Debauched banker who makes the Wolf of Wall St look a pussycat
. . . but are his tales of excess all they seem? And why is Wayne Rooney threatening to sue him?
Twelve bankers walk into a bar. Or, to be more precise, they stumble into a neon-lit brothel in one of the most notorious red-light districts in Manila in the Philippines. A few minutes and £ 5,000 later, they’ve persuaded the madam to eject all of her other, less wealthy customers from the premises. with the brothel and its 40-odd prostitutes entirely to themselves, the drunken financiers are able to begin playing one of their favourite games. It’s called love Monkey bowling. This involves making young Filipina sex workers — love Monkeys, in their racist argot — strip naked and cover themselves in cooking oil.
The bankers take turns to slide the women down the bar of the brothel towards a set of impromptu bowling pins made from ketchup bottles.
This boorish and degrading spectacle kick- starts a weekend spent drinking and gambling to hideous excess, largely in the company of scantily clad prostitutes.
It culminates in one of the city’s shopping malls, where the westerners amuse themselves by throwing bundles of banknotes off the top floor of an atrium, so they flutter down onto a crowd of impoverished locals below.
This activity — which they patronisingly call ‘making it rain’ — causes a near riot, during which the bankers are amused to see a six-year-old girl knocked to the floor.
‘To me, this is a social experiment or maybe some kind of performance art,’ declares one, whose name is John leFevre. ‘ It’s as if we’re feeding pigeons in the park!’
By Monday morning, the financiers have returned to making billiondollar deals on behalf of some of the most prestigious, blue-chip institutions in international finance.
It had been a typical weekend in the turbo- charged life of British-born leFevre, a bond trader who was raised in America and has spent most of his adult life working for Citigroup, one of the world’s largest banks.
Since joining the firm from university, he’s devoted his days to making gargantuan sums of money and his nights to spending that cash in the most debauched fashion imaginable.
His tales are legion. Attending an investor conference in Singapore, leFevre claims to have woken up in a luxury hotel room with an empty wallet and a naked prostitute in his bed. He paid her using a carrier bag full of miniature bottles from his minibar, before heading off to work.
Another time, leFevre says he drunkenly spent £80,000 on a bright red Maserati sports car in a display of financial one-upmanship over a friend who had just bought a BMw.
less than a week later and inebriated following yet another sleepless night, he wrote off the car in an accident, fleeing the scene on foot before the police arrived.
Given these scrapes, it is hardly surprising that leFevre, now 36, should have titled his autobiography Straight To Hell — True Tales Of Deviance, Debauchery And BillionDollar Deals.
The book, published to a chorus of outrage this week, covers his time with Citigroup from the late Nineties until 2008, the pre- crash era where seven-figure bonuses came as standard and, as he puts it, ‘decadent dinners and alcohol and drug-fuelled nights out’ were a ‘requirement’.
like a modern-day Jordan Belfort, the eighties financier played by leonardo DiCaprio in The wolf Of wall Street, leFevre threw money around like confetti, saying: ‘My mission was to push myself to the limit of what I can handle and still be able to function the following day.’
Soon after being posted to Hong Kong by Citigroup in 2004, he recalls being taken for drinks by the firm’s head of hedge fund sales, who ‘hands me a piece of paper before I can even sit down’.
It contained the mobile number of Joe, the ‘go-to drug dealer for expats’.
later that evening, leFevre says, they adjourned to a nondescript office building where he discovered the aforementioned executive — who was married, with children — engaging in a sex act with two prostitutes.
A third prostitute stood on a coffee table, singing karaoke, next to a bowl full of cocaine.
It was a perfect introduction to the lifestyle of a Hong Kong banker, says leFevre, recalling how, on weekday lunchtimes, he and several colleagues would routinely repair to a luxury flat to drink beer, eat takeaway pizza, play video games and snort cocaine for two hours. Then they would return to the office until the markets closed.
Many colleagues would devote lunch breaks to visiting high-end brothels or being entertained by l ocal prostitutes. On one occasion, leFevre recalls receiving an erotic massage at a venue ‘that resembles spa facilities you might see at a Ritz Carlton’.
During another drink-fuelled after- noon, he and a colleague took two Indonesian sex workers to a steak restaurant. when the food arrived, they ordered the women to hold their fingers to burning hot plates by way of ‘entertainment’.
even inside the offices, things were scarcely more decorous.
women employees were routinely humiliated, subjected to sexist remarks and ordered to leave client dinners when male colleagues wanted to adjourn to strip bars, he says.
elsewhere in the book, he recalls asking a junior staffer in Citigroup’s office to conduct an opinion poll about which female colleague staff they would most like to sleep with. Results were then unveiled via a Powerpoint presentation.
So boorish was leFevre’s general behaviour that he was banned from bars and restaurants across Asia.
In one crowded restaurant in Hong Kong, he and several colleagues outraged fellow diners by stripping naked and then starting a food fight.
Most colourfully of all, leFevre claims to have received a ‘lifetime ban’ from a Hong Kong nightclub after starting a fist fight with wayne Rooney, who was visiting on a preseason tour with Manchester United.
It began, he alleges, when he and some drunken colleagues saw the married Rooney ‘ aggressively hitting on this relatively attractive blonde chick’.
leFevre duly decided, as a prank, to sneak up behind the footballer and start ‘gently caressing his back’.
