club, Geraint Anderson’s new boss pointed to a woman seductively bent over in front of him and boasted: “That’s my mistress.”
By now, it had occurred to the 24-year-old that this was no ordinary job interview. Rather, it was a debauched induction into the world of a London city trader, which would see him snort drugs off naked models in limousines and get robbed by prostitutes during a riotous Vegas trip.
For former stockbroker Geraint, “mountains of cocaine“, sex parties and £10,000 fully-expensed night outs were the norm.
Now, the 53-year-old speaks exclusively to The Sun as the BBC drama Industry, which chronicles the highly glamorous – and sordid – world of investment banking returns to our screens.
Considered the “kinkiest show on TV”, it stars Game of Thrones star Kit Harrington and Marisa Abela, with season four tipped to be the sauciest to date.
Geraint knows their world all too well, having savoured the spoils of the trade during one of its most debauched eras – a time later called “the age of irresponsibility” by Gordon Brown after the global financial crisis.
The analyst quit in 2008, after turning whistleblower and spilling secrets in his CityBoy column and book – but not before banking more than £2.5million over 12 years.
Geraint tells The Sun: “I was there for the peak of the madness and that manifested itself in really over-exuberant behaviour.
“Mountains of cocaine, which was the drug of choice, Champagne and – I know it sounds cliché – but it really was all about Stringfellows, Spearmint Rhino, and strip clubs.
“We all felt that the City would collapse at any moment and that mentality meant we were absolutely determined to make as much money as quickly as possible, by hook or crook.
“There’s a lot that Industry gets right, especially the element of the City that both attracts and encourages psychopathic behaviour.
“There were too many young people, too much testosterone, too much cocaine, too much greed and short-term thinking and the stakes are so high that you’re willing to sell your grandmother for your next bonus.”
The cut-throat world of investment banking was an unexpected path for Geraint, who was a left-wing hippy, raised by a Labour MP and religious daughter of Bolivian missionaries.
By his own admission, he knew nothing about finance or the City until a quick 10-minute crash course from his fund manager brother ahead of a job interview in 1996.
“Getting the job was pure nepotism,” Geraint says. “I was 24, with no real skills, a hippy, but within two years I was earning double my father’s salary. I sold my soul to the devil.”
He would go on to become one of the UK’s top stockpickers and was later dubbed the “Welsh Wolf of Wall Street”.
Nothing about his career was ordinary – starting with the job interview, which saw him get “completely hammered” with his future bosses before hitting a strip club.
“One of them, who was 50 or 60, quite rotund and looked like Henry VIII, pointed to a stripper parting her butt cheeks nearby,” Geraint recalls.
“‘She’s my mistress,’ he said and summoned her over to put a big gold chain around her neck. It was clear the relationship wasn’t about love.”
‘Criminal tactics’
Geraint’s success wasn’t always from sharp-minded analysis of the market but extracurricular activities – mainly debauched partying, which he considered “playing to my strengths”.
He admits being “rather Machiavellian” with his tactics, often lavishing clients with booze and drugs to win them over, splashing thousands in the process.
“I used cocaine as a means of attracting clients,” Geraint says. “I’d take them to a Rolling Stones at Wembley Stadium or a Manchester United Champions League match and plied them with it.
“It entered us into a Faustian pact. We were both doing something illegal that could lose us our jobs. We bonded through that and always knew we had something on each other.
One lad, who was getting pleasured in a corner outside, fell asleep
“A client is always going to give a fun ‘friend’ more business than someone with lucid analysis. I suffered imposter syndrome throughout my whole career.”
Back then, Geraint rarely got change back from £2,000 lunches with clients as they enjoyed London’s finest food and quaffed through four bottles of Champagne at a time.
In the evenings, he’d entertain in an area dubbed London’s “pubic triangle” – which he recalls as consisting of the three strip clubs: Browns, Metropolis and Ye Olde Axe.
Geraint says: “A big night for me would be £5,000 or £10,000 but I heard stories of serious money thrown around, one trip to Monaco would have cost £200,000.
He claims not to have been “in that league” of traders who thought nothing of splashing £30,000 on a bottle of 19th century wine at Gordon Ramsay’s Michelin restaurant Petrus.
He adds: “It was the pinnacle of excess through the amount of money that was being spent, the unadulterated luxury and sheer absurdity of it all.
“The biggest trip I heard about was for high-commission-generating hedgefunders, who were flown out on a private jet to watch the Monaco Grand Prix.
