Today is Monday, March 2nd, 2020.

On this day in 1995, 28-year-old derivatives trader Nick Leeson was arrested for defrauding his superiors at

Bering's Bank and for cheating the Singapore Exchange. He would subsequently

be remembered as the man who single-handedly caused the collapse of one of the oldest merchant banks in the United Kingdom. Welcome to today in True Crime, a parcast original.

Today we're covering the arrest of Nick Leeson,

a futures trader at the Singapore Office of Bering's Bank.

From 1992 to 1995, he engaged in increasingly risky, unauthorized speculative trading with the bank's money, and hid

millions of pounds of losses.

His lies finally caught up to him in the early morning hours of March 2nd, 1995.

Nick Leeson sat hunched in the corner of the cramped airplane seat, staring at the Tom Clancy novel he'd picked up in Kota Kinabalu.

He hadn't made much progress and kept catching himself reading the same passages

over and over. His back and arm were stiff, but he couldn't move without waking his wife, Lisa, who was curled against

him.

Out the window, the Frankfurt skyline loomed in the gray dawn.

It looked grim, cold, and uninviting. Nick pulled the thin blanket tighter

around himself, Germany in the winter. He probably shouldn't have worn shorts. Part of him he realized

hadn't expected to make it this far. For the past three years Nick Leeson had served as the general manager of Bering's Bank Singapore office.

He spent his days down in the pit, buying and selling contracts on the Singapore monetary exchange.

It was a timing game.

If the bank's clients could buy low and sell high,

both the client and the bank stood to make a lot of money.

It was fast-paced stressful work, but Nick had done very well.

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