After allegedly being told to ‘f*** off ’ by Rooney, leFevre repeated the trick ten minutes later when the england captain ‘ appeared to be kissing her neck or whispering in her ear’.
So began a mass brawl, he writes. ‘ Punches were thrown; pushing, shoving and shirt pulling ensued. [Fellow players] Ryan Giggs and Paul Scholes jumped in to restrain Rooney and my friend . . . jumped in to restrain Rio Ferdinand from trying to take my head off.’
All of which sounds l i ke eyeopening stuff. The kind of material that, particularly in the post- crash political climate, seems almost
Lunchtimes would be spent visiting high-end brothels In one restaurant, they stripped and had a food fight
‘All this hookers and drugs stuff is a lazy stereotype’
guaranteed to cause outrage. Yet behind the brouhaha, there is a pertinent question: John LeFevre might be able to spin a tidy yarn, but are the tallest of his many tall tales really to be believed?
Take, for example, that supposed fight with Wayne Rooney. According to the book, it took place at a time when LeFevre’s team at Citigroup was structuring a deal to issue bonds for an Indonesian firm called Mulia. That deal was reported by the Financial Times to have been in its early stages in July 2006.
However, a glance at Man Utd’s fixture list reveals that the team did not set foot in Hong Kong that year or in 2007 (and had last visited during the summer of 2005).
That, in turn, means LeFevre’s recollection of the supposed brawl appears to be at best fuzzy and, at worst, fabricated. Wayne Rooney and Manchester Utd are so angry about the alleged lie they are suing.
A spokesman for the player told the Mail: ‘The incidents described in John LeFevre’s book allegedly involving Wayne Rooney and other Manchester United players did not happen. Legal action is being taken against the book publishers and will be against anyone else who publishes them.’
However, since the altercation al l egedly t ook place in a crowded nightclub, and involved some of the world’s most famous sportsmen, it seems odd that no details appeared in any news outlet at the time. Understandably, the publishing industry seems to have doubts about LeFevre.
Straight To Hell has its roots in an anonymous Twitter feed called @GSElevator, which he set up in 2011. It purported to share arrogant, sexist comments overheard in lifts at the offices of Goldman Sachs bank. Thanks to such gems as ‘my garbage disposal unit eats better than 99 per cent of the world’, the Twitter account soon gained 700,000 followers, gaining a six-figure publishing deal for its then unnamed author, who gave the impression, in interviews, that he was a paid employee of Goldman Sachs.
Early last year, however, the New York Times uncovered LeFevre’s identity, revealing also that he had never worked for Goldman Sachs.
Shortly afterwards, LeFevre was dropped by publisher Simon & Schuster, amid concerns about whether he remained credible. The book was eventually picked up by Atlantic, a less lofty rival.
Establishing what other aspects of Straight To Hell are and are not demonstrably true is complicated by the fact that the names of many f ormer colleagues have been redacted f rom the manuscript before publication, presumably for legal reasons. Others have been given pseudonyms.
While we can be sure that LeFevre is, indeed, a former employee of Citigroup, his level of seniority there is a matter of some debate. He joined in the late Nineties, underwent analyst training in New York, was in London from 2001 to 2004, and was employed in its Hong Kong office from 2004 to 2008, where he worked his way up to a mid-level position on the Asia bond syndication desk before joining the now defunct boutique firm Amias Berman.
Yet former colleagues nonetheless question whether the role would have afforded LeFevre the sort of gargantuan income hinted at in his book, where he talks of being able to blow five-figure sums at bars and spend £75,000 on five-day holidays to St Tropez.
They also wonder why, if he really was such a success, LeFevre — who came from a moneyed family and attended Choate Rosemary Hall, one of America’s smartest boarding schools — should now be living in a relatively modest home i n the suburbs of Houston with his wife Trine, 22, and two young children.
Citigroup is not commenting on its portrayal, though an informed source at the bank tells me ‘you only have to walk onto one of our trading floors and see how quiet it generally is to realise that half his anecdotes about the general culture here are nonsense’.
Meanwhile, former employee Mark Watson, who as Citigroup’s former head of fixed income was LeFevre’s boss for several years, tells me he has a strikingly different recollection of the time the book covers.
‘Let’s just say that he’s written about a very different world to the one I knew,’ says Watson.
‘Sure, there was a drinking culture, but only after work. People didn’t go out drinking at lunch, like they used to in the Eighties, because they couldn’t do their job properly if they did that. And this hookers and cocaine stuff is a lazy stereotype.’
Regarding LeFevre, Watson added: ‘I never thought of him as being at all fast living. From memory, he was there at his desk from 7am to 7pm every day because that was the nature of the job and if you didn’t do it you’d be fired.’
Another for mer colleague, Nicholas Chia, who worked on LeFevre’s desk in Hong Kong, tells me that many of the anecdotes in Straight To Hell have been ‘exaggerated and fabricated for consumers, like most story books are’, but concedes they may also ‘stem from some form of truth’.
As for the man himself, LeFevre insists to readers that his memoir ‘showcases the true soul of Wall Street in a way that hasn’t been done before’.
Regardless of whether you actually believe him, he certainly knows how to tell a colourful tale.