[Source is NYTimes 2019 (July 12)   "Jeffrey Epstein Taught at Dalton. His Behavior Was Noticed; Some students at the esteemed Manhattan prep school recall that Mr. Epstein, now charged with sex trafficking, was willing to violate norms in his encounters with girls."  / saved as [HN00KH][GDrive] ] 

Mr. Epstein’s time at Dalton was brief, and an administrator said it ended in a dismissal.

[....]  The school, which had been a progressive haven for the children of artists and writers, was undergoing a shift under a new headmaster. Donald Barr, the father of Attorney General William Barr, came in as a disciplinarian focused on beefing up the academics of the school, and on enforcing a strict code of conduct.

In a school known for creativity, administrators had prohibited denim jeans and “bizarre and eccentric costumes.” If Mr. Barr caught students using marijuana, he would often send them to therapy as a condition of staying in the school. [...]   In February 1974, Mr. Barr had announced that he was resigning as headmaster, protesting the meddling by the board of trustees, but that he would stay on until the end of the school year. It is unclear whether Mr. Barr hired Mr. Epstein during that time.

Mr. Epstein, from Brooklyn, was just 21 when he joined the faculty at Dalton, arriving without a college degree. The school’s student newspaper reported in September 1974 that he was starting that year as a math and physics teacher.

The next year [1975], he participated in a school musical for parents and faculty, and he appeared in later editions of the paper as the coach of the Dalton Tigers math team until the beginning of 1976.

The school had new leadership under Gardner Dunnan, who tentatively explored a rollback of some of its strict rules. Mr. Dunnan announced in early 1975 a policy that would allow denim inside the building, although students were still told to be neat and clean.  [...]

[...]   But Peter Branch, who was an interim headmaster after Mr. Barr and later the head of the high school, was not as fond of Mr. Epstein’s teaching. He said that he did not recall anyone raising concerns to him about Mr. Epstein’s conduct with students, but that he had heard concerns from the faculty about Mr. Epstein’s teaching, and eventually determined that the teacher needed to go.

[Source is Daily Beast (July 12)   "Jeffrey Epstein dodged questions about sex with his Dalton prep-school students" (Updated July 27, 2019)  / saved as [HP001M][GDrive] 

• While at the Dalton School, Epstein was the coach of the math team. In competitions with several local schools, Epstein led the students to victory in one instance and to second place in another. 

• At a February 1976 math meet, the Dalton team competed against Ramaz and the Manhattan Talmudic Academy with “Boss Epstein watching from the sidelines…” (The Daltonian March 5, 1976). 

• At another match up in April 1976, Epstein told his team “a victory would be as easy as Pi.”  The paper reported Epstein would be starting a “math-track team” the following year due to his “unique philosophy of integrating physical exercise with spiritual and mathematical stimulation.” [...]

• [...] “The April 1975 issue of The Daltonian covered a Parent-Teacher Association event, 'the first parent-faculty musical in recent memory,' noting that 'Mr. Epstein proved himself to be the ivory show man on the piano.'”

• Was Epstein wooing and dazzling the parents as a means of gaining access to their rarefied world? It seems to have worked because a parent wondered what he was doing there and put him in touch with the chairman of Bear Stearns, Ace Greenberg (whose children also attended Dalton; Epstein may have tutored them). After the 1975-1976 school year was finished, Epstein informed the school he was not returning and began his career on Wall Street at Bear Stearns. 

HENRY ROSOVSKY, who has enjoyed many honors and much affection from Harvard University, is getting a building named after him. Harvard-Radcliffe Hillel, the Jewish student organization, will name its new student center Rosovsky Hall. It is being designed by MOSHE SAFDIE, an architect and a friend of Mr. Rosovsky's.

Four donors have pledged to raise $2 million for the building. They are: [Leslie Herbert Wexner (born 1937)], chairman of the Limited; [Kenneth Lipper (born 1941)], an investment banker and a former Deputy Mayor of New York City; ROBERT MEISTER [See : Robert Alan Meister (born 1941)] , vice chairman of Frank B. Hall Brokers, and [Jeffrey Edward Epstein (born 1953)], president of Wexner Investment Company.

Dean Rosovsky is acting dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences until July 1 and was dean of the faculty from 1973 to 1984. He has a chair in the economics department, where he has been a professor since 1965. He is a member of the Harvard Corporation, the seven-person board that runs the school.

WHAT is the latest status symbol of the ultra rich? A spectacular residence they purchase for millions, reconfigure with the world's leading architects and interior designers for even more millions, then elect not to live in.

Such is the fate of one of Manhattan's largest town houses, a majestic stone mansion at 9 East 71st Street. Possessing some 21,000 square feet, the house was recently the uninhabited domain of Leslie H. Wexner, the founding chairman of the Limited Inc., the retailing company.

Mr. Wexner bought the house in 1989 for $13.2 million and lavished tens of millions on renovations, art and furnishings. Those curious to see the princely accommodations Mr. Wexner abandoned need look no further than the cover of last month's Architectural Digest. When asked how long Mr. Wexner had occupied the property, Jeffrey Epstein, his protege and one of his financial advisers, replied, "Les never spent more than two months there." Thus the prorated cost of Mr. Wexner's sejours would appear to have been in excess of a million dollars a day.

Visitors described a bathroom reminiscent of James Bond movies: hidden beneath a stairway, lined with lead to provide shelter from attack and supplied with closed-circuit television screens and a telephone, both concealed in a cabinet beneath the sink. The house also has a heated sidewalk, a luxurious provision that explains why, while snow blankets the rest of the Eastern Seaboard, the Wexner house (and Bill Cosby's house across the street) remains opulently snow-free, much to the delight of neighborhood dogs.

The seven-story house was built by the society architect Horace Trumbauer in 1933 for Herbert N. Straus, an heir to the Macy's fortune, who died before it was completed. (Mr. Trumbauer also built Clarendon Court in Newport, R.I., the former home of Sunny and Claus von Bulow.) The Straus house later became a convalescent home and the Birch Wathen School, making Mr. Wexner the first private resident -- or at least, the first private nonresident.

Reached in Florida last week, Mr. Epstein said that the house was now his.

In New York, two other billionaires, David Geffen and Ronald O. Perelman -- and an almost-billionaire, Steven P. Jobs -- are also in the vanguard of this puzzling trend. And there are others.

Across the street from the Wexner house stands the balustraded neo-Renaissance house of Robert W. Miller, the duty-free-shop executive, and his wife, Chantal. Visitors describe the house as being resplendent with a collection of Old Master paintings and boulle furniture, including a Louis XIV desk whose twin is at Versailles. But the Millers choose to live on the 22d floor of the nearby Hotel Carlyle instead because Mrs. Miller prefers the view.

The magnificent Miller house, whose interior has been conjured by the Venetian designer Renzo Mongiardino, usually languishes unoccupied, though it is occasionally used by the Millers' daughter Marie-Chantal and her recent bridegroom, Crown Prince Pavlos of Greece.

Mr. Geffen, the entertainment executive, is currently selling the two town houses on East 64th Street that he purchased in 1994 with the intention of tearing them down. He commissioned three sets of plans -- by the architects Charles Gwathmey and Richard Meier and by the interior designer Rose Tarlow -- for a showpiece town house, but then changed his mind.

Mr. Geffen has also been playing cat-and-mouse with the famous Jack Warner house in Beverly Hills, Calif., which he bought in 1990 for $47.5 million. He at first decided not to move into it, Ms. Tarlow said, but has now decided he will use after all.

Although famously wealthy, Mr. Geffen appears content to divide his time primarily between a modest one-bedroom apartment on Fifth Avenue, which was overhauled by Mr. Gwathmey, and a small beach house in Malibu, Calif.

Ronald O. Perelman, the chairman of Revlon and, according to the 1995 Forbes 400 list, New York's richest self-made billionaire, lives in a town house in the East 60's but continues to own a large apartment on Park Avenue, which he bought in 1993 while separated from Claudia Cohen. (They are now divorced and she lives on a higher floor in the same building.) Mr. Perelman's apartment, which had been decorated by Mr. Mongiardino for the previous owner, was remodeled by the New York designer Peter Marino. Mr. Perelman lived there less than a year, and it is now unoccupied.

Stranger still, even in the annals of the super-rich, is the duplex penthouse apartment of Steven P. Jobs, in a skyline-defining building on Central Park West. Mr. Jobs, a founder of Apple Computer and the chairman of Next Computer and Pixar Animation Studios, engaged the New York architects Pei, Cobb, Freed & Partners to renovate the apartment nearly a decade ago. A spokesman for the architectural firm conceded that reports of the job having cost $10 million were "conservative." Plans for furnishing it have not even begun. Nine years later, Mr. Jobs has yet to spend a night in his aerie.

Still, the Architectural Digest cover confirms Mr. Wexner as the leader of this rarefied pack. Inside the magazine, 10 pages are filled with pictures taken more than two years ago. The house has since undergone yet another transformation at the hands of the designer Alberto Pinto.

While the article does not mention the home's owner, its history is well known to many interior designers, who have long considered the house a plum assignment and are abuzz with speculation over why Mr. Wexner chose not to stay. Paige Rense, the editor in chief of Architectural Digest, declined to comment on the identity of the owner or on the vintage of the pictures.

John Stefanidis, the interior designer who with the architect Thierry Despont wrought all this splendor for Mr. Wexner, showed philosophical acceptance of his client's decision. "He now goes to New York very, very seldom," Mr. Stefanidis said, "and some people just don't have the time to live in all their houses."

Mr. Stefanidis also pointed out that Mr. Wexner was a bachelor when the project began and that his domestic priorities changed when he married in 1993. Friends say that his wife, Abigail, expressed greater enthusiasm for bringing up their two young children in Columbus, Ohio, where the Limited has its headquarters and where Mr. Stefanidis and Mr. Despont have built what visitors describe as a French-style chateau of pre-guillotine splendor.

Linda Stein, a New York real estate broker with movie-star clients, marveled at this fickleness. "It's amazing these guys can ever make a business decision," she said.   [...]

What preternatural power can prompt Rupert Murdoch, Jeffrey Katzenberg, Richard Dawkins, Neil Simon, Art Buchwald, Frank Gehry and Quincy Jones to sit for hours in a hot room contemplating the nano-sized split ends on gecko toes?

It can only be the TED conference, the three-and-a-half day, $4,000-a-pop annual roundup of brains and glitter in which deep wisdom and technological derring-do are served up on an intellectual pu pu platter by 70 speakers and performers.

This year's conclave, the 17th and the swan song of TED's founder, the impresario Richard Saul Wurman, was billed as ''Simply the Greatest Design Conference There Ever Was'' (modesty not being one of Mr. Wurman's many attributes). TED stands for Technology Entertainment and Design, a synergy the 66-year-old Mr. Wurman, probably best known for his Access series of travel guides, detected quite early when he dreamed up the conference in 1984.

Lake Wobegon it isn't. In the self-referential utopian community that is TED, even the juggler has a MacArthur fellowship and the neighbors, if not good-looking, are brilliant, fascinating and sometimes astonishingly rich.

Where else but at TED would Mr. Katzenberg, standing Armani-deep in sawdust with Spirit, his stallion and the namesake of his new animated film, be upstaged by Rex, a biologically inspired robot with springy legs and gecko-like feet capable of navigating the outer reaches of the Amazon -- specifically, the leg of the Amazon.com founder, Jeff Bezos, a longtime Tedster?

It can get deep. Very deep. Steven Pinker, the eminent cognitive psychologist, found himself deep in conversation with the singer Naomi Judd about the role of the amygdala, the part of the brain that colors memory with emotion; something, he aptly noted, ''that would not happen at the meeting of the Cognitive Neuroscience Society.''

It happened here one night last week over chicken and polenta at the annual private dinner, given by the New York literary agent John Brockman, formerly called the Millionaires' and Billionaires' Dinner after the rich techies who traditionally flocked to TED. There were still a few members of that endangered species scattered about, among them Nathan Myhrvold, the retired Microsoft chief technology officer, who gave an electrifying discourse at the 1997 TED about dinosaur sex, and Jeffrey Epstein, a financial adviser to billionaires, who flew a bunch of Tedsters to Monterey in his Boeing 727, outfitted with mink and sable throws and a high-altitude lunch catered by Le Cirque 2000.

The formidable galaxy of stars and ''deep-headsters,'' as the brainiest Tedsters are called, however, is eclipsed by the gravitational pull of the event itself. Mr. Wurman, a larger-than-life figure who dresses in white with Missoni scarves, ensures that TED's sweep is vast. Although the presenters included the designers of the Aeron chair and the Audi TT roadster, Mr. Wurman defines design broadly, as the design of life, embracing music, sensuality, understanding and humor. Beneath the zaniness -- at one point, Mr. Wurman was swaddled in a musical sumo wrestling costume by the comic Raspyni Brothers -- TED is really about the design of creativity and what it means to be human (except when Keith Bellows, editor in chief of National Geographic Traveler, discussed what it means to be a camel).

It is about the inner life of people and things. From the micro (nano-aluminum particles one-50,000th the width of a human hair) to the macro (the design of a country -- Afghanistan), this year's TED concerned the search for ''common rhythms,'' as the cellist Yo-Yo Ma, who came with eight musicians, put it to a packed crowd in describing the Mongolian fiddle and other exotic instruments from the Silk Road, ''the Internet of antiquity.''

Presenters whose normal fees often run to tens of thousands of dollars speak for free. They are simply told to tell the truth. ''Their groin is unprotected,'' as Mr. Wurman put it (correctly, since only 3 out of 70 presenters were women). At times, the confab resembled a mass confessional presided over by an overbearing father figure. ''It's about what you've overcome,'' said Rick Smolan, a photographer. ''What people want to hear about is how you screwed up.''

TED has become a place, perhaps the only place, where, nestled in the warm bosom of fellow elites, luminaries bare their deepest passions and innermost souls. Kary Mullis, the Nobel Prize-winning chemist, spoke of his childhood dreams of launching a frog into orbit, and how he figured out how to do it in his backyard. Josef Penninger, an immunologist and genetic researcher, confessed that the reason he became a geneticist may have had to do with an adolescent mouse phobia. Niels Diffrient, the legendary chair designer, admitted that as a society, ''we shouldn't be sitting.''

Thus ensues the cult of TED. ''He gets all of us to stand up there naked and hope for the best,'' said Mr. Katzenberg, who resisted going to TED for years. ''Inspirational moments are few and far between in any of our lives. When they happen they tend to fuel you in ways you don't even understand.''

As always, there was mind-blowing news from the technological front. Over the years, TED has become a sort of global show and tell for the Next Big Idea (the first TED included the public unveiling of the Macintosh computer and the Sony compact disc; later, TED helped hatch the M.I.T. Media Lab and Wired magazine). Among this year's most talked-about devices were the biologically inspired robots being developed by Robert J. Full at his laboratory at the University of California at Berkeley, modeled on the movement of geckos, cockroaches and other creatures.

An amazing piece of interactive software by Keyhole Inc. displayed by Daniel Dubno, a producer for CBS News, brings spy technology to the PC. It uses satellite digital imagery to let you zoom in from space to any point on the earth's surface, from the summit of Mount Everest to your neighbor's hot tub.

Amory Lovins, a founder of the Rocky Mountain Institute, wowed the crowd with the Hypercar, a swoopy-looking aerodynamic vehicle powered by fuel cells running on tanks of compressed gaseous hydrogen fuel. David Kelley, the founder of Ideo, showed off the Spyfish Submarine Telepresence Vehicle, an underwater device that allows you to visually scuba dive without getting wet.

Dean Kamen could be found gliding through the corridors like some nerdy Fred Astaire on his famous Segway, the gyroscopic human transport scooter he hopes will revolutionize urban transportation. The most amazing ''segue,'' however, was not Mr. Kamen's. That occurred when, after more than an hour of spellbinding music by Yo-Yo Ma and company during a session exploring the design of sensuality, the stage gave way to Christie Hefner talking about Playboy.

As might be expected after Sept. 11, there was more introspection than in the days when TED was a dot-com zillionaires' love-in. David Rockwell, the New York designer, for instance, talked about his viewing platform at ground zero. Daniel Dennett, the cognitive scientist, spoke of American memes, or self-replicating ideas, spreading around the world, including fringe memes like pornography that, he said forebodingly, ''are a big deal to other cultures, viewed as a dire threat to their favorite memes.'' Dr. Dennett also shared the secret of happiness. ''Find something more important than you are and dedicate your life to it,'' he said.

Not everyone was so grounded. Perhaps the most soulless moment came when a straight-faced Frank Nuovo of Nokia hawked a new $25,000 crystal-faced platinum cellphone.

The weird stew of people and points of view, including a rather strange campaign by the evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins to create an advocacy group for American atheists, reflects Mr. Wurman's own passions. The design of TED itself could be the subject of a Ph.D. thesis. An organizer and mapper of complex streams of information, on subjects from cities to hats, Mr. Wurman obsessively designs the conference down to the tiniest detail, including name tags with the schedule on them (color-coded to reflect the wearer's status), the bookstore (his own 80 books are most prominent) and the 70 posters of presenters created by Stefan Sagmeister, a noted graphic designer, reflecting Mr. Wurman's philosophy of ''never shop retail'' (''Do you know what you'd have to pay him for this?'').

A protégé of the architect Louis Kahn, Mr. Wurman even designed teddy-bear-stuffed goody bags, bestowing upon Herbie Hancock, Rupert Murdoch and 950 or so other conferees the look of having just returned from a 4-year-old's birthday party.

Mr. Wurman, who bursts into tears onstage occasionally, knows how extraordinary his creation is. ''If this was Harvard, nobody would come,'' he said. ''Harvard would never be able to get the people I get.''

The question of the future of TED, which Mr. Wurman sold last year to a foundation run by Chris Anderson, a British publisher, for an eight-figure sum, continues to have a soap-operatic undercurrent. Mr. Wurman, who lives in what he calls a Jewish Renaissance manse in Newport, R.I., made a fortune when he sold Access Press to HarperCollins in 1990, and has made another one on TED. His volatile personality -- he has banished people from the conference -- has nevertheless been the charismatic glue holding TED together.

Mr. Anderson, 45, an Oxford philosophy major and former publishing magnate who wears black to Mr. Wurman's white, plans to preserve the TED spirit while bringing in his own innovations, including a scholarship program. Conference proceeds will go to the Sapling Foundation, which finances medical, technological and educational projects in the third world, he said.

Of course, TED wouldn't be TED without psychodrama. Mr. Wurman has started a new conference on the East Coast called TEDMED, which will deal with ''medicine, well-being and digital society.'' To longtime Tedsters, there is the distinct possibility of a bicoastal rivalry akin to feuding Afghan warlords.

As he talks about his new venture, Mr. Wurman's expectant blue eyes take on the cast of a newborn eyeing a nipple.

''It will be better than this,'' he said, looking around. ''My timing is perfect.''

He comes with cash to burn, a fleet of airplanes, and a keen eye for the ladies — to say nothing of a relentless brain that challenges Nobel Prize–winning scientists across the country — and for financial markets around the world. Ever since the Post’s “Page Six” ran an item about the president’s late-September visit to Africa with Kevin Spacey and Chris Tucker – on his new benefactor’s customized Boeing 727 – the question of the day has been: Who in the world is Jeffrey Epstein?

It’s a life full of question marks. Epstein is said to run $15 billion for wealthy clients, yet aside from Limited founder Leslie Wexner, his client list is a closely held secret. A former Dalton math teacher, he maintains a peripatetic salon of brilliant scientists yet possesses no bachelor’s degree. For more than ten years, he’s been linked to Manhattan-London society figure Ghislaine Maxwell, daughter of the mysteriously deceased media titan Robert Maxwell, yet he lives the life of a bachelor, logging 600 hours a year in his various planes as he scours the world for investment opportunities. He owns what is said to be Manhattan’s largest private house yet runs his business from a 100-acre private island in St. Thomas.

Power on Wall Street has generally accrued to those who have made their open bids for it. Soros. Wasserstein. Kravis. Weill. The Sturm und Drang of their successes and failures has been played out in public. Epstein breaks the mold. Most everyone on the Street has heard of him, but nobody seems to know what the hell he is up to. Which is just the way he likes it.

“My belief is that Jeff maintains some sort of money-management firm, though you won’t get a straight answer from him,” says one well-known investor. “He once told me he had 300 people working for him, and I’ve also heard that he manages Rockefeller money. But one never knows. It’s like looking at the Wizard of Oz – there may be less there than meets the eye.”

Says another prominent Wall Streeter: “He is this mysterious, Gatsbyesque figure. He likes people to think that he is very rich, and he cultivates this air of aloofness. The whole thing is weird.”

The wizard that meets the eye is spare and fit; with a long jaw and a carefully coiffed head of silver hair, he looks like a taller, younger Ralph Lauren. A raspy Brooklyn accent betrays his Coney Island origins. He spends an hour and fifteen minutes every day doing advanced yoga with his personal instructor, who travels with him wherever he goes. He is an enthusiastic member of the Trilateral Commission and the Council on Foreign Relations.

He dresses casually — jeans, open-necked shirts, and sneakers — and is rarely seen in a tie. Indeed, those close to him say the reason he quit his board seat at the Rockefeller Institute was that he hated wearing a suit. “It feels like a dress,” he told one friend.

Epstein likes to tell people that he’s a loner, a man who’s never touched alcohol or drugs, and one whose nightlife is far from energetic. And yet if you talk to Donald Trump, a different Epstein emerges. “I’ve known Jeff for fifteen years. Terrific guy,” Trump booms from a speakerphone. “He’s a lot of fun to be with. It is even said that he likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side. No doubt about it — Jeffrey enjoys his social life.”

But beautiful women are only a part of it. Because here’s the thing about Epstein: As some collect butterflies, he collects beautiful minds. “I invest in people — be it politics or science. It’s what I do,” he has said to friends. And his latest prize addition is the former president. In his eyes, Clinton as a species represents the highest evolutionary form of the political animal. To be up close to him, as he was during the African journey, is akin to seeing the rarest of beasts on a safari. As he put it to a friend upon his return from Africa, “If you were a boxer at the downtown gymnasium at 14th Street and Mike Tyson walked in, your face would have the same look as these foreign leaders had when Clinton entered the room. He is the world’s greatest politician.”

“Jeffrey is both a highly successful financier and a committed philanthropist with a keen sense of global markets and an in-depth knowledge of twenty-first-century science,” Clinton says through a spokesman. “I especially appreciated his insights and generosity during the recent trip to Africa to work on democratization, empowering the poor, citizen service, and combating HIV/AIDS.”

Before Clinton, Epstein’s rare appearances in the gossip columns tended to be speculation as to the true nature of his relationship with Ghislaine Maxwell. While they are still friends, the English tabloids have postulated that Maxwell has longed for a more permanent pairing and that for undetermined reasons Epstein has not reciprocated in kind. “It’s a mysterious relationship that they have,” says society journalist David Patrick Columbia. “In one way, they are soul mates, yet they are hardly companions anymore. It’s a nice conventional relationship, where they serve each other’s purposes.”

Friends of the two say that Maxwell, whose social life has always been higher-octane than Epstein’s, lent a little pizzazz to the lower-profile Epstein. Indeed, at a party at Maxwell’s house, her friends say, one is just as apt to see Russian ladies of the night as one is to see Prince Andrew. The Oxford-educated Maxwell, described by many as a man-eater (she flies her own helicopter and was recently seen dining with Clinton at Nello’s on Madison Avenue), lives in her own townhouse a few blocks away. Epstein is frequently seen around town with a bevy of comely young women but there has been no boldfaced name to replace Maxwell. “You may read about Jeffrey in the social columns, but there is much more to him than that,” says Jeffrey T. Leeds of the private equity firm Leeds Weld & Co. “He’s a talented money manager and an extremely hardworking person with broad interests. Most unusual, though, is that in this media-obsessed age he is not in any sense a self-promoter.”

Born in 1953 and raised in Coney Island, Epstein went to Lafayette High School. According to his bio, he took some classes in physics at Cooper Union from 1969 to 1971. He left Cooper Union in 1971 and attended NYU’s Courant Institute, where he took courses in mathematical physiology of the heart, leaving that school, too, without a degree. Between 1973 and 1975, Epstein taught calculus and physics at the Dalton School.

By most accounts, he was something of a Robin Williams–in–Dead Poets Society type of figure, wowing his high-school classes with passionate mathematical riffs. So impressed was one Wall Street father of a student that he said to Epstein point-blank: “What are you doing teaching math at Dalton? You should be working on Wall Street — why don’t you give my friend Ace Greenberg a call.”

Epstein was in many respects the perfect candidate for Greenberg’s consideration. Greenberg, a senior partner at Bear Stearns at the time and a legendary trader in his own right, has long made it clear that it’s the hungry, brilliant guys lacking the fancy degrees that he favors at Bear. They even have an acronym: PSDs — poor, smart, and a deep desire to be rich. It was a description that fit Epstein to a T. He was a Brooklyn guy with a motor for a brain, and while he did love teaching, this close-up view of the rarefied Upper East Side life of his students’ gave him a taste for the big time.

So in 1976, he dropped everything and reported to work at Bear Stearns, where he started off as a junior assistant to a floor trader at the American Stock Exchange. His ascent was rapid.

At the time, options trading was an arcane and dimly understood field, just beginning to take off. To trade options, one had to value them, and to value them, one needed to be able to master such abstruse mathematical confections as the Black-Scholes option-pricing model. For Epstein, breaking down such models was pure sport, and within just a few years he had his own stable of clients. “He was not your conventional broker saying ‘Buy IBM’ or ‘Sell Xerox,’ ” says Bear Stearns CEO Jimmy Cayne. “Given his mathematical background, we put him in our special-products division, where he would advise our wealthier clients on the tax implications of their portfolios. He would recommend certain tax-advantageous transactions. He is a very smart guy and has become a very important client for the firm as well.”

In 1980, Epstein made partner, but he had left the firm by 1981. Working in a bureaucracy was not for him; what’s more, in rubbing up against ever greater sums of money during his time at Bear, he began to feel the need to grab his own piece of the action.

In 1982, according to those who know Epstein, he set up his own shop, J. Epstein and Co., which remains his core business today. The premise behind it was simple: Epstein would manage the individual and family fortunes of clients with $1 billion or more. Which is where the mystery deepens. Because according to the lore, Epstein, in 1982, immediately began collecting clients. There were no road shows, no whiz-bang marketing demos – just this: Jeff Epstein was open for business for those with $1 billion–plus.

His firm would be different, too. He was not here just to offer investment advice; he saw himself as the financial architect of every aspect of his client’s wealth — from investments to philanthropy to tax planning to security to assuaging the guilt and burdens that large sums of inherited wealth can bring on. “I want people to understand the power, the responsibility, and the burden of their money,” he said to a colleague at the time.

As a teacher at Dalton, he had witnessed firsthand the troubled attitudes of some of the poor little rich kids under his charge; at Bear, he had come to the realization that, counterintuitively, the more money you had, the more anxious you became. For a middle-class kid from Brooklyn, it just didn’t make sense.

From the get-go, his business was successful. But the conditions for investing with Epstein were steep: He would take total control of the billion dollars, charge a flat fee, and assume power of attorney to do whatever he thought was necessary to advance his client’s financial cause. And he remained true to the $1 billion entry fee. According to people who know him, if you were worth $700 million and felt the need for the services of Epstein and Co., you would receive a not-so-polite no-thank-you from Epstein.

It’s nice work if you can get it. Epstein runs a lean operation, and those close to him say that his actual staff — based here in Manhattan at the Villard House (home to Le Cirque); New Albany, Ohio; and St. Thomas, where he reincorporated his company seven years ago (now called Financial Trust Co.) — numbers around 150 and is purely administrative. When it comes to putting these billions to work in the markets, it is Epstein himself making all the investment calls — there are no analysts or portfolio managers, just twenty accountants to keep the wheels greased and a bevy of assistants — many of them conspicuously attractive young women — to organize his hectic life. So assuming, conservatively, a fee of .5 percent (he takes no commissions or percentages) on $15 billion, that makes for a management fee of $75 million a year straight into Jeff Epstein’s pocket. Nice work indeed.

It has been rumored that Linda Wachner and David Rockefeller have been clients, too, but both parties deny any such relationship. What’s more, who ever heard of a financial adviser turning down $500 million accounts? All the speculation and mystery has proved fertile ground for some alternative Jeffrey Epstein stories – the most bizarre of which has him playing the piano (he is classically trained) for high rollers in a Manhattan piano bar in the mid-eighties.

Another focus of curiosity is the relationship that Epstein has with his patron and mentor Leslie Wexner, founder and chairman of the Columbus, Ohio–based Limited chain of women’s-clothing stores. Wexner, who is said to be worth more than $2.5 billion by Forbes, became an Epstein client in 1987. “It’s a weird relationship,” says another Wall Streeter who knows Epstein. “It’s just not typical for someone of such enormous wealth to all of a sudden give his money to some guy most people have never heard of.” The Wexner-Epstein relationship is indeed a multifaceted one.

Given the secrecy that envelops Epstein’s client list, some have speculated that Wexner is the primary source of Epstein’s lavish life — but friends leap to his defense. “Let me tell you: Jeffrey Epstein has other clients besides Wexner. I know because some of them are my clients,” says noted m&a lawyer Dennis Block of Cadwalader, Wickersham & Taft. “I sent him a $500 million client a few years ago and he wouldn’t take him. Said the account was too small. Both the client and I were amazed. But that’s Jeffrey.”

Epstein’ s current residence in Manhattan — a 45,000-square-foot eight-story mansion on East 71st Street — was originally bought by Wexner for $13 million in 1989. Wexner poured many millions into a full gut renovation, then turned it over to Epstein in 1995 after he got married. One story has Epstein paying only a dollar for it, though others say he paid full market price, which would have been in the neighborhood of $20 million. Epstein then undertook his own $10 million gut renovation (special features: closed-circuit TV and a heated sidewalk in front of the house for melting snow), saying to friends: “I don’t want to live in another person’s house.”

There are other houses as well, including a sweeping villa in Palm Beach and a custom-built 51,000-square-foot castle in Santa Fe. Said to be the largest house in the state, the latter sits atop a hill on a 45,000-acre ranch. He had it built because of the month or so he found himself spending there, talking elementary particle physics with his friend Murray Gell-Mann, a Nobel Prize–winning physicist and co-chair of the science board at the Santa Fe Institute.

Epstein also owned a grand house (he has since sold it) near Wexner’s opulent manse at the center of the Limited magnate’s high-end housing development in New Albany, Ohio. New Albany was a lush sprawl of farmland on the outskirts of Columbus that Wexner, starting in 1988, turned into a rich village of multimillion-dollar Georgian homes surrounding a Jack Nicklaus–designed golf course. It was a massive development project, financed largely by Wexner himself. Epstein was a general partner in the real-estate holding company, called New Albany Property, despite putting only a few million dollars of capital into the project.

[NOTE - the following paragraph is based on source material from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bob_Fitrakis ... ] 

“Before Epstein came along in 1988, the financial preparations and groundwork for the New Albany development were a total mess,” says Bob Fitrakis, a Columbus-based investigative journalist who has written extensively on Wexner and his finances. “Epstein cleaned everything up, as well as serving Wexner in other capacities — such as facilitating visits to Wexner’s home of the crew from Cats and organizing a Tony Randall song-and-dance show put on in Columbus.” Wexner declines to talk about his relationship with Epstein, but it is clearly one that continues to this day. Not that it helped Epstein in any way to land Clinton. Wexner is a staunch Republican donor, and Epstein, aside from a small contribution to the president’s legal-defense fund, has given more to the likes of former senator Al D’Amato.

What attracted Clinton to Epstein was quite simple: He had a plane (he has a couple, in fact — the Boeing 727, in which he took Clinton to Africa, and, for shorter jaunts, a black Gulfstream, a Cessna 421, and a helicopter to ferry him from his island to St. Thomas). Clinton had organized a weeklong tour of South Africa, Nigeria, Ghana, Rwanda, and Mozambique to do what Clinton does. So when the president’s advance man Doug Band pitched the idea to Epstein, he said sure. As an added bonus, Kevin Spacey, a close friend of Clinton’s, and actor Chris Tucker came along for the ride.

While Epstein got an intellectual kick out of engaging African finance ministers in theoretical chitchat about economic development, the real payoff for him was observing Clinton in his métier: talking HIV/aids policy with African leaders and soaking up the love from Cape Town to Lagos.

Epstein brings a trophy-hunter’s zeal to his collection of scientists and politicians. But the real charge for him is in seeing these guys work it. Like former Democratic Senate leader George Mitchell, for example. In Epstein’s mind, Mitchell is the world’s greatest negotiator, based on his work in Ireland and the Middle East. So he wrote the senator a bunch of checks. Says Mitchell: “He has supported some philanthropic projects of mine and organized a fund-raiser for me once. I would certainly call him a friend and a supporter.”

But it is his covey of scientists that inspires Epstein’s true rapture. Epstein spends $20 million a year on them — encouraging them to engage in whatever kind of cutting-edge research might attract their fancy. They are, of course, quite lavish in their praise in return. Gerald Edelman won the Nobel Prize for physiology and medicine in 1972 and now presides over the Neurosciences Institute in La Jolla. “Jeff is extraordinary in his ability to pick up on quantitative relations,” says Edelman. “He came to see us recently. He is concerned with this basic question: Is it true that the brain is not a computer? He is very quick.”

Then there is Stephen Kosslyn, a psychologist at Harvard. Epstein flew up to Kosslyn’s laboratory in Cambridge this year to witness an experiment that Kosslyn was conducting and Epstein was funding. Namely: Is it true that certain Tibetan monks are capable of holding a distinct mental image in their minds for twenty minutes straight? “We disproved the thesis,” says Kosslyn. “Jeff was on his cell phone most of the time — he actually wanted to short the Tibetan market, because he thought the monk was so stupid. He is amazing. Like a honeybee — he talks to all these different people and cross-pollinates. Just two months ago, I was talking to him about a new alternative to evolutionary psychology. He got excited and sent me a check.”

Epstein has a particularly close relationship with Martin Nowak, an Austrian biology and mathematics professor who heads the theoretical-biology program at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton. Nowak is examining how game theory can be used to answer some of the basic evolutionary questions — e.g., why, in our Darwinian society, does altruistic behavior exist? Epstein talks to Nowak about once a week and flies him around the country to his various homes to deliver impromptu lectures. Over the past three years, he has written $500,000 worth of checks to fund Nowak’s research. This past February, Epstein had Nowak over for dinner at the 71st Street townhouse. It was just the two of them (not including the wait staff), and Nowak, making use of a blackboard in the formal dining room, delivered a two-hour highly mathematical description of how language works.

