A Convenient Death

by Alana Goodman

  “He had cameras in every room of his house. He had cameras in the bathroom. He was doing it for some reason. He didn’t tell me what the reason was, but here’s a good guess: there’s a lot of famous people he had something on.

  “That was the first time I heard him tell [about] the cameras, the cameras, the cameras. I kind of knew that was what was going on, and he’d allude to it in other ways, but at this point he was proud of it.”

  The greatest evidence of Epstein’s photo cache was discovered in a raid on his New York mansion shortly after his July 6, 2019, arrest at Teterboro Airport in New Jersey.

  Prosecutors said they recovered what amounted to child pornography, nude snaps of his victims. “At least hundreds—and perhaps thousands—of sexually suggestive photographs of fully- or partially nude females” were found safely stored at Epstein’s home,4 according to a court memo written by the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, Geoffrey Berman, on July 8, 2019.

  The images “appear to be of underage girls, including at least one girl who, according to her counsel, was underage at the time the relevant photographs were taken,” the prosecutor stated.

  More surprising, perhaps, was how neatly organized the stash appeared at his home. It was laid out in “compact discs with hand-written labels including the following: ‘Young [Name] + [Name],’ ‘Misc nudes 1,’ and ‘Girl pics nude,’” the documents would allege.

  Although it is not known if the images featuring child porn also featured Epstein or others in his orbit, he proudly kept an array of G-rated photos of his high-profile friends on display for any common visitor.

  Epstein showed off his photos with world leaders, pointing to a framed picture of the crown prince of Saudi Arabia, Mohammed bin Salman, and saying, “That’s M.B.S.” The journalist James B. Stewart took note of photos of Woody Allen, a good friend of Epstein’s who has also been accused of sexual misconduct, and Bill Clinton, another friend who likewise has been accused of sexual assault and even rape.

  But while it has become clear just how Epstein went about obsessively documenting the visits of the rich and powerful to his home and their private activities while there—he was hardly shy about the camera system even when he was alive—his motivation for doing so is less obvious. Why did Epstein feel the need to rig his bedrooms and bathrooms with cameras? Was it just his own voyeuristic perversion? Or was there something deeper?

  Arguably, this obsession with following and filming and documenting the most intimate habits of the powerful came out of Epstein’s obsession with power itself. It wasn’t just the sexual behavior of his powerful friends that interested him; it was everything about their lives. This might have been used for blackmail and other purposes to Epstein’s direct advantage, but his fascination went deeper than that. He had conned his way into the upper ranks of high society but perhaps still felt a bit like the outsider looking in. Today we might call that impostor syndrome. He was around people with real power, but he had to find different ways to try to grasp it for himself. And to understand the real roots of that obsession, you have to understand where he came from.

  PART II

  An Indecent Life

  6

  Ill-Gotten Gains

  Years of Deception and Fraudulent Fortunes

  He could see your weaknesses.

  STEVEN HOFFENBERG

  A photo in Epstein’s senior yearbook shows him at sixteen years old, walking shirtless along the beach in Coney Island. He’s chubby and pale, his belly hanging over the top of a pair of old jeans cut into knee-length swim shorts. His frizzy brown hair is badly in need of a trim. His eyes are trained on the ground, an awkward gummy smile on his face.

  The man who would one day wield so much power and wealth, inflicting so much pain on poor suffering victims along the way, in high school was poor, unattractive, and unhappy with that state of affairs.

  “He was getting beaten up all the time for being a schmuck—looking like a schmuck, or whatever. He must have had a rough time, and there was probably never a girl that ever looked at him,” said one longtime friend of Epstein’s in an interview.

  “He really had some kind of contempt for women . . . And I think he was getting back at all those fifteen-year-old, sixteen-year-old girls who would never talk to him because he looked like such a schmuck,” added the friend.

  He had a rough time, and it seemed that he decided to do whatever it would take to leave it behind, to learn charm in order to manipulate those in power, and to get what he wanted from men, women—and girls.

