London’s

Cocaine Survivors
The financial bust has forced some
addicted traders and bankers to come
clean—although many of their colleagues
are still caught up in the City’s culture
of booze and coke.
By Stephanie Baker
and Thomas Penny
Photographs by phil fisk

N
eill Junor remembers the exact moment
he decided to quit snorting cocaine. On
a chilly December afternoon in 2005,
the former equities analyst took a stroll in Lon-
don’s deer-filled Richmond Park to select the
tree from which he would hang himself.
Junor’s decision to step back from the brink
marked the end of a six-year binge of drug and
alcohol abuse that by then had cost Junor his
marriage and a career that paid him as much as
1 million pounds ($1.7 million) a year. He was
out of work, having already walked away from
both his analyst job at BT Alex. Brown and a
­subsequent position in a dot-com venture. “I
burned through everything,” Junor says. “I knew
there was a choice—and the choice was to hang
from that tree or not.”
His story reflects the cocaine use that medical
Neill Junor traded experts say is rampant in the
London’s high life
for a chicken farm
City, London’s fi ­ nancial dis-
in the country. trict. It’s a habit that often goes
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bloomberg markets November 2009
 hand in hand with heavy drinking. Junor says he and his mates
wanted to maintain the thrill they felt at work as they poured
into the Square Mile’s pubs and clubs after a day of getting high
on finance.
“It’s the same rush from doing a deal and doing cocaine,” Junor,
46, says. “The adulation from doing a deal spills into going for a
beer and then a party—it’s an amorphous blob of energy.” Every-
one knows about the City’s drug problem, recovering addicts say.
Bosses turn a blind eye to drugs, as long as you’re making money for
your firm—and until recently, making big money was easy to do.
Executives in the detox business say bankers have swamped
them with calls since the financial crisis began a year ago. The
Causeway Retreat, an addiction and mental health hospital for
professionals on a secluded island 40 miles (64 kilometers) east of
London, has 15 people on the waiting list for its 18-bed facility.
While few walk away from addiction as dramatically as Neill
Junor, some bankers are questioning whether the diminished re-
wards of the City are worth sacrificing their health, says Philip
Hopley, a psychiatrist who runs a clinic at the Lloyd’s of London
insurance building to be close to where his patients work.
“Doing cocaine or drinking heavily is part of the City culture;
you work hard and you play hard and you get rewarded because
your bonus is fantastic,” says Hopley, a consultant at The Priory,
Brendan Quinn, head
of The Causeway
Retreat, says more
City workers are
seeking help.
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bloomberg markets November 2009
a group that runs several mental health centers. When the bo-
nuses are cut and many of your friends lose their livelihoods,
things no longer look so good. “A number of people now tell me:
‘I finally realize what a shit job I have got. If it wasn’t for the bo-
nus, I wouldn’t be working these hours and I wouldn’t be work-
ing with these people.’” The number of people in the finance
industry coming to see him has jumped by about 15 percent
this year, he says.
S
cientists say it’s no accident that trading and cocaine
sometimes go together. Both involve taking risks and
have a similar effect on the brain. Each activity raises
dopamine levels, the organ’s feel-good chemical, ac-
cording to Trevor Robbins, professor of cognitive neuroscience
at the University of Cambridge. Dopamine surges when we take
risks, such as going sky diving, betting on stock price move-
ments or hiding in an office rest room and snorting a line of
coke. Studies show that people who take risks have low levels of
dopamine receptors and try to shock the brain into a boost of
the chemical through novel situations. They’re also more likely
to become addicted, Robbins says.
Those who don’t seek help fast enough, like investment man-
ager Melvin Sabour, can become high-profile casualties. Sabour,
 a managing director of AKN Investments
Ltd., died of a cocaine overdose in Febru-
ary. Sabour was depressed over losses at
his privately held firm, his girlfriend
Kyara Dekker told an April inquest into
his death. She discovered Sabour, 44, un-
conscious in the apartment they shared in
Mayfair, the neighborhood of townhouses
and luxury stores that’s home to money
managers such as GLG Partners Inc. and
Moore Capital Management LLC. Sabour
was pronounced dead by paramedics at
the scene. A postmortem examination
found that Sabour had a lethal level of
­metabolized cocaine in his blood and
attributed his demise to drug-­triggered
heart failure.
“Cocaine can and does have a bad effect
on the heart and it is quite a significant cause
of death in men of younger age in this area of
London,” coroner Paul Knapman told the in-
quest that determined the cause of Sabour’s death.
