No text available for this page

merely hoped to help make the world a better place, now they want to change the world. Rockefeller and Carnegie were, as examples of social- engineering philanthropy, unique. They alone had such resources and will. Now you have legions of people who have to give away vastly larger fortunes than Rockefeller or Carnegie had at their disposal, or might even have imagined. “Except that it’s actually hard to give away this kind of wealth, without unintended consequences that can cause more problems than you’re solving.” Epstein’s long-time business thesis is that the rich know very little about money. They may know about their own businesses, but the great sums that are the result are an ultimate after thought and demand an entirely different sort of intellectual discipline. The Forbes 400, says Epstein, not immune to an amount of wonder, increased their wealth by $500 billion last year, meaning, in effect, that on average every Forbes-list billionaire makes more than another billion every year. And, points out the 62-year-old Epstein, they will almost all be dead in 40 years, most well before that, meaning $4.2 trillion, compounding everyday, will have to be given away. “So, to understand the future, what you have to begin to do is follow the money, not in Watergate-like terms backwards, as in who has gotten it, but forwards to where it will go and who will get it.” Epstein can find himself echoing aspects of Thomas Piketty on the inequities of the accumulation of wealth (“the divide is between people with assets, which appreciate, and people without assets, who fail to advance— that is, of course, the miracle of compounded interest”), except for the fact that Epstein, knowing the rich, understands a curious point that Piketty doesn’t: “Nobody, nobody, wants to give it all to their children. Everybody now has the modern appreciation that one of the curses of great wealth is that it can make your kids weird and fucked up.” Epstein’s position in this private allotment of a decent fraction of the U.S. Gross Domestic Product is not as philanthropist but as a higher sort of banker or guru or brain—a rich whisperer—making him, in addition to rich himself, arguably, among the most influential people you’ ve never heard of. Though, likely, you have heard of him, but not for his prowess with high abstraction, but for a scandal of such luridness that he is, for a great many, the poster child of the lawlessness of privilege, and for a much smaller circle, the poster child for what can happen when you become the target of a resentful world. He is that Epstein, according to the Daily Mail— among his most dogged and hyperbolic antagonists—“‘one of America’s most notorious sex offenders.” HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_022728

No text available for this page

No text available for this page

audible disbelief (everybody makes their own particular odd noise). Press accounts, seldom supplying new information, ever recycle and repeat the mysterious (and monstrous) billionaire mythology, with brief glimpses of him stepping out of the house (the same photos endlessly republished), and the assumption of depravity inside. In fact, the life in the house, without wife or children or conventional domestic demeanor, in some way conforms to the most scripted fantasies: a life somewhere between Daddy Warbucks and Eyes Wide Shut. The domesticity of the house, and the background of Epstein’s problems, centers around a group of young women who act as his support staff and companions. Some have worked for him for many years, marrying, having children, and continuing as part of his business and household infrastructure. One woman, on an afternoon when I was there, recently married, had just returned from an around the world honeymoon that Epstein had arranged for her. Some are his romantic interests. His present girl friend is in dental school. One former girlfriend, Eva Andersson Dubin, a Swedish model and Miss Universe finalist, became a doctor and married hedge funder Glen Dubin and together they finance the Dubin Breast Center at Mount Sinai Hospital. Most at one time will travel with him to his floating residences—the ranch in New Mexico, the vast apartment in Paris, the Island in the Caribbean, the house in Palm Beach. This is so outside of conventional living or staffing or romantic relationships that it is hard to describe in a straightforward or straight-faced way. It sometimes seems part of Epstein’s implicit challenge: not just look at me, but do you even believe what you see? Or it seems he is just oblivious to what others are thinking. A willful and perhaps fatal tone deafness. But Hefnerian prurience can also be quite businesslike: poised young women in a mansion on the Upper East Side with various office responsibilities—in some sense not that different from any of the art galleries in the surrounding neighborhood. Epstein’s young women mingle freely with his powerful guests, not so much as hostess or, in tabloid language, harem-like (or as “sex slaves’), but often as attentive students (that, of course, might be regarded as having its own fetish-like attraction). Once, Epstein invited me to sit in on a day of presentations to him in his dining room by various “quants.” Quant theory involves making investments based solely on mathematical and statistical models. This method can often have uncanny predictive powers. But the problem is it doesn’t scale very well—the market, having discerned a pattern of successful investing, quickly copies and discounts the advantage. Epstein’s HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_022731

