4.

Uncle Tony and Amber Day

There was a single house among the flats on Titchfield Road, a turning on the edge of Regent’s Park. Its loneliness was exaggerated by the metal bars its owner had installed across the front windows, which were also coated with blast-resistant film. In the early 1990s, 3 Titchfield Road was the address of a man called Tony Schneider and his wife, Vassiliki, known as Julie.

Schneider was a crook and a loan shark with connections to violent crime. Although he came from the East End, he looked and dressed like an Italian mob boss, his suits immaculately tailored and his dyed black hair slicked back from his forehead. Schneider had a small hump on his shoulder. He walked with a slight limp, which he claimed was the result of an injury he had sustained falling through a glass skylight while burgling a stocking factory in his teens. John O’Connor, a former head of Scotland Yard’s Flying Squad, said, ‘He had the blackest eyes I’ve ever seen on a human being. To me, he looked like a character out of Charles Dickens.’

Schneider sat at the intersection between the business community and the criminal underworld. Through money lending, he knew some of the most prominent City figures of the late 1980s, including Ted Ball, a brash financier whose leasing business counted Bob Geldof and Terry Venables as customers. Charging interest rates of 50 per cent or more also gave Schneider the need for edgier friends. One of his protection men was Jimmy Evans, an erratic villain who was infamous for having blasted a love rival in the testicles with a sawn-off shotgun. O’Connor, who came to know Schneider after he left Scotland Yard for the investigations agency Kroll in 1993, said, ‘I would place him as untouchable, virtually. He had so many fingers in the pie that anybody that set up an action group to target him, he’d know about it. He was a manipulator and a user and a controller, and was held in the highest regard – and in some cases fear.’

Between the early 1970s and the early 1990s, Schneider was a significant figure in Philip Green’s life. Schneider was born into a Russian émigré family on the Boundary estate in Shoreditch in 1923. His father was a cabinet maker. His mother looked after their three sons. Schneider was the ‘black sheep’, according to one of his closest former associates. He moved from Shoreditch to a bedsit in the basement of a hotel in Belsize Park, then to a flat in the Quadrangle building near Edgware Road, which was used to film the opening scenes of the 1971 Michael Caine gangster film Get Carter. In his teens and twenties, Schneider was a protégé of Jack ‘Spot’ Comer, one of the East End’s most powerful crime bosses before the rise of Ronnie and Reggie Kray. Jack Spot, so called for the black mole on his left cheek, was best known as the suspected mastermind of a failed plot to steal £1.25 million’s worth of gold and diamonds from a security depot at Heathrow airport in 1948. Perhaps because of his affiliation with Comer, who was a rival of the Krays in Hackney, Schneider had his jaw broken by the twins on one occasion. According to his old associate, the Krays arranged to meet Schneider at a snooker hall in Whitechapel. As he sat down, they offered him a cigarette. The loan shark leaned forward, his mouth relaxed and ‘Ronnie Kray bashed him with a knuckle-duster’.

Green met Schneider through job buying. According to several people who knew them in the 1970s, Schneider used to lend Green money for parcel deals. ‘He’d borrow maybe £5,000, £6,000, £7,000 – not hundreds,’ said one. Green looked up to Schneider, whom he called ‘Uncle Tony’. He tried to copy Schneider’s menacing charm, rasping Cockney accent and withering one-liners. In return, the loan shark viewed the middle-class pretender with amusement and contempt. ‘He wasn’t bothered about Philip,’ said Schneider’s associate. ‘He used to laugh at him. Tony would say, “Philip, stop it. I know who you are and where you come from. Kid the other people, don’t kid me.” ’ One of Schneider’s neighbours asked why he disliked Green so much. ‘If you’re earning money out of him, what’s the bloody problem?’ he said. Schneider apparently replied, ‘Well, he’s a fat prick, and you don’t know him.’

Schneider’s day would start at 10 a.m., when he would get up and wander around in a dressing gown, waiting for the first borrower to arrive. Visitors would almost unfailingly be offered a ham sandwich and a cup of tea. Julie, who had met Schneider while working as a waitress in King’s Cross, would clank around in the kitchen, swearing under her breath. ‘All of a sudden you could have five or six people sitting there, and most of ’em knew one another,’ said his former associate. Schneider’s heavies, Jimmy Evans and Terry Plummer, a part-time film and TV extra, maintained a background presence. Evans, a professional bank robber and safe blower, wore his receding red hair long at the back. He could be unpredictable. A few days before Christmas 1964, he knocked on the door of a rival in south London, George Foreman, whom Evans suspected was sleeping with his wife. In his autobiography, The Survivor, Evans said he called out ‘Happy Christmas, you cunt!’ and fired a shotgun at Foreman’s crotch. When the case came to trial, the prosecution put 279 of the shot’s 280 pellets into a jar as evidence. ‘They couldn’t find the last one but they’d dug all the rest out of his groin and the wall behind him,’ Evans wrote. (He was acquitted after Foreman declined to identify him as the gunman.)

At the end of his day, Schneider would often walk over to the Victoria Sporting Club on Edgware Road. It was illegal for casinos to lend gamblers money to keep playing, but as a third party Schneider would discreetly cash cheques for desperate punters. His links with gambling led some in Scotland Yard to believe he was connected to the murder of Andre Mizelas, a society hairdresser who was shot dead as he drove to work along the south side of Hyde Park on 9 November 1970. Mizelas was believed to be mired in gambling debts.

Schneider’s flat in the Quadrangle, where he lived until he moved to Titchfield Road in the early 1990s, was nicknamed ‘Little Marbella’ for the crowd of orange-tanned businessmen it attracted. There was Ted Ball, the bald, braying boss of Landhurst Leasing, to whom Schneider referred bigger borrowers in return for kickbacks; Harold Tillman, the lean and wheedling chairman of the Honorbilt menswear group, who did not borrow from Schneider but dropped in for gossip; and Scot Young, an aspiring property developer from Dundee who was later believed to have become mixed up with London’s notorious Adams crime family. After the mid-1970s, Green had no need for Schneider’s money, but he continued to call and visit. He liked to keep Uncle Tony onside. ‘Philip was frightened of him,’ said Schneider’s former associate. ‘Not frightened so much physically, but frightened of his mouth, ’cos Tony would belittle him.’

Green’s odd relationship with Schneider came back to haunt him when he made his next move. In 1986, the year he left Lee Cooper, Margaret Thatcher’s ‘Big Bang’ stock market revolution blew away the remnants of the Victorian-style City encountered by Sir Charles Clore. Over the coming years, American banks injected a macho Wall Street culture into London’s financial centre – an epochal change described by the historian Philip Augar in The Death of Gentlemanly Capitalism. In 1987, as Thatcher won a landslide third election victory, turnover of share dealing rose by £100 billion to £283 billion. The atmosphere was captured by the Harry Enfield character Loadsamoney, an obnoxious plasterer who waved wads of banknotes around. The boom came to a dramatic end in October 1987, when a sudden rise in US interest rates knocked confidence on Wall Street. A burst of panic-selling in Hong Kong moved across to London, where the sense of chaos was exacerbated by the worst storm in decades. Between ‘Black Monday’ on 19 October 1987 and the following day, the stock market fell by 22 per cent. It was the first real City crash since 1974, and it traumatized a generation of investors.

