A Convenient Death

by Alana Goodman

  Reiter was furious. He realized Epstein was circumventing the law and likely to get off with nothing more than a slap on the wrist. In a rare move, he sent a letter to the victim’s parents letting them know that he was referring the case to the FBI.

  “I do not believe justice has been sufficiently served by the indictment that has been issued,” said Reiter in the letter. “Therefore, please know that this matter has been referred to the Federal Bureau of Investigation to determine if violations of federal law have occurred.”

  Within weeks, the feds took over the case. In almost no time they found three dozen more alleged victims. The federal prosecutor in charge of the office handling the case was Alexander Acosta, an attorney formerly in the private practice Kirkland & Ellis.

  Epstein meanwhile altered his tactics, hiring lawyers from Acosta’s former law firm to represent him as he dealt with the feds. They would know Acosta, and maybe, just maybe, they could get him out of the fix that the FBI had landed him in. “These were very high-profile lawyers. And they put a lot of pressure to bear on [Acosta] to work out some kind of a plea agreement, even though at the same time the plea negotiations were going on, the FBI was uncovering more and more evidence that Epstein’s crimes went far beyond Palm Beach, that he possibly was operating an international sex trafficking organization, in which he had recruiters overseas,” the reporter Julie K. Brown, a Miami Herald investigative reporter, said in an interview with Democracy Now!5

  “And so, there were two parallel things going on: the FBI working the case at the same time that Alex Acosta and his team were trying to make the case go away, so to speak, by negotiating some kind of a plea bargain.”

  When a deal was finally struck between Epstein’s lawyers and Acosta, over a friendly breakfast at a Miami hotel, the financier was effectively able to shut down the growing investigation. That was the effect of the non-prosecution agreement, signed September 24, 2007. In exchange, Epstein would avoid federal charges and agree to prostitution charges with the Palm Beach County state attorney.

  The deal was a major victory for Epstein. But he didn’t see it that way, according to his attorney at the time, Alan Dershowitz.

  “If the full extent of his activities were known when he made that deal, I don’t think he would have gotten that deal,” said Dershowitz.

  “He didn’t think I got a good deal for him . . . For a while he complained about the bills and had them audited by his accountant and stuff like that. Ultimately, we compromised and he never paid me the full amount he owed me.”

  It was true that the prostitution charges would carry a negative stigma for Epstein, but a far less severe one than child rape and sex trafficking, which is what he almost certainly would have faced had the Federal Bureau of Investigation been given the leeway to carry on their own investigation to its conclusion. Besides, the FBI investigation had been rapidly expanding. Agents not only had been investigating his Florida home but also had been traveling to New York and New Mexico to get a better handle on the lascivious and illegal activity he had been engaging in at his numerous residences across America.

  So on June 30, 2008, more than three years after the initial complaint from the worried stepmother was lodged with the local police department, Jeffrey Epstein pleaded guilty to two charges: soliciting a prostitute and soliciting prostitution of a minor. He was sentenced to eighteen months at the Palm Beach County jail’s private wing, where minor and low-risk inmates were housed.

  But Epstein proved even more crafty, using his influence and money effectively to buy an even more cushy sentence.

  “I visited him once in prison . . . because he needed advice about what level he had to register in New York [as a sex offender],” said Dershowitz in an interview. “He was very encouraged, optimistic. He’s a likable guy and everybody in the prison liked him. They got along; everybody was just nice to him. He didn’t do hard time. But nobody does, if you get that kind of a sentence.”

  Another friend who visited him said in an interview that Epstein “actually lived in his own part of the jail nobody else was in. It was like a luxury jail.”

  The work-release program Epstein managed to finagle made the sentence an inconvenience rather than a severe punishment. It allowed the now admitted sexual predator to go to work for at times fourteen hours a day. So in the morning he would get picked up by a waiting chauffeur who’d drive him to a Palm Beach office building. Fourteen hours later, after a full day away at the office, he would be driven back to jail, where he would spend the night. And believe it or not, he was working overtime—six days a week.