After dinner, Epstein asked if Nowak wanted to meet up with his new friend President Clinton, and off they went to a nearby deli, where Clinton regaled the starstruck former Oxford professor with tales from his own Oxford days. “Jeffrey has the mind of a physicist. It’s like talking to a colleague in your field,” says Nowak. “Sometimes he applies what we talk about to his investments. Sometimes it’s for his own curiosity. He has changed my life. Because of his support, I feel I can do anything I want.”

Danny Hillis, an MIT-educated computer scientist whose company, Thinking Machines, was at the forefront of the supercomputing world in the eighties, and who used to run R&D at Walt Disney Imagineering, thinks Epstein is actually using scientific knowledge to beat the markets. “We talk about currency trading — the euro, the real, the yen,” he says. “He has something a physicist would call physical intuition. He knows when to use the math and when to throw it away. If I had acted upon all the investment advice he has been giving me over the years, I’d be calling you from my Gulfstream right now.”

On the 727 these days, he has been reading a book by E. O. Wilson, the eminent scientist and originator of the field of sociobiology, called Consilience, which makes the case that the boundaries between scientific disciplines are in the process of breaking down. It’s a view Epstein himself holds. He wrote recently to a scientist friend of his: “The behavior of termites, together with ants and bees, is a precursor to trust because they have an extraordinary ability to form relationships and sophisticated social structures based on mutual altruism even though individually they are fundamentally dumb. Money itself is a derivative of trust. If we can figure out how termites come together, then we may be able to better understand the underlying principles of market behavior — and make big money.”

So how do termite grouping patterns fare as an investment strategy? Again, facts are hard to come by. A working day for Epstein starts at 5 a.m., when he gets up and scours the world markets on his Bloomberg screen — each of his houses, in New York, St. Thomas, Palm Beach, and New Mexico, as well as the 727, is equipped with the necessary hardware for him to wake up, roll out of bed, and start trading. He will put some calls in to his private banker at JPMorgan to get a reading as to how wealthy investors — the best gauge of market sentiment, he believes — are reacting to the market’s movements. Then he will call currency traders in Europe. On a given day, he will spend ten hours or so on the phone — after all, he is running $15 billion essentially by himself.

Strangely enough, given his scientific obsessions, he is a computer-phobe and does not use e-mail. “I like to hear voices and see faces when I interact,” he has said. Given the huge sums he has to invest, he focuses on assets with extremely high liquidity, like currencies — though he dabbles in commodities and real estate as well. Those who know him say he is an impulsive, quick-to-change-his-mind trader, still governed by Ace Greenberg’s trader’s maxim: If the stock is down 10 percent, sell it. He has been on the short side of the Brazilian real, and those close to him say bets there have paid off in spades. He recently took a long position on the euro before its rebound on the basis that Europeans were too proud to see their currency sink any lower against the dollar. His next targets: an across-the-board short of the German stock exchange and a possible attack on the Hong Kong dollar peg in light of the recent disclosure of North Korea’s nuclear-weapons program.

None of this is investment rocket science, but getting the direction and the timing right, no matter how conventional the investment idea, can spin large money for an investor. Before taking a big position, Epstein will usually fly to the country in question. He recently spent a week in Germany meeting with various government officials and financial types, and he has a trip to Brazil coming up in the next few weeks. On all of these trips, he flies alone in his commercial-jet-size 727. 

Friends of Epstein say he is horrified at the recent swell of media attention around him (Vanity Fair is preparing a megaprofile, and the Villard House office has had a barrage of calls from other media outlets). He has never granted a formal interview, and did not offer one to this magazine, nor has his picture appeared in any publication. Yet for one so obsessive about his privacy, one wonders — didn’t he realize that flying Clinton and Spacey around Africa was going to blow his cover? As he said to a friend: “If my ultimate goal was to stay private, traveling with Clinton was a bad move on the chessboard. I recognize that now. But you know what? Even Kasparov makes them. You move on.”

Silicon Valley political circles once buzzed with talk of "Gore and Doerr in '04." Now that the former veep has taken himself out of the presidential running and the tech bust has dimmed the appeal of John Doerr, the Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers managing partner, some folks are talking up another venture capitalist: retired Gen. Wesley K. Clark, who has said he is thinking of a presidential run. Gen. Clark also says he isn't a member of any political party.

Gen. Clark is best known as the former Supreme Allied Commander, Europe, and as a commentator on foreign-policy issues. But until the end of this month, his day job has been as managing director of merchant banking at Stephens Group Inc. in Little Rock, Ark. He serves on the boards of Entrust Inc., a Dallas Internet security firm; AcxiomCorp., a Little Rock software company; Sirva Inc. (www.sirva.com) of Westmont, Ill., the parent of North American Van Lines; and Messer Griesheim Holding AG of Germany. Gen. Clark recently announced he is leaving Stephens as of the end of February, a Stephens spokesman said.

"I did a lot of tech in the army," Gen. Clark says.

Los Angeles billionaire Eli Broad, who has sought Gen. Clark's views on education, says he is impressed, as is New York money manager Jeffrey Epstein. "He's a brilliant guy," says Linda Stone, a former Microsoft Corp. vice president, who has been introducing Gen. Clark around. Steve Kirsch, a Silicon Valley serial entrepreneur, touted Gen. Clark to fellow philanthropists in San Jose this week. "Electing the right president may be the single most cost-effective charitable donation you can make," Mr. Kirsch said, but added later that Gen. Clark's lack of political experience may make him better suited as a candidate for vice president.

(2016 intro .... Lately, Jeffrey Epstein’s high-flying style has been drawing oohs and aahs: the bachelor financier lives in New York’s largest private residence, claims to take only billionaires as clients, and flies celebrities including Bill Clinton and Kevin Spacey on his Boeing 727. But pierce his air of mystery and the picture changes. Vicky Ward explores Epstein’s investment career, his ties to retail magnate Leslie Wexner, and his complicated past. )

On Manhattan’s Upper East Side, home to some of the most expensive real estate on earth, exists the crown jewel of the city’s residential town houses. With its 15-foot-high oak door, huge arched windows, and nine floors, it sits on—or, rather, commands—the block of 71st Street between Fifth and Madison Avenues. Almost ludicrously out of proportion with its four- and five-story neighbors, it seems more like an institution than a house. This is perhaps not surprising—until 1989 it was the Birch Wathen private school. Now it is said to be Manhattan’s largest private residence.

Inside, amid the flurry of menservants attired in sober black suits and pristine white gloves, you feel you have stumbled into someone’s private Xanadu. This is no mere rich person’s home, but a high-walled, eclectic, imperious fantasy that seems to have no boundaries.

The entrance hall is decorated not with paintings but with row upon row of individually framed eyeballs; these, the owner tells people with relish, were imported from England, where they were made for injured soldiers. Next comes a marble foyer, which does have a painting, in the manner of Jean Dubuffet … but the host coyly refuses to tell visitors who painted it. In any case, guests are like pygmies next to the nearby twice-life-size sculpture of a naked African warrior.

Despite its eccentricity the house is curiously impersonal, the statement of someone who wants to be known for the scale of his possessions. Its occupant, financier Jeffrey Epstein, 50, admits to friends that he likes it when people think of him this way. A good-looking man, resembling Ralph Lauren, with thick gray-white hair and a weathered face, he usually dresses in jeans, knit shirts, and loafers. He tells people he bought the house because he knew he “could never live anywhere bigger.” He thinks 51,000 square feet is an appropriately large space for someone like himself, who deals mostly in large concepts—especially large sums of money.

Guests are invited to lunch or dinner at the town house—Epstein usually refers to the former as “tea,” since he likes to eat bite-size morsels and drink copious quantities of Earl Grey. (He does not touch alcohol or tobacco.) Tea is served in the “leather room,” so called because of the cordovan-colored fabric on the walls. The chairs are covered in a leopard print, and on the wall hangs a huge, Oriental fantasy of a woman holding an opium pipe and caressing a snarling lionskin. Under her gaze, plates of finger sandwiches are delivered to Epstein and guests by the menservants in white gloves.

Upstairs, to the right of a spiral staircase, is the “office,” an enormous gallery spanning the width of the house. Strangely, it holds no computer. Computers belong in the “computer room” (a smaller room at the back of the house), Epstein has been known to say. The office features a gilded desk (which Epstein tells people belonged to banker J. P. Morgan), 18th-century black lacquered Portuguese cabinets, and a nine-foot ebony Steinway “D” grand. On the desk, a paperback copy of the Marquis de Sade’s The Misfortunes of Virtue was recently spotted. Covering the floor, Epstein has explained, “is the largest Persian rug you’ll ever see in a private home—so big, it must have come from a mosque.” Amid such splendor, much of which reflects the work of the French decorator Alberto Pinto, who has worked for Jacques Chirac and the royal families of Jordan and Saudi Arabia, there is one particularly startling oddity: a stuffed black poodle, standing atop the grand piano. “No decorator would ever tell you to do that,” Epstein brags to visitors. “But I want people to think what it means to stuff a dog.” People can’t help but feel it’s Epstein’s way of saying that he always has the last word.

In addition to the town house, Epstein lives in what is reputed to be the largest private dwelling in New Mexico, on an $18 million, 7,500-acre ranch which he named “Zorro.” “It makes the town house look like a shack,” Epstein has said. He also owns Little St. James, a 70-acre island in the U.S. Virgin Islands, where the main house is currently being renovated by Edward Tuttle, a designer of the Amanresorts. There is also a $6.8 million house in Palm Beach, Florida, and a fleet of aircraft: a Gulfstream IV, a helicopter, and a Boeing 727, replete with trading room, on which Epstein recently flew President Clinton, actors Chris Tucker and Kevin Spacey, supermarket magnate Ron Burkle, Lew Wasserman’s grandson, Casey Wasserman, and a few others, on a mission to explore the problems of AIDS and economic development in Africa.

Epstein is charming, but he doesn’t let the charm slip into his eyes. They are steely and calculating, giving some hint at the steady whir of machinery running behind them. “Let’s play chess,” he said to me, after refusing to give an interview for this article. “You be white. You get the first move.” It was an appropriate metaphor for a man who seems to feel he can win no matter what the advantage of the other side. His advantage is that no one really seems to know him or his history completely or what his arsenal actually consists of. He has carefully engineered it so that he remains one of the few truly baffling mysteries among New York’s moneyed world. People know snippets, but few know the whole.

“He’s very enigmatic,” says Rosa Monckton, the former C.E.O. of Tiffany & Co. in the U.K. and a close friend since the early 1980s. “You think you know him and then you peel off another ring of the onion skin and there’s something else extraordinary underneath. He never reveals his hand…. He’s a classic iceberg. What you see is not what you get.”

Even acquaintances sense a curious dichotomy: Yes, he lives like a “modern maharaja,” as Leah Kleman, one of his art dealers, puts it. Yet he is fastidiously, almost obsessively private—he lists himself in the phone book under a pseudonym. He rarely attends society gatherings or weddings or funerals; he considers eating in restaurants like “eating on the subway”—i.e., something he’d never do. There are many women in his life, mostly young, but there is no one of them to whom he has been able to commit. He describes his most public companion of the last decade, Ghislaine Maxwell, 41, the daughter of the late, disgraced media baron Robert Maxwell, as simply his “best friend.” He says she is not on his payroll, but she seems to organize much of his life—recently she was making telephone inquiries to find a California-based yoga instructor for him. (Epstein is still close to his two other long-term girlfriends, Paula Heil Fisher, a former associate of his at the brokerage firm Bear Stearns and now an opera producer, and Eva Andersson Dubin, a doctor and onetime model. He tells people that when a relationship is over the girlfriend “moves up, not down,” to friendship status.)

Some of the businessmen who dine with him at his home—they include newspaper publisher Mort Zuckerman, banker Louis Ranieri, Revlon chairman Ronald Perelman, real-estate tycoon Leon Black, former Microsoft executive Nathan Myhrvold, Tom Pritzker (of Hyatt Hotels), and real-estate personality Donald Trump—sometimes seem not all that clear as to what he actually does to earn his millions. Certainly, you won’t find Epstein’s transactions written about on Bloomberg or talked about in the trading rooms. “The trading desks don’t seem to know him. It’s unusual for animals that big not to leave any footprints in the snow,” says a high-level investment manager.

Unlike such fund managers as George Soros and Stanley Druckenmiller, whose client lists and stock maneuverings act as their calling cards, Epstein keeps all his deals and clients secret, bar one client: billionaire Leslie Wexner, the respected chairman of Limited Brands. Epstein insists that ever since he left Bear Stearns in 1981 he has managed money only for billionaires—who depend on him for discretion. “I was the only person crazy enough, or arrogant enough, or misplaced enough, to make my limit a billion dollars or more,” he tells people freely. According to him, the flat fees he receives from his clients, combined with his skill at playing the currency markets “with very large sums of money,” have afforded him the lifestyle he enjoys today.

Why do billionaires choose him as their trustee? Because the problems of the mega-rich, he tells people, are different from yours and mine, and his unique philosophy is central to understanding those problems: “Very few people need any more money when they have a billion dollars. The key is not to have it do harm more than anything else…. You don’t want to lose your money.”

He has likened his job to that of an architect—more specifically, one who specializes in remodeling: “I always describe [a billionaire] as someone who started out in a small home and as he became wealthier had add-ons. He added on another addition, he built a room over the garage … until you have a house that is usually a mess…. It’s a large house that has been put together over time where no one could foretell the financial future and their accompanying needs.”

He makes it sound as though his job combines the roles of real-estate agent, accountant, lawyer, money manager, trustee, and confidant. But, as with Jay Gatsby, myths and rumor swirl around Epstein.

Here are some of the hard facts about Epstein—ones that he doesn’t mind people knowing: He grew up middle-class in Brooklyn. His father worked for the city’s parks department. His parents viewed education as “the way out” for him and his younger brother, Mark, now working in real estate. Jeffrey started to play the piano—for which he maintains a passion—at five, and he went to Brooklyn’s Lafayette High School. He was good at mathematics, and in his early 20s he got a job teaching physics and math at Dalton, the elite Manhattan private school. While there he began tutoring the son of Bear Stearns chairman Ace Greenberg and was friendly with a daughter of Greenberg’s. Soon he went to Bear Stearns, where, under the mentorship of both Greenberg and current Bear Stearns C.E.O. James Cayne, he did well enough to become a limited partner—a rung beneath full partner. He abruptly departed in 1981 because, he has said, he wanted to run his own business.

Thereafter the details recede into shadow. A few of the handful of current friends who have known him since the early 1980s recall that he used to tell them he was a “bounty hunter,” recovering lost or stolen money for the government or for very rich people. He has a license to carry a firearm. For the last 15 years, he’s been running his business, J. Epstein & Co.

Since Leslie Wexner appeared in his life—Epstein has said this was in 1986; others say it was in 1989, at the earliest—he has gradually, in a way that has not generally made headlines, come to be accepted by the Establishment. He’s a member of various commissions and councils: he is on the Trilateral Commission, the Council on Foreign Relations, and the Institute of International Education.

His current fan club extends to Cayne, Henry Rosovsky, the former dean of Harvard’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences, and Larry Summers, Harvard’s current president. Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz says, “I’m on my 20th book…. The only person outside of my immediate family that I send drafts to is Jeffrey.” Real-estate developer and philanthropist Marshall Rose, who has worked with Epstein on projects in New Albany, Ohio, for Wexner, says, “He digests and decodes the information very rapidly, which is to me terrific because we have shorter meetings.”

Also on the list of admirers are former senator George Mitchell and a gaggle of distinguished scientists, most of whom Epstein has helped fund in recent years. They include Nobel Prize winners Gerald Edelman and Murray Gell-Mann, and mathematical biologist Martin Nowak. When these men describe Epstein, they talk about “energy” and “curiosity,” as well as a love for theoretical physics that they don’t ordinarily find in laymen. Gell-Mann rather sweetly mentions that “there are always pretty ladies around” when he goes to dinner chez Epstein, and he’s under the impression that Epstein’s clients include the Queen of England. Both Nowak and Dershowitz were thrilled to find themselves shaking the hand of a man named “Andrew” in Epstein’s house. “Andrew” turned out to be Prince Andrew, who subsequently arranged to sit in the back of Dershowitz’s law class.

Epstein gets annoyed when anyone suggests that Wexner “made him.” “I had really rich clients before,” he has said. Yet he does not deny that he and Wexner have a special relationship. Epstein sees it as a partnership of equals. “People have said it’s like we have one brain between two of us: each has a side.”

“I think we both possess the skill of seeing patterns,” says Wexner. “But Jeffrey sees patterns in politics and financial markets, and I see patterns in lifestyle and fashion trends. My skills are not in investment strategy, and, as everyone who knows Jeffrey knows, his are not in fashion and design. We frequently discuss world trends as each of us sees them.”

By the time Epstein met Wexner, the latter was a retail legend who had built a $3 billion empire—one that now includes Victoria’s Secret, Express, and Bath & Body Works—from $5,000 lent him by his aunt. “Wexner saw in Jeffrey the type of person who had the potential to realize his [Jeffrey’s] dreams,” says someone who has worked closely with both men. “He gave Jeffrey the ball, and Jeffrey hit it out of the park.”

Wexner, through a trust, bought the town house in which Epstein now lives for a reported $13.2 million in 1989. In 1993, Wexner married Abigail Koppel, a 31-year-old lawyer, and the newlyweds relocated to Ohio; in 1996, Epstein moved into the town house. Public documents suggest that the house is still owned by the trust that bought it, but Epstein has said that he now owns the house.

Wexner trusts Epstein so completely that he has assigned him the power of fiduciary over all of his private trusts and foundations, says a source close to Wexner. In 1992, Epstein even persuaded Wexner to put him on the board of the Wexner Foundation in place of Wexner’s ailing mother. Bella Wexner recovered and demanded to be reinstated. Epstein has said they settled by splitting the foundation in two.

Epstein does not care that he comes between family members. In fact, he sees it as his job. He tells people, “I am there to represent my client, and if my client needs protecting—sometimes even from his own family—then it’s often better that people hate me, not the client.”

“You’ve probably heard I’m vicious in my representation of my clients,” he tells people proudly; Leah Kleman describes his haggling over art prices as something like a scene out of the movie Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome. Even a former mentor says he’s seen “the dark side” of Epstein, and a Bear Stearns source recalls a meeting in which Epstein chewed out a team making a presentation for Wexner as being so brutal as to be “irresponsible.”

One reporter, in fact, received three threats from Epstein while preparing a piece. They were delivered in a jocular tone, but the message was clear: There will be trouble for your family if I don’t like the article.

On the other hand, Epstein is clearly very generous with friends. Joe Pagano, an Aspen-based venture capitalist, who has known Epstein since before his Bear Stearns days, can’t say enough nice things: “I have a boy who’s dyslexic, and Jeffrey’s gotten close to him over the years…. Jeffrey got him into music. He bought him his first piano. And then as he got to school he had difficulty … in studying … so Jeffrey got him interested in taking flying lessons.”

Rosa Monckton recalls Epstein telling her that her daughter, Domenica, who suffers from Down syndrome, needed the sun, and that Rosa should feel free to bring her to his house in Palm Beach anytime.

Some friends remember that in the late 80s Epstein would offer to upgrade the airline tickets of good friends by affixing first-class stickers; the only problem was that the stickers turned out to be unofficial. Sometimes the technique worked, but other times it didn’t, and the unwitting recipients found themselves exiled to coach. (Epstein has claimed that he paid for the upgrades, and had no knowledge of the stickers.) Many of those who benefited from Epstein’s largesse claim that his generosity comes with no strings attached. “I never felt he wanted anything from me in return,” says one old friend, who received a first-class upgrade.

Epstein is known about town as a man who loves women—lots of them, mostly young. Model types have been heard saying they are full of gratitude to Epstein for flying them around, and he is a familiar face to many of the Victoria’s Secret girls. One young woman recalls being summoned by Ghislaine Maxwell to a concert at Epstein’s town house, where the women seemed to outnumber the men by far. “These were not women you’d see at Upper East Side dinners,” the woman recalls. “Many seemed foreign and dressed a little bizarrely.” This same guest also attended a cocktail party thrown by Maxwell that Prince Andrew attended, which was filled, she says, with young Russian models. “Some of the guests were horrified,” the woman says.

“He’s reckless,” says a former business associate, “and he’s gotten more so. Money does that to you. He’s breaking the oath he made to himself—that he would never do anything that would expose him in the media. Right now, in the wake of the publicity following his trip with Clinton, he must be in a very difficult place.”

According to S.E.C. and other legal documents unearthed by VANITY FAIR, Epstein may have good reason to keep his past cloaked in secrecy: his real mentor, it might seem, was not Leslie Wexner but Steven Jude Hoffenberg, 57, who, for a few months before the S.E.C. sued to freeze his assets in 1993, was trying to buy the New York Post. He is currently incarcerated in the Federal Medical Center in Devens, Massachusetts, serving a 20-year sentence for bilking investors out of more than $450 million in one of the largest Ponzi schemes in American history.

When Epstein met Hoffenberg in London in the 1980s, the latter was the charismatic, audacious head of the Towers Financial Corporation, a collection agency that was supposed to buy debts that people owed to hospitals, banks, and phone companies. But Hoffenberg began using company funds to pay off earlier investors and service a lavish lifestyle that included a mansion on Long Island, homes on Manhattan’s Sutton Place and in Florida, and a fleet of cars and planes.

Hoffenberg and Epstein had much in common. Both were smart and obsessed with making money. Both were from Brooklyn. According to Hoffenberg, the two men were introduced by Douglas Leese, a defense contractor. Epstein has said they were introduced by John Mitchell, the late attorney general.

Epstein had been running International Assets Group Inc. (I.A.G.), a consulting company, out of his apartment in the Solo building on East 66th Street in New York. Though he has claimed that he managed money for billionaires only, in a 1989 deposition he testified that he spent 80 percent of his time assisting people recover stolen money from fraudulent brokers and lawyers. He was also not above entering into risky, tax-sheltered oil and gas deals with much smaller investors. A lawsuit that Michael Stroll, the former head of Williams Electronics Inc., filed against Epstein shows that in 1982 I.A.G. received an investment from Stroll of $450,000, which Epstein put into oil. In 1984 Stroll asked for his money back; four years later he had received only $10,000. Stroll lost the suit, after Epstein claimed in court, among other things, that the check for $10,000 was for a horse he’d bought from Stroll. “My net worth never exceeded four and a half million dollars,” Stroll has said.

Hoffenberg, says a close friend, “really liked Jeffrey…. Jeffrey has a way of getting under your skin, and he was under Hoffenberg’s.” Also appealing to Hoffenberg were Epstein’s social connections; they included oil mogul Cece Wang (father of the designer Vera) and Mohan Murjani, whose clothing company grew into Gloria Vanderbilt Jeans. Epstein lived large even then. One friend recalls that when he took Canadian heiress Wendy Belzberg on a date he hired a Rolls-Royce especially for the occasion. (Epstein has claimed he owned it.)

[NOTE - Wendy Belzberg , in 1990, married https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strauss_Zelnick ...  "Harry Strauss Zelnick (born June 26, 1957) is an American businessman and lawyer. He is the founder, CEO, and managing partner of private equity firm ZMC, the chairman and CEO of video game company Take-Two Interactive, and the former chairman of media conglomerate CBS Corporation." ... Her dad was https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samuel_Belzberg ...      It is noted that "reviously, Wendy also dated the late, disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein, who was later an investor in Samuel Belzberg's $100 million fund "Second City Capital Partners I", which was directed by Wendy's current husband Strauss Zelnick."  ]   

In 1987, Hoffenberg, according to sources, set Epstein up in the offices he still occupies in the Villard House, on Madison Avenue, across a courtyard from the restaurant Le Cirque. Hoffenberg hired his new protégé as a consultant at $25,000 a month, and the relationship flourished. “They traveled everywhere together—on Hoffenberg’s plane, all around the world, they were always together,” says a source. Hoffenberg has claimed that Epstein confided in him, saying, for example, that he had left Bear Stearns in 1981 after he was discovered executing “illegal operations.”

Several of Epstein’s Bear Stearns contemporaries recall that Epstein left the company very suddenly. Within the company there were rumors also that he was involved in a technical infringement, and it was thought that the executive committee asked that he resign after his two supporters, Ace Greenberg and Jimmy Cayne, were outnumbered. Greenberg says he can’t recall this; Cayne denies it happened, and Epstein has denied it as well. “Jeffrey Epstein left Bear Stearns of his own volition,” says Cayne. “It was never suggested that he leave by any member of management, and management never looked into any improprieties by him. Jeffrey said specifically, ‘I don’t want to work for anybody else. I want to work for myself.’” Yet, this is not the story that Epstein told to the S.E.C. in 1981 and to lawyers in a 1989 deposition involving a civil business case in Philadelphia.

In 1981 the S.E.C.’s Jonathan Harris and Robert Blackburn took Epstein’s testimony and that of other Bear Stearns employees in part of what became a protracted case about insider trading around a tender offer placed on March 11, 1981, by the Seagram Company Ltd. for St. Joe Minerals Corp. Ultimately several Italian and Swiss investors were found guilty, including Italian financier Giuseppe Tome, who had used his relationship with Seagram owner Edgar Bronfman Sr. to obtain information about the tender offer.

After the tender offer was announced, the S.E.C. began investigating trades involving St. Joe at Bear Stearns and other firms. Epstein resigned from Bear Stearns on March 12. The S.E.C. was tipped off that Epstein had information on insider trading at Bear Stearns, and it was therefore obliged to question him. In his S.E.C. testimony, given on April 1, 1981, Epstein claimed that he had found “offensive” the way Bear Stearns management had handled a disciplinary action following its discovery that he had committed a possible “Reg D” violation—evidently he had lent money to his closest friend. (In the 1989 deposition he said that he’d lent approximately $20,000 to Warren Eisenstein, to buy stock.) Such an action could have been considered improper, although Epstein claimed he had not realized this until afterward.

According to Epstein, Bear Stearns management had questioned him about the loan around March 4. The questioners, Epstein said, were Michael (Mickey) Tarnopol and Alvin Einbender. In his 1989 deposition Epstein recalled that the partner who had made an “issue” of the matter was Marvin Davidson. On March 9, Epstein said, he had met with Tarnopol and Einbender again, and the two partners told him that the executive committee had weighed the offense, together with previous “carelessness” over expenses, and he would be fined $2,500.

“There was discussion whether, in fact, I had ever put in an airline ticket for someone else and not myself and I said that it was possible, … since my secretary handles my expenses,” Epstein told the S.E.C. In his 1989 testimony he stated that the “Reg D” incident had cost him a shot at partnership that year.

What the S.E.C. seemed to be especially interested in was whether there was a connection between Epstein’s leaving and the alleged insider trading in St. Joe Minerals by other people at Bear Stearns:

• Q: Sir, are you aware that certain rumors may have been circulating around your firm in connection with your reasons for leaving the firm?

• A: I’m aware that there were many rumors.

• Q: What were the rumors you heard?

• A: Nothing to do with St. Joe.

• Q: Can you relate what you heard?

• A: It was having to do with an illicit affair with a secretary.

• Q: Have you heard any other rumors suggesting that you had made a presentation or communication to the Executive Committee concerning alleged improprieties by other members or employees of Bear Stearns?

• A: I, in fact, have heard that rumor, but it’s been from Mr. Harris in our conversation last week.

• Q: Have you heard it from anyone else?

• A: No.

• A little later the interview focuses on James Cayne:

• Q: Did you ever hear while you were at Bear Stearns that Mr. Cayne may have trader or insider information in connection with St. Joe Minerals Corporation?

• Q: Did Mr. Cayne ever have any conversation with you about St. Joe Minerals?

• Q: Did you happen to overhear any conversations between Mr. Cayne and anyone else regarding St. Joe Minerals?

• And still later in the questioning comes this exchange:

• Q: Have you had any type of business dealings with Mr. Cayne?

• A: There’s no relationship with Bear Stearns.

• Q: Pardon?

• A: Other than Bear Stearns, no.

• Q: Have you been a participant in any type of business venture with Mr. Cayne?

• Q: Do you have any expectation of participating in any business venture with Mr. Cayne?

• Q: Have you had any business participations with Mr. Theram?

• A: No; nor do I anticipate any.

• Q: Mr. Epstein, did anyone at Bear Stearns tell you in words or substance that you should not divulge anything about St. Joe Minerals to the staff of the Securities and Exchange Commission?

• Q: Has anyone indicated to you in any way, either directly or indirectly, in words or substance, that your compensation for this past year or any future monies coming to you from Bear Stearns will be contingent upon your not divulging information to the Securities and Exchange Commission?

• A: No.

Despite the circumstances of Epstein’s leaving, Bear Stearns agreed to pay him his annual bonus—which he anticipated as being approximately $100,000.

The S.E.C. never brought any charges against anyone at Bear Stearns for insider trading in St. Joe, but its questioning seems to indicate that it was skeptical of Epstein’s answers. Some sources have wondered why, if he was such a big producer at Bear Stearns, he would have given it up over a mere $2,500 fine.

Certainly the years after Epstein left the firm were not obviously prosperous ones. His luck didn’t seem to change until he met Hoffenberg.

One of Epstein’s first assignments for Hoffenberg was to mastermind doomed bids to take over Pan American World Airways in 1987 and Emery Air Freight Corp. in 1988. Hoffenberg claimed in a 1993 hearing before a grand jury in Illinois that Epstein came up with the idea of financing these bids through Towers’s acquisition of two ailing Illinois insurance companies, Associated Life and United Fire. “He was hired by us to work on the securities side of the insurance companies and Towers Financial, supposedly to make a profit for us and for the companies,” Hoffenberg reportedly told the grand jury. He also alleged that Epstein was the “technician,” executing the schemes, although, having no broker’s license, he had to rely on others to make the trades. Much of Hoffenberg’s subsequent testimony in his criminal case has proven to be false, and Epstein has claimed he was merely asked how the bids could be accomplished and has said he had nothing to do with the financing of them. Yet Richard Allen, the former treasurer of United Fire, recalls seeing Epstein two or three times at the company. He and another executive say they had direct dealing with Epstein over the finances. And in his deposition of 1989, Epstein stated that he was the one who executed “all” Hoffenberg’s instructions to buy and sell the stock. He called it “making the orders.” He could not recall whether he had chosen the brokers used.

To win approval from the Illinois insurance regulators for Towers’s acquisition of the companies, Hoffenberg promised to inject $3 million of new capital into them. In fact, in his grand-jury testimony Hoffenberg claimed that he, his chief operating officer, Mitchell Brater, and Epstein came up with a scheme to steal $3 million of the insurance companies’ bonds to buy Pan Am and Emery stock. “Jeffrey Epstein and Mitch Brater arranged the various brokerage accounts for the bonds to be placed with in New York, and I think one in Chicago, Rodman & Renshaw,” Hoffenberg reportedly said. Then, said Hoffenberg, while making it appear as though they were investing the bonds in much safer financial instruments, they used them as collateral to buy the stock. “Epstein was the person in charge of the transactions, and Mitchell Brater was assisting him with it in coordination on behalf of the insurance companies’ money,” Hoffenberg claimed at the time.

At one point, according to Hoffenberg, a broker forged the documents necessary for a $1.8 million check to be written on insurance-company funds. The check was used to buy more stock in the takeover targets. Meanwhile, in order to throw the insurance regulators off, the $1.8 million was reported as being safely invested in a money-market account.

United Fire’s former chief financial officer Daniel Payton confirms part of Hoffenberg’s account. He says he recalls making one or two telephone calls to Epstein (at Hoffenberg’s direction) about the missing bonds. “He said, ‘Oh, yeah, they still exist.’ But we found out later that he had sold those assets … leveraged them … [and] used some margin account to take some positions in … Emery and Pan Am,” says Payton.

Epstein’s extraordinary creativity was, according to Hoffenberg, responsible for the purchase by the insurance companies of a $500,000 bond, with no money down. “Epstein created a great scheme to purchase a $500,000 treasury bond that would not be shown … [as] margined or collateralized,” he reportedly told the grand jury. “It looked like it was free and clear but it actually wasn’t,” he said.

Epstein has denied he ever had any dealings with anyone from the insurance companies. But Richard Allen says he recalls talking to Epstein at Hoffenberg’s direction and telling him it was urgent they retrieve the missing bonds for a state examination. According to Allen, Epstein said, “We’ll get them back.” He had “kind of a flippant attitude,” says Allen. “They never came back.”

Epstein, according to Hoffenberg, also came up with a scheme to manipulate the price of Emery Freight stock in an attempt to minimize the losses that occurred when Hoffenberg’s bid went wrong and the share price began to fall. This was alleged to have involved multiple clients’ accounts controlled by Epstein.

Eventually, in 1991, insurance regulators in Illinois sued Hoffenberg. He settled the case, and Epstein, who was only a paid consultant, was never deposed or accused of any wrongdoing. Barry Gross, the attorney who was handling the suit for the regulators, says of Epstein, “He was very elusive…. It was hard to really track him down. There were a substantial number of checks for significant dollars that were paid to him, I remember…. He was this character we never got a handle on. Again we presumed that he was involved with the Pan Am and Emery run that Hoffenberg made, but we never got a chance to depose him.”

“From the government’s discovery in the main sentencing against Hoffenberg it would seem the government was perhaps a bit lazy,” says David Lewis, who represented Mitchell Brater. “They went for what they knew they could get … and that was the fraudulent promissory notes [i.e., the much larger and unrelated part of Hoffenberg’s fraud, based in New York State]…. What they couldn’t get, they didn’t bother with.”

Another lawyer involved in the criminal prosecution of Hoffenberg says, “In a criminal investigation like that, when there is a guilty plea, to be quick and dirty about it, discovery is always incomplete…. They don’t have to line up witnesses; they don’t have to learn every fact that might come out on cross-examination.”

Epstein was involved with Hoffenberg in other questionable transactions. Financial records show that in 1988 Epstein invested $1.6 million in Riddell Sports Inc., a company that manufactures football helmets. Among his co-investors were the theater mogul Robert Nederlander and attorney Leonard Toboroff. A source close to this transaction claims that Epstein told Nederlander and Toboroff that he had raised his share of the money from a Swiss banker, whose identity they could not be allowed to know. But Hoffenberg has claimed the money came from him, and Towers’s financial statements for that year show a loan to Epstein of $400,000. (Epstein has said he can’t remember the details and has disputed the accuracy of the Towers financial reports.)

Around the same time, Nederlander and Toboroff let Epstein come in with them on a scheme to make money out of Pennwalt, a Pennsylvania chemical company. The plan was to group together with two other parties to take a substantial declared position in the stock. According to a source, Epstein was supposed to help Nederlander and Toboroff raise $15 million. He seemed to fail to find other investors, say those familiar with the deal. (Epstein has said he was merely an investor.) He invested $1 million, which he told his co-investors was his own money. But in his 1989 deposition he said that he put in only $300,000 of his own money. Where did the rest come from? Hoffenberg has said it came from him, in a loan that Nederlander and Toboroff didn’t know about.