Before the market turned sour, a consortium led by Irvine Sellar, founder of the Mates flared trousers chain, bought a 29 per cent stake in Amber Day, a lacklustre clothing manufacturer. A year later, in August 1988, Sellar engineered a fiddlier deal. He and his partners sold a menswear retailer called Review to Amber Day in return for shares, which they placed with Green and Blue Arrow, a recruitment company chaired by Tony Berry, one of the City’s rising stars. Amber Day was a name that would come to have huge resonance for Green and his growing band of critics in the business mainstream over the next four years.

Green paid £3.1 million for a 16.4 per cent stake. Blue Arrow paid £1.8 million for 9.6 per cent. Berry was a grammar-school boy from Edmonton in north London who had steered Blue Arrow into the FTSE 100 through the takeover of Manpower, an American competitor more than twice its size. Berry had trialled for Tottenham Hotspur in his youth, and in 1987 Green had persuaded his friend Irving Scholar, Spurs’ chairman, to make Berry a non-executive director of his beloved club. A year later, Berry returned the favour. Although Green boasted of investing more than £3 million of his own money in Amber Day, £300,000 came from Blue Arrow in the form of an undisclosed and unsecured loan. A letter to Green from Berry’s deputy, David Atkins, said Blue Arrow had been ‘disappointed to learn that you are unable to find the £3.1m’. It said the recruitment company had ‘no alternative’ but to lend him the money for a year. Green was installed as Amber Day’s chief executive. Atkins joined the board as a non-executive director.

Green’s arrival as the boss of a public company put him on the radar of the national press for the first time. Amber Day’s stock market quote also gave him new financial clout. One of Green’s first moves was to make a vengeful takeover approach for his old employer, Lee Cooper, by then renamed Vivat. Years later, Green told the BBC’s Robert Peston that he did it ‘just for a bit of sport’ and ‘it really pissed them off’. Through the abortive bid, he met Sir Laurie Magnus, an amiable investment banker who was advising Vivat. Green should have hated Magnus, a baronet who was educated at Eton and Oxford, but Magnus was impressed by Green’s grasp of Vivat’s trading numbers and the way he ran rings around its French directors. Green must have sensed the warmth, because after the deal died he rang Magnus and said, ‘I’d like you to be on my side next time.’ Samuel Montagu, Magnus’s employer, had a record of working with risk-taking entrepreneurs such as Jimmy Gulliver, whose Argyll Group triggered a multibillion-pound bidding war for the Distillers Company in 1985 (although the merchant bank would later come spectacularly unstuck with its work for the Mirror Group pension plunderer Robert Maxwell). Magnus checked out Green with the bank’s librarian, who kept an index of anyone who had appeared in Private Eye’s Slicker column. At that point, Green’s name was fairly unblemished. Magnus became the first in a long line of City grandees to be lured in by the perceived glamour of the wisecracking trader. Green’s irreverent sense of humour made him an attractive diversion from Magnus’s more strait-laced clients, and for Green the presence of Magnus gave him a badge of respectability.

Amber Day’s new boss had discovered Hong Kong in his time at Martin Geminder (‘Very fast. Very quick. Nobody goes to sleep,’ he told The Guardian in 2004). He set about cutting costs and moving production to Asia. In Green’s first year, sales fell by 14.3 per cent to £8.6 million, but pre-tax profits more than tripled to £503,000. Ronald Metzger, the outgoing chairman, saluted his ‘energetic’ successor, who was to become executive chairman. In June 1989, Amber Day bought a second, more upmarket menswear chain, Woodhouse, and in September it made a flaky takeover approach for Moss Bros, the suit-hire business. Around the same time, Green tried to mount a takeover bid for Sears, the remains of Clore’s retail empire, which still included Selfridges. Green persuaded an American investment bank, Citi, to fly over what one insider described as ‘an army’ of advisers. When Citi’s bankers looked at Amber Day’s tiny size in comparison to Sears, they laughed at Green and flew home. Nevertheless, in his second year, Green announced a near-doubling in sales to £15.7 million and a quadrupling of profits to £2.1 million.

Jeff Randall, City editor of the Sunday Times, stumbled across the whip-smart newcomer while looking for sources to tell him about a rumoured boardroom rift at Tottenham Hotspur. He found Green beguiling and witty, and quickly realized that he was also deliciously indiscreet. Randall marvelled to colleagues about how Green managed to make himself the middleman in so many deals, so becoming a veritable ‘supermarket’ of stories. Green invited the ambitious young journalist to wine-fuelled dinners at his home on Avenue Road with eclectic guest lists, where the likes of Michael Knighton, a moustachioed property tycoon who tried to take over Manchester United, sat next to Jilly Johnson, a Page Three model. These were the days when business journalism – Sunday business journalism in particular – was about getting close to influential figures and trading favourable coverage for the inside track on big stories. Randall began to call Green every Friday. He talked up Amber Day’s prospects, telling readers the company’s ‘hyperactive’ boss was ‘lining up support from several large merchant banks for a blockbusting move’.

Green’s reputation was growing, but Tony Berry’s career collapsed almost overnight in December 1988. To fund its takeover of Manpower in 1987, Blue Arrow had raised £837 million through what was then Britain’s biggest-ever rights issue – the sale of new shares. The rights issue was a flop: just 38 per cent of Blue Arrow’s investors participated. To disguise its failure, Blue Arrow’s advisers, County NatWest and UBS Phillips & Drew, secretly bought some of the shares themselves after the deadline had passed. They then misled the stock market by saying that 50 per cent had been sold, and manipulated disclosure rules to avoid revealing their purchase of more than 13 per cent, which they planned to drip out into the market quietly. The arrangement was exposed by the Black Monday crash of October 1987, which forced County NatWest to announce heavy losses on its hidden Blue Arrow shareholding. In December 1988, the Department of Trade and Industry announced an inquiry into County NatWest’s role.

In parallel, Blue Arrow was torn apart by a power struggle between Berry and the American boss of Manpower, Mitchell Fromstein. Berry forced Fromstein to resign, prompting a rebellion among Manpower’s US franchisees. Pressure mounted on Berry after news of the DTI investigation broke, and Fromstein returned through a counter-coup in January 1989, taking the title of chief executive and relegating Berry to non-executive chairman. In April, Fromstein shocked Blue Arrow’s shareholders by revealing a previously undisclosed £25 million loan – an amount representing a third of the previous year’s profits. The recipient turned out to be Peter de Savary, a lively property developer whose America’s Cup yachting challenge had been sponsored by Blue Arrow. It was curtains for Berry, who had made the loan without proper board approval. He resigned two days later. The Times reported, ‘Tony Berry, the stock market star, finally came to earth last night. He left the City headquarters of the group he created, almost certainly for the last time, in pouring rain and drove off into the night.’

The DTI launched a new inquiry into the de Savary affair in May 1989. Blue Arrow disclosed its £300,000 loan to Green the same month. Although Blue Arrow sold its shares in Amber Day that June and Green repaid his debt in August, news of the relationship was damaging for two reasons. First, Green was rumoured to have lined up Berry as chairman, but to have been dissuaded by Amber Day’s stockbroker, Hoare Govett, which pointed out Berry’s obvious conflict of interests. Second, it hinted at Green’s links to a web of businessmen – some of them distinctly unsavoury – centred around Tottenham Hotspur. Private Eye started to make the connection in June 1989. It described Green as a ‘supporter pal of Berry’.

