Two weeks ago Chris Albrecht flew to Las Vegas on a private jet, made $120 million (£61 million), then tried to strangle his girlfriend.

The first two parts of this story are entirely unremarkable. As chairman and chief executive of HBO – America’s most successful television network, with annual profits of $1 billion – Albrecht was travelling to Sin City to watch a boxing match that he was ultimately responsible for televising: Oscar De La Hoya versus Floyd Mayweather Jr. Subscribers to HBO could pay $54.95 each for a virtual ringside seat at the bout, which was hyped with the promoter’s headline “The World Awaits”. But Albrecht, 54, had no intention of watching the fight on the small screen: he wanted the real deal in the MGM Grand Garden Arena. “For events like that, the whole team flies over there from LA in the corporate jet,” says a friend of Albrecht’s. “If they’re not ringside, they’re pretty damn close.”

With his shaved head, tanned skin and black open-necked shirt, the HBO chief looked every bit the media mogul. Beside him was his TV starlet girlfriend, the Latina presenter Karla Jensen, 17 years his junior and a society page regular.

Drinking heavily, cheering the fighters along, Albrecht was a pressure-hose of booze, testosterone and adrenalin. An alcoholic, he had decided two years previously that he could handle a drink or two at social events. He was wrong, and the tension in the arena wasn’t helping. It was the Mexican holiday of Cinco de Mayo, and Mayweather (an African American) had swaggered into the ring wearing a sombrero and a cape in the colours of the Mexican flag – mocking De La Hoya’s racial heritage. The rapper 50 Cent was also striding around with Mayweather, bragging about the $1 million bet that he had placed on his friend.

Boos echoed. De La Hoya– the “Golden Boy” – raised his arms and the crowd rallied. But no matter what the outcome in the ring, Albrecht was going to be the loser of the evening. By the next morning his 22-year career at HBO would be ruined, his past uncovered, his family embarrassed and his employer in turmoil.

Perhaps, in one of those last moments before the bell rang, Albrecht might have recognised a bit of himself in De La Hoya. After all, the HBO chief was the golden boy of his profession. A Queens-born comedy club manager-turned-programming executive, he “green-lit” shows at HBO – sometimes after rival networks had turned them down – that went on to gain both critical adulation and worldwide followings: The Sopranos; Sex and the City; Six Feet Under. His involvement in The Sopranos was so deep that he personally changed the details of Tony Soprano’s first murder to make the depressed Mob boss more sympathetic.

With no advertisements and epic, BBC-worthy production budgets, Albrecht’s HBO changed television, abandoning the channel’s 1980s sales gimmick as a first-run movie service and instead filling the vacuum that had emerged between movies and schlock TV.

Albrecht’s formula has since been replicated by newer rivals such as FX and Showtime, resulting in post-Sopranoshits such as The Shield and Dexter. In fact, at the time of the De La Hoya/Mayweather fight the press was beginning to ask what Albrecht was planning to do when The Sopranos came to an end this year. Nevertheless, for that one night at the MGM, he was still the king: more than two million pay-per-views added up to a staggering revenue of $120 million for “The World Awaits”, not to mention the $19 million that MGM had collected at the gate. This was the most lucrative fight in boxing history – and an entertaining one: it took 12 closely matched rounds and a highly controversial split verdict from the judges before the ageing De La Hoya lost his title.

The bout was over. But for Albrecht, by now utterly wasted, the trouble was just about to begin.

There are, as you might expect, varying accounts of what happened next. The Times asked Albrecht for his version but he declined, somewhat understandably, to be interviewed. His friends spoke off the record. Which brings us to the report filed by Albrecht’s arresting officer the next day. It begins: “In the MGM parking lot we observed a white male grabbing a white female by the throat with both hands. The male was later identified as Christopher Albrecht and the female as Jensen’s name is blanked out]. Albrecht was also observed dragging [Jensen] in a northbound direction towards the entrance of the hotel. As I ran towards the two subjects [a security guard] pulled Albrecht’s right arm, partially freeing Albrecht’s grip from [Jensen’s] neck. I then placed Albrecht’s left arm in a submission hold and placed Albrecht on the ground and into custody. I could smell a strong odour of alcoholic beverage.”

The report goes on to note the red marks on Jensen’s neck, her unwillingness to co-operate (a sign, some have since claimed, of “battered woman syndrome”) and her refusal of medical attention. Albrecht, meanwhile, told the officer that his girlfriend had “p****d me off”.

Towards the end of the report a passing detail, brilliantly vulnerable to interpretation, is offered: “Albrecht informed me he was the CEO of HBO.”