Two things happened that alarmed Nederlander and Toboroff. After the group signaled a possible takeover, the Pennwalt management threatened to sue the would-be raiders. Epstein was reluctant initially to give a deposition about his share of the money, telling Toboroff there were “reasons” he didn’t want to. Then, after the opportunity for new investors was closed, co-investors recall Epstein announcing that he’d found one at last: Dick Snyder, then C.E.O. of the publisher Simon & Schuster, who wanted to put up approximately $500,000. (Neither Epstein nor Snyder can now recall the investment. Yet in the 1989 deposition Epstein said that he had recruited Snyder, whom he had met socially, into the deal.)

According to a source, Toboroff and Nederlander told Epstein that Snyder was too late, but, without their realizing it, Hoffenberg has claimed, Snyder wrote a check to Hoffenberg and bought out some of his investment. But then Snyder wanted out.

“Nederlander started to get these irate calls from [Snyder,] who wasn’t part of the deal, saying he was owed all this money,” says someone close to the deal. Toboroff and Nederlander were baffled.

Eventually, a source close to Hoffenberg says, Hoffenberg paid Snyder off.

Just as Nederlander and Toboroff were growing wary of Epstein, he became increasingly involved with Leslie Wexner, whom he had met through insurance executive [Robert Alan Meister (born 1941)] and his late wife. Epstein has told people that he met Wexner in 1986 in Palm Beach, and that he won his confidence by persuading him not to invest in the stock market, just as the 1987 crash was approaching. His story has subsequently changed. When asked if Wexner knew about his connection to Hoffenberg, Epstein said that he began working for Wexner in 1989, and that “it was certainly not the same time.”

Wherever and whenever it was that Epstein and Wexner actually met, there was an immediate and strong personal chemistry. Wexner says he thinks Epstein is “very smart with a combination of excellent judgment and unusually high standards. Also, he is always a most loyal friend.”

Sources say Epstein proved that he could be useful to Wexner as well, with “fresh” ideas about investments. “Wexner had a couple of bad investments, and Jeffrey cleaned those up right away,” says a former associate of Epstein’s.

Before he signed on with Wexner, Epstein had several meetings with Harold Levin, then head of Wexner Investments, in which he enunciated ideas about currencies that Levin found incomprehensible. “In fact,” says someone who used to work very closely with Wexner, “almost everyone at the Limited wondered who Epstein was; he literally came out of nowhere.”

“Everyone was mystified as to what his appeal was,” says Robert Morosky, a former vice-chairman of the Limited.

Much of Epstein’s work is related to cleaning up, tightening budgets, and efficiencies. One person who worked for Wexner and who saw a contract drawn up between the two men says Epstein is involved in “everything, not just a little here, a little there. Everything!” In addition, he says, “Wexner likes having a hatchet man…. Whenever there is dirty work to be done he’d stick Jeffrey on it…. He has a reputation for being ruthless but he gets the job done.”

Epstein has evidently been asked to fire personal-staff members when needed. “He was that mysterious person that everyone was scared to death of,” says a former employee.

Meanwhile, he is also less than popular with some people outside Wexner’s company with whom he now deals. “He ‘inserted’ himself into the construction process of Leslie Wexner’s yacht…. That resulted in litigation down the road between Mr. Wexner and the shipyard that eventually built the vessel,” says Lars Forsberg, a lawyer whose firm at the time, Dickerson and Reily, was hired to deal with litigation stemming from the construction of Wexner’s Limitless—at 315 feet, one of the largest private yachts in the world. Evidently, Epstein stalled on paying Dickerson and Reily for its work. “It’s probably once or twice in my legal career that I’ve had to sue a client for payment of services that he’d requested and we’d performed … without issue on the performance,” says Forsberg. In the end the matter was settled, but Epstein claims he now has no recollection of it.

The incident is one of a number of disputes Epstein has become embroiled in. Some are for sums so tiny as to be baffling; for instance, Epstein sued investment adviser Herbert Glass, who sold him the Palm Beach house in 1990, for $13,444—Epstein claimed this was owed him for furnishings removed by Glass.

In 1998 the U.S. Attorney’s Office sued Epstein for illegally subletting the former home of the deputy consul general of Iran to attorney Ivan Fisher and others. Epstein paid $15,000 a month in rent to the State Department, but he charged Fisher and his colleagues $20,000. Though the exact terms of the agreement are sealed, the court ruled against Epstein.

Wexner offers some insight into his friend’s combative style. “Many times people confuse winning and losing,” Wexner says. “Jeffrey has the unusual quality of knowing when he is winning. Whether in conversations or negotiations, he always stands back and lets the other person determine the style and manner of the conversation or negotiation. And then he responds in their style. Jeffrey sees it in chivalrous terms. He does not pick a fight, but if there is a fight, he will let you choose your weapon.”

One case is rather more serious. Currently, Citibank is suing Epstein for defaulting on loans from its private-banking arm for $20 million. Epstein claims that Citibank “fraudulently induced” him into borrowing the money for investments. Citibank disputes this charge.

The legal papers for another case offer a rare window into Epstein’s finances. In 1995, Epstein stopped paying rent to his landlord, the nonprofit Municipal Arts Society, for his office in the Villard House. He claimed that they were breaking the terms of the lease by not letting his staff in at night. The case was eventually settled. However, one of the papers filed in this dispute is Epstein’s financial statement for 1988, in which he claimed to be worth $20 million. He listed that he owned $7 million in securities, $1 million in cash, zero in residential property (although he told sources that he had already bought the home in Palm Beach), and $11 million in other assets, including his investment in Riddell. A co-investor in Riddell says: “The company had been bought with a huge amount of debt, and it wasn’t public, so it was meaningless to attach a figure like that to it … the price it cost was about $1.2 million.” The co-investors bought out Epstein’s share in Riddell in 1995 for approximately $3 million. At that time, when Epstein was asked, as a routine matter, to sign a paper guaranteeing he had access to a few million dollars in case of any subsequent disputes over the sale price, Wexner signed for him. Epstein has explained that this was because the co-investors wanted an indemnity against being sued by Wexner. One of the investors calls this “bullshit.”

Epstein’s appointment to the board of New York’s Rockefeller University in 2000 brought him into greater social prominence. Boasting such social names as Nancy Kissinger, Brooke  Astor, and Robert Bass, the board also includes such pre-eminent scientists as Nobel laureate Joseph Goldstein. “Epstein was thrilled to be elected,” says someone who knows him.

After one term Epstein resigned. According to New York magazine, this was because he didn’t like to wear a suit to meetings. A spokesperson for the Rockefeller board says Epstein left because he had insufficient time to commit; a board member recalls that he was “arrogant” and “not a good fit.” The spokesperson admits that it is “infrequent” for board members not to be renominated after only one term.

Still, the recent spate of publicity Epstein has inspired does not seem to have fazed him. In November he was spotted in the front row of the Victoria’s Secret fashion show at New York’s Lexington Avenue Armory; around the same time the usual coterie of friends and beautiful women were whisked off to Little St. James (which he tells people has been renamed Little St. Jeff) for a long weekend.

Thanks to Epstein’s introductions, says Martin Nowak, the biologist finds himself moving from Princeton to Harvard, where he is assuming the joint position of professor of mathematics and professor of biology. Epstein has pledged at least $25 million to Harvard to create the Epstein Program for Mathematical Biology and Evolutionary Dynamics, and Epstein will have an office at the university. The program will be dedicated to searching for nature’s algorithms, a pursuit that is a specialty of Nowak’s. For Epstein this must be the summit of everything he has worked toward: he has been seen proudly displaying Harvard president Larry Summers’s letter of commitment as if he can’t quite believe it is real. He says he was reluctant to have his name attached to the program, but Summers persuaded him. He rang his mentor Wexner about it, and Wexner told him it was all right.

An insatiable, restless soul, always on the move, Epstein builds a tremendous amount of downtime into his hectic work schedule. Yet there is something almost programmed about his relaxation: it’s as if even pleasure has to be measured in terms of self-improvement. Nowak says that, when he goes to stay with Epstein in the Caribbean, they’ll get up at six and, as the sun rises, have three-hour conversations about theoretical physics. “Then he’ll go off and do some work, re-appear, and we’ll talk some more.”

Another person who went to the island with Epstein, Maxwell, and several beautiful women remembers that the women “sat around one night teasing him about the kinds of grasping women who might want to date him. He was amused by the idea…. He’s like a king in his own world.”

Many people comment there is something innocent, almost childlike about Jeffrey Epstein. They see this as refreshing, given the sophistication of his surroundings. Alan Dershowitz says that, as he was getting to know Epstein, his wife asked him if he would still be close to him if Epstein suddenly filed for bankruptcy. Dershowitz says he replied, “Absolutely. I would be as interested in him as a friend if we had hamburgers on the boardwalk in Coney Island and talked about his ideas.”

EDITOR’S NOTE: The original version of this story stated that Jeffrey Epstein was a member of the New York Academy of Sciences. The academy has since notified Vanity Fair that it has no record of Epstein’s membership.

It is a measure of the allure of New York magazine that a group of cold-eyed, wealthy executives is prepared to hold hands and jointly contribute more than $50 million to buy a publication that has made little money in the last three years for Primedia Inc.

The group -- led by Mortimer B. Zuckerman, owner of The Daily News and U.S. News & World Report -- is the presumptive favorite after ''best and final'' bids were delivered on Thursday, in part because Henry R. Kravis of Kohlberg Kravis Roberts, the principal owner of Primedia, is interested in selling New York magazine to him.

For connoisseurs of New York power, the combustible mix of personalities and agendas forming around Mr. Zuckerman promises plenty of fireworks.

There are many precedents for monied individuals uniting to acquire trophy assets -- sports teams, restaurants, racehorses -- but a city magazine with a history of deconstructing and occasionally torturing Manhattan elites is a more delicate proposition. Each member of the Zuckerman consortium is hard-wired into New York business or culture, with interests including real estate, advertising, entertainment and Wall Street -- in other words, almost everything New York magazine writes about.

It is hard to imagine an article that would not touch on a family member, a business partner, a friend or a foe of the Zuckerman-led group. If the bid succeeds, the editor of the magazine could be so busy taking calls from his or her ownership group that just getting the magazine out could be difficult.

Mr. Zuckerman's group includes Nelson Peltz, a billionaire investor whose Triarc Companies owns Arby's restaurants; Jeffrey Epstein, a money manager with his own claim to the billionaires club; Donnie Deutsch, chief executive of Deutsch Inc., who sold the advertising agency for hundreds of millions of dollars several years ago; and Harvey Weinstein, co-chairman of Miramax films.

James L. Dolan, chief executive of Cablevision Systems, the owner of the cable television provider as well as Madison Square Garden, the New York Knicks and the New York Rangers, is no longer a part of the current bid. But Cablevision maintains an interest in the magazine's Web site, and other members of the group say he may come in later.

Because New York is something of a hybrid, a regional magazine with a national footprint, there was little interest from major publishers, and the low level of recent profits made it difficult for any purely financial players to find backing for a bid. The only other bona fide contender is American Media, which includes tabloid newspapers like The National Enquirer and enthusiast magazines like Shape. But difficulties in its core businesses made its backers reluctant to bid high to add another property.

That makes the Zuckerman consortium the likely new owner of New York, a magazine that is considered the forerunner of today's prototype city publication. Talents like the founding editor, Clay Felker, and writers like Tom Wolfe and Norman Mailer made the magazine an influential political and cultural presence.

Under a limited-partnership agreement that was signed on Thursday, Mr. Zuckerman is the general partner by dint of the strategic assets he brings to the business -- the daily newspaper in New York and the weekly magazine. He convinced others who had both the ego and the assets to make a play for the magazine that joining him was the surest way of being in the picture when it was sold. The other partners are supposedly silent, but given their histories they are not men prone to minding their manners on the sidelines of a business.

(The recent dissolution of YankeeNets, the pairing of George Steinbrenner's New York Yankees and the New Jersey Nets owned by a group that operates under the umbrella of the Community Youth Organization, is one of many examples of the perils of partnership among titans.)

''The principal issue is that if everybody is looking to get something different out of it and each has a clearly defined role, then it tends to work,'' said Paul J. Taubman, a merger banker at Morgan Stanley who has put together deals for professional sports teams involving several wealthy parties. ''If they are all trying to get the same thing out of it, that makes it a lot more challenging.''

Robert Marston, founder and chief executive of Robert Marston & Associates, a public relations firm, said that all the talent and money in this single bid would take some sorting out.

''Virtually all of the players in this contest are individuals of exceptional accomplishment, with significant expertise in business and a deep understanding of the media,'' Mr. Marston said. ''The question that remains, however, is how will these titans work together and who among them will be willing to devote the time required to turn around the magazine. And who among these bosses is likely to emerge as the true boss, given all the egos and talent involved?''

A recent instance of monied individuals backing a media property, The New York Sun, offers the Zuckerman-led group an encouraging precedent. But the owners of The Sun, a 20-month-old, five-day-a-week newspaper in New York, are bound together by a conservative political agenda that makes it easier to keep the cats herded.

''At The Sun, there is a spiritual tie that binds the partners,'' said Michael Steinhardt, one of the principals. ''It is being done for reasons well beyond the economic, and I am not so sure that is the case with New York magazine.''

Michael Wolff, the media columnist for New York who played a role in organizing the bid and who may have a supervisory editorial role if it is successful, said that while the bid had its complications, it also had enormous possibilities.

''There are people who buy trophy assets because it gives them a certain sort of cachet, to be part of the group,'' he said. ''I am reasonably confident that we are going to own this magazine, and if we do, it will give the magazine incredible, undreamed-of access to the kinds of circles that it should be a part of.''

Such access carries its own complications. Each of the investors has his own circle of influence and friends, and could reasonably expect that those constituencies would be looked after by the magazine. Kurt Andersen, the radio host and author who was editor of New York in the mid-1990's, has said he was fired after coming into conflict with Mr. Kravis of Kohlberg Kravis, in part because of the magazine's coverage of Wall Street. He notes that he was ousted even though the magazine had a separate corporate identity as part of Primedia.

''There is no intermediary in this new scenario,'' Mr. Andersen said. ''Henry Kravis was the investor, but for a time Primedia was there as a protective shield.''

''In this case, you not only have a whole bunch of them, but no corporate wall,'' he said. ''Who is going to be the go-to guy to protect the editor from all the billionaires? The pressure will be fivefold.''

For New York magazine to be noticed, its potential owners acknowledge that it should be independent, at least in theory. ''We are all grown-ups and know that the magazine should and will bruise some egos and some feelings,'' said one person, who refused to be identified, citing confidentiality requirements of the bidding process.

The magazine will also put a dent in new owners' wallets. The magazine, which last year had a profit of $1 million to $2 million on revenue of slightly more than $43 million, has been starved of editorial and circulation investment the last few years. So on top of the $50-million-plus purchase price, the winners of the auction can expect to share the costs of significant new investments in the next few years. One of the bidders suggested that any successful suitor for the magazine can expect to invest $10 million to $15 million in the first three years just to stabilize the property.

''There aren't many examples out there of a group coming together like this,'' said Roland DeSilva, managing partner of DeSilva & Phillips, a media investment banking firm. ''The agenda for all of them has to be New York City, not just New York magazine. It is the financial, social and cultural capital of the world. Their investment is not just about a magazine.''

Last Monday, Donny Deutsch, the advertising executive, and Michael Wolff, the often-caustic media columnist, were the toast of the New York Magazine Awards at the Four Seasons restaurant. Seated at a table along with Caroline Miller, editor in chief of the magazine, and Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, the two men, visible representatives of Mortimer B. Zuckerman's much-followed bid to buy New York, found themselves accepting early congratulations for their seemingly inevitable victory.

What Mr. Deutsch and Mr. Wolff did not know was that Ms. Miller had spent five hours the night before, along with other executives at the magazine, briefing a less outspoken bidder.

The bidder, Bruce Wasserstein, a longtime Wall Street deal maker, swooped in and took the magazine off the auction table with a $55 million bid -- more than $10 million over the Zuckerman offer -- leaving the Zuckerman team wondering where their bid had gone astray.

Mr. Zuckerman and his partners -- Mr. Deutsch, the investor Nelson Peltz, the film executive [ Harvey Weinstein (born 1952)] and the money manager [Jeffrey Edward Epstein (born 1953)] -- had campaigned publicly and confidently for the magazine, openly speculating about the changes to come once they took over.

Such behavior made their resulting empty-handedness all the more remarkable. No doubt a hefty serving of crow, with a side dish of comeuppance, will fuel much table talk in coming weeks among New York City media watchers.

The members of the Zuckerman team have blamed what they say was a fickle auction process, where they were not allowed to respond to a higher bid in a second round. But in a telephone interview on Friday, Mr. Zuckerman played down the significance of the loss.

''I don't mean to sound casual,'' he said, ''but anybody who has been active in business knows that you win some and you lose some. You'd like to win every one, but we are all grown-ups.''

Mr. Zuckerman's strategy of joining up with many of the moneyed individuals interested in the magazine and then low-balling the owner, Primedia Inc., had seemed like a savvy move. None of the biggest magazine-publishing companies, like Time Inc. and Condé Nast, were pursuing New York, mainly because its size (about 440,000 circulation) and reliance on regional advertising did not mesh with their other properties.

But it soon became apparent that others with money wanted the magazine badly. In the end, the Zuckerman bid came in third, behind Mr. Wasserstein's and that by CurtCo Robb Media, a West Coast publisher of luxury magazines including The Robb Report. Only American Media, the publishers of tabloid newspapers like The National Enquirer and enthusiast magazines like Shape, submitted a lower bid.

Mr. Zuckerman responded emphatically when it was suggested that he had played the wrong cards. ''We made it clear that we were willing to put more money on the table,'' he said, ''but after they had a handshake, they were not willing to entertain other offers. It was inconsistent with the normal bidding process.''

''Best and final'' bids were due on Dec. 11. Mr. Zuckerman and his team submitted a bid for $44 million and waited for a response from Allen & Company, which ran the auction. Meanwhile, Mr. Wasserstein submitted a bid above $50 million and then sent a team to conduct further due diligence on Sunday. After a day of negotiations on Monday, a deal in principle took shape and the deal makers shook hands on Tuesday.

Mr. Deutsch, the chief executive of Deutsch Inc., maintained that being in the game was as important as winning.

''We were laughing our way through the meetings, having a great time along the way, so I don't think there are going to be any tears in the end,'' he said. ''We might have played it too cute in the bidding process, but then again it might have been wired from the start. It's not really that big of a deal.''

If the property in play represented a different city, perhaps that comment could be taken at face value. After all, New York barely makes any money -- about $1 million in profit on revenue of about $43 million last year.

''Certainly, if you look at it from any business point of view, it is insignificant,'' said John Huey, editorial director of Time Inc. ''But because it is New York, with the New York media covering the sale of New York magazine, it takes on an aura that defies all logic.''

And the loss of face after the public posturing seems very real. The motives behind the bid in the first place -- ego, power and cachet -- have been dented by the failed effort.

''These kind of players like to continually prove they are vital,'' said Jeffrey A. Sonnenfeld, associate dean for executive programs at the Yale School of Management. ''What was motivating this deal was not a good financial outcome, but a demonstration of power. If it was no big deal, they would not have gotten involved in the first place.''

''These are media mammoths at play,'' he added, ''and the dream team just lost.''

Mr. Wolff, the media columnist for New York magazine who inserted himself into the process by rounding up investors like [Jeffrey Edward Epstein (born 1953)] and Mr. Deutsch, writes a great deal about mogul semiotics. He was blunt in his self-assessment.

''We got outplayed,'' Mr. Wolff said. ''The idea of bringing together many interested parties seemed like a good idea, until it turned out to be a bad idea. It was less efficient than doing it with just one guy.''

Although there was plenty of immediate speculation that Mr. Wasserstein would soon rid the magazine of a man who nominally competed against him, Mr. Wolff said he had no concerns about working for the victor.

''I haven't spoken to the new owner, but I don't think I am tainted by my involvement,'' he said. ''At some point, it is all just fodder for the column.''

Meanwhile, as Mr. Wasserstein and Primedia work to put the finishing touches on the deal, Mr. Wolff has resumed his customary table at Michael's restaurant, and his role as a well-paid observer of the New York media world is little changed. But some of the people he has written about seem to be enjoying that his trip through the looking glass of the world he covers has come to naught.

Steven Rattner, a principal of the Quadrangle Group, a media investment firm, who has been at the receiving end of Mr. Wolff's occasionally brutal commentary, thinks that Mr. Wasserstein's victory will have practical implications.

''Bruce is a very serious person and my guess is that he bought this to do very serious things,'' he said. ''The problem with New York magazine is that it has not been a serious publication for a number of years, and my prediction is that you will see significant changes.''

But Gil Schwartz, a CBS executive who chronicles the byways of business power as Stanley Bing in his column in Fortune magazine and in a recent book, ''The Big Bing,'' thinks the collective pratfall will disappear quickly for the principals involved.

''They are all very busy people and I think they will be happy moguling away very soon,'' he said. ''Being in the hunt is at the core of being a mogul. They made an offer that they thought was appropriate and someone came in with a little richer bid, so no harm, no foul. I think everybody can walk away from this with their self-aggrandizing instincts intact.''

A group of media and finance executives, who last year made a remarkably public but ultimately losing bid for New York magazine, have not lost their lust for high-profile media properties, three executives involved in the discussions about a possible venture said.

The group, which is led by Mortimer B. Zuckerman, owner of The Daily News, is considering investing up to $11 million in Radar, a magazine focused on celebrities that published two issues last year before running out of money.

It is also interested in investing in -- or even acquiring -- The New York Observer, a weekly paper in Manhattan, and Time Out New York, a weekly listings magazine.

In addition to Mr. Zuckerman, the group has Nelson Peltz, a billionaire investor whose Triarc Companies owns Arby's restaurants; Jeffrey Epstein, a money manager; Donny Deutsch, chief executive of the advertising agency Deutsch Inc.; and Harvey Weinstein, co-chairman of Miramax films.

The possibility that the Zuckerman group was considering investing in Radar was first reported last week in The Daily News.

The group had been the presumptive favorite to buy New York magazine from Primedia. It even speculated in public about its plans for the city magazine.

But on Dec. 16, after the group delivered an offer that Primedia considered low, Primedia accepted a $55 million bid from Bruce Wasserstein, a Wall Street deal maker. Primedia is principally owned by Kohlberg, Kravis & Roberts

''Following the sale of New York magazine, several media entities approached the group offering ideas for investment,'' said Matthew Hiltzik, a spokesman for Mr. Weinstein, who said that he was speaking for others in the group as well. ''Right now, we are just kicking tires, not buying anything.''

Radar, a magazine that both celebrated and made fun of celebrities, garnered a lot of attention from the press when it produced issues in the spring and summer of last year.

But it has been on hiatus as the founders, including Maer Roshan, the former editorial director of Talk, searched for long-term financial backing.

Before it became clear that their bid for New York magazine would be unsuccessful, members of the group had indicated that they wanted to install Mr. Roshan as editor.

One executive who is involved in the current discussions said that the group was looking at a number of possibilities, including a reconfigured Radar magazine that could compete more directly with New York magazine.

New York is primarily a regional magazine, with an emphasis on news and listings about New York City, while Radar had articles and cheeky commentary about national celebrities and national news.

Mr. Roshan declined to comment on the possibility that a deal was in the works, as did a spokesman for Mr. Zuckerman.

Two executives involved in the group said that Time Out New York and The New York Observer had been contacted about a possible sale, but executives at both media properties said that they were unaware of any discussions about a possible sale to the Zuckerman group.

Among the newer arrivals who are beneficiaries of the program are Richard Driehaus, the Chicago money manager whose new house in St. Thomas is the talk of the town; Jeffrey Epstein, the elusive money manager who reportedly handles only clients with $1 billion or more in assets, and Steven Gluckstern, the former head of Zurich Re who now has his own asset management business.

NEW YORK -- After disappearing from view, Radar Magazine is back on the radar -- and with some high-profile backers.

Publishing and real-estate chieftain Mortimer B. Zuckerman is teaming up with money manager Jeffrey Epstein to relaunch Radar, a general-interest title aimed at young, urban professionals.

The April debut of Radar Magazine is likely to be one of the most closely watched launches since the 1999 debut of [Talk Magazine], the ill-fated collaboration between Walt DisneyCo.'s Miramax Films and media conglomerate Hearst Corp.

The top editor at Radar will be Maer Roshan, the former editorial director of [Talk Magazine]. Since 2002, Mr. Roshan has been seeking a financial backer for Radar, which published two prototype issues last year but never landed the financial muscle it needed to get off the ground until now.

"This is essentially about talent," said Mr. Zuckerman. "More than anything, I'm backing Maer Roshan."

Mr. Zuckerman, owner of U.S. News and World Report and the New York Daily News, and Mr. Epstein were part of a consortium of investors that came up short earlier this year in a bidding war to acquire New York magazine. Wall Street financier Bruce Wasserstein purchased that title.

Mr. Roshan had been approached by the Zuckerman/Epstein coalition about editing New York. When that deal fell through, he says, the three men turned their attention to Radar. Mr. Roshan said the new Radar -- like its prototypes -- will be aimed at young readers with a " 'Sex and the City'/Jon Stewart sensibility."

Radar will be Mr. Zuckerman's first major magazine launch since Fast Company, the New Economy title he helped create in 1995.

Linda Sepp, former publisher of Fast Company, will be Radar's publisher.

Mortimer B. Zuckerman, the owner of The Daily News, and Jeffrey Epstein, a Wall Street financier, yesterday agreed to finance Radar, a celebrity and pop culture magazine that published two test issues last year.

Two executives involved in the negotiations said the backers, who were part of an unsuccessful bid for New York magazine last year, are committed to spending up to $25 million to back Radar and Maer Roshan, its editor in chief and founder.

Radar's cheeky, sometimes snarky approach to celebrity and culture attracted news media attention when the magazine was first published, but attempts to line up financing fizzled. "It will be fun to get back to assigning stories," Mr. Roshan said.

The first issue under new ownership will appear next April, with issues to follow every other month for the rest of the year before the magazine moves to a monthly schedule in 2006. But Mr. Roshan and the new owners of Radar face a magazine industry that has only slowly recovered from recession and has proved inhospitable to both general-interest publications and magazines not part of large media companies.

The three men say they believe that a magazine that captures the interest of young, single people who live in urban areas and are tastemakers in their own right will find not just a readership, but also a group of reliable advertisers.

"In this business, to say that it is not a sure thing does not even begin to capture what a crapshoot starting a magazine can be, but I've had some success," Mr. Zuckerman said. "Still, we think that there is real interest in reaching these kind of consumers, and Maer is better suited to doing that than almost anyone I can think of."

Radar's seemingly endless search for financing became something of a running joke in New York publishing. The staff held a celebration with one owner, an investor from Morocco, at Mr. Roshan's home, only to find out that the money that was always about to be wired was not forthcoming. Even yesterday, when Mr. Roshan sat with a reporter and some of his staff at the Coffee Shop in Union Square, giving an interview about finally obtaining financing, a last-minute glitch developed, a legal issue involving the magazine's name, that briefly put the press offensive on hold.

Mr. Epstein and Mr. Zuckerman will be equal partners in the new venture, and Mr. Roshan will retain a small ownership stake. The magazine will use some of the publishing resources of Mr. Zuckerman's company, which also publishes U.S. News and World Report.

Mr. Zuckerman's track record with media investments is mixed. The Atlantic Monthly made little if any money during the years he owned it, and U.S. News is a distant third to Time and Newsweek. But he did very well by investing $20 million in Fast Company, a magazine that he sold four years ago to Gruner & Jahr USA Publishing for $360 million. He also invested in a magazine called Family Fun and sold it for a profit to the Walt Disney Company.

"No one I know has a better track record of buying properties cheap and then selling them for a big profit," said Mark Edmiston, managing director of AdMedia Partners, a media investment bank.

Still, Mr. Edmiston said: "The world has not been kind to general-interest magazines. Increasingly, it is the narrowly focused magazines which are doing very well."

An argument has been made that at a time of hundreds of cable channels, many of them catering to niches, there is little room for a general-interest magazine. Talk magazine, where Mr. Roshan was editorial director under Tina Brown, spent more than $50 million and struggled mightily before closing in 2002.

But Mr. Roshan said he believed that Radar's focus on young, urban readers and relatively small circulation -- executives expect to sell 125,000 copies per issue next year, with that growing to 175,000 in 2006 -- would allow it to beat punishing odds. Radar executives said that given the growing popularity of Jon Stewart's "Daily Show" and The Onion, a satire of a newspaper, they believed there was a market for a magazine that takes on serious matters in unserious ways. To help Radar forge an identity, Mr. Roshan said, its Web site (www.radarmagazine.com) will incorporate some of the voice and style that has developed in blogs.

"In some ways, this is going to be a new magazine," Mr. Roshan said. "Some significant time has lapsed since, and we need to update what we are trying to do. This is a magazine that is trying to be irreverent, provocative and literate. We think there's room, especially for a magazine that is not trying to get to one million circulation, for something that doesn't talk down to its readers. And we want it to be very commercial."

Mr. Epstein, a money manager, said his investment was meant to finance a business, not a hobby.

"I think that Maer did a great job with practically no funds," he said. "When I invest in companies, I invest in the people, and I don't think that anybody has the track record with start-ups that Mort does."

"I always focus on the potential downside of an investment," he added, "and I don't think this is something that is going to lose money."

Donald Trump picked up an oceanfront estate in Palm Beach, Fla., for what he called "a bargain" price of nearly $41.4 million at an auction yesterday.

Mr. Trump beat out money manager Jeffrey Epstein and a luxury home builder for the 43,279-square-foot estate, which sits on 6.5 acres, according to Joseph Luzinski, a senior vice president at Development Specialists Inc. The Chicago management-consulting firm, which specializes in bankruptcy and restructuring matters, auctioned off the 17-bedroom, 16-bathroom property on behalf of the creditors of Abraham Gosman. Mr. Gosman, a Palm Beach developer, declared personal bankruptcy in 2001.

Mr. Trump plans to flip the property, known as Maison de L'Amitie, or House of Friendship, next year after he renovates the home and possibly subdivides the property. Declining to divulge his plans for the property, other than saying he will "bring it to a level that no house in the country has attained," Mr. Trump estimates it will take six months for him to renovate the property with 500 feet of ocean frontage.

"This is a terrific development project," he says. "This house sits on a better piece of land and it's in a better location" than a 20,000-square-foot oceanfront estate in Palm Beach that financier Ron Perelman sold last week for just under $70 million, Mr. Trump adds. "It will keep me busy on weekends."

Mr. Trump maintains a home in Palm Beach at Mar-a-Lago, a historic estate he converted into a country club.

 Jeffrey Epstein, a money manager with a secret list of billionaire clients and a strong penchant for privacy, suddenly finds himself at the center of a very public scandal. As reported earlier this week in The Palm Beach Post and several other publications, Mr. Epstein has been charged with soliciting prostitution after a long investigation by police in Palm Beach, Fla. In an affidavit describing their investigation, the police said that Mr. Epstein repeatedly paid young women, including some minors, for massages, and sometimes sex, at his Palm Beach home.

The indictment, unsealed Monday, seems to be drawing especially close attention because of Mr. Epstein’s reputation as an enigmatic financier with connections in high places. He was known to hobnob with President Clinton and manage money for Limited chief executive Leslie Wexner. 

A lawyer for Mr. Epstein, who lives on a private island in the Virgin Islands and keeps an office in New York, denies that he committed any crimes. The lawyer, Jack Goldberger, also told The Palm Beach Post that the grand jury had rejected the other charges that police had tried to bring against Mr. Epstein, including charges of unlawful sex with a minor. 

In a 2002 profile of Mr. Epstein in New York magazine, an unidentified Wall Street professional described him as a “mysterious, Gatsbyesque figure.” He began his career at Bear Stearns, but little is known about the identities of his current clients or how he earns the money to fund his lavish lifestyle.

In a rare interview with The New York Times in early 2005, Mr. Epstein described how he pays each of his three executive assistants more than $200,000 a year, and also gives them standing charge accounts at Frédéric Fekkai, the society hair dresser.

•    Correction Appended

In May 2002, an unsigned item was published in The New York Post's Page Six gossip column suggesting that a "a grocery billionaire" who is "a close Clinton pal" was interested in buying a modeling agency, Elite Models. The item implied that Bill Clinton might even run the agency and went on to describe the billionaire, Ronald W. Burkle, as one known for flying models around on his private jet.

This item, which was never followed up, was written by a regular Page Six contributor named Jared Paul Stern.

Mr. Burkle, according to one of his associates, contacted The Post to say that the item was untrue.

It was the first step in a strange dance that would, eventually and improbably, lead to the revelations of last week, when Mr. Burkle produced recordings that appeared to show Mr. Stern asking for tens of thousands of dollars and suggesting that he could help Mr. Burkle with Page Six coverage. Mr. Stern has denied the accusation of extortion. His lawyer, Joseph Tacopina, said yesterday, "This is a classic case of entrapment."

A series of interviews and e-mail messages reveal the unlikely interaction between the men, which began with a mutual friend and a hastily arranged meeting in a Manhattan penthouse. It is a story with far more chapters, and even chapters within chapters, than has previously been suggested.

Piecing it together is difficult: Mr. Stern is under criminal investigation and Mr. Burkle is intensely concerned about his privacy, despite his appearances at celebrity hot spots like the nightclub Marquee and his high-profile friends like Mr. Clinton and Sean Combs.

The following account was assembled from e-mail messages provided by Mr. Stern and interviews with people involved in the interaction between him and Mr. Burkle.

Last summer, Mr. Burkle asked Paolo Zampolli, the president of ID Models, to ask what he could do about what he said was inaccurate coverage in Page Six. Mr. Zampolli, a friend of Mr. Burkle's, was a source whom Mr. Stern had used in his days as a fashion reporter.

Mr. Zampolli encouraged Mr. Burkle to meet with Mr. Stern, to become a friend of the column "so when they run these things they will at least call you to get a comment," Mr. Zampolli recalled saying.

The meeting, at a penthouse in the Palace Hotel, took place on July 21, four days after Mr. Stern had written another item about Mr. Burkle involving a vengeful former lover. Mr. Stern said he considered the meeting a chance to meet a wealthy potential investor for his clothing line, Skull and Bones.