When the DTI published its report into the de Savary affair in 1991, it revealed more links between the two. Green had lent Berry £275,000 of Amber Day’s money in December 1988 to help him buy 400,000 shares in Spurs. Berry had repaid the loan in January, but some of Amber Day’s institutional shareholders were alarmed at the corporate governance breach and the amount of time Green seemed to be spending interfering with the football club. One of them thought that Green was ‘hand in hand’ with Terry Venables, Spurs’ manager. In his autobiography, Superfan, a Spurs obsessive called Morris Keston described watching Green try and fail to help Venables buy the club from Irving Scholar during an evening meeting at Amber Day’s Baker Street offices on the Friday before the 1991 FA Cup final. Keston said that Green tore up his £1 million cheque when Scholar insisted on closing the deal that night.

In May 1990, the Sunday Times broke news of an abrupt change in direction at Amber Day. It revealed that Green was planning to buy What Everyone Wants, a chain of forty discount shops based in Glasgow. What Everyone Wants had been set up in 1971 by the husband-and-wife team Gerald and Vera Weisfeld, who accepted their customers’ £10 Provident Financial cheques and sold fashions at the lowest possible prices. The Weisfelds were tough, quirky operators who ran What Everyone Wants like a family. They encouraged their staff to sing and rewarded them with cars and cash bonuses for hitting sales targets. The Weisfelds had decided to step back from business and dedicate themselves to charity after a plane they were travelling in caught fire over Rio de Janeiro and was forced to make an emergency landing, but Vera was reluctant to sell their baby to Green. Tina won the day for her fiancé by calling Gerald and begging him, ‘Philip really needs this deal.’

To amuse the Weisfelds, Green arranged for the Coldstream Guards’ band to march in during the deal’s closing dinner. At £47 million, What Everyone Wants was twice Amber Day’s size, but the move initially pleased the City. Sales leapt to £31.2 million in 1990 and then £103 million in 1991. Pre-tax profits went from £3 million to £10.1 million. Having stood at 42.5p when Green arrived, Amber Day’s shares shot up to a peak of 129p in November 1991, making it one of the best performers that year. Green’s pay packet increased by 50 per cent to £450,000, including a bonus. The first cracks appeared when Gerald Weisfeld walked out after six months. Vera Weisfeld, who left at the time of the sale, said, ‘It changed very quickly … The prices went up, and the Glasgow people are streetwise.’ The Sunday Times continued its unwavering support for Green, but other papers began to question his leadership. John Jay, who was then City editor of the Sunday Telegraph, said Amber Day needed ‘a more measured hand on the tiller’ and mentioned that one of Green’s heroes was Robert Maxwell, prompting Green to offer him ‘a kick in the bollocks’. When David Hellier, an Independent journalist, wrote a short piece accusing him of comprehensively denying a story that turned out to be true, Amber Day’s boss roared, ‘I just thought you should know I tore your fucking article out and put it under the cat’s arse where it fucking well belongs.’ A dossier of unflattering details about the personal finances of another critic, Dominic Prince at the Sunday Express, was couriered to rival papers – followed by calls from Green to gauge the recipients’ reactions. These were tastes of trouble to come.

In June 1991, Amber Day raised £24.4 million through a rights issue to pay down debt taken on to fund What Everyone Wants. As a condition of the fundraising, institutional investors such as Midland Montagu, John Govett & Co. and the Prudential insisted that Green hire a finance director and two non-executives to give the board a more sober feel. Graham Coles, the new finance director, and Leslie Warman, the first non-executive, joined in the late summer. Coles and Warman were amazed by the shambles they discovered. Amber Day’s ‘guv’nor’, as he called himself, would typically arrive at Baker Street at 10 a.m. after a late night in the casino. There were no proper board meetings, board papers or monthly financial accounts. A cast of characters apparently unconnected with Amber Day’s business traipsed in and out, including a property dealer known as ‘Black Jack’ Dellal and the rag trader Harold Tillman. According to a colleague, when Green was not flying to Glasgow or Asia, he would sit in his office ‘showing off, doing several telephone calls at the same time, wheeling and dealing’. Hoare Govett and Laing & Cruickshank, Amber Day’s first two brokers, had resigned – apparently because Green kept interfering with the trading of the company’s shares. Green boasted to the new directors that he had a ‘direct line’ to the market maker at the replacement stockbroker, Smith New Court. His contact there was named Richard Osmond, although Green insisted on calling him ‘Donny’. ‘You would hear about him placing loose shares,’ said a source who was close to the board. ‘The business of the chief executive is to be shifting jeans and T-shirts, not placing lines of stock.’

In New Year 1992, Green went to Hong Kong and Sri Lanka on business. In mid-January, while he was away, Amber Day’s shares suddenly fell off a cliff. The price dropped by more than a third to 66p in a fortnight. Jeff Randall at the Sunday Times thought the strange collapse bore the hallmark of a ‘professional bear raider’ – a speculator who sells a stock short, then wages ‘an undercover campaign of lies and misinformation’ to drive the price down. Attention focused on Simon Cawkwell, a comically fat trader who resembled a character from a P. G. Wodehouse novel, after a critical journalist received a letter thanking him ‘on behalf of all public schoolboys bullying Philip Green’, signed ‘EK’. Cawkwell went by the name Evil Knievel. Cawkwell later denied being the shadowy spiv who spread rumours from a phone box. ‘I haven’t used telephone boxes since I was a teenager,’ he said. However, he admitted that he had made ‘several terms’ school fees’ betting against Amber Day: ‘You could not, in my humble opinion, run that business from St John’s Wood when it was operating in Glasgow.’ Cawkwell sold the shares short on the basis that Green struck him as ‘a joke character’.

The slide in Amber Day’s share price brought simmering tensions between Green and his new colleagues to the boil. In late January, while Green was still in Asia, Graham Coles called an emergency board meeting. The most worrying item on the agenda was his discovery that Green had bought a wholesale parcel of videos on the grey market and sold it to a friend, Stephen Kay, the head of a company called Intervision. Kay still owed Green £2 million for the videos, but in the previous fortnight Kay had bought almost 400,000 Amber Day shares, slowing the steep fall in the share price. To Coles and the other directors this looked dangerously like an illegal share support operation, where a buyer is incentivized to prop up a company’s stock. Kay had bought the shares through Bikuben-Whitefriars, a firm of stockbrokers that had already barred Green as a client after becoming uncomfortable about certain trades he had carried out. By phone, Green assured Sir Laurie Magnus there was nothing untoward, and when he returned to London he said the amount outstanding from Intervision was less than £1 million. Magnus channelled Franklin D. Roosevelt, telling Amber Day’s directors the only thing they had to fear was ‘fear itself’ – meaning they should not worry about City gossip and should concentrate on the positives. The board accepted Green’s answers, but the incident was terminal for Green and Coles, who was also concerned that Green seemed to have borrowed heavily from Barclays against his stake in Amber Day, leaving him facing personal financial ruin if the share price fell further.

