Three big stories captured the attention of the British this past summer: the shocking vote in favor of Brexit, the country’s departurefrom the European Union; the Queen’s 90th-birthday celebration; and the senseless assassination of Jo Cox, a 41-year-old member of Parliament from West Yorkshire, by a deranged 52-year-old constituent.

But, off the radar screen of most Americans, a fourth story also galvanized the country: the case of Sir Philip Green, a self-made retail multi-billionaire. With flowing white curly locks, a perma-tan, and unshakable brashness, the 64-year-old Green is the British Donald Trump (without the political aspirations). For months he has been front-page news, thanks to an irresistible combination of flamboyance and arrogance.

At issue was Green’s March 2015 decision to sell for $1.50—that’s not a typo—the retailer British Home Stores, known as BHS, to an investor group led by Dominic Chappell, a 49-year-old former racecar driver with a history of bankruptcy, little money, and virtually no retailing experience.

The demise of BHS, which was something of a national institution, struck a raw nerve with the British people. Modeled after Woolworths, the BHS chain was founded in 1928, and it sold at discount prices everything from electronics and furniture to perfume and groceries. Samantha Brick, a writer from Birmingham, recalls she used to go to BHS with her grandmother for tea. They’d sit together at the Formica-topped tables in the cafeteria. “It was really comforting and very reassuring,” she says.

The $1.50 purchase price not only smacked of farce but was also suspicious. According to a July parliamentary report about the deal, Chappell and Retail Acquisition Ltd., Chappell’s company, “were manifestly unsuitable owners of BHS. It is inconceivable that someone with Sir Philip Green’s experience seriously considered otherwise.”

Green said that the chain’s problems were becoming too much for his company to keep it. BHS was an increasingly small part of his overall financial empire—the privately held Taveta Investments Ltd., of which his retail business Arcadia Group is a subsidiary. Arcadia includes such well-known British retail names as Topshop and Topman; Miss Selfridge; Burton; Evans; Wallis; and Dorothy Perkins. Topshop, in particular, with its focus on fashionable young women, had become Green’s flagship (and has a large store on New York’s Fifth Avenue).

But the plot thickened considerably in April 2016 when BHS filed for “administration,” the U.K. equivalent of Chapter 11, throwing many of its 11,000 employees out of work and threatening the pensions of 20,000 current and former employees. Suddenly it seemed clear to the British people why Green might have been so eager to get rid of BHS: the gaping financial shortfall in the pension plan—said to be around $800 million and growing. Where once the British press referred to Green as the “King of the High Street [the British term for mid-level fashion retail],” suddenly he was known, in the pages of the Daily Mail, as “Sir Shifty.”

Last spring Parliament held a series of extraordinary public hearings to investigate how the collapse of BHS affected the company’s pension fund. The committee’s first report, released on July 25, was ruthless in its criticism of Green. What happened to BHS is “the unacceptable face of capitalism,” it concluded. According to the committee, Green “systematically extracted hundreds of millions of pounds from BHS, paying very little tax and fantastically enriching himself and his family, leaving the company and its pension fund weakened to the point of the inevitable collapse of both.” Furthermore, the report stated, “BHS declined to make the employer contributions necessary to maintain the sustainability of the pension schemes over the duration of Sir Philip Green’s period in charge.” Now the plan’s 20,000 pensioners are facing reductions of up to 77 percent of their expected payouts.

Responding to the report’s conclusions, a spokesperson for Theresa May, Britain’s new prime minister, said that May intended to “prevent irresponsible and reckless behavior.” Frank Field, the chairman of the parliamentary inquiry, characterized Green as “much worse” than the disgraced former newspaper baron Robert Maxwell—who left an $800 million “black hole” in his company’s pension plan before he fell off his yacht to his death in November 1991—a remark that prompted Green to threaten Field with a libel suit.