  Epstein was born January 20, 1953, the day President Dwight D. Eisenhower was inaugurated. The elder son of Seymour and Pauline, the lucky few from their respective families who had not perished in the Holocaust, Jeffrey Epstein grew up in a middle-class area of Coney Island, nearly an hour away from Manhattan using public transportation. The neighborhood was Sea Gate, the oldest gated community in the city.1

  The Epsteins were rare in that both Seymour and Pauline worked but were still firmly on the very lower end of middle class. Seymour, born December 4, 1916, in Manhattan to European immigrant parents, first held down construction work, where he demolished homes, before getting a more stable job with New York City’s Parks Department, where he picked up trash. Neighbors have recalled Seymour’s stutter. Pauline, born October 5, 1918, in Brooklyn to Lithuanian immigrant parents, worked as an aide in a school.

  The Epsteins lived in an apartment taking up the middle third of a decently sized house in Sea Gate at Maple Avenue. In 1955, Mark Epstein was born, stretching the family’s already thin resources. The family couldn’t afford much more than the essentials.

  “[Jeffrey] hated his childhood because they were poor,” recalled Steven Hoffenberg in an interview.

  Poor though he was, Epstein had one notable resource. By all accounts, he was smart. A natural math whiz who skipped a couple grades. A piano virtuoso. He was also generous, mentoring other kids at Lafayette High School along the way.

  Despite being remembered as a schmuck, Epstein seems to have had at least a bit of a social life. His friends affectionately called him Eppy, and he had at least one girlfriend, who remembered him fondly years later.

  “That last year in school, I think he kind of loved me,” one high school sweetheart recalled in the book Filthy Rich. “One night on the beach he kissed me. In fact, our history teacher made up a mock wedding invitation for Jeffrey and myself to show to the class. That seems pretty inappropriate now. But back then, we all thought it was funny. Jews and the Italians, that was pretty much who went to Lafayette High School. They didn’t socialize that much. And though my mother was crazy about him, she told me Jewish boys don’t marry Italians.”2

  Epstein graduated early and quickly moved to leave Coney Island behind. In the fall of 1969, he enrolled at the Cooper Union and studied physics. The college’s main attracting feature for the student from humble roots was its cost—free. He was sixteen years old, but as he did in high school, he began tutoring his fellow students. This time he charged for his services. For the first time, Jeffrey Epstein was a working man.

  Mysteriously, Epstein, despite his brilliance, did not seem able to stick to his studies. He lasted only until the spring of 1971, before he left without earning a degree. Months later he began studying mathematics at New York University. He was affiliated with the prestigious Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences. He would leave that higher institution in June 1974, though it is unclear why, again without any sort of degree.

  Somewhere along the way he found other work—an unceremonious job in Brooklyn as a roofer. It seemed the boy from the poor family was going back to where he came from.

  But Epstein would not tolerate returning to his old world. And it is at this point that he would begin to try his hand at being a confidence man—reliant on the world of fraud, distortion, and lying to get ahead.

  His
first documented fraud was fudging his résumé to get a job at the Dalton School. Founded in 1919, Dalton is one of the most prestigious educational institutions in New York City and normally hired only the best. Yet somehow, in the early 1970s, the college dropout and former roofer Jeffrey Epstein persuaded them to hire him to teach the children of Manhattan’s leading families.

  He is believed to have been hired by the school’s headmaster, who coincidentally left the school amid an unrelated brouhaha months before Epstein’s official start date in 1974. The schoolmaster was Donald Barr, the father of William Barr, who would serve as attorney general of the United States at the time of Epstein’s arrest and subsequent death.3

  At Dalton, Epstein taught physics and math, and he coached the school’s math team. His students were mostly the older kids, high school upperclassmen who were seventeen or eighteen years old, not too far off from Epstein himself, who was only in his early twenties.