Mr. Stern encouraged Mr. Burkle to become a source for the column. The meeting ended amicably, and Kevin Marchetti, a financial analyst who often travels with Mr. Burkle, later placed an order with Mr. Stern for 60 shirts, at a total cost of $5,700.

Around this time, Mr. Zampolli also tried to arrange a meeting between Mr. Burkle and Richard Johnson, the editor of Page Six, but the meeting never took place.

Over the next few months, Mr. Marchetti sent Mr. Stern occasional but not particularly exciting gossip tips, such as: "not sure anything Page 6 worthy, but in Turkey (Turkbucu) and have to say it may be the next St. Tropez or Sardinia."

Mr. Stern had little to do with the daily column at this time--he was editing a special Page Six magazine at the offices of The Post and feeding gossip items to Radar, which he did in secret because the magazine was financed in part by Mortimer B. Zuckerman, the owner of the rival Daily News. None of the Radar items were about Mr. Burkle, according to Mr. Stern.

Although Mr. Burkle's name showed up on the business pages of The Post, he did not appear in Page Six again until December, when Radar announced it was folding.

On Dec. 16, an item appeared in Page Six that said Mr. Burkle and other wealthy figures who had been gossiped about in Radar had put pressure on Radar's backers, Mr. Zuckerman and Jeffrey Epstein, to stop financing the magazine. The item was written by Fernando Gil, an occasional contributor who was dating a model who had once dated one of Mr. Burkle's friends.

In response, Mr. Burkle sent a letter to the owner of The Post, Rupert Murdoch, complaining about inaccurate coverage in Page Six and naming the item about Radar in particular, and according to Mr. Gil, called Mr. Gil on his cellphone to complain.

The letter to Mr. Murdoch was forwarded to The Post's executive editor, Colin Myler, who told Mr. Burkle that The Post would contact him concerning any future Page Six items. Two days later, an item appeared in Page Six saying that Mr. Burkle had flown several people to Aspen, Colo., on his private jet, which Mr. Burkle said was untrue.

And on Jan. 27, an item appeared referring to an unnamed "babe-loving billionaire" that was checking the ages of the "young models he invites on his private jet." Mr. Burkle's lawyer, Martin D. Singer, contacted The Post, saying that the item obviously referred to Mr. Burkle and that it was untrue. There was no response by The Post.

In early March, the weekend of the Academy Awards, Mr. Zampolli offered at a party to introduce Mr. Burkle to Mr. Johnson and Paula Froelich, a staff reporter for Page Six. Mr. Burkle declined his offer.

On the following Friday, March 10, Mr. Zampolli received an e-mail message from Mr. Stern, who had returned to his Page Six duties: "Can you put me on the phone w/ Ron today?" Mr. Zampolli replied that Mr. Burkle was angry about recent coverage.

On March 14, Mr. Stern sent an e-mail message directly to Mr. Marchetti. It is this e-mail message that led to the two recorded meetings that would result in the extortion allegations. "Hi Kevin," the message began. "I understand Ron is upset about the press he's been getting. I think I can help him get the situation under control."

Correction: April 14, 2006, Friday A picture caption in some copies on Wednesday with an article about the meetings between Jared Paul Stern, a contributor to the Page Six gossip column in The New York Post, and Ronald W. Burkle, a California billionaire who accuses him of attempted extortion, misidentified Mr. Stern's hometown. It is Oak Hill, N.Y., in the Catskill Mountains, not Catskill, N.Y.

PALM BEACH, Fla. - In the summer and autumn of last year, when most of the mansions here stood empty behind their towering hedges, the police stealthily watched one at the end of a waterside lane. They monitored the comings and goings of its owner's private jet, subpoenaed his phone records and riffled through his trash.

The owner was Jeffrey Epstein, 53, an intensely private New York money manager with several billionaire clients. Months earlier, the stepmother of a 14-year-old girl told the Palm Beach police that a wealthy older man, whom the girl later identified as Mr. Epstein, might have had inappropriate sexual contact with her.

In sworn statements to the police, the 14-year-old and other teenage girls said a friend had arranged for them to visit Mr. Epstein's home and give him massages, usually in their underwear, in exchange for cash.

Most of the girls, according to the police, said Mr. Epstein had masturbated during the massages, and a few said he had penetrated them with his fingers or penis. They identified him in photos and accurately described the inside of his home. Some recalled that his employees had fed them snacks or rented them cars.

Mr. Epstein pleaded not guilty in August to the crime he was ultimately charged with, soliciting prostitution. But at a time when prosecutors around the nation have become increasingly severe in dealing with people accused of sex offenses, the case has raised questions about whether Mr. Epstein's prominence won him preferential treatment.

By the account of the police, they found probable cause to charge Mr. Epstein with much more serious offenses: one count of lewd and lascivious molestation and four counts of unlawful sexual activity with a minor.

But instead of proceeding with such charges on his own, the Palm Beach County state attorney took the rare step of presenting a broad range of possible charges to a grand jury, which indicted Mr. Epstein in July on the lesser count. In Florida, prosecutors usually refer only capital cases to grand juries.

Even before the indictment, the Palm Beach police chief, Michael Reiter, had accused prosecutors of giving Mr. Epstein special treatment and asked the state attorney, Barry E. Krischer, to remove himself from the case.

In an editorial, The Palm Beach Post attacked Mr. Krischer, a Democrat whose post is elective, saying the public had been left "to wonder whether the system tilted in favor of a wealthy, well-connected alleged perpetrator and against very young girls who are alleged victims of sex crimes."

The case has taken a toll on the reputation of Mr. Epstein, who owns a palatial home in Manhattan, has pledged $30 million to Harvard and once flew former President Bill Clinton on his 727. Politicians including Eliot Spitzer, a Democratic candidate for governor in New York, and Gov. Bill Richardson of New Mexico, also a Democrat, have returned campaign contributions from him.

But Mr. Epstein fought back, assembling a team of star lawyers, including Gerald B. Lefcourt and Alan M. Dershowitz, a friend of his, to look into the backgrounds of his young accusers.

Mr. Lefcourt says that the police acted "outrageously" and that his client has been wrongfully dragged through the mud.

"He disputes that he ever had sex with any under-age person or anything like that," said Mr. Lefcourt, whose clients have included Russell Crowe, Martha Stewart and Abbie Hoffman.

Neither the police nor the state attorney's office would discuss the case in detail. But the police released a thick report on the 13-month investigation after the indictment was unsealed in late July.

The police started investigating Mr. Epstein in March 2005, almost immediately after they were contacted by the stepmother of the 14-year-old, who, according to the report, was in a special school for students with disciplinary problems.

The girl, the report said, told the police that an older friend had "offered her an opportunity to make money" and had driven her to Mr. Epstein's house one Sunday. The friend, identified by the police as Haley Robson, a local community college student, told the girl to say she was 18 if Mr. Epstein asked, the report said.

The girl told the police that Mr. Epstein's assistant had led her upstairs to a room with a massage table and that Mr. Epstein had come in and told her to remove her clothes. She said Mr. Epstein had masturbated as she massaged him, had pressed a vibrator against her underwear and had given her $300 afterward.

In October, the police interviewed Ms. Robson, then 19, who told them Mr. Epstein had routinely paid her to bring teenage girls to his home. The police then interviewed a total of 5 alleged victims and 17 witnesses, many of whom told similar stories about what they had observed or participated in at Mr. Epstein's home. According to the report, at least one said Mr. Epstein had engaged in intercourse with her.

Mr. Lefcourt, his lawyer, said one girl who told the police of having had sex with Mr. Epstein as a minor had lied about both the sex and her age and had not shown up for grand jury questioning. He also said Mr. Epstein had passed a lie-detector test clearing him of any sexual involvement with under-age girls.

A spokeswoman for the Palm Beach police said that early this year, the police went to Mr. Krischer, the state attorney, intending to apply for warrants to arrest Mr. Epstein. Instead, she said, they were told that Mr. Krischer would convene a grand jury to examine the evidence and decide what charges, if any, to bring.

Around that time, the police report said, Mr. Dershowitz met with prosecutors to share information about the accusers, including statements they had posted on MySpace.com, the social networking site, concerning use of drugs and alcohol. According to the report, Mr. Krischer's office then decided to delay the grand jury session for several months.

The Palm Beach police grew frustrated, the report said, and on May 1 the department asked prosecutors to approve warrants to arrest Mr. Epstein.

Chief Reiter also wrote Mr. Krischer questioning "the unusual course that your office's handling of this matter has taken" and suggesting that Mr. Krischer disqualify himself. Chief Reiter refused several requests to be interviewed, and his spokeswoman would not say explicitly why he had urged the prosecutor to step aside.

Mike Edmondson, a spokesman for Mr. Krischer, said the state attorney's office sometimes sent noncapital cases to grand juries when there were questions about witness credibility. Mr. Krischer does not recommend a particular charge in such cases, Mr. Edmondson said, but gives the grand jury a list of possible charges.

Bruce J. Winick, a law professor at the University of Miami, said that while prosecutors in Florida rarely referred noncapital cases to grand juries, they sometimes did so with sensitive cases to be extra-cautious.

Mr. Lefcourt said the police were wrong to have released the report so soon, especially without correcting information that later proved wrong. He cited his assertion that one accuser had lied about her age, adding that she had also been arrested on drug charges and had been fired by her employer for stealing.

"What I'm trying to focus on," Mr. Lefcourt said, "is, What's motivating the selective and misleading release of information to the public?"

Star magazine was onto a juicy scoop. "Is Reese Witherspoon expecting her third child?" asked the magazine in a story last summer titled, "Going for Baby No. 3!" After the item ran, Star got a 10-page letter from Ms. Witherspoon's lawyer, John Lavely Jr., that called the story "fiction-masquerading-as-fact" and demanded a retraction.

The magazine issued a retraction of a sort. Writing in its pages that "Reese's attorney assures Star that the Oscar-winning actress is not pregnant," the magazine ran a photo of Ms. Witherspoon wearing a bathing suit, under the headline "Reese Mystery Solved: She's Not Pregnant ... It's Bloat!"

Mr. Lavely sued on Ms. Witherspoon's behalf -- for violation of rights of publicity and invasion of privacy. The case is pending.

Actress Reese Witherspoon is suing Star Magazine, alleging it violated her rights of publicity and invasion of privacy for this June 26 cover article.

In the perpetual cat-and-mouse game between gossip publishers and celebrities' lawyers, Lavely & Singer, of Los Angeles, has long been a prominent player on the side of skittish stars. The firm, which has about 17 lawyers, often threatens media outlets over the pending publication of stories, photographs or videos of its clients, who have included Michael Jackson, Arnold Schwarzenegger and Brad Pitt.

Lately, though, celebrity gossip mavens aren't merely ignoring some Lavely & Singer letters. They are turning the missives against their senders -- defiantly mocking the lawyers.

This year, Lavely & Singer tried to nix an exposé questioning the truth of James Frey's best-selling memoir, "A Million Little Pieces." Days before a Web site called the Smoking Gun planned to post its story, it received a five-page letter from Lavely partner Martin Singer. "It is certainly foreseeable that your publication of a false story about Mr. Frey -- particularly one falsely attacking his credibility -- would imperil both his existing and anticipated economic benefits, resulting in substantial damages to my client."

The Smoking Gun published its story and Mr. Singer's letter. Mr. Frey later admitted to fabricating portions of his book, which had been sold as nonfiction. Mr. Frey hasn't filed a lawsuit against the Smoking Gun, which is owned by Time Warner Inc., of New York.

William Bastone, the editor of the Smoking Gun, has posted on the site numerous Lavely & Singer letters sent to other media outlets as well, including dispatches related to topless photos of actress Jennifer Aniston and reports called false by Lavely & Singer that actress Catherine Zeta-Jones was on the Atkins diet.

"We share the letters with the world because we shouldn't be the only ones enjoying Lavely & Singer's tough-guy threats," says Mr. Bastone, who sometimes calls up a digital photo of the 54-year-old Mr. Singer on his computer. Sometimes, "you gotta poke the tiger with the stick."

While declining to comment on specific matters, Mr. Singer noted in an email that "we insist that our clients tell us the truth, and we do not lie to publications."

In July, Mr. Lavely, 62, tried to prevent the National Enquirer from publishing a story about actress Hilary Swank's alleged affair with her agent, John Campisi. "The false and outrageous claim that he is having an illicit, inappropriate extramarital 'steamy affair' or a 'love relationship' with Ms. Swank...is a vile fabrication," wrote Mr. Lavely, who represents Mr. Campisi in the matter.

The National Enquirer's response? Stories ran in two consecutive issues in September on the supposed relationship, along with photographs of the couple in romantic embraces. Both stories appeared with separate items dissing Lavely & Singer. "Lawyers Don't Want Enquiring Minds to Know," said one, which went on to call Mr. Lavely "our favorite, killing tree after tree with a string of threatening letters." The next week, the Enquirer published Lavely & Singer's letterhead, including its phone and fax numbers. No suit has been filed against the Enquirer.

David Perel, editor in chief of the National Enquirer, says he personally wrote both Lavely sidebars. "I wasn't trying to bash the lawyers but rather to show the readers what goes on behind the scenes in the reporting of a big story," Mr. Perel says. He adds that he has a lot of respect for Lavely & Singer.

As far as Lavely & Singer is concerned, the snide retorts aren't mere editors' fun; they are "mean-spirited mockery" used as "an intimidation tactic" to deter the firm and other lawyers from protecting clients' rights, wrote Lynda Goldman, a partner at Lavely & Singer, in an email.

Messrs. Lavely and Singer founded the firm in 1980, specializing in entertainment litigation. The firm, which typically charges its clients by the hour, developed its niche with celebrities through word of mouth, Mr. Singer says. Today, a lot of business is directed to the firm by Hollywood publicists. (The Wall Street Journal has received two complaint letters from Lavely & Singer, both unrelated to the publication of this article.)

Much of the media's newfound swagger vis-a-vis the firm can be chalked up to the irreverence of the blogosphere, where next-generation gossip hounds at Web sites like PerezHilton, Pink Is the New Blog and the Superficial ply their trade. Smaller online publishers can be a libel lawyer's nightmare because they "have very little in the way of cash but have a lot in the way of reach," says Harvey Levin, a lawyer turned television producer who is now managing editor of TMZ.com, a gossip Web log, or blog, owned by Time Warner.

In July, Gawker, a media news and gossip Web site owned by blog company Gawker Media, published an item about money manager Jeffrey Epstein, who had recently been indicted in Florida for solicitation of prostitution. (Mr. Epstein has entered a plea of not guilty.) The item also mentioned Los Angeles billionaire Ronald Burkle in a way that, according to a letter from Lavely & Singer to Gawker, "falsely portrays Mr. Burkle as a would-be felon who has somehow 'managed' to avoid being charged for engaging in illegal sexual relations with underage girls on his jet."

Lavely & Singer called Gawker's statements false and defamatory and demanded a retraction and "sincere apology."

"Here it is," responded Gawker, which posted the letter. "We're sincerely sorry that Mr. Burkle and Mr. Epstein have a few things in common." Gawker hasn't been sued.

The high stakes of being first out with the latest breakup, baby or breast enlargement has influenced the cost-benefit calculus in deciding whether to publish a juicy tidbit or hold back for fear of a lawsuit.

"Five years ago, if we didn't publish something, it just didn't get published," says Michael Kahane, general counsel of American Media Inc., the parent company of the Star and National Enquirer. "Now, if we don't publish it, we may get beaten out on the story."

Which doesn't mean a Lavely letter gets treated as scratch paper. "You would be stunned at how many stories out there never got published because of Lavely & Singer's threats," says TMZ's Mr. Levin.

Richard Johnson, who runs the New York Post's Page Six gossip column, says he respects the lawyers at Lavely & Singer. "We'll make a phone call to a subject of a story and in a matter of hours we'll start getting a barrage of faxes from them," said Mr. Johnson, who has two, four-inch-thick envelopes of letters from lawyers on his desk. "I'll always read them carefully and forward copies to my lawyers."

Lawyers representing celebrities have to contend with a body of U.S. libel law that tilts in the media's favor. Stories about public figures, including entertainers and politicians, are afforded an additional layer of legal protection. A public figure alleging libel must prove that the publication acted with "actual malice," which means it published something it knew to be false or recklessly disregarded the truth. Truth is an absolute defense in a libel suit.

Last month, a California state court rejected a defamation claim brought by Lavely & Singer on behalf of Britney Spears against US Weekly. Ms. Spears alleged the magazine libeled her when it published an article about a sexually explicit home video she purportedly made with her husband. (Ms. Spears recently filed for divorce.) Lavely & Singer says it hasn't decided whether to appeal.

In dismissing the suit, the court suggested that times have changed. "In 'The Dick Van Dyke Show,' a married couple slept in different beds, but in 'Sex and the City,' the single women slept in many different beds." US Weekly's article on the sex video wasn't defamatory, the court said, since Ms. Spears has "put her modern sexuality squarely, and profitably, before the public eye."

“Radar is a work in progress,” says Yusef Jackson. “I think we’re still finding our editorial voice.

Radar magazine’s June/July cover features a sexy, pistol-packing Lindsay Lohan linked to a story about the increasingly violent skirmishes between celebrities and paparazzi. A photo sidebar showcases 15 famous people flipping the bird for the cameras. That’s typical for the flashy and irreverent magazine, which routinely chronicles the missteps of stars, politicians, and the rich and powerful. The editor and founder, Maer Roshan, arrives via New York magazine and Tina Brown’s late Talk, and of course Radar resides in the publishing epicenter, New York City.

In short, despite a rather rocky launch-or, rather, several rocky launches - Radar has the DNA and mission to feed off today’s overheated, buzz-fueled, New York/Washington/Hollywood celebrity culture. With one anomaly: the magazine’s chief named backer is a media-shy Chicago businessman from a famous Chicago family - Yusef Jackson, the third son of the Reverend Jesse L. Jackson. 

Why? “Radar was a great media property for the money,” Yusef Jackson says. “We were able to buy the assets at a good price, and I thought the previous owners pulled the plug too early. An independent product like Radar needs the time to prove itself-or not.”

The magazine had started up for two issues in 2003, stopped, rebounded for three issues in 2005, and folded. Last year, Jackson formed Integrity Multimedia Company, and the dormant Radar became the company’s first acquisition. Radar‘s new Web site débuted last September, and the first issue of the Jackson era came out in March. 

Since Jackson stepped in, Radar‘s revival has generated the kind of gossip and conjecture that would make the pages of, well, Radar. Media reporters and pop culture columnists have speculated about the unseen hand of Ronald Burkle, the Los Angeles billionaire who made his money in grocery stores and private equity and who counts the Jacksons and Bill and Hillary Clinton among his good friends. Gawker, a New York–based media-and-celebrity blog that seems more than a little obsessed with Radar, claimed through an unnamed source that Burkle had put up about $8 million of Jackson’s initial $10-million investment. 

Jackson, who is 36, won’t comment. “You’ll never hear from me what I’m investing,” he says, “and I never, ever, talk about my investors.” He adds with a laugh, “That’s what keeps my investors happy.”

Burkle, 54, did not respond to requests for an interview, but he has been both friend and financier to the youngest Jackson since the late 1990s. Jackson calls Burkle a mentor, a father figure, an adviser, and a friend. “I talk with him about my business life, my personal life, and I love to spend time with him,” Jackson says. “He’s as good a friend as I could ever have. He has given me the best advice in the world. He knows about my investment in Radar, and I talk with him about Radar sometimes.” 

Jackson says that Radar attracted him because it offers a multimedia, multiplatform approach to publishing-a model in which a magazine is more than words and advertisements printed on shiny paper. In print, the magazine features long-form journalism in a distinctive voice; on the Internet, Radar‘s aggressive Web site breaks news and connects with viewers through videos and blogs; in the future, the magazine hopes to deliver content on cell phones and other devices. 

“Radar is a work in progress,” Jackson says. “We’ve just published our second issue, and I think we’re still finding our editorial voice. It takes a little time.” 

Yusef Jackson acknowledges that his interest in Radar may seem anomalous, but he says he likes the media business-it’s talking to reporters that bothers him, going back to his days as a freshman linebacker at the University of Virginia. “Given my family’s background-and we are a very public family and very public people-there has been a general interest in my story, and sometimes those stories have a tendency to drown out the products you’re offering,” Jackson says. “Often the stories are wrong and misleading, and I’ve even chosen not to correct them. I think the actual facts and the honesty and integrity of my intentions will over time outlast any particular story.”

A lawyer with a degree from the University of Virginia School of Law, Jackson in person is thoughtful, confident, and soft-spoken. When he talks about magazine publishing, he sounds anything but romantic, and he insists he brings to Radar the same attention to detail and bottom-line results that drive his principal business, River North Sales & Service, the profitable Anheuser-Busch distributorship he owns with his brother Jonathan. (The oldest Jackson son, Jesse Jr., is the congressman from the South Side and south suburbs’ 2nd district; he flirted with a run for mayor last year.)

River North Sales occupies space on two floors in a converted warehouse building west of the Loop, under the el tracks on Lake Street. Inside the front door, a flat-screen television mounted on the wall offers closed-circuit programming from Anheuser-Busch, with up-to-the-minute stock prices and slick features on the latest promotions for Budweiser distributors and retailers. The office, done in exposed brick and wood, is as businesslike and orderly as Jackson himself. His communications assistant, a young woman named Jennifer Donahoe, tells me the interview will begin “in six minutes,” and she fetches me in five. We walk up a flight of stairs to Jackson’s spacious office, which seems big enough to handle a Frisbee toss while you throw back a few Buds. We settle in on a couch and chair in the middle of the room, our conversation intermittently drowned out by the passing el train.

“If Radar didn’t learn from its first two iterations, then shame on Radar and shame on me,” says Jackson, who maintains that the magazine needs to broaden its editorial approach by appealing “to as many people in Kansas City as New York City.” He adds, “If I can develop a business infrastructure around smart circulation, not ego-based circulation -that is, focusing on bookstores and airports, versus spreading it to the mass markets too early-then we have an opportunity for success.”

Conventional wisdom in the media business holds that it takes gobs of money to sustain a consumer magazine until you can attract the right kind of readers-and enough of them-to make advertisers drool. Charles Whitaker, an authority on magazines and an assistant professor at Northwestern’s Medill School of Journalism, points out, for example, that Condé Nast has spent between $100 million and $125 million to launch Portfolio, a business-meets-celebrity title that targets a readership similar to Radar‘s. “They’re betting they’re going to be hip and smart,” Whitaker says. “But they’re Condé Nast. They have very, very deep pockets.” 

Jackson says that won’t be Radar‘s approach. “Conventional wisdom has large media companies, with portfolios of magazines, starting new ones and investing two years before they put out the first issue. This isn’t that. This is an independent magazine, and it can’t live by that model. We wouldn’t last a day under that model.”

Instead, Jackson says, Radar will attract an audience by breaking news on its Web site, generating buzz about its print articles, and seeking partners who can deliver its stories through cell phones, online television, and other means. The Wall Street Journal reported that AT&T had invested more than $10 million, perhaps with an eye toward using Radar‘s content to boost the company’s Internet presence. Kevin Belgrade, a spokesman for AT&T, confirms the investment, but not the amount-nor the company’s plans. “This is what our customers say they want, and we’re looking forward to seeing how Radar does,” he says.

“If Radar didn’t learn from its first two iterations, then shame on Radar and shame on me,” says Jackson, who maintains that the magazine needs to broaden its editorial approach by appealing “to as many people in Kansas City as New York City.”

Whitaker also points out that it helps to have a gifted editor with the vision to make the magazine stand out from its newsstand rivals. That’s Maer Roshan’s role. Radar is his baby (some would say his obsession). Roshan raised enough seed money from friends and family to publish two issues from his living room in 2003. The magazine emerged again in 2005 with the help of the real-estate and media mogul Mortimer Zuckerman, owner of the New York Daily News and U.S. News & World Report, and his partner, the financier Jeffrey Epstein. The two men pledged $25 million, but pulled the plug after three issues, claiming the advertising dollars weren’t there.

“I owe Mort a lot for taking a chance on this idea, but I am frankly mystified why he pulled out,” Roshan says. “Anyone who works at magazines can attest that three issues will not tell you what you need to know.” 

Jackson and Roshan had met previously in New York, and Roshan says a friend of a friend brought them together. “I didn’t have a real great appetite for once again [recruiting] the people who had worked really hard for years without knowing there was someone who believed in the concept and would give it a real fighting chance. That’s what Yusef promised,” he says.

One source close to the magazine, who asked to remain anonymous to preserve relations with the principals, told Chicago that Jackson and Roshan have clashed over such issues as selecting vendors and making timely payments. Both men say it isn’t so. “Yusef has been true to his word,” Roshan says. “He has been supportive, with how much money we have to work with and how we’re going about [our business].”

Adds Jackson: “I control the budget and finances, and [Roshan] controls the editorial content. I think we’re doing fine.”

* * * 

Radar’s circulation strategy begins online. With Jackson’s backing, Roshan relaunched the magazine’s Web site first, in September, and started breaking stories and making some noise. They included a piece on the CBS news anchor Katie Couric’s hairdresser, who pitched a fit when she had to fly coach on a Couric assignment to Jordan; Fox News’ Bill O’Reilly’s overblown claims that he was on Al Qaeda’s hit list; and Random House’s proposed settlement of fraud claims related to James Frey’s discredited memoir, A Million Little Pieces.

The site is averaging 755,000 unique visitors each month, and Jackson wants those numbers to double or triple. Still, Radar online got people talking, generating enough buzz for Roshan to put out his first relaunched print edition in March, followed by the June/July issue that hit the streets in May. A third issue is scheduled for September.

Roshan says the magazine aims for readers who like both celebrity gossip and in-depth journalism. “You have Us Weekly and you have The New Yorker,” he says. “But why can’t you appreciate JLo and be interested in the Iraq war? Why not merge those interests in one publication? It doesn’t mean they deserve equal treatment.” For example, Radar‘s June/July issue-the one with the cover story on the celebrity-paparazzi war-offers a strong investigative feature on how street gangs, including the Chicago-based Gangster Disciples, are infiltrating a U.S. Army desperate for new recruits. 

Both in print and online, Roshan says he’s trying to combine the best of old media-serious, careful reporting, fact checking, and copy editing-with new media’s ability to deliver entertaining content in multiple ways. The multiplatform approach targets an audience the advertisers should love: urban, 25- to 39-year-old professional men and women, the so-called cultural influencers who have plenty of disposable income and are comfortable with blogs and online videos. The 120-page first issue had 31 pages of paid advertising, including ads for HBO, Showtime, Perrier, and tequila makers, and, not surprisingly, Budweiser Select. The second issue, at 112 pages, had 28 pages of ads. 

“We knew that coming out of the history of the magazine, getting ad revenue would be very difficult, especially with a summer issue,” Jackson says. But he adds that the revenues for both issues were about the same, and he expects Radar to run more than 40 ad pages in September. 

* * * 

Despite the optimism, Radar faces long odds. “Everyone wants to figure out how to launch a smart, pop-culture magazine, figuring they can get young people back to print,” says Northwestern’s Whitaker. “But so far, no one’s been able to show how to get the kind of mass audience that one needs to make it work for advertisers. Radar keeps saying it’s something new and something different, but it really isn’t. 

“Radar‘s got to generate some sort of engagement and buzz right away to make it,” Whitaker adds. “They’ve got to be the magazine version of YouTube, where young people feel they’ve got to be there. I don’t know that this idea is necessarily the one. But I’m pulling for them, and if it is, it’ll be great for the magazine industry.” 

Jackson has vowed to fund the magazine for the next five years-a substantial undertaking, even if not on a Condé Nast level-which is probably why the media critics keep coming back to Ron Burkle, who placed 117th on the 2006 Forbes 400 list of the richest Americans, with a fortune estimated at $2.5 billion. 

Burkle is a big investor in the Democratic Party-in March, he hosted a fundraising event at his home that helped to put $2.6 million into Hillary Clinton’s campaign war chest. And he has shown plenty of interest in media properties. In the past year, he joined with a fellow billionaire, Eli Broad, to make a run at Tribune Company (owner of Chicago), but was outbid and out­maneuvered by the maverick Chicago real-estate mogul Sam Zell. In May, Burkle’s Source Interlink, which distributes magazines, CDs, and videos to bookstore chains and grocery stores, announced it was buying Primedia’s Enthusiast Media, publishers of more than 70 special-interest magazines, including Hot Rod and Soap Opera Digest, for $1.2 billion in cash.

Burkle has known the Jacksons for years. In the late 1990s, Burkle’s private equity firm, Yucaipa Companies LLC, invested in a dot-com called OneNetNow, an early social networking site that sought to close the digital gap between whites and minorities. The firm attracted many black celebrities, including Sammy Sosa, then with the Chicago Cubs. Both Rev. Jackson and his son, Yusef, sat on the start-up’s board of directors, with Yusef serving as the board’s chairman. 

Burkle and the Jacksons are no strangers to media scrutiny. There is, for example, the story of how Yusef Jackson came to own, at age 28, his lucrative Anheuser-Busch distributorship. By some accounts, the story begins with the Reverend Jesse Jackson’s launch of a boycott of Budweiser in the early 1980s, charging the St. Louis–based company with failing to award positions to blacks and other minorities. The company agreed to fund a minority distributorship program. 

“We’re small. We need lots of friends and lots of partners,” Jackson says with a laugh. “It’s just like the beer business. Making friends is our business.”

Some observers have linked Jesse Jackson’s actions to the subsequent success of his sons Yusef and Jonathan in winning an exclusive Budweiser distributorship from Anheuser-Busch. The story plays well in clout-obsessed Chicago-even though Yusef was 12 when his father launched the boycott, and 16 years passed before he actually bought the Budweiser business. 

The details behind the Budweiser deal are far more complicated and help to explain the relationship between Yusef Jackson and Burkle. In 1996, Burkle asked the elder Jackson to come to a gathering at his home and give a talk about the need for more minorities in business. Yusef, then a young associate at the Chicago law firm of Mayer, Brown & Platt (now Mayer, Brown, Rowe & Maw LLP), went along. Yusef sat next to August Busch IV, son of Bud chief August III, and the two young men hit it off while talking about life with famous fathers, Jackson says. 

Out of that meeting came the agreement, two years later, for Jackson and his brother Jonathan, a real-estate broker, to buy the Anheuser-Busch distributorship in Chicago. Jackson will not disclose the price but says he used “equity and bank debt” to finance the purchase. He also will not say how much River North earns. Annually, the business distributes more than three million cases of Budweiser and other malt beverages, teas, and waters to bars, restaurants, and sports venues in an exclusive swath of Chicago that runs from Irving Park to Roosevelt Road, and from Lake Michigan to Harlem Avenue.

Burkle has teamed up with Yusef Jackson several times since, including their $450-million play last year to buy the Washington Nationals baseball team (the team was sold to another group). In 2004 Jackson and Burkle were the high bidders, at $850 million, to buy the Chicago Sun-Timesand its sister newspapers from the troubled Hollinger empire. Hollinger eventually decided against selling its Chicago properties, but Jackson says it only made him hungrier to join the media club. “It was a disappointing loss. I was interested in the Sun-Times because I thought it was a great city institutional paper, with a lot of history.” Jackson says that if the paper comes up for sale again, and the numbers are right, he will bid again.

By some expert accounts, a Jackson run on the Sun-Times would be as quixotic a media play as his backing of Radar. “Anyone interested in buying the Sun-Times would have to be very ignorant about the newspaper business,” says the veteran newspaper analyst John Morton. “No traditional publisher would be interested. It’s usually someone with a warm glow in the glands who buys a second newspaper, much to their everlasting regret.”

For the moment, the Sun-Times is not for sale, and Jackson seems focused on his new magazine. And whether it’s Burkle, or AT&T, or some other major investor he probably won’t talk about, he’s ready to consider all comers. “We’re small. We need lots of friends and lots of partners,” he says with a laugh. “It’s just like the beer business. Making friends is our business.”

It was just about a year ago that Jeffrey Epstein, the reclusive financier, was being charged with soliciting prostitutes in Palm Beach, Fla. He may now have another image problem on his hands.

BusinessWeek reports that Mr. Epstein’s Virgin Islands-based money-management firm, Financial Trust Company, is listed in a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission as a stakeholder in Bear Stearns‘s High-Grade Structured Credit Strategies Enhanced Leverage Fund, which became much easier to refer to in recent weeks as “Bear Stearns’ collapsing hedge fund.”

It is a tantalizing nugget of information about someone who rarely discloses anything about his business or his billionaire clients. Despite his penchant for privacy, Mr. Epstein runs in prominent circles: he once flew former President Bill Clinton on his 727.

Regulatory filings show that Mr. Epstein’s firm had voting power over 10 percent of the equity in the Bear Stearns fund, which, aided by loans from some of Wall Street’s biggest banks, bet heavily on the securities linked to the market for subprime mortgages, or those to homeowners with weak credit histories.

As the subprime mortgage market has been rocked by a rise in defaults, many of those bets have gone bad. As of the end of April, the Bear fund was down 23 percent for the year. 

Mr. Epstein did not respond to BusinessWeek’s calls, and his lawyer had no comment. 

Of course, Mr. Epstein is not alone in his exposure to the fund. A fund-of-funds managed by Paris-based BNP Paribas is listed in the S.E.C filing as well. That fund was also heavily invested in Wood River Partners, a $127 million fund that imploded in 2005. 

Bear Stearns says it will reveal the details of the fund’s losses next week. 

Another Bear Stearns fund that got into trouble recently (with the same ridiculously long name as the other fund, except without the words “enhanced leverage”) is being propped up by loans from the firm. It was down about 10 percent as of April. The younger, “enhanced” fund is more heavily leveraged, and Bear Stearns has said it won’t provide any financing for it. 

Go to Article from BusinessWeek »

[Jeffrey Edward Epstein (born 1953)], the financier charged with sex trafficking, made his fortune managing the fortunes of billionaires. But in 2003 and 2004, during the same time prosecutors say he was paying underage girls for sex, Epstein also tried to establish himself as a media mogul — twice.

[Jeffrey Edward Epstein (born 1953)], now 66, was part of a group that made an unsuccessful bid to purchase New York Magazine in 2003, The New York Times  [See [HN02NA][GDrive]],  reported at the time. Former advertising executive Donny Deutsch, investor Nelson Peltz, U.S. News & World Report owner Mortimer Zuckerman, and [Harvey Weinstein (born 1952)] were also members of that group.

According to The New York Times [See [HN02NA][GDrive]], the group bid $45 million for the magazine, but investment banker Bruce Wasserstein outbid them by $10 million. The group, led by Zuckerman, blamed their loss on the rules of the auction.

"We made it clear that we were willing to put more money on the table,'' Zuckerman told The New York Times [See [HN02NA][GDrive]] in 2003, ''but after they had a handshake, they were not willing to entertain other offers.''

