On Feb. 26, 1995, the day her husband helped bring down a venerable British investment bank, Lisa Leeson joined a rather exclusive sorority. Its members include Lori Milken (wife of Michael) and Seema Boesky (former wife of Ivan), part of an elite group whose husbands perpetrated spectacular feats of fraud and illegal financial manipulation.
But unlike her fellow sorority members, Lisa Leeson - though she certainly lived well - has never had the pleasure of enjoying the exalted life of the seriously rich. Although Nicholas W. Leeson managed to rack up more than $1 billion in losses before his bosses at Barings got wise to his scheme, his house of cards collapsed less than a month before he was to receive a bonus of nearly $700,000.Lisa Leeson had been counting on her husband to quit the rough and tumble of trading, as he had promised, and to use that bonus to buy a house in their native Britain, where they could start a family. Instead, she is finishing a grueling round of interviews to promote sales of her husband's book, "Rogue Trader," an as-told-to account written by a journalist, Edward Whitley, of how Leeson, at 26, helped to bankrupt one of the oldest and most distinguished merchant banks in Britain.
In doing so, she has broken that exclusive club's unwritten code of silence, a code that normally relegates spouses of front-page felons to the deepest shadows. Not only has she gone public, but she has revealed intimate details of her life - and has stared down a public that is often skeptical when a felon's closest confidante says she has been utterly blind to his flaws or schemes.
Lisa Leeson's highly public efforts - more than 80 interviews crammed into two weeks - seem to be paying off, for the book has just hit the top of the best-seller lists in Britain. (In the United States, there has been no publicity blitz, and the book - published by Little, Brown and priced at $24.95 - has yet to appear on any best-seller lists.)
The Leesons, though, are unlikely to see a penny of profit from the book, which reportedly earned an advance of more than $1 million.
"First we have to pay taxes, then the agent, then the writer, then the lawyers," she explained as if reading a grocery list. "And if there's anything left after that, which I doubt there will be, the creditors can come after it."
Doesn't she resent having to plug her husband's book, particularly since she has numerous reservations about it? "It's just something that has to be done," she said, in what has obviously become a stock answer in Lisa Leeson's public repertoire. "We have no money and we have a lot of bills to pay."
Nick Leeson is a lucky man. His wife, who says she was unaware of his crimes, is a powerful advocate for his cause. She is poised, quick-witted, attractive and patient, all qualities prized by public relations experts.
Leeson's book is unlikely to win him much sympathy, portraying him as a brash and cocky trader who thought nothing of dropping his trousers to exhibit a "pasty white" backside to a group of women during a drunken spree in Singapore, or spoiling the stark serenity of a guest house in Japan by trashing it while on a business retreat. "By the time we'd finished, it looked like a rugby club changing room," he writes.
Lisa Leeson dismisses such shenanigans as standard operating procedure for "young fellas out for a drink," and, indeed, many young traders are likely to read the book and recognize themselves in it.
Still, one wonders how much self-restraint Lisa Leeson is exercising. She is clearly putting her best face forward for the book tour, playing to the hilt the part of the supportive, forgiving wife.
She is no longer, however, the carefree 24-year-old smiling blithely from photos taken when the couple lived in Singapore and Leeson's misdeeds were still under wraps.
Lisa Leeson's new smiles were tight and brief as she sipped ice water late one recent afternoon in an airy tearoom at the Waldorf Hotel in London. She fields politely but concisely each question lobbed at her and then waits for the next one. She occasionally ventures a joke, but rather halfheartedly.
She looks older than her 27 years, and her face has lost some of its fullness, leaving behind high cheekbones and ethereally clear skin.
She has no answer when asked why people should read her husband's book. "It's difficult for me to say because I didn't write it," she said. "I think lots of people are very interested in it, but it's Nick's book. I haven't any idea if he had any message he wanted to get across."
In fact, she is not the book's biggest fan. She is annoyed by a section describing a business trip to New York, where her husband blew off a dinner meeting with Barings executives. He recalls her getting angry, announcing that she was going shopping. "I hope our credit cards are in good shape," he then quotes her as saying.
The passage brings to mind the image of a high-flying young couple living on an unlimited expense account in a plush apartment, driving expensive sports cars and spending weekends on their yacht, an image bandied about by the British press immediately after the Barings debacle.
It is an image that Lisa Leeson has worked hard to dispel, repeatedly protesting that the couple did not own a car until shortly before the bank's problems came to light, that they never had a yacht and that their subsidized apartment in Singapore was a perk enjoyed by numerous expatriates.
"I didn't really like that bit," she said of the book's rather cavalier description of her New York spending spree. "I went out to buy presents for friends, to pick up things they had asked me to bring back. I'm not the sort who buys designer fashions. I'm not a big spender."
Still, she would almost certainly like a competing book just out on Barings even less - though she says she has no intention of reading it. The book, "The Collapse of Barings," by Stephen Fay, makes her husband out to be a greedy, arrogant cad but talks little about the Leesons' personal life.
As for "Rogue Trader," the book as a whole angers Lisa Leeson, she says, because it has renewed all the feelings of betrayal she experienced after her husband was jailed. "My mother says I became a different person after I first read the book," she said. "I was angry, I was disappointed, I was hurt all over again.
"It hurts, you know, because I thought we were the perfect couple. I thought Nick knew me and I knew Nick." She paused a moment and took a breath. "Obviously, I didn't."
So why is she still working so hard on her husband's behalf? "I had no choice," she said. "Nick had to write the book, and I have to promote it. We have bills to pay. It's my task."
She could, of course, have deserted him - as other women have done in similar circumstances - but she says she won't do that. Asked if she has ever considered divorce, she seems surprised. "No, I've not really thought about that," she said.