John Rusnak hit the news headlines over a decade ago for one of the biggest trading frauds ever involving AIB's US bank Allfirst in Baltimore.
His multibillion dollar bets on currencies ultimately cost AIB $691m. After serving serving five years in prison, he has begun a new life running a dry cleaning business in Baltimore, Maryland.
The ZIPS dry-cleaning and laundry business has four outlets in the Baltimore area and Rusnak has plans to expand the business to 20 outlets.
Talking on the John Murray Show today, he described his time working in the bank in the late 1990s as a "terrible time" which he does not like to look back at.
Describing it as a time of great despair and anguish, he said he made "tremendously bad choices" which had a ripple effect which just continued to get worse and worse
He said it was a time when he did not have a lot of support around him, accountability or correct encouragement and good friends or people to tell him when he was wrong.
"It was my emotional weakness that led me to make those choices," he stated. But at the same time, he said he wished he'd had better friends around him - he wished he had the people he has around him now, adding that the outcome would have been distinctly different.
The trading environment and the flaunting of the rules persisted for many, many years at Allfirst and Rusnak admits he was fully aware of his losses and how high his exposure was during the near five year period, adding that he kept precise records.
But he admits the last nine or 10 months at the bank were a bit of a haze, and he was making "incredibly irrational decisions" and had reached a point where he was never going to make the money back.
He also said that serious fraud continues in financial markets, adding that it will continue as long as young men are offered big bonuses to produce profits - and as long as their supervisors are also encouraged down the bonus route they will continue to look the other way. "I have seen no significant change or reform in the financial markets," he stated.
The former trader said it was a great relief when he finally confessed to the fraud, but adds that it was an extremely difficult time. "You can imagine when the worst thing you have done in your life is all over the Wall Street Journal, or the Irish Times, it is a terrible time".
"Reality crashed into the myth I had created about myself and it wasn't easy to take responsibility and to admit that I was wrong after all those years of lying," he stated.
Rusnak was sentenced to seven and a half years in February 2003 and released in July 2008, his sentence reduced by 25 months for good behaviour. He was in seven prisons during his term.
Rusnak said he wished he "never made those choices" which landed him in prison. "I'm always going to be remorseful for what's happened. I wish I had never made those choices. I wish I had thought clearly about the consequence for other people. And I wish I had made better choices," he stated.
He also said that he made the best of his time in prison before his release in 2009. "I could simply get up and try and make the best of where I was, and try to be a good father, and try to be a good husband from where I was, and try to prepare myself for when I came home."
"Jail is not whatever you want to call it, is not what people perceive it to be. There is honour among thieves and you treat everyone respectfully and you treat them the same," he said.
Rusnak told John Murray that the investors in the dry-cleaning business - one the owner of a Baltimore restaurant he knew from his days at Allfirst - felt he had made his biggest mistake and trust him to run the business.
