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Bank Of America Psycho Killer Was Busy Helping Hedge Funds Avoid Taxes During His Business Hours
The most bizarre story of the weekend was that of Bank of America's 29-year-old banker Rurik Jutting, who shortly after allegedly killing two prostitutes (and stuffing one in a suitcase), called the cops on himself and effectively admitted to the crime having left a quite clear autoreply email message, namely "For urgent enquiries, or indeed any enquiries, please contact someone who is not an insane psychopath. For escalation please contact God, though suspect the devil will have custody. [Last line only really worked if I had followed through..]”
But while his attempt to imitate Patrick Bateman did not go unnoticed, even if it will be promptly forgotten until the next grotesquely insane banker shocks the world for another 15 minutes, the question that has remained unanswered is what did young Master Jutting do when not chopping women up.
The answer, as the WSJ has revealed, is just as unsavory: "he had been part of a Bank of America team that specialized in tax-minimization trades that are under scrutiny from prosecutors, regulators, tax collectors and the bank’s own compliance department, according to people familiar with the matter and documents reviewed by The Wall Street Journal."
Basically, when not acting as a homicidal psychopath, Jutting was facilitating full-blown tax evasion, just the activity that every developed, and thus broke, government around the globe is desperately cracking down on, and why every single Swiss bank is non-grata in the US and may be arrested immediately upon arrival on US soil.
Mr. Jutting, a U.K. native and a competitive poker player, worked in Bank of America Merrill Lynch’s Structured Equity Finance and Trading group, first in London and then in Hong Kong, according to these people and regulatory filings. Mr. Jutting resigned from the bank sometime before Oct. 27, which police say was the date of the first murder, according to a person familiar with the matter.
The trading group, known as SEFT, employs about three dozen people globally, one of these people said. It helps hedge funds and other clients manage their stock portfolios, often through the use of derivatives, according to the people and internal bank documents.
Mr. Jutting joined Bank of America in 2010 and worked three years in its London office, the bank’s hub for dividend-arbitrage trades, the people familiar with the matter say. He moved to Bank of America’s Hong Kong office in July 2013.
Ironic, because it was just this summer that a Congressional panel headed by Carl Levin was tearing foreign banks Deutsche Bank and Barclays a new one for providing structures such as MAPS and COLT, which did precisely this: give clients a derivative-based means of avoiding taxation (as described in "How Rentec Made More Than 34 Billion In Profits Since 1998 "Fictional Derivatives").
As it turns out not only did a US-based bank - Bank of America - have an entire group dedicated to precisely the same type of hedge fund, and other Ultra High Net Worth, clients tax evasion advice, but it also housed a homicidal psychopath.
Perhaps if instead Levin had been grandstanding and seeking to punish foreign banks, he had cracked down on everyone who was providing this service, Jutting's group would have been disbanded long ago, and two innocent lives could have been saved, instead allowing the alleged cocaine-snorting murderer to engage in far more wholesome, banker-approrpriate activities:
During his time in Asia, Mr. Jutting’s pastimes apparently included gambling. In a Sept. 14 Facebook post, he boasted of winning thousands of dollars playing poker at a tournament in the Philippines. He signed off the post: “God I love Manila.” The comment drew eight “likes.”
Alas one will never know "what if."
But we are certain that with none other than America's most prominent bank, the one carrying its name, has now been busted for aiding and abetting hedge fund tax evasion around the globe, it will get the same treatment as evil foreign banks Barclays and Deutsche Bank, right Carl Levin?
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If he had just taken to killing other bankers.
i believe this is a song by the Talking Heads...
http://hedgeaccordingly.com/2014/01/bac-ceo-brian-moynihan-to-btv-tradin...
Obviously this guy knows something is going on but authorities will be rushing to deem him insane...and then after another week, we wont be hearing anything from him again...much like any stories on Ebola, MH17, MH370, Ukraine.....oh but, did you know the Dow and S&P are close to an all time high????
As well, that trading group know as SEFT, should be renamed THEFT. We should get the names of the other 30 members if possible.
He basically commited seppuku. On the 2 "sex workers".
A useful tool by day makes for
An angry tool by night.
Listen Ben.
To an outsider, specifically an Indian, he sounds like a run-of-the-mill "AMERICAN".
Why you guy's call him "SICK", "PSYCHO", and such is beyond me. Sounds like a regular American to us.