  While in jail, Epstein boasted to a friend that he was in negotiations to buy a portion of the Miami Dolphins from the then owner, Wayne Huizenga, according to an interview. Epstein, who knew and cared nothing about sports, mused, “I think if you buy them, you worry about hot dog sales.”

  The friend also recalled one jail visit that Epstein cut short by telling him, “It’s 4:00 p.m., I’m expecting a call from Israel, from the prime minister.” At that hour, it would have been nearing midnight in Tel Aviv.

  So sweet was Epstein’s deal that he was able to receive his “massages” even while serving time. They were carried out at his office, instead of his mansion, though it is believed that they came with all the benefits of the ones that got him into the joint in the first place.

  “It was not for some business arrangement and it was for . . . improper sexual contact,” Brad Edwards, a lawyer representing accusers, told the Daily Beast.

  “He just wasn’t in jail. He only slept there. He was in his office most of the day and what I can tell you he had visitors, female visitors,” the lawyer told the website.

  “They believed they were going there for something other than a sexual purpose. Once there, he used his perfect master manipulation to turn the situation into something sexual,” said the lawyer.6

  And this is why, when Epstein finally did die in jail, so many were inclined to believe he was murdered. After all, he had a history of beating the courts. And he had powerful presidents and princes in his pocket who could help him out in a time of need.

  11

  The Prince

  Transatlantic Travels with Andrew

  Jeffrey’s my friend. Being loyal to your friends is a virtue. And I’m going to be loyal to him.

  PRINCE ANDREW

  The New York literary agent John Brockman described a scene he once walked in on when he went to Epstein’s Upper East Side mansion.

  “Last time I visited his house (the largest private residence in NYC), I walked in to find him in a sweatsuit and a British guy in a suit with suspenders, getting foot massages from two young well-dressed Russian women [one apparently named Irina]. After grilling me for a while about cyber-security, the Brit, named Andy, was commenting on the Swedish authorities and the charges against Julian Assange,” Brockman wrote in an email to a client for whom he was trying to facilitate a meeting with his financial patron, Jeffrey Epstein.

  According to Brockman, the Brit named Andy said, “We think they’re liberal in Sweden, but its [sic] more like Northern England as opposed to Southern Europe.

  “In Monaco, Albert works 12 hours a day but at 9pm, when he goes out, he does whatever he wants, and nobody cares. But, if I do it, I’m in big trouble,” the Brit said.

  That is when, according to Brockman’s own retelling, he “realized that the recipient of Irina’s foot massage was his Royal Highness, Prince Andrew, the Duke of York.” Prince Andrew has denied this encounter ever took place.

  These are the sorts of stories that seem to follow Prince Andrew wherever he goes. In 2020 a local attorney general accused the British royal of groping women on Jeffrey Epstein’s private island.1

  “An employee told me that he saw Prince Andrew on a balcony out at Little St. James groping girls right out in the open,” the U.S. Virgin Islands prosecutor Denise Ge
orge said in an interview with Vanity Fair.2

  “He said he remembered walking up to him and saying, ‘Good morning, your Highness,’” the prosecutor said, retelling the conversation Prince Andrew had with Epstein’s former employee.

  * * *

  —

  Jeffrey Epstein was exposed. Getting investigated and arrested on child sex crimes revealed to him that he was vulnerable. Yes, he had effectively been able to minimize damage. Money, power, and friends in the right places helped. They always did.

  But no matter how light the sentence he received, it was humiliating. It was also a hindrance—though not a complete one—to the three-a-day “massage” routine he demanded. Moreover, it came with various limitations: public shunning by some, like Bill Clinton, and being legally required to register as a sex offender.

  It was what one might call a learning experience. Though to the public, Epstein was even less contrite. “I’m not a sexual predator, I’m an ‘offender,’” he told the New York Post in a 2011 interview.

  “It’s the difference between a murderer and a person who steals a bagel,” Epstein added.

