‘I had a feral youth during the Troubles, went on to earn $1m a year in City, and gave it all up’
From orphan and boxing champ to financial whiz and chronic gambler, Tyrone man Chris Mcgale also survived a near-fatal car crash. He’s now written his memoir.
WHEN Chris Mcgale personally pitched his new memoir, The Million Dollar Irishman, to Christopher Little, JK Rowling’s literary agent, Little cut him short by saying: “Oh, no, not another Irish sob story.”
He must not have heard the whole tale because, in fact, McGale, in his own retelling, is more Michael Douglas in Wall Street than Frank Mccourt in Angela’s Ashes, and the melancholic mood music that Little feared is soon drowned out by a deafening cacophony of champagne glasses clinking and cha-ching sounds.
The former Merrill Lynch head honcho frequently says things like “I dominated people with an attitude” or “I was the star player on the team” or “I was betting more in a week than the price of a house in Omagh”. The book is replete with his wagers and winnings, the big business deals he cut and his millions in earnings. His catchphrase was, “I’m Chris Mcgale, who the f*** are you?”
Such braggadocio might be a little hard to take, in fact, were it not for the very genuine sadness that foreshadows it. Mcgale came from a very difficult background. He grew up during the 1960s and 1970s in Troubles-era Tyrone, the fifth of seven siblings. He never really knew his father John, who died of cancer when he was just three years old. Nine years later his mother Kate became ill, also with cancer.
“There was a long period of her dying and dying very cruelly,” he recalls. “She had hung on for such a long time. She was expected to live for six months but lived for two years. She was just skin and bone.”
He and his six siblings became orphans.
“There were no parents, there was no social services, no church, no school, all the institutions you would expect to have around, weren’t there,” maintains Mcgale. “After my mother died nobody stepped in to help. Instead of there being some kind of life-raft, everything got worse.”
He and his older brother Paul largely fended for themselves. The family owned a grocery shop and pub, Kate’s on John Street in Omagh, but the two boys prepared all their own meals. A few months after their mother’s death Paul was expelled from school.
“I left too and there was no conversation about that, nobody said ‘stay in school’,” Chris says.
“Many times I wondered if we would have been better off in a home.”
By 16 Paul had become an alcoholic and entered his first treatment centre at 18. He was violent toward Chris.
“I wanted him to be my hero,” he writes in the book. “But I ended up hating him.”
His physical tussles with Paul spurred a successful junior boxing career and for a time he was Tyrone County Champion.
“I learned at a very early age the need to win,” he says. “I’m only a little guy — 5ft 6ins — and I’m sure my lack of size had a big bearing on my mentality.”
Mcgale lived what he calls a “feral” youth, betting on horses and pool and honing his street skills.
“I hadn’t got a whole lot of money so I couldn’t afford to lose,” he explains. “I’d be studying racing books while others were reading their schoolbooks. Someone once said of me ‘that guy was running from the British Army when we were running for buses’”.
In Omagh Mcgale encountered soldiers on manoeuvres and heard English accents for the first time.
“Rugby and soccer were regarded as foreign games. We didn’t play either and even today I’ve never seen a game of club rugby played, even though I’ve been to many internationals and bet large sums on them.”
He got tuberculosis at 16 and it took a year out of his life but, at 18, he would eventually return to education at Omagh Tech, going on to graduate from Queen’s University Belfast in economics with accountancy.
“Things had gone back to normality, in terms of the level of violence,” he recalls of Belfast then.
“We’d go down to the pub past rioters. For me it all seemed too easy, I’d gotten into college and it seemed great. I turned up for two lectures a week and I worked in the business back home and there wasn’t too much focus [on his studies].”
Still, he did well enough to be recruited, first by Deloitte and then by Ulster Investment Bank (UIB) in Dublin, where he was to work as an investment analyst, advising fund managers on buying and selling shares.
He describes leaving Northern Ireland to go south as “a bit like being in an abusive relationship and then getting out of it”. His background marked him out at the bank and, he says: “Lots of the people I was working with had been through the best schools in Ireland.”
Nonetheless, he stood out and became head of research and then UK equity portfolio manager, managing a £100m fund. The upward trajectory of his life was interrupted in 1988 when, on the road between Belfast and Dublin, he was involved in a near fatal head-on collision with a lorry.
He was lucky — a trainee nurse, Karen Cosgrove, whose home overlooked the scene of the crash, climbed into his smouldering car and saved his life. She used shirts that had been in the car to soak up blood and held his hand, telling him it would be all right.
But he had little memory of that at the time, he recalls: “It was 6.35am when I crashed. I got petrol, filled the car up, and then I don’t remember anything until I woke up in hospital. Again there was no one. My jaw was broken and I thought I would suffocate. I was choking on wires. It was pretty gruesome. The first night on the wards there was a police guard opposite me, either protecting a victim or a terrorist.”
The rehab centre where he ended up was, he recalls, “like a scene from One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest. I thought ‘I’m not like them’ but of course I was. They told me my balance was c**p and I had a speech defect and I couldn’t count to 10”.
