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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 ultimately an afterthought 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 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 HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_022896

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around-the-world honeymoon that Epstein had arranged for her. Some are, or have been, his romantic interests. His present girlfriend, whom he met four years ago at a dinner party in New York, is in dental school. One former girlfriend, Eva Andersson Dubin, a Swedish model and Miss Universe finalist whom Epstein has known for more than thirty years, became a doctor— Epstein sent her to medical school—and married hedge funder Glen Dubin. Together they finance the Dubin Breast Center at Mount Sinai Hospital. Most of the women at one time will travel with Epstein to his other floating residences—the ranch in New Mexico, a vast apartment in Paris, the island in the Caribbean, the house in Palm Beach. Epstein will sometimes move a meeting in his dining room outside to the park—his idea of going out to lunch is a Sabrett’s hot dog—with the various girls in the house the accompanying entourage, as though something out of an 18th-century French court. But the Hefnerian prurience can also be quite businesslike: poised young women in a mansion on the Upper East Side with various office responsibilities are really not that different from any of the art galleries in the surrounding neighborhood. They mingle freely with his powerful guests, not so much as hostesses—or, in tabloid language, harem-like “sex slaves”—but as attentive students (which, of course, might be regarded as having its own fetish-like attraction). Epstein explicitly denies that there is an sexual quid pro quo. HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_022900

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his view that only the Gates Foundation has real experience in the vast complexities of giving away “hyper wealth.” That evening, Epstein, preternaturally responsive to both the price of oil and to the politics of the Middle East, entertains a delegation from Qatar, including Sheikh Hamad Bin Jassim, the foreign minister. Hamad lives across the street in a similarly furnished house—he and Epstein have the same decorator. Epstein, in his relaxed and amused manner, keeps prodding: “Why are you financing the bad guys? What do you get out of that?” The Qatarians, in some mild diplomatic discomfort, seem most worried that their bid for the World Cup might be compromised by bribery allegations. At 9 the 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 Sachs’s Lloyd Blankfein, and is one of attorney general Eric Holder’s closest friends. Weingarten, hoarse with a cold, is just back from a failed defense of former Connecticut Governor John Rowland. After a blow-by-blow of the trial, there was a discussion of the Qatarian’s visit— Epstein served chocolate made from pistachios grown on the Sheikh’s farm—and speculation about who actually controls ISIS, with Weingarten arguing that the Turks are not getting enough scrutiny (he posits that ISIS is part of their proxy war against the Kurds). There HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_022902

is, in Epstein’s dining room, always an alternative version of world events—“perception versus reality,” says Epstein, “not to imply that one necessarily has greater weight than the other.” “Why,” I ask Weingarten, when Epstein briefly steps out of the room, “do so many people keep coming back here, everything considered.” This is before the most recent blowup but has been an obvious question ever since his stint in jail. “Why we camp out here? I guess because there’s no place like it.” Epstein summons in the next person cooling his heels in the ante-room. It’s a young man named Brock 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 now describes himself as the “the most active investor” in Bitcoin and the programmable currency space. After a bit, Epstein invites his next appointment to join them. Larry Summers, the former treasury secretary and President of Harvard, enters the dining room. Summers, off Diet Coke, digs deep into the Sheikh Hamad chocolates, then focuses in on the Bitcoin investor. “Okay,” he says, after listening for a bit to Pierce and his update on the rapid Bitcoin price swings, “I have opportunities here. But an additional feature of my decision problem, roughly speaking, is that the worst that could happen to you is that you could lose all the HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_022903

money you put into it. Whereas, I could go—TI 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 seeming dramatic understatement, “you are going to have some low quality characters playing early in the space...” That evening, in the Epstein dining room (he seems rarely to use the rest of the house’s 50,000 square feet), there is a small cocktail party, which includes the former Prime Minister of Australian, Kevin Rudd, and Thorbjorn Jagland, the head of the Nobel Peace Prize Committee, who offers an affable, but generally 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, for breakfast. Barack is, over his omelet, able to defend both Obama and Putin. Then a high ranking official from the Obama White House, whose name I am asked not to use. There follows the former head of the UN Security Council, Hardeep Purie, and then head of the central bank of Kazakhstan, Kairat Kelimbetov. Then Nathan Myhrvold the former chief technology office at Microsoft. Then Martin Nowak, a Professor of Biology and Mathematics and Director of the Program for Evolutionary Dynamics at Harvard, the institute that Epstein has funded with $30 million. Part HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_022904

