A Convenient Death

by Alana Goodman

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  Epstein fancied himself somewhat of a media mogul. At least that’s what he aspired to be.

  In 2003, he tried to buy New York magazine. Joining forces with heavy hitters from across media, Hollywood, and advertising, Epstein sought to have greater control over those who buy ink by the barrel. The group comprised the movie mogul Harvey Weinstein, the advertising executive Donny Deutsch, the moneyman Nelson Peltz, the journalist Michael Wolff, and the owner of U.S. News & World Report, Mort Zuckerman.

  New York had written the first major profile of Epstein—a long, mostly laudatory piece that came out on the heels of his Africa trip. It had in some ways changed his trajectory. He had before that been only a slight fascination of gossip pages. But no longer.

  It showed him firsthand the power of the press. And made him want a piece of it.

  He, Deutsch, Peltz, Wolff, and Zuckerman put in an offer for the magazine for $44 million. It was somewhat of a lowball offer for the publication with a circulation of 440,000. Two others would bid more, and the winner would be the Wall Streeter Bruce Wasserstein, who ponied up $55 million.

  In truth, all the bids would be too high from strictly a business view; New York made an annual profit of only $1 million. But it illustrates that the interest was never financial. The goal was power.

  “These kind of players like to continually prove they are vital,” the Yale School of Management associate dean Jeffrey A. Sonnenfeld told David Carr of The New York Times.8 “What was motivating this deal was not a good financial outcome, but a demonstration of power. If it was no big deal, they would not have gotten involved in the first place.”

  Wolff, a good friend of Epstein’s who was the original organizer of the group, admitted the error was teaming up with others. “We got outplayed . . . The idea of bringing together many interested parties seemed like a good idea, until it turned out to be a bad idea. It was less efficient than doing it with just one guy.”

  The failure, however, would leave Epstein undeterred. So the next year he joined forces with Zuckerman to invest $25 million in Radar Magazine. Epstein entered the enterprise an equal partner with Zuckerman but was a complete neophyte in terms of being in the publishing world.

  But, at least outwardly, he took a business approach to the acquisition. “When I invest in companies, I invest in the people, and I don’t think that anybody has the track record with start-ups that Mort does,” Epstein told The New York Times in 2004.9

  “I always focus on the potential downside of an investment, and I don’t think this is something that is going to lose money,” he added.

  That last comment would perhaps show more hubris than knowledge. The magazine was an embarrassing flop.

  Radar Magazine lasted only three issues.

  “It’s too difficult a climate to start magazines in, given the advertising conditions for this period of time,” Zuckerman would tell The New York Times, publicly taking the fall for the financial failure.10 Epstein did not publicly comment.

  The blame would be placed squarely on advertising. It was a bust, they claimed, seemingly giving up before even giving it a serious chance for success.

  But few close to the project believed that was the real reason. “No one could quite figure out why, after just three issues, after putting all that money in, they would suddenly abandon the project,” Radar’s founding editor, Maer Roshan, told Vanity Fair in 2019.11 “Our advertising revenue and circulation was far ahead of projections.”

  Roshan proposed a theory, however. “When you look at the sequence of events, it’s clear that the police first approached Epstein at some point during the Radar rollout . . . It’s not surprising that Mort [Zuckerman] would want to distance himself from that partnership as quickly as possible.”

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  One of the ways Jeffrey Epstein played the press was by holding information over them—signaling that he knew damaging information about the rich and famous. And also by keeping them close. The story told by the New York Times journalist James B. Stewart illustrates this.

  The journalist had contacted Epstein to determine whether he was advising Elon Musk, the founder of the electric car giant Tesla. The reporter had heard this was the case.

  Musk’s and his company’s position would be clear—that it didn’t happen. “It is incorrect to say that Epstein ever advised Elon on anything,” a spokeswoman said.

  But if one reads between the lines, the spokeswoman’s denial is weak. It does not state, for instance, that Epstein and Musk never had conversations or that there was never a relationship. It rather slyly claims only that Musk never received advice from the predator.

  Regardless of the Musk-Epstein relationship, it’s a window into Epstein’s operation. The reporter reached out to Epstein for comment, and instead received an invitation to his palatial New York mansion.

  Stewart says he was greeted at the door by a young woman with an eastern European accent who led him upstairs, where he was soon joined by a casually dressed Epstein.

  Epstein showed off his photos with world leaders, pointing to one of the crown prince of Saudi Arabia, Mohammed bin Salman, Woody Allen, and Bill Clinton.

  They then began to chat. For an hour and a half.

  The conversation was not limited to the work Epstein might have been doing for Tesla. Epstein, it appears, was keen to keep up the perception that he indeed was doing something for the car company and tech entrepreneur, but he also acknowledged that because of his reputation no one wanted to be associated with him. He predicted any such claim would be denied.

  But of course a tie to a legitimate company—especially one like Tesla, which is seen as cutting-edge and in a major growth industry—served Epstein well. He would welcome any such association because it would make him seem perhaps more legitimate than he actually was.

