Ex-Trader: I Took the Fall for the Financial Crisis

0:00The barrister said to me, this has got nothing to do with the truth Tom, it's about who tells the best story. And I just thought, you know, this is a joke. Former trader Tom Hayes was sentenced to 14 years in prison for manipulating one of the world's most important interest rates. He spent five and a half years in prison, but in 2025, the Supreme Court overturned his conviction. People wanted someone to pay for the financial crisis and they wanted bankers to go to prison. So this was manna from heaven. This is like, yeah, look at these evil bankers, look what they've done. To understand Tom's story, you need to understand LIBOR.

0:30LIBOR stands for the London Interbank Offered Rate. It helped determine the price of everything, from mortgages and business loans to complex financial contracts worth trillions of dollars worldwide. Every day, major banks submitted estimates of what it will cost them to borrow money from other banks. The highest and lowest submissions were removed, and the rest were averaged to create LIBOR. What is it that you were accused of doing with that number? Well, basically, fundamentally, we were accused of rigging or manipulating the rates. and in practice what that meant was you know the banks who submitted the rate the rate that they all traded products against we were choosing rates that were to our commercial advantage so I mean my bank UBS would be asked where could you borrow three monthly in LIBOR and my submitter I wasn't a submitter I was a trader and I might send him an email saying can you submit a high rate or can you submit a low rate which would basically be me saying look you've got choice of numbers you've got five numbers maybe you know 5.1 5.12 5.16 5.18 you know can you choose a low rate and he'll say okay i'll choose 5.1 or choose 5.12 so you're talking about differences in the submitted rate of the hundredths of a percentage point which when you take the averaging process actually makes a difference to the published rate in the thousandths of a percentage point so one might say well why why would you bother doing that because these these margins are so small.

2:00But obviously, the derivative size is we're large. I might have$100 ,000 a basis point position, and a basis point is one hundredth of a percentage point. So if the published rate moves by thousands of a percentage point, that's worth$10 ,000 to my book or to my bank or whatever. Every submitter was also a trader. So axiomatically, there is not this independent, pure rate that wasn't influenced by a bank's commercial positions. and it broadly worked for 20 years because some banks would be have commercial interests where they needed a higher rate and something they would submit higher rates some have where they need a lower rate they would submit lower rates obviously the extremes were chopped out anyway so the number that was spat out largely came out correct which is why until 2008 no one ever complained about the published rates even though we had this like conflicted system and i was working in Japan I didn't even breach any civil regulations in Japan so I wasn't sanctioned on a regulatory basis by Japan where I was working but then I was prosecuted by two prosecutors in the US and in the UK for something that happened whilst I was working for a Swiss bank in Japan you know doing yen libel or yen products I mean it was just crazy so we will get into that don't worry um but I just want to make sure that we're really clear on on the libel and the manipulation that was happening you were basically asking the guy within your organization UBS to pick a lower rate or lower or higher depending on I mean the thing is is I would look at the desk position so I would look across my desk and actually when I did the breakdown before my trial only about 53 % of the time I was asking for movements that accorded to my own trading book about 9 % of the time I'd ask for movements where I had no position at all on that particular day and I think like the rest of them, it was actually contrary to my book because the desk had the larger position.

3:55So I mean, if the desk needed it high on a notion of say 200 million and I needed it low on a notion of 100 million, then overall the desk needed it high. You did the greater good in that sense of the desk. Well, I wasn't doing God's work. No, no. It wasn't just always a selfish action is what you're trying to say. I was doing a mathematically sensible thing. Yeah. I mean, that was one of the things where when avarice is thrown at you in a context of a trial and you're like, well, hang on a minute, you know, there's a large number of times here where I'm doing things against my own interest. But one of the frustrations for me in my trial was I fought like hell to get my profit and loss in my trial.