of Nowak’s research has to do with trying to “describe cancer mathematically.” (Epstein preempts Nowak’s explanation : “Think of cancer the same way as you think of a terrorist group. The NSA has been able to thwart a great number of terrorism acts by intercepting communication signals from one terrorist to another. That same dynamic, a form of signal intelligence, of finding a terrorist in Europe, can be used to intercept communication between cancer sells. Cancer cells merely communicate in protean code rather than electronic code. If you can decode what the signals are saying you can jam those signal between terrorist calls—essentially wipe out their cell phones. Likewise if you can decode biological signals you can jam them too, that’s the holy grail.’’) Then Richard Axel, a Nobel prize winner in physiology. Then Ron Baron who has $26 billion under management in his Baron Fund. Then Josh Harris, the co-founder of Apollo Global Management ($164 billion under management) and owner of the New Jersey Devils and the Philadelphia 76ers. What goes on at Epstein’s house confirms everyone’s worst fears about power and the powerful: they are all in a secret and shared conversation. The world runs on insider information. And, certainly, inside Epstein’s dining room, it remains a man’s world—a rich man’s world. Indeed his salons tend to offend most every aspect of reconstructed gender and political sensibilities. HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_022905

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News, is 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 to cultivate. In his 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 is, the e/ephant in the room. (Epstein says too it’s 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). And, too, he seems often to be 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 $2.4 million. (Alas, I did not invest.) At any one moment, he is making a series of bets for himself and others. Recently he identified a dozen or so promising quants, each hawking their own special-sauce algorithm, and planned to test their math with investments of up to $5 million each. But don’t mistake him for running anything like a workaday hedge fund; this is much more a privileged association. Money is always about the club it gets you into. Most everyone who is now of a certain age and ambition and status grew up in, and found they were temperamentally suited to, the era of wealth that started HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_022908

in the late 1970s. A meritocracy on steroids, or, as Vanity Fair would baldly dub it, the new establishment, an increasingly parallel world, a self-invented one, at further and further remove from the ordinary one. Epstein’s is just one version, albeit picaresque and louche, of this shared story. Epstein often tells, with some obvious marvel, his middle class to riches tale: born in 1953 in Coney Island, father worked for the city’s Parks Department, mother a housewife. The captain of the math team at Lafayette High school in Bensonhurst, he went on to Cooper Union where the tuition is free. He dropped out after two years and began taking classes at the NYU’s Courant Institute of Mathematics. Then, without a college degree, hence by a slight of hand, he got 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.) Dalton was his first exposure to the wealthy. They have, he concluded, just as many problems as the people in Coney Island, but different ones, almost invariably involving divorce and money. “I found it interesting as a science experiment,” he recalled recently as we chatted about his life. “It did not really involve me. I could just stand back and watch.” HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_022909

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dictators or military strongmen. Then, in his telling, he was representing a series of vastly wealthy people and families—not just doing their bidding or their investing, but helping them to navigate the ambitions of their wealth. If they had big dreams before, it’s nothing to what they can have now. If early in his career he might have seemed 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. At just about this point in the narrative, the incredulity about Epstein began to circulate in social circles. Epstein had acquired the major symbols of wealth but without position, public holdings, or obvious paper trails. His is a questionable substrata of wealth, without institutional credentials or bona fides. He’s a freelancer. That’s the rub: he doesn’t work for anyone. There is no clear alternate narrative, except perhaps 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—along with, he points out, Paul Volcker.) But the characterization persists: if it’s not clear, it must be murky. Sure, Goldman Sachs partners and tech geniuses, they might have stratospheric wealth, but what to make of a Coney Island, Zelig-like no-namer? HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_022914