I dunno. Anyway, I'm going to head over to the "NEGATIVE" retail interest rate story. See you there.
Most Americans that don't escape their home city aren't demons. You just see the worst sociopaths in positions of power and with enough money to travel and bang prostitutes.
Listen.
Did someone say "BANG" prostitutes?! Oh my!
And he'll continue to try to escape penalties... this time, death.
Great practice round, fucknut!
He was supposed to use the nail gun on himself instead of the women. Just shows you what psychopaths these bankers are.
He was British not American and all you pretend to know about regular Americans you learned from Hollywood. How about murder of women by gang rape on city buses while the bus is driving around for hours. Is that what regular Indians do?
Yeah! And the Indians were civilized by the Brits, too.
Mission Accomplished, Commonwealth.
Lotta the fuzzy wuzzies causing problems about the globe today used to be British Subjects as well, I'll have the Indian (dot not feather) note.
Listen.
"LOOKS" you guys got some "UP" votes. Yeeeea! The ZH people love your "SPECIAL" Olympic style comments. Congratulations Americans always "WIN".
Are you sure you're not a 12 year old American? You could have fooled me.
But he is English
Hey Bangalore - I couldn't agree with you more about Americans and our psychopathology. But how about all those "normal" Indians who gang rape women who have to go into the fields just to take a shit? Hey, yummy - let's fuck her while she has a string of poop coming out her ass.
You think that's normal?
Congratulations, you are a moron!!
He is, but Why do you think so? because of his take on Merikans? Maybe he's inspired by your art Billy.
Ya know, I was thinking about heading to the local B of A branch and squeezing a loaf through the "overnight deposit" window. But they'd probably get off on that shit. Literally.
Juttland will be busy writing a book on tax evasion with a speical behind the scenes look at overseas banking. ... with a speical Center Fold pull out of Ms Chop Suey of the Year [he may need 2 or 3 pullouts of all her body parts].
Tacky. Taxing. Nail biting. Wicked tacky. Made for cable.
"He basically commited seppuku. On the 2 "sex workers"
Actually he used them to hedge his seppuku risk. They thought it was an ordinary trade but it was actually a seppuku swap.
Maybe he was going to talk. There are incentives.
Beats workin
WS interviewing is optimized to get personalities like this chap. Normally they just keep them focused on competition and screwing the rest of the world. For this guy, it wasn't enough; he needed more....
No kidding. This psycho took out two souls that were providing a desired service to society. Those banks, on the other hand.
He escaped nail-gun.
So Far. He hasn't been on a work party yet.
Do you really believe that the enemy does not also read Zerohedge?
Nail Guns and "suicides" are becoming too obvious. There are other methods.
Wet saws, jack hammers, trowels, impact wrenches, grinders.
Ebola
Dinner with Michelle.
Examples have to be made, mister.
If you weren't insane going into being a Bankster......you'll end up becoming insane.
Champaigne, caviar, hookers, blow and nail guns for all !!!!!
yea. why couldn't he have turned his sights on someone else? if he had to get a hot chick, let's say Blythe Masters, for instance...
If Rutting had killed those women in the USA, he would have been covered by AG Holder's bankster full criminal immunity protocol. Banksters, Fast and Furious gunrunners and Obama's coke supplier are "exceptional people" for whom the criminal code does not apply.
Careful, your rurik is jutting.
Not surprising to find an individual who lacks any kind of empathy for fellow humans, in a field that requires no kind of empathy for fellow humans.
Incredible. Absolutely incredible.
Called cops on himself? Right. Yeah...I'll buy that...NOT.
F...R...A...M...E
He knows TOO MUCH.
Somebody wants him discredited and off'd.
maybe he saw a tall building ... and open window ... in his future?
Hmmm...A Window F...R...A...M...E???
Yeah. That sounds about right.
That's the Setup!
I'm thinking after he is on the inside there will be story along the lines of:
"He was involved in an altercation with another prisoner"
Bank of America is at the top of my list for take down during next financial crisis (Citi #2)
NO WAY public will tolerate another mass bailout. 1 or 2 TBTF sacrifices must be made in order to bail rest.
Don't worry, Goldman Sachs and JPM off limits ... and will get the choices pieces off the carcass(es) ... while taxpayer eats the sh!t sandwich.