“There were six or seven of them with half an ounce of Bolivia’s finest and one or two prostitutes each. They watched the race in luxury seating and were put up in a high-end hotel overnight.
“That’s at least £200,000 spent and if that doesn’t secure business, nothing will. There were other tales of whole hotel floors being booked out and filled with prostitutes, cocaine, all of that.”
‘Chimpanzee-like behaviour’
The excess led to X-rated nights with Geraint regularly bedding glamorous women eager for a taste of high-life luxury. He also attended sex parties, some he says turned into orgies.
That debauchery also spilled over into summer parties, which he says “secretaries considered to be a great opportunity to get with a rich broker or investment banker”.
But it didn’t always go to plan. Geraint recalls: “One lad, who was getting pleasured in a corner outside, fell asleep.
“The disgusted lady left him there with his pants and trousers down by his ankles for him to be woken up by security guards hours later.
“It used to be a very misogynistic, drug-fuelled, sexually-charged, chimpanzee-like industry back then – I hear it has changed a lot now.”
Excessive cocaine use only exacerbated their wild behaviour and turned them into “psychopathic, egotistical, self-aggrandising monsters”.
Geraint recalls: “Once I’d been up all night helping Bolivia’s economy in the best way I could and had forgotten I had to be in the office the next day.
“I had to address 200 people on the trading floor, which was broadcast live to Paris, Frankfurt and Milan, and suddenly, everyone started talking.
“I stopped and then noticed a stream of blood exit my left nostril and pour down on to my crisp white shirt. It was crazy and a different era.”
He recalls a chaotic Las Vegas trip with hedge fund managers that saw them snort through mountains of cocaine, rack up a £11,000 bar bill with a £3,600 waitress tip and get robbed by sex workers while staying at five-star hotel Caesar’s Palace.
There’s a code of silence, an omerta, it’s like the mafia. I reckon they regret letting me into their circle now
There was also a £25,000 private jet flight to Ibiza, where bankers were greeted at the airport by a limousine filled with naked women and cocaine served from a silver-domed platter.
Another example of their garish opulence was “Champagne off” competitions, where rival tables of bankers would order increasingly larger bottles of bubbly to show off.
It started with a ‘modest’ three-litre bottle called a Jeroboam, which cost £800 a pop, and escalated to the point that a 15-litre Nebuchadnezzar, costing £6,000, was wheeled out on a trolley.
Then there was illegal activity, with Geraint claiming insider trading “was rife” and false rumours were often spread to the press to manipulate stock prices – and help them make a quick profit from tanking shares.
On the trading floor, which he dubbed “a psychopaths’ playground”, colleagues were enemies and acted “ruthlessly and manipulatively” while battling for higher bonuses.
Wake-up call
Geraint quit in 2008, roughly a year after a near-fatal motorcycle accident that served as a wake-up call and made him think: “What are you doing with your life?”
“I was making a lot of money but it was destroying my soul,” he says. “I could see what I was becoming. I was self-interested, inconsiderate, lacked empathy and ruthless.
“When your nearest and dearest tell you you’re turning into an a**ehole and are behaving like a pr*ck, it makes you take a long, hard look at yourself in the mirror.”
Geraint broke the industry’s omertà with his 2008 memoir CityBoy: Beer And Loathing In the Square Mile, after years writing an anonymous column under the same name in a free London newspaper.
In July, he’s releasing a parody corporate self-help book titled How To Con Friends And Manipulate People: The Subtle Art Of Being A Total Psychopath.
Geraint, who now lives in Wales’ Black Mountains, says his work is “more fulfilling and less guilt-inducing” – even if his salary has taken “a complete nosedive”.
He has no regrets about exposing the banking industry – but acknowledges he is a hypocrite for having taken 12 bonuses before doing so.
Having essentially declared “the city is full of w***ers”, Geraint says it was fair that he got “roughed up and pushed around a bit” and has received hateful emails and online abuse.
Many in the industry despise him for having bitten the hand that fed him, to which he says: “They can f*** off, it deserved to be bitten.”
Geraint adds: “There’s a code of silence, an omerta, it’s like the mafia. I reckon they regret letting me into their circle now.
“Exposing the City’s secrets was the perfect way to burn bridges forever. No matter how poor or desperate I am, those mafia dons in the square mile will never take me back.”
Geraint Anderson’s new book How To Con Friends And Manipulate People: The Subtle Art Of Being A Total Psychopath, released on July 2, is available for pre-order. Industry returned Monday night on BBC One.