  He maintained that view until the end. “I just want you to know I’m not a pedophile,” he told a Fox Business reporter in 2019.3 “Maybe the only thing worse than being called a pedophile is being called a hedge fund manager.”

  Practically speaking, Epstein’s new status as an admitted sex offender did not mean retreat for him. It did not mean a sudden change of behavior. Obviously not. No, it meant he had to get smarter, better, and more intentional.

  “Jeffrey knew all of the right people in this game, and trading girls for favors is how he kept in the circle,” one victim who accused Epstein of sex trafficking has claimed.

  So he cozied up to his good friend Prince Andrew, the Duke of York, which would both help him re-ingratiate himself into the upper echelons of America’s elite and provide a bit of protection from the prying eyes of a curious public and overzealous law enforcement officers.

  “I remember when Andrew and Jeffrey Epstein first became friends,” a source told Vanity Fair. “Jeffrey had Andrew put on a pair of sweatpants for the first time in his life. He had him wear blue jeans for the first time. It was Jeffrey who taught Andrew how to relax.”

  Relaxation—which, for the royal, allegedly came with a captive kid for his own sexual gratification—in exchange for what Epstein wanted.

  * * *

  —

  Epstein and Prince Andrew had one thing in common: they both dated Ghislaine Maxwell. The shared love would seem unimaginable. A Brooklyn boy of Jewish heritage going out with the same woman once fancied by a British royal of unimpeachable lineage?

  The connection might help explain the closeness of the trio, and also the weirdness.

  “I met through his girlfriend back in 1999 who—and I’d known her since she was at university in the UK and it would be, to some extent, a stretch to say that as it were we were close friends,” Prince Andrew said in a 2019 interview with the BBC, meant to deal with the fallout of his close relationship with Epstein.

  In fact, a Maxwell friend revealed in an interview that the two were more than friends. Which might not have been the only fact that the British royal elided.

  A letter in defense of Prince Andrew, by his private secretary, Alastair Watson, pegged the start of their relationship at least half a decade earlier. “The duke has known Mr Epstein since being introduced to him in the early 1990s. The insinuations and innuendos that have been made in relation to the duke are without foundation,” Watson wrote in March 2011.

  Regardless, Epstein and Prince Andrew were indisputably friends. “I saw him once or twice a year, perhaps maybe maximum of three times a year,” the duke explained.

  So close, indeed, that he’d usually stay at Epstein’s house if it was vacant. “Quite often if I was in the United States and doing things and if he wasn’t there, he would say, ‘Well, why don’t you come and use my houses?’ So I said, ‘That’s very kind, thank you very much indeed,’” said the duke.

  Indeed, he would at other times stay at Epstein’s home—even if he was in town. The duke claims to have admired Epstein solely for his intellectual pursuits. “He had the most extraordinary ability to bring extraordinary people together and that’s the bit that I remember as going to the dinner parties where you would meet academics, politicians, people from the United Nations, I mean it was a cosmopolitan group of what I would describe as US eminents,” he told the BBC.

  The friendship wasn’t just enjoyed in America. Epstein was a guest of the duke’s at Windsor Castle, and then they went on a shooting expedition at Sandringham House, the queen’s winter home, in 2000.

  Andrew claims he had a keen awareness of the signs of child sex abuse, because he was a patron of the U.K.’s National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children. “I knew what the things were to look for but I never saw them,” he said.

  But in July 2006, a month after Epstein was arrested for the first time in Palm Beach, Andrew invited him to his daughter Princess Beatrice’s eighteenth birthday party at Windsor Castle. “I’m afraid, you see this is the problem is that an awful lot of this was going on in the United States and I wasn’t a party to it and I knew nothing about it,” he rather unconvincingly now claims.

  Because it is now known that when Prince Andrew was aware of Epstein’s predilection for sexually abusing young girls, it did not prevent the royal from remaining friends with the pervert.

  In December 2010, the duke came to New York and stayed at Epstein’s mansion. Epstein was released from his sweetheart jail sentence nearly a year and a half earlier, in July 2009.

