Epstein

by Dylan Howard

  In a world of disturbing secrets and deception, Epstein’s international web of blackmail was the aspect of his life that he most desperately tried to hide. Was it the one thing that could have truly destroyed it all?

  Even more importantly, how was this web of blackmail connected to yet another question hanging over Epstein and his dark legacy: How did he amass a fortune to rival some of the richest individuals in the world?

  Epstein was estimated to have been worth roughly $500 million at the time of his death, despite not having any public means of income. Financial documents uncovered in recent weeks show hundreds of millions of dollars flowing into his shady businesses in the US Virgin Islands: Southern Trust and Financial Trust. Local officials had given him an extremely lax tax deal. No one really asked questions.

  For Epstein, the money kept rolling in—and out—right up to the end.

  Two days before his death was reported, he secretly signed a new will that placed his millions into a trust, forever hiding its movements. Listed as the executors were Darren K. Indyke and Richard D. Kahn, two longtime associates.

  Epstein’s former colleague Steven Hoffenberg claims that Indyke and Kahn had once been tasked with investigating Epstein’s financial misdeeds at investment group Towers Financial in the 1990s, an investigation that ended with Hoffenberg sentenced to twenty years in prison for running a Ponzi scheme that the SEC considered to be one of the largest in history—at least, prior to Bernie Madoff’s crimes a decade later. Epstein, however, skipped off scot-free.

  Why were those men chosen as executors?

  Who really inherited Epstein’s trust?

  If he really died, why has his fortune not been seized as evidence in the ongoing investigation into his crimes?

  Moreover, if no one inherited those millions . . . is it because he’s still alive?

  If so, where is Jeffrey Epstein?

  Will he ever meet justice?

  The answers are there, in what Epstein left behind. In his connections, his crimes, his financial dealings and fears, lies the truth.

  One of the most disturbing stories in recent memory, Epstein’s tale may also be the most complicated. Yet, it is lying right in front of you.

  All you have to do is put together the pieces.

  CHAPTER 2

  THE BIRTH OF A MONSTER

  On July 6, 2019, federal agents swarmed a private jet at New Jersey’s private Teterboro airport.

  As an unsuspecting Jeffrey Epstein walked off the plane, he was apprehended, handcuffed and placed under arrest—for sex trafficking.

  The events of that day not only shocked the convicted pedophile, a man who had long evaded justice but also, stunned the world, a world that had thought his reign of lawless horrors would continue forever.

  As Epstein descended through the clouds to his ultimate destiny, he surely had no idea what awaited him on the tarmac.

  In those final last moments of blissful ignorance, he would have passed over the very place where it all began. Looking from the windows of his plush private jet, once known as the “Lolita Express,” Epstein could have looked down upon the tidy streets and neatly appointed homes of Sea Gate, Brooklyn, the quaint middle-class neighborhood in which he was raised.

  As he walked those streets decades before, no one ever could have expected what was to come: how high he would rise, how far he would fall, and how thoroughly his life, his reputation, and his circumstances would change.

  Born on January 20, 1953, Jeffrey Epstein was the cherished first child of school aide Pauline and gardener Seymour.

  On the day of his birth, Dwight D. Eisenhower was sworn in as the thirty-fourth president President of the United States, and shared an ominous warning in his inauguration address: “We sense with all our faculties that forces of good and evil are massed and armed and opposed as rarely before in history.” How little did he know.

  Epstein’s parents had married only months earlier, when Pauline was already pregnant with Jeffrey. Both were children of Jewish European immigrants, and many of their family members had been killed in the Holocaust. Nothing in their background could have hinted at the hellish crimes their son would commit.

  A year after Jeffrey’s birth, his younger brother Mark was born. The two boys were raised in the quiet enclave of Sea Gate.

  Epstein’s childhood friend Gary Grossberg spoke exclusively to reporter Andy Tillett about his quiet young life with his charming friend, Jeff—and the surprising way his friend’s life has turned out.

