A Convenient Death

by Alana Goodman

While perpetrating this fraud, Epstein also began a new, relatively low-stakes, but nonetheless revelatory form of fraud, according to those who knew him.13

  Hoffenberg’s Towers Financial tried to take over Pan Am Airways. The point person on the deal ultimately failed Epstein. Upon hearing that an acquaintance of his was traveling to Spain in a few days, Epstein offered, “If you like, I can upgrade you to first class. Much better food.”

  “How?” asked the acquaintance, the author and journalist Edward Jay Epstein.

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

  Years later, the writer would recall, “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.”

  Apparently, Jeffrey Epstein had been using stickers procured during the failed Pan Am deal to upgrade friends and acquaintances—without the hassle and expense of actually going through the airlines. It was surprisingly easy to pull off.

  The writer recalls that he should have realized then the jig was a fraud, even if it was reflective of his acquaintance. And it couldn’t go on forever.

  “It was all dazzling fun, but in late 1988 a dark cloud poked its way into the festivities. It began when I tried to board an All Nippon Airways flight that Epstein had upgraded to first class. The A.N.A. representative told me it could not be a first-class ticket, which cost $6,000, because I had paid only $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,” Edward Jay Epstein would write in 2019.

  Just as the small-scale fraud came to an end, the large-scale one also did. Hoffenberg ultimately pleaded guilty to $460 million worth of fraud in 1995. “Epstein has remained free and has used and benefited from the ill-gotten gains he amassed as a result of his criminal and fraudulent activities,” Hoffenberg, who has been keen in recent years to blame his former associate for the financial crimes, has alleged in court documents.14

  * * *

  —

  Epstein had now reached the top of his field, finding his way there through a mixture of charm and fraud. He was willing to lie to get what he wanted, and to manipulate powerful people through unknown means into giving him a massive amount of money and power. But was that enough? No, he wanted more.

  7

  The Accomplice

  When Jeffrey Met Ghislaine

  If I see somebody he likes, I go over and say, “How would you like to meet a rich man?”

  GHISLAINE MAXWELL

  In 1990, Epstein spent $2.5 million on a Palm Beach mansion.1 The intercoastal waterfront home is an eight-thousand-square-foot, five-bedroom, eight-bathroom stunner, with privacy bushes and a white fence giving cover to the exclusive enclave. The location is prime—less than a mile and a half from Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort, which was purchased five years earlier. It is now estimated to be worth nearly $17 million.

  Epstein’s rise from Coney Island boy to Upper East Side man had taken less than a decade—with stops at Dalton, Bear Stearns, and then his own shops along the way. He had money and all the luxuries of wealth. Multiple homes, private jets, and beautiful women.

  Yet in spite of his newfound wealth, Epstein had a difficult time fitting in with elite society circles. Friends described him as crass with no taste for the arts, food, or culture.

  “Palm Beach is a pretty snooty place,” said another friend of Epstein’s in an interview. “There’s no way they were accepting him. Forget all the other things you know about him. He was a lower-middle-class Jew. He was from Coney Island. His father was a Parks Department employee. This guy didn’t have an air of class about him. That alone would shun him in Palm Beach.”

  But Epstein still wanted their acceptance. “Pretension was very important to him,” said the friend.

  Epstein might have lived among the elites, but he was not one of them. That is, not until he met Ghislaine Maxwell.

  Once he met her, his life would change. She introduced him to class, was his match in every way, and would eventually become his partner in one of the darkest schemes one could ever imagine.

  * * *

  —

  In the early 1990s, Ghislaine Maxwell was young, popular, and broke. The French-born ninth child of the British media mogul Robert Maxwell, Ghislaine, then in her early thirties, had moved stateside after her father’s suspicious passing.

  On November 5, 1991, Robert Maxwell, owner of the Mirror Group newspapers in the U.K. and the New York Daily News, had been found dead, floating off the Canary Islands, miles from his yacht, Lady Ghislaine, named for his reportedly favorite child.2 Immediately questions arose as to whether he had simply fallen off his boat in the middle of the night, committed suicide, or been killed.

  Robert Maxwell had plenty of enemies. His insatiable quest for power and influence led him to raid his companies and banks to help prop up his ever-growing schemes. There were also allegations that he had been a spy—for the Israeli Mossad or for the British or Russian intelligence services. Foreign intelligence services often recruit connected businessmen to become assets or operatives to funnel information on colleagues or political figures they know back to spies. Maxwell, with his transatlantic connections in media, politics, and business, would have been a good recruiting target.

  Some thought Maxwell had committed suicide, but his wife maintained that he had not.

  In her memoir, A Mind of My Own, she revealed that an autopsy discovered “precise details of a whole range of injuries which had been caused before death; there were significant hemorrhages in and around damaged tissues on the back, shoulders, and arms.”3 The report explicitly states, “It is impossible to exclude homicide.”

  Suicide or not, Ghislaine was left without a father and without resources. The comforts her family fortune afforded her had been wiped out. Especially when it became clear after her father was gone that he had looted hundreds of millions of dollars from the pensions of his company to help cover his debts and keep his empire afloat.

