by Craig Unger
Yuri Shvets worked with Berezovsky from 2002 to 2007 as a security consultant and said he had personal knowledge that Listerman provided girls to Berezovsky when the oligarch lived in London. “Every other day [Berezovsky] was receiving a new one from Russia, and that was just for one day. She spends the day and overnight and then she goes. He has another one, etc. It was Listerman. He helped FSB to film videos, sex parties of his clients with hookers, and then this information was used by the FSB to blackmail people.”
Wearing an Astrakhan fur hat, Listerman, or someone who looks a lot like him, was photographed entering Epstein’s mansion in January 2016, according to the New York Post.68 In a 2019 interview with the Daily Beast, Kristina Goncharova, Miss Teen Ukraine in 2010, described Listerman, with considerable distaste, as “the world’s famous seller of young models to oligarchs.”69 At the Miss Teen Ukraine pageant, Goncharova had been first approached by Listerman, who wanted an introduction—and she was just fourteen years old.
As a visitor to Epstein’s New York town house told New York Post columnist Richard Johnson in 2016, increasingly the young women and girls at Epstein’s seemed to be coming from the remains of the Eastern bloc. “Half of them are from the former Soviet Union and the other half are a mix of Americans and Europeans,” the source said. “When the Russian girls arrive in the city, they already have Jeffrey’s phone number.”
A well-known figure in Russia who has thrived under Putin, Listerman, sometimes known as Uncle Petya, got his start in the nineties recruiting young girls for modeling agencies—which he supplemented by getting them work as part-time “girlfriends” escorting affluent businessmen. According to a source who knew both men, Brunel had known Listerman for some time and had helped him set up a legitimate modeling agency many years earlier. Kommersant, Russia’s biggest business daily, reported in 2003 that one could see them together in marijuana smoking clubs in Paris, where Listerman arrived, two models in tow: one of whom was the top model Natalia Vodianova, from Emmanuel Ungaro’s show in the Louvre, and the other of whom was Listerman’s wife and, not incidentally, the face of Christian Dior, Kristina Semenovskaia.70
The men found they could make good money from superstar models, but second-tier models often had trouble bringing in revenue. Once the Soviet Union collapsed, however, and the ascent of the oligarchs began in Russia, a new market emerged. “Listerman figured out he could make a shitload more money by turning his modeling agency into a pimp agency,” said the source. “So basically there were about a hundred Russian oligarchs who had a constant stream of girls Listerman supplied.”
In other words, whatever the season, if an oligarch wanted young party girls for the chic Alpine ski resorts in Davos or Courchevel or for yacht parties in Ibiza, Mykonos, or Saint-Tropez, Listerman was the man. “Everybody used Listerman. He was the go-to guy for the Russian oligarchs. That’s how they got all the girls on their boats.”
By the nineties, Listerman had become a well-known figure in Russia, and according to the Daily Beast, in 2000, after Vladimir Putin had been elected president, he went on vacation in Courchevel with multibillionaire oligarch Vladimir Potanin.71 Deputy Prime Minister Boris Nemtsov, an opposition leader in the Duma, was staying in the same hotel.72 (An outspoken critic of Putin’s, Nemtsov was assassinated in 2015 near the Kremlin.)
After they got settled in a small chalet in the mountains, Putin led everyone to dinner, whereupon about “ten long-legged girls” showed up in tow with “famous promoter” Petya Listerman.
“Petya, what is this?” Nemtsov asked.
“Well, you guys too, after all,” Listerman said.
Thoughtful and considerate as ever, he had brought extra girls for everyone.73
As Listerman put it in an interview on a Russian website, “In the 20 years that I have been doing my job, I have become the best in the world [for Russian girls] I am a brand! I created a brand! The coolest, richest people who love all the most beautiful, the most expensive and want new ones . . . to be fucked—they all come to me.”74
Listerman had started out as a ski instructor in the posh Dombai winter resort in the Caucasus and then moved to Paris, where he started recruiting young girls for modeling and earned extra money by making them work as escorts for affluent Western businessmen.75
In the mid-nineties Listerman was arrested on stolen car charges, and when he was released from a French prison after several months, he began to develop a new business model in which, in addition to their providing sexual services, he allegedly used his girls to steal highly sensitive information from the political and business elite they were serving.76 According to Russian newspaper Sovershenno Sekretno, before long, Listerman’s girls became regulars at Davos, Switzerland, and the Côte d’Azur, in France, and would return with a boatload of confidential information. Before long, Listerman met with oligarch Boris Berezovsky to implement a new kind of “model espionage” where, in addition to their sexual activities, young models would engage in intelligence operations by allowing themselves to be photographed with their patrons in compromising positions or by stealing secrets.*
With Listerman delivering the goods for him, Berezovsky soon became a key supplier of kompromat to President Boris Yeltsin through Yeltsin’s bodyguard, Alexander Korzhakov. In the end, Shvets told me, “Listerman became an agent of the FSB. I know this firsthand because I used to know Boris Berezovsky pretty well when Listerman was supplying him with girls.”