  * * *

  —

  Friendship was not the only thing binding Epstein and Prince Andrew together. There was also money.

  In 2011, the British press revealed that the New York financier had helped the duke’s ex-wife, Sarah Ferguson, the Duchess of York, with her enormous debts. She had accepted, through her assistant, around $20,000 (£15,000, to be exact) from Epstein.

  The money was delivered in response to a direct appeal from Prince Andrew, the U.K. ’s Telegraph reported in 2011.

  “The convicted paedophile gave £15,000 to the Duchess’s former personal assistant, Johnny O’Sullivan, after the Duke allegedly made a personal appeal to him to help his former wife with her financial troubles,” the paper would write in a shocking exposé.

  “The Duchess’s spokesman confirmed last night that Epstein, who was sentenced to 18 months in jail for child sex offences in 2008, paid off part of the £78,000 the Duchess owed Mr O’Sullivan in a ‘private arrangement’ between the two men.”

  The astonishing thing is not so much that a British royal would take a rich financier’s money; it’s that a royal could be so cheaply bought.

  Vanity Fair wrote that the real sum of money received by Ferguson was much, much larger. “The major reason Andrew hung out with Jeffrey was to get money for Sarah Ferguson,” a source told the glossy magazine in a 2011 article.4

  “Andrew feels responsible for Sarah. She walked away from their divorce with nothing, unlike Princess Diana, who got millions from Prince Charles. There have been newspaper reports that Sarah got £15,000 [$24,500] from Jeffrey, but I think that Sarah has actually received hundreds of thousands of dollars from him,” the source claimed.

  The Duchess of York was desperate. She was deeply in debt and needed cash. When she ended her marriage to the duke in 1996, she reportedly was in the hole £4.2 million.

  The queen was reportedly “deeply concerned” about her ex-daughter-in-law’s financial state. Bankruptcy by a royal, even an ex-royal, had never been claimed before. And it would be deeply humiliating for the entire family.

  Despite being “continually on the verge of financial bankruptcy,” as Ferguson once told Oprah, she has never had to file for bankruptc
y. That’s in part thanks to Epstein, and perhaps much more so than is even realized.5

  * * *

  —

  Prince Andrew has been accused of sexual misconduct by Virginia Roberts Giuffre, who blames Maxwell for putting her in the situation.

  On a visit to England in 2001, Maxwell awoke Giuffre one morning to say, “We’re going shopping for a new ensemble . . . To go dancing with a Prince of England this evening,” Giuffre has recalled in an unpublished book she shopped called “The Billionaire’s Playboy Club.”

  “What . . . wow!” Giuffre replied, feigning interest and surprise.

  All day they shopped as Maxwell prepped the girl for her forced date. “Make sure your [sic] bubbly and energetic, nobody want’s [sic] a dead horse,” Maxwell commanded. “Who knows where this could lead for you.”

  Giuffre, then seventeen, put on a pink mini-T-shirt to go with her embroidered jeans decorated with horses. She had a brand-new Burberry handbag to complement her outfit.

  She was a nervous wreck. So she popped a Xanax to help keep her cool. Epstein and Maxwell both teased the kid for her nerves, she recalls.

  Finally, at 6:00 p.m., Prince Andrew arrived. They exchanged kisses on the cheeks, and soon the three adults were shit-talking the royal’s ex-wife, Sarah Ferguson.

  The foursome then went to a nearby restaurant for dinner, where they were seated as couples—Jeffrey and Ghislaine on one side, Prince Andrew and Giuffre on the other. “I remained calm, cool, and collected, hoping that my nervousness wouldn’t spill out at any given moment,” Giuffre recalls.

  Next the party traveled to the exclusive nightclub Tramp. Epstein took his usual place—a chair in the corner, where he could watch what would happen. Prince Andrew got everyone cocktails, except Epstein, whom he brought sparkling water, knowing full well that his friend didn’t drink.