They sure knew how to live it up in those heady years before the investment banking crash on Sept 15.
They were the City boys, big-name investment banks' stock analysts, traders and bankers in the square-mile City of London who earned fat bonuses.
Once, a group of them and their clients took a £25,000 (S$64,000) private jet trip to Ibiza, Spain, where they were met by a limousine filled with naked prostitutes.
Many supped Cristal champagne and flaunted £3,000 tailor-made Ozwald Boateng suits, Porsches and Ferraris. Now, one of them has broken the 'code of silence', as he himself puts it.
An insider, Mr Geraint Anderson (below), has, in a book, lifted the veil on what he calls the greed, short-term gambling and bonus culture that precipitated Sept 15's crash on Wall Street and London.
Even before the book's launch in June this year, Mr Anderson, 35, had been writing a popular weekly column in thelondonpaper, a free London paper, since 2006.
'Cityboy', his pseudonym while working as a high-flying stock analyst with a top London bank, gave glimpses into the lavish lifestyle of City boys, who received bonuses of up to six figures.
With the current credit crunch the hot-button issue, his book, Cityboy: Beer And Loathing In The Square Mile, which dished out more of the excesses, has been serialised by The Times of London.
Mr Anderson, a former Dresdner Kleinwort analyst who was named 'top stock picker' for two years running, said in his book: 'I've been dragged to strip joints where I've seen married traders throw £2,000 on private dances.
'I took clients for a £1,000 noshup (lavish meal) at Petrus. They had a £30,000 bottle of wine the waiter assured me was purchased quite often.'
Some of the City boys were just 23 years old, he added.
With Lehman Brothers having gone belly up, and Merrill Lynch in a fire sale, he said it's the end of the lavish life for the City boys. They had it coming, he added.
He blamed the pervasive bonus culture among the big-name banks where highly paid staff like the City boys pushed dodgy debt products and received huge bonuses.
He spoke of CDOs, or collateralised debt obligations - complex, high-risk products that appealed, so long as the gravy train did not stop. That train did screech to a halt, with the now-infamous sub-prime lending fiasco in the US.
Mr Anderson said the traders 'raked in cash by selling mortgage-backed securities they knew would explode at a later date'.
As he told the BBC in August: 'I think the people who created these products were either stupid or they were extremely devious.
'I'm not sure which one is more worrying...The only way these products could have survived would be if interest rates stayed low for, you know, decades, or indeed the property boom continued for decades.'
He said everyone knew these scenarios were unlikely.
In other words, it was all a make-believe world, a house of cards ready to collapse.
He admitted that he was a member of this cabal and that, when he quit his bank job earlier this year, his last bonus - in six figures - was 'disgustingly huge'.
But he claimed that, unlike his extravagant bosses and colleagues, he held on to his second-hand suit and 20-year-old Vauxhall car.
'Let's not shed too many tears for these people,' he told the BBC.
This article was first published in The Straits Times on October 5, 2008.