Drugs and alcohol played a key role in the death of
Darren Liddle, a 26-year-old fixed-income analyst at Credit
­Suisse Group AG in London in September 2007. Liddle, who spent
two stints in a psychiatric hospital, went on a cocaine and alco-
hol binge at the Hilton hotel on London’s Park Lane just weeks
after leaving the hospital for the second time. He sat on the
ledge of his 19th-floor room, shaking and crying, for more than
two hours before jumping to his death. A coroner told an inquest
in January 2008 that job pressures may have contributed to
­Liddle’s addictions. Credit Suisse declined to comment on the
incident. Liddle’s father and brother didn’t respond to e-mails.
“Medical people are absolutely bamboozled by the level of
abuse going on in the City and the extreme level of cocaine con-
sumption,” says Brendan Quinn, The Causeway’s chief execu-
tive officer and a specialist nurse in recovery treatment. “More
and more people are coming in, putting their hands up and
­saying: ‘I’ve got a problem and I need help.’”
The spread of cocaine in the City is driven by ample supplies
at cheap prices. Cocaine, the glamour drug for jet-setters in the
1980s, has dropped in price to about £40 a gram from almost
£70 a gram in 1997, according to figures from the U.K. Home
Office. The price drop reflects dealers’ success in diluting the
product and opening up new supply routes, authorities say. The
number of cocaine users in the U.K. has doubled to 1 million in
the past decade, according to the United Nations World Drug
‘I’d go to dinner parties where the host was
chopping up a big line of coke on the cheese
board,’ one former addict says. ‘Cocaine
is London’s middle-class dirty secret.’
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bloomberg markets November 2009
Seth Freedman, above on the beach in Jaffa, Israel, joined the army to
beat his addiction and wrote a book about the City’s excessive culture.
Report 2009. The UN says British cocaine use peaked in
2007—the year after City bonuses reached a record
£8.8 billion. While bonuses will plummet more than
60 percent from that high to £3.2 billion this year,
­according to the London-based Centre for Economics
and Business Research Ltd., there’s still plenty of
money to buy cheap coke.
Some recovering addicts seek help in the company of others
secretly struggling with a drug habit. On a rainy day in July in
the wood-paneled vestry of St. Michael’s Church, a stone’s
throw from the Bank of England, about a dozen bankers and
traders sit around a mahogany table, talking about their addic-
tions. With an antique wooden clock ticking in the background
and takeout sandwiches on the table, men in pinstripe suits and
women in conservative dresses—using first names only—share
stories of the daily challenge of keeping clean.
One equities salesman and recovering addict at St. Michael’s
says the greatest challenge to keeping clean comes at the end of
a workday. “I could take you to four or five pubs a few minutes
from here, walk up to the bar and buy a pint and a gram of coke,”
says the man, who asked that he not be identified. “If you con-
tinue using, you become suicidal.”
A
short underground train ride away, on a warm Thurs-
day evening in August, thousands of bankers spill out of
Yoray Liberman/Getty images (top); daniel acker/bloomberg news
pubs and restaurants in London’s Canary Wharf,
clutching cold beers and mixed drinks. At a bar around
the corner from the London headquarters of Citigroup Inc., Credit
Suisse and Morgan Stanley, a man repeatedly brushes his right
nostril with his thumb while waiting for the barman. In the men’s
restroom at the back of the bar, there’s a smudge of white powder
on the wooden lid of the toilet. When the lid is wiped with a cloth
from London-based testing company Drug-Aware Ltd., a bright-
blue spot emerges, indicating a positive cocaine sample.
City bankers are merely a part of Britain’s culture of hard living.
In September 2005, London’s Daily Mirror newspaper published
photos purporting to show model Kate Moss snorting cocaine
along with her then-boyfriend, musician Pete Doherty. Moss
lost contracts with Burberry Group Plc and Chanel SA after the

incident and attended a rehabilitation A wine bar toilet in
clinic in Arizona. Police didn’t charge Moss London’s Canary
Wharf tests positive
after questioning her about the incident. for cocaine.
At least one cocaine user at a financial
firm was brazen enough to deal the drug from his desk. David
Frith, a 28-year-old banker who worked at Barclays Plc’s office
in Basingstoke, England, was convicted in 2007 of selling drugs
from his desk and received a jail sentence of 71⁄2 years. Police
­listened to Frith’s phone calls, which had been routinely re-
corded by the bank, and tracked his drug runners, according to
a police spokesman. Barclays declined to comment on the inci-
dent. Frith’s Basingstoke-based solicitors, Talbot Walker LLP,
declined to comment.