4:32So I'm in a fraud trial where I'm accused of like manipulating this rate to benefit my trading book and by indirectly benefit myself. And I had no money. I had no numbers in my trial. The only numbers in my trial was my salary and my bonuses. You know, and I was denied my profit and loss, where I wanted to show clearly through doing some regression analysis that this wasn't the thing that was actually making me a profitable trader. Rather than this stupid thing that was presented to the jury that every penny I'd ever made for myself personally and for any employer was as a result of this. But I couldn't do the basic analytical stuff that I needed to do.

5:08It was so strange being in a trial with no money and no victims. Like, you know, it was just, I mean, and I think one of the, I got very frustrated being a witness in that case because I felt so angry about the fact that it just seemed to me to be like a show trial. I remember saying to my barrister at one point, they're saying things and they know because of the undisclosed evidence that the jury can't see that those things are wrong. And the barrister said to me, this has got nothing to do with the truth, Tom. It's about who tells the best story. And I just thought, you know, this is a joke.

5:41like and it was just a complete kangaroo court i'd like to come to your the trial and that in a bit if we can i just want to make sure that we focus on the basics at the start well no it's okay don't worry don't worry um you lost five years of your life essentially as you see it because of this i can understand why you're passionate um the the libel thing right did you know what you were doing was wrong the manipulation of the rate would you have said this is not what we should be doing right so the very very obvious element and the point that i've made to my jury was either i'm the stupidest fraudster ever i didn't think i was doing anything wrong because i know my phone lines are recorded you know i know my emails are kept you know i wrote 2000 i made 2000 requests i was prolific as people say i i was brazen as my trial judge described it um i didn't like the manager of the submitter but he sat next to me and because we disliked each other so much we wouldn't speak we would i would communicate with him by email make requests by email now had i thought i was doing something which was an international criminal fraud i'd have just turned around to the boat and said can you do this or can you do that i wouldn't write it put it down in writing you know and there are numerous instances where i'll say things like oh you just need to give the submitter a mars bar and they'll put it where you want or a coffee or some sushi the idea that this person is being like embroiled in some international fraud over a coffee or a sushi or a Mars bar.

7:07And when I got fired for this very late in the day, nobody even believed me that I'd been fired for this behavior. It was just so nonsensical. And so if you ask me, did I think I was doing anything wrong? No. And sometimes people say to me, if you go back, would you do the same thing? I was given what I knew at the time and all the information that was available to me, the fact that all my managers knew and my managers' managers knew, and it was our own company policy why would i think anything other than this is normal you know and you only have to look at all these people who got caught up in this trawl and that that went along the bottom of the ocean and picked up all of us guys um so no i'm not apologetic about it and i i can you know we can criticize the system and say it was conflicted and it shouldn't have been set up and run like it was which would be a fair criticism but then to sort of like embroil us and like blame us for actions of other people in relation to a different thing to do with LIBOR was just not fair.

8:05I just wanted to check uh just to clarify for the audience because I listened to the lowball tapes and what I understood was that it was common practice you guys were kind of trained that way you were just like a one-off person doing this everyone was kind of doing it well I think I think the word training is probably the wrong way to put it because that would imply there was some sort of like you know official protocol I mean but you learn by osmosis and And you come in and you see the way things are done. And it's done openly. And it's done transparently. And it's just part of your job. And you don't even think about it.

8:35So when you went into the organization, this is what people are doing. And you start doing it. Is that what you're saying? Yeah, pretty much. I mean, they actually moved the cash guys, who were the submitters, closer to the derivatives traders, who were us guys, to facilitate the flow of information between the departments. So these guys would know what the positions were of these guys. You know, and I made a lot of requests in part because Yen wasn't part of this internal IT system. And then also in part because I think it is possible that for some people, they might have had some sort of doubts about it.

