Epstein

by Dylan Howard

  “To the men in power, I hope they’re afraid,” Bloom said.

  Allred, her mother, warned that more lawsuits are on the way:

  Victims should know that they can file a civil lawsuit as a Jane Doe. That is our plan, at least for most if not all of our victims. We’re going to be filing as Jane Does.

  Members of the public do not need to know who they are, and they won’t know who they are. Of course, a defendant has the right to know who’s suing him, but the public does not need to know.

  Shockingly, Epstein’s coconspirators are trying to co-opt that strategy for their own devious devices. On September 3, 2019, an unnamed “John Doe” filed court papers begging a judge to block his name from being released in the event that Virginia Roberts Giuffre succeeded in unsealing more documents from her civil lawsuits.

  The mysterious John admitted he didn’t even know if he would be mentioned in the documents, but he would be taking no chances. His attorneys said they knew the explosive filings could include a “range of allegations of sexual acts involving the Plaintiff and non-parties to this litigation, some famous, some not; the identities of non-parties who either allegedly engaged in sexual acts with Plaintiff or who allegedly facilitated such acts.” His attorneys did not confirm whether Doe could be considered famous or not.

  Aside from Epstein’s famous friends, his former staffers and “recruiters” like Ghislaine Maxwell are also now stalked by the searchlight as they hide out around the world.

  One, Nadia Marcinkova (a.k.a. Nadia Marcinko), was yet another pretty young blonde in Epstein’s roster of sex slaves. Brought from Yugoslavia at the age of sixteen, she quickly became one of Epstein’s favorite companions.

  During the Palm Beach investigation, a sixteen-year-old victim told cops that Epstein had forced her to perform oral sex on Marcinkova. Still, when police swooped in on Epstein, Marcinkova was spared. His non-prosecution agreement specifically named her as a coconspirator who would receive immunity from further prosecution, along with other alleged victims-turned-­recruiters, Adriana Ross, and Sarah Kellen. (His assistant, Lesley Groff, was also named.)

  That immunity agreement is only valid, however, in Southern Florida—not New York.

  When asked about Marcinkova’s role in the global sex ring, and whether she could be prosecuted, her attorneys told the New York Times: “Like other victims, Nadia Marcinko is and has been severely traumatized” and “needs time to process and make sense of what she has been through before she is able to speak out.”

  Marcinkova was unique among Epstein’s girls in that she was able to attract attention outside of his inner circle. She trained as a pilot under his sponsorship, and built a huge YouTube following as the sassy and sexy “Global Girl.” Now, other female pilots and aviation community members are disgusted to learn about what she may have witnessed or done.

  “What Nadia Marcinko knows is a lot,” said Florida air safety investigator Christine Negroni. “She has seen everything. When we talk about Jeffrey Epstein and the kind of information he took to the grave, he is not the only one who has that kind of information.”

  Negroni continued in an exclusive interview:

  She is also very, very aware of what happened in that house and his network of people, many of whom flew on his airplanes, many of whom have been reported to have participated in some of these activities.

  It’s a tough spot for her to be in. I don’t know: is she perpetrator? Is she victim? Reports suggest she came to the United States at the age of fourteen and that there were documents that suggested Epstein bought her from Slovakia at the age of fourteen.

  So it’s very hard for me, and I hope for everyone, to be judgmental about a woman who may have facilitated these horrible crimes on young women when she herself might have been a victim. She seems to have made the best out of a bad situation. Whether that should be held against her I don’t know.

  She has a heck of a story to tell. The question is whether she’ll tell it.

  Of course, perhaps the only person who knows the whole story—from sex trafficking to espionage and everything in between—is Ghislaine Maxwell. Conveniently, at the time of this writing, she seems to have disappeared into thin air.

  Days after Epstein’s death, it was reported that she had been living in the quiet Massachusetts fishing village of Manchester-by-the-Sea, in the mansion of former boyfriend Scott Borgerson.

