Filthy Rich

by James Patterson

  Why?

  Alan Dershowitz has presented the prosecutors with his own pieces of evidence—printouts from the victims’ Myspace pages.

  In her “About Me” column, under “Best physical feature,” Mary has written “Ass and eyes.”

  Under “Ever drank” and “Ever smoked pot,” she’s written “Yeah.”

  Under “Ever shoplifted”: “Lots.”

  Under “Ever skinny dipped”: “Yeah.”

  Under “[Do] you wanna lose your virginity”: “I already lost it.”

  One of the victims has been caught with drugs and arrested. She’s also been caught stealing from Victoria’s Secret. From the state attorney’s perspective, these girls look like compromised women. And if what they say about Epstein is true, wouldn’t that make them prostitutes?

  As witnesses, they would be weak, while the lawyers on Epstein’s side were exceptionally strong.

  Alan Dershowitz had represented Claus von Bülow, the British socialite who was acquitted of the murder of his wife, Sunny. Dershowitz had been on O. J. Simpson’s team when the former football star was acquitted of the murders of his ex-wife, Nicole Brown Simpson and Nicole’s friend Ronald Lyle Goldman. And rich as von Bülow and Simpson had been, neither one had had the resources that Epstein was willing and able to deploy in his own defense.

  Neither of them had been intimate friends with his lawyer.

  As far as Reiter was concerned, none of that mattered. Even if Epstein thought that the girls he’d molested were eighteen years old—even if they had lied to him—it didn’t matter under Florida law. The chief grew worried that in Epstein’s case exceptions were being made, and he grew even more concerned with each unreturned call that he made to the state attorney’s office.

  On May 1, the Palm Beach PD asked the state attorney’s office to issue an arrest warrant for Jeffrey Epstein.

  That same day, Chief Reiter took the extraordinary step of writing Barry Krischer a letter all but demanding that he recuse himself from the case.

  CHAPTER 45

  Videotaped Deposition of Michael Reiter in B.B. vs. Epstein, a civil lawsuit against Jeffrey Epstein: November 23, 2009

  Q:At some point you sent a letter to state attorney Barry Krischer. Let me show you what we’ll mark as exhibit 3. Let me give you a chance to read through this letter again to help refresh your recollection.

  A:I’ve read it.

  Q:At this point, in May of 2006, I’m assuming based on what you told us before that you had had some conversations with Barry Krischer directly…by phone—correct?—prior to this letter.

  A:I had conversations in person and by phone.

  Q:Okay. But nonetheless in May—May 1, 2006—you felt the need to write this letter; is that correct?

  A:Yes.

  Q:Can you tell us why?

  A:Well, I felt the handling—and just continued to feel that the way the state attorney’s office handled this case was extremely unusual. I knew that Mr. Krischer was making decisions about this case. I felt that his objectivity was lacking, and I felt that the appropriate way, after reading the statute that governed the assignment of cases to other circuits—I felt that his action met the standard. I used some of the words from the statute in here. And I attempted to call him, and he wouldn’t return my phone calls.

  The detective attempted to contact—his contact in the state attorney’s office, Lanna Belohlavek, however you pronounce that…and she wouldn’t return his calls. So I wrote the letter in hope that he would think about his situation and realize that his objectivity was insufficient to prosecute the case and ask the governor to appoint someone else. And I felt like that was necessary for a fair prosecution of our case that had been submitted to him.

  Q:Could you tell us, explain to us, why you felt that his objectivity may be lacking in regards to this prosecution…? In other words, what evidence did you see here, uncover, that you felt made it potentially nonobjective?