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smile, was an attentive host, soliciting every guest’s story and views. (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 on the Monterey tarmac and, with a few other Googlers, literally ran whooping from one end of the plane to the other. Then they described for Epstein, in what I cannot now remember was 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. (Epstein’s flirtation with the media would result in his backing an unsuccessful effort, of which I was a part, to buy New York Magazine in 2004, and then later, with Mort Zuckerman, backing the launch of Radar magazine.) New York magazine was then soliciting him for a profile, as was Vanity Fair, who had assigned the British journalist, 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 achieved such wealth and influence. Epstein, sensing HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_022917

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In the end, the police tracked down 18 girls—nine of whom were under 18 [THIS IS IMPORTANT: HOW OLD WAS THE YOUNGEST?]; the others were in their 20s and 30s; one woman was in her 60s—a number of whom gave statements describing, in essence, happy - ending massages. (Although the nature of the allegations will dramatically grow into threesomes and forced sexual encounters, nobody at this point alleged anything more than this.) A shadowy rich man, friend of the louche and disgraced president, at all times surrounded by a retinue of young and attractive women doing his bidding, is 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 girlfriend, Ghislaine Maxwell—the daughter of the disgraced Robert Maxwell—encouraged at least one of the girls to come to Epstein’s home (and is henceforth known as the procurer or madam for Epstein and, later, his friends). It certainly doesn’t look good. Epstein called in Dershowitz, who flew into Palm Beach to put the local authorities in their place— alienating Palm Beach officialdom—and, further amping up the profile of the case, also brought in Roy Black, the famous criminal attorney who defended William Kennedy Smith in his rape trial in Palm Beach. Epstein might have just been hit with solicitation charges and paid a fine even though some of the girls HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_022919

were underage; prostitution charges in Florida (as in most places) have no age limits and the Palm Beach grand jury proposed solely a solicitation charge. But Epstein’s flamboyance and his friendship with Clinton invited the scrutiny of the Bush FBI, and ultimately Epstein and his legal team decided to go for a plea deal. The result was a baroque set of agreements with both the Feds and Palm Beach county, which mandated jail time (Epstein was sentenced to 18 months, of which he served 13—nearly all Florida prisoners serve only 70% of their officially sentenced time) and sex offender status. The deal also provided for an unusual, if not unprecedented, arrangement by which he agreed to pay the legal fees for 40 girls specified by the FBI in civil suits against him and not to oppose their claims, resulting in an overall settlement costs that may be as high as $20 million. (A bit more baroqueness: one of the lawyers representing some of the plaintiffs, Scott Rothstein, would also go to jail for recruiting investors to pay for these suits on the fraudulent basis that settlements had already been reached and that many of the listed women had agreed to take reduced immediate cash payments. ) It is in part this impossible-to-explain weird-justice outcome that has made some people think Epstein was covering for someone, or something, else—perhaps his most high-profile friend? HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_022920

“So?” I ask, one day late in our interviews. “Explain this. It does make it look like you were covering for you-know-who.” “Covering?” He chuckles. “First, by the way, you- know-who was never there. Never came to the island. Not once. Not ever. But you’re right—nobody has ever heard of anything like [this agreement]. But while it was breathtaking, it was also straightforward: you sign this or else we will federally indict you in ways that will threaten your property, the people who work for you, and might put you in jail for ten years. I took the deal.” (Indeed, the deal protected him from federal prosecution, and protected his “co-conspirators,” the employees who supplied him with massage girls, from being charged as accessories to molestation and sex with minors.) Epstein got out of jail in 2009. The experience does not seem to have much dented his general bonhomie. One evening over dinner he and the former director of ports in the semi-rouge state of Djibouti, who had fallen afoul of the regime and found himself in prison, exchanged jail stories—they agreed, not as bad you’d think. Epstein, having done his time, moved mostly seamlessly back into his life, to the shock-shock of tabloids whenever they are reminded of his existence (notably, when Epstein’s payment of Fergie’s debts slipped out, likely leaked by Fergie herself). Some things changed. While surprisingly few others dropped him, the Clinton’s did, an irony of the HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_022921