  “Sea Gate was a very, very beautiful, happy family community,” Grossberg began. “If you go out to Sea Gate, Coney Island was there, and it was just very, very private. The beach was there, the ocean was there. It was very, very charming, very charming.”

  He continued:

  It was great. It was wonderful. The Epsteins are just lovely, lovely people. Absolutely the best. No doubt about it. No doubt in my mind. His mother, just the most wonderful woman. In fact, you know something? When I speak to you, I speak to you with his mother’s heart. Okay?

  You’ve got to remember this was in the seventies, and life was very different. There was no Internet. There was no high-profile cable TV. There was no media. There was no nonsense. . . .

  I was actually close with Mark, his brother, but Jeff was a friend.

  We didn’t share a lot of time because he was a year older than us, and he was in a different grade. And due to his magnetic personality and well-being, he was in different circles. . . .

  He was always a gentleman, always very kind with everyone. And he did a lot of things for a lot of people. . . .

  Always did things right. The Epsteins, they’re like that. They’re good, kind people, whether it’s in education, philanthropy, the facilitation of people. They were around people who were doing these types of things.

  People are not talking about that. They’re only talking about the individuals who were so-called around him. So it’s just unfortunate that this particular situation came down and turned into a cancer.

  Jeffrey’s a very good-looking guy, number one. Very, very talented. He’s got money and people, women. They became jealous, whatever it may be. And so I don’t believe all these stories about all this nonsense. I’m not saying that there were no improprieties, because who knows, I wasn’t there. But I can only tell you about the caliber of the individual that people are talking about. . . .

  I only knew and know of the Epsteins in a very, very wonderful way, and it’s important for people to speak the truth. And as I say, I don’t believe any of these stories about any of that stuff going on because I don’t know him that way. I’m telling you the truth. And I’m not trying to hide anything. I’m letting you know exactly. I don’t believe it.

  I truly believe that this was politically motivated. I guarantee you that he would have never been arrested if Alex Acosta was not on Trump’s cabinet. If he wasn’t connected, if there was no election, if there was nothing happening . . . it’s shit. Everything had happened. It’s very sad.”

  Like most children in the neighborhood, Epstein attended local public schools with Grossberg, later entering the Lafayette High School in South-Central Brooklyn.

  Already making his mark, Epstein skipped his freshman and sophomore years, and joined the math team, where he competed with Brenda Solovitz. In an exclusive interview with our team, Solovitz said Epstein still seemed like a normal guy in high school, too.

  At that time, he seemed to be just like a normal person. I don’t know of him doing anything outrageous. He was no worse and no different to the rest of us at that point.

  “He probably came to my house as part of the math team. Sometimes I made a lasagna and they’d all come over for lunch, but that was it really.

  I don’t know what he did, but he seemed normal to us. There was nothing about his behavior that seemed off.

  He was really bright, and he was in the honors classes I was in, and certainly we moved in the same classes. He seemed fine, just seem
ed normal, y’know? He wasn’t standoffish from people. He was funny sometimes. He fit right in. He didn’t seem like a geek. To me, he seemed like a normal person.

  His father worked in the parks department and that wasn’t unusual at that time. A lot of us came from lower middle—what used to be middle class, but we lived in housing projects and things like that. It was just our fathers’ luck, but we didn’t have a lot of money.

  To me he was a normal guy, a really bright normal guy.

  From there, though, Epstein’s path would grow rockier as his dark side began to emerge. In 1969, sixteen-year-old Epstein graduated from high school two years early and entered the prestigious Cooper Union college in lower Manhattan. At Cooper Union, he took advanced math classes and made extra cash by tutoring classmates. But suddenly and inexplicably, he dropped out in spring 1971.

  Just a few months later, Epstein enrolled instead at New York University’s Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences, where he studied the mathematical aspects of heart physiology. But in June 1974—when the go-go 1960s had given way to the gas lines and financial downturn of the 1970s—Epstein again quit school, having failed to receive a degree from either institution.

  It remains something of a mystery as to why he dropped out of both institutions. Still, the decision to end his academic career would not slow ambitious Epstein’s rise through Manhattan’s elite.