  A:Well…when I first told him about the case, and I realized that it was a serious case, [that] there were multiple victims, [and] that the suspect was very well known, I told him about it. And we were—it was in person. I talked to him after a meeting that he and I were both involved in. And I had known him to be a victim advocate and to protect the rights of children. Well, I know that he even wrote a portion of the statute that addresses those issues. And when I told him originally, he said, “Let’s go for it; this is an adult male in his fifties who’s had sexual contact with children of the ages of the victims.” He said this is somebody who we have to stop. And whatever we need, he said, in the state attorney’s office, we have a unit that’s equipped to investigate and prosecute these kinds of cases. And I didn’t have too many facts early on when I talked with him, but I knew that there were multiple victims and to our detectives they were believable. So when time went on and Mr. Epstein became aware of the investigation and his lawyers contacted the state attorney’s office, they told me that.

  And from that point on, and I believe it was Mr. Dershowitz initially, the tone and tenor of the discussions of this case with Mr. Krischer changed completely. [At] one point he suggested that we write [Epstein] a notice to appear, which would be for a misdemeanor. He just completely changed from not only our first conversation about this[—when] he didn’t know the name Jeffrey Epstein—till when he had been informed on Mr. Epstein’s reputation and his wealth, and I just thought that very unusual.

  I feel like I know him or knew him very well, the state attorney, and I just felt like he could not objectively make decisions about this case: that is why I wrote it.

  CHAPTER 46

  Detective Recarey: May 2006

  Chief Reiter’s letter to the state attorney had no perceptible effect.

  Krischer did not recuse himself from the case. No arrest warrant was issued. And on the afternoon of May 3, Detective Recarey received a telephone call from assistant state attorney Daliah Weiss, who advised him that she had been taken off the Epstein case.

  Weiss had been the perfect person to prosecute Epstein. As a member of the special victims unit, she focused on sex crimes and crimes against children, prosecuting high-profile cases involving rape, aggravated child abuse, and neglect. But Epstein had added another lawyer, a man named Jack Goldberger, and made Goldberger his attorney of record.

  Goldberger was friendly with Barry Krischer—and an associate of Goldberger’s was married to Daliah Weiss.

  If Epstein’s legal team had wanted to remove Weiss from the case, this would have been a good way to do it.

  Nine days later, Detective Recarey met with ASA Lanna Belohlavek, who told him that her boss, Barry Krischer, had asked her again to take the case to the grand jury. Recarey told Belohlavek that he had already requested arrest warrants for Epstein, Sarah Kellen, and Wendy Dobbs. The Palm Beach PD had finished its investigation months earlier, he said, and had been waiting since then for the case to move forward. He asked her once more to issue the warrants. Once again Belohlavek declined, saying that the original offer her office had made to Epstein’s old lawyer had been resubmitted to the new lawyer. When Epstein’s reply came, she would call.

  While waiting for that call, Recarey received several calls from Mary’s father, who told him that he was being followed by a green Chevrolet Monte Carlo—tailed so aggressively that other vehicles were being run off the road. Recarey ran the plates and found that the Chevy was registered to one Zachary Bechard of Jupiter, Florida.

  Bechard was a licensed private eye.

  “A funny thing happened in Palm Beach,” says Tim Malloy, who was working as a TV newscaster in South Florida at the time.

  “This would have been right around the time that Michael Reiter sent his letter asking Barry Krischer to recuse himself from the case. I didn’t even know what Epstein looked like, really, at the time. We had pictures taken by the British tabloids, where the link to Prince Andrew first broke. But we didn’t have too many of them. What we did have was a contact in th
e hangar where Epstein kept his 727.

  “I don’t know how much you know about Palm Beach International Airport. It’s the kind of place that has private hangars, valet parking, and waiting lounges that look as chic as anything you’ll see in Manhattan. It’s an airport for the rich, basically. Saudi princes, heads of state. Powerful men who value their privacy. You can bring limousines onto the tarmac. And we found out Epstein was very secretive about his dealings there. He didn’t want anyone to know the tail numbers on his planes.

  “But our contact didn’t like Epstein. And he was horrified by how young the girls around Epstein were. So thanks to him, we had the 727’s tail number, and thanks to one other source—someone I won’t say too much about here—we had Epstein’s flight plan for a certain trip he was making. We knew he was going to land at the airport. And so our producer climbed into the station’s traffic helicopter and told the pilot to hover at five hundred feet a quarter mile south of the field.

