Broker reveals cocaine-fuelled lives of stressed City high fliers

Stephen Crump, 41, who once earned £250,000 a year, was arrested by an undercover policewoman in a pub on the edge of the Square Mile.

He was seized in a Met operation which uncovered a number of cocaine dealers selling drugs to City workers. Three dealers who sold between £20,000 and £30,000 worth of the drug a week to office workers in their lunch breaks have already been jailed.

Crump blamed the stress of his job after being caught plying the woman officer with cocaine on three separate occasions at the Mr Pickwicks bar.

He was held in a 20-month investigation codenamed Operation Telon - the biggest of its kind ever carried out by Scotland Yard's Clubs and Vice Unit - which uncovered drug dealing at Mr Pickwicks and Bar Bed in Whitechapel.

The former stockbroker was given a suspended sentence and ordered to do 250 hours of community service after his lawyer told the court he had turned to drugs to cope with his high-pressure career.

Crump, who is now taking an IT course and trying to start up his own business, started work in the City at 17 and said he was offered cocaine almost immediately.

At the peak of his addiction the father of two was spending £400 a day on cocaine and drinking two bottles of wine, 10 pints of lager and a bottle of vodka.

He said: "The pressures were immense and everyone was doing it. You would hear sniffing in the toilets.

"We would start work at 6.30am, take our first line at 11.30am, then be entertaining until 2am. I was very young and impressionable and suddenly I was earning all this money.

"I then became involved in a co-dependent relationship and would get home and carry on doing cocaine and drinking, then have a shower and go back to work.

"I was working in Singapore, Tokyo and Hong Kong, flying first class on holiday to Barbados and buying £2,000 Gucci suits.

"Now everything is gone. But I've been clean for 18 months and am pressing on, turning my life around and fighting to see my kids. I'm also engaged to a wonderful woman who has had a big part to play in my recovery."

In court his lawyer, John King, described how his client had only offered the cocaine to the officer in an attempt to woo her.

"This was about impressing a woman rather than commercial dealing," he said. "This sort of thing is rife in City traders and people working in the City as he was."

He added: "(Crump) had essentially been living in a dream world for 15 years, living with cocaine and therefore not taking care of his life or his family.

"Now he is, and he has changed dramatically." Crump, of Basildon, Essex, admitted three counts of supplying a class A drug and one of facilitating the supply of a class A drug and was sentenced to a year in prison suspended for two years.

In November, Phillip James, 38, who lived in a Docklands apartment off The Highway, and Lee Ingram, 40, of Harwood Hall Lane, who had a £1.5 million Upminster home, were each jailed for 10 years by Southwark crown court.

The court heard that the dealers ran a highly lucrative cocaine and Viagra racket based at the Bar Bed in Leman Street.

They spent their profits on holidays in Dubai and southern Spain and expensive jewellery.

Anthony Best, 37, of Firbank Road, Romford, a crack addict who worked for the pair, was jailed for seven years.

A spokesman for charity DrugScope said that many City workers turned to drugs.

"The problem is so bad that many City employers now have drug and alcohol policies and run random drug tests," he said.

"Cocaine makes people more energetic and confident, which they might see as a benefit. When taken with alcohol it can also mean people are able to drink more."