  That fall, the twenty-one-year-old college dropout was hired to teach math and physics at the Dalton School, one of Manhattan’s most prestigious private schools. Located on the ritzy Upper East Side, Dalton then cost roughly $3,000 a year to attend—more than $15,000 in modern currency. Today, the annual tuition has ballooned to more than $50,000.

  When Epstein arrived, the school was filled with rich kids from the upper echelon that he was desperate to enter. Soon-to-be celebrity students who attended Dalton while Epstein was a teacher included Dirty Dancing star Jennifer Grey, Maggie Wheeler (Janice from Friends), media mogul Rupert Murdoch’s daughter Prudence, and Michael J. Fox’s future wife Tracy Pollan, who starred in the 1980s sitcom Family Ties.

  In an unusual twist of fate, Epstein was hired at the prestigious institution only months after authoritarian headmaster Donald Barr had stepped down. Barr was the father of current US Attorney General William Barr, the man who would later be responsible for prosecuting Epstein, in 2019.

  As headmaster, the elder Barr had turned the notoriously progressive school into a punishingly conservative institution. Girls were sent home for wearing short skirts; boys, for having long hair. Teachers were forbidden from wearing casual or eccentric clothes, the colors and cuts that had been fashionable just a few years before. And if students were busted for smoking weed, they could only avoid expulsion by undergoing therapy. Barr was the Dalton dictator, and he considered his orders “ukases”—an Imperial Russian term for edicts made by a czar.

  “They think they can cheat on tests, steal from one another’s lockers and exploit each other emotionally so long as they have the right opinions about the war or civil rights or something else,” Barr said at the time. “That is not morality.”

  Halfway through the 1974 school year, the conservative headmaster clashed with the Dalton board of trustees and resigned in protest. His replacement, Dr. Gardner Dunnan, rolled back some of the stricter codes of conduct, giving Epstein—a predator in the making—the perfect hunting ground.

  With no outdoor hangout areas, students socialized in the hallways, and Epstein frequently inserted himself into these groups. At the time, most students viewed him as a quirky young teacher who cared more about gossiping than grading.

  “I won’t say that the girls didn’t like him, but they thought he was odd,” former Dalton alumna Karin Williams said of the young teacher. “You noticed him. He stood out as this young guy in this weird coat.”

  (Williams is referring to the full-length fur coat Epstein wore to school, the kind favored by the men who lorded over the streetwalkers off Times Square, or who waited at Penn Station to swoop in on fresh-faced new arrivals to the city.)

  Under that coat, Epstein kept the top two buttons of his shirt open, exposing a gold chain necklace. Most girls didn’t take him seriously, and perhaps that was precisely how Epstein wanted them to think of him: laid-back and approachable.

  “I was a 14-year-old and he helped me through a time when there wasn’t anybody else to talk to,” Dalton graduate Leslie Kitziger told the New York Times in a 2019 exposé on Epstein’s Dalton years. “He listened . . . I felt like he really cared that I was having a rough go.”

  Former student Scott Spizer even remembered Epstein popping up at a boozy student party, and recalled the special attention he gave to the girls.

  “I can remember thinking at the time, ‘This is wrong,’” Spizer told the Times. “He was much more present amongst the students, specifically the girl students, during non-teaching hours. . . . It was kind of inappropriate.”

  What’s more, Dalton alumnus Mark Robinson claimed that Epstein wasn’t the only faculty member cruising the halls for sexual conquests.

  “There were a number of teachers who looked at the student body as their next meal,” Robinson alleged.

  But Epstein didn’t get far. Amid complaints about his lackadaisical teaching style, the Dalton school board terminated Epstein after the 1976 school year.

  “It was determined that he had not adequately grown as a new teacher to the standard of the school,” said Peter Branch, head of the high school at the time. Branch only recalled getting complaints about Epstein’s poor academic abilities, though—not his personal habits.

  True to form, Epstein somehow managed to turn that failure into a stepping-stone to even greater success: a job on Wall Street.