  “Our cameraman had a telephoto lens. The idea was to get a tight shot, on video, of Epstein deplaning. And for a moment we did get the shot: Epstein, with the collar of his cashmere coat flipped up over his neck, about to run down the steps into a cart that was waiting for him.

  “Then he saw our helicopter, with the station’s markings.

  “I was doing a live voice-over on Epstein’s arrival. It was the first video anyone had on him up to that point. But Epstein had run back onto the plane. Then, during the next commercial break, my producer told me through my headpiece: ‘Jeffrey Epstein wants us to stop taking his picture. In fact, he wants to talk to you.’

  “The cameraman kept rolling. And eventually Epstein got out, got into a car with tinted windows, and was driven over the bridge to his home in Palm Beach. So in a sense we failed to get the story. But the fact that Epstein would call a news program from his plane and command them to order the program’s traffic helicopter away—that says something about the man’s arrogance. And maybe his temper.”

  CHAPTER 47

  Mary: July 2006

  On June 29, assistant state attorney Lanna Belohlavek told Detective Recarey that despite his protestations, the case would be going to a grand jury after all. One had been convened for July 19.

  On July 12, Recarey spoke with Mary’s stepmother, who said that she still hadn’t heard from the state attorney’s office. This, too, was odd, since Recarey knew that Mary would be called upon to testify.

  She was back in Palm Beach now, after months of living with out-of-state relatives.

  All in all, it had been a very tough year for Mary.

  “What has happened to my daughter’s life is criminal,” her father would say.

  Mary had been sent to a school for troubled children. For her it was the wrong place at the worst time in her life. She had gotten into more fights there, growing depressed and withdrawn from her sister and parents. Helplessly, her parents watched her spiral out of control. As they neared the end of their rope, they sent her out of state. But after the move, Mary had fallen apart completely. She used drugs, fell in with a bad crowd, ran away from her relatives, and shacked up with a gang of drug dealers.

  When the gang was busted by local police, the dealers blamed Mary for snitching and put out the word that they wanted her dead.

  “We had to move her again,” Mary’s father explained. “We finally got her into therapy—she’s still seeing the therapist. And worst of all, she developed HPV. She’s already had to have a serious operation.”

  Mary’s troubles didn’t end there. On June 28, she was brought in front of the grand jury. She hadn’t been briefed by the state attorney—she hadn’t even met the prosecutors—and she had no idea what she would be asked.

  Almost immediately, she found that she was being treated more like a criminal than like a witness or victim.

  “The prosecutor produced a printout of our daughter’s Myspace page,” Mary’s father recalls. “Mary was stunned. She began to cry. The prosecutor accused her of all sort of things; it was like she was working for Epstein.

  “All this time, we knew that we were being watched. Creepy guys. Private investigators from Miami. They would follow us, scaring the hell out of my wife and Mary’s sister. My car was vandalized. It was like living in hell.”

  By this point, Epstein’s defense dream team included Jack Goldberger, Alan Dershowitz, and Gerald Lefcourt. All of them had excellent track records. Dershowitz and Lefcourt were two of America’s most famous lawyers, and before long, another celebrity lawyer—Ken Starr, the former solicitor general who had had Bill Clinton impeached for perjury—would join Epstein’s team.

  As far as Mary’s parents were concerned, their daughter had walked into an ambush. Everyone in the courtroom seemed to be playing defense on the side of Jeffrey Epstein. And as for the second girl—Alison, who claimed that she had been raped—she never testified in court at all.

  CHAPTER 48

  Michael Reiter: July 2006

  On July 28, the grand jury reached a verdict that floored the Palm Beach PD.

  The original plea deal that Krischer had offered to Epstein had been bad enough. Now the grand jury was recommending that Epstein be charged with just one felony count of solicitation of prostitution.