9:11But I wasn't one of those people. You didn't see it as wrong. Well, no, I mean, because I and the biggest evidence of that is the fact that my behavior didn't change. I was open about it, transparent about it. And because of my Asperger's, I would be like, if I needed a low rate for the week, I wouldn't just send one email on a Monday and say we need it low for the week. I would send an email on Monday, on Tuesday, on Wednesday, on Thursday, on Friday. If I'm going to buy a lottery ticket, I'd rather have a million lottery tickets than a single lottery ticket. But that was why I got called, I think, like the Jesse James of LIBOR.

9:42You know, I got, you know, I got all sorts of like grief about being like the worst of the worst. And it came to like the number of requests I made because I was prolific. I was brazen, as my child just said. So it was when you take those things in context, you can see why I don't look back at that and think I did the wrong thing. Yeah. And I think what most people don't understand is there's two types of liable manipulation. There's what the traders were doing, which is this a fraction of a percent. Yeah. And then there's lowballing, which is, can you explain what lowballing is and what that was doing to the liable rate?

10:18Well, lowballing effectively was a thing that precipitated all of the investigations, precipitated the whole sort of libel scandal. And in effect, at the tail end of 2007, you'll remember Northern Rock went under. People were queuing outside trying to get their money. I mean, that was the beginning of the sort of the global financial crisis. And liquidity was getting tight. And people were struggling to borrow money because, you know, nobody quite knew where the bodies lay. And I mean, it got progressively worse and it got a lot worse on September the 15th, 2008, when Lehman's went under. But in that time period, there was a lot of focus.

10:55The libel rates, your published rates were published every day. So, I mean, not only was the final number published after all the calculations, but each individual bank's contribution was published. So you could look through and you could say, you know, RBS is submitting one. You know, Deutsche is submitting one. UBS is submitting one. You know, oh, Barclays is submitting nine. they must be struggling to borrow money. Yeah, they stick their head above the trenches almost or get singled out. And so then there's all these press articles, Barclays struggling to borrow money, you know, in the market.

11:24And so at that point, you had various central banks, you know, both in the UK and in Europe, the New York Federal Reserve, treasuries, you know, we had the UK treasury, Whitehall, putting pressure on people like Barclays to like lower their rate because they didn't want them to be, an outlier and didn't want them to appear to be financially struggling. So effectively what happened was then, what happened then was banks started to actually collectively submit rates that were not within the reasonable range that I described earlier. So if I was trying to give you a real world example, if I walked into 10 banks on the high street and I said to the bank manager, I'll pay 5 % to borrow money for two months.

12:12Will you lend it to me? And he was like, no, sorry, that's not enough. And every bank manager said no. And then at the end of that process, you were asked, well, where can you borrow money in reasonable size? And you answered 4%. That's demonstrably, numerically, objectively false. And that's what lowballing was. So in order to protect their solvency and their franchise, these banks basically started lying about their solvency positions and lying about their borrowing costs to protect their solvency, I should say. And that's interesting. That's what triggered the investigation. But then when everybody started investigating, they found all of that stuff that never led anywhere, obviously, because no one wanted it to.

12:57But instead, they found people like me saying, oh, I'd like it higher i'd like it low across various different banks across the world and you know i was working in japan doing yen is for a swiss bank i had nothing to do with the uk or the us but i was conveniently became a political football do you think you were scapegoated then i was scapegoated for an industry practice that was conflicted um and i was scapegoated alongside others i should because i was not the only person who went to prison um to protect the more senior people who had committed a greater crime i mean it was interesting because again my trial judge sort of tried to differentiate between the sets of behavior one being lobel was this noble endeavor to protect the solvency of the banks when all the banks were going under okay fine i can accept that but don't don't defecate on me because you can say shit if you need to don't shit on me don't shit on me because um because you're trying to like you know have a smoke and mirror situation with the regards to the thing that was much more serious um and that that was the case but also i mean it was politically expedient you know people wanted someone to pay for the financial crisis and they wanted bankers to go to prison.