F
or some, the only escape from addiction is to quit their
City career. Five years ago, Seth Freedman was a
24-year-old private-client broker executing equities
trades for wealthy individuals when his coke habit be-
came all-consuming. His dealer would roll up to his office in a
station wagon with his latest stash.
“I was buzzing at work because of flickering screens, and I
was managing lots of money,” Freedman says, as he smokes a
cigarette and nurses a glass of water at a pub in North London.
“When the market shuts, how do you keep that buzz going?”
In 2004, Freedman was sitting on the roof terrace of Coq
d’Argent restaurant, in the heart of the Square Mile, with both a
30-year-old receptionist and a 16-year-old bottle of Lagavulin
single-malt Scotch whisky in his lap. Thanks to the coke in his
nose, he felt like the king of the City. Yet he woke up the next
morning sporting two bleeding nostrils—and a determination
to get out of his drug hell.
“I didn’t want to be caught up in the
vicious circle of money worship by day,
hard drugs by night, and little to no Cocaine Capital
structure past the next trade I put on or The U.K. has more users than other European nations; the number
of people taking the drug there doubled in the past decade.
the next gram I scored,” he says.
ESTIMATED NUMBER OF COCAINE USERS, 2008
Instead of checking into rehab,
­Freedman decided to join the Israeli
army—solidifying his connections with
a country he had regularly visited as a
child. In a 15-month tour, he used the en-
forced discipline of the military to get fit,
learn to work as a team member and find
Germany: 380,000*
a higher purpose than money. Freedman
quit the Israeli army in 2006, disturbed *2006; includes crack cocaine users. **Percentage of population ages 16 to 59 in England and Wales
who have used cocaine in the year. Source: United Nations
by his stint in the West Bank, to write a
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bloomberg markets November 2009
book about his experiences called Binge Trading: The Real Inside
Story of Cash, Cocaine and Corruption in the City (Penguin, 2009).
Freedman says City bosses push employees to take a short-
term view on both trading and living. “You’re encouraged to be
a gambler and a risk taker,” he says.
Junor, the addict who decided to seek help rather than hang
himself, says his addictions thrived in the City. In 1999, he was
earning £1 million a year as an analyst at BT Alex. Brown and
enjoying boozy lunches with clients. At that point, he only dab-
bled in cocaine.
“Everyone knew I had a drinking problem when I was in the
City,” Junor says. “There were a couple of times where I showed
up to meetings pissed, but that was Neill.”
After Deutsche Bank AG took over BT Alex. Brown in 1999,
Junor helped establish the digital unit at Emap Plc, the U.K.
publishing company that he had covered as an analyst. He
­began using coke heavily as he jetted between homes in Los
­Angeles, London and New York. “I had a fire in me that was
­alcoholism and it had an accelerant thrown on it that was co-
caine,” he says. “Cocaine allows you to keep drinking; it sobers
you up.” He quit the publisher in 2001 and continued taking
­cocaine while living in a West London penthouse loft.
“I’d go to dinner parties where the host was chopping up a big
line of coke on the cheese board,” he recalls. “Cocaine is Lon-
don’s middle-class dirty secret. It’s pervasive.” Junor sought
treatment in a rehab center in southwest London without suc-
cess. Then he tried yoga and Alcoholics Anonymous, attending
90 meetings in 90 days in 2006. He’s been clean ever since.
Salvation came two years ago when he moved to a farm in
­Dorset, in southern England, to raise free-range chickens for a
living. He still wakes up at 6 a.m.—only instead of boarding a
train, he feeds the chickens raised in white sheds spread across
his farm. Junor, who now earns less than £100,000 a year, has re-
married and his new wife recently gave birth to a daughter.
Some drug addicts hit rock bottom after losing their jobs.
One former associate at a global law firm in Canary Wharf used
his salary to support a decade-long cocaine habit. In January, he
lost his job and had £30,000 in tax-free severance money with
nothing to do all day.
ANNUAL PREVALENCE
IN THE U.K.**
U.K.: 1,000,000 3%
Spain: 910,000
2
Italy: 850,000
1
’98 ’00 ’04 ’07 ’08
 ‘Medical people are absolutely bamboozled by the level of abuse going on in the City
and the extreme level of cocaine consumption,’ says one expert in recovery treatment.
