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July 16, 2006 By JO KNOWSLEY; BEN LAURANCE Gary would come home and his hands would be sweaty. He'd say things like 'banking is really immoral' THE NatWest Three were given the freedom of Houston yesterday to go shopping. David Bermingham, Giles Darby and Gary Mulgrew spent the day choosing new clothes and toiletries. They had believed they would be immediately imprisoned while awaiting trial and forced to wear prison-issue boiler suits. So none of them brought a spare set of clothes. But they were released on $2.5 million bail by a judge on Friday into the custody of their Houston lawyer. They are due to reappear in court this Friday to learn if they will be allowed to return to Britain on bail. Local lawyer Douglas McNabb said they were getting 'the red-carpet treatment'. He declared: 'These boys sure have been treated differently to others. 'They'd been expecting to be stuck straight into the prison system with all its problems and here they are being treated as guests of the state rather than the accused.' It is now expected the three will face trial on September 11. AURA MULGREW hoped the romantic weekend with her husband at Scotland's beautiful Skibo Castle might help repair her marriage. She packed her jewellery, her most elegant clothes. Her long blonde hair was beautifully coiffed. But when she and Gary Mulgrew her millionaire banker husband of ten years arrived at the castle in July 2001, she realised the trip was not really to commemorate their wedding anniversary. The big talking point among him and a group of work colleagues with the couple for the weekend was the deal they had done a year earlier with the controversial American energy giant Enron. Laura said: 'Giles Darby and David Bermingham, who had worked for Gary at NatWest, were there. I didn't pay a lot of attention for years I had little to do with his work and kept myself preoccupied with the children. He wanted it that way he kept me very much closeted away. And I had just given birth to our daughter Katrina. 'I just remember being disappointed that the weekend wasn't about us or our marriage it was about Gary and his work.' That weekend was to prove a premature celebration. For just four months later Enron was to collapse, leaving multimillion pound debts and embroiling Gary, Darby and Bermingham in a fraud scandal which now threatens to bankrupt all three of them. Last week the Natwest Three, as the men have become known, were extradited to America to face fraud charges, accused of skimming off Pounds 4 million from a deal with Enron. They are alleged to have persuaded NatWest's investment banking offshoot to sell its stake in a Cayman Islands investment company at a knockdown price to a small independent company controlled by Andy Fastow, the finance director of Enron. The profits were then divided between the three Britons, Fastow and another Enron executive. A successful PR machine has campaigned to convince the world that the men are innocent. But Laura, 44, and now divorced from Gary, paints a picture of a secretive, mean-spirited man who kept his wife and children closeted far away from his working world, was violent and emotionally unstable and who was financially careful even when he was making millions. She describes a man who lost interest in sex with her after they married, but who furtively carried out a string of affairs though the allegations of adultery are not mentioned in her divorce petition. Speaking exclusively to The Mail on Sunday, she said: 'Everyone in his work always looked up to Gary. Giles and David thought he was wonderful. But then they also thought we had a wonderful marriage which was far from the truth. 'Everything about Gary was a sham. He was able to persuade people, including me, about things that didn't properly exist.' Laura has now 'escaped', as she puts it, a 15-year marriage though cynics could well point out that she decided to flee the marriage only after the Enron scandal erupted and the man who had supported her for so long looked likely to be bankrupted. In her divorce petition, based on 44-year-old Gary's unreasonable behaviour, she claimed he was cold and distant towards her, showed no interest in sex and had been 'financially secretive' making her fear for the financial security of herself and her two children, Callum, now ten and five-year-old Katrina. She said: 'I just wanted it ended.' BUT SHE was living with Gary and their children through the events that led to last week's extradition.It was a nightmare Laura could never have envisaged when she met Gary in 1990 when they were both aged 27 and living in Tokyo. He was already with NatWest and Laura had left her native New York to try to forge a career as a model. 'I met Gary on a blind date,' she said. 'We went for a coffee and I was a bit surprised he waited for me to pay for it. He was a banker but it didn't seem like he was earning a lot of money.' It was an illusion that was to carry through most of their married life. Laura said: 'I thought Gary was very funny. He had me laughing all the time with his Scottish humour. I thought I had fallen in love with him. But I fell in love with who I thought he was. 'He told me he had had a traumatic childhood. He was ripped away from his mother at the age of two his father had left her and her three children penniless and she was only about 20. She put all the kids into an orphanage and was only able to get them back later.' Gary and Laura married in Fort William in the Scottish Highlands on July 27, 1991. Laura said: 'We had about 70 guests and what I thought was strange was that none of Gary's friends gave us a gift. His mother did, but just about nobody else. I was shocked that they were all so cheap.' The couple were at first based in Glasgow in a tiny rented flat. But within weeks Gary was ignoring Laura. 'He'd go out drinking with his unemployed brother all the time.' And just a few weeks after they married he moved to Birmingham during the week to do an MBA degree, sponsored by NatWest. Then they moved to New York, where Laura soon began to see signs of how mean Gary was financially and emotionally. It was 1993 and NatWest had paid for the couple's apartment but the furniture was appalling. Yet when the spring base that supported the mattress broke, Gary was reluctant to buy a new one. At the same time he was very secretive about his job and what he was earning. She tried, however, to play the good wife and when he demanded they have a baby she duly, and quickly fell pregnant. But Gary did an abrupt volte face. 