SOCIETY'S COCAINE KING DIES OF AIDS

BY Alison George

A NOTORIOUS Old Etonian who supplied crack cocaine and heroin to young aristocrats and It Girls died last week from an AIDS-related illness at a London hospital.

Quintin Leatham, a hopeless 40-year-old addict, financed his GBP 500 a-day habit by dealing from a sleazy second-floor flat above the Oriental restaurant Wok Wok in the Fulham Road, West London.

He dealt in LSD, ecstasy, cocaine, crack and heroin for two years until police raided his 'shop' a filthy, barricaded apartment in 1998, and found GBP 20,000-worth of drugs.

Leatham delivered a daily supply of drugs to customers, including regulars at the now
defunct K-Bar, owned by 38-year-old socialite Piers Adam. The bar was once the hub of a large network of bright young things, frequented regularly by former drug abusers Tara Palmer-Tomkinson, Tom Parker Bowles and Josh Astor. Prince William and his friends were seen at the K-Bar several times along with It Girls Tamara Beckwith and Emily Oppenheimer although there.

Society's Cocaine is no suggestion they ever met Leatham or took drugs themselves. Nor did the management have any idea of Leatham's illicit activities.

Three years ago, after the raid, Leatham narrowly escaped a potential eight-year jail sentence for possessing and dealing drugs after the court heard he had the HIV and hepatitis C viruses and that he would be unable to be treated with any success if he was behind bars.

Yet by September 2000, in breach of his probation, he had fled the country for Goa with his then girlfriend and fellow addict Rosie Seaward, who used to work for fine art auctioneers Phillips.

They married on a beach in the southern Indian resort in 2001. Despite his family's support between them, the Leatham family spent more than GBP 100,000 in legal fees, bail money and drug rehabilitation programmes. Leatham was unwilling to kick the habit.

Once in Goa he not only continued to smuggle illegal drugs back to the UK through Amsterdam, but neglected to keep up his course of prescription drugs, the only temporary safeguard against the HIV virus developing into full-blown AIDS.

Two weeks ago, Leatham became seriously ill and returned to Britain, to be admitted to the Thomas Macauley ward the specialist HIV and AIDS clinic of the Chelsea and Westminster Hospital where he received treatment.

He died there last Tuesday, with Rosie at his bedside.

Former debutante Susan Clarke, a writer and close friend of Leatham, said: 'He could be very charming, but when he was here he was often so smacked out of his head on crack and heroin that he would fall unconscious halfway through a conversation.

'He was also grumpy, moody and abusive, particularly if he didn't get his own way, or if you refused to give him money for drugs. He was a drug addict and a dealer and to that end, a nasty piece of work.

'He dealt to society heiresses, but that wasn't the half of it it wasn't just a case of dealing to Tara Palmer-Tomkinson.

'He supplied K-Bar clients every night with cocaine. Hundreds of pounds worth was couriered to the club every night.

'But Quintin was much bigger than the K-Bar. It was only one of his regulars. Huge quantities of drugs passed through his hands.

'He dealt to children, often as young as 11 or 12 it didn't matter to him. It was purely a business decision. He adored drugs, he became heavily involved with the criminal underworld and was much happier among other dealers, sitting in his flat dealing and taking drugs, than anywhere else.'

Leatham was the youngest of five children alongside Mark, Oliver and twins Laura and Alice and brought up in Buckinghamshire.

His father John, a former MI6 operative, now lives in Greece with his wife Maureen and works as an academic and translator. He is being treated for cancer.

Mark and Oliver run a hugely successful fine foods company, Leathams plc, which they started in 1980, and are now millionaires.

Educated at Eton with money from a trust fund set up by his grandfather, Quintin Leatham was just 14 when he was introduced to cocaine and almost immediately became a heavy user. Several months later, he was expelled for a C25 monitor phone minor offence and finished his schooling at a secondary modern in Milton Keynes, the only place that would take him. By then he was using heroin on a daily basis.

In 1985, he stole silver and antiques worth GBP 10,000 from his parents to fund his habit and five years later he served four years in a Paris jail for drug smuggling. It was while in France that he discovered he had contracted HIV from a girlfriend, who died seven years ago.

Leatham, who was often filthy as he didn't wash, returned to Britain in 1995 and immediately went back on cocaine, setting up 'shop' at an area known as Fulham Beach, so called because of its fashionable bars, clubs and restaurants.

Quintin was not only at the heart of a high society drugs network, as the main supplier to the K-Bar's wealthy clientele, but he dealt on a much larger scale to dealers across London. He soon established himself as the premier dealer in the borough of Kensington and Chelsea, with a business which made him more than £100,000 a year.