effort was to identify a dozen or so promising algorithms (each quant is effectively hawking his secret sauce algorithm) and invest up to $5 million with each. I knew paltry little about this and so rather found myself identifying with the young women to whom Epstein was explaining the basic math and mechanics—out of my league, but grateful for the lesson. The Epstein house/office is, by careful design, exclusive and club like, part hang out, part secret society. Along with the difficulty in explaining why, even after his jail term, the rich and powerful have yet beaten a path to his door, it’s also notable in the fixed hierarchy of who comes to whose turf, that everybody, when they went to see Epstein, comes to him. A week in late September, U.N. week as it happened, began, on Sunday, at Epstein’s house with a colloquial for billionaires—Gates, TK, TK, TK. Epstein, preternaturally responsive to both the price of oil and to the politics of the middle of East, entertained that evening a delegation from Qatar, including Sheikh Hamad, the foreign minister. Hamad, indeed, lives across the street in a similarly furnished house—he and Epstein have the same decorator. Epstein, in his relaxed and amused demeanor, kept prodding: “Why are you financing the bad guys? What do you get out of that?” The Qatarians, in some mild diplomatic discomfort, seemed most worried that their bid for the World Cup might be compromised by bribery allegations. At 9:00 next morning, Epstein is joined for breakfast in the dining room by Reid Weingarten, who’s represented among other fat cats in trouble, Worldcom’s Bernie Ebbers and Goldman Sach’s Lloyd Blankfein. Weingarten, horse, with a cold, and dejected, is just back from a failed defense of former Connecticut Governor John Rowland. (Epstein: “You actually believe he was getting fucked?” Weingarten: “From minute one. I’m not a virgin. But his was the worst I’ve ever seen. It was like an assassination. ) After a short discussion of the Qartarian’s visit—Epstein is serving the chocolate, made from pistachios grown on the Shakes farm—and speculation about who actually controls ISIS, I am asked to leave the room. Twenty minutes later, after what ever business has been transacted or particular confidences, shared I am asked back in. “Why?” I asked Weingarten, when Epstein briefly steps out of the room, “do some many people keep coming back here, everything considered.” HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_022732

“Why we camp out here? I find that question as mysterious as you do,” says Weingarten. Shortly after Weingarten leaves, Epstein tells me that Eric Holder will resign by the end of the week—which he does. Epstein summons in the next person cooling his heels in the ante- room. It’s a young man named Brook Pierce, a former child actor, and dotcom high flyer—a principle in a gaming company called DEN, a notorious dotcom burnout, with its own sex scandal—who is now a leading investor in Bitcoin. He describe himself as the “the most active investor in the field.” And, indeed, is the first clear explanation I actually get about Bitcoin. It is so good that Epstein stops him and checks to see if his next appointment is here. And seconds later, Larry Summers, the former treasury secretary and President of Harvard, enters the dining room. Summers, off Diet Coke, digs deep into the Shakes chocolates, focuses in on the Bitcoin investor. “Okay,” he says, after listening for a bit, “I have opportunities here. But an additional feature of my decision problem roughly speaking 1s that the worst that could happen to you is that you could lose all the money you put into it. Whereas, I could go—I mean I don’t look that great now—but I could go from being seen as a figure of some probity and some intelligence to being a figure of much less intelligence and much less probity...” “Well,” says Pierce in what in some dramatic understatement, “you are going to have some low quality characters playing the space...” That evening, there is a small cocktail party, which includes the former Prime Minister of Australian, Kevin Rudd, and Thorbjorn Jaglandthe head of the Noble Peace Prize Committee, who offers an affable, but general scathing, critique of U.S. diplomacy (and a brief defense of Obama’s Peace Prize award) and to whom Epstein offers a ride back to Europe on his jet. The next morning, it’s Ehud Barack, the former Israeli Prime Minister and Israel, for breakfast. Barack is, over his omelet, able to defend both Obama and Putin. Then Kathy Ruemmler, who has just left her job as White House Counsel joins. She is already in the mix as a possible next attorney general, but, in fact, will withdraw from consideration in part to work with Epstein. Larry Summers wife, Elisa New, drops by. She teaches American poetry at Harvard and is putting together a proposal for a series on poetry that WGBH in Boston may produce and Epstein is advising on where she might go for added support (he also makes mince meat of her budget). MORE...TK HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_022733

