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In 1989 he was hired in London as a back office clerk doing settlement work, making sure all transactions were accounted and paid for. As the bank continued to ponder its commitment to derivatives, he focused on them. By 1992 he had moved from that job to a position as a roving troubleshooter, jetting off to Indonesia to help set up an office or to Tokyo as part of a team investigating allegations of internal fraud. At the time the Singapore International Monetary Exchange was trying to set itself up as Asia's hot new trading floors. Barings wanted a presence-and Leeson was put on the team assigned to help get it. At first he did settlements as he had done in London. Then, because Barings was short staffed, Leeson began executing trades himself. He was only 25, but as a former colleague puts what must have been the bank's position: "So what? No one else knew anything about developing this kind of business."
Before long Leeson was bringing in tens of millions of dollars. Last year, when the Asian markets were sagging, he was thought to have made $20 million to $36 million for Barings. Just a couple of weeks before the bank's collapse, he boasted to friends that he had been promised a $2 million bonus for the work, in addition to his $350,000 salary, company-financed apartment and limitless travel budget. In Singapore he developed a following. Says one trader: "When all the charts said sell, he would push the market even higher and the locals would go with him." His immediate boss in Singapore was so enamored of Leeson's success that the young man operated virtually without supervision-even though other traders were warning SIMEX authorities that Leeson was a "gunslinger" who should be watched carefully. Singapore traders came to feel that Leeson considered himself invincible. As a currency trader put it, "He began to believe his own press clippings."
THE ACCOLADES-AND THE MONETARY rewards-were gratifying, particularly to a working-class kid, the son of a plasterer from the London suburb of Watford. "He doesn't exactly throw money around," his sister Victoria, 21, told the Watford Observer, "but he feels we shouldn't go without and if he can help us, he does-he's our big brother. He loved his work and would put in up to 20 hours a day. He wanted to make something of himself because he knew he could." The press, she added, "seem to be saying that if you are working class, you don't deserve a top job, that you should work as a dustman or a shop assistant." Leeson never attended college. At 18 he became a junior clerk at Coutts & Co., another prestigious bank. In 1987 he became a clerk at Morgan Stanley. That American corporate pedigree, a mark of aggressiveness, was enough to help him land a job at Barings.
For all of their ambitions, Leeson and his wife Lisa never really seemed to fit into the affluent, neo-colonial life-style of Singapore-nor into the city's multiethnic society. Barings paid Leeson's dues for the Cricket Club, an old establishment institution for British expatriates in Singapore, but he rarely went there. The Leesons' three-bedroom apartment was part of a low-rise building on neatly manicured grounds in one of Singapore's fashionable neighborhoods, where Tamil and Malay workers come in every morning to mow the lawns, wash the cars and sweep the grounds. But the Leesons took their apartment furnished and barely decorated it, adding almost no personal touches.