  Ghislaine Maxwell had become accustomed to all the trappings of the British elite. With her long, dark wavy hair, she had a way about her that made the men in her life swoon.

  But in order to live the life she aspired to, she needed currency. And, given her family’s sudden predicament, she needed it quick—and from somewhere else.

  * * *

  —

  Despite her father’s passing, Ghislaine Maxwell was quick to use his Rolodex and ingratiate herself into America’s most elite social circles. She had helped make inroads into New York City when her father owned the Daily News. But now she decided to stay there permanently and make it her home.

  “Ghislaine basically didn’t have a job, and she went to the opening of anything that had a gold envelope to it,” said her friend Laura Goldman in an interview. “She was quite a social person, but part of it was that she wasn’t working all day, so she could go to everything.”

  Ghislaine would party with the movie mogul Harvey Weinstein, the magazine editor Tina Brown, and Arianna Huffington, the socialite wife of a Republican congressman. She was also friends with American royalty (the Clintons) and British royalty (Prince Andrew).4

  Some called her “Goodtimes Ghislaine,” a source told The Sun. “She was a huge networker at these bashes, going from famous person to famous person and introducing people who didn’t have a prior connection to each other,” the source said.5

  But with her father’s passing, she too was missing something—money.

  Which is why in the early 1990s Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell would turn out to be such a durable duo. Each provided what the other one lacked.

  “She told me how she had absolutely no money in her pocket and was bawling her eyes out on the streets of New York just prior to meeting Jeffr
ey,” recalled another friend in an interview.

  Epstein was very rich and still very much a bachelor. Eva Andersson, the former Miss Sweden and now a doctor, dated Epstein for eleven years before throwing in the towel in the early 1990s. “He really loved her,” recalled a friend in an interview. But he had no interest in tying himself down to one woman.

  What he was interested in was someone who could help him make his way in posh society. Soon Ghislaine and he would be a couple—and then even more. Maxwell was Epstein’s “half ex-girlfriend, half employee, half best friend and fixer,” as one acquaintance described it.6

  According to Epstein’s former house manager Juan Alessi, Ghislaine served as both Epstein’s girlfriend and the head of his household staff from the mid-1990s until the mid-2000s. “She was the manager of all the households, because he has homes all over the world,” he said in a deposition.7

  The status of their relationship was a mystery even to Epstein’s inner circle. “There was a period of time when she was his girlfriend, and then there was a period of time when she was not,” said a longtime associate of Epstein’s, noting that the precise beginning and end of these periods was unclear.

  While the couple often shared a bed and Maxwell acted like his significant other—cooking breakfast for Epstein’s overnight guests, accompanying him to social functions—Epstein openly downplayed their romantic involvement. “Nah, she’s not my girlfriend; she’s just somebody I know,” Epstein told one male friend, according to an interview.

  Conchita Sarnoff, a journalist and advocate against human trafficking who knew the couple, has said of Maxwell, “She seemed in love when I first saw them together. I believe Jeffrey was taking care of her. I feel Ghislaine clung to Jeffrey because she felt protected by him.”8

  Epstein, Sarnoff said, “seemed less in love but more enamored.”

  Together their social life flourished. Maxwell introduced Epstein to her friends Prince Andrew and the Duchess of York, her contacts on the New York social scene, and she was on Epstein’s arm when he first visited the White House under President Bill Clinton. She also provided Epstein with companionship and real-world lessons on how elites operate.

  The relationship was not just based on mutual benefit. Friends said Maxwell was deeply in love with Epstein and hoped to marry him. People close to the couple noted that Epstein shared many characteristics with Maxwell’s late father—a serial philanderer with a taste for very young women—whom she had revered from childhood.

  Epstein “was her sun and moon,” said Maxwell’s friend Laura Goldman. “Everything revolved around him.”

  Privately, Epstein was also deeply protective of his relationship with Maxwell. One longtime friend, who was charmed by the British brunette, recalled asking Epstein if it would be okay to ask her on a date. Epstein said it didn’t bother him, and the gentleman took Maxwell out to dinner in New York.

  “That was a bad idea,” revealed the friend in an interview. “[Jeffrey] didn’t talk to me for six months after that.”

  * * *

  —

  Maxwell fed one of Epstein’s needs. It was roughly around this time that he got her to satisfy another. Epstein would provide the money Maxwell desired to live the lifestyle she sought. Maxwell, in turn, would provide young girls for Epstein.

  Epstein made no attempt to be monogamous. He always seemed to have a rotation of attractive young women hanging around his homes or accompanying him to parties.

  One friend recalled asking Maxwell where Epstein met all these girls in New York. Maxwell took credit for finding them.

  “If I see somebody he likes, I go over and say, ‘How would you like to meet a rich man?’” claimed Maxwell.

  The curious friend asked Maxwell where she slept while Epstein was having sex with these other women.

  “I get out of the bedroom,” said Maxwell, nonchalantly.