  There was no mention of underage girls. The original accusation—four felony counts of unlawful sex acts with minors and one felony count of lewd and lascivious molestation—had simply evaporated.

  It wasn’t enough to send Epstein to prison.

  Epstein was allowed to surrender on a Sunday, when no one would know he’d been arraigned. A few hours later, he was released on three thousand dollars bail.

  The Palm Beach PD was not even notified.

  Once again, Chief Reiter was outraged. So much so that he took the extraordinary step of calling the FBI and the federal prosecutor’s office.

  At the time, the federal prosecutor of the Southern District of Florida was a Republican named R. Alexander Acosta. Chief Reiter recalls being present at Acosta’s swearing-in ceremony and remembers Acosta’s declaration that one of his goals would be the prosecution, to the fullest extent of the law, of anyone who takes advantage of the weak—especially perpetrators of sex crimes. Disgusted with Krischer’s laissez-faire attitude, Reiter recalls thinking he’d found his man.

  In Acosta, the chief saw a prosecutor who wouldn’t shy away from confronting a man with Jeffrey Epstein’s resources and connections.

  But it turned out that Acosta had worked under Ken Starr at Starr’s high-powered multinational law firm, Kirkland & Ellis. And while Acosta had a sterling résumé, which included a stint clerking for future Supreme Court justice Samuel Alito, he had only argued two cases before a judge.

  At the time, Reiter did not know this. All he knew was that someone had to look much more seriously into Jeffrey Epstein’s crimes.

  Reiter’s actions did not necessarily make him a hero—at least, not in every corner of the community he served.

  “I had individuals suggest that the department’s approach to the investigation and my referral of the investigation to the FBI was more horsepower than the investigation deserved. And I had other individuals suggest that—yeah, the term ‘back off’ probably fits,” Reiter said in his deposition for B.B. vs. Epstein.

  “I had people in the community in Palm Beach who either made comments directly to me or to others who relayed them to me that I didn’t need to take the tack in the investigation that we did, which is [to] completely investigate it and then refer it to the FBI after the state case was resolved,” Reiter said in the deposition. “I had one individual who came to see me a couple of times about this.”

  According to the chief, the individual in question was a prominent Palm Beach politician.

  “He said this wasn’t necessary; this was a case that was really very minor,” Reiter recalled. “The victims had lifestyles that don’t make them—shouldn’t make them believable to the police department.”

  “I told him th
at those kinds of suggestions to me were improper and he should stop,” said Reiter. “That he had taken a couple of steps down the road toward something that could eventually constitute a crime. We talked several times. Early on it didn’t end favorably. You know, this is an individual [whom] I had to interact with in my official capacity and in his official capacity as well.”

  The Palm Beach politician wasn’t the only one to pressure the police chief. “I received comments from a variety of different viewpoints…in some cases I had people tell me, hey, he’s a Palm Beacher, why are you investigating a Palm Beacher?” Reiter would say when deposed. “I had people that said it was an unfavorable career move for me to ask the state attorney to remove himself from the case and to refer it to the FBI….I had plenty of people that told me that that was a mistake.”

  Reiter didn’t back off. To have done so would have been a betrayal—not only of the victims but also of his vocation and the community he had sworn he would serve.

  “My responsibility was to protect everyone that lives in Palm Beach and preserve their constitutional rights and be the police department for all,” Reiter said. “And I think that under the law, particularly under the criminal laws, that all people have to, by the nature of our system, be treated exactly alike.”

  But along with handing the case off to the FBI and the US attorney, Reiter took another unusual step. He wrote personal letters—on Palm Beach PD letterhead—to the parents of the victims in the case.

  He delivered the letters by hand.

  CHAPTER 49

  Jeffrey Epstein: September 2007

  In the winter of 2013, Scott Blake, a forty-seven-year-old middle school principal from Palm Beach Gardens, Florida, would be sentenced to the minimum mandatory sentence—ten years in prison, with ten years of probation on top—for pleading guilty to one charge of soliciting sex with a minor.