It’s an absurdly vast house, among the largest in Manhattan, but the dining room is windowless, creating a hermetic or stop-time sense, broken only by the household staff ferrying in time-of-day-appropriate foods and beverages. The real world seems terribly far away, but with paparazzi often posted near by, it’s dangerously close too. Once I arrived for a visit and found several police cars blocking the street and thought the worst—they’d come for him again. But it was a security detail for a controversial head of state who had come for tea. We met several years before he became arguably the world’s most notorious sex offender. In 2002, his plane, a meticulously appointed 737, ferried a group of people to the TED conference in Monterey. He was the mysterious and peculiarly gracious host arriving after everyone had boarded: tanned, relaxed, attentive, soliciting every guest’s story and views, and accompanied by three young women not his daughters, witty, poised, helpful, and beautiful—out of a men’s magazine fantasy of the luxe life. One more thing about this trip suggesting something of his unique view of the public world and what you got to see when you are near him. Google founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, with their company rising into the stratosphere, came out to see his plane on the Monterey tarmac and, with a few other Googlers, literally ran whooping from one end of the plane to the other. Then, sitting in the plane’s plush HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_024229

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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 not as a philanthropist but as a sort of adviser or guru or brain—a rich whisperer—making him, in addition to rich himself, arguably among the most influential people you’ve only heard of for reasons that have nothing to do with his influence. Epstein sometimes seems to have an out-of-body attitude toward his own fate and bad press—that’s something that occurs in a less interesting parallel world. Not long ago, when I met him for lunch in New York, he noted that he hadn’t been out to lunch in a restaurant in ten years. It was a not particularly pleasant experience for him and we were done in 30 minutes. On the other hand, Epstein’s life sometimes seems part of a purposeful challenge: not just look at me, but do you even believe what you see? But, perhaps, he is HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_024233

just oblivious to what others are thinking: a willful and in a sense fatal tone deafness. Press accounts recycle the mysterious billionaire mythology—a man of vast and unsourced riches living in a parallel universe of absolute entitlement—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, rather conforms to the scripted fantasies: somewhere between Daddy Warbucks and Eyes Wide Shut. There is indeed a group of young women—in their twenties and thirties— who act as Epstein’s 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, had just returned from an 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, has just graduated 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. HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_024234

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whose turf, that, when they want to see Epstein, they tend to come to him. He’s created a world and you enter it. His conversations are less meeting-like—focused and agenda-driven—then narrative. In effect: the outside world comes to Epstein’s and he eagerly solicits reports. It’s a real time newspaper, or the news you don’t read in a newspaper, market movements before they occur, the health and eccentricities of world leaders, high level government appointments soon to be announced. It’s Sunday lunch—in his schedule from a week last fall—with Gates, Mort Zuckerman, the real estate billionaire and owner of the Daily News, and Peter Thiel, the PayPal co-founder and early Facebook investor. That evening its Sheikh Hamad Bin Jassim, the foreign minister of Qatar. 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?”’) Next morning, Epstein is joined for breakfast in the dining room by the lawyer Reid Weingarten, who’s represented, among other fat cats in trouble, Worldcom’s Bernie Ebbers and Goldman Sachs’s Lloyd Blankfein. Weingarten, hoarse with a cold, is still lamenting his failed defense of former Connecticut Governor John Rowland. After a blow-by-blow of the trial, they discuss the Qatarian’s visit—Epstein served HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_024236

chocolate made from pistachios grown on the Sheikh’s farm—and speculate about who actually controls ISIS, with Weingarten arguing that the Turks are not getting enough scrutiny. There 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.” “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 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, 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 money you put into it. Whereas, I could go—TI mean I don’t look that great now—but I could go from being HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_024237

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 of Nowak’s research has to do with trying to “describe cancer mathematically.” (Epstein preempts Nowak’s HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_024238

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. The question is why, in the face of such disgrace, with the paparazzi so near, the high and might still come? Perhaps simply that it’s intelligence of a high order. Not just market moving information, but Epstein and Summers trying to unravel the conundrum of zero interest rates, or Epstein and Noam Chomsky on memory and language, or Epstein TK... What goes on at Epstein’s house might seem just to HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_024239

confirm everyone’s worst fears about power and the powerful: it’s all insider stuff. But the conversations at Epstein’s are the conversations, I suspect, that rich men dream of, but in the real world, such a buttoned-down and agenda-driven place, are actually hard to have. “That’s Jeffrey,” says Mort Zuckerman, (whose paper, the Daily News, is ever vitriolic in its coverage of Epstein), with a twinkle in his eye. On Epstein’s part, there is the wink: 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 elephant 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). Epstein has a 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 situation, I have none of that. I have no institutional ties which makes me in some sense one of the few wholly independent sources of information and actual honest HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_024240

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For a period, one part of his activities, he says, was recovering monies for countries looted by exiled 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. Sure, Goldman Sachs partners and tech geniuses, they might have stratospheric wealth, but what to make of a Coney Island, Zelig-like no-namer? In 1994, just at the moment when Prince Charles was on television acknowledging his love for Camilla Parker Bowles, Jeffrey Epstein was sitting with his arm around Princess Diana at a dinner at the Serpentine Galley in London (Diana wearing her “revenge” dress that evening). Graydon Carter, in his second year as HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_024244

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sudden interest of the Bush FBI in the case, moved the case from solicitation to scandal, and a plea deal with a sentence of 18 months. He got out of jail in 2009, serving 13 months, and 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 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 in tabloid parlance. 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 the recent 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. 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 HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_024248

have—many obviously hope—the effect of derailing the Hillary Clinton presidential campaign. It is a curious attribute of his character that, other than perhaps being more circumspect about what legal advice 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 HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_024249

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 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. fe a tSEP} HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_024250