  A week after the interview, Stewart received a call from Epstein to see if he would join him for dinner together with his good buddy Woody Allen. Later he’d be invited to another Epstein dinner with the journalist Michael Wolff and the former Trump adviser Steve Bannon.

  And then came the final offer: an invitation to Stewart to write a biography of Epstein. The journalist declined.

  Nevertheless, the stunt Epstein tried to pull is reminiscent of a Jack Abramoff trick.

  Abramoff, the prominent Washington, D.C., lobbyist who pleaded guilty in 2006 to tax evasion, conspiracy, and fraud, would try to win over staffers on Capitol Hill by offering them future jobs. The minute the jobs were accepted, the staffers no longer were working for the constituents but were, in effect, extensions of Abramoff’s own lobbying shop.

  “When we would become friendly with an office and they were important to us, and the chief of staff was a competent person, I would say or my staff would say to him or her at some point, ‘You know, when you’re done working on the Hill, we’d very much like you to consider coming to work for us,’” Abramoff revealed in an interview he gave to CBS’s 60 Minutes after he served three years in prison.12

  He continued, “Now the moment I said that to them or any of our staff said that to ’em, that was it. We owned them. And what does that mean? Every request from our office, every request of our clients, everything that we want, they’re gonna do. And not only that, they’re gonna think of things we can’t think of to do.”

  Surely Abramoff and Epstein did not operate in the same profession—one a lobbyist, the other a supposed money manager. But they worked in the same field. Both courted influence and wielded power, and used people as pawns in their quests to achieve their own goals. The notion that Epstein would try to strike an agreement favorable to the reporter seems reflective of his own true intentions in holding that meeting and the subsequent conversations.

  16

  The Arrest

  The End Is Near

  Mr. E
pstein knew an astonishing number of rich, famous and powerful people, and had photos to prove it. He also claimed to know a great deal about these people, some of it potentially damaging or embarrassing, including details about their supposed sexual proclivities and recreational drug use.

  JAMES B. STEWART

  Jeffrey Epstein inhaled his last breath of free air on July 6, 2019. Arriving on a private jet at New Jersey’s Teterboro Airport, the six-foot, 185-pound, now nearly all-white-haired sex predator would be picked up by federal authorities as his plane landed, arriving from Paris, France.

  He’d be fingerprinted and processed, eventually moved by the federal government to the Metropolitan Correctional Center in Manhattan. He would never walk free again.

  Federal records would reveal he’d been traveling with a Virgin Islands driver’s license, a Florida driver’s license, an American Express card, a UnitedHealthcare insurance card, a Medicare insurance card, a U.S. Customs and Border Protection boaters option card, and a passport. He would check in no personal belongings to MCC.

  The investigation of Epstein was being conducted by the federal prosecutors out of the Southern District of New York. But that was not the only federal law enforcement body pursuing charges. The U.S. Marshals Service was looking into whether he had filed his travel arrangements properly in accordance with laws surrounding registered sex offenders, which he had been since his first guilty plea in Florida more than a decade earlier.

  The charges Epstein had been brought in on were related to activities between 2002 and 2005. He was being accused of sex trafficking of underage victims in New York and Florida. The charging documents said there were dozens of victims. And, as Epstein had been known to do, the victims had allegedly been paid off in cash.

  The strange thing about the charges is that they did not cover more recent activities. And they appeared to piggyback off the earlier investigation into Epstein, which had of course resulted in his early guilty plea on state charges. It would not take Johnnie Cochran to envision that Epstein’s defense—and who wouldn’t have assumed there would be one?—would revolve around both a prior non-prosecution agreement he had signed with the feds in Florida and constitutional double-jeopardy questions.

  The attorney general of the United States, Bill Barr, the son of the man who likely hired Epstein at Dalton so many years earlier, would say that his co-conspirators were likewise being investigated. The so-called co-conspirators would remain uncharged and unnamed as of the time of this writing, despite there being ample evidence that Epstein had assistance in carrying out his crimes.

  Flight records of Epstein’s plane would indicate that he had gone to Monaco and Austria, according to The New York Times.1 Sex offenders are legally required to alert authorities of their whereabouts and travel arrangements, but he alerted authorities only that he was traveling to France and the Virgin Islands. Big-time criminals who are successful at evading the law have been known to be picked up on far more minor crimes, but the U.S. Marshals Service had not made an arrest on these apparent illegal actions.

  More worrisome, girls were suspected of being aboard Epstein’s plane throughout his 2019 international travel.

  For the last few years, Epstein had been keeping a low profile. It had, until very recently, served him quite well. He had in a prior life flown too close to the sun. “It’s the Icarus story, someone who flies too close to the sun,” a reporter once told Epstein, giving him the elevator pitch on the story he was writing about the sex predator.

  “Did Icarus like massages?” Epstein responded, making a self-deprecating crack.2

  The wealth and power he had so aggressively sought had helped him achieve his ultimate ambitions. He had come a world away from the childhood he despised in the working-class confines of Coney Island. His friendships with world leaders and business titans gave him prestige. His philanthropy won him accolades from the top scholars and scientists of his generation. And it helped him carry out his business, which most assuredly was not—and never was—money management. But he had flown too close to the sun. He got burned.