I think they all will go down. But, BAC and C will be the ones who get more publically spanked for sake of appeasing the masses (to some degree). Meanwhile, the criminals at GS and JPM will be exiting stage left and probably wind up with immunity for some sort of lame testimony that gets middle management hanged.
The Public will tolerate anything, so long as the football and hot wings keep flowing.
Guess sociopaths no longer make ends meet for those who are doing God's work. Got to go for the psychopaths. Joy.
Fa Fa Fa Fa Fa Fa Fa Fa Fa Fa, better, run run run run run awaaaaay, ooooh ooooh oohooh
He maybe the only western banker we see going to jail.
best and brightest bitchez. that's why they get paid the big bucks. they're just that much damn smarter than the rest of us. that, and having no discernible conscience.
They are not the best and the brightest. They are only the best and brightest of the slimebuckets they could hire at the time. In point of fact, there are brighter minds than the minds one finds on Wall Street. The problem with the elitest view of Wall Streeters is that they are someohow to be viewed as 'the best' or 'brightest' when in fact they are just garden variety people with strength in a couple of areas of study. In brief, there are brighter people than Wall Street has to offer.
Interestingly, the term '1%ers' refers to the few who run the place - statistically, 1% of humans are psychopaths.
Make of it what you will.
Have to admit, there could be a big clue in there.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murders_of_Sumarti_Ningsih_and_Jesse_Lorena
Too Big To Fail - next!
Too big to nail.
IMPEACH BARAK ISIS HUSSEIN EBOLA OBAMA FOR TREASON !!!
AMNESTY = CIVIL WAR
Psychopath that wanted to be caught...operating out of some type of dissociative guilt trip....hmmm not a psychopath but a violent schiziopath....psychopaths on his education/general IQ level do not want to get caught perpetrating anything much less some trivial murder(s) with no clear over arching benefit. Back to the drawing boards
suckas
This is a sensational story of a banker + coke + hookers. But I haven't really seen anything about it in the US media.
Thank goodness for the UK tabloids:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2820219/Psycho-banker-s-crazed-w...
Not having seen much about the story is probably because he is a British citizen.
Many thanks for posting that very interesting Daily Mail link
A visit from a mobile execution van is in his future.
It should be the objective of every business and individual to avoid paying taxes. The focus point of any article on this topic should be that some businesses receive favortism based on the business they are in or accounting practices. Personally, I don't think there should be a business tax, because it is another layer of taxation on the individual, in addition to it simply being a bad idea to tax production in general. But if there is a business tax, they should be taxed equally.
Exactly. About 92% of the articles on this site deal with various governments' abject failures and incompetencies, and how we should all be protecting ourselves by burying gold, etc. Now we learn that this guy's job was to help clients reduce the amount stolen from them by these same governments -- and suddenly this is a bad thing?
[duplicate post]
The real scary part is that this type of sociopathic peronality is endemic to the whole big bank system; not to mention .gov.
So when things really go south for the money conjurers will it be wholesale murders and suicides?
Here's my out of office message for the record:
I'm on vacation and will not be doing any of the following: (Note: That is unless my employers frame me or kill me to silence me before I expose the crimes that they commit on a daily basis)
Murder
Shopping for luggage
Soliciting Prostitutes
Using nail guns
Jumping off buildings before I text my girlfriend I'm on my way home
Jumping in front of train
Shooting and killing myself after murdering my family
ZH got cho' back bro. You din do it.
Lone Renegade Wolf? I want the rest of his team at BofA QUARANTINED NOW!
Are you a psychopath? Your (probably psychopathic) boss wants to know http://www.marketwatch.com/story/are-you-a-psychopath-your-boss-wants-to-know-2014-10-24
Psychopaths to maintain order after massive nuke attack – Home Office docs http://rt.com/uk/200923-exercise-nuclear-attack-psychopaths/
BoA statement on the situation:
"The psycho did it, all the frauds of BoA were done by this one psycho guy who was a genious at hiding tax fraud from us and our customers"
Interesting that, while at work, this guy was just a typical, everyday employee who did nothing unusual that might draw attention.
Banker killing sprees probably make their other crimes feel less bad.
Go find the Max Keiser report for today - Max was ridiculed by the press for calling big bankers 'mass murderers' - the same time that this dude was doing it!
Talking Heads PSYCHO KILLER. LMAO
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O52jAYa4Pm8
The late comedian Robyn Williams once made a joke that cocaine was gods way of saying you have too much money.
