Filthy Rich

by James Patterson

  The prince had also visited Epstein on several occasions, in Palm Beach as well as in New York. And if allegations Virginia Roberts made in her 2015 declaration are to be believed, Epstein asked her to give the prince whatever he required, then report back with the details.

  According to the Guardian, Epstein and the prince had partied together at Windsor Castle, in Saint-Tropez, and in Thailand, where “Andrew was pictured on a yacht surrounded by topless women.”

  According to Roberts’s lawsuit, Epstein had forced her into the prince’s bed on Little Saint Jeff’s.

  After Epstein’s conviction, the British press were using another name for Little Saint Jeff’s: Sex Island. The Guardian reported that the manager of two Virgin Islands–based corporations owned by Epstein happened to be the wife of the governor of the Virgin Islands. There were allegations involving a million-dollar donation that Epstein had made to the governor’s reelection campaign. And then there was Roberts’s claim that she had been forced to have sex with the prince on the island as well as in New York and in London.

  Invariably, the photograph of Prince Andrew with his arm around the bare midriff of a very young-looking Virginia Roberts ran with stories that appeared in the tabloids.

  “It is emphatically denied that the Duke of York had any form of sexual contact or relationship” with Roberts, Buckingham Palace spokespersons would say. “The allegations made are false and without any foundation.”

  The prince’s ex-wife, Sarah Ferguson, the Duchess of York, while on a skiing trip with the prince and their daughter Eugenie in Switzerland, told reporters, “He is the greatest man there is. It was the finest moment of my life in 1986 when I married him. He is a great man, the best in the world.”

  “I won’t stand by—because I know what it feels like to have salacious lies made up about you—and not support him so publicly because they are just shockingly accusatory allegations, which I don’t think is right,” she said a few days later when interviewed by Today host Matt Lauer. “It’s a defamation of character, and as a great father and a humongously good man and all the work he does for Britain I won’t stand by and let him have his character defamed to this level.”

  But at the same time, a certain schadenfreude attended the good man’s fall from grace, and former associates kept coming out of the woodwork to dish to the press.

  “I’ve seen him treat his staff in a shocking, appalling way,” said a former aide to the prince. “He’s been incredibly rude to his personal protection officers, literally throwing things on the ground and demanding they ‘fucking pick them up.’ No social graces at all. Sure, if you’re a lady with blond hair and big boobs, then I bet he’s utterly charming.”

  Despite all this, the prince had stuck by Epstein. There was even a photo, frequently trotted out by the tabloids, of the two of them strolling in Central Park.

  Some few months before it was taken, a reporter posing as a businessman had secretly taped Sarah Ferguson’s demand for five hundred thousand pounds in return for access to the prince.

  “If you want to meet him in your business,” she’d said then, “look after me, and he’ll look after you. You’ll get it back tenfold.”

  “Once again,” she said afterward, “my errors have compounded and rebounded and also impacted on the man I admire most in the world: the Duke.”

  Prince Andrew had had his troubles already—with shady real estate deals, sticky romances, highly embarrassing document dumps (courtesy of Julian Assange and WikiLeaks), and questionable ties to Tunisian oligarchs, corrupt presidents of former Soviet republics, and Mu’ammar Gadhafi, among other entanglements, many of which were explored in a Vanity Fair article headlined THE TROUBLE WITH ANDREW.

  “The duke has a record of being loyal to his friends,” a “royal source” told Vanity Fair’s Edward Klein. “Take his feelings for Sarah Ferguson. If you are a prince and you bring a woman into the royal life and, for whatever reasons, she’s spit out, you might have feelings of debt toward her. The duke feels that she’s been spattered and rejected. His close relationship with the Duchess of York is problematic, and there have been many problems over the last 5 to 10 years, all of which stem from the duchess. Some of the behavior of the duchess is inconsistent with being married to, or an ex-wife of, the duke. There’s no question but that Sarah’s been a financially self-destructive element in the duke’s life.”