What made appearances even worse for Green is that the companies he runs had sent billions in dividends from BHS and his other U.K. companies to his wife, Tina. Now the principal beneficial owner of her husband’s businesses, she officially resides in Monaco, and so she legally did not pay taxes on the dividends received. The precise amount of the dividends remains unclear. Field said on Sky News that, if you added up the dividends, the incurment of debt, and the repayment of loans, the Greens had extracted about $2.7 billion from BHS and Taveta. When I asked Green to explain the sum, he declined to do so. My question was “too personal,” he said. The parliamentary report clarified that the “Green family” had received roughly $500 million in dividends from BHS between 2002 and 2004 and, in 2005, almost $2.2 billion in dividends from Taveta.

In this era of austerity the British people seem to have had quite enough of the retailing tycoon, with his legal tax dodges, his complicated corporate structure, and his hyperinflated lifestyle, replete with a helicopter, a Gulfstream G550 jet, and three yachts—including one, Lionheart, which is 295 feet long and reportedly has a swimming pool, a helipad, and a beauty salon.

Green socializes with Kate Moss and Beyoncé, the latter of whom sang at his son Brandon’s Bar Mitzvah, in 2005, which took place in the gardens of Len Blavatnik’s Grand-Hôtel du Cap-Ferrat, on the Riviera, at an estimated cost of $6.4 million. For Green’s 50th birthday, in 2002, he held a toga party on Cyprus, which cost a reported $7 million and featured Tom Jones and Rod Stewart. His 60th-birthday party, held over four days at the Rosewood Mayakoba resort, south of Cancun, reportedly cost $10 million. The guests included Naomi Campbell, Leonardo DiCaprio, Gwyneth Paltrow, and Kate Hudson. Robbie Williams, Stevie Wonder, and CeeLo Green performed, and the Beach Boys sang at an outdoor barbecue.

For a while, Green’s gallivanting amused British tabloid readers. “He’s the only person I know who has both Tony Blair and Kate Moss on speed dial,” gushed Michael Gove, the former British secretary of state for education, in 2014. Samantha Brick says, “We didn’t mind reading about him in the gossip pages and about how his wife would organize these six-figure-, seven-figure-sum parties for his birthday, where Kate Moss and Gwyneth Paltrow would show up.” But, she continues, since the pension issue, “there’s no return for him.”

Green chalks up all the criticisms to the insecurities of others, and he is not shy about berating those he regards as his persecutors. Last year, Ian Grabiner, chief executive of Arcadia, told the Financial Timesthat “the volcanoes erupt frequently. He’s very sensitive but I think that for all people like Philip, insecurity is a factor, because in their minds they have got to continue to be successful. . . . There’s a very childish side to Philip that looks for affection.”

The June 15 parliamentary hearing, which lasted for nearly six hours, showed Green in all his volatility. At first, he threatened not to appear, because, he claimed, Field, who demanded that he write a check to fill the pension hole, was biased against him. Field asked me, in an interview, to convey to Green that a $460 million payment over time to the BHS pensioners would do the trick. But in the end, amid calls from members of Parliament and other public figures to have him stripped of his knighthood, Green relented.

Trial and Errors

He arrived at the cramped hearing in a feisty mood. A few days earlier, doctors had placed a ninth stent into his coronary arteries. He was bombastic. He was disrespectful. He was charming. He contradicted himself. At one point, seemingly out of the blue, he turned to Richard Fuller, a Conservative Party M.P. from Bedford, and blurted out, “Sir, do you mind not looking at me like that all the time? It’s really disturbing. . . . You just want to stare at me?”

As for the gap in the pension plan, Green said, “It’s my fault. The answer is: it wasn’t dealt with. We’re here, and we have to find a solution. It’s not my style to blame anybody else.” He then proceeded to blame all sorts of people for not letting him know the extent of the problem and suggested that somehow a micro-manager such as himself—when he took over BHS, he claims, he saved $600,000 by ordering new clothes hangers—had not been informed.

Green also blamed Goldman Sachs, for not warning him off Chappell as the buyer for BHS. “We one-million percent would not have done business with him,” Green told the M.P.’s. “If [Goldman Sachs] had said, ‘Don’t deal with this guy,’ that would have been the end of it.”