One of his surgeons at the Ulster Hospital dubbed Mcgale “my Humpty Dumpty man” (which was, in fact, also the original title for the book). He decided to take an ill-advised civil lawsuit against the driver of the lorry and it didn’t go as planned.
“I wanted revenge. I wanted someone to blame who wasn’t myself. The judge was starting to sum up and I was going: ‘Oh no, I’m going to lose. After all of that’. And I looked across at the other side and they started to roar and cheer and backslap and I thought to myself: ‘If you knew what I have been through’. I actually broke down for the first time in the court. I was not expecting for that to happen.”
There were, at least, small mercies; his lawyer had worked pro bono and the counter claim from the lorry driver was covered by insurance: the case wouldn’t cost Mcgale anything.
After the crash he focused on getting back to work. He went to London and arrived in the City, he says, “like Crocodile Dundee”. He got a job with a large firm of independent stockbrokers called Smith New Court.
“I was good at making decisions and a lot of it was street sense, judgment and body language, I just had a better sense of right and wrong than most people. I was making $1m a year eventually.”
Smith New Court was ac
quired by Merrill Lynch in 1995 and Mcgale was appointed managing director of Global Markets & Investment Banking.
“I had made representations for the opportunity that became
Merrill Lynch with a guy who came to Dublin to meet my boss. I called him up and said ‘I heard you need an Irishman’, and he said, ‘who?’ and I said, ‘me’. That’s a true story. He dined out on that for a long, long time.” He is not the only one, you feel, but either way, Mcgale was Merrill’s main man in Ireland. Rising stock market indices meant rising revenues for the firm and rising pay for Mcgale. “I described myself as like Wayne Rooney,” he says now. “I was the guy who came from nowhere who ended up being the star player on the team.” He met the woman who would become his “million dollar wife”, Niamh, in UIB in 1995 and they married in 1998.
“I sought her number and the rest is history,” he says. “She understood a lot of the investment life.”
She had concerns, by the sounds of it, about his gambling, however. He describes how he “might spring to life before my 5.30am alarm clock and say, ‘sh*t***, did I lose £10k on the horses last night?’ And I often did. I had a £50,000 credit limit with Victor Chandler, whom I knew well, and lost £20,000 on the previous year’s Vodafone Derby, a third of what I had won a month before on Rock of Gibraltar in the 2000 Guineas”.
At one point Niamh asked him if he would go to Gamblers Anonymous. He reluctantly went and looked around at the other gamblers, thinking that “none of them were in my league”. The “elder statesman” of the group observed that he might be in denial. Mcgale left and never went back. These days, he says he doesn’t gamble at all, except for the odd punt.
“It’s something I did like working on the stock market; both are forms of gambling. When I did both it was about having a high level of knowledge on things that I did. I started in pennies, moving to pounds, then to hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands and millions.”
By his late 30s he had “gotten to the top of my mountain” and was feeling burned out. His daughter Kate had been born in 2001 (the first of four children) and he was worried that she would grow up without a father, like him and his brother. He had what he calls his “George Best moment” and took a sabbatical from Merrill.
He turned his back on his big salary and retired to “a darkened room” to write his book. The sabbatical lasted only three years, however, as he reasoned that Niamh had “married a stockbroker, not a maudlin writer with zero income”. He didn’t write another word of the memoir until 2013, when a cascade of memories came back to haunt him.
After more than 20 years, driving between Belfast and Dublin once again, he retraced his path on the day of his crash.
He decided to try to visit the home of the woman who had saved his life. “I owe you so much,” he told her. He then boarded a flight and, as the wine flowed, had flashbacks to the day of the crash itself. The recollections would provide the impetus for him to go back to writing his memoir.
Much of it takes in his complicated relationship with his brother, who died in 2007. By then they had reconciled, but his death hit Chris hard.
“I was devastated by it. For the first time I took responsibility for a lot of the things that had gone wrong between us. Events had really damaged both of us. When we reconciled, I’d had kids and I’d learned that a lot of my anger was misplaced. His death was the worst of all the deaths in the family.”
This was a dark period for him. The financial crisis rendered his $1m options at Merrill almost worthless and his family pub in Tyrone was unsellable (though it was eventually sold). He thought of the period as “his second neardeath experience”, this one financial. When a business deal fell through, he was left writing letters to politicians and entertaining barmy thoughts of “hacking the Irish treasury”.
Nearly a decade on it appears that his life has calmed down. The writing of the book has brought a sense of catharsis, even if the umpteen drafts haven’t whetted his appetite to try another one.
He now lives in Chiswick, West London, where his neighbours include Colin Firth and comedian Al Murray, and he runs the property-based Tyrone Capital. But with laundry drying in the background when we talk over Zoom, his Gordon Gekko persona seems far away.
After all the years of highstakes deals, lavish spending, and the nerve-fraying cycle of boom and bust, there’s a sense that he has found some kind of inner peace and he has high hopes for the book.
“There has been a sense of normality about life now,” he says.
“Lockdown has been a plus for us. I’m on another journey. I’m on the way up again. It’s been a hell of a life.”
‘Iwastheguywho came from nowhere who ended up being star player on the (stockbroker) team’