  “The same kind of loyalty manifested itself last December, when the duke visited Epstein at his home in New York,” said a spokesperson for Buckingham Palace. “Epstein was a friend of the duke’s for the best part of 20 years. It was the first time in four years that he’d seen Epstein. He now recognizes that the meeting in December was unwise.”

  “Don’t expect to see a photo of the two of them together,” another “royal source” would say.

  But one more story about the prince’s dealings with Jeffrey Epstein had already emerged.

  At a dinner party at Epstein’s town house, the prince dished about the wedding of his nephew Prince William to Kate Middleton.

  “He was amused that his dinner companions were so interested in every detail,” a guest in attendance told a New York Post gossip columnist. “What would Kate wear, what would the Queen wear, would his ex-wife Sarah Ferguson be invited?”

  Other guests in attendance that night included Chelsea Handler, George Stephanopoulos, Charlie Rose, Katie Couric, and Woody Allen.

  At around the same time, Jeffrey Epstein told the New York Post, “I’m not a sexual predator, I’m an ‘offender.’ It’s the difference between a murderer and a person who steals a bagel.”

  Was it so remarkable that Prince Andrew would have been seen in Epstein’s company? Andrew’s philandering had been tabloid fodder for years. Randy Andy, they called him in the UK. And in the circles that Jeffrey Epstein moved in, philandering wasn’t seen as a vice. Epstein came of age just as industrywide deregulation took hold on Wall Street. Junk bonds were king. Call girls were charging ten thousand dollars a night. And in the shadows, you’d see things that would have made Caligula blush. Sights that would make Nero himself reach for the nearest fire extinguisher. When the urge presented itself, the new super rich didn’t have to swap wives.

  They could simply swap harems.

  By the same token, was it so very strange to think that a man like the prince would have grown so detached from reality—insofar as reality is even a word that applies to a prince? Was it odd that he thought it was absolutely fine to be seen by photographers strolling through Central Park with a registered sex offender—when at the time large swaths of the financial, banking, and trading industries were characterized by their very detachment from day-to-day concerns such as morality, ethics, and appearances?

  As for Jeffrey Epstein, one question that might be worth asking is, if he’s in fact a narcissist and megalomaniac, could he actually believe that he’s innocent? Then again, that might be the wrong question. Epstein did plead guilty, after all. But what if he simply doesn’t see what he pleaded to as a crime? What if he’s proud of his lifestyle? And if that’s the case, why wouldn’t Prince Andrew be proud to be seen in public with his dear friend Jeffrey Epstein?

  What if, for people like Epstein and the prince, it’s just servants and masters, the way of the world? They’re natural winners—aristocrats, after all—and if life were fair, well, how would we know who the real winners are?

  CHAPTER 59

  Anna Salter: November 2015

  Why do powerful men do the things that Jeffrey Epstein and Prince Andrew have been accused of doing?

  Dr. Anna Salter studies child sex offenders professionally. Educated at Harvard, with a graduate degree in clinical psychology, she spoke, with the benefit of hindsight, about Jeffrey Epstein and others like him from her office in Madison, Wisconsin.

  “Consider a car,” says Dr. Salter. “There’s a motor, and there are brakes. We all have sexual impulses we don’t think it would be a good idea to act on. Most of us have
good control over our behavior. We have good brakes.

  “Sexual offenses and inappropriate sexual behavior are sometimes the result of a bad motor—for example, an attraction to prepubescent children or eleven-to-fourteen-year-old pubescent children as opposed to postpubescent individuals. But they are always the result of bad brakes.

  “Antisocial psychopaths don’t have brakes at all.”

  Dr. Salter has never met Epstein, but she’s followed his case closely and finds him a familiar type. She’s especially struck by the singular nature of the relationship between powerful, wealthy men and vulnerable, underage women.

  “[The men] are more impressive to a fourteen-year-old [girl] than to, say, an adult young woman who is self-supporting and feels more sure of herself,” she explains.

  “They are attracted to what they call freshness—barely budding sexuality and lack of sexual experience. The difference between them and their victims feeds their ego.