The New York Times [See [HN02NA][GDrive]]  wrote that the motives behind the bid were "ego, power and cachet."

And that was not Epstein's only attempt to enter the media business. In 2004, Epstein and Zuckerman invested $25 million in pop-culture focused [Radar Magazine], according to The New York Times. Epstein and Zuckerman became equal partners in the company. Radar's founder and editor-in-chief Maer Roshan kept a minority stake. The trio told The New York Times that they thought the magazine would appeal to trendy urban singles.

"I always focus on the potential downside of an investment," [Jeffrey Edward Epstein (born 1953)] told The New York Times [See https://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/19/arts/radar-magazine-lines-up-financing.html ] in 2004, "and I don't think this is something that is going to lose money." 

Under their leadership, the celebrity news magazine went from publishing in print bi-monthly to every month but continued to struggle. Radar stopped publishing a print magazine in 2008. That same year, Radar was sold to American Media, Inc., which still publishes an online edition.

[Jeffrey Edward Epstein (born 1953)] made most of his fortune as a hedge-fund manager, Business Insider previously reported [See https://www.businessinsider.com/how-financier-jeffrey-epstein-made-his-fortune-2019-7 ] . After spending a decade at Bear Sterns, he launched his own investment firm that he claimed only catered to billionaires. L Brands CEO Les Wexner was his only confirmed client.

Epstein was arrested on charges of sex trafficking in New Jersey on July 6, and pleaded not guilty on July 8. Prosecutors said that, from 2002 to 2005, Epstein lured girls as young as 14 into his homes and paid them for massages that became increasingly sexual in nature. Business Insider previously reported that Epstein served 13 months in prison after confessing to felony sexual solicitation of underage girls.

In March 2018, Business Insider reported  [See https://www.businessinsider.com/harvey-weinstein-turns-himself-in-over-sexual-assault-charges-2018-5] that New York Police charged [Harvey Weinstein (born 1952)] with rape, criminal sex conduct act, sex abuse, and sexual misconduct against two women, following over 70 accusations of sexual misconduct.   [...]

In the mid-1970s, students at one of New York’s most esteemed prep schools were surprised to encounter a new teacher who pushed the limits on the school’s strict dress code, wandering the halls in a fur coat, gold chains and an open shirt that exposed his chest.

The teacher, Jeffrey Epstein, would decades later face allegations that he coerced and trafficked teenagers for sex. At the Dalton School on the Upper East Side, some students saw Mr. Epstein as an unusual and unsettling figure, willing to violate the norms in his encounters with girls. 

Eight former students who attended the prestigious school during [Jeffrey Edward Epstein (born 1953)]'s Mr. Epstein’s [Referen ce here to https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/15/nyregion/jeffrey-epstein-news.html ] short tenure there said that his conduct with teenage girls had left an impression that had lingered for decades. One former student recalled him showing up at a party where students were drinking, while most remembered his persistent attention on the girls in hallways and classrooms. 

“I can remember thinking at the time, ‘This is wrong,’” said Scott Spizer, who graduated from Dalton in 1976.

None of the female students who spoke to The New York Times in recent days remembered Mr. Epstein making unwanted physical contact with them, and he has not been accused of any crimes related to his time at the school. 

But a few students said they had been discomfited by a close relationship he had with one of their female peers, a concern that had escalated so much that one of them had raised the issue then to a school administrator.

Dalton has long been known for its rigorous academics, repeatedly ranking among the nation’s best private schools while drawing the sons and daughters of New York titans of finance, media and art. Among the alumni are the CNN journalist Anderson Cooper, the actress Claire Danes and the comedian Chevy Chase. 

Mr. Epstein’s time at Dalton was brief, and an administrator said it ended in a dismissal. While Mr. Epstein later developed a reputation in the world of finance as a man of brilliance — “He was a Brooklyn guy with a motor for a brain,” New York magazine wrote in a 2002 profile — the administrator told The Times that he had dismissed Mr. Epstein for poor performance.

But the accounts offer a window into Mr. Epstein’s early adulthood, before he developed extensive private wealth that allowed him to acquire a $56 million mansion just a mile south of the Dalton School. It was there, prosecutors said this week, that Mr. Epstein and his employees paid “numerous” underage girls to engage in sex acts with him. 

Federal prosecutors in New York charged Mr. Epstein, 66, with sex trafficking on Monday. He has pleaded not guilty. His lawyer did not respond to a request for comment. 

• Read the latest developments on the Epstein case.  :   Epstein Paid $350,000 to Possible Witnesses Against Him, Prosecutors Say

Officials with the Dalton School also did not respond to requests for comment, but news of the charges has led alumni to reconnect and swap memories of a young teacher who sometimes seemed to defy the expectations of behavior for an authority figure.

A school in turmoil

Like much of the rest of the country, the Dalton School in the 1970s was in the midst of a culture war.

The school, which had been a progressive haven for the children of artists and writers, was undergoing a shift under a new headmaster. [Donald Barr (born 1921)], the father of Attorney General William Barr, came in as a disciplinarian focused on beefing up the academics of the school, and on enforcing a strict code of conduct.

In a school known for creativity, administrators had prohibited denim jeans and “bizarre and eccentric costumes.” If Mr. Barr caught students using marijuana, he would often send them to therapy as a condition of staying in the school. He himself described his leadership style as “by ukase,” using the Imperial Russian term for an edict from the czar.

Staff members would sometimes turn students away from their morning classes; girls for skirts that were too short, and boys for hair that was too long. 

Some students and parents balked at the constraints. Still, the school continued to draw families of fame. Around the years of Mr. Epstein’s tenure, records show the student roster included Prudence Murdoch, the daughter of the media mogul Rupert Murdoch; the fashion designer Jill Stuart; and several future actresses, including Jennifer Grey, Tracy Pollan and Maggie Wheeler.

While [Donald Barr (born 1921)] was strict on the school culture, he made it a point to hire teachers from unconventional backgrounds, recalled Susan Semel, a social studies teacher at Dalton from the 1960s to 1980s who later wrote a book on the history of the school.

“Barr didn’t care about credentials as long as you were interesting and knew your stuff,” Ms. Semel said. 

In February 1974, Mr. Barr had announced that he was resigning as headmaster, protesting the meddling by the board of trustees, but that he would stay on until the end of the school year. It is unclear whether [Donald Barr (born 1921)] hired Mr. Epstein during that time.

Mr. Epstein, from Brooklyn, was just 21 when he joined the faculty at Dalton, arriving without a college degree. The school’s student newspaper reported in September 1974 that he was starting that year as a math and physics teacher.

The next year, he participated in a school musical for parents and faculty, and he appeared in later editions of the paper as the coach of the Dalton Tigers math team until the beginning of 1976.

The school had new leadership under Gardner Dunnan, who tentatively explored a rollback of some of its strict rules. Mr. Dunnan announced in early 1975 a policy that would allow denim inside the building, although students were still told to be neat and clean. 

In the years since, however, Mr. Dunnan has faced allegations of his own inappropriate conduct. A former Dalton student said in a lawsuit that she had been invited to live with Mr. Dunnan at age 14, and had suffered repeated sexual assaults under his care. Mr. Dunnan denied the allegations. The lawsuit was dropped, but the woman’s lawyer, Mariann Meier Wang, said she intended to refile it. 

‘Everyone talked about it’

At Dalton, Mr. Epstein was known as a charismatic, young teacher who at times acted more like a friend than an authority figure to students. 

The urban school inside a brick building did not have outdoor spaces to congregate, so students gathered in halls and in rooms that spanned the building’s many stories. That included lab rooms dedicated to various subjects, providing a more informal and intimate setting for students to get help outside of class from their teachers.

It was in one of these lab rooms that Leslie Kitziger, who graduated from Dalton in 1978, first met Mr. Epstein. 

Ms. Kitziger remembered him as a flamboyant dresser and lively jokester. “He was goofy and like a kid himself,” she recalled.

Ms. Kitziger said she became close to Mr. Epstein at a time when she was struggling at home with her parents’ divorce. She confided in him, and remembered him as caring and attentive. 

“He listened,” Ms. Kitziger recalled. “I was a 14-year-old and he helped me through a time when there wasn’t anybody else to talk to. I felt like he really cared that I was having a rough go.”

She stressed that Mr. Epstein was always professional with her.

But other students, including Millicent Young, a graduate of the school’s 1976 class, saw things differently. Ms. Young never had Mr. Epstein as a teacher, but the school was small enough that she would spend time around him. She recalled observing Mr. Epstein flirting with the girls at the school, which drew her attention because it was so different from how other teachers behaved.

“There was a real clarity of the inappropriateness of the behavior — that this isn’t how adult male teachers conduct themselves,” Ms. Young said.

Mr. Spizer, the fellow student who graduated the same year, said he had a clear recollection of disliking Mr. Epstein because he was spending so much time with girls in the school.

Some other students spoke on condition of anonymity, fearing retribution from Mr. Epstein. One recalled that he had made efforts to spend time with her outside the school, and she remembered raising concerns about Mr. Epstein’s conduct with another student to Mr. Dunnan. An attorney for Mr. Dunnan said the former headmaster had not been aware of any concerns about Mr. Epstein’s conduct at the school.

Another student, who also requested anonymity, fearing reprisals from Mr. Epstein, recalled seeing Mr. Epstein at a high school party in an apartment on the Upper East Side where students were drinking and socializing. Mr. Epstein was the only teacher there, which raised eyebrows among the students.

“It was weird,” said another former student, Paul Grossman, a 1978 graduate who did not attend the party but remembered hearing about it. “Everyone talked about it,” he said.

Peter Thomas Roth, who graduated from Dalton in 1975 and later founded a cosmetics and skin care company with his name, said Mr. Epstein was such a “brilliant” teacher that his father later hired him to tutor Mr. Roth in statistics.

Mr. Roth said he never heard of any rumors about misconduct at the school.

“He was like your friend, you know?” Mr. Roth said. 

But Peter Branch, who was an interim headmaster after [Donald Barr (born 1921)] and later the head of the high school, was not as fond of Mr. Epstein’s teaching. He said that he did not recall anyone raising concerns to him about Mr. Epstein’s conduct with students, but that he had heard concerns from the faculty about Mr. Epstein’s teaching, and eventually determined that the teacher needed to go.

“Epstein was a young teacher who didn’t come up to snuff,” Mr. Branch said. “So, ultimately, he was asked to leave.”

Mr. Roth, the former student, said he and Mr. Epstein did not stay in close touch. But a couple of years ago, he got an invitation to Mr. Epstein’s home after running into him.

It was the only time he had been invited to Mr. Epstein’s palatial townhouse, he said, and so he went over for an afternoon gathering. Everyone present was in their 40s and 50s, Mr. Roth said, and there was no untoward behavior.

Michael Gold contributed reporting.

"I’m teaching a bunch of little brats next year.”—Jeffrey Epstein, 1974-75 Dalton School Yearbook

It took a clandestine FBI-NYPD joint sting operation to arrest the elusive convicted sex offender Jeffrey E. Epstein on Saturday July 6th on the tarmac of Teterboro airport in New Jersey (a story first broken by The Daily Beast). Simultaneously, a sledgehammer was used to break the entry to his massive $77 million New York City townhouse on East 71st Street. Police recovered hundreds, possibly thousands, of nude images of young women and girls—an automatic legal problem for a man who is on multiple sex offender registries. Epstein’s case may be one of the most extreme cases of organized child abuse in modern history.

Epstein is without doubt the wealthiest individual on any sex offender registry in the United States (and he is at Level 3—at greatest risk of abusing more children). On his registry entry, the following residences are listed: his $7.8 million 70-acre private island in the U.S. Virgin Islands (his primary residence owned by his Delaware-based LLC, L.S.J.), his Paris apartment on Avenue Foch (one of the most expensive addresses in the world), his $15.5 million Palm Beach estate, his $77 million New York City townhouse (a gift from Victoria’s Secret founder Leslie Wexner), and his $10 million castle/ranch in New Mexico. At the bottom of his residences is another island in the Virgin Islands, Great St. James. Epstein purchased it in 2016 for $18 million and was actively (and without permit) developing an even larger compound on its 165 acres—that is, until his arrest this past Saturday.

As far as vehicles, his offender registry entries list two Gulfstream jets (though his lawyers say he sold one of them in June), two helicopters, nine Mercedes-Benzes, nine Chevy Suburbans, three Cadillac Escalades, three Harley-Davidsons, one $375k Bentley Mulsanne, a jet-ski, and other assorted items. He has wined and dined American presidents, princes, elite academics, socialites, corporate CEOs and other VIPs. His alleged victims were little girls, often economically destitute or runaways or orphans—from sixth graders to high-school sophomores. Because his alleged crimes span multiple decades, his victims likely number in the hundreds—or more.

“Unnoticed by almost everybody, travelling with her was a greying, plumpish, middle-aged American businessman who managed to avoid the photographers.” —Mail on Sunday, Nov. 15, 1992 (London edition)

That businessman was Jeffrey Epstein. In the early 1990s, British newspapers that followed British socialite Ghislaine Maxwell (alleged to be Epstein’s chief procurer of victims) tried to figure out who Epstein was. The Mail on Sunday asked in 1992: “But what is he—property developer, concert pianist, math teacher, corporate treasure hunter, stockbroker, merchant banker or globe-trotting businessman?” No one seemed to know.

Given Epstein’s apparent mystique, I checked New York City’s birth, census, and marriage records to be certain about the facts. Epstein was born Jan. 20 1953 in Brooklyn, NY. His parents were Paula (nee Stolofsky, 1918-2004) and Seymour G. Epstein (1916-1991) and they were married in Brooklyn in 1952—shortly before Jeffrey Epstein’s birth.

Epstein grew up during the 1950s and 1960s in the Lafayette neighborhood around Coney Island, as documented by James Patterson, John Connolly, and Tim Malloy in their 2016 book on Epstein, Filthy Rich. Epstein attended the now-shuttered Lafayette High School, a working-class high school that produced a significant number of professional baseball players. Epstein’s mother, Paula, was a homemaker while his father, Seymour, worked for the New York City Parks Department as a groundskeeper and gardener. During their retirement years, Epstein’s parents (as well as several maternal aunts) resided in nearby properties he purchased in West Palm Beach. In 1991, Epstein’s father passed away at the Cleveland Clinic in Ohio at the age of 75. His mother passed away in 2004 at age 85 in Palm Beach.

Epstein has a younger brother, Mark (“Puggy”), who has joined him in real-estate deals throughout the years. Mark operates a real-estate business, OSSA Properties, which owns some of the properties—including the apartments in the 301 East 66th Street building—where Jeffrey Epstein’s alleged sex slaves and other employees were housed (real-estate ownership between the brothers may have commingled).

“Most of Epstein’s college study years were spent at NYU. I verified that he did not graduate from NYU with their registrar.”

Jeffrey Epstein graduated from Lafayette High School in 1969 at age 16, having skipped two grades. He was “chubby with curly hair and a high, ‘hee-hee’ kind of laugh,” according to Filthy Rich. In the fall of 1969, Epstein started at Cooper Union and studied there for two years until the spring semester of 1971. Many writers say he attended New York University (NYU) after Cooper Union, but they rarely give specific dates. I decided to verify exactly when Epstein went to college and where. It turned out that Epstein was enrolled at NYU between September of 1971 and June of 1974. Thus, most of Epstein’s college study years were spent at NYU. I verified that he did not graduate from NYU with their registrar.

In a 2002 profile in New York magazine, Thomas Landon reported that Epstein studied at NYU’s Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences. It is not clear why Epstein attended two institutions of higher education but did not graduate from either. When Epstein joined the board of Rockefeller University, he misrepresented his educational and employment background; a press release stated that he had “studied physics at Cooper Union in New York and then joined Bear Stearns, becoming a Limited Partner until 1981.” Between Cooper Union and Bear Stearns, Epstein studied at NYU and was a teacher for two years (two unreported and significant events). When a convicted sex offender facing sex-trafficking charges was first employed as a teacher, it bears at least some scrutiny.

After the summer of 1974, Epstein began working as a teacher of mathematics and physics at the Dalton School in the Upper East Side of Manhattan. It has been reported that he began there in 1973, but this is incorrect. I searched the 1973-74 Dalton yearbook and there is no mention of Jeffrey Epstein. I then searched Dalton’s school newspaper and found in the September 1974 issue that “... Mr. Epstein, who will also teach physics, [has] also joined the department this year.” Epstein also confirmed that he taught there between 1974 and 1976 in a deposition.

In the United States, there are various schools that educate children from the social upper classes—Kent School, Horace Mann, Miss Porter’s. Dalton is among that set. These schools are often restricted to children from the “old money” stratum in society, with a small number of scholarship students or athletes from non-elite backgrounds.

In 1974, Dalton was run by headmaster Donald Barr—father of Attorney General William Barr, whose Justice Department recently began a review of Epstein’s 2007 non-prosecution agreement for the Palm Beach child sexual assault charges. Writers have noted the interesting coincidence. However, Donald Barr resigned in turmoil in February of 1974 (according to the March 14, 1974 issue of The Daltonian) which was seven months before Jeffrey Epstein began teaching there that fall. While it is possible that Donald Barr may have hired Epstein, if he made personnel decisions long in advance, the Dalton School lost four math teachers (according to The Daltonian) prior to the 1974-75 school year. Therefore the school may have hired Epstein, in part, out of an urgent need to fill vacant positions—even though Epstein did not have a college degree.

“The paper reported Epstein would be starting a 'math-track team' the following year due to his 'unique philosophy of integrating physical exercise with spiritual and mathematical stimulation.'”

Peter Branch was the acting headmaster after Barr’s departure and he may have hired Epstein. Full verification would require access to Dalton’s personnel records, if they still retain them. I put a Freedom of Information Law (FOIL) request into the State of New York Department of Education and they reported having no teaching license on file for Epstein—this may suggest that he was not planning on a career in teaching. Unlike public schools, it should be noted, a private school like Dalton does not require its teachers to possess a state teaching license or certificate.

Update: After publication, a reporter from the Miami Herald kindly provided me with Branch's phone number. When he spoke with me, he noted that he was upper school director before being appointed interim headmaster at Dalton. His appointment began on July 1, 1974 and Barr's contract at Dalton expired on June 30th. Branch does not recall hiring Epstein and he is relatively certain Barr or possibly the head of the Math Department hired Epstein because hiring decisions were typically made in the spring. He also noted that Barr liked to hire unconventional teachers to enhance the educational experience for students at Dalton. 

While at the Dalton School, Epstein was the coach of the math team. In competitions with several local schools, Epstein led the students to victory in one instance and to second place in another. At a February 1976 math meet, the Dalton team competed against Ramaz and the Manhattan Talmudic Academy with “Boss Epstein watching from the sidelines…” (The Daltonian March 5, 1976). At another match up in April 1976, Epstein told his team “a victory would be as easy as Pi.” The paper reported Epstein would be starting a “math-track team” the following year due to his “unique philosophy of integrating physical exercise with spiritual and mathematical stimulation.” The Dalton School students and families are comprised of some of the wealthiest families in the United States—unlike Epstein’s own. But this access may have created an opening for him.

As a young man from a working-class neighborhood in Brooklyn (equipped with a deep Brooklyn accent), Jeffrey Epstein at Dalton likely had to be a “quick study” to gracefully flow among the social upper class. Vicky Ward’s 2003 Vanity Fair profile of Epstein deemed him “The Talented Mr. Epstein”—drawing a parallel to Matt Damon’s character in the 1999 film The Talented Mr. Ripley, where Tom Ripley cons his way into the upper class through fraud and misrepresentation (and plenty of piano playing). To wit, the April 1975 issue of The Daltonian covered a Parent-Teacher Association event, “the first parent-faculty musical in recent memory,” noting that “Mr. Epstein proved himself to be the ivory show man on the piano.” 

“The April 1975 issue of The Daltonian covered a Parent-Teacher Association event, 'the first parent-faculty musical in recent memory,' noting that 'Mr. Epstein proved himself to be the ivory show man on the piano.'”

Was Epstein wooing and dazzling the parents as a means of gaining access to their rarefied world? It seems to have worked because a parent wondered what he was doing there and put him in touch with the chairman of Bear Stearns, Ace Greenberg (whose children also attended Dalton; Epstein may have tutored them). After the 1975-1976 school year was finished, Epstein informed the school he was not returning and began his career on Wall Street at Bear Stearns.

UPDATE: Peter Branch does remember how Epstein left Dalton: The math and science faculty approached him and asked him what he was "going to do about Jeff." The science faculty were in the process of evaluating teaching and found that Epstein's teaching skills had not improved over the previous year. Branch then informed Epstein that it was time to move on. 

After just four years, on August 1, 1980, Bear Stearns published an advert in The Wall Street Journal listing all the people who had made limited partner, including Jeffrey E. Epstein (along with people such as Larry Kudlow, former CNBC commentator and current director of the National Economic Council). Epstein, it seemed, was on the path, to accumulating the economic riches necessary for entry into the one percent. Obtaining the social graces required for acceptance by the social upper class would come much later with the help of several socialites, but mostly Ghislaine Maxwell.

Epstein was permitted to plead guilty to charges of soliciting prostitution in 2008 in the State of Florida. However, his victims were children, and it has been widely pointed out, cannot give consent, and therefore cannot be prostitutes. (Epstein’s lawyers tried to tarnish and humiliate the victims at the time by calling them “prostitutes,” and, as Vanity Fair revealed, Epstein reportedly smeared the underage girls in private as “prostitutes and strippers who’d already been indoctrinated into the sex world.”) 

Such lax charges in the Florida case, compared to what he is now facing, were hashed out in a deal with Florida State Attorney Barry Krischer, in conjunction with Alexander Acosta (who just stepped down as President Trump's labor secretary over his role in the Epstein saga). The deal was protested by the highly professional Palm Beach police led by Chief Michael Reiter and the late Detective Joseph Recarey. 

Epstein’s 2019 charges are for crimes committed in New York and Florida between 2002 and 2005. However, there are allegations against Epstein from earlier time periods (such as Maria Farmer’s 2019 sworn affidavit that she and her 15-year old sibling were assaulted by Epstein and Maxwell in various locations in 1996—allegations that were reportedly nixed by an editor from Vicky Ward’s 2003 profile of Epstein). One thing to keep in mind is Epstein was a school teacher and would have had possible access to victims there as well. There are no reports that he did anything at Dalton school, but he was asked about his relations with students in a deposition in 2009 and here is what he said:....

His answer about the ages of his students is noteworthy. He replies “Mostly old—mostly 17 and 18.” This tells us that Epstein thinks that the ages of 17 and 18 are “old.” He is asked what subject he was teaching, and he answers truthfully, physics and mathematics. The attorney asks if any of the girls he was teaching were under age 17 at the time, and Epstein answers that he does not know—this sounds genuine. Things take a turn when the attorney asks Epstein if he had any sexual contact with any students at Dalton. Epstein answers the first time with a question, “Again?” He is asked a second time and again answers with a question, “While I was a teacher?” The attorney says yes, let’s start with that question and Epstein gives a solid “no.” The attorney presses “How about after?” and Epstein says “Not that I remember.”

In summary, Epstein revealed that he feels high-school students aged 17 to 18 years are “old” and he that he does not remember if he had sexual contact with Dalton students after he was a teacher there. The final time he is asked, he reads from a statement in which he claims that the attorney’s law firm is engaged in fraud and then pleads his Fifth Amendment rights. Questions about sexual contact with Dalton students appear to be sensitive for him. Epstein depositions are extremely difficult to read because he pleads the Fifth to almost every question—as he eventually does here.

Julie Brown of the Miami Herald has done a significant amount of research on the Epstein case with her and her colleagues’ award-winning Perversion of Justice series. The extensive reporting in the Miami Herald, The Daily Beast, and by independent journalists like Ed Opperman, Pearse Redmond, William Ramsey and others has likely influenced law enforcement to consider the new evidence uncovered by the press—including possible new locations where recruitment or abuse might have occurred.

Related to Epstein’s deposition above, Virginia Roberts Giuffre, who accused Epstein of sexually abusing her as an underage girl and loaning her out to his famous friends, claimed that Epstein “lost interest” as she got older and sent her to Thailand to bring him another victim, at which point she says she escaped from Epstein.

Another alarming detail about Epstein is reported in Vicky Ward’s 2003 Vanity Fair article. She noted that Epstein left a paperback copy of the Marquis de Sade’s The Misfortunes of Virtue lying on a table at his 71st Street townhouse. Why would Epstein have left this book out in plain view? This obscene novel (even Napoleon ordered its author jailed) is about a 12-year-old French girl, Justine, who travels alone across France and winds up in a monastery and is forced to become the sex slave of monks where she endures repeated sexual assaults and is ordered to participate in orgies. She escapes but suffers similar abuses and encounters as the story follows her life until the age of 26.

“His answer about the ages of his students is noteworthy. He replies 'Mostly old—mostly 17 and 18.'”

Justine may have been a pedophile’s fantasy story in which the victim somehow learns “virtue” from what she endures. Justine almost parallels the life of some of Epstein’s alleged victims. What is even more tragic is that in the course of her reporting, Ward found two of Epstein’s victims and their mother. Ward says they detailed in 2003 how Epstein sexually assaulted them in the mid-1990s—including the time when one was allegedly held captive for 12 hours at mogul Leslie Wexner’s Ohio property after she says Epstein and Maxwell assaulted her. (Wexner has not responded to the allegations.) Perhaps their stories might have been able to deter or expose Epstein earlier, if they had been published when the girls first came forward.

We can expect a trove of information about Epstein to continue to emerge now that he is in jail. Indeed, the Miami Herald reports that at least a dozen new victims have come forward since his arrest. Epstein and his accomplices may have seen his victims as little girls—but now they are strong, brave women fighting back today.

Thomas Volscho is a sociology professor at the City University of New York, College of Staten Island. He has been researching the case of Jeffrey Epstein for a book he is writing.

There are plenty of mysteries still swirling around Jeffrey Epstein, the convicted sex offender who’s newly indicted for sex trafficking (he’s pleaded not guilty). But the biggest unanswered question remains how he made the nearly $600 million that he and his attorneys listed on his unaudited and unverified financial statement. In order to find out how he amassed his fortune, it may take subpoenas from the U.S. Attorney’s Office in the Southern District of New York to Wall Street types in Epstein’s inner circle—people such as Leslie Wexner, the billionaire founder and CEO of L Brands, Glenn Dubin, the billionaire cofounder of the hedge fund Highbridge Capital Management, and Leon Black, the billionaire founder of Apollo Global Management, the private-equity behemoth.

While we await subpoenas and depositions—if they ever come remains to be seen—there is a road map of sorts in the form of Epstein’s so-called “little black book,” 92 pages of names, emails, and phone numbers of people Epstein knew, or wanted to know, but in any event had detailed information about. Wall Street people comprise a significant amount of the entries. “He was a kind of wholesale collector of people, including people he didn’t know,” one of the Wall Street guys in the black book tells me. “I guarantee you that 90% of the people whose names are in his book, he’s not in their book. Many of these people don’t even know him.”

What the book tells us is that Epstein knew, or aspired to know, some of the biggest names on Wall Street and in Washington. Sure there are the Trumps — Donald, Ivana, and Ivanka — and Bill Clinton’s surrogate Doug Band in the book. But once you get past their names, there is the horde of Wall Street executives. The contact book is dated for sure, replete as it is with misspellings and incorrect or superseded phone numbers, emails, and addresses. It remains something of an enigma: What was the book’s purpose? “I don’t think it means anything,” the Wall Street executive continues. “…I didn’t really know Jeffrey. He was like Boo Radley in the corner of the room. After I met him, he became Jeffrey Epstein, he had no interest in me. He knew right out of the box who the players were, the people who would stay out all night, people who had interests in extracurricular objectives, and who the hitters were. That wasn’t me.”

The Wall Street names in the book range from the highly prominent to the obscure, and, for some unknown reason, a disproportionate number of names of bankers in it worked once upon a time at Lazard, my old firm. The prominent are easy to identify, but why were their names in the book? Why would the late David Rockefeller’s name be in there? He was, of course, the textbook definition of moral rectitude before he died two years ago, at the age of 101. Also in the Epstein book are deceased financiers, such as Lord Hanson, the British industrialist; John Gutfreund, the onetime “King of Wall Street,” who presided over a major Treasury market scandal when he was the leader of Salomon Brothers; Paul Allen, the cofounder of Microsoft; Edmond Safra, a billionaire banker who perished in a fire in his apartment in Monaco in 1999; and Al Taubman, the billionaire Detroit real-estate tycoon who was caught up in a scandal involving Sotheby’s. (Taubman’s son Bobby is also in Epstein’s book).

Then there are a passel of billionaires who are very much alive. There is the multi-billionaire philanthropist and staunch conservative David Koch; Mike Bloomberg, the multi-billionaire former mayor of New York City and erstwhile presidential candidate; and there is Eddie Lampert, the billionaire hedge fund manager now presiding over the bankruptcy of Sears. There are the Forbes brothers — Steve, a onetime presidential candidate, and Chris, known as “Kip” — whose father was Malcolm Forbes and who may have at one point been billionaires. There are also the billionaires Ron Burkle, the onetime supermarket buyout impresario (and great friend of Bill Clinton), and Edgar Bronfman Jr., the spirits scion who took the family’s fortune and went Hollywood, with mixed success.

Also among the billionaires are Conrad Black, the Canadian media tycoon turned prominent historian and convicted felon, and Nicolas Berggruen, the fabulous and fabulously itinerant art collector and the founder of the annual $1 million Berggruen Prize that is given to a “thinker” who helps to shape “human self-understanding” and to “advance humankind.” There is also Henry Kravis, the billionaire cofounder of KKR, the onetime buyout king. How did Kravis, who is usually oh so careful about such things, get into Epstein’s book? I am not the least bit surprised to see billionaire Ron Perelman’s name in the book, especially since he lives blocks from Epstein’s East 71st mansion.

But the real fun of Epstein’s tome comes in wondering about the names of the less well-known bankers, and why Epstein would be in touch with them. Jes Staley, a former senior executive at JPMorgan Chase and now the CEO of Barclays Plc, the big British bank, was, as the New York Times reported, Epstein’s conduit to JPMorgan Chase back in the day. Epstein introduced Staley to the billionaire hedge fund manager Glenn Dubin. Dubin, who did not respond to a request for comment, met Epstein through his wife, Eva Andersson, a former Miss Sweden, and of course they are both in the book. When JPMorgan Chase bought a majority stake in Dubin’s Highbridge Capital Management in 2004 (and the rest five years later), Epstein got a fee. (Staley did not respond to a request for comment.)

Bill Berkman, the wealthy investor whose secretary once sued him about being forced to look at pornographic pictures of women in emails (the suit was dismissed with prejudice in 2015), is in the Epstein book, as are the hedge fund managers Boykin Curry and Adam Dell, the brother of Michael Dell, the multi-billionaire founder of Dell Computer. There is Alan Patricof, the prominent New York venture capitalist and Clinton friend; John Paulson, the billionaire hedge fund manager who made a fortune betting against the mortgage market in the years leading up to the 2008 financial crisis; and Michael Ovitz, the onetime Hollywood super-agent and Disney executive.

A former Goldman Sachs vice chairman and director — Robert Hurst — makes an appearance in Epstein’s book, as does Tony Dub, a former senior banker at First Boston back in the day. Lew Ranieri, the billionaire creator of the Wall Street securitization market when he was at Salomon Brothers — which eventually led us down the rabbit hole of mortgage-backed securities — is in the book. And, not surprisingly given that Epstein worked there briefly, two of the former leaders of Bear Stearns — Jimmy Cayne, the former CEO, and Warren Spector, the former president of the firm — are included.

But it is the former employees of Lazard — the prominent but relatively small M&A and investment management firm — that are disproportionately showing up in the book. There is Roger Barnett, who was a former colleague of mine, and is now the CEO of Shaklee, the Japanese nutrition and green cleaning-products company. (Barnett is married to Sloan Lindemann, the daughter of the late billionaire George Lindemann, whose name is also in the book.)

There is Eva Lorenzotti, a former junior banker at Lazard and New York socialite who is now affiliated with the Rhone Group (started by two former Lazard bankers); there is Todd Meister, also a former junior banker at Lazard when I was there, whose father Robert “Bob” Meister (also in the book [See Robert Alan Meister (born 1941]), a vice chairman of Aon Group, the insurance brokerage, introduced Epstein to Les Wexner, the billionaire founder of the Limited (who of course was in the book.) Robert Meister and Jeffrey Epstein were said to have had a falling out long ago but Wexner did help Todd Meister get his hedge fund off the ground with an investment of many millions of dollars. (Todd Meister was once briefly married to Nicky Hilton Rothschild, the sister of Paris Hilton.)

Wexner was also a longtime Lazard client. Former Lazard CEO William Loomis was once on the Limited’s board of directors. (Loomis’s name is not in the Epstein book.) Nina Griscom, a New York socialite and the stepdaughter of longtime Lazard honcho Felix Rohatyn, is in the book, as is Raymond McKenzie, who also worked at Lazard around the time I was there too. (“When it rains it pours,” McKenzie emailed me when I inquired why he was in the book.) And there is Jeffrey Leeds, a longtime friend, who left Lazard in the 1990s and started his own private-equity firm focused on the education sector. (Lazard did not respond to a request for comment.)

Two other entries caught my eye. One is for Tom Barrack, the founder of hedge fund Colony Capital and a longtime friend of Donald Trump. Barrack was head of Trump’s inauguration committee; he has agreed to cooperate with the House Judiciary Committee’s ongoing investigation into Trump. But Barrack, like Ron Burkle, lives mostly in California so that complicates somewhat being in Epstein’s social circle, ameliorated for sure by private jet travel. The most bizarre entry of all is that of Anton “Tony” Valukas, a former U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of Illinois and a senior partner at the prominent Chicago law firm, Jenner & Block. Valukas’s biggest claim to fame was probably as being the acclaimed author of the 2010 nine-volume report examining the causes of the biggest bankruptcy in American history—the 2008 liquidation of Lehman Brothers. Why in the world would Epstein and Valukas want to have anything to do with each other? Valukas did not respond to an email request for comment.

• NOTE : This article has been updated.

In Joel and Ethan Coen’s 1991 movie Barton Fink, a writer in pursuit of the big story accidentally winds up befriending a serial murderer who lives next door. That dark comedy’s ironic juxtaposition did not escape me in August 2019 when Jeffrey Epstein was found hanged in the Metropolitan Correctional Center in New York and the mushrooming scandal involving him threatened to engulf three of the wealthiest men in America, two former presidents of the United States and the second son of the queen of England.