Green had more problems. Some of Amber Day’s shareholders picked up unsettling rumours of company staff being transferred to help his wife, Tina, with her struggling boutique in Knightsbridge. Harabels went bust in April 1992. Green, who had taken a debenture over the business three months earlier, controlled the process and installed as receiver his old Tollington grammar friend Panos Eliades, who had become an insolvency professional. Eliades had managed the demise of Tarbrook, the imports business set up by Green and his mother. He had also acted as receiver to two other Green companies, Buzzville and Cupcraft. Eliades said, ‘We kept in touch, and when he was in trouble, obviously who would he go to? I suppose he went to his old school pal.’ Private Eye noted that Eliades lived next door to Roger ‘Ferret’ Levitt, a bow tie-wearing, cigar-chomping insurance salesman. Eliades had stood bail for Levitt when he was arrested for theft after his Levitt Group collapsed with debts of £34 million in 1990. Green had introduced Levitt to Tony Berry, who had tried to put Blue Arrow into a joint venture with Levitt and also considered using him as his personal financial adviser. Tina soon opened a new boutique in Mayfair, named Alma – perhaps a tribute to Green’s mother. It was on South Molton Street, in a shop previously occupied by Amber Day’s Woodhouse brand. The lines between Green’s family, friends and business interests appeared to be very blurred. He did not react well to questions about the overlap. When John Jay at the Sunday Telegraph mentioned Tina’s problems with Harabels, Green told him, ‘I don’t mind you writing about me, but if you write about my wife things could get uncomfortable.’ ‘What does that mean?’ Jay asked. ‘I will leave you to be the judge of that,’ Green replied.

In a June 1992 issue, Private Eye unpicked the relationship between Green and Tony Schneider. It said that Schneider, his wife Julie and their company, Eastcheap General Trading, had at various times owned 255,000 Amber Day shares worth more than £150,000. The Slicker column had already asked, ‘Just why a man who has featured as a target criminal for Scotland Yard’s organized crime squad – he was acquitted in the 1970s on charges concerning alleged pornography and extortion – should be investing in Green’s company remains to be explained.’ According to Schneider’s old associate, Green encouraged him to buy shares in the company, promising they would continue to rise. The loan shark was none too pleased when the share price fell consistently for the next few months. Eventually, Green offered to buy Schneider out at the original price. Green then sold the shares for a profit. Schneider was outraged. ‘Tony phoned Philip up and he’s screaming and shouting, and Philip made a remark to him that he didn’t like,’ Schneider’s friend recalled. ‘He said, “Well, you’re over twenty-one.” ’

The disputed investment in Amber Day led to one of the most notorious incidents of Green’s career. A few years later, in November 1996, Green came across Schneider at Langan’s Brasserie in Mayfair, one of the most fashionable restaurants of the time. Schneider was having lunch with friends. When Green bounded over to say hello, Schneider leapt up and punched him in the face twice, sending him sprawling. According to a bystander, the manager hurried to help Green to his feet. Schneider apparently said, ‘Leave that prick where he is. He can crawl out.’ There was a ripple of appreciative applause and several diners stood to raise their glasses in a toast. One onlooker told the Mail on Sunday, ‘It quite put me off my spinach soufflé.’

(When he heard that I was looking into Tony Schneider for this book, Green told me, ‘You really are a sick fucker.’ He insisted that Schneider had ‘no relevance to my business career whatsoever’, and said he had ‘no recollection’ of the Langan’s story. ‘If I went into Langan’s twice in my life it would be a lot,’ Green said. ‘It’s a load of rubbish.’ He did not quite deny having borrowed from Schneider in the 1970s, although he said, ‘You got evidence of that? Show me the cheques.’)

Most of Green’s friends were connected in some way. Through Schneider, Green was linked to Ted Ball, the hard-drinking boss of Landhurst Leasing. Ball had grown up on a council estate in south London and felt the need to prove himself by throwing money around. When Landhurst secured a £120 million credit line from a syndicate of banks led by Guinness Mahon in 1990, he gifted all his staff Dom Pérignon champagne and Montblanc fountain pens. Landhurst, which lent money to the likes of Frank Warren, the boxing promoter, was put into receivership in August 1992 when its bankers discovered a black hole in its accounts. Records soon showed that Schneider’s company, Eastcheap General Trading, had leased an Aston Martin Zagato, a Bentley Turbo R and two Mercedes from Landhurst. Green had leased a £60,000 kitchen for his home in St John’s Wood and a £160,000 Cougar Sportscat powerboat. Harabels had leased a Mercedes 300SL. Amber Day had leased a Bentley Turbo, a Jaguar Sovereign and a Saab Turbo. Tony Berry had borrowed £800,000 for antique furniture and cars. Terry Venables had borrowed £1 million to buy shares in Spurs. Private Eye described Green’s circle as a ‘clique … united by a love of Tottenham Hotspur as well as their wallets’.

The steady drip of allegations about Green’s private life and the see-sawing of Amber Day’s share price began to spook some of its biggest shareholders. A fund manager at one of the investment institutions felt that he was being compromised by Green, who would call him constantly with informal updates about Amber Day, in contravention of City practice. He said, ‘I got hauled in by my management and told in no uncertain terms that if I didn’t step back, I would be sacked. I was pretty appalled by the things I was learning and I couldn’t get away from it fast enough.’ The fund manager said that after he stopped answering Green’s calls, Amber Day’s boss leaked his name to the press, which he interpreted as a veiled threat ‘not to shoot my mouth off’. He decided that Green was a ‘nasty, vicious character’.

By May 1992, Green and Graham Coles were no longer speaking. Green was avoiding Leslie Warman altogether. On the last Sunday of that month, Coles and Warman visited Green at home in St John’s Wood. They threatened to leave unless the boss agreed to separate the roles of chairman and chief executive, and bring in the second non-executive director he had promised. The next day, Warman gave Sir Laurie Magnus a handwritten note headed ‘Secret memorandum’, warning that he was close to walking out. It said, ‘Since the January problems (which you know have not been resolved) trust on the board has not been what it should be … It goes without saying that I would have preferred it if matters had not reached this point.’ A week later, there was what one source called a ‘High Noon’ stand-off at a rare board meeting. The motion to split the roles of chairman and chief executive was put to a vote by the board, which was packed with Green supporters such as Ian Grabiner and Elaine Gray, both of whom he had promoted from What Everyone Wants. They voted against Warman’s suggestion. The following Sunday, Jeff Randall broke the news of Coles’ and Warman’s departures. He reported that Coles had been headhunted by First Leisure, a disco operator, and that Warman was leaving owing to ‘a disagreement with Green over corporate strategy’ – which was not strictly accurate, given that the dispute had been about Green’s dominance. Randall went on to say that Green had been ‘subjected to a campaign of personal abuse, including hate-mail at his north London home, and anonymous faxes at his office. Newspapers have probed his private life and have delved into the business problems of his wife, Tina, who recently had their second child.’