He killed two prostitutes....there goes our 4th quarter GDP...
Don't worry, murder will count as well.
He will be hedging his cheats for a triad boss before the week is through.
Possibly his cheeks as well WB!
The women of the night must have supported a Flat tax.... feckin psycho swhould be put down like a dog.
Hey Clowns - you must hate dogs, right? "Put down" is a phrase that people use to avoid the reality of murdering a sentient being. Really close to the other phrase "final solution". I don't want this guy "put down like a dog". I want him slowly skinned alive.
A sick fuck working for a sick fuck corporate bank.
"Rogue" Psycho/Addict/Pervert/Tax Evader/Trader/Binge Drinker/Killer..... Just a Banker, Nothing to see here move along.
The first time I walked down the main drag in Wan Chai in Hong Kong, I couldn't believe what I saw; all the mama bars there and prostitutes openly in the street outside trying to get guys to go in.
Within the first week I'd already been offered cocaine, though I didn't take it at that stage. When I did, it was easy to get.
I know 100 guys between the ages of 20 and 50, and I'd say around 30 of them were regular cocaine users. Not all were working in banking, but most were, of the ones I knew. They were all Westerners.
I know guys in banking in London, Chicago and Sydney and they've all got the same pressures as Hong Kong. Yes, I know some cocaine users in those cities, but the ratio of the people I know to the ratio of people I know who are drug users is minimal -- it's almost non-existent. So it can only really be down to two things -- the availability of it and how many people do it; the general acceptance of it in Hong Kong.
When I read the news of the murders in Wan Chai, allegedly by a British banker, my first reaction was "I hope I don't know him, please don't be someone I know," because it easily could have been. I knew some guys who were seriously screwed up and now I realize just how much I had changed in Hong Kong, almost inhuman at times.
Getting drugs
The guy that I used, you could give him a phone call or a text message from 4 p.m. onwards and within an hour -- I think his record was 10 minutes -- one of his drivers was sitting in a car outside the office. You'd just tell people you were popping down for a cigarette.
You'd dive over into his car, he would just drive around the corner, and by the time you got out 30 seconds later, you've got cocaine and you've given him the money. He had four or five delivery points that were his favorite delivery points and they were all within walking distance of the office.
And if your guy was busy or not answering, then you knew that someone else had a guy and they could get some off him. Of the hundred nights that I wanted to get cocaine, I think I can only remember one night when I couldn't get any.
You could walk into almost any bar in Wan Chai and stand there and have a drink and you would soon pick up the signs of another cocaine user; they're going to the toilet every 20 minutes, their nose is running, they're talking rubbish, really quickly.
They wouldn't say no if they had some on them. It felt like some unofficial club where you only knew members first names -- but you all looked out for each other on the drug front.
A gram would cost between $90 to $130 (HK$700 and HK$1,000). At the start I was doing it once a month, and after a few years I found myself doing it four times a week. I would do one gram for one night out. But then quite often I would find myself on a three or four-day bender.
http://m.cnn.com/primary/cnnd_fullarticle?topic=newsarticle&category=cnnd_world_asia&articleId=cnn/2014/11/03/world/asia/hong-kong-banker-drugs#page2
A drug-using investment banker has allegedly murdered two prostitutes in Hong Kong. It’s a pretty jarring headline – a real life American Psycho. But most bankers I know aren’t really all that surprised.
People have been calling him Patrick Bateman. Perhaps, he has an alibi and was out returning video tapes. But instead, I see Colonel Kurtz. What happens when you take the “Best of the West,” presumably well-raised, Cambridge-educated, and well-paid, and you throw him into an alternate reality, a world largely without societal restraints and an industry with its own set of deviant moral benchmarks? For some people, and maybe for Rurik Jutting, things fall apart.
Hong Kong is a tropical Island masquerading as a legitimate city.
To a very large extent, expat bankers in Asia can do whatever they want. As an overhang of colonialism, they tend to get treated better than locals. They can start food fights at The Mandarin Grill, flee the scene of a car crash, or take their pants off and run around Lan Kwai Fong. And if they get so out-of-control that they get banned from 3 bars in one night, the cops will just take them home.
Many of my Chinese friends will speak English when they make dinner reservations or if they walk into a Gucci store, because even acting like an ABC (American Born Chinese) gets them better treatment.
