M: Britain’s Unconventional Playboy, Chris Reynolds Gordon

On a cold December day in 2007, Chris Reynolds Gordon went to his attic to get a rope and a box. Before his properties investments crashed, he had been one of the most successful 22-year-olds in the world. He drove an AC Cobra, owned an apartment in the South Kensington area of London, hopped first-class flights to Las Vegas at a moment’s notice, and had spent New Year’s traveling with a girlfriend from Paris to Istanbul on the Orient Express. But after a sudden loss of more than £3.2 million and the untimely death of his mother, he had gone from everything to nothing. “I was devastated,” he says. “My bank account read £3,000.”

As his stepfather worked in a home office on the ground floor, Chris wrote a note, left it on his bed, fled out the back door of their house in Chigwell, England, and headed to a forest behind a nearby high school. He found a tree and tied the rope around a high, sturdy branch. The day was windy, and he wasn’t wearing a jacket. He worked the other end of the rope into a noose and slid it around his neck. “I felt that I always wanted to have a significant meaning in life,” he says. “I would rather show people how not to live your life and end it than continue as a failure.” He stood atop the box and grasped the noose. He estimates he stood like that for 40 minutes. Finally, he pushed the rope off his neck and stepped off the box.

When he got back inside, he tore off a piece of paper and found a black ballpoint pen. On it, he wrote, “£360 million, aged 31.” Seven years later, Chris still has the piece of paper in his wallet. The figure he scrawled was a thousand times the amount of money his mother had bequeathed him in 2006. He had used that money to bet against the foreign exchange market and a variety of companies on the FTSE 100 (the share index of the top 100 companies on the London Stock Exchange), just before the recession, and he made an “astronomical sum.” But then he went big again, sinking his winnings into construction projects in Morocco, Dubai, and Egypt that went bust. On the day he wore the noose around his neck, the money was almost gone: from £3.2 million to £3,000 in mere days.

“I knew I needed to get it all back. I just didn’t know how.”

I meet Chris, now 29 years old, at a friend’s house in south London. He is deciding between a leather kilt and a pair of assless chaps for the evening’s Halloween sex fetish party. His friends have a laugh when he holds up the chaps, but he shakes his head and goes with the kilt instead.

Upstairs, he changes out of his standard blue crewneck and jeans into the kilt. He takes off his shirt and slips into a black velvet blazer. His hair is short, with a touch of gel. I help him tie up two silver armbands with blunted spikes to complete the costume.

“Thanks, mate,” he says.

He pulls out his gold-plated iPhone 4. The background screen is a picture of his 24-year-old girlfriend, a lingerie model named Lauren Bea, seated on a bed next to a female friend. Both are wearing lingerie and blindfolds, heads tilted upward. Chris opens WhatsApp and sends a text. “I’m looking forward to tonight,” he says. “It’s actually nice I won’t to have to fuck a ton of people.”

The plan is for him and Lauren to join seven friends at the Coronet Theatre, a club in central London, for a Halloween party called Torture Garden. He expects he’ll have sex with a few women but nowhere near the number he would expect to sleep with at one of his own sex parties, where a ratio of three “superhot” women to every two men gives him “pretty good odds,” he says. Chris’ sex party business is what has skyrocketed him to success. He has been hailed by Vice as “Britain’s answer to Dan Bilzerian,” and England’s Channel 4 is making a documentary on his wild life.

Lauren walks downstairs confidently. Her costume is a Le Petit Secret black thong and black string brassiere that goes around, rather than over, her breasts. She has blonde hair with light brown highlights and a tattoo of three butterflies on her lower right abdomen. Chris adjusts his velvet blazer and looks her up and down. “I love your makeup,” he says. The two of them have been dating for seven months, in an open relationship. “It wouldn’t work for everyone, but it works for us,” he says.

From afar, Chris Reynolds Gordon might seem like the playboy type. He’s handsome, his net assets exceed hundreds of millions of pounds, he just purchased a seven-bedroom villa in Ibiza, he’s an athlete (he was a junior champion 800-meter runner), he has sex with women of his choosing essentially whenever he wants, and he is a savvy businessman.

But he isn’t a traditional playboy. He couldn’t care less for perfectly sized lapels, ski trips, or other old-money hallmarks. He says he plans to buy a house in Monaco within the next two years, but he laughs when I ask if he will keep a yacht or sailboat in the Monte Carlo harbor. “I just have a lot of friends there,” he says, “and it’s good for business.”

He also has an unorthodox cleverness. After his mother died, he knew he wanted to be financially independent so that he wouldn’t have to rely on his stepfather, with whom he has a tenuous relationship. (Throughout our conversations, he referred to his relationship with his stepfather as “frosty” but sometimes called him “my father.”)

“I started at Traders University,” he says. “Just something I had seen in my e-mail. It was really shit—taking your money and promising you the world.” Then, in 2006, he met Paul Wallace, an independent trader and a performance coach, at a house party in Shoreditch. Wallace introduced Chris to a former Goldman Sachs trader, who took him under his wing for “thousands of pounds an hour.” (Chris requested that the trader not be named.) “You’re trading at the perfect time,” he recalls the trader telling him. “The world is in crisis. You can do a lot by going short.”

Over the next year, Chris and his mentor spoke over Skype as often as every other day, looking for quick changes in the marketplace that they could exploit using technical analysis chart patterns. Many of the financial tools that Chris used, he innovated himself, he says. He recalls making £80,000 in a single day while sitting at his laptop. “I was on cloud nine.”

His decision to work under the tutelage of a successful trader rather than spend time in school (he dropped out of Swansea University after one term) suggests a street-smart practicality lacking in the typical young person raised amid the trappings of wealth.

“I could have just gone for the normal path—a lot in my year went to either Oxford or Cambridge,” he says. “It went school, university, banking job…but I get up whenever the fuck I want; I go to bed whenever the fuck I want; I travel whenever the fuck I want; I can do whatever the fuck I want.”

While his go-for-broke attitude is partly what allowed him to make a quick fortune, it also led him to invest in those ill-advised construction projects—which brings us back to those 40 minutes in the woods.

Sometime after that cold December day, Chris had a new idea: diamonds. He decided to pursue a job at Alrosa, a Russian state-owned diamond trading and mining company, but the industry proved difficult to crack. “No one took me seriously,” he says. “Everyone knows everyone, and I’m just a new kid who has no fucking clue.”

He flew to Moscow, where Alrosa is headquartered, and stayed in the President Hotel. He says he met with State Secretary Pavel Borodin, all the while pretending, at age 23, to be one of the richest men in the world, not to mention a knowledgeable diamond trader. Chris left Moscow thinking he had the job, but perhaps his bluff wasn’t entirely credible: A week later he learned he wouldn’t be hired. “I had no idea why,” he says.

There followed a stint as a part-time model (“shorts and calendars, mainly”) and an attempt to get back into running shape, with the idea of trying out for the British Olympic team, which didn’t pan out. “When I decided to stop running, I cried a lot, but I knew that dream was never going to happen,” he says. “My parents loved me running. When it was going well, they came to everything.”

He got back into trading but without the success he had known selling short in the volatile days leading up to the recession. Low on cash, down on his luck, he moved into a youth hostel in the outskirts of Swansea, where he slept free of charge on a changing-room floor. He was 25. He took a job packing boxes.

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