  “Great wealth and access are generally factors that make men feel they are entitled to whomever and whatever they want. Some have narcissistic personalities with inflated self-images. And of course, great wealth and status make such men think they can get away with it. Too often, they’re right.”

  On the other hand, Dr. Salter believes that certain conditions, such as the ones exhibited by Jeffrey Epstein, might be an inborn character trait.

  Personality can be influenced, sometimes quite heavily, by genetics.

  “Virtually no one believes anymore that humans are born a totally blank slate,” she explains.

  “We arrive with temperamental and personality variations that, of course, the environment can often, but not always, influence. We arrive with baggage.”

  Is Epstein a born psychopath, then?

  “Psychopathy is the umbrella term for individuals who do not have a conscience. Pyschopaths are often narcissistic, but narcissists are often not psychopathic. Some individuals who prey on young girls delude themselves into thinking that the abuse will not harm the child. They have a conscience, but they have medicated it with thinking errors. Others are flat-out psychopathic and simply don’t care if it hurts the young girl or not. I can’t say anything about Epstein, as I have not evaluated him, but narcissism and psychopathy are concepts an evaluator would look at concerning anyone who was sexually attracted to postpubescent individuals but who then began to focus on younger teens.

  “Psychopaths are often superficially charming, high-stimulus seekers who are bored if not doing something. They lie, con, and manipulate. They do not establish deep affective ties.

  “They are callous and remorseless individuals who simply don’t feel bad about harming someone.

  “Rules don’t apply to them because they are exceptional. They are sure they won’t get caught.”

  CHAPTER 60

  Jeffrey Epstein: July 2010

  Jeffrey Epstein was done with jail, but he wasn’t done settling suits brought by his victims. Under the conditions of his non-prosecution agreement, he’s even paid for the victims’ lawyers. Still, Epstein’s NPA seemed to ensure that he would not be prosecuted again for his crimes. Double jeopardy was working in Epstein’s favor. But in July of 2010, reports began to appear in the press: federal investigators were following other leads—leads that could result in child-trafficking charges and a twenty-year sentence.

  The Florida attorney general’s office refused to comment. It was against policy to confirm or deny the existence of an ongoing investigation. One of Epstein’s lawyers told the Daily Beast that he had no knowledge of such an investigation. “Jeffrey Epstein has fully complied with all state and federal requirements that arise from the prior proceedings in Palm Beach,” Jack Goldberger said. “There are no pending civil lawsuits. There are not and should not be any pending investigations, given Mr. Epstein’s complete fulfillment of all the terms of his non-prosecution agreement with the federal government.”

  If there was an investigation, nothing had come of it yet. For the moment, Epstein was free—free to turn his attention, again, to intellectual pursuits. He launched a website, JeffreyEpsteinScience.com, that featured blog posts such as “Conversations with Jeffrey Epstein,” “The Value of Quantum Computation to Jeffrey Epstein,” “Why Evolutionary Biology Intrigues Jeffrey Epstein,” and “An Understanding of Theoretical Physics from Jeffrey Epstein.” The latter post began: “This is where Jeffrey Epstein takes you to the very cutting edge of the frontiers of knowledge to explore and discuss our basic understanding of the subtle, simple, and hidden [qualities] that lie beneath…our universe.”

  “Jeffrey doesn’t know shit about science,” says Stuart Pivar, the art collector who has known Epstein for more than three decades. “Does he like to act like he does? Yes. But he doesn’t. But as far as these academic scientists—without people like him they wouldn’t have any money.”

  Other friends of Epstein’s say that he truly did have a brilliant mind for science. And in any case, Epstein had done more than sponsor individual scientists. He’d also sponsored conferences on Little Saint Jeff’s. On his website, he announced a conference called Mindshift at which Nobel laureates, such as the theoretical physicist Murray Gell-Mann, would mix with surgeons, engineers, and futurists and where professors would discuss cognitive neuroscience, artificial intelligence, systems of encryption and decryption, and other topics.