This bit of finger-pointing seemed odd, since Green never actually hired Goldman Sachs to represent him in the sale of BHS. Instead, he said at the hearing, he had asked Michael Sherwood, his longtime friend and a London-based Goldman Sachs vice chairman, if Anthony Gutman, the firm’s co-head of European investment banking, could “do a favor” and “look over a few of the people” interested in buying BHS.

Gutman testified that the bank had turned down the BHS-sale assignment because it was “too small.” Gutman did, at Green’s insistence, “provide informal assistance” on the initial BHS-purchase proposals “related to funding and intentions.”

The M.P.’s report found that Goldman Sachs had “provided free advice to Sir Philip on the transaction, having turned down the opportunity to be formally engaged. In doing so, they hoped to maintain a longstanding and lucrative relationship with a wealthy client.” (Goldman’s relationship with Green is now “under review,” according to a Goldman spokesperson.)

Although Green did not commit to fixing the pension problem at the hearing, he did allow, “It’s going to get my best shot to find a solution as quickly as we can.” But weeks after the June 15 hearing, there remained no proposal from him. Field, for one, has had enough of Green. “That family could sort the pension out now if it wished to,” he said at a June 29 hearing. “It just has to come up with some money, money it has already taken out fivefold, this sum, from these companies. . . . We are fed up with hearing, ‘I am about to fix it.’ He does not fix it. What is required is a very large check from the Green family, who have done so well out of the whole of this.”

In a July 30 letter to Field, Green wrote, “I have tried to stay silent in the face of your regular outbursts and to focus on the important task of working towards a solution for the Bhs pensioners. But I am not prepared to continue to allow your abuse to go unanswered. . . . We are working towards a voluntary solution for the Bhs pension schemes because we want to help the Bhs pensioners. I will not be bullied by your press campaign and political grandstanding into supporting the Bhs pension schemes.”

On July 31, the London Sunday Times reported that Green had finally put forth a plan featuring a new pension fund “rejuvenated with a cash injection from Arcadia”—instead of from Green or his family. By this point, however, the British pensions regulator was looking into a nearly $300 million shortfall in Arcadia’s pension fund, so, as the Timesnoted, it was possibly “unsuitable to shoulder the burden” of bailing out the BHS pension fund.

Field told me in June that “the story has turned out to be a tragedy for Green, when he could have actually at the very beginning shaped events. His greed has allowed events to shape him. . . . I can’t understand the man, who needs to pay up, and each day witnesses his reputation [getting] further shredded, but does nothing but moan. It’s an Icarus story, isn’t it? Of seeing a way to make riches and then thinking you are immune from the power of the sun.”

Adds one prominent businessman, “It’s really the character of Philip Green that makes it so completely interesting. And he is the most vain man ever, and pugnacious, and it’s just terribly interesting to find him sort of on the ropes for a bit. . . . If you’re consistently flashy, consistently rude, and very rich, you can’t then be surprised if nobody likes you.”

Here’s the Deals

Before I had a single conversation about him, Green called my cell phone—“No Caller ID” showed up—and told me that he was worried that Graydon Carter, this magazine’s editor, was out to get him. He claimed that I had already started making calls seeking dirt on him. I told him I hadn’t spoken to anybody. “You’re on trial,” he told me. “Let’s see how well behaved you are.” He also threatened to sue.

Green’s résumé makes clear that he very well may be the most successful leveraged-buyout aficionado to ever take on the retail industry, at least if accumulating vast wealth is the sole criterion. He grew up prosperous in Croydon, in South London. His father, a small-businessman, died of a heart attack when Green was 12.

Green attended Carmel College, an expensive, now defunct boarding school west of London known as the “Jewish Eton,” until he was 16, when he left without graduating. He told the Financial Times in a 2015 interview that he “wasn’t a good school pupil” and preferred business, the tenets of which he had picked up by watching his mother, who had taken over the family business, which came to include auto shops, gasoline stations, and car showrooms.