14:13So this was manna from heaven. This is like, yeah, look at these evil bankers, look what they've done. I mean, most people think that I had something to do with sterling libel. Most people think that I've affected their mortgage in some way, shape or form. Most people think that it's been affected by some sort of margin of, you know, many, many percent, which is completely wrong. And it was just, there was so many things that were just, just not correct in the narrative that was being propagated and we just stayed silent. We didn't, we didn't counter it enough. This ad's brought to you by Hiscox.

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16:33Vanta saves you up to 90 % of the time it takes to prove you're compliant with these standards, and on average, half a million dollars. If proving your compliance is something that you need to get done, you can get started at vanta.com forward slash making money. There's a link in the description, and we've also put a QR code on screen. How does it affect normal people then? So if let's just say I successfully, quote unquote, manipulated the rate. And although the rate was truthful and although the rate was accurate, the final published rate moved by, I don't know, one thousandths of a percentage point.

17:09for some people in some currencies that could have a very infinitesimally small impact on them i mean we worked in the wholesale market so like you know all my clients for example were banks 28 000 trades i did all but 40 this was at ubs were with other banks and i was a market maker for the street i think i did 40 with like hedge funds or asset managers or whatever so it was i i didn't face retail clients but nonetheless retail clients some of them in some currencies to have products that is attached to LIBOR, that would be predominantly in the US and they could be credit cards or they could be mortgages, which are attached to a variable or floating rate, which in this instance would be LIBOR.

17:49So in those instances, you can have like a very, very small, you know, movement in the rates, which would impact them. But you're talking about thousands of a percent and I never understood why I was sitting in a seat in a dock on trial for yen LIBOR moving by thousands of a percent when the Japanese don't even tie their retail products to LIBOR, they tie it to TIBOR, which is the Tokyo equivalent. And you had Wonga lending people money back then at 6 ,000%. And it just seemed entirely like I didn't get it. But the other thing is that you have to look at what the cumulative effect was on that rate.

18:25I mean, so my individual actions might have biased it down by a thousandth of a percent. But then I had RBS who had the opposite position, who biased it up by a thousandth of a percent. and that's why no one ever complained about the number until we started getting to the point where actually the number was not a thousand of a percent difference it was hundreds of times that you know it was like half a percent three quarters of a percent different because people were actually physically lying about what their borrowing costs were and that's from the senior leaders that's from the treasury it's from the treasury it's from whitehall it's from the bank of england it's from the new york fed it's from international central banks and it's from the c-suite and none You're basically saying that you and a couple of other traders served time, whereas the leaders of the financial institutions and people in power, in government, in the Bank of England, manipulated the rate to 100 times the degree you did and faced no repercussions.

19:19Many more times than 100. But there's a real delineation between our behavior and the low-balling. Because if someone submits 5 % rather than 6%, that's very different from someone submitting 5.11 instead of 5.12. They're completely different things. And when that behavior is consistent across banks and consistent in one direction, which is lower, then that has a really material impact on the published rate. Just to bring it back, because like you said, a lot of the narrative, the press narrative at the time was that this had screwed over normal public in their mortgage rates and stuff. And I know you disagree with that.

20:01No, I don't agree. Just from my understanding, if these banks were suppressing the rate lower, they were low-balling the rate, would that have made finance products cheaper then for the public? Would this have generally benefited? For a variable rate mortgage holder, which was linked to LIBOR, they would have paid less. So they actually benefited from the rigging in that sense? Yeah. It wasn't that it cost them more. People didn't lose their houses because of the low-balling even. No, no, no, not at all. I mean, it's just, no, because for a start, most, LIBOR wasn't a commonly, a common variable for rate for mortgages in the UK.

20:36It was much more so in the US. People, there were people who had derivative products who needed it high, who would have suffered a lot from the fact that that rate was artificially low. and some of those some of those institutions um might have been institutions like pension funds who are hedging their interest rate risk for example um who you know have liability driven investments and they have like interest rate swaps as hedges against some of the products or bonds that they hold so that those guys could have been affected and then by definition if you hold if you've got a pension then you're indirectly affected so there could have been an effect on the public in a sort of second derivative sense of it.