“I used lots of coke and gambled,” says the lawyer, 28, who
asked to remain anonymous. “I had early onset of cocaine psy-
chosis. You start to go mad. In the last three months of using, I
saw, or imagined I saw, insects crawling on me.” After an inter-
vention from his family, the lawyer checked into a Priory detox
clinic in London. The recovering lawyer is staying clean by going
to daily addicts’ meetings.
At the recovery facility The Causeway, a helicopter pad sits
next to a turreted Edwardian manor house, which sports a gym,
a 200-year-old billiard table and a recording studio. Wealthy
City bankers take the 20-minute helicopter ride to the secluded
400-acre (162-hectare) Osea Island and pay up to £10,000 a
week for treatment.
“Half the referrals this month have
come in for people in the City who’ve
lost their job, lost their car, everything,
because they’ve leveraged themselves
too high,” Quinn says. “We had a guy
come to the island on a helicopter, and
he took 6 grams of cocaine on the
20-minute journey.”
Although the major insurers, such as
Aetna Inc., Axa SA and British United
Provident Association Ltd., cover rehab
programs at the Causeway and ensure
confidentiality, Quinn says clients from
the U.K.’s financial sector are reluctant
to claim for their treatments.
“People won’t use their company in-
surance policy for mental health or ad-
diction for fear that it will go back to Psychiatrist Philip
their employer,” he says. “They go sick Hopley says alcohol
and drug abuse is
for a month and pay for it themselves part of City culture.
with no record of it happening.”
Moved by the scarcity of treatment choices in Britain,
­private equity executive Jon Moulton tried to establish a
­modern rehab facility—an effort thwarted by the credit crisis.
In ­October 2007, his charitable foundation opened Winthrop
Hall, a 25-room hotel-style center in the Kent countryside,
southeast of London. Many of Winthrop’s patients were
from the City: lawyers, hedge fund managers and even the
CEO of a major foreign bank who spent a lot of time in
the U.K.
In January 2009, Winthrop Hall shut its doors as City job
losses cut people’s ability to pay, says Moulton, who resigned
as man­aging partner of London-based private equity firm
­Alchemy Partners LLP in September. The facility wasn’t up
and running long enough to have treatments covered by pri-
vate ­insurance companies. “It’s one thing to spend £100 on a
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bloomberg markets November 2009
consultation for a drug or alcohol problem,” he says. “It’s an-
other thing to spend £800 a day on residential rehab.”
A company that does not offer help to deal with a drug or
­alcohol problem could face a lawsuit for wrongful dismissal if
it fires someone who has admitted an addiction, says Marco
­Martinez, a former Salomon Brothers investment banker who
checked himself into the Priory in 2000 to treat an addiction to
alcohol and codeine.
“The driving force for banks is fear of litigation,” Martinez
says. “If someone is selling drugs to a mate on the trading floor
and the police find out about it, they will go after the people con-
cerned, but they’ll also go after the employer.” Martinez is now
working with Tactus, a Dutch treatment
provider, to offer banks a new online pro-
gram to deal with alcohol abuse called
lookatyourdrinking.com. He’s planning
another Web site for drug users next year.
U.K. law requires employee consent
for any drug testing. Although pre-­
employment urine testing is now stan-
dard in the City, says Jason Kennedy, of
the London-based headhunting firm
Kennedy Associates, the screenings only
show evidence of cocaine use in the
­previous 72 hours.
“Drug tests are usually booked days in
advance, which in theory gives a candidate
time to clean himself up,” Kennedy says,
adding he’s never had anyone fail a test.
Bankers seeking help can find it right
around the corner. At the eight weekly meetings of drug addicts
in the City, bankers talk about the daily struggle to stay clean.
In the safety of a lunchtime Cocaine Anonymous meeting in
St. Michael’s Church, one woman with a blond bob and a fat
string of pearls says she was terrified of attending for fear of
bumping into a bank colleague. “Then I thought—who cares? I
want to quit my job anyway,” she says, echoing the sentiments
of ex-City fliers Junor and Freedman.
Those survivors say they’re speaking out now to show thou-
sands of anonymous addicts still working in the City that it’s
possible to escape before going to the brink of suicide. Although
Junor has lost his London townhouse and no longer drives a
Porsche, he’s regained something more valuable—his life. ≤
Stephanie Baker is a senior writer at Bloomberg News in London.
stebaker@bloomberg.net Thomas Penny covers European government
in London. tpenny@bloomberg.net
To write a letter to the editor, type MAG <Go> or send an e-mail to
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