Perhaps it’s just the ultimate feminist nightmare: Men (and a few opportunistic women) continue to come to Epstein’s because, no matter their public bows to modern manners, they simply don’t care that he offends every aspect of feminist sensibility Or, it’s a guilty pleasure. People who know Jeffrey exchange “Jeffrey” stories. “That’s Jeffrey,” says Mort Zuckerman, the real estate billionaire and publisher of the Daily News (ever vitriolic in its coverage of Epstein), with a twinkle in his eye and obvious enjoyment, to tales of Epstein escapades. It is an outréness that Epstein seems delighted to cultivate. In Epstein’s Paris apartment, 10,000 square feet on the Avenue Foch, a neighborhood otherwise occupied by foreign potentates, there is a stuffed baby elephant in his living room—that 1s, the elephant in the room. (At the same time, Epstein is a major supporter of cancer research and the elephant, he says, is also a reminder that elephants have 23 copies of tumor suppressor genes and humans have only 1.) The single book on his bedside table is Lolita (he is, beyond the joke, a great Nobokov fan). Or, in a more sophisticated view, it’s a two tier understanding of the world. There is a media version of the world, which most of us live in and largely accept, and are certainly influenced by. And then there are those people who live in the media itself and therefore know that it’s mostly bunk. If the media says it, as likely some version of the opposite is true. I might guess too that for many of his visitors there’s an order of identification: there but for the grace of God. Any hyper-prominent person might, at any time, run afoul of prosecutors, the political moment, the media, or the Internet hoi polloi. Epstein is the Dreyfus of the rich. And then there is the glue of wealth. Once, at lunch in the Epstein dinning room with Bill Richardson, the former Governor of New Mexico, and past Presidential aspirant, when Epstein left the room for a few minutes, I asked the obvious question, the one everybody asks each other, “How did you meet Jeffrey?” Richardson seemed surprised: “Jeffrey,” he said, as though stating what should have been perfectly obvious, “is the biggest landowner in New Mexico.” And then there is Epstein’s yet more structural explanation as to why after prison and with continuing tabloid infamy he can maintain his valued place. It comes back, not unexpectedly, to the nature or the needs of money: “At a certain level of finance, almost everyone is allied with an institutional interest. You are part of government, or you want to be in government, or you are connected to a bank or other portfolio, or you have key relationships with certain corporations or industries. Because of my HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_022734

situation, I have none of that. I have no institutional bona fides which makes me in some sense one of the few independent sources of information and actual honest brokers. That’s the usefulness of disgrace.” And then there is too, that he is right. Since I began working on this piece in September, Epstein predictions about the price of oil, yen, ruble, and euro have all born out. (If I had invested $100,000 the way Epstein said I should in early September, by the end of January I would have made $2.3 million. Alas, I did not.) And something else, which perhaps also surely accounts for Epstein’s continuing relationships with the rich and powerful: Most everyone who is now of a certain age and certain ambition and certain status grew up in, and found they were temperamentally suited to, the new age of wealth that started in the late 1970s. A meritocracy on steroids, or, as Vanity Fair would baldly and ingratiatingly dub it, the new establishment, an increasingly parallel world, a self-invented one, at further and further remove from the ordinary one. In some sense, Epstein is just one version, picaresque, as well as louche, of this shared story. He often tells, with some obvious marvel, his middle class to riches tale. He was born in 1953 in Coney Island. His father worked for the city’s Parks Department. His mother was a housewife. He has a younger brother, Mark. Epstein was distinguished by little other than his math talents. The captain of the math team at Lafayette High school in Bensonhurst, he goes on to Cooper Union where the tuition is free. He drops out after two years and begins taking classes at the NYU’s Courant Institute of Mathematics. Then, without a college degree, hence by a slight of hand, gets a job teaching math and physics at Dalton in 1974. (A few years ago, during a chance encounter with a former Dalton math department chairman, Margo Gumport, I asked her about Epstein. She said he was the most brilliant math teacher at Dalton in her 50-year career and that she had often wondered what had become of him.) It’s his first exposure to the wealthy. They have, he concludes, just as many problems as the people in Coney Island, just different ones, almost invariably involving divorce and money. “I found it interesting as a science experiment,” he recalled not long ago as we chatted about his life. “It did not really involve me. I could just stand back and watch.” Dalton fathers were attracted to him. Punch Sulzberger, the publisher of the New York Times, and a Dalton father at the time, tried to recruit Epstein to come to the Times. (Epstein recounts a story of riding with HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_022735