  “Maxwell is very clever,” the journalist Conchita Sarnoff has observed.9 “In spite of her personal insecurities, as a result of her father’s death and financial challenges, I believe she nevertheless knew exactly what she was doing when she agreed to solicit girls on his behalf. However, I don’t think that phase of their relationship began until she understood Epstein would not marry her.”

  She would accompany him as he jet set across the globe, catering to his every whim. “Every pretty girl in New York, in those days, Ghislaine would invite to Jeffrey’s,” Maxwell’s acquaintance Euan Rellie has said. “Her job was to jazz up his social life by getting fashionable young women to show up.”10

  * * *

  —

  Although it is unclear exactly when Epstein began preying on underage girls, accusers have dated it back over two decades. Numerous victims tell similar tales: they were young, vulnerable, and overpowered by Epstein and his associates.

  George Houraney, the director of the American Dream Calendar Girls pageant, said in an interview that he was forced to ban Epstein from his events in the early 1990s after he started preying on the contestants—some of whom were as young as fifteen.

  Epstein had started showing up at the pageants in Las Vegas. He was in his late thirties, with a cocky swagger and a business card falsely identifying him as the head of Victoria’s Secret.

  The contest was a less sophisticated version of Miss America and took place at casinos in Vegas, Atlantic City, and the Bahamas. Hundreds of girls from across the country competed, hoping it would be their ticket to Hollywood stardom or the New York City catwalks.

  Unlike Miss America, the contest was open to girls as young as fifteen years old. National winners got cash prizes and were featured in the American Dream Girl bikini calendar, often posting on top of a hot rod.

  “The girls that came to me were always young, mostly naive. Some of them had never even been on an airplane,” said Houraney in an interview.

  “There was no age limit except you had to be fifteen or older, so we had a lot of teens enter,” he said. “It was a chance for them to get a scholarship, or money, or whatever, or [try to] get an acting job.”

  The event had some corporate sponsors, including the men’s cologne brand English Leather. Epstein said he wanted to sign on as a backer. But it soon became clear he had another interest in the show.

  Houraney said he started getting complaints from girls and their parents. Contestants claimed Epstein promised to help them with their careers and then tried to pressure them into “sexual situations” and badgered them to send him nude photos.

  “By the third event, I found out he was trying to get girls in his room and that’s against all my rules. Girls weren’t allowed in sponsors’ rooms or judges’ rooms. You know what I mean?” said Houraney. After that, Houraney said he banned Epstein from the events.

  But this didn’t dissuade Epstein. Houraney said he ran into him later at an American Dream Calendar Girls party hosted by Donald Trump at Mar-a-Lago. Trump had partnered with the beauty pageant through his Trump Taj Mahal casino in Atlantic City.

  According to Houraney, the party was supposed to be a meet and greet for American Dream girls and representatives of beauty brands, such as Revlon and Max Factor. He said Trump’s staff handled the guest list, and Epstein was the only “sponsor” who was actually invited.

  “In walked Jeffrey Epstein, and I had a fit,” said Houraney. “He thought because he’s now friends with Trump, and I’m producing events at Trump’s [casino], that he can just buy Trump and still get into my events.”

  Furious, Houraney said he pulled Epstein aside.

  “You know, you can’t keep doing this. You’re going to get arrested,” Houraney told him.

  Epstein laughed it off.

  “I’ve got enough money to get out of anything I ever need,” Epstein responded, according to Houraney. “There’s plenty of countries I can live in like a king and I don’t have to worry.”

  All
the same, perhaps it was after this that Epstein decided that his and Maxwell’s ordinary efforts to procure young women were not enough and began what would become their notorious pyramid scheme for preying on underage girls.

  * * *

  —

  It worked like this: Epstein or someone working on his behalf would solicit a young girl to come to his house or where he was staying to give him a “massage.” The unsuspecting victim-in-waiting would nearly always be from a poor or otherwise disadvantaged background.

  She’d be offered a chance to make, say, $200 giving a “massage,” wherein she’d be sexually coerced or assaulted by Epstein. Depending on how much sexual gratification she gave him, she’d be paid more.

  But on some occasions the girl would not succumb to Epstein’s demands. That would be okay, too, so long as she in turn recruited other girls from her peer group who in her place would perform on demand. In fact, every girl had the opportunity to make more money this way. With the payment for recruiting being the same as for being sexually violated, both became options. They could themselves service Epstein or recruit other kids to the cause. The ideal scenario, in Epstein’s eyes, was for a girl to do both.

  Which all helps explain why Epstein targeted girls from low-income families. They were more attracted to the idea of getting paid $200. Perhaps not an exorbitant sum, but an amount of money they had no other opportunity to obtain for an hour’s work. Additionally, their friends—and their friends’ friends—could also more easily fall prey to the financier. There was another bonus, perhaps, that Epstein and his consorts had in mind when they plotted their devilish scam. Lower-class kids would be less likely to be believed by law enforcement and adults.

  Epstein’s appetite was so ferocious he would, at his height, require “massages” three times a day. Moreover, he craved variety and youth.