present tabloid interest in Epstein’s old address book with its many Clinton contacts. And his sex offender status has transformed him from libertine playboy to pedophile. While he has regularly entertained PR proposals aimed at his public rehabilitation, until Gates prodded him, and until this recent renewed tabloid fever, Epstein had concluded that he was perfectly satisfied living behind high walls and in his own exclusive club. Even now, this new Dershowitz-Prince Andrew chapter seems like a parallel disturbance rather than something that is actually affecting him. “Bad press is not something actually bad,” he notes, trying to balance perception and reality. And, indeed, the tabloid narrative and his own story rather define divergent realities. The ongoing case, with the filings that introduced the Dershowitz and Prince Andrew allegations, was brought by the imprisoned Rothstein’s former partner, Brad Edwards. It relies entirely on the testimony and the memoir, excerpts of which were published by the Daily Mail, of Virginia Roberts, who claims that Ghislaine Maxwell met her, when she was 17, at Donald Trump’s Palm Beach resort and got her a job in the Epstein house, which she held for several years, traveling in the Epstein entourage. It is Roberts—who refused to cooperate with the FBI’s 2007 investigation of Epstein—who has propounded the “sex slave” narrative. She claims that “massage” was a code word for sexual acts, and that she worked for Epstein for HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_022922

TK years for $TK, having sex with him and his friends, and reporting on the details to Epstein so he would have blackmailable details about them. In the laundry list of big names, she also claims that Epstein introduced her to Bill Clinton and Al and Tipper Gore (though there was no sex involved). Roberts, who was part of the original settlement— which some accounts put as high as $1 million—has sought an additional $50 million {NEEDS STATUS CHECK} from Epstein [CLARIFY THAT SHE IS NOT SUING HIM BUT SUING THE GOVT AND SAYING SHE’LL DROP IT IF HE PAYS HER?], and is planning a book on her life and the scandal. But there has been no corroboration of the Roberts charges nor any new evidence or further prosecution. Epstein says she never met Clinton through him and, indeed, that he himself has never met the Gores. Dershowitz is suing her for libel. But true or not, the story has taken on a life of its own, with the US and British tabloid press continuing, so far unsuccessfully, to search for a smoking gun connecting Clinton to underage girls, which could have the effect of derailing the Hillary Clinton presidential campaign. In the meantime, it is delaying—dquite an understatement—Epstein’s hoped-for public rehabilitation. It is a curious attribute of his character that, other than perhaps being more circumspect about what legal advice HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_022923

to follow, Epstein would have done little differently. (When I suggested recently to Epstein that one obvious way to blunt the animus bearing down on him would be to get married, he said he’d rather go back to jail.) His life, living it as he wants, seems to him to be an extraordinary accomplishment. Being on the wrong side of morality, custom, politics, feminists, the media, that’s just a bit of bad luck. And it is perhaps this attitude of his that irks his critics the most. 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 catchall 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 (excuse me, pedophile) in a correct and prudish world—someone who somehow didn’t get the memo about vast changes in mores and culture. But Epstein’s friends—and I think that is, in the end, the best word for the powerful people who orbit him—are willing to take him as he comes. Epstein is their confidant. Not the only nexus of them, but one of them. Dr. Epstein. Lay on my couch. As he is everybody’s confidant, everybody becomes his confidant. This is the back and forth, the power loop. His expertise is knowing what other people know. Which surely offers a unique sense of confidence that it HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_022924

is possible to understand how the world works. And in a time of such radical flux and existential instability, everybody wants to seek out someone who might have some answers or at least make you feel like he does— even, and maybe especially, the rich. In the last days of my interviews with Epstein, he was called by a particular world-stage individual, among the richest and most powerful—proudly louche himself—who, feeling out of his depth in a world of crashing oil prices and wild currency fluctuation, had come to believe he might benefit from some private tutoring. Epstein welcomed him to the club. HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_022925