Strictly Business
I have been reading about the travails of Jes Staley as he exits his job as CEO of Barclays Bank in London. He has left his post because the UK regulators have done a comprehensive investigation into the way in which he characterized his relationship with Jeffrey Epstein, the indicted and now deceased alleged perpetrator of many sex crimes including and especially involving many young women whose lives have been altered or ruined by their relationship with him. Staley says he will contest the charges and has said that his relationship with Epstein was always purely professional. Staley is just one of many that include Donald Trump, Bill Gates and Prince Andrew that have encountered reputational damage due to their affiliation with Epstein, who is the sexual Torquemada of the modern age. This has intrigued me because I used to know Jes Staley and he was the head of JP Morgan’s Asset Management area when I was the head of that area for Bankers Trust and then Deutsche Bank. I had the opportunity to meet him several times back then when we were collegial competitors and he was one of Jamie Diamond’s fair-haired boys and was on the short list of potential successors to the JP Morgan throne. This is yet again a case of how the mighty have fallen.
The notion of high-powered people falling from grace due to their prurient interests has always intrigued me. I could make up some fantastic story as to why my hidden perversions and my fear of being exposed and discredited are the basis of that salacious interest, but it wouldn’t be true. I have plenty of vices, but they are mostly obvious to the world and as such are not so scandalous. I have enjoyed a perfectly normal (as within the bounds of reasonable acceptability and well short of opprobrium) sex life during my life and may have crossed a line here or there, but not by much and not so often. I often say that as a youth who grew up in Europe in the 60’s I am amazingly straight-laced. I like that way of characterizing it because as everyone knows, Europeans have a much wider band of acceptable sexual behavior than we Puritanical Americans possess as a general rule. When I had my moment of scandal in 2007 (the hedge fund debacle) and made the New York Times, it was about having a blog where I admitted going to see a movie with my wife on a Saturday night during a financial meltdown. I was quite adamant about saying that if that was the worst I ever got tagged with, I was OK with that.
One of the movies that had the most impact on me in this arena was a Jeremy Irons movie made in 1992 called Damage. In that movie, Juliette Binoche is a lovely young woman engaged to Jeremy Irons’ son. Irons is a British Minister and is therefore in the public eye. He gets infatuated with Binoche and proceeds to have an affair with his son’s fiancé. The dramatic end to that affair comes when he is discovered in his love nest by his son, who back up in horror and falls to his death over a stair railing to the stone floor below. The repercussions ruin Irons’ family, his family life, and his career. You next see him in his small abode on a Greek island where he keeps a wall-sized portrait of his family, which included Binoche. The ending monologue is of him commenting that he bumped into Binoche years later in an airport as she rushed through with her toddler son (presumably with her eventual husband). He says to no one in particular that she looked just like any other young mother. The message is quite clear that what seems like the urgency of love in the moment is simply lust in the moment and that its import is fleeting at best when put into the perspective of time and life taken as a whole. It is an amazingly powerful movie and statement about our humanity.
I also especially remember a scene from Taken with Liam Neeson. When he finally locates his abducted daughter, she has just been trafficked at a swanky Parisian house where the proprietor specializes in selling young female horseflesh to the wealthy wonton patrons who prefer to buy and discard their pleasures. After initially getting caught and then freeing himself in one of those great action fight sequences, Neeson shoots the proprietor, who is now wounded on the floor of the elevator. The tuxedoed man looks up at Neeson and gasps that it was not personal, it was just business. Neeson says the obvious that it was personal to him and then he dispatches the man with a bullet in the head. That pre-death entreaty by the proprietor sounds an awful lot like Jes Staley’s comment that his relationship with Jeffrey Epstein was strictly professional.
Meanwhile, people who have seem the details of that investigation, which included some 1,200 email exchanges between Staley and Epstein, a lot by any standard whether professional or personal, suggest that this went way beyond professional. At this point Jes Staley has given up on his career to be sure (he undoubtedly has banked plenty of coin…$120 million by one count… to last him into a comfortable early retirement), but yet he is determined to contest the findings of the investigation. It sounds an awful lot like someone who is hanging on by his fingernails to what’s left of his deeply damaged life. He doesn’t want to find himself in a small apartment on a Greek island I guess. So, he is staying the course on his comments that he did nothing wrong by way of that relationship. I’ll be he was sweating peanut butter when he first heard about the Epstein indictment and arrest.
Those people in the know are wondering aloud why he used such opaque but salacious-sounding references like “Snow White” in his “professional” emails. They also wonder why he would visit Epstein while in prison in Florida for sexual crimes with minors. Why would he sail his personal yacht to Epstein’s private Caribbean island? And then there is the complicating fact that he had one of his daughters get tutored by Epstein about college entry applications (Wow, could Staley be involved in that mess too? With a sex offender no less?)
Let’s face it people, its never strictly business. There is little about business, including and perhaps especially in high finance, that is strictly professional and has no personal angle. Relationship building is part of the game and part of life as human beings. We nurture personal relationships to gain proximity and rapport so that we have an edge in our future dealings. Almost all business people curry favor with one another. In my early days, I drank scotch because my superiors and clients drank scotch. It was only once I realized I no longer had to be a drinker to have a rapport that I stopped drinking scotch. And then there are others who find that encountering others with similar libidinous ways is both gratifying and perhaps liberating. I’ve never sailed my yacht to someone’s island, but I did visit a convicted felon in prison once. He was there for a $40,000 fraud incident that should have been settled as a civil case, but I guess someone might say I am too tainted to opine on Jes Staley and his actions.
I do not judge Jes Staley on the theory that none of us should throw stones whether we live in a glass house or not. I just believe we are all human in our own ways. But I do find the notion that his relationship with Jeffrey Epstein was strictly business is an absurd defense that should be reconsidered.