My sense of reality and entitlement got so warped in Hong Kong that when I would come back to the US to visit family, my mother suggested I walk around Wal-Mart just to re-acclimate myself and “be less of an asshole.”
The alleged murderer, Rurik Jutting, lived in the J-Residence building in Wan Chai, one of Hong Kong’s seedier and less prestigious areas. At around US$ 4,000 a month, the building is popular with young bankers and (poor) expats who like to be close to Central but cant afford to live in the Mid-Levels or on The Peak.
Rurik lived two blocks away from Lockhart Road, the aorta of Hong Kong’s red light district. He couldn’t walk home at night without getting propositioned by street walking freelancers and the pros standing in front of the velvet curtain bars. “You very handsome man” and “Just one drink okay la.”
It’s an entire street filled with bars like Cockeyes, where we once hosted intern drinks (The Princelings loved it), and the now-closed Fenwicks, where we once staked out our regional head of sales, “Dirty Sanchez”, until we caught him walking out at 3am on Tuesday with a love monkey on each arm.
Before moving to Asia, I highly doubt Rurik Jutting was ever called handsome by anyone other than his mom. He’s what we call a “Twelve” – the term used in Asia to describe an ugly and fat (in his case) white guy with a young, attractive, usually paid-for Asian girl. He’s a two and she’s a ten.
It’s also been reported that the police also found a small amount of cocaine in his apartment. Now, I have no idea what kind of person Rurik is, but I do know that investment banking is a culture of pervasive deviance, particularly in Asia.
When I first moved to Hong Kong, the first thing one of the outgoing (repatriated) hedge fund sales guys gave me was the number of his drug dealer. “Look, I don’t really know you, but trust me, you’ll need this for your clients.” And everyone knew it when Drug Dealer Joe’s not-too-subtle Toyota Supra would show up in front of Cheung Kong Center or ICBC Tower (where Merrill Lynch is) for a delivery.
It’s often not even a function of choice. I had a colleague get chastised by our boss for not attending an important client’s bachelor party trip to Manila. “You have a pregnant wife at home, so what?” I think it was the non-forwardable Bloomberg message itinerary titled “A Weekend of Debauchery” that scared him off. And he paid a price for not indulging – getting fewer trades than his more willingly deviant counterparts at other banks.
One time I went to a dinner at Ruth’s Chris Steakhouse where an investment banking colleague showed up with two prostitutes and proceeded to hold a contest to see which of them could keep their hand on the famously-hot plates the longest.
Even formal closing dinners – a global banking tradition, where the bookrunners an clients celebrate the success of a deal in the private room of some fancy restaurant, get drunk, and hand out tombstones (Lucite deal trophies) and (in the good old days) inscribed Mont Blanc pens as mementos of their greatness – are not immune.
My first closing dinner in Hong Kong was slightly different from those that I have experienced in New York or London. Toward the end of dinner, a senior banker quietly made it known that the CEO wanted the party to continue at a karaoke bar. To avoid creating an embarrassing or awkward scene for the client, the female bankers were asked to discreetly excuse themselves from dinner. The young analyst next to me got a Blackberry message from her boss, “Hey, maybe you should go home now.”
One of my counterparts on the deal team – a pretty square, happily married guy – also tried to excuse himself from the evolving festivities. But, the CEO was having none of it. “Where the f–k do you think you’re going? I don’t think so.” And that was it – he knew that future business from this client (and therefore his bonus) depended on it.
To be clear about what karaoke means – it’s a large private room where we sit around on couches, singing karaoke, drinking whiskey with iced green tie, and playing a dice version of Liar’s Poker. And then, the mama-san parades in at least thirty or forty girls in skimpy dresses, each one wearing a nametag with a number on it. From there, it doesn’t take long for the process to get started. “I’ll take number 12 and number 34.” Or “Dibs on 11.” And “Don’t be greedy; just get two.”
The mama-san also provides drugs, but it’s like buying beer at Yankee Stadium, so it’s better to bring your own.
At the end of the night, a bill is presented that says something like “Tokyo Otoro Sushi,” which is convenient when it comes to expensing it. After all, the tab can be astronomical, especially if people get “take-out.”
There are plenty of bankers, especially sales guys who cover hedge funds (which are heavily populated by expats), who conduct regular meetings at massage parlors (during lunchtime) and karaoke joints (at night).