Randall believed there was a vein of anti-Semitism to some of the City criticism of Green. It was two years after the Guinness share-trading trial, when three Jewish defendants (and a fourth who had a Jewish father) had been convicted of market manipulation for helping to prop up the share price of Guinness while it tried to take over a rival, Distillers. Several Gentile bankers, including the City grandee David Mayhew of Cazenove, had walked free. Randall told friends that his support of Green had prompted anonymous letters calling him a ‘Jew lover’. On one occasion he was even said to have received photocopies of cartoons printed by Julius Streicher, a publisher of grotesque Jewish caricatures in Nazi-era Germany. However, it is worth noting that both of Green’s most vociferous critics, John Jay of the Sunday Telegraph and Leslie Warman on the board of Amber Day, were themselves Jewish. Jay in particular felt that Green’s behaviour was offensive to the code of Jewish business ethics, which holds as a key principle that both sides of any transaction should benefit. According to Talmudic tradition, the first question asked of those who pass into the next world is, ‘Were you honest in business?’

Green’s victory over his City babysitters turned out to be pyrrhic. The departures of Coles and Warman stripped him of credibility. News of their departure was accompanied by a profit warning. A few months later, in September 1992, Amber Day delivered pre-tax profits of £7.5 million – far less than the £16 million Green had originally promised, and a decline on the previous year’s £10 million. It was enough for Amber Day’s three leading shareholders to demand his head. Sir Laurie Magnus delivered the news by phone to Green, who was eventually persuaded that it would be less embarrassing to stand down than to be forced out. He issued an angry statement blaming ‘adverse and undeserved publicity’. ‘Not a moment too soon,’ was the verdict of the Sunday Telegraph. In the Sunday Times, Jeff Randall wrote that Green had ‘walked on the wild side, and his enemies would not let him forget it’. But the farewell results also revealed a £6 million loss on the sale of Review and Woodhouse to their founder, who was working with Green’s friend Harold Tillman. The bear raiders had been on to something.

Aged forty, with a wife and two young children, Green was back where he had started: unemployed, and smarting with an acute sense of failure. From Carmel College to Bond Street Bandit, Lee Cooper and now Amber Day, his career had been an uninterrupted series of calamities. Amber Day was a more public humiliation than the others. It gave Green a deep loathing of the City and its conventions. Inexplicably chippy, despite his education at one of the most expensive private schools in Britain, he ‘felt very strongly the establishment was out to get him’, according to a banker who tried to help him cling on at Amber Day.

In the years to come, Green would be contemptuous about ‘all those tossers running public companies’ and ‘people [in the City] talking off-the-record in their posh accents’. For the time being, he had to console himself with a £1.1 million payoff, described as ‘obscene’ by The Guardian. His replacement, David Thompson, defended Green, who agreed to stay on as a consultant for three months. However, 1992’s pre-tax profits of £7.5 million were later revised to a loss of £7.8 million, and Amber Day lost a further £2.1 million in 1993. There were further write-downs on the menswear business sold to Harold Tillman. Green’s ignominious exit was capped by leaked news of a DTI investigation into Amber Day. DTI inspectors interviewed the main players but took no further steps. One individual who was interviewed thought the process ‘amateurish’ and said he was ‘amazed and appalled nothing ever came out’.

Green’s circle of friends seemed to be cursed. The DTI published its report into Blue Arrow’s £25 million loan to Peter de Savary, which had been intended for a development at Canvey Island in Essex. It described Tony Berry as ‘likeable and charming’ but concluded that he had failed to show ‘acceptable conduct for someone in a position of authority of a public company’. Peter Lilley, the trade secretary, sought Berry’s disqualification as a director. The DTI pursued Berry for five years but finally gave up in 1994, by which point he had run up £1.1 million in legal costs and gone through ‘untold pain and suffering’. He never held a major City job again, although he remained Tottenham Hotspur’s deputy chairman. The Serious Fraud Office initially secured the conviction of four bankers involved in Blue Arrow’s 1987 rights issue, but five months later an appeal judge ruled the trial unfair and overturned the verdicts.

Ted Ball’s wild behaviour came to worry his friends. He kept a double-decker bus and a tank in the garden of his mansion in East Sussex, where he hosted extravagant parties. He drank Chablis in the office during the day and moved on to Bacardi and champagne at night. There was an infamous story about a charity auction at a banqueting hall below the Western Marble Arch synagogue, where Ball was said to have made the winning bid for a signed football, then drunkenly kicked it up into a chandelier, sending fragments of glass shattering. He apparently told the distraught maître d’ he would cover the cost – about £10,000 – and continued to smash the chandelier to pieces, insisting that he now owned it.

When Landhurst Leasing collapsed, many of its loans turned out to be backed by worthless collateral. Ball and his finance director were charged with fraud for accepting bribes from the owners of the Brabham Formula One racing team in return for loose loans, including money advanced against racing cars with no engines. As the court heard stories about briefcases of cash being handed over on the M1, Ball pleaded guilty to eight charges and was sentenced to three years in jail in 1997. He died a few years after his release. The administrators appointed to Landhurst uncovered a morass of excess. They had to liquidate ‘so many bloody Ferraris’ they affected the market for supercars, according to a source who was involved in the administration. He explained that Landhurst’s borrowers were divided into two camps. ‘There was a group around Philip Green and his associates, but there was also a group of fairly unpleasant people,’ he said. ‘There were drug dealers and someone that had a conviction for murder.’

Landhurst’s demise would prove catastrophic for Terry Venables, the Tottenham Hotspur boss (and later England manager). In 1991, Venables had bought Spurs with Alan Sugar, the Amstrad tycoon. The pair fell out viciously over money and the way Venables was running the club. In 1993 and 1994, the BBC’s Panorama programme revealed that £2 million of Venables’ initial investment in Spurs had come from Norfina, a finance company. A further £1 million to take up the issue of new shares had come from Landhurst. Venables had pledged the assets of four pubs owned by a company called Transatlantic Inns as security for the Landhurst loan. There were two problems: he had ceased to be a director of Transatlantic two months beforehand, and one of the pubs – The Miners in Cardiff – did not exist. After a lengthy DTI investigation, Venables decided not to contest nineteen different charges. He was banned from acting as a director for seven years in 1997, although he was still allowed to work as a coach.

Roger Levitt, the financial adviser who lived next to Green’s schoolfriend Panos Eliades, left 18,000 clients facing destitution when his Levitt Group fell apart – including the thriller writer Frederick Forsyth, who lost £2.2 million. Levitt declared himself bankrupt. Desperate to secure his conviction, the SFO agreed to whittle down sixty-two charges to one of fraudulently trading in return for a guilty plea. There was outrage when Levitt walked free from court with a 180-hour community service sentence in 1993, proclaiming his innocence despite having been branded ‘thoroughly and markedly dishonest’ by the judge. But he became the first person in Britain to be banned for life from working in financial services, and he was struck off as a director for seven years. Levitt fled to New York to work as a boxing promoter just before the DTI issued a warrant for his arrest for breaking the terms of his director’s ban in 1996. The DTI failed to extradite him and he stayed in America with his family.

Sir Laurie Magnus’s association with Philip Green dented his reputation. Beyond Amber Day, however, Samuel Montagu had a bigger problem in the form of Robert Maxwell, the belligerent tycoon who was found to have looted £425 million from the Mirror Group’s pension funds after his dead body was found floating by his yacht off the Canary Islands in November 1991. The DTI eventually censured the merchant bank over its role in the stock-market listing of the Mirror Group, but in any case Samuel Montagu was subsumed into HSBC in 1992 as part of HSBC’s takeover of its parent company, the Midland Bank. Magnus, who left three years later, said of Green, ‘I and my colleagues knew there was some reputational risk in working for him. Looking back, I don’t regret it … He felt there was some sort of establishment vendetta against him. I sympathized with him. He faced real prejudice at times.’

