“A drug dealer would turn up at 9am every morning,” Kent Bray told City AM. He did not need to phone. The man came on schedule, and Bray, then running the biggest forward foreign exchange book on Citibank’s London desk, would head downstairs, take the lift, get in his car and loop round the block. Two hundred pounds went one way, three grams of cocaine the other.
“I’d just use all day,” said Bray, who is 62. “There were some days I’d get some for the way home.”
Daily Mail Australia reported on his account on June 24, 2026, days after City AM published its video interview with him.
From the Wallabies to a Citibank desk
Bray played for New South Wales against the British and Irish Lions in 1989. He then spent six years at Harlequins in England, in a side that also had former England captain Will Carling. He took a degree at Oxford University and went on to become a director on Citibank’s foreign exchange desk in London.
The cocaine came in the early 2000s. A Harlequins supporter offered it to him, according to the Daily Mail. Bray has said he took it only on his own, which made the habit easy to hide from friends and colleagues. City AM put the cost at £600,000 a year, and Bray has previously said he spent $160,000 a year in early-2000s money.
“The worst possible version of myself”
The quantities climbed. “In the end, I was doing 20 to 30 grams of cocaine a week,” he said, adding that some days he got through five or six grams. He compared it with drinking 40 bottles of wine a week. “I wasn’t doing it because I was enjoying it. I was doing it because I was addicted.”
Evenings were no better. He went home to Essex and his two children, he said, “as the worst possible version of myself, and I was crushed.”
His body gave it away. During the Rugby World Cup in England in 2015, some friends flew in from Australia and barely recognised him. “I looked skeletal,” Bray said. “They said, ‘Have you got AIDS? Have you got cancer?’” On the flight home, one of them told another that they had better get used to the idea they might not see him again.
Former Wallabies player Troy Coker pleaded with him to get professional help. Bray went to rehab in 2016, but stayed clean for only eight days afterwards. He then hit what he described as rock bottom, using “up to or beyond 80 grams of cocaine by myself in a hotel room.”
“I’ve lost five stone,” he said of that moment. “I’m mentally fragile. I’m spiritually bankrupt. My ex doesn’t like me. I’m not present for my kids. I’m risking the lot, and the lot meant death.”
Recovery
His first clean day was June 18, 2016, and he has stayed off the drug since. City AM describes him now as a counsellor and coach. In the interview, it says, he also spoke about mentoring Gary Stevenson, the YouTube activist, at Citibank.
Sources
- Aussie footy star turned finance guru reveals he was doing 30 grams of cocaine a week as his addiction almost killed him: 'My friends thought I had AIDS' | Daily Mail Online
- City trader: 'My coke dealer came to the Canary Wharf office every day at 9am'