21:21But in terms of a very direct impact, like in terms of like your mortgage, low balling, you were paying less. In terms of money, I think I read that you earned 2.4 million was a bonus. How much of this for you and the behaviour was financial incentive, do you think? Well, none, because I never ever had the chance to do my regression analysis to see the link between how much libel moved on at any given day and what my pnl was i get the impression that you would have done that anyway right did you do that in your own head you can't report that in court but surely you've done i said in court i said and i said in interview that it was about five percent of my pnl you know if i'm making the bank 100 150 million dollars a year you're talking about between five to seven and a half million let's just say on the worst case it's 10 you know it's the difference between me making 85 rather than 100 or 190 rather than 100 or 135 rather than 150 i mean i i am not going to commit a criminal offense in the most blatant fashion possible to boost my p &l by that margin what would that do to your bonus for just a lemon on the street well in theory i mean it would move my bonus by the commensurate percentage you know so so don't go you know go from you know i mean it depended on the year but i mean i think like my best year is like five million dollars or whatever and you go from 5 million to 4.5 million.

22:40But when you start talking about those types of numbers, they become, they're not really real anymore. And the difference between 4.5 million and 5 million, by the time he's taken a tax off it, which was 50 % in Japan, it's$250 ,000. It's a lot of money. And for the most people who are listening to this thing, $250 ,000, wow, it changed my life. But when you're earning that much in five weeks, you know it's five weeks wages so i mean just to try and put it in you know you look at the median wage in the uk what's the median wage in the uk like 39k 37 38k okay so i'm just a bit over i mean might be right now to be honest yeah so let's just say it's three three grand a month you know so you're looking at sort of someone saying are you going to commit an international fraud to be paid 39k rather than 36k i in the past when i worked in sales i would have sold things without a commission just to put a number on the board so that amongst my peers I was seen as equal so I know what you're saying about the money but was there a pressure there that was outside of the money that would have been I want that extra 10 % you know just there's pressure in banks to make money all the time the biggest offense you can make in a bank is losing money or I mean like that's that that's that's the real crime losing money so I'm not I'm not for one minute trying to divorce it from the pressure but I wouldn't say I was I was under pressure to make that extra slice if you like by committing an offence what I said to the people who interviewed me I wanted to do the best job I could do and I'm you know like getting the most favorable published libel rate was the sort of extra cherry on the top but if you also look at the fact that often you know almost 50 % of the time my requests were made when either I had no position or were contrary to my own positions, it doesn't play out with the data.

24:30But again, you know, I just think as I've gone from someone who at one point was earning those sums of money to coming out of prison with nothing. I got divorced, you know, the remaining assets, you know, had gone to my now ex-wife, you know, I had zero. And I went to visit my friend in and I lived in North London and I would walk to Ballum rather than pay£2.80 to get on the tube you know and I was on universal credit when I got out of prison and I couldn't get a job working behind the bar so you know I've been on both sides I've been on both sides I've been in a situation where you know I could just go and spend a hundred grand on a car without even thinking about it and then I haven't got£2.80 for the tube to go and see my mate how do you handle that mentally like the change when you came out i think the difference is is once you've been locked in a box for five and a half years the joy of freedom is just and the blessing of freedom is just so infinitesimally or so infinitely i should say great that you don't you know i don't money was not the thing that i thought about in that instance yeah you know i was just so happy to be free i'd come out in lockdown and everyone was like oh this is really restrictive and i was thinking I'll tell you restrictive.