No text available for this page

No text available for this page

“You can’t spend a billion dollars, you can just relocate it to a different investment class. And you can’t give away a billion dollars without a vast staff, in effect going into the business of giving away money, yet another business you are likely to know little about.” At just about this point in the narrative, the questions or the incredulity begins in social circles and eventually in the media. He begins to acquire the major symbols of riches but does this without position, public holdings, or obvious paper trails. In essence, the formulation is, how can a person have enough money to merit increasing attention, but no clear way of having gotten it. Epstein gets stuck in that tautology. He may be rich, but he is without institutional protection or bona fides. He is a questionable substrata of wealth. He’s a freelancer. That’s the rub: he doesn’t work for anyone. Without institutional credentials he’s... well, nobody knows what. For a period, one part of his activities he says is recovering monies for countries looted by exiled dictators or military strongmen. If early in his career he might seem like a sort of George Peppard (there’s a physical resemblance) in Breakfast at Tiffany’s, a charming hustler, later he’s George Peppard in Banacek, a smart and astute operator. Then, in his telling, he’s representing a series of vastly wealthy people and families. He’s not just doing their bidding or their investing, he’s helping them to imagine the ambitions of their wealth. They’ ve satisfied their business dreams. Now there are the separate challenges and possibilities of their actual wealth. In essence, as he becomes more public the response to this, as a function of envy and the media’s need for definition, is “bullshit.” True, there is no clear alternate narrative. No one is accusing him of anything, accept, sometimes, guilt by association. (In addition to Robert Maxwell, who will be accused of fraud, there’s Steven Hoffenberg, briefly a New York high flyer, who went to jail for a Ponzi scheme, for whom Epstein acted as a consultant.) But the characterization persist: if it’s not clear, it must be murky. Sure, Goldman Sachs partners and tech fortunes, but what to make of a Coney Island, Zelig-like no-namer? In 1994, just at the moment when Prince Charles is on television acknowledging his love for Camilla Parker Bowles, Jeffrey Epstein is sitting with his arm around Princess Diana at a dinner at the Serpentine Galley in London (Diana is wearing her “revenge” dress that evening). Graydon Carter, into his second years as editor of Vanity Fair, is also at the dinner. Epstein’s rise and Carter’s rise are not, with a little critical interpretation, that different. Both are a function of the age of new money, both are helped HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_022738

No text available for this page

arrive—and soon he does, tanned, relaxed, with wide open smile, accompanied by three young women. It would be unlikely, outside of a men’s magazine fantasy of the luxe life, that you could locate this in reality. Epstein’s attentions, taking time with each of his passengers, seemed impossible to account for. The quiet of the plane, engineered into acoustic perfection, seemed spooky. Epstein’s three companions were witty, poised, helpful as well as powerfully alluring—as though stewardesses of bygone times. (One more thing about this trip: Google founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, with their company still in its infancy, came out to see the plane and, with a few other Googlers, literally ran whopping from one end of the plan to the other. Then they described for Epstein, in what I can not now remember as a put on or entrepreneurial brainstorm, a brand extension in which they would market a line of Google bras with the Os as convenient cups. In fact, the name Google, they said, was invented out of the belief that men would focus on a word with two Os in it.) Not long after this trip, Epstein’s assistant called to invite me for tea at his house in New York, where Epstein, with what seemed to me little understanding of the subject, began to ask me about media—the upside, downside, and nature of media coverage. New York magazine was then soliciting him for a profile, as was Vanity Fair, who had assigned the British tabloid reporter, Vicki Ward, to the job. Both profiles, New York’s by Landon Thomas, pivot on the Clinton connection and detail the same quandary, how a man without clear institutional bona fides nevertheless achieves wealth and influence. Ward— who would more recently assert in the Daily Beast, that she was barred by Vanity Fair from writing about under-age sex evidence (a fact that could be read the other way: Vanity Fair, even looking to take down Epstein, did not find the evidence credible)—follows a rabbit hole of questionable contacts who might or might not have been the source or sources for Epstein’s wealth, but gets no closer to an answer, beyond confirming her own sense of dubiousness. Epstein, sensing that he might be exposing himself, tried to stop the process (Ward, well known for offering an operatic view about her reporting exploits, says he threatened her), called Carter and said he was having second thoughts about being a public figure. “Then you should live in a two bedroom apartment in Queens,” responded Carter. And then the troubles began. HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_022740