  This was not lost on him. “If my ultimate goal was to stay private, traveling with Clinton was a bad move on the chessboard. I recognize that now. But you know what? Even Kasparov makes them. You move on,” he reportedly told a friend.3

  His predatory ways were known. He was toxic.

  And yet, in 2019, he was still going strong. Until his final arrest, he had not been stopped from continuing to traffic children, both for his sexual pleasure and for service of those still around him.

  “Epstein engaged in a pattern and practice of trafficking and sexually abusing young women and female children on this private, secluded island of Little St. James where Epstein and his associates could avoid detection of their illegal activity from Virgin Islands and federal law enforcement and prevent these young women and underage girls from leaving freely and escaping the abuse,” the U.S. Virgin Islands prosecutor Denise George would allege in a lawsuit filed in 2020 after his death.4

  In fact, he had recently purchased, in 2016, another island, Great St. James, to help conceal these activities, the prosecutor asserted. The nearby island, divided up into three parcels valued together at nearly $23 million, allowed him “to further shield his conduct on Little St. James from view, prevent his detection by law enforcement of the public, and allow him to continue and conceal his criminal enterprise.”

  Moreover, according to the prosecutor, Epstein’s intent was to expand his operation. The island provided not only privacy but also more land on which to carry out his crimes.

  “The Epstein Enterprise maintained and made available young women and underage girls for the purpose of engaging them in forced labor and sexual activities and used coercion and deception to procure, abuse, and harbor its victims.”

  This criminal activity occurred until his arrest in 2019, according to the lawsuit. The number of girls involved is unknown. But it is believed that they may have been as young as twelve years old.

  One fifteen-year-old tried to escape the sex enslavement by swimming off the island, the lawsuit claimed. (A search party organized by Epstein located her, detained her, and took away her passport.) Another girl who allegedly tried to escape was threatened with “physical restraint of harm.”

  So how was Epstein able to still do it, despite being widely known as a pariah? Because he was also still known as a mover and shaker. His prior associations with the rich and powerful were still being used, despite his new pariah status.

  “The Epstein Enterprise deceptively lured underage girls and women into its sex trafficking ring with money and promises of employment, career opportunities and school assistance. The Epstein Enterprise preyed on their financial and other vulnerabilities, and promised victims, money, shelter, gifts, employment, tuition and other items of value.”

  Besides, the girls were told, they were just being asked to give the man a “massage.”

  It was, until the end, the same con Epstein had employed for decades.

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  Teterboro is the closest private airport to Manhattan. It caters to the rich and famous, especially those with their own airplanes, offering privacy and accessibility to high-status customers. It’s only twelve miles away, making it convenient for the rich and famous to land their private jets and get into the city in under thirty minutes. That summer morning, Epstein was headed to his home in New York City.

  So why did Epstein even return to the United States? Some have speculated that toward the end he lived his life in fear. That his scheme of treating world elites to forbidden—and illegal—goods was coming to an end.

  The recent attention to Epstein, which began when the media started to reexamine his sweetheart deal cut by the then prosecutor Alex Acosta, had started taking a toll on his lifestyle and business interests. Deutsche Bank, which had had a long relationship with Epstein,
began to examine his finances and seek distance. He reportedly had dozens of accounts with the German-based bank, and had borrowed money from the financial giant. His relationship with the bank reportedly was so complex that it had a hard time cutting him off completely; it was apparently too difficult a task to close all his accounts because not all his accounts were easily identifiable as his own.

  Nevertheless, liquidity and borrowing began to get more difficult for him. And he had already been shut out of banks before.

  “He had been a client of JPMorgan’s private-banking division from the late 1990s until around 2013, five years after he had pleaded guilty to state prostitution charges,” The New York Times reported.5

  But with the renewed attention to Epstein—first the Miami Herald pieces, then a tsunami of more critical and probing coverage—Deutsche Bank made the calculation that it was more damaging to its profits to keep him as a client than it would be to cut him off entirely.

  There was also widespread speculation among the financial community that Epstein had for years engaged in money laundering. No one could quite nail down how it was that he made his money, so certainly all profitable and even criminal enterprises remained possibilities. Deutsche Bank had its own theories. Wall Streeters in particular have long been keen to make these assumptions. The bank, it turned out, had similar concerns.

  “In 2015 and 2016, anti-money laundering compliance officers in Deutsche Bank’s offices in New York and Jacksonville, Fla., raised a variety of concerns about the work the bank was doing with Mr. Epstein,” the Times reported.

  “In addition, the compliance officers on at least one occasion noticed potentially illegal activity in one of Mr. Epstein’s accounts, including transactions in which money was moving outside the United States, two of the people said. The compliance officers produced a so-called suspicious activity report, but it is unclear whether the report was ever filed with the Treasury Department’s financial-crimes division.”