The week before he disappeared, Nicholas Leeson kept throwing up in the bathroom at work. Colleagues didn't know why. He had been working hard, perhaps harder than usual. For two months, the security guard at his luxury apartment building in Singapore had been complaining about the noise from Leeson's computer printer. It was grinding out copy from 8 p.m. to 4 a.m.--the hours Wall Street did business 12 time zones away. During the daytime, the young Englishman appeared distracted, almost dour. In the trading pit of the Singapore International Monetary Exchange, where Leeson worked from dawn to 7 p.m. among the other men who yelled at numbers careening across video screens, a fellow trader remembers that people would say hello to him and he wouldn't seem to hear them. At least he didn't respond.
Yet on Tuesday Feb. 21, amid the pit's uproar, Leeson replied quite evenly to a question from an A.P.-Dow Jones reporter curious about rumors that the Englishman was making huge purchases on the Japanese and Singapore exchanges on behalf of his London-based investment bank. Leeson coolly explained that he was "buying Nikkei futures here and selling them there." As simple as that, nothing out of the ordinary. One of Leeson's colleagues at another Barings office in Asia told Time of a phone call with Leeson two days later. "He sounded really weird on the phone, like he was in a really good mood," said the man, who often partied with him in London and Tokyo. "He asked me, 'How's life?' He never asked me anything like that before. It was completely out of character. We talked again later in the day, when he must have already known he was in trouble, but he was still joking around. I asked him to change something in the way he sent reports to us and he said, 'Do you want me to tell you which hand I wrote the report with?'"
At the end of trading that day, Leeson gathered up his notes, walked off the floor and began his getaway. By 11:30 that night, he was out of Singapore, checking into a hotel in the Malaysian capital of Kuala Lumpur, 200 miles to the north. At 7 a.m. on Friday, his wife reportedly jumped into a cab and headed for the airport. In his wake lay a venerable 232-year-old British banking empire rendered suddenly and irretrievably insolvent; half the financial world was reeling in fear, the other half in astonishment. On his office desk was a handwritten note that said "I'm sorry."
It seemed beyond imagining that a bank like Barings could be utterly undone, sapped of more than a billion dollars--nearly twice its available capital--in a few weeks of reckless financial gambling by a single person. Around the world staff members were in shock. Many were about to receive their annual bonuses. Now, in Barings outposts outside Britain, passports were being confiscated, properties frozen, company credit cards rescinded, salaries withheld-just as tax time approached. "We were a bank with a crest, not a trademark," said one Hong Kong employee in dismay. Indeed, Barings was one of the Queen's banks (she could lose as much as $1 million), and the founding family currently boasts five different hereditary peerages, more than any other English clan since the Middle Ages. The Princess of Wales is a great granddaughter of a Baring. But last week control of Barings plc appeared to be going to the Dutch firm ING-for the decidedly nominal amount of $1.60.