So, Rurik Jutting, depending on how things play out for you, don’t forget – Jefferies is still hiring for equities in Asia, although you might be better off in Dallas.
John LeFevre is the creator of the @GSElevator Twitter feed and the author of the soon-to-be-released Straight To Hell: True Tales of Deviance, Debauchery, and Billion-Dollar Deals.
Tessa Thorniley reports from Hong Kong for Danwei on the city's drugged up financial industry.
On a Friday night in Lan Kwai Fong, a 29-year-old stockbroker knocks back a shot of sake and tries to work out how many people in his bank take drugs.
It is a question that has been rippling through the Hong Kong banking community since the death, in June, of Neil McCormick, the 36-year-old head of Asian equity derivatives at UBS on the island.
McCormick had returned to the UK for a wedding when, after snorting cocaine at a friend's home in Holland Park, London, he plunged from the balcony to his death.
While none of his friends suggested that Hong Kong had turned him into a drug user, other bankers who spoke to Danwei on condition of anonymity suggested that cocaine use on the island is ubiquitous.
“What happened to Neil is obviously terribly sad, but it is not that surprising,” says one. “The financial community here is buried in white powder.”
“On the evening of the last day of the 2009 financial year, I know of a team of accountants responsible for calculating traders' profits at a US investment bank in Hong Kong who snorted cocaine at their desks through the night until 9am in order to continue working,” she adds.
After another shot of sake, the young stockbroker, born in Hong Kong but educated in the UK, has his answer. “I would say around 65 per cent of the people who work with me have a recreational drug habit,” he says.
“I would not say they were addicts, and I've never seen them do drugs in the workplace, but at the weekend – sure!”
Having said that, he goes on to talk about how sometimes drugs do leak into the workplace. “You hear some dodgy tales here. A guy from one of the big banks was out here on business recently. He arrived on a Monday and was due to have meetings through till Wednesday and Thursday. But he went out Monday night and no one heard from him again until the following Monday. When he got back to his office in Sydney he was fired.”
Another few shots of booze and the stockbroker is ready to hit the Tazmania Ballroom for a large night out. All around him, expats are cutting loose in spectacular fashion after a long week at work.
“Hong Kong is like London on steroids!” he says. “Look where we are,” he adds, gesturing around the tight network of streets that make up Hong Kong's main bar area. “This is a one-kilometer-square party zone. Everything is just more concentrated here.”
For young expats working in high-pressure and high-rolling jobs, Hong Kong has always been a party town. The majority of the foreign population is male and single, and looking for a good time before returning home to settle down.
As one long-term resident and bar and restaurant owner put it: “There are a lot of single guys here. They are often posted here by their companies, without their families and they like to party and go out chasing women.”
And just as cocaine has become the drug of choice in London and New York, it is now the preferred sharpener of Hong Kong's expat community.
In the past few years, the drug has gone from being relatively rare to being the standard accompaniment at almost any social occasion. A day on a junk with a group of recruitment consultants and financial analysts might kick off with a 'fat line'. A quiet dinner party might be perked up with some nose candy. And out on the streets, Hong Kong is as debauched as any international city.
One recovering cocaine addict, and a Hong Kong resident for the past eight years, sketches out the picture of excess on the island. “About half the guys I've seen in recovery are white-collar workers. I've talked to people who have dropped HK$30,000 in a weekend.
“First they get the cocaine, then the girls, then the jeroboams of champagne, then the hotel suites and so on. We call them the weekend warriors. They start with beers on a Friday night and they don't stop until Sunday evening, even when their families are calling them and asking where they are. Usually they are at work first thing Monday morning though,” he said.
Out on the streets of Central, barmen and the public relations staff at nightclubs even dole out free cocaine to regulars and models, keen to get the party started at the weekend.
“That's the way the clubs work,” says one industry insider. “They dish it out for free because they want the attractive people in there, so that the men will go in and spend money. They give the models coke to get things going.”
“I know guys who hit the clubs, pick up these models and then go back to a suite at the Four Seasons and keep partying all weekend, fuelled by the drugs,” he adds.
The drug deliveries begin on Friday afternoon, according to one petite banking industry insider who recently split up with her hedge-fund manager boyfriend after discovering he was nursing a five-gram-a-week cocaine habit. “Coke dealers in Hong Kong text their customers every Friday afternoon to let them know supplies are in. At the office of one headhunter almost everybody's mobile beeps at exactly the same time,” she said.