Epstein, in man-who-can-have-everything fashion, has, for many years, ordered up a daily massage following his workout sessions. “Often these were massage massages,” says Epstein matter of factly, “but sometimes these were happy ending massages, especially in Palm Beach, where there are many massage parlors—‘Jack Shacks,’ they’re called—that do outcalls. There was no sex. An often there was no happy ending. Often I would be on the phone for the entire massage. There were however a lot of massages and a lot of girls, with one girl recommending others.” It is after Epstein’s round of publicity and widely touted association with Clinton, that the mother of one of the massage parlor girls who went to Epstein’s house (most of the girls return to Epstein’s house many times) calls the police. The police interview the girl, Saige Gonzales, who then supplies names of other girls. Some of whom are found to be younger than 18. In the end, the police track down 18 girls—nine who are under 18; the others in their 20s and 30s; one woman is in her 60s—a number of whom give statements describing scenarios not terribly different from Epstein’s description above, except each is laid out in clinical, lurid, and near-identical detail. A cold and forceful Epstein demands that unwitting juveniles (though they have come here for this very purpose) perform repulsive (or at least repulsively described) acts on him. (Although the nature of the allegations will dramatically grow, nobody at this point alleges that he did anything to them.) Epstein, tipped to the investigation, vastly raises the stakes, calling Dershowitz, who flies into Palm Beach to put the local authorities in their place—alienating Palm Beach officialdom—and, doubling down on the profile of the case. Dershowitz brings in Roy Black the famous criminal attorney who defended William Kennedy Smith in his rape trial in Palm Beach. Here’s the narrative: the shadowy rich man, friend of the louche and disgraced President, at all times surrounded by a retinue of gorgeous retainers doing his bidding, is now found to have gathered a network of wrong-side-of-the-tracks Palm Beach girls to provide him with weird sexual services. (It somehow reads weirder that he doesn’t have sex with them.) To boot, his former girl friend, Ghislaine Maxwell—the daughter of the disgraced Robert Maxwell—encouraged at least one of the girls to come to Epstein’s home (and forever more has become a fixture of further weird possibilities in this tale). HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_022741

No text available for this page

Compounding Epstein’s predicament, the world outside of his carefully constructed and controlled environment is someplace that he seems not just ill-equipped to handle but in which he seems to be blindly grouping about (i.e. he’s totally tone deaf). I visited him once during this time and found him weighing the conflicting advice of some of the most vaunted and egomaniacal lawyers (along with Dershowitz and Black, celebrity criminal attorney, Gerald Lefcourt, and Clinton prosecutor, Ken Starr) of the day— anyone with new advice, Epstein seemed to hire—as well as a catchall of the leading crisis managers, who he seemed to retain at will, all wrangling for fees and primacy. Certainly, the upshot of his dealings with the Justice Department seem to involve a through-the-looking-glass logic. The government threatens to prosecute him (with the possibility of a 10-year sentence) and various friends, associates, and lovers, or offers an ass-backwards sort of deal in which Epstein’s lawyers have to go to the Palm Beach authorities and get them to agree to charge him with an offense that will send him to jail and get him a sex offender status. Except that a solicitation charge won’t produce that result. Therefore he has to agree also to a procurement or pimping charge (even though he has paid money, not received it—the sine qua non of pimping). What’s more, he has to agree to pay the legal fees of any of the girls who want to sue him—and, not to defend himself from their suits— forcing him to settle with each of the girls for what are reportedly high 6- figure sums or more. He’s sentence to jail in 2008 for 18 months and serves 13 (while Epstein is now frequently accused of somehow managing to cut short his sentence, almost all Florida prisoners serve only 70% of their officially sentenced time). This hardly ends the legal catch all. Epstein's butler, Alfredo Rodriguez, steals and tries to sell an alleged journal or calendar with Epstein’s activities—but he tries to sell it to an undercover agent. Rodriguez is sentenced to 18 months in jail on a charge of theft and of withholding evidence (and a further two and half years on a related gun charge). Scott Rothstein, a lawyer whose firm represented additional girls in their suits against Epstein, also goes to jail for recruiting investors to pay for these suits on the fraudulent basis that settlements had already been reached. It’s the largest fraud in Florida history and Rothstein receives a 50-year sentence. Then, Brad Edwards, Rothstein’s former partner, sues the federal government in 2008 for abridging the rights of two of the original complainants under the Crime Victim Rights Act (giving victims the right to be consulted about the disposition of their cases) regarding the Justice HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_022743