  For a working-class kid, this was a glimpse into a whole new world. True, he was only a lowly teacher, but his students were the kids of the adults who ran the city—the political players, the media honchos, and the money managers.

  “I come from a background where I had no money and it was only by understanding math and science that I was able to live the life I currently lead,” Epstein would later recount in court documents.

  Or, as his former boss Hoffenberg described it in an interview, “His greatest dream was to be superrich, to be a multimillionaire, generated by this hatred of his childhood.”

  At Dalton, Epstein socialized with his students and was well liked by them, though in retrospect some worrisome traits began to emerge. Specifically, it was the way he interacted with young female students. “It was just kind of a general circle of girls,” the former student Scott Spizer recalled in an interview with National Public Radio. “He was much more present amongst the students, specifically the girl students, during nonteaching hours . . . it seemed just, it was kind of inappropriate.”

  There was an acute awareness of what Kerry Lawrence of the graduating class of 1976 calls “creepiness.”4

  “When you had a faculty member that girls were paying attention to, it was somewhat disconcerting,” Lawrence added.

  Years later, Epstein would demure in a deposition on whether he had sexual relations with any students. Asked whether he had been intimate with anyone he taught, he answered, “Not that I remember,” a typical lawyerly response that left open the possibility of such teacher-student relations.

  After two years at Dalton, the school decided to move on from the unconventional teacher because he wasn’t “up to snuff,” the interim headmaster Peter Branch would recall many decades later. “It was determined that he had not adequately grown as a new teacher to the standard of the school,” he would tell another reporter.5

  Which of course was always true. Epstein had no business being a teacher, because he did not have the qualifications required to serve in such a capacity. He had weaseled his way into the job, only to be found out eventually that he did not have the qualifications. An important lesson, perhaps, in retrospect—that the longer the con, the harder and harder it is to maintain.

  For his next opportunity, Epstein seems to have switched tactics a bit, attaining it not exactly by lying but by using charm to get what he wanted from the powerful people with whom he surrounded himself. Either because he knew his end was near or because it was all part of his plan, Epstein used parent-teacher conferences to network, telling his kids’ parents that he was looking for work on Wall Street, according to the Miami Herald.6

  According to Filthy Rich, Epstein began tutoring the son of the Bear Stearns executive Alan “Ace” Greenberg, and some believed he dated his daughter, Lynne.7 Then he charmed the father into giving him a job at the prestigious investment bank. The college dropout from Brooklyn scored a job on Wall Street in 1976, at a time when most hires there were graduates from the most prestigious colleges in America.

  Epstein thrived. He picked up the language, innately understood financial concepts, and finally began to make decent—and soon great—money. He also, for apparently the first time, got his taste of forbidden fruits, entering an inappropriate relationship with his assistant.

  But that would not be enough. And soon he was unsatisfied and looking for love. Epstein was highlighted as “Bachelor of the Month” in the July 1980 issue of Cosmopolitan magazine.8

  Accompanied by a photo of the Wall Streeter sporting his best impression of a Beatles haircut, the personal ad stated, “Financial strategist Jeffrey Epstein, 27, talks only to people who make over a million a year! If you’re ‘a cute Texas girl,’ write this New York dynamo at 55 Water St., 49th floor, N.Y.C. 10041.”

  The Brooklyn boy had created a new persona: a “New York dynamo” who works only with the most wealthy and who cultivated exotic—southern!—women.

  Thanks perhaps to the effect of his alter ego, Epstein quickly moved up the chain. That same summer, he was named a limited partner, a step below full partner but still a remarkable rise for someone with no family connections and no financial experience. He had only his relationship with Greenberg and a quickly developed mentor-mentee relationship with Bear Stearns’s CEO, James Cayne.