25:48I was thinking, I can go to the supermarket. I can go to the park. I can walk through a door without being locked. You know, I can meet people. I can go on the internet. It's just like, honestly, like, and I don't want to belittle it because I know people did suffer a lot with their mental health during that time period. But from someone who's done proper time, I can tell you that, you know, it felt like freedom to me. You were in quite a serious prison for a period of time, right? Three and a half years I was in high security, yeah. Yeah. Was it Belmarsh? Is that right? Belmarsh was one of them.

26:21I was there for about nine months. Yeah, I was on the lifer's wing. I was sharing a cell with a couple of Jamaican guys who'd murdered someone with a Mach 10 machine gun. Yeah, I was in a one-man cell, but three of us. Yeah, having to take a shit in front of the other two cellmates. And that was a bit dehumanising. Would people who've done your type of crime normally be sent to a maximum security prison? This white collar crime, you might call it. Well, back in those days, there was an algorithm to help assess your risk category. And one of the things in the algorithm was your length of sentence.

26:56And I was given a 14-year sentence, which was just outrageous. And so the algorithm went, this guy's really bad. Like, so I'm given this high security level where obviously they think that I'm a high security prisoner. and um i had to go back down to belmarsh because i had a process of crime hearing whether they were alleging that everything i'd ever earned was a criminal proceeds even though i'd like paid tax on it all and whatever else and i was stuck in belmarsh for like nine months on the but they put me on the lifer's wing which was better because it's safe the highest the highest security in some senses is safer than the sort of c cats and the lower securities where everyone's mingling well the sea cats are full of plastic gangsters guys who've got like issues and they want to got something to prove younger kids you know if you've been a 20 or 30 then you're living in jail it's your home you know they're more serious you know i've seen guys get annoyed about someone playing the music too like going to their cell pick up their stereo and throw it over the balcony it's like yeah because he's just you know you're not you're being anti-social um when it does kick off in those places it really kicks off you know like i did see someone get their throat slit with a tunity lid in um in Belmarsh when the air ambulance came I don't know if that person made it or not but you see a lot of violence it's some and the strange thing is it started shocking and then it becomes sort of just regular and you become a bit used to it you know and I remember like sometimes there'd be an overdose or suicide or something and the coroner would need to come in or they'd deal whoever it was would have to come in and we'd all be banged up and we couldn't get out and my and I got to the point where I'd be like I was meant to do my washing today why did they have to do that today you know which it sounds like cruel but i suppose because you just become a bit immune to it you know when you've seen someone get boiling water thrown in their face and it's the 10th time you've seen it you're a little less shocked than the first time you see it um so you know it was um i was i was in high security for three and a half years mainly in a prison in the midlands called loud and grange which is a b-cat you have to be doing at least 10 years um and so most people in there i remember when i left wandsworth to go to loudon the reception orderly said just don't complain about your sentence length because there's guys in there who'll have done your sentence twice over already and at the time i was on a 14 to do seven and it felt like to me that felt like a life sentence and actually that there were guys in there who when i first walked in you know who'd done nine ten twelve years already you know and And so seven for them was nothing.