For me, his sad saga began unfolding some thirty-three years earlier when I was still investigating a world-class financial mystery in Europe that began with the hanging of the Italian banker Roberto Calvi, known as “God’s banker,” under Blackfriars Bridge in London on June 18, 1982. It involved an even more sinister financial scandal that threatened to bring down the Vatican Bank and cause what Pope John Paul warned would be “a catastrophe of unimaginable proportions in which the Church will suffer the gravest damage.” Archbishop Paul Marcinkus, the Vatican Bank’s head and a principal player in the scandal, had guided me through some of the inner sanctums of the Vatican, but even with his help, the missing $1.5 billion in funds remained a mystery. I was still trying to unravel the financial threads of the missing money when I encountered Jeffrey Epstein on October 31, 1987.

I had gone that evening with the British businessman Jimmy Goldsmith and his thirty-five-year-old daughter Isabel to a Halloween party at the Upper East Side home in Manhattan of Coco Brown, a movie producer who rarely, if ever, made a movie. Soon after our arrival, a young man in his mid-thirties with a big, toothy smile sauntered up to us, hugged Isabel and introduced himself as Jeffrey Epstein. He was with his brother Mark Epstein. “A surfeit of Epsteins,” remarked Isabel, who knew Jeffrey from London.

The next day, Epstein called me and said there was something he’d like to talk to me about. We met for tea at the Mayfair Hotel on 65th Street the following Thursday. He told me at the outset he had information that I might be interested in for my Wall Street Babylon column in Manhattan Inc. He said he had learned it in the course of his business dealings.

“What is your business?” I asked him.

‘I’m sort of a financial bounty hunter,’ he said, with an I-know-more-than-you grin

“I’m sort of a financial bounty hunter,” he said, with an I-know-more-than-you grin that rarely left his face throughout our tea. He explained that he hunted down hidden money for a fee. He described the convoluted network of concealed funds in Andorra, Fiji, Gibraltar and the Cayman Islands in such vivid detail that it sounded like he might be in the business of hiding as well as finding it. He dropped many legendary names in the realm of money machinations — Adnan Khashoggi, Aristotle Onassis and Sheikh Zayed bin Sultan Al Nahyan — but his tales, though intriguing, didn’t quite add up. For one thing, I knew Khashoggi well enough through Jimmy Goldsmith to doubt that he needed help from Epstein in either hiding or finding hiding places for money. I asked him about the only hidden money of interest to me, which was the $1.5 billion from the Vatican Bank that vanished into shell companies in Panama. Epstein knew nothing about those funds. As we finished the tea, I mentioned I was leaving for Spain on Monday.

“How do you go?” he asked.

“Iberia Airlines.” I added that I always flew coach.

“If you like, I can upgrade you to first class. Much better food.”

“How?”

“Drop your ticket off with my doorman tomorrow morning. It won’t cost you a penny.”

Jeffrey lived in a one-bedroom apartment at Solow Tower at 265 East 66th Street. As instructed, I brought my ticket to the doorman on Friday morning, and Friday evening I picked it up with a first-class sticker and a first-class seat assignment. I flew to Malaga, Spain, and back in great style and comfort.

When I mentioned Epstein’s ticket trick to Jimmy Goldsmith, he warned me to be careful with him. It was good advice I did not immediately heed.

In December 1988, I needed to go to Los Angeles to interview associates, and possibly victims, of the so-called Junk Bond King Mike Milken, now involved in a growing scandal. When I told Epstein about it, he not only converted my coach tickets to first class, but he insisted that I stay at his house in Santa Monica. He had rented the two-bedroom house near the pier for his girlfriend Eva Andersson, a former Miss Sweden in her third year of medical school at UCLA. Since I needed to be in Los Angeles for weeks for my interviews, I happily stayed at Eva’s house. She couldn’t have been a better host.

Epstein had another surprise for me in LA. It came in the form of a call from the actress Morgan Fairchild. At his behest, she met me for lunch at the Polo Lounge at the Beverly Hills Hotel. She was preparing for her role in the upcoming Murphy Brown TV series, and Epstein had told her I could tell her all she needed to know about investigative journalism. It was a subject that typically made people’s eyes glaze over, but Fairchild seemed keenly interested. I dined with her many times in LA.

Back in New York, Epstein introduced me to a diverse group of his acquaintances. We had lunch with Leslie Orgel, a Salk Institute theoretical chemist who, over lunch at the Italian Pavilion, said that human life might have been seeded on earth by a higher intelligence in the universe, a theory that greatly interested Epstein; Vera Wang, a former Vogue editor, who had just opened a bridal-dress store on Madison Avenue; Evangeline Carey, the wife of former governor [of the state of New York] Hugh Carey, who shared an office with Epstein at Villard House; and Stuart Pivar, a Brooklyn-born scientist who made a fortune in plastic containers and helped endow the New York Academy of Art. Epstein also took me to several events at the Academy of Art, including his former girlfriend Paula Fisher’s wedding celebration (which ended in a food fight between Pivar and Barbara Guggenheim).

[ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stuart_Pivar ] 

Beginning with his book Lifecode in 2004 Pivar has published novel claims about the evolution of species 

[ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vera_Wang ] 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nth9iYCdC6k&t=135s .. yes Orgel was close with Sydney Brenner ... waht an acceont!!!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leslie_Orgel ...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7RBq_XwXaC0 0- Book "Origins of life" ...

It was all dazzling fun, but in late 1988 a dark cloud began to overshadow the festivities. It began when I tried to board an ANA flight to Jakarta that Epstein had upgraded to first class. The ANA representative told me it could not be a first-class ticket, which cost $6,000, because I had only paid $655. When I pointed to the first-class sticker, she said anyone could steal one and paste it in. I was unceremoniously moved to coach.

I later asked one of his girlfriends about the upgrade. She told me it only works about one in three times, and that Epstein would send her to the airline counter to check to spare himself the potential embarrassment. She explained he had obtained the stickers from a friend and, after pasting them on, entered the airline’s computer to make the seat assignments. I suspected Epstein had obtained the first-class stickers from Pan Am Airlines, of which he was working with Steven Hoffenberg on a failed attempt to get control. I had met Hoffenberg with Epstein at the Regency Deli in New York. Epstein told me he owned a bill-collection agency. Hoffenberg was a tall man with dark sinister eyes who looked the part of a tough repo collector.

The cloud darkened further when I got a frantic call from Dick Snyder, the CEO of Simon & Schuster, the publisher of my book Deception: The Invisible War Between the KGB and the CIA. Snyder had met Epstein at a dinner at my house. He told me he had given Epstein $70,000 to invest in a deal to take over the chemical company Pennwalt. He told me that after sending the money, he had not received the necessary papers and that Epstein was not returning his calls. He called one of the principals in the deal, who said he had never heard of Snyder. I told him I would look into it.

I was puzzled as to how Epstein, who only a few years earlier had bounced checks, had come into this windfall

Epstein was in Palm Beach at the time, but he had given me a computer program called Carbon Copy so I could get real-time quotes on the stocks I was interested in. It was another way of showing off his technological prowess. The program allowed me to remotely access his computer via my telephone modem. I decided to use it to find out what was going on with my publisher’s investment in Pennwalt. Remotely, I clicked on “home” on Epstein’s computer and went to the archive, where I found a file of recent transactions. In it were dozens of letters from people demanding the return of their investments, including Vera Wang’s father, C.C. Wang, the owner of a pharmaceutical company. Another was from a financier involved in the takeover deal of Pennwalt who reported that a check from Epstein for $83,000 had bounced a second time. The sums were considerable, but from the one-way correspondence, I could not determine if they were repaid. One set of transactions involved Steven Hoffenberg, the person who may have indirectly provided my first-class stickers. Rather than demanding repayment, he wanted to transfer large sums to Epstein from Associated Life and United Fire, two small insurance companies that Hoffenberg controlled. As I read through this material, I found nothing about Snyder’s money, but I grew increasingly queasy about Epstein.

************************************

In early 1989, I wrote my Wall Street Babylon column about a small-time grifter trying to pass as a big-time financier. Although this character was modeled on Epstein, I didn’t identify him by name. The point of the column was that the takeover game had become so lucrative that even operators without money — who had their power breakfasts in the Regency Deli instead of the Regency Hotel — could play in it. All that was needed was enough charm to convince investors they too could score like the big corporate raiders. It was titled “The Win-Win Game.” After it was published, Epstein stopped speaking to me.

Epstein, meanwhile, had reportedly scored well in the win-win game. I heard of his success from Eva, who had married Glenn Dubin, a financier with whom I invested. Epstein had moved from his one-bedroom apartment in the Solow Tower, first to a townhouse that had belonged to the Iranian government before it had been seized by the US government in 1977, and then to a mansion on 71st Street. That mansion had previously belonged to Les Wexner, the billionaire chairman of L Brands, which owned Victoria’s Secret, The Limited and other retail chains, and who Epstein bragged he was advising. According to other mutual friends, I learned that he had acquired a large ranch in New Mexico, a mansion in Paris with a stuffed baby elephant in the living room, and a private airliner. I was puzzled as to how Epstein, who only a few years earlier had bounced checks, had come into this windfall. Were his apparent newfound riches the product of his own financial skills? Or, in light of his reported association with politicians, power brokers and financiers, was he a larger-than-life version of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Jay Gatsby?

These doubts escalated when I had lunch in 1994 with Alfred Taubman, who, among other things, owned Sotheby’s. Taubman, who I had met at Jimmy Goldsmith’s home in Mexico in 1989, told me over a long lunch at San Pietro on 54th Street of his discovery that Epstein had extorted a kickback of $65,000 from the commission due to Sotheby’s real estate brokerage arm from Wexner’s original purchase of the mansion on 71st Street. According to Taubman, Epstein, to whom Wexner had given a power of attorney, threatened to block the deal unless he got his kickback, which he called a “finder’s fee.” Even though it was possibly illegal to pay a share of the commission to someone who was not a registered real estate broker, Sotheby’s paid him. When he found out, Taubman demanded Epstein repay Sotheby’s, but Epstein coldly refused. Taubman went directly to Wexner, with whom he had served on several boards. But Wexner laughed off the kickback, saying Epstein had extracted it simply to demonstrate that he could reduce Sotheby’s commission, and, just that week, he had given it back to Wexner as a “present.”

So I was not surprised in 1996 when the corporate detective Jules Kroll told me he was conducting a discreet investigation into Epstein’s background. I owed Kroll a favor since he had helped me in my Vatican Bank investigation by providing me a videotape of a reconstruction of the hanging of Roberto Calvi that proved that “God’s banker,” rather than committing suicide, had been murdered. Kroll sent one of his top investigators, Thomas Helsby, to interview me about Epstein. Over our lunch at Petaluma, Helsby told me that a board member of Wexner’s company, concerned about Epstein’s influence over Wexner, had personally hired the Kroll agency to find out about Epstein’s past. Its investigators had already determined that Epstein had not been truthful in his claims that he had academic credentials. In fact, he had dropped out of college, worked as a roofer in Brooklyn, and faked his résumé to get a teaching job at Dalton, the private school on New York’s Upper East Side. This did not come as a total shock. Even though Epstein told me he had a degree in nuclear science, I had always assumed that, like Jay Gatsby, he had invented his credentials as well as himself.

The real shock came ten years later when I read that Epstein had been arrested in Palm Beach for soliciting underage women to perform sexual acts. I knew he liked the company of highly attractive women but not underage ones. The women he had introduced me to all had substantial careers: doctors, actresses, art dealers, theater producers, academics, money managers and filmmakers. It didn’t occur to me that he would consider having sex with underage girls. Such ugly perversity was not only criminal, but it made him vulnerable to blackmail. Evidently, he had fallen prey to the “master of the universe” complex in thinking he was immune from federal law and the rules of civil decency. In true master of the universe style, he made a deal with the Department of Justice, pleaded guilty to two charges of soliciting and underage prostitutes, and went to prison in Florida for thirteen months.

***

After a hiatus of some twenty-four years, I heard from Epstein in April 2013. He said he had read an article I’d written in the New York Review of Books on Nabokov, and he would love to discuss it with me. He invited me for tea the next afternoon at his home.

I went because I wanted to see this mansion he had acquired from Wexner. On the outside of his house on East 71st Street, just off Fifth Avenue, was a plaque with the initials “JE.” A tall, striking woman in her late twenties answered the door with a friendly smile. She introduced herself as Jennifer and showed me to the anteroom. The walls contained photographs of rich and powerful men posed with Epstein. There were three photos of him with Bill Clinton. (As I would later learn, the visitor logs at the White House showed that Epstein visited Clinton there no fewer than seventeen times.) When Jennifer reappeared, she asked if I would like an omelet or anything else to eat and led me to a long rectangular table in the dining room.

“Just tea,” I replied.

A few minutes later, Epstein came in accompanied by Svetlana, another of Jeffrey’s assistants. She was almost as tall as Jennifer. Then a third assistant came in the room, named Leslie, who served us tea and left with Jennifer.

Epstein, wearing a tracksuit, sat at the head of the table. Except for his gray hair, he looked very much the same as the last time I’d seen him, in 1989. His glistening know-it-all smile had not changed. He began the conversation by saying that Nabokov was his favorite writer and he kept a copy of Lolita next to his bed and on his plane. He wanted to know what the author was like. The last time I had spoken to Nabokov and his wife, Vera, had been more than a half century before, and my memory of him was dim, but I recounted a few vivid impressions. I then asked Epstein what he was working on.

He began the conversation by saying that Nabokov was his favorite writer and he kept a copy of Lolita next to his bed and on his plane

He told me his main interest was cutting-edge artificial intelligence. He was funding a group in Hong Kong to produce “the world’s smartest robot,” which would have “more empathy than a woman.” He said one problem his robot team had was simulating the feel of human skin. As he discussed the progress on the prototype robot, I couldn’t help thinking of George Bernard Shaw’s play Pygmalion. In it, a phonetics professor, Henry Higgins, attempts to implant his intelligence in a young flower girl and winds up enthralled with his own creation. I asked, “What would the robot be used for?”

“The elderly,” he answered. His theory was that advances in medicine and biotechnology would result in an increasingly large population of centenarians, many of whom would need twenty-four-hour assistance. Empathetic robots would provide it.

I changed the subject. “How do you make money these days?”

“I manage money for a few select clients,” he replied.

I knew that his guilty plea to felony charges in Florida in 2008, including soliciting sex from a minor, would have made it difficult, if not impossible, to get a license to manage other people’s money in the US. So how was he making his money? “Do you have an offshore hedge fund?” I asked.

His smile broadened. “Hedge funds are a thing of the past. But there are wealthy individuals in various parts of the world who need help protecting their assets. I help them.”

In the anteroom, along with the Clinton photos were photos of Epstein with Saudi prince Mohammed bin Salman and Emirati prince Mohammed bin Zayed, some in beachwear and with snorkel gear. I asked, “Are these clients in the Middle East?”

He answered that some were and that he was planning to buy a house in Riyadh since that was becoming the new center of international finance.

“What about Russia? Any clients there?” I asked.

He shrugged and said he often flew to Moscow to see Vladimir Putin.

I found this hard to swallow. He was, after all, a fabulist, as I’d learned from the Kroll report. Nor did it make any sense to me that powerful financiers would trust someone like Epstein to secure or hide their money. After all, they knew he had made a deal with the Department of Justice to avoid federal charges. How could they be sure he wouldn’t make another deal to reveal their secret funds?

When I asked him further about the service he performed for these men, he called it jokingly a “reverse Ponzi scheme,” explaining that instead of making it appear there was money when there was none, which is the essence of a real Ponzi scheme, he made it appear there was no money when actually there was money.

I understood that a wolf-in-sheep’s-clothing strategy might be useful in warfare, but why would a wealthy person want to seem poorer than he was? Who would pay him for such a service?

Before I had the chance to ask him more about his business, Leslie opened the door a crack and announced, ‘Leon is here’

He said there was no shortage of rich spouses, without a pre-nuptial agreement, seeking a divorce. By reducing their apparent assets, he would save them a small fortune.

I was unsure whether or not he was speaking hypothetically. But if he found potential clients for his reverse Ponzi strategy among people interested in minimizing alimony, he could likely also find them among individuals wanting to minimize their tax liability and the exposure of ill-gotten gains. Before I had the chance to ask him more about his business, Leslie opened the door a crack and announced, “Leon is here.”

Svetlana rose to her feet. I assumed it was my signal to leave, but Epstein seemed in no rush to end our chat. He went on for another fifteen minutes discussing his curious enterprise.

Then, walking me out, he introduced me to a man patiently waiting in the anteroom with Jennifer. It was Leon Black, who I had met once before during my investigation of the junk bond world, where he worked for Mike Milken. He was now head of Apollo Global Management, a private equity fund with over $300 billion in assets, and had a reported personal net worth of $10 billion. He was also one of the most important collectors of modern art in the world. I wondered what was he doing patiently waiting in the anteroom of Epstein’s home. His very presence there made me realize that I had underestimated Epstein’s continued connections with the rich and powerful.

I saw Epstein only occasionally over the next six years. Almost all of our meetings were in that same room in his house for afternoon tea. New pictures were on his walls that showed him with unlikely acquaintances. Indeed, at one point, he talked about putting together a dinner at his home with the linguist Noam Chomsky, the movie director Woody Allen, former president Bill Clinton, and the living God, the Dalai Lama. If it occurred, I was not invited.

Only once did we go out for lunch. In May 2014, we went on a walk into Central Park to a hot dog stand with two of his friends. He called its fare “the best hot dog outside of Coney Island” while passing one to each of us.

Four of his female assistants, including Jennifer and Svetlana, accompanied us. They walked at a discreet distance, two on either side of our group, keeping pace in a way that caused Epstein to jokingly call them “my Russian wolfhounds.” They were more functional than that, since they carried, in case Epstein needed them, Fiji water, cash and cell phones.

I got the opportunity to find out more about Epstein’s female staff through a chance meeting. A week after our walk in Central Park, I ran into Jennifer in Maison Kayser, a café on Third Avenue and 74th Street. She said she was buying croissants for a trip she was taking to Little St. James, Epstein’s private island in the Caribbean, that afternoon. Over coffee, I asked how she had met him.

She had come to New York from Minnesota to be a model and wound up in a difficult relationship with a man. Enter Epstein, who rescued her from it and gave her a job as an assistant. He also gave her free use of an apartment on East 66th (near where he had lived in 1989). When she told him that she dreamed of being a chef, he paid for her to take courses at the Culinary Institute of America, arranged a part-time internship for her at a steak house and found her a full-time position in the food industry.

I next asked her about Svetlana, the assistant who had sat across from me at my first tea with Epstein. She told me Svetlana was now studying dentistry at NYU at Epstein’s expense. At that point, I recalled that Eva Andersson, his former girlfriend, had, with Epstein’s help, become a doctor. She became the chief doctor for NBC News and founded with her husband the Dubin Breast Cancer Center at Mount Sinai Hospital. A chef, a dentist, a doctor, an empathetic robot? I wondered after speaking to Jennifer how far Epstein’s Pygmalion ambitions went.

Epstein befriended Bannon after Trump fired him in 2017

I spoke to Epstein on February 25, 2019, just after Robert Kraft, the wealthy owner of the New England Patriots, was charged with two counts of soliciting sex in a massage parlor in Jupiter, Florida. The police claimed his arrest was part of an investigation into suspected human trafficking. Epstein had pleaded guilty to two counts of soliciting sex in Florida and said the difference was that Kraft went to a massage parlor while Epstein had hired women from massage parlors to come to his house. Both cases involved long-term police surveillance. Epstein pointed out, “In my case, the police had gone through my garbage for months and had my house under surveillance according to the report. No one had asked the question how they could allow young women to go in and out, and not protect them and question them if they truly believed they were underage.” His outrage, if I understood him correctly, was that if the local police had acted sooner and prevented underage girls from coming to his house, he would have been spared the need to make the deal with the federal government.

After the Miami Herald published an exposé of his exploitation of women in November 2018, Epstein sought help, as I learned from one of his close friends, Steve Bannon, Trump’s former strategic advisor. Epstein befriended Bannon after Trump fired him in 2017 and even planned a trip with him on his plane to the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia. Now he sought Bannon’s help restoring his public image. Bannon suggested Epstein should go public by giving an exclusive interview on CBS’s 60 Minutes or another high-profile TV show. Bannon then became his media coach and schooled him on how to take control of a television interview. To this end, in March 2019, Bannon prepared him through a sham 60 Minutes interview in the living room of Epstein’s mansion with a TV camera crew and indoor lighting. Playing the role of a 60 Minutes interviewer, Bannon fired questions at Epstein about the source of his money, his guilty plea and his relations with women. Although Epstein thought he did well in this trial run, according to a person who attended this mock interview, he decided against having Bannon try to arrange a real 60 Minutes interview.

The ax finally came down on Epstein on July 6, 2019. After flying back from Paris, he was arrested at Teterboro Airport by an FBI SWAT team. He was hauled off to the Metropolitan Correctional Center (MCC), the federal detention center in Manhattan. The indictment charged that Epstein had recruited women under the legal age for sex between 2002 and 2005 and engaged in sex trafficking. He would not be a free man ever again.

Martin Weinberg and other of Epstein’s defense lawyers expressed to me doubts about this finding

Epstein was found dead on the floor of a jail cell at the MCC on 6:30 a.m. on August 11, 2019. How did he die in a locked cell just fifteen feet away from two guards? Barbara Sampson, the chief medical examiner in New York City, determined the cause of death was suicide by hanging — a finding she said was based on a “careful review of all investigative information.” The presumed motive was that he could not face remaining in prison.

Martin Weinberg and other Epstein defense lawyers expressed to me doubts about this finding. Unlike the coroner, they had direct knowledge of Epstein’s state of mind less than eight hours prior to his death, since they had met with him in the MCC. Telling Epstein that they were about to file an appeal for bail with additional security measures designed to meet the judge’s stated concerns, in addition, Weinberg told him there was a high-level Department of Justice witness who had agreed to swear that the prosecutors in Florida had illicitly transferred material about Epstein to prosecutors in New York, an error that provided grounds for Epstein’s indictment to be quashed. Since when they left Epstein had seemed buoyed over these developments, and expressed hope about being released on bail, his lawyers could not see any clear motive for him to kill himself a few hours later.

In any case, his sudden demise added to the mystery of the source of Epstein’s wealth. According to the court filings released after his death, he had $577,672,654 in cash, bank deposits and property. This meant in the thirty years since I first met him, he had gone from being a small-time grifter, who faked airplane upgrades and bounced checks, to a tycoon who had amassed over a half-billion-dollar fortune, even after he had paid out tens of millions of dollars to settle lawsuits by his “Jane Doe” victims, as was required by his plea agreement and vast legal fees. He had also given over $100 million for scientific research at Harvard, MIT and other universities. He told me in 2013 that he was working with Bill Gates to create a multi-trillion-dollar philanthropic fund, a claim that I did not believe. Yet the New York Times, partly confirmed, reported after his death that Epstein told Gates he had “access to trillions of dollars of his clients’ money that he could put in the proposed charitable fund.”

But how could he have clients since he could not legally manage other people’s money after his felony conviction? He also had no known business enterprises other than shell companies registered in the Virgin Islands.

The first postmortem question that arose involved the origin of Epstein’s money. How did he go from bouncing checks in the late 1980s to having private planes in the early 1990s? The person in a position to answer was Steven Hoffenberg. When Epstein introduced me to Hoffenberg in 1988, he had an armed bodyguard and struck me as an odd business associate of Epstein’s. Seven years later, I discovered that Hoffenberg was a major-league swindler. In 1994, he was charged with running a massive Ponzi scheme during the time he was involved with Epstein, in which some $475 million was stolen from clients and banks. He pleaded guilty and was sentenced to twenty years in prison. But a large part of the missing funds was not recovered.

How did he go from bouncing checks in the late 1980s to having private planes in the early 1990s?

When Hoffenberg got out of prison in 2013, he went, uninvited, to Epstein’s home to demand money that he claimed Epstein owed him. According to Epstein’s version of the confrontation, Epstein told Hoffenberg that he was crazy and threw him out. But Hoffenberg told a different story. In a recorded interview in September 2019, Hoffenberg said that Douglas Leese, a London financier, had introduced him to Epstein in 1987 as someone who could help him in his criminal enterprise. Leese, who had employed Epstein to do money laundering for his clients, recommended Epstein, according to Hoffenberg, because Epstein had a “criminal mindset.” So Hoffenberg hired him to help in the Ponzi scheme for part of the loot. If true, it could go some way to explaining how Epstein got his windfall. But the problem with Hoffenberg’s story was that Epstein was never implicated by either the state or federal prosecutors of the Ponzi scheme, not even after Hoffenberg and his associates at Towers Financial cooperated with the investigations. Why didn’t Hoffenberg name Epstein as a participant in the swindle? Was Hoffenberg counting on Epstein to hide part of his money since he had often bragged about his ability to hide money? What Hoffenberg claimed after getting out of prison, though Epstein denied it, was that some of Epstein’s money belonged to him.

Wherever Epstein’s original windfall came from, it was established after his death that at least two billionaires paid him hundreds of millions of dollars long after Hoffenberg was arrested. Presumably, he provided for them a benefit. And from everything he and others told me, it was financial in nature.

One of them was Les Wexner. Born in 1937 in Dayton, Ohio, to parents of Russian Jewish origins, he made a multibillion-dollar fortune off of his retail chains well before he befriended Epstein in the late 1980. My friend Alfred Taubman, who was Wexner’s close friend and mentor, told me that Wexner granted Epstein power of attorney over his personal finances, made him a trustee on the board of the Wexner Foundation, and permitted him to choose models for Victoria’s Secret fashion shows. By 1994, Epstein had so involved himself in Wexner’s finances that Taubman pointedly asked Wexner about allowing Epstein such latitude. Wexner replied, “If you knew how much money he has made me, you wouldn’t ask.” As far as Wexner was concerned, his relationship with Epstein was all about money, but in July 2008, he discovered that Epstein had misappropriated millions off of him by taking excessive fees and other means. He revealed after Epstein’s death that Epstein repaid his foundation $46 million but claimed that was only part of the missing funds. It becomes a criminal matter when someone with a power of attorney misappropriates funds. The fact that Wexner never pursued the matter by informing the authorities raises a question about the nature of the services that Epstein was providing.

Leon Black was the second multibillionaire who paid large sums to Epstein for his services. Born in July 1951 in New York City, Black was the son of Eli Black, who headed United Brands Company. After becoming a top deputy to Michael Milken at Drexel Burnham Lambert, Leon Black cofounded Apollo Global Management, which became one of the largest private equity firms in America. He became friends with Epstein in the mid-1990s at a time when Epstein, nearing the peak of his political influence, was a frequent visitor at the Clinton White House. Soon afterward, they entered into a business relationship that lasted until 2017, and Epstein was made a trustee of the Debra and Leon Black Family Foundation.

According to a close associate of Jeffrey Epstein, Black broke off both the personal and the business relationship in 2018. After Epstein’s death, Black said in a press release that he had paid Epstein for his advice on “tax strategy, estate planning and philanthropy.” Although tax avoidance schemes could fall in a gray area, it was not unusual for wealthy men to pay brokers a fee of 5 to 10 percent of the money saved if they found a loophole in the tax code. According to Dechert LLP, a law firm hired at Black’s request by Apollo’s board, Black paid Epstein around $158 million from 2012 through 2017 for financial services, suggesting that Epstein had saved him at least $1.3 billion.

But the means Epstein used became murkier when the New York Times revealed that, according to documents it reviewed, Black had paid Epstein at least $50 million in suspicious wire transfers that drew scrutiny of the Deutsche Bank, which handled them. And Black transferred money to other entities controlled by Epstein, supposedly as an investment. According to a lawsuit brought against Epstein’s estate by the attorney general of the US Virgin Islands, Black, along with his personal holding companies, invested possibly as much as $154 million in the Southern Trust Company, a corporation that Epstein created in the Virgin Islands in 2013 to do DNA data research, but it produced no profits. Black, as was his right, did not explain the rationale for these investments

I discussed Epstein’s activities in 2020 with a financier who had known Epstein since the late 1990s. Like Wexner and Black, he was also a philanthropist and art collector. “Why did anyone give Epstein money?” I asked.

The financier told me about a proposition Epstein had once made him. Epstein told him that he could save him over $40 million in US taxes if he gave him $100 million to put through a maze of offshore nonprofit companies that he controlled, and the funds would wind up, free of taxes, in the financier’s foundation. When the financier told Epstein that the scheme could amount to fraudulent tax evasion, Epstein replied that it was highly unlikely the IRS would unravel it, and if it did, he could protect the financier from any criminal exposure if he gave him total power of attorney over the funds, as if this ploy would provide an alibi for him to the IRS. Shaken by the criminal nature of the offer, the financier turned down Epstein’s proposition. It is possible that other, less prudent investors entered into Epstein’s reverse Ponzi scheme.

• This excerpt is adapted from Assume Nothing: Encounters with Assassins, Spies, Presidents, and Would Be Masters of the Universe, published by Encounter.

Prince Andrew hosted [Jeffrey Edward Epstein (born 1953)], Ghislaine Maxwell and [Harvey Weinstein (born 1952)] at Royal Lodge, the prince's private home in the grounds of Windsor Castle. 

The trio visited the Windsor mansion as part of his daughter Beatrice's masked ball 18th birthday celebrations in 2006, two months after a US arrest warrant had been issued for Epstein for the sexual assault of a minor.

It had previously been reported that Epstein, Maxwell and Weinstein visited Windsor Castle for the event, but not that they had been hosted at Andrew's private home.

Andrew, who is facing increased scrutiny over his living arrangements in light of his relationship with Epstein, has not responded to a request for comment.

It is understood that Epstein, Maxwell and Weinstein visited Royal Lodge ahead of the main party, which took place in the state rooms of Windsor Castle and involved a champagne reception and banquet.

Royal Lodge is owned by the Crown Estate, a property business owned by the monarch [See https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/explainers-57559653 ] but run independently with profits going to the Treasury. 

The BBC has matched the trees and patio wall in a previously published image of the trio to other pictures of Royal Lodge.

A witness told the BBC they remembered seeing Weinstein and Epstein at a drinks event in the back garden of Royal Lodge - before guests headed to the main party at the castle.

Epstein was arrested by police in Florida eight days after the event.

Asked by BBC Newsnight in 2019 why he invited [Jeffrey Edward Epstein (born 1953)] to his daughter's 18th birthday two months after the US arrest warrant was issued, Andrew said: "Certainly I wasn't aware when the invitation was issued what was going on in the United States and I wasn't aware until the media picked up on it because he never said anything about it."

Andrew relinquished his titles earlier this month amid renewed scrutiny of his links with Epstein following the posthumous publication of Virginia Giuffre's memoir.

In the memoir, Ms Giuffre said she was forced to have sex with the prince on three separate occasions, including once with Epstein and "eight other young girls".

Andrew, who reached a financial settlement with Ms Giuffre in 2022, has repeatedly denied any wrongdoing. In 2019, he told BBC Newsnight he did not remember meeting Ms Giuffre "at all" and that they "never had any sort of sexual contact".

Fresh questions have also been asked about how he is able to fund his lifestyle despite not being a working royal.

The revelation that he has only ever paid a token annual rent on his Windsor mansion, Royal Lodge, has intensified the questions over his living arrangements [See https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cgmx1gxv1e7o ] - even though he paid for renovations and rent in advance so there were no monthly payments. 

Buckingham Palace has not commented on whether Prince Andrew might move out of his home - or where he might go.

But BBC News understands that two other properties in the grounds of Windsor Castle, Adelaide Cottage and Frogmore Cottage, were options suggested to both Prince Andrew and his ex-wife Sarah Ferguson some months ago.

In the fall of 1982, a money manager named Harold Levin got a phone call that would change his life. A lawyer representing Leslie H. Wexner, the founder and CEO of the women's apparel retailer The Limited, said Wexner was looking for a financial adviser. Would Levin be interested? Levin most certainly was. In Columbus, Ohio, where Levin lived, Wexner was a legend. Wexner grew The Limited from a single Columbus store into a global retail empire that included mall fixtures Abercrombie & Fitch, Victoria's Secret, and Bath & Body Works.

Levin landed the job after six months of grueling interviews. He wasn't making Masters of the Universe money—Wexner paid a salary of $250,000 a year—but it was enough for Levin to move his family into a 6,ooo-square-foot house across the street from Wexner in Bexley, Columbus's most exclusive suburb. By 1986, Wexner ranked sixth on the Forbes 400 list of richest Americans, with a net worth estimated at $1.4 billion. "In New York, I had bankers constantly taking me out to dinner," Levin told me. Once, a banker arranged a private tour of Le Bernardin. "The kitchen was so clean, you could eat off the floor," Levin remembered. Wexner entrusted Levin with increasingly ambitious projects. Starting in the mid-1980s, Levin purchased thousands of acres of farmland in New Albany (population 414) on the outskirts of Columbus, where Wexner planned to build his very own town modeled on an 18th-century Georgian village. "Les sent me to Richmond, Virginia, to look at architecture he wanted to copy," Levin said.

On one of Levin's trips to New York in 1989, Wexner asked him to meet a brilliant young financier who wanted to pitch an investment opportunity.

Levin had never heard of the man, Jeffrey Epstein, which was odd. After working for Wexner for seven years, Levin knew virtually every player on Wall Street (a few months earlier, Levin says, he met with arbitrageur Ivan Boesky). Levin's skepticism was confirmed as soon as he arrived at Epstein's Madison Avenue office. There were no visible signs of a trading operation; just Epstein sitting behind a desk that didn't even have a computer. "Epstein was trying to explain a currency trade he wanted to do. I have an MBA from Ohio State, and I didn't understand a word the man said," Levin recalled. Levin went back to Columbus and reported that Epstein was a fraud. "I told Les, 'Stay away from him,' " Levin remembered. Wexner agreed not to do the trade.

Levin was shocked when Epstein showed up in Columbus a few months later and announced Wexner had put him in charge of his finances. Levin tried to protest but says Wexner wouldn't take his calls. Levin couldn't stand having Epstein as a boss. "He was an asshole. The most arrogant person I ever met," Levin recalled. A few months later, Levin quit.

Levin said Epstein taunted him on his way out. "On my last day, Epstein walked into my office and held up a piece of paper. He bragged that Les had given him power of attorney over his money. I worked for Les for seven years and I never had general power of attorney," Levin said. Epstein, Levin continued, even ordered him to surrender equity in Wexner's town project, likely costing Levin millions. "Epstein basically said, 'If you want, you can fight it out, but I have a lot of lawyers and I'll make sure it'll cost you a fortune.' "

Levin's life unraveled. He couldn't find a job. Friends told him Epstein was spreading rumors around Columbus and on Wall Street that Wexner had fired him for misappropriating funds. His wife filed for divorce, Levin said, and was granted custody of their three children. "I had a nervous breakdown. I was living out of my car for a while," Levin said. He applied for jobs using computers at the library and showered at state parks. "Epstein ruined my life. I lost everything," Levin said.