  A year later, under murky circumstances and more than a whiff of scandal, he was out. There were allegations of an inappropriate and perhaps illegal loan, insider trading, and a deal gone bad. But none of the charges stuck. Asked by SEC investigators about the rumors of his departure in testimony given on April 1, 1981, Epstein admitted that he heard “it was having to do with an illicit affair with a secretary.” It is unclear whether Epstein himself believed whether the rumor mill had gotten this one correct.

  Epstein also told SEC investigators “he was offended by the company’s investigation of a twenty-thousand-dollar loan he’d made to his friend Warren Eisenstein,” according to Filthy Rich. “On top of that, questions about Epstein’s expenses had come up. In the end, Bear Stearns fined him $2,500—an embarrassing thing, to be sure.”9

  Scandal could not keep Epstein down, however. He struck out on his own, in a solo venture he registered to his apartment and called the Intercontinental Assets Group Inc. He intended the company to specialize in recovering assets for the ultra-wealthy, and soon enough he was a successful “financial bounty hunter”—a moniker he clearly relished.

  Epstein also started offering “strategic advice” that would assist his clients in limiting their tax liability. He counted on the fact that wealthy clients would spend millions of dollars for his services if they stood to save tens or hundreds of millions in taxes. By the late 1980s, he changed his business plan again, setting up shop under the name J. Epstein & Company. His private firm’s gimmick would be to manage the money for the richest of the rich: billionaires.

  Shortly after beginning his new firm, Epstein found two anchor clients. The first was the client of a lifetime, the underwear magnate Leslie H. Wexner, the chairman and CEO of L Brands, which owns the clothing company the Limited and the lingerie maker Victoria’s Secret.

  They met in a strange and purely accidental way when Epstein was seated next to Wexner’s friend Robert Meister on a flight to Palm Beach. Both were in first class. Meister, an insurance executive, talked up his client Wexner, who he revealed was unhappy with his money managers. Epstein’s services as a money manager were offered, and soon thereafter an introduction was made.

  The two hit it off. Wexner and Epstein were fast friends and even closer business associates. “People have said it’s like we have one brain between the two of us: each has a side,” Epstein told the Vanity Fair profiler Vicky Ward in a breakout piece about him in 2003 titled “The Talented Mr. Epstein.”10

  Wexner’s trust in Epstein was so immense he’d end up signing over his house—the Manhattan mansion considered the largest residential home in the city—to him. Epstein would be named a board member of h
is personal foundation. But perhaps the biggest sign of his trust was giving him power of attorney over his wealth, allowing the young, and perhaps somewhat unproven, wealth manager to have the financial power of a billionaire.

  Epstein helped design and manage the building of Wexner’s yacht, Limitless. He involved himself in all matters business and personal, often visiting the clothing tycoon’s Columbus, Ohio, mansion. It helped that Epstein eventually acquired his own home nearby in New Albany, Ohio.

  Epstein even helped the Wexners find a nanny. “I’ll just put Jeffrey on it,” Abigail Wexner, Les’s wife, reportedly announced at a party after voicing frustration about her child care.

  “Les is an insecure guy with a big ego . . . he had a lot of money but craved respect,” the former vice-chair of L Brands, Robert Morosky, would later tell The Wall Street Journal.11 “They played off each other’s needs.”

  The second client, Towers Financial, got Epstein into trouble. Towers would go down as the biggest financial Ponzi scheme in American history prior to Bernie Madoff.

  Steven Hoffenberg, who once owned the New York Post, ran the company.

  “Jeffrey was my partner in what we did raising the billion dollars. He worked with me every day, seven days a week and he was in the mix with everything that I did,” said Hoffenberg in an interview with CBS News.12 “I was the CEO of Towers Financial Corporation, a public company, and Jeffrey was my main assistant, associate, or partner. And the company did do a billion dollars in raising money. And it was criminal.”

  The way the scheme worked was that Towers Financial would sell bonds and notes, using the proceeds to funnel money to pay interest to earlier accounts. Of course, much of that money went to Hoffenberg himself. Epstein, for his part, was on a retainer pulling in $25,000 a month for his financial advice.