  During a parent-teacher conference, the twenty-three-year-old had managed to dazzle one student’s financier father. So, when Epstein was fired from Dalton, the broker connected Epstein with Alan Greenberg, a Wall Street bigwig who was poised to become chief executive officer of multibillion-dollar global investment bank and brokerage firm Bear Stearns.

  “This parent was so wowed by the conversation he told my father, ‘You’ve got to hire this guy,’” Greenberg’s daughter Lynne Koeppel recalled to the Miami Herald. “That was Jeff. He was very smart and he knew how to woo people, how to schmooze . . . If that was his plan, it worked.”

  Later that year, Epstein landed a job at Bear Stearns as a low-level junior assistant to a floor trader. He swiftly rose through the ranks, and within four years he had become a limited partner, taking on mega-millionaire clients like Seagram president Edgar Bronfman. For Epstein, it was a boyhood dream come true. But it wouldn’t last.

  CHAPTER 3

  FOLLOW THE MONEY

  By 1980, Jeffrey Epstein’s life was a fast-paced collage of frantic days on Wall Street and glittering nights among Manhattan’s elite. He had managed to climb into yet another exclusive circle of society, and for the first time—it must have seemed—nothing was off limits.

  As he began his finance career, Epstein was heralded as an uncommon genius from the start, chosen personally by Wall Street icon Alan Greenberg to be his protégé. (Greenberg served as Bear Stearns’ CEO from 1978 to 1993 and as chairman of the board from 1985 to 2001. He also served as a non-executive director of Viacom.)

  “Bear Stearns never had any training program,” Epstein said in a recently unsealed interview we obtained. “There was no course to begin. Alan Greenberg said he wanted me to learn each area of the business.

  “He thought the best place for me to start would be on the floor of the American Stock Exchange and then later move up to the trading desk and learn all the different areas of the firm, including the margin department. He was amazing.”

  But in less than a year, Epstein found his niche. He analyzed the portfolios of wealthy clients and came up with cunning money-saving schemes.

  Getting in on Wall Street before the 1980s banking boom allowed Epstein to build a spec
tacular network of connections that made him the toast of Manhattan during one of the most prosperous decades it had ever seen. In just a few short years with Bear Stearns, Epstein had made millions of dollars, was traveling full-time by chauffeured limo, had billionaires relying on his financial advice, and was carousing around town with stunning women on both arms.

  A close friend from that period, Vanity Fair contributing author Jesse Kornbluth, recalled how Epstein became a rising star of the social scene in an exclusive interview with investigative reporter Andy Tillett, who contributed to this book.

  I would say Jeffrey Epstein’s money, how much there is, how he got it, is a complete mystery, and not just to me.

  I met Jeffrey Epstein in 1987, at a party given by Pepsi-Cola. He was with a blue jeans manufacturer. We chatted, and he seemed interesting. We decided we’d carry on this conversation again elsewhere.

  Jeffrey was Peter Pan. He looked young, was fit, cheerful, and self-amused. . . . He had an ironic smile, which is congenial to me, since I find a lot of things ironic as well. I guess the final thing to say is, New York was not then, because of the huge interest in finance, populated by very interesting heterosexual men. There were many interesting gay men, but heterosexual men doing business, not so much. Jeffrey was one of the few.

  New York’s the big leagues. You’ve got to be good to do it here, at the level of a Madoff, or an Epstein. He actually seemed not just smart, but accomplished. Those are very attractive qualities, and he was unmarried, so he was the ideal extra man. He was invited places. He made his way rather quickly. There was nothing about him of the freak and pervert that he would come to be.

  Still, Kornbluth said, when he got to know Epstein more intimately, the whiz kid’s carefully constructed façade began to crack.

  Brighter minds than I say that he had actually really very little ability. That his mind skittered. That when the conversation turned serious, he made an ironic joke and changed it. This makes it incredibly puzzling that, say, someone like Leon Black, a major financier with a large, large department of tax experts, would say, “Jeffrey, you’ll be my tax adviser.” These sorts of things make no sense. As for his education, we know there was none. He came from Brooklyn, was a high school graduate. His parents weren’t distinguished in any way.