  Epstein had been hosting get-togethers like this for years. Toward the end of Chief Reiter’s investigation, in March of 2006, Epstein had hosted twenty top physicists—including three Nobel Prize winners as well as the celebrity physicist Stephen Hawking—at a Saint Thomas symposium called “Confronting Gravity,” which was advertised as “a workshop to explore fundamental questions in physics and cosmology.”

  “This is a remarkable group,” one of the Nobel Prize winners told a reporter for the St. Thomas Source.

  “There is no agenda except fun and physics, and that’s fun with a capital F,” Epstein said.

  Epstein had been especially interested in Stephen Hawking. Someday, Hawking had theorized, the universe would stop expanding and collapse, at which point time would begin to run backwards. Hawking believed that computer viruses were living things. He thought that given the size of the universe, alien life forms existed. He did not believe in God. But he had a vast appreciation for the inner workings of the universe, and this is why Epstein gave Hawking a tremendous gift. He paid to have a submarine modified so that it could fit Hawking and his wheelchair and give the scientist his first glimpse of an actual alien world—the one that lies under the waves of the ocean.

  It was one of the most romantic, generous gestures that Jeffrey Epstein had ever made.

  CHAPTER 61

  Al Seckel: January 2012

  Epstein’s partner in the Mindshift conference, a man named Al Seckel, was known for throwing fabulous parties that were said to have included the actor Dudley Moore, magician James “the Amazing” Randi, and future Tesla and SpaceX founder Elon Musk, as well as many of the scientists Jeffrey Epstein would court in the course of his own climb up the social ladder.

  In certain Los Angeles circles, Al Seckel was a very good man to know. But, like Jeffrey Epstein, Seckel was a sort of illusionist. According to Mark Oppenheimer, a journalist who knew Seckel and followed his career for fifteen years, Seckel made his money by selling rare books and papers, often through his social and academic connections.

  “A number of these transactions resulted in accusations and lawsuits,” Oppenheimer would write. “In speaking to former Seckel acquaintances, I kept hearing variations on a scheme Mrs. Pearce Williams believed he perpetrated against her late husband, the man Seckel said was his mentor. Seckel took books and promised money, or he took money and promised a book; but somehow, the promised party lost money.”

  “He was charming, erudite, humorous,” one of Seckel’s marks told the reporter. “I lent him $75,000. When the time came to pay it back he didn’t want to do it.”

  Oppenhe
imer found several people whom Seckel had stiffed and uncovered dozens of lawsuits he’d been involved in. In 2007, Seckel settled a libel lawsuit against a man who’d edited his Wikipedia page. Years later, Oppenheimer spoke with Seckel’s lawyer, Nicholas Hornberger.

  “Hornberger confirmed that he’d reached a settlement for the case, a favorable one,” the journalist wrote. “Hornberger added that Seckel has still not paid him for his services.”

  He also interviewed Seckel’s wife, Isabel Maxwell.

  Al and Isabel met on a blind date and married in Malibu in or “around” 2007 (“I don’t keep the dates in my head,” Seckel explained). A few years later, they moved to the South of France, where Seckel continued to trade in rare books and papers. While living in France, he was sued by a Virgin Islands company that accused him and Isabel of fraudulently attempting to sell rare books and a seventeenth-century portrait of Isaac Newton.

  Seckel had also been trying to sell papers belonging to Isabel’s father.

  Isabel is Ghislaine Maxwell’s sister and the daughter of Robert Maxwell.

  It was an odd thing, Epstein’s association with this self-professed PhD who, on closer inspection, turned out to be a bit of a grifter. But the Mindshift conference that Epstein and Seckel hosted in the Virgin Islands did take place, in 2010. Murray Gell-Mann was there, along with Leonard Mlodinow, a physicist who coauthored books with Stephen Hawking. Gerald Sussman, an expert on artificial intelligence who taught at MIT and also attended the conference, said that he didn’t remember too much about it.

  “We had scientific discussions, talked about various things,” he said vaguely.

  When Mark Oppenheimer asked him if he’d given money to Seckel, Sussman “got testy” with the reporter.