29:29You know, that's why I laugh sometimes when I see people, you know, write books about their time in prison, like Geoffrey Archer or whoever else. They're in for three months. They're in like in a safe section of Belmarsh for a week. And then they're in an open prison, which isn't even prison. Like a three-month prison sentence in prison would be called a shit and a shave. You know, it's a bad holiday. That's not jail. You know, that's not really doing long periods of time in high security institutions. that's so i have you know i'm sort of always there's a lot of people i think try to sort of make out that they've done prison time and i think you haven't done real jail you know i think within the within the prison community if you're doing four or more in custody that's considered a long sentence but anything under that is like reasonably short because you know you can get into a decat for two of those years which isn't prison and then you do two in custody so but four or more is long do you remember the moment where they said to you in court you're getting 14 years like what what is that moment like well interestingly my trial judge heavily criticized by the supreme court for everything that he did in my trial hated me and the feeling was mutual um and he's meant to wait till the end of his sentencing remarks to tell me what my sentence would be that's what happens but he wanted to tell me right at the beginning because he wanted to see the impact it had on me and he wanted to watch me whilst he made his sentencing comments and see you know the impact it had on me because he had at that point in time he'd won you know I'd been convicted I was going to jail and so he told me to stand up he said I'm going to tell you your sentence now um instead of you know at the end so he told me 14 years and he said you can sit down there so I sat down and I looked across to my ex-wife I looked across to my mum and they were just in shock and it's an out of body experience it doesn't feel like a real thing you know um and i had the next time i had that same out of body experience was when i won at the supreme court it didn't feel real to me it was felt i felt like i was watching myself from outside and uh it didn't sink in like it didn't it just didn't seem it just your body i think shuts off in a way to protect yourself and i just thought this is so crazy because i'd been told i was going to get between six and seven years or maybe at the worst case eight and then i'd get 14 which was i think in his sentencing remarks he said the maximum sentence for this is 10 years which is widely considered to be too short and i was thinking widely considered by who so you know to get around the maximum he gave me um consecutive sentences you know because there was more than one count and so the new legislation that came on in in relation to benchmark manipulation which was in 2013 or 2012 had a maximum sentence of seven years but he still managed to double what parliament decided the maximum sentence should be so i had this mad amount of time and actually the initial part of being in jail you're trying to survive that's the that's the that's really the first the early days you mean well the early months you know like you're just you you are scared and you're trying to survive i remember being in the cells at suvock for the first time and they let your barristers come down to speak to you before you go you know and i just sat there saying to them i'm scared i'm scared you know and then you get in that van and there were so many paparazzi you know they had the bbc had their mobile van with its sky thing or satellite dish on top and you know all the reporters are reporting from outside the court you know I was unlucky because when I was when my trial started it was just after the general election in 2015 and there had been a clear majority for David Cameron and there was nothing really going on particularly so I was on the front page and the first item on the news when my trial started and then when it finished it was August and there was a slow news cycle so same thing again you know I've got the paparazzi taking pictures through the window so I sort of I remember I put my back up against the wall and my feet out across the bench so they couldn't get my picture of me at my most lowest ebb I think so they never got any pictures of me in the van um I didn't want to see I didn't want to be able to get that shot can you tell us about like the safety concerns and like those early months in prison because I think you know I look at a guy like you and I think about a guy like me and I think I would not last in prison you know I don't about tea maybe you know i'm hard as nails no i mean like the same thing can you can you run us through like what are you scared of what is going on like what are the dangers well you don't trust anyone initially because you just you assume everybody in prison is bad and that's something that you have to change your mindset about because in when you're in for a long time you need friends and i made some of the best friends of my life inside i mean they're all exclusively in for murder um but they're carrying with them like a lifetime of guilt for something that they've done you know but i think you can't judge people by the worst action that you've ever done i mean i just i mean i suppose it's like imagine if you were out on the street and you had a big flashing sign over your head with the thing that you're most ashamed of that you've done in your life that you're most embarrassed of the thing that you think that i wish i hope nobody ever finds out that i did that imagine you had a sign and we're constantly being played like a video we're constantly being played above your head and every person you met was judging you based on that thing that you feel just cringe about, you know, that's where you've got to say, well, I'm not going to judge that person solely on this worst thing that they've done.

34:53You know, and generally the sort of unwritten rule in prison is you don't ask what people are in for. You know, you let them tell you if they want to tell you. I mean, there was a lot of confusion in prison. I think they all thought that I'd sort of stolen one cent from every bank account in the world and all these other sort of things that I'm sure they got that from a movie. or they thought I was saying I was in for fraud but I was actually a nonce. But I mean, reality was because my case was so high profile and because there's a proliferation of phones in prison, I'd say, look, just Google me.