Tony Schneider died of a heart attack in May 2003, aged seventy-nine. According to his former associate, he was on holiday at the time with his wife, Julie, in the flat he had bought her near Athens. His last words when he woke up at 4 a.m. with heart pains were said to have been, ‘Make me a cup of tea.’ Schneider left Julie an estate worth £273,180. She fell out with Schneider’s closest friends over money, sold their house near Regent’s Park and moved to a suburban road in Wood Green, north-east London, where she installed bars over the doors and windows. Schneider’s funeral at Edgwarebury cemetery in north London was attended by several hundred people. Green was not there, but Harold Tillman was among the mourners. Tillman, meanwhile, defied the DTI’s attempts to ban him from acting as a director after Honorbilt went into administration in 1990, but was banned for three years in 2001 over the collapse of a company called Launchexception, which ran the O Bar in Soho.

There was a sinister postscript to the Amber Day saga. In the late summer of 1992, David Hellier, the Independent journalist who had been critical of Green, went into the Sunday Times for a contract shift. He received a call from Leslie Warman, the non-executive director who had just stood down. Warman had been angered by the way Green had leaked the news of his departure, which was followed by a smattering of other articles mentioning Warman in a disparaging light. He wanted to explain the background properly and help Hellier piece together the Amber Day ‘jigsaw puzzle’. John Cassidy, the Sunday Times’ business editor, was keen to investigate the story, but Jeff Randall opposed it. That afternoon, Warman received a hysterical call from Green. Amber Day’s boss shouted so loud down the line that Warman’s wife, Linda, a GP, could hear him from the other side of the room. Green allegedly threatened him, ‘If you don’t shut your fucking mouth, I’ll get my friends south of the river to come for you and your family.’ Randall always denied having given Warman’s name to Green, but he accepted that he might have mentioned the prospect of a negative article to Green, leaving him to guess the likely source. The story died. For the next few days, Warman’s wife felt uneasy whenever she took their children to the park or the shops near their home in Golders Green, imagining that Green’s friends were among the crowds, watching them from behind newspapers.

(Green denied having threatened Warman or having mentioned any ‘friends south of the river’ when I asked him about the incident for this book. ‘That’s all bollocks,’ he said. ‘I don’t talk like that. That’s not my style.’)

Revenge was Green’s first instinct after leaving Amber Day, as it had been after Lee Cooper. He still had an 8 per cent stake, and for a while he was in danger of losing his house as the share price languished below the level of his borrowings. In April 1993, Amber Day bounced on an unexpectedly good set of results and Green sold his shares for £7.5 million, more than clearing the debt against them. The following month he went into direct competition with his old employer, buying fifty-four discount stores out of receivership. Green paid £3.3 million for Parker & Franks, which was sold by one of his closest insolvency contacts, Philip Monjack at Leonard Curtis. David Thompson, Amber Day’s new leader, had to explain why Green was able to buy a rival business less than eight months after receiving a £1.1 million golden goodbye. ‘Mr Green did have an exclusion clause in his contract but this deal does not breach it,’ he said. Green rebranded the chain Xception and opened the first refurbished store in Manchester.

Next, Green took over Owen Owen, a group of loss-making department stores. He threw a 1995 Valentine’s Day party at the famous Lewis’s department store in Manchester, part of Owen Owen’s portfolio. There was pink champagne and a Glenn Miller-style band in 1940s GI uniforms. Green told a Sunday Times reporter that Owen Owen had been cleaned up and ‘prepared for us, who as retailers can really take it forward’. But the reality did not match the rhetoric. A year later, Green sold eight of its thirteen stores to a rival, Allders, for £23.6 million. A further four were closed or sold. In 2004, Green offloaded the remaining Liverpool shop to David Thompson, his successor at Amber Day, who had tried to follow him into dealmaking. What was left of Owen Owen went bust less than three years later.

He also tried his hand at jewellery. Owen & Robinson – no relation to Owen Owen – had sixty loss-making shops trading as The Gold Centre and thirteen more-promising trainer stores branded as Foothold. Green gained control by buying its £6 million outstanding bank debt for a discounted £3 million and taking an equity stake. It was clear to Owen & Robinson’s boss, a jovial Irishman called Alan Gaynor, that Green still needed to scratch the Amber Day itch. The company was listed on the stock market, and Green demanded to meet its biggest shareholders. Gaynor corralled twenty reluctant fund managers into a room. Green turned up late after what one observer guessed had been ‘a big lunch’. He proceeded to walk up and down, lecturing them. ‘You suits don’t have a fucking clue,’ he said. ‘You’ve never run a fucking company.’ One of the investors mouthed to Gaynor, ‘I told you so.’ Green’s City comeback proved short lived. He and Gaynor were forced to put the jewellery business into administration.

But these were scrappy little deals. Looming over Green like a mountain to be climbed was Sears, Sir Charles Clore’s once-mighty empire. Green had longed to take it over since the late 1980s, when the bankers from Citi had scoffed at him. There was an element of emotion – a break-up bid for the company Clore built would be rich in symbolism – but it was also logical. In its glory days, British Shoe Corporation, owned by Sears, had sold one in four pairs of footwear. Sears had begun to lose momentum even before Clore stepped down as chairman in 1976. He was succeeded by his lawyer, Leonard Sainer, whom Clore’s biographer Charles Gordon described as ‘seemingly tired and weary, with layers of skin draped around his eyes’. Sainer lacked Clore’s vision – as did Sainer’s successor, Geoffrey Maitland Smith, a tax adviser who was once Paul McCartney’s accountant. Maitland Smith sold some of the peripheral businesses, like Mappin & Webb and William Hill, but Sears’ processes remained antiquated. John Lovering, who went on to become one of the most powerful figures in private equity, remembered arriving as finance director in 1988 and asking to see the group’s cash balance. ‘Some little lad held out a Woolworths notebook,’ he said. ‘Sears worked out its cash balance by calling up every subsidiary and asking how much cash they had.’

In 1995, Maitland Smith was replaced by Sir Bob Reid, the former chairman of British Rail. Reid’s chief executive was Liam Strong, an urbane but overpromoted former British Airways marketing director who quickly alienated his senior team by refusing to take advice. The combination gave off a smell of weakness. Sears had effectively become a property portfolio with a collection of badly managed retail businesses on the side. One of the unloved parts was Olympus, a loss-making chain of 200 sports-equipment stores.

Olympus caught the eye of Tom Hunter, a softly spoken greengrocer’s son from New Cumnock in East Ayrshire. Hunter’s family had closed their shop in a local downturn caused by a miners’ strike in 1984 and gone into shoe wholesaling. With £5,000 from his father, Campbell, and £5,000 from Royal Bank of Scotland, Hunter had started out supplying Nike and Adidas trainers to retailers from the back of a van. He had gradually developed the business into Sports Division, a chain of forty-five stores. Eager to expand, Hunter approached Liam Strong about a bid for Olympus. Strong dismissed the thirty-four-year-old as inexperienced. Hunter knew Green through a contact at What Everyone Wants, Ian Grabiner, who had introduced them over an Italian meal on one of Green’s trips to Glasgow. Hunter called the arch dealmaker and explained his predicament. ‘Leave it to me, Thomas,’ Green said.