TWO YEARS AFTER guards discovered Epstein unconscious in his Manhattan prison cell, the pedophile's life and mysterious death remain a subject of fevered speculation and conspiracy theorizing. Was Epstein an intelligence agent? A debased financial genius? A sociopathic con man who fleeced billionaires and politicians with sexual blackmail?

In a search for answers, I spent the past six months investigating the Epstein mystery that could unlock others: How did he get his money? For it was Epstein's half-billion-dollar fortune that enabled him to sexually abuse and traffic hundreds of girls on multiple continents. "There's no question that Epstein could not have done what he did without the support of people that provided him money," said attorney David Boies, whose firm represents numerous Epstein accusers, including Virginia Roberts Giuffre.

Epstein burnished his own myth, telling people, preposterously, that he only accepted clients with assets of $1 billion or more. But until recently, Epstein's only publicly named client was Wexner. ''When I asked Jeffrey who else he worked with, he'd say, 'I can't talk about it,' " an Epstein friend recalled. Wexner paid Epstein's predecessor about $600,000 a year in today's dollars. Epstein, a former high school math teacher from Coney Island, Brooklyn, was worth a reported $559 million. His estate included a 51,000-square-foot Manhattan town house (bought from Wexner); a private jet (formerly owned by The Limited) and a helicopter; a Caribbean island; a Paris apartment; a Palm Beach mansion; and a 10,000-acre New Mexico ranch. (Epstein's brother's real estate company also had majority ownership of a Manhattan condo building on East 66th Street where Epstein allegedly housed girls. The building was formerly owned by Wexner.) Prosecutors say that Epstein built his vast sex-trafficking ring throughout the '90s and early aughts. In other words, Epstein became Epstein during his long association with Wexner.

When Epstein pleaded guilty to two counts, including soliciting a minor for prostitution, in Palm Beach in June 2008 and registered as a Level 3 sex offender in New York, Wexner refused to discuss him. In 2019, a Wexner spokesman told The Washington Post that the Wexners had severed all ties with Epstein in 2007. They condemned Epstein's actions, the spokesman said. It was only after Epstein died that Wexner described their relationship—and even then in opaque terms. In Wexner's telling, he was another Epstein victim preyed upon by a devious mastermind. "Being taken advantage of by someone who was so sick, so cunning, so depraved is something that I'm embarrassed that I was even close to," Wexner said during a speech in September 2019. In a letter to his charitable foundation around this time, Wexner claimed Epstein had "misappropriated vast sums of money from me and my family." Epstein had reportedly transferred back nearly $47 million to a Wexner-controlled charity fund in 2008.

But Wexner's belated attempts to explain himself only raised more questions. Why, for instance, did Wexner not report Epstein's alleged $47 million theft to the FBI? Or how could Wexner claim to be blindsided by Epstein's duplicitousness? "I told Les, 'I wouldn't trust Epstein to cross the street—why are you trusting him with your money?' " recalled Jerry Merritt, a former Ohio state highway patrolman who served as The Limited's security chief for more than 25 years.

In reporting this article, I spoke to more than 30 people who had firsthand encounters with Epstein or Wexner. (Wexner, who announced he was stepping down from the board of his company in March, declined numerous interview requests.) The story that emerged is a deeply strange one. Sources say Epstein occupied different roles in Wexner's life depending on the audience. "Jeffrey compartmentalized. He told you what you wanted to hear," Epstein's former lawyer Alan Dershowitz told me. Epstein sometimes portrayed himself as a surrogate son to a lonely billionaire. He told some people he was Wexner's fixer. Dershowitz said that when he became Epstein's criminal lawyer in 2007, Epstein boasted that Wexner would not testify against him. Whatever the nature of their relationship, Epstein's long-standing connection to one of America's richest men inarguably aided his public profile, adding to his air of legitimacy and thus his power.

WEXNER MET EPSTEIN sometime around 1986. They were introduced by Wexner's close friend the insurance mogul [Robert Alan Meister (born 1941], whose firm handled insurance for The Limited. I spoke with Meister in April, and he opened up for the first time about the origins of Wexner and Epstein's relationship. It was history that Meister, 79, found difficult to revisit. "I walked away from Epstein a long time ago, and I've been trying to erase him from my mind ever since," he said.

Epstein struck up a conversation with [Robert Alan Meister (born 1941] on a commercial flight to Palm Beach. Meister remembered being impressed with the young banker. In reality, Epstein lived in a one-bedroom apartment and ran a fledgling investment firm. (Epstein had been forced to leave Bear Stearns in 1981. He told Securities and Exchange Commission investigators he had been penalized after letting a friend borrow money to buy stock, that there were irregularities with his expense account, and that there were rumors at the firm about his relationship with a secretary.) "He was a great bullshit artist," Meister said. People who knew Epstein remarked at his savant-like skill at impressing powerful older men. "Jeffrey was a flatterer," said interior designer Robert Couturier, who met Epstein in the 1980s. "Jeffrey would call me every day and say, 'Oh you're so brilliant. You're the best.' " Epstein's friend Stuart Pivar, a founder of the New York Academy of Art, said Epstein's magnetism was almost impossible to resist. "If you had hundreds of millions of dollars and you knew Jeffrey, there's a high likelihood that you'd give it to him. He was that good of a con man."

In hindsight, [Robert Alan Meister (born 1941] suspects Epstein aggressively cultivated him in the hope that Meister would open doors to his billionaire friends—like Wexner. Not long after Epstein met Meister, Epstein invited Meister to play racquetball and started turning up in the steam room at his gym while he was using it. "I'd be having a steam and Epstein would come in," Meister said. During one conversation, Epstein asked Meister to introduce him to Wexner. Epstein falsely said he had learned that Wexner's money manager was stealing from him. Epstein, a self-described financial "bounty hunter," offered to help recover the funds. It was convincing enough that Meister arranged a meeting for Epstein at Wexner's house in Aspen. "Epstein was such a liar," Meister said. In Wexner's 2019 letter to his foundation, he wrote that he hired Epstein because friends "recommended him as a knowledgeable financial professional."

Soon after introducing Wexner and Epstein, Meister started hearing disturbing stories about Epstein's sexual proclivities. "Think of whatever the worst thing anyone could do is, and Epstein did them all," Meister said. The breaking point came when Epstein showed up unannounced at Meister's Park Avenue apartment with five models for Meister's sexual entertainment. "Epstein thought he was bringing me a gift," Meister recalled. "I told him, 'Get the fuck out and I never want to see you again! ' "

[Robert Alan Meister (born 1941], whose estimation of Epstein had done a total 180, gave his friend a general warning about his character. Meister says he and his wife, Wendy, warned Wexner to stay away from Epstein. "We begged him, don't get involved," Meister recalled. It was too late: Wexner had hired Epstein as his financial adviser. "He thought Epstein was brilliant," Meister said.

For an introvert like Wexner, Epstein was a social connector who populated Wexner's life with glittery people.

Epstein claimed he could discern hidden patterns in financial markets, but his true moneymaking gift was reading people. He surely recognized Wexner was deeply lonely. "Business was Les's life," said Wexner's childhood friend Peter Halliday, whose Ohio bank prepared The Limited's first stock offering. Wexner was born in Dayton, Ohio, in 1937 to Russian Jewish parents who worked in the garment business. When Wexner entered high school, his family moved from Dayton to Columbus, where his father, Harry, opened a small women's apparel store called Leslie's. "It was tough moving into a new community. Les didn't make a mark for himself," Halliday said.

Wexner hoped to become an architect like Howard Roark, the libertarian protagonist of Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead. Harry insisted he study business at Ohio State. Les briefly enrolled in law school but dropped out to work for the family business. As the story goes, Les wanted Harry to carry a limited inventory focused on casual clothes, and when Harry disagreed, Les quit. In 1963, Les opened The Limited with a $5,000 loan from his aunt Ida. "I built a business so I could create my own world," Les later told the New York Times. Within a year, Harry closed Leslie's and was working for Les.

Wexner may have been CEO, but it seemed that his mother, Bella, was the boss. For 34 years she served as The Limited's corporate secretary. A former executive recalled that Bella belittled her son in meetings when she didn't like his ideas. "It'll never work! Don't do it!" Bella would yell in front of his staff. "I remember sitting there thinking, How dare this woman?" the executive said. Les seemed to be terrified of Bella. According to Meister, Les would sometimes stay at Meister's house in Palm Beach so that Bella, whose Palm Beach house was near Les's, wouldn't know Les was in town. "He was afraid of her. She was running his life," Meister said.

By 1976, The Limited operated 100 stores. Two years later, Wexner risked bankrupting the company when he borrowed $30 million to acquire the logistics company Mast Industries, which operated a dozen factories in Asia and contracted with hundreds of others around the world. The gamble proved to be Wexner's genius move, akin to McDonald's revolutionizing fast food. By controlling production and shipping, Wexner globalized the apparel business. Wexner's core insight was that baby boomers viewed shopping as a form of entertainment. The Limited's supply chain allowed Wexner to rapidly roll out new clothing lines at lower cost and keep customers coming back.

As shopping malls spread across the country, The Limited boomed. Wexner went on an acquisition spree in the 1980s. He took over the Lane Bryant and Lerner chains, the department store Henri Bendel and a struggling Palo Alto lingerie store called Victoria's Secret. At the time he met Epstein, The Limited had an annual revenue of $3 billion. Despite the success, Wexner remained little known outside Ohio. [Robert Alan Meister (born 1941] recalled a party in Aspen when Donald Trump walked up to Wexner and said, "Nice to meet you, now how did you get so fucking rich?"

WEXNER AND EPSTEIN soon became virtually inseparable. They were an odd pair. Wexner was in his late 40s, with a round face and big ears. Epstein was in his early 30s and dashing—from the right angle he looked like Richard Gere. "Les knows everything about me. He knows every experience I've had," Epstein once told a friend. Wexner's public image continued to grow after hiring Epstein. A1989 Boston Globe profile that detailed Wexner's rise reported that his September 1 diary entry that year read: "I finally like myself." (In a filmed deposition, featured in the Netflix documentary Filthy Rich, Brad Edwards, a lawyer for some of Epstein's victims, asked Epstein if he had a sexual relationship with Wexner. Epstein denied it.)

Merritt, The Limited's security chief, was unnerved by the sudden friendship. Merritt recalled a weekend in the late 1980s when Wexner invited Epstein to shoot at targets on land Wexner owned in rural Ohio. "Les had started collecting guns, but Les didn't know which end of a gun worked," Merritt said. Merritt recruited a world-class trap shooter named Jim Forsbach to teach Wexner to shoot, but, Merritt said, Wexner relied on Epstein. "Epstein had this Magnum, P.L gun. He didn't know what he was doing. It looked like he'd never taken it out of the holster," Merritt recalled.

Epstein was a social connector who populated Wexner's introverted life with glittery people. Novelist Christina Oxenberg remembered being invited by Epstein to a dinner party at Wexner's Upper East Side town house not long after Epstein took over Wexner's finances. "Les seemed like this rumpled, sweaty schlub. He was so ill at ease. And there was Jeffrey facilitating the conversation," Oxenberg told me. Dershowitz said the first time he met Epstein, at the Martha's Vineyard home of Lynn Forester de Rothschild, Epstein invited him to be a guest of honor at Wexner's upcoming birthday dinner. "Jeffrey said something like, 'For a present, my friend Leslie Wexner wants me to invite the most important man I met this year,' " Dershowitz recalled. The flattery worked: Dershowitz attended. Other guests included astronaut John Glenn and former Israeli prime minister Shimon Peres.

Wexner's physical appearance changed. A former Victoria's Secret executive recalled Wexner dyed his hair. He hired a live-in personal trainer and adopted a new wardrobe. "Les would wear the tightest jeans you saw. I don't know how he didn't cut off blood supply to his private parts," the former executive said. Wexner's colleagues referred to this look as "chairman's casual."

According to sources, Epstein took an interest in Wexner's romantic life. In 1985, New York magazine put Wexner on the cover with the headline "The Bachelor Billionaire." Wexner dated but the relationships didn't tend to last. Around the time Wexner met Epstein, Wexner broke up with a Columbus woman. According to sources, Epstein showed up at her house with a multimillion-dollar check and told her to stay away from Wexner. (The woman declined requests for comment.)

The friendship vexed Wexner's mother, Bella. Sources said she wanted Les to settle down and get married. "Bella hated Epstein. She was so blunt," Merritt said. Around 1990, Wendy Meister introduced Wexner to a corporate lawyer in her late 20s named Abigail Koppel, who worked in the London office of Davis Polk, The Limited's outside law firm. "Abigail was so secretive about it," a friend from London recalled. "She said, 'Don't tell anyone. I don't want to jinx it.' "

But Epstein stayed very much in the picture. He reportedly arranged Wexner and Koppel's prenuptial agreement and was one of 50 attendees at their January 1993 wedding ceremony. Wexner even gave Epstein Bella's seat on the board of the Wexner Foundation.

Epstein soon began traveling to Ohio with Ghislaine Maxwell, the on-off girlfriend who had helped burnish his society connections in Manhattan. "She was with Jeffrey everywhere," Merritt said. To some, it seemed like the age-appropriate Maxwell was a public front for Epstein's crimes involving underage girls. "It's a useful beard situation," said Oxenberg, Maxwell's former friend. Epstein and Maxwell were also social with the Wexners outside of Ohio. When the Wexners traveled to Europe, Epstein and Maxwell joined them on shopping trips.

By this point, Epstein was representing himself as something of a problem solver for Wexner. One time, Epstein called Dershowitz and asked if the lawyer knew someone in the Clinton administration. Epstein claimed Wexner was in a panic because customs agents at Teterboro Airport in New Jersey seized thousands of dollars of Cuban cigars and $50,000 in cash from his private jet. Dershowitz said he did not know anyone who could help. A person close to the Wexner family with knowledge of the allegation emphatically denied that any such event occurred. Vanity Fair has found no mention of the alleged incident in court or law enforcement records.

During the 1990s, both Epstein's and Wexner's profiles grew on the world stage. In 1991, Wexner cofounded a philanthropic organization of Jewish billionaires known as the Mega Group, which uses some of its vast resources to shape Middle East policy. In 2003, Wexner's foundation commissioned GOP messaging guru Frank Luntz to advise American Jewish leaders on how to rally support for Israel. "For a year—a SOLID YEAR—you should be invoking the name of Saddam Hussein and how Israel was always behind American efforts to rid the world of this ruthless dictator and liberate their people," Luntz's recommendation stated.

Epstein kept close in that circle ofinfluence. U.N. ambassador Bill Richardson and Middle East envoy George Mitchell allegedly participated in Epstein's sex ring, according to a lawsuit filed by Giuffre. (Richardson and Mitchell adamantly deny the allegations.) Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak was an Epstein confidant. Epstein invested $1 million in one of Barak's business ventures; Barak reportedly visited the East 66th Street condo building. Dershowitz told me he once arrived at Epstein's town house as Epstein and Barak were wrapping up lunch. On a chalkboard, Barak had drawn a map of how the West Bank should be divided. (Barak could not be reached for comment. In 2019 he denied any wrongdoing related to the condo visits.)

During his time as Wexner's financial guru, Epstein's holdings grew tremendously—sometimes by acquiring properties formerly owned by Wexner such as the town house on East 71st Street, one of the largest private homes in Manhattan. While it has been reported over the years that the home was transferred to him in a $1 transaction—and Epstein may have led people to believe that—documents show he paid Wexner $20 million for it. In Columbus, Epstein owned a 10,000-square-foot house next to Wexner and, according to Merritt, paid a below-market price for one of The Limited's private jets. (Epstein also reportedly oversaw construction of Wexner's superyacht, Limitless.) Merritt recalled once asking Wexner why Epstein was so well compensated. "Les just said, 'Because I got more money than I can ever spend,' " said Merritt. "Les gave him free rein over his checkbook." In 2019, the Wall Street Journal reported Epstein earned $200 million from Wexner. Merritt puts the number at $400 million.

Epstein's predecessor Harold Levin described a possible scenario by which Epstein could have taken control of assets. "We didn't put a mortgage on any of those properties. We used The Limited's stock to buy them, so there were no liens," Levin said. In other words, because Wexner didn't owe banks any money, his properties could be controlled by Epstein, and there would be scant public record of it.

AS EPSTEIN'S WEALTH grew, his predatory behavior became more brazen. He sometimes used his connections to Victoria's Secret in his schemes, a pattern at least some executives at the company were aware of. One afternoon in the spring of 1993, an executive rushed into the office of Victoria's Secret catalog president Cynthia Fedus-Fields with disturbing news: A model told a hairdresser at a photo shoot that a man named Jeffrey Epstein was running around New York presenting himself as a Victoria's Secret scout. Fields knew Epstein was problematic. Fields, then in her 40s, had met him the previous year and rejected several inappropriate propositions from him to go out, one of which included a weekend date to Wexner's house in Aspen. (Fields declined Epstein's advances.)

Fields told the executive to report Epstein to Wexner immediately, according to a source briefed on the conversation. "Les said he would stop it," the source recalled.

Merritt remembered one lunch around this time when Epstein boasted he was the "personnel director" for Victoria's Secret. In May 1997, an aspiring model named Alicia Arden told the Santa Monica police that Epstein sexually assaulted her in a hotel room after he posed as a Victoria's Secret scout.

“Les knows everything about me. He knows every experience I’ve had,” Epstein once told a friend.

According to the harrowing story of accuser Maria Farmer, Epstein even brought the abuse to Wexner's doorstep in Ohio. In the spring of 1996, Farmer was miserable working as Epstein's personal assistant in New York when she received a dream assignment: Film producers wanted the 25-year-old to create paintings that would be featured in the Jack Nicholson movie As Good As It Gets. Epstein begged Farmer not to quit and made an incredible offer: His client Les Wexner wanted Farmer to spend the summer working on the paintings at Wexner's 300-acre compound in the town Wexner was building from scratch. (As reported in Filthy Rich, Farmer spoke to a Vanity Fair reporter in 2003, but the magazine did not publish her accusations against Epstein.)

Although Farmer was broke and living in a tiny Greenwich Village apartment, her instinct was to turn it down. Epstein's relationship with Wexner seemed odd to her. Farmer recalled the first time Epstein gave her a tour of his town house: "Jeffrey said, 'See all this stuff? I don't need any of it. I could live in a tent. But Les gave this to me for a dollar. Les would do anything for me.' "

Farmer was also unsettled by strange visitors coming and going at the house. She recalled government officials making pilgrimages to meet Epstein for unexplained reasons. What frightened her most, though, were the children. Farmer said she witnessed Maxwell escorting countless high school-age girls to meet Epstein, supposedly to interview for modeling jobs. "Every afternoon. Ghislaine would run out saying, 'I need to get the nubiles!' " Farmer recalled. (Maxwell's attorney did not respond to a request for comment.)

Nonetheless, Farmer accepted Epstein's offer and that May, she packed her supplies into a truck and drove west to Wexner's Ohio village. But what seemed like a dream would turn into a nightmare. This account is based on my interviews with Farmer and a sworn affidavit she submitted in federal court in 2019.

Early in her stay, Farmer began to feel like she was being watched at all times. Maxwell called Farmer from New York, screaming at her because she accidently spilled henna dye on a white rug. "Ghislaine yelled, 'You're going to have to leave right now!' Jeffrey later called and apologized," Farmer recalled. In interviews, Farmer said she needed Abigail's permission to go jogging outside because the grounds were patrolled by armed guards and dogs. (In a 2019 statement to The Washington Post, the Wexner family said neither Les nor Abigail knew who Farmer was before her accusations were made public. "And while we don't know with whom Ms. Farmer may have spoken, who may have claimed to be Mrs. Wexner, it was not Mrs. Wexner," a family spokesman said at the time.)

Epstein and Maxwell were Farmer's only connection to the outside world. They flew in on weekends and took Farmer to see movies like Independence Day and go food shopping at Walmart. Farmer thought Epstein and Maxwell acted more like kids than adults. "They would do things like 'pants' each other while waiting in line to buy movie tickets," Farmer recalled. Over time, socializing with a couple nearly twice her age felt almost normal. Farmer invited her two elementary school-age brothers to live with her at Epstein's Ohio house.

One night about two months after she arrived in Ohio, Farmer said Epstein and Maxwell invited her to their bedroom and sexually assaulted her. Farmer said she fled, locked herself in her room, and called 911. She said the sheriff's dispatcher responded, "We work for Wexner." Terrified, Farmer called her father in Kentucky. He agreed to drive overnight to pick her up. (A spokesman for the Franklin County, Ohio, sheriff's office confirmed to The Washington Post that its officers had been contracted for Wexner's security detail at the time but said it had no remaining records of such a call.)

Farmer said that when she returned to New York, her 16-year-old sister, Annie, whom Epstein was also helping financially, revealed that Epstein and Maxwell had touched her inappropriately at Epstein's New Mexico ranch. Farmer says she tried to file a report with the New York Police Department. Officers said they had no jurisdiction in Ohio and instructed her to talk to the FBI instead. Farmer said she did, but the FBI never followed up.

IN SEPTEMBER 1997, Wexner celebrated his 6oth birthday with a dinner at his Ohio estate. Meister says he used the occasion to once again tell Wexner how untrustworthy Epstein was. "My wife and I told him and Abigail hundreds of times to stay away from Epstein," Meister said. In front of guests including former senator Joe Lieberman and real estate developer Marshall Rose, Meister said he begged Wexner to sever ties with Epstein. "Les wouldn't listen," Meister said. It was the last time Meister visited Wexner's house.

Meanwhile, Epstein was driving a wedge between Wexner and executives at The Limited. Executives didn't understand why Wexner, a brutal boss and famous control freak, allowed Epstein such latitude. "Les berated people. I once saw Les smack an executive on top of his head," a former Victoria's Secret executive said. "Les could be a complete asshole," recalled another former executive. "His favorite thing was to yell, 'You have shit for brains!' " But with Epstein, he took a more sympathetic stance: "Les would defer to him in any meeting.... Les would put his hand on Epstein's shoulder."

Epstein often invoked Wexner's authority to make employees feel as if they worked for him. "Epstein would call you and wouldn't give his name. He'd just start talking and expect you to know who it was," a former senior executive said. "He was becoming more and more active in the business. It was really upsetting people." In 1996, as The Limited was preparing to spin off Abercrombie & Fitch into a separate company on the New York Stock Exchange, Epstein flew to Columbus and told executives that he would decide the share price. Executives worried Epstein was committing insider trading because days earlier, someone—they assumed Epsteinhad sold an unusually large chunk of Limited stock. "There was so much concern that one of the lawyers looked around the room and said, 'Are we going to have to go to jail for this?'" recalled an executive who attended the meeting. According to the executive, Epstein got his way.

The Limited's vice chairman, Tom Hopkins, told Wexner that Epstein was a con man, sources said. Wexner brushed aside the complaints. "Les thought he knew more than the people around him," a former executive said.

Merritt said beginning in the early aughts, Epstein spent less and less time in Ohio. But publicly Wexner still had glowing things to say about his money manager. In 2003, Wexner told a journalist that Epstein had "excellent judgment and unusually high standards," adding he was "always a most loyal friend."

ON THE FACE of it, these two men were vastly different in temperament. Epstein was flamboyant and not private at all about his sexual appetites, even if most everyone was unaware of the age of his victims. Epstein filled his house with erotic art and displayed a copy of Nabokov's Lolita and a book by the Marquis de Sade on his desk. Wexner was a press-shy billionaire who literally built his own fiefdom in the middle of the American rust belt. It's hard to ultimately define their dealings, but I am certain that the vast sums Epstein earned from Wexner were the source of his power. One of the tragic ironies of the story is that Wexner's teenage customer base was made up of the kinds of girls that Epstein preyed upon. Epstein used the money and legitimacy his work for Wexner and others afforded him to bring about unspeakable human suffering.

Since Epstein's death in August 2019, Wexner's professional life has been in a tailspin. The board of L Brands—The Limited was renamed in 2013—hired Davis Polk to conduct an investigation into Wexner's relationship with Epstein. The investigation was never made public, but months later, Wexner stepped down as CEO, ending his run as the longest-serving chief executive in the S&P 500 (he remained chairman emeritus of the board).

Wexner's problems only deepened. Shareholders sued L Brands, alleging the Davis Polk investigation was a whitewash. L Brands retained the law firm Wachtell, Lipton to conduct a second investigation into Wexner and Epstein's dealings. This past May, Wexner stepped down from the L Brands board, ending his last official role in the company he founded more than a half century ago.

Meanwhile, Dershowitz has subpoenaed Wexner to testify as part of his defamation lawsuit against Giuffre, who alleged Epstein trafficked her to Dershowitz. (Dershowitz denies Giuffre's allegation.) L Brands shareholders are suing board members including the Wexners in Delaware court, accusing "Abigail Wexner of acquiescence while Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell sexually assaulted [Maria Farmer] in the New Albany compound." (The Wexners have declined to comment, citing pending litigation.) Maxwell's sex trafficking trial is scheduled for the fall. (She has pleaded not guilty.) Wexner's name is bound to be discussed during testimony.

Those who've known Wexner longest have experienced a range of emotions as they've watched his fall. "It's not the Les I knew and know," former Columbus mayor Greg Lashutka told me. Harold Levin, the former financial adviser who feuded with Epstein, feels a small measure of vindication. "When Epstein was arrested, my ex-wife called me and said, 'You were right,' " he told me. Wexner's childhood friend Peter Halliday thought that the full extent of Epstein's trail of destruction has yet to be told. "I know the story isn't finished," he said. "When the whole story does come out, I just hope Les is dead."

One evening in early 1976, a bushy-haired Jeffrey Epstein showed up for an event at an art gallery in Midtown Manhattan. Epstein was a math and physics teacher at the city’s prestigious Dalton School, and the father of one of his students had invited him. Epstein initially demurred, saying he didn’t go out much, but eventually relented. It would turn out to be one of the best decisions he ever made.

At the gallery, Epstein bumped into another Dalton parent, who had heard tales of the 23-year-old’s wondrous math skills. The parent asked if he’d ever thought about a job on Wall Street, according to an unreleased recording of Epstein and a document prepared by his lawyers. Epstein was game. The parent dialed a friend: Ace Greenberg, a top executive at Bear Stearns. Epstein, the friend told Greenberg, was “wasting his time at Dalton.”

Greenberg invited Epstein to the investment firm’s offices at 55 Water Street at the southern tip of Manhattan. Epstein showed up in a turtleneck. Greenberg was impressed — even though the young man didn’t have the foggiest idea of how Wall Street worked. Greenberg had helped build Bear Stearns into one of the industry’s scrappiest firms by eschewing the traditional investment-banking practice of hiring Ivy Leaguers with M.B.A.s. He preferred what he called P.S.D.s: those who were poor, smart and had “a deep desire to become rich.”

Epstein fit the bill. He grew up in a working-class family in Coney Island. Friends described him as a math whiz and a piano virtuoso. And, as Greenberg and his colleagues would soon learn, he yearned for wealth. That trait had been apparent as early as ninth grade: A classmate told us that Epstein predicted to her that one day he would be very rich.

Before offering Epstein a job, Greenberg had him meet another senior executive, Michael Tennenbaum. His son happened to be a Dalton student, who reported to his father that Epstein was popular with students and the school’s young female staff members. Epstein went to Tennenbaum’s office overlooking New York Harbor for an interview. “He was just a hell of a salesman,” Tennenbaum told us. Epstein was hired.

It was an extraordinarily lucky break for him — the first of many. Administrators at Dalton, unimpressed with Epstein’s teaching, had asked him to leave the school after the academic year ended. Now, just like that, he had a new job that paid about $25,000 a year (roughly $140,000 in today’s dollars).

Greenberg viewed the young man as a protégé. Early on, he invited Epstein to a dinner party and seated him next to his 20-year-old daughter, Lynne, who told us that she suspected it was a setup. The two hit it off and started dating. Word of the new guy’s romance with the boss’s daughter spread quickly, granting Epstein something akin to protected status at the firm.

Tennenbaum soon became Epstein’s supervisor. “He was proving to be quite talented,” Tennenbaum told us. But in late 1976, he received a disconcerting phone call from the head of Bear Stearns’s personnel department. Employees had belatedly gotten around to checking Epstein’s résumé, which stated that he had received degrees from two California universities.

“Are you sitting down?” the H.R. official asked Tennenbaum. “Neither school has heard of him.”

Tennenbaum was in a delicate spot. He asked Greenberg what to do. The response, Tennenbaum told us, was that he should treat Epstein as if he were a normal employee — an instruction that made clear that, thanks to his relationships, Epstein was in fact not a normal employee.

He summoned Epstein to his office. “You lied about your education,” he said.

“Yes, I know,” Epstein calmly replied. He had never graduated from college. Tennenbaum recalls being disarmed by the admission. Decades later, he would regard it as an example of Epstein’s ability to manipulate his marks — in this case, him.

“Why did you do it?” Tennenbaum stammered.

Without an impressive degree or two, Epstein said, “I knew nobody would give me a chance.”

This resonated with Tennenbaum. He had benefited from his own share of second chances over the years. And so he agreed to give Epstein one as well.

It was perhaps the first example of Epstein getting caught cheating — and then avoiding punishment thanks to his uncanny ability to take advantage of those in positions of power. This would become a lifelong pattern, one that largely explains Epstein’s remarkable success at amassing wealth and, eventually, orchestrating a vast sex-trafficking operation.

Nearly five decades later, and more than six years after his death, Epstein has become an American obsession. The public fascination only intensified after President Trump initially refused this year to release federal investigative records about the infamous sex offender — before reversing himself under pressure.

Much of the last quarter-century of Epstein’s life has been carefully examined — including how, in the 1990s and early 2000s, he amassed hundreds of millions of dollars through his work for the retail tycoon Leslie Wexner. Yet the public understanding of Epstein’s early ascent has been shrouded in mystery. How did a college dropout from Brooklyn claw his way from the front of a high school classroom to the pinnacle of American finance, politics and society? How did Epstein go from nearly being fired at Bear Stearns to managing the wealth of billionaires? What were the origins of his own fortune?

We have spent months trying to pierce this veil. We spoke with dozens of Epstein’s former colleagues, friends, girlfriends, business partners and financial victims. Some agreed to speak on the record for the first time; others insisted on speaking confidentially but gave us access to never-before-seen records and other information. We sifted through private archives and tracked down previously unpublished recordings and transcripts of old interviews — including one in which Epstein gave a meandering account of his personal and professional history. We perused diaries, letters, emails and photo albums, including some that belonged to Epstein. We reviewed thousands of pages of court and government records.

What emerged is the fullest portrait to date of one of the world’s most notorious criminals — a narrative that differs in important respects from previously published accounts of Epstein’s rise, including his arrival at Bear Stearns.

In his first two decades of business, we found that Epstein was less a financial genius than a prodigious manipulator and liar. Abundant conspiracy theories hold that Epstein worked for spy services or ran a lucrative blackmail operation, but we found a more prosaic explanation for how he built a fortune. A relentless scammer, he abused expense accounts, engineered inside deals and demonstrated a remarkable knack for separating seemingly sophisticated investors and businessmen from their money. He started small, testing his tactics and seeing what he could get away with. His early successes laid the foundation for more ambitious ploys down the road. Again and again, he proved willing to operate on the edge of criminality and burn bridges in his pursuit of wealth and power.

Rung by rung, Epstein climbed a social and financial ladder, often using young women as a potent form of currency. His girlfriends, lovers and even exes helped elevate his status inside a bank, got him hired to track down missing assets and gained him entree to prestigious organizations. And deliberately or not, some of them enabled him as he constructed a sex-trafficking operation that would later ensnare hundreds of teenage girls and young women.

That story starts at Bear Stearns, the place where Epstein learned how to win and use power. The institution continued to enable him long after he had shown his true colors.

More than four decades later, Tennenbaum still regrets that he didn’t end Epstein’s career when he had the chance.

“I didn’t realize,” he said, “that I was creating one of the monsters of Wall Street.”

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[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nikki_Haskell]

‘Deeply offended’ by an internal investigation

Having been let off the hook, Epstein was looking at a bright future. In 1980, Bear Stearns named him a limited partner — one rung below a full partner — and Epstein, who was 27 at the time, claimed that he was the youngest in the firm’s history to join the partnership. He was pulling in about $200,000 a year (more than $800,000 in today’s dollars). By then, Epstein’s dalliance with Greenberg’s daughter had fizzled — she told us that she learned that Epstein “lied about everything” — but his renown was growing.

He was regularly flying to Palm Beach, Fla., to visit young women. That summer, Cosmopolitan named Epstein its “bachelor of the month,” describing him as a “dynamo” who “talks only to people who make over a million a year!” The magazine encouraged interested parties to write to Epstein at his work address.

One secret to Epstein’s early success was his close relationship with Jimmy Cayne, a senior executive who would one day run Bear Stearns. Rumors, perhaps fueled by envy, began to spread that Epstein was helping Cayne, who died in 2021, to pursue women and score drugs, according to several of their colleagues. Cayne raved to colleagues about Epstein and began introducing him to some of his most lucrative clients.

“That’s what really catapulted him,” Tennenbaum recalled, describing Epstein and Cayne as “two sleazeballs.” Once or twice a week, Epstein would let it be known that he was having lunch with the chief executive of a major company — meetings apparently arranged by Cayne, said Elliot Wolk, who became Epstein’s boss after Tennenbaum. Wolk surmised that Epstein’s appeal to these clients was partly his charisma and partly his newfound understanding of complex trading strategies that could save ultrawealthy clients huge amounts in taxes.

Epstein was not content to simply climb the corporate ladder. In 1980, he flew on Bear Stearns’s dime to a conference in the Caribbean. While there, he spent more than $10,000 on jewelry and clothing for his latest girlfriend — and charged it to the firm. The accounting department noticed the payments and flagged them to the financial controller, who quickly concluded that the expenses were improper, according to a person with direct knowledge of what happened. The controller reported the matter to Greenberg, by then the chief executive. Once again, there were no consequences.

More serious trouble soon surfaced. When investment banks help companies go public, they can dole out shares to favored clients before the stock begins trading on public exchanges. Getting early access is a lucrative privilege, because the value of the shares often spikes in the first hours of trading — yielding a fast, low-risk profit for those initial holders. Bear Stearns executives learned that Epstein was giving his girlfriend access to these “hot deals,” as several of his colleagues recounted to us.