In March, the South China Morning Post, the island's English-language newspaper, revealed the existence of “Dial-a-line”, the local taxi service that delivers more than just passengers.
The taxis are used by a network of drug dealers to deliver and sell narcotics to customers who contacted them by phone or text message.
According to the report – which included interviews with the cab service's former customers – news of the operation had spread by word of mouth and business is apparently booming.
One ex-client pointed out that the taxis did not go into Lan Kwai Fong because of police patrols, but added that it was “normally fine” if people were out for the night anywhere else, such as Soho and Hollywood Road in Central.
The banking insider said: “What I've noticed here, compared to London or New York, is the number of middle income earners who take drugs, the accountants, recruiters, research analysts. I think it's partly because they suddenly have a much higher disposable income than they did at home.”
Hong Kong has been quietly developing its cocaine habit since the mid-2000's, with police admitting for the first time, in 2005, that the drug had “increasing popularity” and that there had been “an upsurge of cases”.
The following year the street price of the drug in the city halved as South American smugglers and Hong Kong triads began to flood the island with the drug. It currently retails at around HK$1,000 a gram.
In November last year, the police said cocaine seizures had almost doubled and the amount of ketamine intercepted rose four and half times in the first ten months of 2009.
At the time, Secretary for Security Ambrose Lee Siu-kwong said the figures were higher because there was an abundant supply of drugs and the authorities had stepped up the fight against trafficking this summer.
Then, in April the police accidentally stumbled upon a record stash of 372kg of cocaine (worth an estimated HK$337 million) on the rooftop of a house near the Chinese border.
By international standards, the haul was relatively puny – most record seizures elsewhere are quoted in tons rather than kilograms. But with Hong Kong police focusing their attention on ketamine, the drug of choice for the island's young Chinese partygoers, it is only recently that cocaine has come under closer scrutiny.
And since the authorities are keen to maintain Hong Kong's status as an international financial capital, the police and courts tend not to look too closely at the behavior of the island's expatriates. A spokesman for the police denied this was the case, and said the force would “continue to crackdown on drug trafficking and abuse, regardless of the ethnicity or backgrounds of the persons involved”.
“I think the authorities here don't know what to do. Maybe they are quite naïve about what is really going on?” said one bar owner.
However, a few miles south of Lan Kwai Fong, in an abandoned Aberdeen shipyard now filled with feral dogs and illegally-dumped building materials, sits Wayne's boat.
The former Yau Ma Tei (Kowloon) ferry that once served as a tycoon’s offshore gambling den, is now a haven of calm and sofa-strewn meeting rooms. It is a world apart from the flash, fast-paced rhythm of Central. This is where Hong Kong's partygoers come when they have hit rock-bottom.
Onboard, Dr Wayne Moran runs 1212, pronounced one to 12 in reference to the 12 step treatment program, a center that treats recovering addicts. Joanne Schmitt has worked as one of the center's small team of counselors for the past two-and-a-half years, witnessing the darker side of expatriate life.
Schmitt trained as a counselor at the Hazelden Center in the United States, which has treated the likes of Liza Minnelli, Melanie Griffith and Steve Tyler, the lead singer of Aerosmith. She said most of her patients were from the US, UK or Australia, male, in their mid-40s and married with “very decent” salaries.
“By the time they come to us, they have probably been alcohol or drug users for some time. Addiction tends to start in the teenage years. By the time they get to Hong Kong they will probably already have a problem. But in many cases when they come here it gets worse,” she said.
She adds that cocaine, for example, is “very easy to get hold of” and that it is more common for high achievers – bankers and businessmen – to wind up in the treatment center than those lower down the pay scale.
“If I think of a typical patient, they will probably have come to Hong Kong for work. They are the work hard, play hard type. Perhaps they are also quite athletic and usually very good at what they do. Sometimes they get into alcohol or drugs as a way of letting off steam. Then, perhaps because of the lack of a wide family structure it’s easy to fall into bad habits. Usually only the spouse will know – she’ll be the only one who can see the descent – but by the time it’s a problem she is often already the enemy. Then, there isn’t the support network that people would have back home to catch them,” she said.
She underlined that not all recreational drug users become addicts in need of treatment, but said the increasingly widespread social acceptability of drug use is narrowing the line between the two.
She added that cocaine addicts are not as common at Recovery Works as alcoholics, since there were fewer drug takers who had reached the “fairly desperate state” that drunks get to.