  While Ghislaine was on the run, Epstein victim, Jennifer Araoz, filed a new lawsuit against her, alleging: “Maxwell participated with and assisted Epstein in maintaining and protecting his sex trafficking ring, ensuring that approximately three girls a day were made available to him.”

  But when reporters swarmed the Massachusetts seaside town, Ghislaine was already gone—if she’d ever even been there in the first place.

  Our reporters went on the hunt in Europe and the United States. Then suddenly, there was a wholly unexpected twist: The New York Post published a photo of Ghislaine gazing defiantly at the camera while sitting at a Los Angeles In-N-Out, burger and fries in front of her.

  Supposedly, the image had been taken by a lucky bystander who happened to recognize the woman who was then the world’s most wanted.

  But once you looked closer at the image, strange details began to emerge.

  First, Ghislaine had a book in front of her: The Book of Honor: The Secret Lives and Deaths of CIA Operatives. It hardly seems like it could have been a coincidental choice. More likely, it was a pointed message to someone—or everyone.

  Second, an advertisement in the background showed an ad for the movie Good Boys, a raunchy comedy in which preteens make R-rated sex jokes. The ad had been photoshopped into the image. The real ad at that location was for a local hospital.

  There was also another clue that told family friend Laura Goldman that it was all a setup: “When I saw the picture of Ghislaine Maxwell at In-N-Out, I knew it was a fake immediately because she doesn’t eat. Jeffrey liked thin women, so she starved herself to death. There was no way she was eating a hamburger and french fries!”

  Later, a source would confirm to our team that the middleman—or middle woman, rather—who peddled the photo to the paper is a high-end Beverly Hills Realtor with property listings in Israel.

  “I just talked to someone who texted with Ghislaine,” Goldman revealed. “So she’s definitely not in American witness protection. I think she’s out of the country.”

  Goldman is sure of one thing: Someone has helped Ghislaine go deep, deep underground. Was it her spy handlers?

  “If you know the Maxwell family, you know they’re their own little team,” Goldman said. “The seven siblings and Mrs. Maxwell supported each other completely.

  “Ghislaine’s sister Isabel has been married three times,” Goldman said. “Her last husband also died mysteriously. They liked larger-than-life men.”

  Men, like their father, who had ties to international intelligence agencies.

  Really, if you dig deep enough, the most powerful men of the twentieth century do have that one trait in common. While not all agents themselves, like Epstein, nearly without exception the leading figures of our time are connected by shadowy threads to the web of international intelligence, sexual blackmail, and the trafficking and abuse of children.

  In a riveting series for MintPress.com, Chilean journalist Whitney Webb traced sexual blackmail practices back to 1920s and 1930s America, when leading liquor salesman Stan Rosenstiel hosted bugged “blackmail parties” with young boys for party favors. Rosenstiel invited the rich and powerful, for very specific reasons. Webb cites a Florida Sun Sentinel report that alleges Rosentiel was once overheard saying “if the government ever brings pressure” against him or his pal, notorious mafioso Meyer Lansky, he’d use his recordings as blackmail.

  During World War II, such techniques became more mainstream as the US intelligence community looked to mobsters and underworld kings for techniques to help them win against the Nazis. After the war, the wise guys
’ participation earned them a lifetime of “get out of jail free” cards.

  Meanwhile, Lansky didn’t limit himself to connections with and favors for the CIA. The shadowy character also worked with leading figures of the Mossad to launder money in the Middle East.

  Supposedly, Lansky’s own sexual blackmail ring was responsible for obtaining blackmail photos of FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, leading to even more lenient treatment of Lansky and his associates throughout the 1950s and 1960s.

  Although a victim himself, Hoover also was famous for collecting blackmail files on leading Americans, including the members of Camelot—the Kennedy family, and specifically President John F. Kennedy. Did he learn the tactic from America’s original blackmailer, Rosenstiel? Hoover and the liquor baron were close friends, and Rosenstiel even donated $1 million to the J. Edgar Hoover Foundation.

  Both men cultivated a mentorship of rising young politico Roy Cohn—Donald Trump’s future mentor. Cohn became Senator Joseph McCarthy’s adviser, and later worked with Ronald Reagan’s administration. His meteoric rise through the ranks of the American elite, it seems, was due to his own “blackmail parties.”