Green had hardly any money, but he happened to know the boss of Olympus, Derek Lovelock, from his days bustling around Great Portland Street. When Lovelock finally called to confirm the potential for a deal, Green was in hospital. Already overweight and wheezy – his father’s genetic inheritance – he had suffered his first heart attack. Doctors discovered that two of Green’s coronary arteries were partially blocked and fitted him with two stents. ‘It’s a bit difficult today,’ Green croaked to Lovelock. ‘Can it wait until next week?’ When he emerged from hospital, Green called Hunter. ‘The good news is we’ve got a lock-out period,’ he said. ‘The bad news is I’ve got the lock-out period, and you’ve got to deal with me.’ Hunter asked how much money Green intended to put in. Green was astonished. ‘I want to take money out,’ he said. He demanded £1 million cash upfront for his services, plus a 13 per cent stake in the enlarged Sports Division. After a fierce bout of haggling, during which Hunter’s lawyer warned Green that his client was ‘not the kind of guy you can shout at’, they agreed on a stake of 12 per cent.

In need of cash, Hunter turned to Bank of Scotland and its head of corporate lending, who would become crucial to his and Green’s careers: Peter Cummings. Hunter put up his home and shares in Sports Division as security for a £20 million loan. Green agreed a price of £20 million for Olympus with Lovelock, keeping the identity of the buyer secret. At the final meeting in the offices of Sears’ law firm, Titmuss Sainer Dechert, Green welcomed Hunter with a theatrical flourish. ‘You’d better let him in,’ he told the Sears side, ‘’cos he’s got the fucking cheque.’

From their office on an industrial estate near Kilmarnock, Hunter and his father now oversaw a business with almost 250 stores and £250 million of sales. Green visited only once, when he declared there were ‘too many fucking sheep’ in Scotland and went back to London. Hunter confidently rebranded the Olympus stores to Sports Division. In 1997, two years after the Sears deal, Green pushed Hunter to float the group on the stock market, which would crystallize their combined fortune of several hundred million pounds. One of the analysts appointed to prepare the listing was NatWest Securities’ John Richards, who had sometimes clashed with Green at Amber Day. Richards thought Green was ‘a demon in terms of doing a deal’ but joked that ‘if you shook hands with him, you had to check whether you still had all your fingers afterwards’. They embarked on what Richards could ‘only describe as one of the most embarrassing series of store visits in my life. Every store we went into was a mess in one way or another. One store manager got a complete bollocking in front of me – “the way you’ve organized your stock room is totally wrong” – to which he said, “Well, your fucking system doesn’t work.” ’

The merger of Olympus and Sports Division had clearly been a mess. But Green and Hunter were determined to press ahead with the float, so Richards and his colleagues began writing detailed research notes. ‘And then we started getting the numbers,’ he said. ‘And the like-for-like sales were down literally 15 per cent, 20 per cent, at which point I had to say to Philip and Tom, “This just isn’t going to happen.” ’ There was a crisis meeting in March 1998, at which Green and Hunter discussed the prospect of an emergency sale to one of Sports Division’s rivals, Blacks Leisure. Then, out of the blue, Hunter took a call from Dave Whelan, the owner of Wigan Athletic and the boss of JJB Sports – another rival. Whelan was eager to buy Sports Division and willing to pay a big price. ‘One condition,’ he told Hunter. ‘Don’t tell Philip Green. This needs to be private and he can’t keep a secret.’ Hunter negotiated a price of £290 million, which Richards said was ‘even more than we were going to float at – it was a total get-out-of-jail-free card’.

When the finalized deal was presented to Green, his first reaction was, ‘I could have got more.’ Hunter retorted, ‘No you couldn’t, and if you fuck about, I won’t do it, I’ll go back to my sheep and you can fuck off.’ Green relented, and JJB Sports announced the acquisition in July 1998. Like Lee Cooper with Bonanza Jeans and Jean Jeanie a decade earlier, JJB soon realized that it had horribly overpaid. Hunter resigned from his new job as JJB’s deputy chairman before Christmas, and Whelan had to issue two profit warnings as he grappled with Sports Division’s trading problems. Green walked away with almost £36 million. It was the lucky windfall that put him on the road to the big time.

Over the years, the Greens would give a variety of reasons for their move to Monaco. In her 2005 Daily Mail interview, Tina said they decided to leave London after Green was mugged outside their home by ‘three guys, one of them with a great big sword, which he held to Philip’s throat’. In his 2016 parliamentary evidence, Green said he had ‘wanted to put my children in school somewhere, and I had two or three choices’. According to someone who knew them at the time of the Sports Division sale, it was simpler: Green ordered his wife to whisk the children off to the tax-free principality a few days before the start of the tax year in which his big Sports Division payday arrived. From that moment on, all Green’s business interests were held offshore in his wife’s name. Tina was said to have been ‘in tears’ about leaving their home in St John’s Wood. She rented a flat in Le Formentor, a building on Monaco’s sought-after Avenue Princesse Grace, and her husband started commuting weekly to London.

Green had become the retail industry’s shark. He could taste Sears’ blood in the water. He continued to build his private empire, paying £7.5 million for the discount chain Mark One from the insolvency practice Leonard Curtis in February 1996 after a bidding battle with the Mancunian rag trader Shami Ahmed, which he likened to fighting ‘ten rounds with Mike Tyson’. Some journalists compared him to Stephen Hinchliffe, a dealmaker from Sheffield whose Facia Group was buying up ailing brands such as Red or Dead and Sock Shop – until Facia went bust in 1996 (Hinchliffe was later jailed twice for fraud).

But Green remained focused on Sears. In April 1997, less than a month before Tony Blair swept into Downing Street, Sears finally sacked its hapless boss, Liam Strong. At the same time, its chairman, Sir Bob Reid, announced plans to demerge Selfridges, effectively signalling a break-up of the group. First, Green moved in on Shoe Express, one of its footwear chains. His negotiating team, which included his stepson, Brett Palos, outmanoeuvred Sears mercilessly. At an early stage of the talks, the Sears side left a sheet of paper in a meeting room listing all the rival bids. Green urged Palos to stuff it down his trousers and they ran outside to read it in the car. Green then wore down the Sears team. The night before the deal was due to be announced in December 1997, the two sides were still arguing over a sum of £40,000. Green looked across the table with a glint in his eye. ‘We either stay here all night discussing this, or we toss a coin for it,’ he said. Sears tossed – and lost. The next morning, Green bought Shoe Express for £8.3 million. He humiliated Sears by converting some of the shops to Mark One and selling the rest for £20 million within months, making a huge profit.