According to a 1992 article by Chris Blackhurst in The Independent, Green remained close to his mother and set up “a string of companies with her—none of which was especially successful.” In fact four of them—Cupcraft; Tarbrook, a clothing importer; Buzzville, a women’s-clothing maker; and Joan Collins Jeans, intended to be the British answer to Gloria Vanderbilt jeans—went bust.

What Green excelled at, he soon found out, was risky, scrappy deal-making. In 1985, he bought a bankrupt clothing company, Bonanza Jeans. One of its customers, Jean Jeanie, owed Bonanza about $350,000, he says. So the owner of Jean Jeanie offered to sell Green the company for $5.5 million. Green’s accountants took a look at Jean Jeanie’s books, only to discover that it was bankrupt, too, owing Barclays bank more than $4.8 million and another $4.8 million to its suppliers. Green persuaded Barclays to hold off for six months on calling in its Jean Jeanie loan. Then he went back to the owner and told him there was good news and bad news. The man was bankrupt, but Green would still be happy to do a deal with him. He offered $90,000 for the option to buy the owner’s 65 shops, and he promised an additional $600,000 in six months. After the owner agreed, Green flew to Paris and Hong Kong, where he convinced wholesalers to give him new inventory on a “pay on sale” basis. Three days before his deal with Barclays was set to expire, Green says, he sold his Jean Jeanie option to Lee Cooper, a British jeans brand—for $4.3 million, he told The Independent in 1992, a figure which over the years has increased to $10 million in the telling. He was off to the races.

A few months earlier, he had met his future wife, Christina Palos, who is known by her nickname, Tina. Brought up in the Far East by wine merchant parents, she had her own Sloane Street boutique, Harabels. At the time she was married to businessman Robert Palos, with whom she had two children. The first time she met Green, she thought he was “dreadful” and “an arrogant pig,” she told a Daily Mail reporter in 2005. The second time she met him she fell in love with him. They were married in 1990, after she proposed, according to Top Man, a 2005 biography of Green by Stewart Lansley and Andy Forrester.

In 1988 Green invested most of his profits from Jean Jeanie and Bonanza Jeans—and millions more, solicited from his friends and business associates—in Amber Day, a struggling publicly traded retail group, of which he became C.E.O. According to Top Man, Green bought a house in St. John’s Wood and a vacation house in Marbella, and he started throwing lavish parties for his friends.

Under his leadership, Amber Day bought Woodhouse, an upmarket men’s-wear retailer, and What Everyone Wants, a Scottish chain, and ratcheted up the company’s profits from $5.4 million to $18 million. The stock price more than doubled.

But in September 1992, with a missed earnings forecast and the stock plummeting, Amber Day’s board of directors fired him. “Green’s ousting was all about the kind of person he is and the company he keeps,” one observer claimed in The Sunday Times. “In the past he walked on the wild side, and his enemies would not let him forget it.” Top Manexplains that the traditionalists in the City (London’s financial district) disapproved of Green’s brashness and his unorthodox way of running his business, and regarded him as “an untamed polecat who needed reining in. The anti-Green camp found they had plenty of ammunition in what was to become an increasingly dirty war.” The satirical magazine Private Eye ran several unflattering stories that focused on “Green’s close friendship with men associated with the very public financial scandals of the time,” Top Man observes.

According to the biography, the Amber Day experience was “shattering” for Green, who pledged never to run a public company again. But Green now claims the opposite: that Amber Day was the best thing that ever happened to him, opening up the way for bigger conquests. But first he had to focus on his health. In 1995 he had a series of heart problems that ultimately resulted in the nine stents being implanted in his chest. In 1998, he says, he was threatened by a mugger with a sword, near his London home.

Tina insisted they take a time-out. The family moved to Monaco. Green now says that he chose the principality because someone told him it was a nice place to live. When pressed, he also mentions its lack of taxes on income, capital gains, and dividends. While Tina continues to live in Monaco, Green flies back and forth to London.