The number of people joining Recovery Works with drug and alcohol problems is not rising, she said, although she adds that during the financial crisis a number of newly unemployed professionals started to attend daytime recovery programs for the first time.
“I think they felt they finally had the time to do something about their problem,” she said.
At Cocaine Anonymous meetings in the city, attendance ranges anywhere from two or three people to ten, suggesting that the numbers of drug takers who hit bottom and get help are relatively few, even if recreational drug use is increasingly common.
And, to put the expatriate population in Hong Kong into context, it accounts for less than five per cent of the island's seven million population, including the large Filipino and Indonesian communities. Strip those out and the figures are only in the tens of thousands.
A former cocaine addict said the number of cases were stable, and that Hong Kong was not out of line with the situation in the West. “Addiction is a disease. If you have it, it doesn't matter where you are – Hong Kong the US, the UK – you'll feed your addiction until you get help. Some people can drink a bit of alcohol then stop when they've had enough. Some people just keep going – they are the addicts. Their environment doesn't make much difference in my experience,” he said.
However, unlike the West, Hong Kong has escaped the financial crisis relatively unscathed and the banking community has cash to burn again. HSBC, which carries out an annual survey of expatriates, noted that in 2010 more than half the 250 participants agreed that their economic conditions had improved, a far higher proportion than their counterparts in London or New York.
The study also reported that Hong Kong expatriates are relatively high earners – with 35% of them earning over US$200,000 – and that 75% of them are earning more since relocating.
In a bid to help employees with problems, several of the US investment banks have imported their Employee Assistance Program (EAP) to Hong Kong.
The system came into being because of America's strict discrimination laws, because it was feared that staff who needed treatment for drug, alcohol or other personal problems could face unfair treatment in the workplace if they sought help.
Through the scheme, a third party confidentially assesses staff in need of treatment and liaises with the bank's Human Resources department, simply informing them that the employee will be absent for a period of time.
“A lot of the banks here have EAPs. US companies spend so much on their employees, they want to ensure they do the best job,” said Schmitt.
“It gives staff a chance to get help if they need it. The company pays the EAP for their services but the EAP isn't part of the company. Sometimes employees get sent there by their bosses though. I think if an employee needed help once or twice the company will be supportive. After that, I'd doubt it. Also this service isn't really provided by any Asian or British or other European companies,” she added.
Human Dynamic, an EAP firm with offices across Asia and partners around the world lists a range of services on its website from tackling poor morale and stress in the workplace to treatment of more serious issues.
The firm which carries the tagline “Happy Employees will generate Happy Customers and Happy Shareholders” declined to comment on whether drug problems among employees are becoming a bigger issue in Hong Kong.
Among the bankers, there is widespread denial that anyone is partying harder now than they were in the 1980s. One former banker, turned recruitment consultant said that more people had “burned out or overdosed” in the 80s, unable to cope with the sudden wealth that the island created.
More than a decade before the colonial lights were switched off by Chris Patten in 1997, the English-speaking expat population in Hong Kong was already predicting the end of swinging Hong Kong.
In a 1986 Sunday Times magazine article entitled 'Jittery City', a variety of long-time residents predicted the demise of the entertainment industry, nudity and girlie bars.
Pat Sephton, described as a Liverpudlian former model who back then ran a Tsim Sha Tsui night club known as Bottoms Up told the newspaper there was “not a chance” that her girlie bar would be allowed to exist after 1997.
“I know they assure us nothing will change. But you remember what happened to Shanghai? You remember Blood Alley and all the girls in the clubs along The Bund? They stayed for a month or two, and then they were forced out. There's no way a communist administrator is going to allow men to ogle at naked girls”.
On the streets of Lan Kwai Fong or Wan Chai today however, it is clear that the party is still in full swing.
Tessa Thorniley, a freelance business and travel writer based in Shanghai. She writes for newspapers, magazines and websites including The Daily Mail, the South China Morning Post, the Guardian, The Daily Telegraph and Wallpaper.
Bangalore, STFU already. Everytime I see your post, its some anti-American BS, as if Americans are somehow to blame for everything in your pitiful life.
And read the fucking post. This guy was a Brit.
And speaking of India, you have the most corrupt courst system in the world, Ive read about incidents where rape victims went to police and were raped again by those they sought help from. Congratulations on such a great system.