  Rosenstiel’s fourth wife, Susan Kaufman, later claimed to have attended one such party in 1968 at the Plaza Hotel in New York City. Kaufman said that in addition to Hoover himself in drag (going by the name “Mary”) she saw young boys engaging in sexual behavior with Hoover, Cohn, and her then-husband.

  Multiple reports claim that Cohn was unapologetic about hosting the gatherings, insisting that they were part of his anti-Communist crusade.

  As with Epstein, Webb writes, many turned a blind eye to Cohn’s activities. He was simply too connected, and had too much dirt, to take down.

  Trump’s former adviser Roger Stone explained: “Roy was not gay. He was a man who liked having sex with men. Gays were weak, effeminate. He always seemed to have these young blond boys around. It just wasn’t discussed. He was interested in power and access.”

  Donald Trump would later buy Cohn’s party palace, the Plaza, and host his own debaucherous bashes there throughout the 1980s and 1990s. Male model Andy Lucchesi told reporter Michael Gross that such parties were populated by “a lot of girls . . . 14, look 24. That’s as juicy as I can get. I never asked how old they were. I just partook.”

  But Cohn’s influence, like Epstein’s, spanned both sides of the political aisle. His cousin, Dick Morris, was a close adviser to Bill Clinton. Cohn had connections in media, too: He was friends with FOX News head honcho Rupert Murdoch, and called Barbara Walters his “wife.” His high school the pals turned friends for life included Si Newhouse Jr., Generoso Pope Jr. of the National Enquirer, and Richard Berlin, who owned Hearst. Many of Cohn’s connections would later become close with Jeffrey Epstein as well.

  Roy Cohn died in 1986, but sexual blackmail—including the trafficking of children—would continue to permeate the highest levels of American society.

  In June 1989, George H. W. Bush and Barbara Bush were photographed visiting the Covenant House, a Catholic charity for homeless kids in Manhattan. It had been founded under the direction of Cohn’s friend and frequent party guest, Cardinal Francis Spellman. Bush’s Yale roommate, Robert Macauley, was on the organization’s board. (His AmeriCares foundation funded Covenant House, while also working with the CIA to fund the Contras in South America. Like Epstein, Macauley lived in Palm Beach.)

  Just weeks after the presidential pair’s visit, Covenant House was the topic of a jaw-dropping exposé by the New York Post, which alleged that extensive child sex abuse had happened there.

  That same year, the Washington Post reported that former NBC News correspondent Craig Spence had been caught running a D.C. child sex ring that provided underage sex slaves to powerful men in apartments that were bugged and rigged with security cameras. Even his parties, which hosted members of the Reagan and Bush administrations, had been bugged for gathering blackmail material. Spence even brought his prisoners to the White House for late-night encounters (not with the president).

  Like Epstein, Spence often boasted to his friends and colleagues that he was working for the CIA. Also like Epstein, after his dirty deeds were exposed, Spence was found dead—supposedly by suicide.

  For many, Epstein seems like a singular monster; at least, upon first encounter. A personification of evil that is deeper and darker than our society has ever known. Ultimately, however, the painful truth is that he was really nothing special.

  Epstein’s predecessors were many. Over the course of decades, none of them were stopped.

  With Epstein gone, we are forced to face the sad fact that he will not be the historic first in this dark saga to face justice. As he joins the trail of heartbreak started by his predecessors, we are left to ask: Who are his contemporaries in sexual blackmail and the exploitation of children for espionage? And who are his successors?

  Somewhere, it is certain, there are people who consider themselves to be the heirs to Epstein’s darkest legacy: whether male or female, American or foreign, working for the CIA, MI6, or the Mossad.

  Some we may suspect. Others will never raise the slightest hint of impropriety. Some we may even know.

  It was not possible to stop Epstein, even with all of the stories we wrote and all of the brutal facts we exposed while he was living.

  It may not even be possible to unravel his entire twisted life and network within the span of our lifetimes.