Green was not the only predator circling. Richard Caring, a clothing supplier who had lived in Hong Kong, was also planning a takeover of his own. Caring was a sleek, slight figure with a glossy mane of hair and dazzling white teeth. His Italian-American father, Louis Caringi, had been a GI who was stationed in Britain during the war. In 1945, Louis tumbled down the steps of Warren Street Tube station and broke his leg. The nurse in the ambulance taking him to hospital was Sylvia Parnes, who came from a family of successful clothing retailers (and also happened to be a cousin of Larry Parnes, manager of the pop star Billy Fury). Louis and Sylvia fell in love and married. Louis, who anglicized his surname, pretended to be Jewish to blend in with Sylvia’s family. Lou Caring, as he became known, set up one of the biggest dress manufacturing companies in London. His son, a talented golfer, went to Millfield public school in Somerset on a sporting scholarship, until his father’s company went bust and he had to leave at fifteen – an experience that ‘hurt him desperately’, according to a family friend. Lou and his son then relaunched the business. Richard had first met Green on the rag-trade scene of the early 1970s – although Caring, who was four years older and infinitely smoother, initially saw Green as an irritating little boy. They became closer on regular trips to Hong Kong in the years when they both felt like pioneers exploring a new land of cheap sourcing.

In early 1998, Green picked up a rumour of Caring’s plan. Caring was particularly interested in Sears’ catalogue business, Freemans. He believed that he had a buyer lined up already in the shape of a German mail-order company, Otto Versand, which had bought a catalogue called Together from Caring in the late 1980s. Green bombarded Caring with voicemails telling him that he was ‘doing it all wrong’, but Caring was silent. In a fit of frustration one evening, Green sent his chauffeur to Caring’s house in Highgate, north London. The driver knocked on the door and handed Caring an envelope containing a pound coin and a note. It said, ‘I know what you’re up to and I know you’re mean. Now you can afford to call me.’

A few weeks before Christmas 1998, speculation over a mystery bid for Sears reached fever pitch. Despite the company’s denials, an analyst called Richard Ratner told the Daily Express, ‘My belief is that people are out there ready to move on Sears.’ Ratner, nicknamed ‘Ratty’, was speaking from knowledge. Ratty was a public-school eccentric who once welcomed the boss of Railtrack for lunch by dressing as a stationmaster, but his clownish sense of humour masked a sharp mind. He called Green ‘Monsieur Vert’, and he was one of the few people Green trusted in the City. Ratner had already put Green in touch with a merchant bank called Rea Brothers, which had been impressed by Green’s analysis of Sears and agreed to work with him.

A few days before Christmas, Green struck. He and Tom Hunter announced a £460 million takeover approach for the wounded giant, with Richard Caring’s involvement kept quietly in the background. They offered to pay Sears’ shareholders in cash – which was bold, because they didn’t yet have any money. The stock market laughed at Green’s flimsy raiding party. Sir Bob Reid, Sears’ chairman, rejected him out of hand. A few days later, Green tabled a new offer. Reid rejected him again. The explosion of action confused the City, which hesitated between its scepticism of Green and its usual desire to see a sluggish company ripped apart.

Green now needed increased firepower. He got very lucky. Out of the blue, he received a call from Frederick Barclay, a reclusive tycoon who lived with his twin brother David in a mock-gothic castle on Brecqhou, one of the Channel Islands. The Barclay brothers were familiar with corporate raids, having made their first fortune buying a shipping and brewing company called Ellerman on the cheap and breaking it up for a profit. Green and Hunter flew to Monaco to meet them in the Hôtel de Paris, Monte Carlo’s answer to the Ritz. The Barclays were waiting at their usual table at the back of the hotel’s famous Bar Américain. The ageing brothers had a reputation for strangeness – it was said you could only tell them apart because David parted his hair on the right, Frederick on the left – and on the way in, Green muttered to Hunter, ‘I’ll handle this.’ He confidently sketched out the Sears bid to the Barclays, explaining how they would make their money back by selling the retail brands, effectively getting the property portfolio for free. As they chatted, Fred Barclay leaned across the table. ‘Young Tom, do you want to know the best business advice of your life?’ he asked. Hunter nodded eagerly. ‘Never do business with arseholes,’ Fred said. The Barclays looked at each other and burst out laughing. Bemused, Green and Hunter shook their hands and left. On the steps outside, Hunter breathed in the grandeur of Monte Carlo’s Place du Casino in the cold December air. Green turned to him, shaking his head. ‘Fucking weirdos,’ he said.

Despite the bizarre meeting, the Barclays agreed to put £100 million into a new bidding company, January Investments. Green, Caring and Hunter chipped in £25 million. BankBoston and Bank of Scotland provided loans of £415 million. As with the Olympus deal, Peter Cummings, the Bank of Scotland financier whom Green and Hunter had befriended, played a crucial role. It was testament to Green’s growing clout that he was able to put together a fighting fund of almost £550 million in such a short space of time.

Sears cowered in anticipation of a second strike. Green returned from his traditional winter break in the Caribbean and established a war room at his suite at the Dorchester, the Park Lane hotel favoured by Sir Charles Clore’s business partner, Jack Cotton. David Barclay seconded his sons, Aidan and Howard, to help with the preparations. Aidan was the more serious of the two. Howard liked to lean back expansively in his red braces, puffing on cigars. Green chain-smoked cigarettes, frantically juggling phone calls. From time to time he would stop, jab a butt in Howard’s direction and say, ‘In my next life, I want to fucking come back as you!’

In mid-January 1999, Green raised his offer to £519 million. Sir Bob Reid rejected him again, but this time the presence of the Barclay brothers and their hard cash persuaded Sears’ biggest shareholder, Phillips & Drew, to fold its hand. The defence was crumbling. A week later, Green and the Sears team faced off in an evening meeting at the Dorchester. Green said he would make a final bid of £548 million if the board surrendered. As Sir Bob Reid prevaricated, Green’s bankers published a humiliating analysis describing Sears as the ‘incredible shrinking company’. Emasculated and exhausted, Reid accepted the deal. As a condition of their backing, the Barclay twins had asked Green to use the blue-blooded bank Robert Fleming alongside the smaller Rea Brothers. In the early hours of the morning, observing Green become twitchy, one of his advisers popped out to buy him cigarettes. He came back to find Green chasing a tearful Flemings banker around the meeting table, shouting, ‘I’ll rip your fucking throat out!’ At the end of a tense night, the Flemings man had made the mistake of handing Green the bill.

Sears was the ultimate back-of-a-fag-packet deal. But the gamble paid off. Green took over in January 1999 and asset-stripped the company with cold precision. The old board had already agreed a £141 million sale of its store-card business to Groupe Cofinoga, a French conglomerate. In April, Green sold the Freemans catalogue to Otto Versand for £150 million. Arcadia Group, the owner of Topshop, paid £151 million for Sears’ fashion brands, including Miss Selfridge and Warehouse. The Adams childrenswear chain went to its management team for £87 million. By the end of July, the 108-year-old empire was gone. Green’s consortium had recouped almost the entire £548 million purchase price – and it still had Sears’ valuable property portfolio, which turned out to be worth about £300 million. Having put in little more than £120 million of their own money, Green and his friends made profits of more than £280 million. His wife also had a piece of the action. Tina had bought 1.8 million Sears shares in late 1998, before her husband’s interest became public knowledge. She was sitting on a paper profit of £3.6 million.

Eight years after the disgrace of Amber Day, Green had suddenly caught the attention of every banker in London. He had ruthlessly dismantled Sears into its component parts and shown the City he possessed the one quality it prizes above all others: the ability to make money.