An alternative and much less damaging account of the scene outside the MGM was given to the New York Daily News by an unidentified friend of Jensen’s. “Chris was trying to guide [Jensen] to the car and she slipped on her wobbly high heels,” said the source. “He was helping her up when the police grabbed him.” Even Jensen herself eventually weighed in, saying that the neck-hold was “fuelled by both of us drinking too much alcohol . . . but I was not injured . . . I still love him and I forgive him. Chris and I are both committed to our sobriety and are looking forward to putting this behind us and moving on.”

What’s known for sure is this: after 12 hours in a Las Vegas county jail, Albrecht was released to face the mother of all Monday mornings. Indeed, he spent most of it composing an e-mail that pinged after lunch into the inboxes of HBO employees on both coasts, explaining that he was “deeply sorry for what occurred in Las Vegas” and that it was “a wake-up call to me of a weakness I thought I had overcome long ago”. It went on: “I have been a sober member of Alcoholics Anonymous for 13 years. Two years ago I decided that I could handle drinking again. Clearly I was wrong. Given that truth, I have committed myself to sobriety.” Albrecht announced that he would take an immediate leave of absence and “go back to working with” AA.

It was a classic non-apology apology, crafted perhaps in part by Albrecht’s lawyer, David Chasnoff, a Las Vegas bruiser who specialises in managing thermo-nuclear celebrity hangovers (it is said that he was instrumental in the annulment of Britney Spears’s 55-hour Las Vegas marriage). Also helping was Allan Mayer, a PR man adept at cutting free household-name clients from the wreckage of their personal lives. By Tuesday, Albrecht and Jensen, their relationship apparently still functioning, had ventured out near the HBO chief’s home in Beverly Hills to a party at the Laura M boutique, where Albrecht’s 24-year-old daughter Kate (who makes occasional appearances in the HBO show Entourage) was launching a jewellery line. Albrecht’s other daughter is still in high school; both are from his former marriage that ended in 2000 after 20 years. Most of the Entourage cast stayed well away. The paparazzi, meanwhile, were out in droves.

Perhaps Albrecht believed that he still had a chance of keeping his job. After all, he was good friends with his predecessor and mentor Jeff Bewkes, now president of HBO’s parent company, Time Warner, and in line to become its next CEO. That hope must have disappeared the next morning, when an astonishing fact was revealed by the Los Angeles Times: in 1991, HBO had paid a sum estimated at between $400,000 and $500,000 (£202,000 to £253,000) to Sasha Emerson, a former employee and girlfriend of Albrecht’s, to settle an allegation that he had shoved and choked her at HBO’s offices in Los Angeles. The payout had apparently been blessed by Bewkes.

“With great regret, at the request of Time Warner, I have agreed to step down,” announced Albrecht later that day. “I take this step for the benefit of my HBO colleagues, recognising that I cannot allow my personal circumstances to distract them from the business.” And just like that, one of the most remarkable careers in American media was over – at least for the time being. The tussle over Albrecht’s succession has already begun, with candidates including his deputy, Bill Nelson, and Eric Kessler, the HBO marketing head. Colin Callender, the Briton who runs HBO’s original movies division, is regarded by some insiders as “too creative” for the job.

Many in the business have yet to absorb what happened. “Chris didn’t have many enemies,” explains one LA-based entertainment executive. “There’s no sense of satisfaction that he was brought down by this.”

Meanwhile, levels of outrage at the domestic-violence allegation vary. Some find it hard to take seriously (“Since when did it become a crime to beat up your girlfriend in Las Vegas?” one TV writer joked to The Times), while others are appalled. “He does have an alcohol problem,” said one executive, “but to say that’s why he beat up his girlfriend is too much of a reduction for me. I mean, I’ve gotten drunk plenty of times and haven’t beaten up any women.”

Albrecht admitted a charge of battery last week, paid a $1,000 fine and was given a six-month suspended sentence. He is still being photographed out and about with Jensen.

By Hollywood standards he is not rich enough to retire – his estimated $2 million to $3.5 million salary at HBO was considered modest in LA – and is expected to sign an independent production deal with a studio before the end of the year; independent because the events of the past fortnight have shown that a personal indiscretion by an official at a public company can become a major news event; and the cost of a major news event can be great indeed.

The very fact that Bewkes’s future as CEO of one of America’s biggest companies can be vulnerable to a subordinate’s drunken behaviour is a lesson that Time Warner and others are unlikely soon to forget. Meanwhile, with all the time that Albrecht now has on his hands, perhaps he can catch up on recent Sopranos episodes. Last Sunday’s instalment featured an alcoholic mobster falling off the wagon and Tony leaving New Jersey for a short holiday. Guess where he went?

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