In 2000, Green turned his attention to BHS, acquiring the chain for $300 million. It soon became clear that he had made a fabulous deal. Two years after the purchase, BHS was valued at $2.1 billion and had already paid its new owners $240 million in dividends. Green now says he should have sold the company at that point but he had fallen into a romance with BHS. He held on to it. In 2002, Green bought Arcadia Group, a collection of retail brands that now forms the basis of his fortune, for $1.3 billion. To do so he put in $15 million of his own money and borrowed the rest. In 2005, a group of banks refinanced the Arcadia debt, permitting Tina to take out the $2.2 billion dividend. Green’s retail empire continued to thrive in the years after the financial crisis—with the exception of BHS, which started to face steep challenges from Internet retailers and other competitors.

In 2006, Green was knighted for his “services to the retail industry.” In August 2010, Prime Minister David Cameron asked Sir Philip to undertake “an efficiency review” of government spending. His report, though light on details and heavy on bullet points, found much waste across departments and spending categories.

I asked Green to allow his British friends, including Simon Cowell, businessman Richard Caring, and fashion entrepreneur Sir David Tang, to speak with me, but I never heard from them. Instead, he suggested I speak with the American retailers Mickey Drexler, chairman and C.E.O. of the J. Crew Group; Pete Nordstrom, co-president of Nordstrom, Inc.; and Richard Baker, the governor and executive chairman of the Hudson’s Bay Company (which owns Saks). Drexler tells me that Green “is an out-there brash guy,” who has become “a juicy target” for the British press and Parliament because he’s an “enormously successful, wealthy guy.”

Richard Baker says, “We call him a triple threat. He’s a merchant, an operator, and he has enough design savvy to be dangerous.”

Like Baker, Nordstrom says Green is a man of his word: “He’s not always an easy guy to sit across the table from if you’re trying to negotiate something . . . but what we find refreshing and constructive is that he’s very transparent and honest.”

With Green’s extraordinary financial success came extraordinary hubris. He thinks nothing of picking up the phone and lambasting journalists. For instance, in 2008, the writer Alice B-B (a Vanity Fair contributor) questioned in a Daily Mail column whether Topshop was still a relevant shopping experience for women after they moved beyond young adulthood. Green called her out of the blue. They had never met before. She was at home. “He basically said, ‘Who the fuck are you? I don’t even know who the fuck you are. Are you fat? Are you thin? I don’t even know what you look like. I could get you banned from Topshop,’ ” she recalls. (Green declined to comment.)

Near the very end of the June 15 hearing, Green wrote something on his notepad, he said, because he was afraid he might forget it. He wasn’t sure he should say it out loud to the M.P.’s, but then he blurted it out anyway: “Envy and jealousy, my doctor told me, are two incurable diseases.” The audience in the hearing room gasped audibly.

He told the M.P.’s he could have structured his companies “much, much more aggressively” for his own gain than he did. He claimed he has paid every bit of the taxes—hundreds of millions of pounds—he owed to the U.K. government. He was done apologizing. “I have a very clear conscience,” he said. “We have run these companies properly. We have paid everything that was due.” As if to prove his point, a few days after the June 15 hearing, the press reported that he had taken delivery of a new, $66.5 million, top-of-the-line Gulfstream G650. Described as the “holy grail of private jets,” the G650 seats up to 19 passengers and sleeps 10. Lady Tina reportedly planned to spend $400,000 re-decorating the interior. One observer told The Sun, “It’s the most luxurious private jet on the planet, the fastest of its kind.”

Green likes to point out that he is not the only businessman in the world with a boat and a plane, and he blames his country for what he considers unfair—and anti-Semitic—persecution. “Listen, all I can tell you is this,” Green said to me in May. “You can phone as many people as you like that know me, and they’ll tell you I don’t tell lies. I say it how it is. I’m reliable. If I say 9:00, it’s 9:00. If I say I’m going to do something, I do it. You’re going to find England, unfortunately, is a place where you get a lot of jealous, envious, you know, negative people. That’s how it is.”