The firm soon discovered yet another infraction: Epstein had lent $15,000 to a high school buddy in a manner that violated federal rules governing brokers. And there might have been more: The Securities and Exchange Commission would soon conduct an insider-trading investigation into well-timed trades before an attempted corporate takeover; the S.E.C. interviewed Epstein, though he was never accused of wrongdoing.

In early 1981, Bear Stearns began investigating Epstein, and two senior executives interrogated him about the girlfriend’s I.P.O. shares and the personal loan. Epstein denied wrongdoing — and was “deeply offended” by the investigation, as he later put it in a letter to his colleagues. The firm’s executive committee decided to fine him $2,500 and suspend him for two months, according to a note we reviewed that was sent to employees by the firm’s leaders. Rather than accept this indignity, Epstein announced that he was resigning.

His five-year tenure at Bear Stearns was over, but Epstein didn’t intend to slink away from Wall Street. The connections and credentials he had collected at the firm would prove indispensable as he sought to lure clients and financial victims. By giving Epstein second chances, Bear Stearns paved the way for a future that would far exceed anything that would have been possible if he had stayed at the firm. Rather than shunning their ousted colleague, employees would embrace Epstein and help him prosper.

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A $450,000 oil scam

One of the Bear Stearns contacts who would prove invaluable to Epstein was a junior saleswoman — and former Miss Indianapolis — named Paula Heil. She would expose Epstein to a previously unseen world of wealth, privilege and possibilities.

They started dating before he left Bear Stearns; we tracked down a financial self-help book Heil wrote in 1981 that was dedicated “to Jeffrey.” That year, the couple traveled to England. While they were there, Heil took Epstein to visit a rich acquaintance of hers, Nick Leese, at his family’s countryside manor. There they met Nick’s father, Douglas Leese, a defense contractor with extensive connections in the arms industry and the British government. He took an immediate liking to Epstein.

Soon Epstein was making regular trips to England and spending time in the Leeses’ rarefied world. Epstein tutored Douglas’s younger son, Julian, and Julian taught him to shoot. Douglas mentored Epstein, let him tag along for meetings with British and international elites and took him on as a consultant with an expense account. Nick, meanwhile, introduced Epstein to up-and-coming Wall Streeters, according to one, who recalls Epstein sitting quietly by himself during a small gathering at a friend’s apartment in the early 1980s. “He looked like someone who was taking notes in the corner,” he told us. Epstein was “part of the family,” Julian later told Tom Pattinson, a British journalist who shared the unpublished interview transcript with us. (Julian died in 2024.)

It was perhaps Epstein’s first close experience with true generational wealth, and he liked the taste enough to help himself to more. The relationship ended a couple of years later when Douglas Leese accused Epstein of abusing his expense account by charging personal flights on the Concorde and stays at luxury hotels. “He was very cross and upset about it,” Julian said of his father. “And he said he didn’t want to have any more to do with Jeffrey.”

Epstein had been spending extravagantly, and despite his lofty compensation at Bear Stearns and his work for Leese, he found himself strapped, even occasionally bouncing rent checks. Back in New York, he joined forces with John Stanley Pottinger, a lawyer who had recently left a senior post in the Justice Department. Epstein, Pottinger and Pottinger’s brother rented a penthouse office in the Hotel St. Moritz on Central Park South. (The broker, Joanna Cutler, told us that Epstein initially stiffed her on the commission.)

According to Epstein’s friend Bob Gold, Epstein and the Pottingers pitched tax-avoidance strategies to wealthy clients, including some whom Gold believes Epstein met through Bear Stearns. The short-lived business partnership has not previously been reported — and is especially notable because decades later Pottinger would team up with Brad Edwards to represent scores of women who accused Epstein of sexually abusing them. (Edwards told us he knew only that Pottinger and Epstein briefly shared an office, not that they were in business together. Pottinger would later say he met Epstein through a client.)

Epstein continued to take advantage of his past affiliation with Bear Stearns, despite having left the firm under a cloud of suspicion. He surprised an acquaintance by answering his home phone, where he took some business calls, by saying, “Bear Stearns.”

And some of Epstein’s former colleagues at the firm saw fit to maintain friendships with him — friendships that would prove extraordinarily profitable for Epstein. One was Clark Schubach, who had been one of Epstein’s managers. Speaking publicly for the first time, Schubach told us he has fond memories of Epstein, who struck him as an outer-borough striver — just like Schubach, who grew up in the Bronx.

In 1982, he introduced Epstein to Michael Stroll, who ran a pinball and video-game company. Stroll trusted Bear Stearns and Schubach. He gave Epstein $450,000 — about 10 percent of his net worth — to invest in a supposed crude-oil deal that Epstein told him he was planning.

Within two years, most of the money had vanished, Stroll later said in an unpublished interview with Thomas Volscho, a professor at the College of Staten Island who has spent years researchingEpstein’s early years and shared some of his notes and documents with us. Epstein began dodging Stroll’s phone calls; at one point, he sent Stroll a quart of oil in an attempt to convince him that a deal was, in fact, in the works. The dispute ended up in civil court, with Stroll arguing that Epstein had promised to return his money but never did. In 1993, Epstein prevailed on technical grounds, and a judge ruled that he wasn’t personally liable. Decades later, Stroll remains bitter. “He’s a despicable prick,” he told us.

The Stroll scam marked a turning point for Epstein. He had already shown himself capable of betraying friends and patrons who trusted him, but now he had advanced from the flagrant abuse of expense accounts to apparently absconding with hundreds of thousands of dollars. Stroll would later lament to Volscho: “I unknowingly seeded his growth.”

A Dalton parent introduces Epstein to Ace Greenberg, a Bear Stearns executive who hires him at 23.

Through Schubach, Epstein meets two junior Bear Stearns employees.

Through the investment bank, Epstein is connected to many executives.

Epstein used his time at Bear Stearns as an initial source of connections and prestige.

Epstein scams Stroll, a video-game executive, securing a building block for his fortune.

Schubach also introduces Epstein to Stroll.

Greenberg and Cayne vouch for Epstein with other powerful figures.

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Bounty hunting in the Cayman Islands

During his time with the Leese family, Epstein liked to tell people that he was a “bounty hunter” who tracked down hidden money. The Leeses had rolled their eyes — Epstein seemed to enjoy cultivating an air of mystery — but soon enough he would be able to make good on that boast.

Around 1982, a mutual acquaintance introduced Epstein to Ana Obregón, a young Spanish socialite and actress. On their first date, he sped her around Manhattan in a Rolls-Royce. She was mesmerized by his charm and looks but ultimately just wanted to be friends; in her 2012 memoir, after Epstein had been designated a sex offender, she described him as “the perfect man I never fell in love with.”

Even as Epstein was romancing Obregón, he had a serious girlfriend: Eva Andersson, a model and former Miss Sweden. They began dating soon after she moved to New York from a small town in her native country, and many of Epstein’s friends and acquaintances have said she was the love of his life.

But that didn’t stop him from pursuing other women — especially those with money or connections. During his fling with Obregón, the brokerage firm Drysdale Securities imploded. The Obregóns, along with a handful of other wealthy Spanish families, soon hired Epstein to help track down their missing millions. Now he really was a bounty hunter.

Epstein brought on his friend Bob Gold, a former federal prosecutor, as his wingman. Gold told us they spent more than a year trying to find the missing assets, which Drysdale had apparently hidden through a byzantine network of offshore banks and shell companies. They narrowed down the list of banks where the money might be stashed but eventually hit a wall.

Then one day in 1984, Gold went to Epstein’s apartment and found him playing a Rachmaninoff concerto on the piano. All of a sudden, Gold says, Epstein began riffling through a stack of documents and announced that he had solved the mystery: The clients’ funds had ended up at a Canadian bank’s branch in the Cayman Islands. To this day, Gold says, he isn’t sure how Epstein figured it out. He and Epstein chartered a Lear jet and showed up at the bank. Gold warned a bank manager that he could be in legal jeopardy if he didn’t hand over millions of dollars’ worth of bond certificates. Gold and Epstein returned to the United States with the securities. (Gold says he and Epstein later drifted apart.)

Epstein benefited handsomely from his efforts. Coupled with the fruits of his Stroll scam, the payday meant Epstein had almost certainly surpassed an impressive milestone: He was a millionaire.

‘You are someone that’s going to help me get where I want to go’

By the mid-1980s, Epstein had re-established himself at Bear Stearns, now as a valued client. He was routinely calling his former manager, Schubach, to place orders to buy or sell stocks, bonds and options. The firm earned commissions on Epstein’s trades and therefore had an incentive to keep him happy.

In 1986, Schubach hired a petite 23-year-old named Patricia Schmidt to be his assistant. She told us that her main job was to be “eye candy,” but her other duties included answering the phones. That put her in regular contact with Epstein.

One evening, Schubach, who was a senior managing director, asked her to deliver a sheaf of papers to Epstein at his apartment in the Solow Tower, a gleaming black-glass building on the Upper East Side. Epstein welcomed her in, made her tea and invited her to come back anytime to use the building’s rooftop pool. Schmidt suspected that she was dispatched to Epstein because she was an attractive young woman. “Clark knew exactly what he was doing sending me to Jeff’s apartment,” she told us. “I was his leverage to Jeff.”

A week or so later, Schmidt took Epstein up on the offer. A doorman let her in, and she went straight to the pool. After she swam for a bit, Epstein arrived at the pool to say hi. He suggested that she check out the sauna. When he followed her in, Schmidt was surprised but not dismayed. He asked if he could give her a massage. Schmidt said yes. It was the beginning of a sexual relationship, which Schmidt chronicled in her diary and until now had remained secret.

Epstein saw that Schmidt had potential to further his own ends. He routinely asked her to go to the Bear Stearns library and research his prospective clients. He had her give his clients and acquaintances tours of Bear Stearns or escort them to dinner. Schmidt understood what was going on. “It was always about getting him in a position of leverage,” she said. “I was his plaything. It was like, ‘You are someone that’s going to help me get where I want to go.’”

Schmidt wasn’t the only young assistant Schubach delivered to Epstein. In a bawdy book compiled to celebrate his 50th birthday in 2003, another woman who worked at Bear Stearns wrote about how Schubach took her to Epstein’s apartment and then left — at which point Epstein blurted out, “You are a virgin, right?” The letter goes on to describe Epstein, on a different occasion, tickling and kissing her, and the entry includes a photo of her in a thong.

The woman’s name was redacted by the congressional committee that released the birthday book. But we reviewed an unredacted page of the book’s table of contents. The woman’s name was Suzanne Ircha. She had just graduated from college when she met Epstein. (In the early 1990s, when Ircha was trying to start a Hollywood career, she turned to Epstein for a loan, according to notes taken by one of Epstein’s assistants that we reviewed.) Ircha would become a close friend of Melania Trump’s and would marry Woody Johnson, the owner of the New York Jets and an heir to the Johnson & Johnson fortune, whom Trump named as ambassador to Britain in his first term.

Schubach acknowledged to us that he sent a few young female colleagues Epstein’s way over the years. “I liked the guy,” he said. “If there was a single girl who he might have liked, did I introduce them? Sure.”

A toehold in America’s most exclusive social scene

One sign of Epstein’s remarkable ascent was the place where he spent his days working. By 1987, he was operating out of the Villard Houses, a complex of 19th-century mansions on Madison Avenue that had been converted into luxury apartments and offices. It was a venue befitting the era’s highest rollers, and Epstein aspired to join this crowd.

He had been put up in these plush surroundings by a new acquaintance, Steven Hoffenberg, who ran a debt-collection company, Towers Financial. Hoffenberg was also paying him about $25,000 a month (the equivalent of roughly $70,000 a month today) as a consultant. Epstein and Hoffenberg soon refashioned themselves as corporate-takeover specialists, trying unsuccessfully to buy iconic companies like Pan American World Airways.

To finance this attempted buyout blitz, Hoffenberg was constructing what turned out to be an elaborate Ponzi scheme that bilked investors out of nearly $500 million. Hoffenberg, who a decade later would be sentenced to 20 years in prison, claimed in court and in interviews that Epstein helped orchestrate the fraud. (Hoffenberg died in 2022.)

Epstein denied any involvement, but it is hard to believe he was in the dark about what was happening. In 1988, he contacted Julian Leese and offered him an internship at Towers. Despite his father’s enduring anger at Epstein, Leese accepted the gig.

His assignment was to help Towers raise money by selling what turned out to be fraudulent bonds to international investors. Leese said he introduced Hoffenberg to his father, who in turn introduced Hoffenberg to potential buyers of the bonds. Among the customers to whom Julian Leese sold the Towers securities were his godparents. “It was a disaster,” he recalled to Pattinson.

Epstein, meanwhile, began soliciting millions of dollars from other acquaintances, including Dick Snyder, the chief executive of Simon & Schuster, for what he suggested were win-win investment opportunities. In 1988, Epstein and a few other investors began buying shares of Pennwalt, a $1 billion chemical company. After publicly disclosing their stake, they announced that they were preparing a bid to buy all of Pennwalt for $100 a share — about 40 percent above where it was trading at the time.

Epstein and his partners didn’t appear to have any intention of actually buying the company. But Pennwalt’s stock shot higher in anticipation of a bidding war. Presto: They could sell the shares and secure a significant profit. And Epstein wasn’t shy about what he was doing. He befriended the journalist Edward Jay Epstein (no relation) and explained it to him in detail; Ed Epstein then wrote a column in Manhattan,inc. magazine in 1989 that outlined what was essentially legal market manipulation. (The column in the long-defunct magazine, which we found in the archives at Columbia University, didn’t name Epstein but described him as “a 36-year-old friend who prefers to remain nameless.” Ed Epstein died in 2024.)

But Epstein’s perfidy ran deeper. Ed Epstein discovered that dozens of the people Epstein recruited to invest in Pennwalt, including Snyder, had written to him demanding that he repay their money. In other words, Epstein had lured investors in, used their money to book big profits and then refused to return their funds. There is no record of Epstein facing any consequences — or repaying the money. A result was that by the end of 1988, he reported being worth about $15 million, according to a previously undisclosed document from a Swiss bank, which Thomas Volscho, the professor, shared with us.

Epstein seems to have had a keen sense of which benefactors he could quickly suck dry, leaving them angry and betrayed, and which were worth nurturing for the long haul as sources of connections and prestige. One of those was Sir James Goldsmith — a financier and European politician who was embedded in Manhattan’s upper crust. One evening, he hosted a gathering at his mansion on the Upper East Side. Among the guests was Stuart Pivar, who had amassed a fortune before becoming a renowned art collector. When Pivar arrived, he encountered Epstein playing a Beethoven sonata at a piano in Goldsmith’s spacious entrance hall. Pivar told us he was transfixed: Epstein had an irresistible “magnetism” — especially with “the beautiful daughters of famous, powerful men.”

Several years earlier, Pivar, Andy Warhol and others founded the New York Academy of Art, and in 1987 Epstein became a member of the organization’s board. It was the first time he had joined a prominent board, and it represented a big step toward his shedding his roots as a hungry P.S.D. He was already swanning around New York with beautiful women and raking in tens of thousands of dollars a month. Now he was beginning to ensconce himself in America’s most select social scene. (In later years, after he left the board, his affiliation with the academy would also help him draw at least one young woman into his web.)

Epstein’s colleagues on the board included his ex, now married and named Paula Heil Fisher, as well as a member of the Forbes family and Katie Ford, whose family ran the Ford modeling agency. Epstein only occasionally showed up at board meetings, according to records we reviewed from the academy’s archives, but he had numerous opportunities to network with the academy’s illustrious membership.

After Warhol died that year, the academy threw a $150-per-person black-tie fund-raiser in his honor featuring an art exhibition, a musical performance and a dinner of cold snapper in vodka sauce. Photographers captured Tony Bennett, Lynn Von Furstenberg and other stars and socialites arriving at the downtown party. The evening’s invitation listed the event’s co-chairmen, fixtures of New York’s arts and finance scenes.

The first name was Mr. Jeffrey E. Epstein.

A confidence man meets his most significant mark

A fateful flight to Florida that year would launch Epstein from a mere millionaire into a plutocrat with palatial estates, two private islands and luxury aircraft. The transformation came about through a new client: Les Wexner, the billionaire who built brands like the Limited and Victoria’s Secret. The two were introduced by Wexner’s friend Robert Meister, an insurance executive who happened to sit next to Epstein on the plane to Palm Beach. Meister suggested that Wexner get in touch with Epstein for financial advice.

Wexner soon had a financial adviser, Harold Levin, fly to New York to meet Epstein. Levin told us that he spent an hour with Epstein in his office and immediately got a bad vibe. He found a pay phone and called Wexner. “I smell a rat,” Levin reported. “I don’t trust him.”

Wexner apparently didn’t listen. About a year later, he hired Epstein to be Levin’s boss. As far as Levin could tell, Epstein won the billionaire’s confidence by falsely telling him that Levin had been stealing. Levin decided to quit rather than work for Epstein. Before long, Wexner had given Epstein essentially free rein by granting him power of attorney over his finances. Epstein’s name began appearing in government filings as responsible for Wexner’s businesses and charities. Some of Epstein’s phones had Wexner’s number on speed dial, according to photos we reviewed.

Almost immediately, Wexner’s colleagues grew alarmed by his embrace of Epstein. “I tried to find out how did he get from a high school math teacher to a private investment adviser,” the vice chairman of the Limited told The New York Times in 2019. “There was just nothing there.” A Limited board member eventually became so troubled by Epstein that he hired Kroll, the private investigations firm, to see what could be unearthed about his past, according to Ed Epstein. Even Meister realized he’d misjudged Epstein and urged Wexner to cut ties.

Once again, Wexner didn’t listen, and thus became the most important contributor to the staggering growth in Epstein’s fortune. One unsolved mystery of the Epstein era is what exactly Wexner got out of their relationship. He has repeatedly refused to answer questions, including ours. But Epstein’s modus operandi with other wealthy men — including the private-equity billionaire Leon Black — was to instill fear that their finances were a mess, that their advisers and even family members were inept or exploiting them and that only one man had the wherewithal to save them.

Epstein appeared to deploy that playbook with Wexner — and to reward himself lavishly. He seemed to be taking whatever he thought he deserved from Wexner’s accounts, according to people who later learned what Epstein was doing. The amounts were often measured in the tens of millions.

He bought a waterfront mansion in Palm Beach for $2.5 million, about a mile from Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate. Epstein and Trump had become pals in New York, and Epstein was a regular at Trump’s Atlantic City casino; a former executive there recently told CNN that the two men seemed to be best friends. In Florida, Epstein began hanging out at Mar-a-Lago, attending parties featuring N.F.L. cheerleaders and “calendar girl” contestants.

He bought another mansion, on 30 acres in New Albany, Ohio, where Wexner was building an enormous real estate development. He ditched his one-bedroom in the Solow Tower and began leasing a grand marble townhouse on the Upper East Side — the former residence of Iran’s deputy general consul — for $15,000 a month. (According to lawsuits that we reviewed, the owner of the Solow building sued Epstein for not paying rent. The townhouse’s owner — the U.S. government — sued him for illegally subletting. The owner of the Villard Houses, where he by now leased his own office, made similar accusations.)

Epstein cruised around Manhattan in a Rolls-Royce Silver Spirit. He began donating thousands to politicians — and developing relationships with them. In 1989, Epstein accompanied Wayne Owens, a Democratic congressman from Utah, on a trip to the Middle East to explore ways to promote business ties between Israel and its neighbors. Epstein apparently was invited in his capacity as a finance expert, but he struck participants as out of his depth and bored.

Dan Gordon, a screenwriter who was part of the entourage, says he warned Owens that Epstein was showing disrespect by his slovenly attire in meetings with Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu and Shimon Peres and Saudi Arabia’s crown prince at the time, Abdullah bin Abdulaziz Al Saud — the types of connections that Epstein would cultivate in the years ahead. One of Owens’s aides, Michael Yeager, recalled Epstein boasting about his Indiana Jones-like pursuit of hidden assets and his close ties to Wexner.

Aside from the money, Wexner’s greatest value to Epstein was that he imbued him with new credibility and credentials. In 1989, Ken Lipper, a prominent fund manager, was standing in a ski-lift line in Aspen, Colo., when a stranger approached him. It was Epstein. He said he worked for Wexner, who wanted to invite Lipper to a party in Aspen. Lipper, according to the person who recounted this to us, had no idea how Epstein, who was traipsing through the snow on foot, had tracked him down. But Wexner was a billionaire, and so Lipper attended the party and then met privately with Epstein, who put millions of Wexner’s dollars into one of Lipper’s funds. In a previously unreported act of dishonesty, Epstein later claimed on a regulatory filing that he was employed by that Lipper fund.

Epstein also posed as a Victoria’s Secret talent scout, prompting more executives to complain to Wexner about his conduct, to no avail. He began citing his work for Wexner to prove his bona fides to banks, regulators and journalists. For most of his life, Wexner would be his only publicly known client.

Epstein, Lipper, Wexner and Meister together contribute $2 million to Harvard.

On a flight to Palm Beach, Fla., Epstein meets an insurance executive.

Through Meister, Epstein meets Wexner.

Epstein’s affiliation with Wexner bolsters his credibility
with people and institutions.

A chance encounter led to a key client — and a slew of other connections.

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A new girlfriend, and enabler, arrives

Epstein was about to meet someone who would usher him into even more elite circles while also playing a central role in his darkest crimes. His nearly decadelong romance with Eva Andersson came to an end around 1990. In Epstein’s telling, the split was the result of a mutual realization that his future did not include “staying in one place and having a family.” The two remained close until Epstein’s death.

Shortly after their breakup, Epstein was introduced to Ghislaine Maxwell, the daughter of the British media baron Robert Maxwell. Their first get-together, arranged by a mutual friend, was at Epstein’s office at the Villard Houses, she has said. When the domineering Robert Maxwell learned that his daughter was spending time with Epstein, he contacted Ace Greenberg and Jimmy Cayne, both of whom he was close to, to see what they knew about their former Bear Stearns employee. Greenberg and Cayne apparently vouched for Epstein.

That November, Robert Maxwell died suddenly as his business unraveled. Ghislaine Maxwell flew to New York, distraught and short on cash. Epstein came to her aid, financially and socially. When a memorial event was held for her father at the Plaza Hotel — owned at the time by Trump — Epstein sat next to Maxwell, he in white tie, she in shimmery blue. By 1992, they were an item.

It was around this time that Epstein apparently began grooming and abusing hundreds of teenage girls and young women. Maxwell was later convicted of playing a central role in his sex-trafficking operation and is serving a 20-year prison sentence. She recently told Todd Blanche, the deputy attorney general (and Trump’s former personal lawyer), that Epstein was her “lifeline.”

His friends told us that Maxwell tried to train him on social niceties, on what to wear, on how to act like an aristocrat. Not all the lessons took, but with her roster of glamorous connections, Epstein became even more of a staple of Manhattan’s exclusive social scene.

At one elegant soiree, he met the ABC News journalist Catherine Crier and held forth about the scientists he knew. Crier told us that, a few months later, she and Epstein attended a movie screening at the Plaza. As guests milled around in formal wear, Epstein stood out in a white T-shirt. At the event, Crier introduced him to her friend Elliot Stein, a prominent investment banker. Stein later connected Epstein with Leon Black, who would ultimately replace Wexner as Epstein’s most lucrative client. This was Epstein at his most productive, leveraging one relationship to create another, over and over and over.

While he was dating Maxwell, Epstein continued to see other young women — and to flaunt them with powerful men. One of them was Stacey Williams, a former Sports Illustrated swimsuit model, whom he met at a Christmas party that Trump threw at the Plaza. In 1993, Epstein took Williams by Trump Tower. Williams has said that Trump groped her and that Epstein later chastised her for letting it happen. (Trump has denied it.)

As Wexner prepared to wed the lawyer Abigail Koppel, Epstein helped prepare a prenuptial agreement to protect the billionaire’s assets. Williams told us that when the time came to sign it in January 1993, Epstein instructed her to deliver the document to Wexner’s office in a sexy outfit, along with a joking message: Was he sure he wanted to get married? Williams says she felt uncomfortable about being wedged into Wexner’s affairs, but she grudgingly delivered the agreement, without complying with the wardrobe request.

Using donations to reach the Clintons and Rockefellers

On a freezing Thursday in February 1993, Epstein and Wexner arrived at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington. Just weeks earlier, Bill Clinton had been sworn in as the 42nd president. It was the first of many visits Epstein would pay to the Clinton White House.

Epstein had become a political donor — including, later that year, $10,000 to help refurbish the White House, earning him a spot at a reception with the Clintons — and that gave him a certain amount of cachet with the new president. But Epstein had something else going for him as well: a new connection named Lynn Forester.

Forester told us that she met Epstein at a reception for George Mitchell, the Senate majority leader, whom Epstein had befriended. Forester was a successful telecommunications executive, but she rose to greater prominence through her marriage to Andrew Stein, the Manhattan politician who in 1993 ran unsuccessfully for New York City mayor. The end of his mayoral campaign coincided with the end of their 10-year marriage. Now Forester and Stein were feuding over how to divvy up millions of dollars, and Epstein apparently convinced Forester that he could protect her from getting ripped off. It was a version of the same tactic he used to get in Wexner’s good graces years earlier.

A source told us that Epstein called one of Stein’s lawyers, claimed that Forester had empowered him to negotiate on her behalf and demanded that Forester, as the couple’s primary breadwinner, walk away with a greater share of the assets. (Forester told us she has “no idea” whom Epstein contacted, nor “why he thought he was empowered to do anything on my behalf.”)

It was an opportune moment for Epstein to ingratiate himself with Forester, whom Clinton had appointed to a White House advisory commission. On at least one occasion, Forester brought up Epstein in a brief private conversation with the president, according to a letter, first reported by The Daily Beast, that she wrote that mentioned Epstein. He became a regular visitor to the White House, sometimes with a girlfriend in tow, according to records housed at Clinton’s presidential library. (Forester says she has “no recollection of having anything to do with Epstein and the White House.” She says she cut ties with him in 2000, after he deceived her on a property transaction. “I was a very small part of Epstein’s life, and he was a blip on mine,” she said.)

By 1995, Clinton and Epstein were sufficiently chummy that he wrote a get-well-soon note to Epstein’s ailing mother. “Hang in there,” the president scrawled on a yellow Post-it, which Epstein saved and we reviewed. (“The president knew nothing about this guy,” said Angel Ureña, a spokesman for Clinton. “Nobody did.”)

Through Forester, Epstein meets Alan Dershowitz and bolsters ties to Bill Clinton and Prince Andrew.

Epstein donates $10,000 to refurbish the White House.

Through Mitchell, Epstein meets Lynn Forester.

Epstein befriends the Senate majority leader.

A prominent telecom executive helped Epstein further expand his network.

Around the same time, Epstein began developing relationships with the scions of two of America’s wealthiest families.

One was Libet Johnson, Woody Johnson’s sister and also heir to the Johnson & Johnson fortune. Epstein oversaw a trust that held some of her land, and Maxwell told Blanche that Epstein in the mid-1990s provided Johnson with the same sorts of services that he offered Wexner. In 1994, Johnson gave more than $2 million to his J. Epstein Foundation, according to filings we found in Indiana University Indianapolis’s repository of old charitable records.

Epstein used the foundation to procure access to prestigious organizations and influential people — including David Rockefeller, the heir to the industrial fortune. Soon after the foundation was established in the early 1990s, it began donating tens of thousands of dollars to Rockefeller University, a prestigious research institution, and the Trilateral Commission, which Rockefeller had established as a forum for some of the world’s most powerful figures to discuss global problems.

The donations appeared to have their desired effect. In 1995, Rockefeller welcomed Epstein to the board of Rockefeller University, according to prepared remarks we found in his family’s archive. Around then, Epstein hosted Rockefeller at his Manhattan mansion to discuss with a small group of wealthy people how to best pass on money and values to younger generations, according to someone who was there. Epstein also became a member of the Trilateral Commission. A program for a dinner in 1998 celebrating the commission’s 25th anniversary noted the evening’s participants, including Epstein and Forester, who were listed as a pair. (Forester said she didn’t recall attending.)

Henceforth, Epstein would relentlessly cite his Rockefeller connections, even claiming that he managed money for the dynastic family. A person who was close to Rockefeller and helped manage his money told us that this was not true. Epstein, he said, didn’t even pitch Rockefeller on any investments.

Epstein was also beginning to dole out money to Harvard University, where he was keen to cultivate connections with high-profile academics. One of those was the law professor Alan Dershowitz. In the summer of 1996, Dershowitz was at his house on Martha’s Vineyard when he got a call from Forester. She was on the Vineyard with Epstein, who she said was a Harvard donor and wanted to meet Dershowitz.

Dershowitz told us that Epstein showed up at his Chilmark home later that day toting vintage Champagne. The pair took a walk around a nearby pond, and Epstein, the inveterate name-dropper, informed Dershowitz that he was close with Harvard figures, including Larry Summers, an economics professor then serving in the Clinton administration. But the main topic was Wexner, who Epstein said had taught him “how to be rich.” Wexner’s birthday was approaching, and Epstein wanted Dershowitz to attend a dinner in his honor. Dershowitz ended up flying to Ohio on one of Epstein’s planes along with Senator John Glenn. Shimon Peres — the recent Israeli prime minister, whom Epstein met years earlier during the Middle East trip with Representative Owens — was among the other dinner guests. (The following year, Forester hosted a party on Martha’s Vineyard where Epstein mingled with guests including Dershowitz and Britain’s Prince Andrew.)

The year after meeting Epstein, Dershowitz wrote an opinion piecefor The Los Angeles Times arguing that the age of sexual consent should be lowered to 15. Epstein seemed to see the potential of nurturing a relationship with the prominent lawyer. He introduced Dershowitz to Jimmy Cayne so that Bear Stearns could manage his money. And he persuaded the investor Orin Kramer, whose hedge fund already held tens of millions of Wexner’s dollars, to let Dershowitz invest, too.

But Kramer’s hedge fund soon suffered calamitous losses, and Dershowitz’s six-figure investment was annihilated. Epstein demanded that Kramer make Dershowitz whole and threatened to make his life miserable if he refused. They eventually negotiated a compromise: Kramer would refund Dershowitz’s investment if Epstein agreed to keep at least $30 million of Wexner’s money in the struggling hedge fund. As a result, Kramer would receive enough fees from Wexner to cover the cost of reimbursing Dershowitz.

Keeping Dershowitz happy proved prescient. He would become one of Epstein’s highest-profile and longest-serving defenders. In 2005, the parents of a 14-year-old girl in Palm Beach told the police that Epstein had sexually abused her; that led to state and federal criminal investigations. Dershowitz and other lawyers engineered a sweetheart deal in which Epstein escaped federal prosecution, pleaded guilty in Florida to soliciting prostitution from a minor and received a light jail sentence. (He also had to register as a sex offender.)

Presumably without intending to, Wexner had subsidized Epstein’s long-term and fruitful cultivation of Dershowitz.

Epstein oversees a trust that held some of Libet Johnson’s land.

Johnson gives Epstein’s foundation over $2 million.

Epstein donates to Rockefeller University and the Trilateral Commission and is appointed to their boards.

Epstein cites his Rockefeller credentials to win over people and institutions.

Epstein cultivated and then exploited relationships with heirs to two great American fortunes.

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‘I told you I would make it very big’

In 1999, Julian Leese knocked on the imposing wooden door of Epstein’s Manhattan townhouse. It had been years since he’d last seen Epstein, when Leese interned for Towers and lost his godparents’ money, and even longer since Leese and his family taught a young Epstein to shoot and to mix with aristocrats shortly after his departure from Bear Stearns. As Leese recounted to the journalist Tom Pattinson for a podcast, he had let Epstein know he would be in town, and Epstein, now 46, invited him to his Upper East Side residence for tea.

A butler waved him inside. Soon Epstein descended the sweeping staircase. “My boy,” he declared, “I told you I would make it very big.”

There was no doubt about that: Epstein was fantastically wealthy. His company’s financial documents around then indicated that he was worth more than $100 million — an amount that would grow substantially in the years ahead. Much of that appeared to have flowed to Epstein from Wexner, who would later claim that he “had misappropriated vast sums of money.”

Bear Stearns remained his preferred Wall Street brokerage firm, but he was on his way to becoming a coveted client of JPMorgan Chase, whose chairman was impressed by Epstein’s claim that he managed money for David Rockefeller. Until 2013, as we reported this year, JPMorgan would provide Epstein with an array of services that enabled his sex-trafficking operation.

Epstein had by now amassed a huge real estate portfolio — including Little St. James, an island off the southeastern coast of St. Thomas in the U.S. Virgin Islands. Epstein and a rotating cast of his victims and celebrity guests moved among his properties on a fleet of private aircraft.

Epstein’s pace of raping, abusing and trafficking girls and young women was accelerating. Ultimately, he would face accusations from hundreds of women. Little St. James was an ideal, out-of-the-way venue for his crimes.

But there was something else that was attractive about Little St. James. The U.S. Virgin Islands was an unusually welcoming place for Epstein to do business. The territory’s law enforcement and financial regulations were notoriously lax, its politiciansacquiescent. And the islands had created a series of generous tax incentives to lure businesses from the mainland.

Epstein applied for one of those breaks, which would enable his main company, Financial Trust, to avoid most taxes — a potential savings of tens of millions of dollars a year.

To vouch for his character, Epstein had turned to Harry Loy Anderson Jr., the president of the Palm Beach National Bank & Trust Company, where Epstein had held accounts since the early 1990s. Anderson — whose daughter is now engaged to Donald Trump Jr. — wrote a letter stating that Epstein was “a gentleman of the highest integrity” and that he “enjoys an excellent reputation in our community.” (Epstein’s house manager later said in a deposition that he was using Anderson’s bank to pay some of Epstein’s victims.) The letter, not previously reported, was submitted to the development commission and was obtained by the journalist Wayne Barrett; we found it in his archives at the Briscoe Center for American History at the University of Texas, Austin.

In the hearing room, Epstein unspooled a fantastical version of his life story, according to a transcript of the meeting that we obtained from the U.S. Virgin Islands. He had willingly left a job at Bear Stearns to become “a financial doctor” to the wealthy. One of those clients, Wexner, had helped develop his “sense of integrity.” He’d later grown close to the Rockefeller family, advising them “on certain financial issues.”

By the end, the commission’s members and staff were eating out of his hands, joining the long list of people and institutions who, knowingly or not, would become Epstein’s enablers. One seemed to be fishing for stock tips. Others jostled for him to locate his company on their islands in the territory. Another asked if Epstein would consider teaching a course at the local university. “I’d love to,” Epstein replied. “As I said outside this room, I believe that the future of the Virgin Islands is really with the young people.”

And he thought he had something to teach them. One of his classroom priorities, he mused, would be to educate them on “the ethics of business — which is very difficult nowadays.”