https://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/02/business/dealbook/more-details-on-bankers-tragic-death-but-questions-persist.html

More Details on Banker’s Tragic Death, but Questions Persist

John Hughes holds a portrait of his son Thomas, a Wall Street banker who committed suicide in May. Mr. Hughes said his son generally liked his job, relentless hours aside, and found the work rewarding and stimulating.Damon Winter/The New York Times

Wall Street has always had a problem balancing the staffing equation: having the right number of people around to give those employed a meaningful work experience but also free time to unwind and recharge.

The typical Wall Street work cycle contributes a tricky variable. Deals often have deadlines by which they must be announced or consummated, and the work needs to be done to get them to that point. But it is not easy to anticipate when a deal might pop; it is not like an assembly line, where the work flow can be calculated precisely at each step.

Often, there are not enough junior professionals for the amount of work that needs to be done — or that senior professionals think needs to be done. As a consequence, the younger workers get pushed to their physical and emotional limits in long sleep-deprived days. Smartphones ensure no one is ever out of touch.

Sometimes, the consequences can be tragic.

Take the case of Thomas J. Hughes, a 29-year-old, highly paid junior banker at the investment banking boutique Moelis & Company. Last May 28, hours after returning to New York from a business trip to Cleveland, he jumped to his death from the stone windowsill outside his 24th-floor rental apartment in Lower Manhattan, according to the medical examiner’s report.

In October, I wrote about the Hughes tragedy, and that of another young Wall Street banker, Sarvshreshth Gupta, a 22-year-old analyst at Goldman Sachs.

Back then, some questions about Mr. Hughes’s death were unanswered: Was he overworked? What drove him to jump? Was there foul play involved, as some have suggested? These remain hard questions to answer definitively. He left no note. And getting to the bottom of the complex psychological accounting that leads someone to make such an unalterable decision is nearly impossible.

But, thanks to the medical examiner’s report, the toxicology report and some emails Mr. Hughes sent in the hours before his death – all of which John Hughes, his father, shared with me last week – the narrative of Thomas Hughes’s last day has become a little less opaque.

There is no question the younger Mr. Hughes was working hard at Moelis, a firm that specializes in advising companies about strategic decisions and employs 650 people, about 450 of them investment bankers. His hours were long, according to his parents, and often relentless, as is typical on Wall Street, despite the efforts by many firms to institute a better work-life balance.

Thomas Hughes received a $400,000 bonus for 2014, according to his father. That would bolster a view that the firm’s philosophy, like that of firms across Wall Street, was to push people hard and pay them well.

After weeks of intense work, during which he missed a family Easter gathering, Mr. Hughes resolved to take a four-day vacation to Bermuda last May 21. The idea was to play golf, get some sun and relax, his father said. He made it to the island but spent most of his time in his room, working on his computer. He returned to New York on May 24.

Early the next week, he flew to Cleveland for work-related meetings. He returned to New York early on the evening of May 27, a Wednesday.

The original hypothesis was that Mr. Hughes went out drinking after he got back from Cleveland because the doorman at his apartment building, reported smelling alcohol when letting him in around 2 a.m.

But, according to the toxicology report in October, no alcohol was in Mr. Hughes’s body. Instead of going out drinking, he apparently went back to his office, at 399 Park Avenue, to work, his father said. Emails show he was logged into his work computer until he left.

“We had assumed that he was out drinking between 6 p.m. and 1:30 a.m.,” John Hughes wrote me. “It turns out that he went from the airport directly to his office and worked until about 1.”

According to the emails provided by his father, at 5:45 p.m. on May 27, Mr. Hughes received an executed nondisclosure agreement from a potential buyer of a company, code-named Project Cactus, that Moelis was representing. From his office computer, at 12:43 a.m. May 28, Mr. Hughes emailed a copy of the Project Cactus confidential selling memorandum to a representative of the unnamed potential buyer.

The young banker got home an hour or so later, according to what the doorman told the police.

According to the medical examiner’s report, the younger Mr. Hughes used cocaine, a habit he had developed at boarding school but that his parents thought he had kicked. The cocaine was also apparently laced with a powerful synthetic drug. According to the toxicology report, his blood and his brain were bathed in a combination of cocaine and ethylone, a recreational designer drug known as “bath salts” that can cause a mixture of euphoria, paranoia and anxiety. “He continued working throughout the night,” his father wrote, “sending lots of emails” about work-related things.

At 4:16 a.m. in New York, a Moelis colleague in Los Angeles emailed Mr. Hughes referring to Project Cactus: “Did you ask if they wanted a meeting for next week? We need to do that for all parties.” At 9:06 a.m., Mr. Hughes emailed back: “I did not. Will ask him.” Sixteen minutes later, at 9:22 a.m., he emailed the potential Project Cactus buyer to try to set up a meeting to visit with the seller for the next week.

At 9:45 a.m., Mr. Hughes received an email from another Moelis colleague, keeping him “in the loop” on Project Knight MP. Five minutes later, he emailed back to that colleague, “Thanks.” That was his last recorded communication.

Soon thereafter, around 10 a.m., Thomas Hughes jumped to his death. The medical examiner ruled that suicide – “descended from height” – was the manner of death. “There was a lot of cocaine in his system — enough to cause a quick and severe psychotic episode, as well as convulsions and extremely high blood pressure and heart rate — and other terrible mental and physical strains,” his father wrote by email. “That was it. Very sad.”

(https://xoxohth.com/thread.php?thread_id=4051478&forum_id=2#36613003)

Suicide Banker's Dad - "But thats the nature of the assignment that he chose"

Suicide Banker's Dad - "But thats the nature of the assignment that he chose"

(https://xoxohth.com/thread.php?thread_id=4051478&forum_id=2#36613198)

Dude should have COPPED m7 and gone into chill NON-PROFIT management

(https://xoxohth.com/thread.php?thread_id=4051478&forum_id=2#36613360)

Holy Shit that's a lot of money. How many hours working are we talking? I think I'd gladly do that for 5 years and bank a cool million.

What exactly is the problem here?

(https://xoxohth.com/thread.php?thread_id=4051478&forum_id=2#39344184)