'He went out more than ever and commented on how fat and unattractive I was,' she said. 'He would go out to eat with clients but never wanted to take me out. I was expected to cook, but I was given little money to live on a few hundred dollars a month. 'Then there was the violence [ something Mulgrew vehemently denies]. On one occasion I was six months pregnant and we had a row about something all because I had asked him to come to the table and have his dinner. He pushed me on to the bed and punched me in the jaw. I was stunned.' He also made a huge fuss when she spent Pounds 700 for a cot and equipment for their new son. 'I remember one birthday, after our son had been born, and I had struggled out in a blizzard with a baby who was breastfeeding, to buy Gary a jumper. Then I went home and cooked him dinner. 'But he came home drunk, opened the present and didn't eat his dinner. Then he said: 'You're a loser just like your father.' and went to bed. 'He was a Jekyll and Hyde character. He put the baby's room together but had little to do with him after the birth. When I came home from the hospital he made me feel disgusting. And he stopped touching me almost entirely after that. We rarely had sex.' In 1997 the couple returned to the UK. And by 1999, Laura says Gary appeared to 'want to be nice to me. He wanted me to go out and play the corporate wife. He got some kind of bonus at work.' The couple bought The Old Rectory, a nine-bedroom, 300-year-old Queen Anne home set in five acres near Sud- bury in Suffolk for Pounds 1million. 'It was the only really nice thing he's ever done for me,' she said. 'He had really never bought me birthday or anniversary presents. He was too mean. But he did buy that house.' But once they moved into The Old Rectory Gary demanded that Laura have another baby. 'I had always wanted a daughter, and I was in denial about the state of our marriage. I fell pregnant really quickly,' she said. But while Gary quibbled over the tiniest bills giving Laura just over Pounds 1,000 a month for household expenses, all food and clothing for the family huge sums were flowing-into one of his dozens of bank accounts, the fruits of his highflying job with NatWest. In January 2000, just a month before Mulgrew and his colleagues became involved in the deal with Enron's finance chief that was to land them in so much trouble, nearly Pounds 600,000 landed in Mulgrew's account from Greenwich NatWest. Three months later, there was a further payment of almost Pounds 240,000. Mulgrew was able to pay off the mortgage on the Old Rectory at a sweep and that was before he received his Pounds 1.5 million share of the winnings from the fateful Enron deal. He invested in pubs, he invested in property. He was even able to put Pounds 250,000 into Celtic, the Glasgow football club he followed with such passion. In February 2000 Gary did the deal with Fastow and his colleagues that was to result in his current crisis. But Laura was not aware of any huge improvement in his finances. Yet Gary was by now earning the sort of income most people can only dream about. In the tax year to April 2000, his earnings were Pounds 1.58 million and in the following 12 months, they touched a jaw-dropping Pounds 3.2 million boosted by a payoff when he quit NatWest. Laura, however, claims to have been unaware of these huge windfalls-By the end of 2000 she was also pregnant with their daughter Katrina. Gary left NatWest and joined Royal Bank of Canada. After Enron's collapse in November 2001, Mulgrew, together with Darby and Bermingham, had known they could be affected by the fallout, though they insist they are confident they did nothing wrong. And he was concerned about possible financial ruin. In one affidavit he claims that fighting the extradition would cost him at least $1.5million (almost Pounds 817,000). Laura, however, was initially unaware of his troubles. But then she noticed her volatile husband appearing even more troubled. 'He would come home and his hands would be sweaty,' she said. 'He would come out with strange things like "banking is really immoral".' When the Enron scandal broke Laura claims Gary had woken up early in the morning and turned to her with a shocking revelation. He said: 'You know I haven't been such a good husband to you. I'm a phoney. I'm a fraud. I've had an affair for a long time.' He then revealed that he had been sleeping with an Enron employee based in London. He also told Laura there had been other women. 'I was horrified,' she said. 'We didn't have a happy marriage but I didn't think he had cheated. 'When he told me about his lovers it was as if he had kicked me kicked me for all the years I had put up with everything to help him.' Worse was to come. 'When I asked him, 'What made you do it?' he turned on me and said, 'Because I hate you so much I wish you were dead.'' ' She was finally divorced in March this year, and only last week completed the sale of The Old Rectory for an undisclosed sum she says to help pay her enormous legal costs and other debts. Home is now a compact three bedroom terraced house in Lavenham, Suffolk, which would easily have fitted into one of the more generous rooms at the Rectory. 'It's claustrophobic after the Rectory,' she said. 'I'll have to learn to call it home.' SHE LIVES with her daughter Katrina and for the moment Gary pays maintenance but only until 2008. Most heartbreaking for Laura is the fact that last year her ten-year-old son Callum opted to go and live with his father. The last time she spoke to Gary was a couple of weeks ago when she wanted to know what he was going to tell Callum about the extradition. She said: 'He was positive. He expected he'd be home in a few days. But I told him he had to tell Callum who is now staying with his paternal grandmother the whole truth. 'You can't leave the child in the wilderness,' she said. 'That's the way he treated me throughout our whole marriage.' Laura claims he was shocked when she petitioned him for divorce. And she said it was true she had been left depressed and disturbed by the marriage. But she said: 'Now I am stronger and have faith that our future will be better. I don't know what will happen to Gary and I'm afraid I don't care very much any more. 'If it wasn't for the children I would never want to see him again.' | |