35:24But then actually I was under threat because people were – I never met more millionaires than I ever met except when I was in prison. There was so – everybody had lots of money because there's a lot of fantasists in prison. But if you're one of the people who walks around and say I've got nothing, which I did because the government took it all off me, then they automatically think, oh, well, he must have something because why would he say he's got nothing? You know, so then you're sort of under threat because people think that, oh, you know, we can tie him up, kidnap him in his cell, you know, threaten to cut off his fingers, call his mum, say, transfer me some money.

35:57But you're not protected by other cons. Sorry, you're not protected by screws. You're protected by other cons. I remember when I got to my first high security prison, Loudoun, I'd been in segregation for two weeks, so kept out of the general population in Wandsworth and sent up to Loudoun. And I went on to the induction wing and the wing manager pulled me into his office and he could see that I didn't know what the hell I was doing. I was vulnerable. and so he called in this other guy so this guy walked in he must have been about six foot six massive he was from Bradford he was doing 35 years for a gangland assassination and he point that the wing manager pointed at Jigger the big the big guy doing 35 years he'd done I think nine at that point he said right you are going to look after him pointing at me and I'm thinking why is this massive black guy like going to look after me you know and I didn't understand the relationship that that officer had with that inmate but that inmate it later sort of i sort of yeah i then sort of understood why that inmate might have reasons to look after me if you see what i mean and i don't want to go into the details of that but there were reasons that he might have to look after me um and no i was never i never had any problems on that wing although inadvertently i did actually managed to offend other inmates but not not deliberately just because i think they felt like i would talk down to them and that was partly the vernacular you know in my use of words you know so i might use a long word and they might just not know what it meant and think oh he's he's talking down to me so there were times where some of my other prison mates had to talk me out or talk me out of getting myself into trouble and i did frequently sort of get myself you know into sticky situations without really necessarily meaning to do that i was only i was only physically attacked once and that funny enough that was in open prison which is supposedly the safest of all prisons and um again i'm i'm hesitant to actually talk about it publicly because it's going to have ramifications for the individual involved um so i didn't tell any i didn't tell any prison staff about that um but um there were times when i felt that my life was under threat which in a way in a much more serious sense than the time i was actually attacked that's actually when i was in ccap when i was in category c um because one of the things i've said to you you're not kept safe by officers you're kept safe by other inmates And I'd gone to a prison in Wiltshire called Earl Stoke.

38:44And I didn't know anybody. I'd gone down. I knew one guy I'd come down on the bus with called Delroy. He was a big drug, a big Jamaican drug dealer. And we'd shared a cell on the induction wing when I got to Earl Stoke. And I got into a sticky situation at Earl Stoke where I got padded up with somebody who was involved in distribution of drugs. and he viewed me as, I remember when I walked in, he said, are you an undercover fed? And I was thinking, yeah, because of course I would go to prison for like five years or four years, just so I could wind up in the same cell as you. But then it was this instant suspicion, because I was an impediment to his business operation.

39:26I didn't want to be in the cell with him. I'd rather have been somewhere else, but I was stuck with this guy. And then he became progressively convinced that I was a grass of some description. And I remember I went off, there was no lock on that door for some reason. It was like a strange wing and I'd gone off to education and I'd come back and it looked like someone had moved an item of furniture in that cell and he came back and assumed that it was me and I'd been going through his possessions. And I had no reason to go through his possessions. Why the hell would I do that? but there was a degree of paranoia in part I think because of his because of his activities I mean he's back in jail for attempted murder now so um uh which he pled guilty to this but this that wasn't what he was in for at the time and I felt very intimidated by him and I and I I asked to move wings and I eventually through complaining enough I moved wings because I didn't want to sleep in the same cell as him um but then i moved to the cell to the wing from whence he came where all of his mates were and then i was like i was like so then the rumor went around that i was some sort of grass and you don't want that in prison you really don't and in in other prisons i had backup i had other people who would say no leave him you know you do so i was petrified i was really petrified you know it was really i couldn't talk about it on the blue phones on the wall because someone would listen.