Departments agreement not to prosecute in favor of the state action. In 2014, Edwards tries to ad Virginia Roberts, another of the original complainants, who has previously settled with Epstein, to the long-running suit. Roberts who was paid a settlement under the original terms of Epstein’s agreement— that he would pay attorney’s fees and not oppose any law suits against him—is now trying to overturn the agreement under which she was paid, and, with Edwards, further suing Epstein for $50,000,000. As the most vocal of the accusers, Roberts, with the Daily Mail being her prime outlet, emerges now with what is billed as a memoir of her “sex slavery” with Epstein, written ten years after the fact. She names a number of people as being at Epstein’s Island home, including Clinton and Al Gore and his wife, who Epstein’s lawyers insists were never there—proof available through secret service records. The FBI is now arguing that Roberts should not be party to the suit against the government because she refused to cooperate with the government in its investigation in 2007, hence has no standing as a victim. (At the same time, the FBI included her on the list of 40 victims with whom it mandated Epstein reach a settlement.) It is hard to find a more hyperbolic intersection of media and lawyers then in Epstein’s case. Edwards, over the six years of his law suit, tries to depose Clinton, Donald Trump, and Dershowitz—almost all of his targets coming directly from the original Vanity Fair and New York Magazine articles about Epstein. In addition to Prince Andrew as a British hot button, first connected to Epstein through Roberts’ interview with the Daily Mail in 2010, Clinton takes on a new role as Hillary spoiler through his connection, real or imagined, to Epstein and sex slaves. Almost everybody identified in any story about Epstein is approached by other media seeking to write about Epstein, often with financial incentives. No new details emerge. Every aspect of the current story is based on court filings describing events that may or may not have taken place prior to 2007. A recent Reuters story identified a charity that Epstein has not given money to in 15 years that said if he does give again, they would give it back. The world cleanly divides, with Epstein (and friends) behind secure walls and the Mail and social media and upholders of new norms, ever more incredulous and apoplectic that Epstein not only walks free but prospers too. HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_022744

Although he has spent more than a year in jail and paid out what may be as much as $20 million, he yet seems somehow to have gotten away with it—that worst sin of all. He is the unrepentant catch all of up-to-the-minute badness: the financier whose wealth is a product of Wall Street math rather than work; a rich middle-age white man who not only parades his wealth and entitlement, but has a Peter Pan complex to boot; an insistent Playboy in a correct and prudish world; someone who somehow didn’t get the memo about vast changes in mores and culture. When I suggested recently that one obvious way to blunt the animus is to get married, he said he would rather go back to jail. He is Calvin Harris’s song, It Was Acceptable in the 80s, come to life. This is all, inevitably, a Gatsby-like story. But Gatsby in New York Post and Daily Mail parlance would likely be a freaky financier too. And it’s a story about the limitation of journalism, in which the most compelling parts of the story—it would take a long running cable show to do justice to the meaning of Epstein’s ambitions and impulses—need to be sacrificed for not just moral certainty but for a rather preposterous fantasy of moral certainty. Anyway, I hope I get invited back to Jeffrey’s house. HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_022745