  Dead men tell no tales, but we are compelled to tell them: stories of crimes, of conspiracies, of darkness.

  In addition, we are compelled to listen: to those who missed the red flags, to victims whose lives were changed in an instant.

  It is only in doing so that we can raise the slightest hope, the slightest chance, that we may ever stop the ones who wish to follow in Epstein’s footsteps.

  EPILOGUE

  In the final days and hours of completing this book, disturbing new discoveries about the crimes and connections of Jeffrey Epstein continued to surface.

  Even after reporting on him together for years, we found deeper and deeper layers of deception than we had ever known. As we gathered in team researching and writing sessions, the silence would be broken every few moments by one of us saying, “Oh my God.”

  There isn’t time or space to connect and reveal every single detail we discovered. (Although, we’ll probably spend the rest of our lives trying.) This book represents the best and most compelling reporting that we’ve ever done on Epstein and his cohorts. But this epilogue represents one of the spine-tingling stories that made our jaws drop when we discovered it—a story that could have been a book all on its own.

  The summary is this: Donald Trump’s personal fixer Michael Cohen and Jeffrey Epstein are both tied to a company called Reporty (now named Carbyne), which was then in the early stages of creating a new spy-like technology.

  (Convicted felon Cohen plead guilty on August 21, 2018, to eight counts, including campaign finance violations, tax fraud, and bank fraud. Cohen said he violated campaign finance laws at the direction of Trump and “for the principal purpose of influencing” the 2016 presidential election. In November 2018, Cohen entered a second guilty plea for lying to a Senate committee about efforts to build a Trump Tower in Moscow. In December 2018, he was sentenced to three years in federal prison and ordered to pay a $50,000 fine.)

  The stated purpose of Epstein and Cohen’s business alliance in Carbyne was to help 911 callers by connecting the dispatch system to their cellphones’ microphone, GPS, and camera, giving the dispatcher a live feed of the caller’s surroundings. The obvious implication is that the same technology could easily be used to execute widespread spying and blackmail, to an extent the world has never before seen.

  The explosive story of Carbyne’s background was first published by reporters Zev Shalev and Tracie McElroy of Narativ.org.

  In September 2017, Russian billionaires Viktor Vekselberg and Andrew Intrater bought 24 percent of Carbyne’s most valuabl
e stock options, through Intrater’s company Columbus Nova.

  (Intrater donated $250,000 to Trump’s inauguration fund, and has already donated thousands to his 2020 campaign. His company also paid Cohen half a million dollars in “consulting fees.” He was investigated by Robert Mueller’s Special Counsel team.)

  In 2015, the Times of Israel reported, Ehud Barak had formed a limited partnership company called Sum and bought all of Reporty’s Series A stock—with most of the millions he needed to do so coming from Jeffrey Epstein. (It wasn’t the first time he’d gotten millions thanks to Epstein. In 2004, Barak received about $2.4 million from Leslie Wexner’s Wexner Foundation, where Epstein was both a trustee and major donor.)

  Barak’s cash infusion was enough to win him a seat as chairman of the board at Reporty, now Carbyne. The company is now based in Tel Aviv.

  (In a twist that is sure to titillate Tom Brady haters, the Kraft Group is also a major investment source.)

  In 2019, Carbyne partnered with Windbourne Consulting, a mysterious company that calls itself a “leader in public safety communications consulting and project management services to international, federal, state and local governments.” Their headquarters is a mere five minutes away from the Pentagon.

  Calling the technology “Smart911,” Windbourne has already implemented Carbyne in the United States. Although, they may not want you to know about it.

  A May 2017 Windbourne newsletter touted the platform’s rollout in Michigan, announcing that the governor there had dedicated $2.2 million in grant funding to make the technology available to all residents. Anyone who put Smart911 on their phone and gave it access to their camera, mic, and GPS would get an eighteen-month subscription for free, the newsletter explained. The company also touted an oddly suspicious story from 2014, where a Michigan man who just happened to have Smart911 already installed was saved from a fire because of the app. The government and company encouraged all residents to download it.