According to Shvets, Berezovsky said Listerman helped the FSB shoot videos of his clients’ sex parties with hookers and allowed the kompromat to be used by the FSB to blackmail people.
As the Russian website FBI Media reported, “Listerman has not been a ‘free bird’ since the 90s. His girls are actively involved in the FSB’s program to collect incriminating evidence against top businessmen and politicians.”77
That meant ultimately his boss was Vladimir Putin.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
WHO’S GOT THE KOMPROMAT?
At a time when Jeffery Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell were courting the titans of Wall Street and Silicon Valley, internationally known academics, and European royalty, they were also injecting the virus of human trafficking into the American body politic and weaponizing it in the form of dirty little secrets of the richest and most powerful people in the world.
But exactly who used these secrets as leverage and against whom was unclear. Were they using the girls as perks to woo new clients, lending them out like trinkets to entertain billionaires? Were they using them as leverage—extortion, perhaps—by keeping sex videos as potential blackmail? Were they trading them to foreign intelligence services in Israel or Russia? No one really knew.
Some men close to Epstein actually said they thought that what was going on was far more innocent than the press has made it out to be. According to Mother Jones, Stuart Pivar, a scientist and cofounder of the New York Academy of Art, who also served as Epstein’s longtime friend and art adviser, said Jeffrey was suffering from satyriasis, an affliction characterized by an insatiable sexual appetite.1 There was no grand strategy behind Epstein’s operation, another associate of his told me, insisting that what was going on was merely that a bunch of rich guys were constantly looking for girls for their own pleasure and amusement. Epstein’s massive homes—in New Mexico, on his Caribbean island, in his Upper East Side mansion—were all part of an operation that was really just a latter-day version of Hugh Hefner’s Playboy Mansion, but on steroids. In other places, in other times, rich and powerful men would gather in wood-paneled, smoke-filled rooms and trade tall tales over fine whiskey and Cohibas. Jeffrey was offering up young girls instead.
But that rationale doesn’t quite work. For one thing, there was no reason to doubt that Ghislaine and Jeffrey regularly documented the sexual escapades of their guests. Christina Oxenberg told me that Ghislaine had told her about the videos in 1997. In 2015, Virginia Roberts Giuffre filed an a
ffidavit in court asserting that she believed federal prosecutors had videos and photos of her “as an underage girl having sex with Epstein and some of his powerful friends.”2
There was the Epstein acquaintance who told me Epstein had shown him photos of Donald Trump with young girls. And in 2019, according to Bloomberg News, after the FBI raided Epstein’s Upper East Side mansion, prosecutors said that FBI agents had assembled a “vast trove of lewd photographs of young-looking women or girls” as well as compact discs labeled “Misc nudes 1” and “Girl pics nude.”3
So there was no doubt that this was kompromat on a grand scale. But so many questions about it were unanswered. And there was always the possibility that Epstein’s operation itself was not secure. A former deputy sheriff in the Palm Beach County Sheriff’s Office told me he had possession of more than four hundred videos that were presumably taken by Epstein and Ghislaine.4 Epstein’s lawyers—and there were many of them—presumably had access to the materials or at least knew some of their contents. So did prosecutors and their investigators.
Moreover, exactly who was in these videos, who had been compromised, has never been fully revealed. As noted, Epstein’s black book and his planes’ flight logs listed hundreds of celebrities and power brokers of one sort or another. Between them, the two documents, also as noted, showed that Bill Clinton and Donald Trump, former Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak and former British prime minister Tony Blair, billionaire industrialist David Koch, and countless other luminaries had hitched rides with Epstein on the Lolita Express. There were also scores of celebrities from the worlds of art, entertainment, and media, including Mick Jagger, Alec Baldwin, Courtney Love, and Charlie Rose. Not to mention less glamorous but nonetheless powerful titans of the media industry, Wall Street, and politics.
In addition to his huge operation on Little Saint James, Epstein oversaw an equally elaborate operation in his East Seventy-First Street mansion in New York, and maintained a special set of apartments to house the girls just a few blocks away. Then, of course, there were his massive homes in New Mexico, Paris, and elsewhere. Scores of people worked for him and could not fail to notice the nude photos, erotica, dildos, and sex toys, not to mention all the tall, lithe, attractive young girls.
The girls themselves knew what was happening—or at least parts of the story. And there were hundreds of them. The black book alone listed dozens of masseuses in New York, Paris, New Mexico, the Virgin Islands, and other locales. With Ghislaine at the top of Epstein’s “sexual pyramid scheme,” dozens of girls like Virginia Giuffre serviced Epstein and then recruited others to do the same. Courtney Wild, in the Netflix documentary Jeffrey Epstein: Filthy Rich, claims she was first molested by Epstein when she was fourteen and subsequently brought Epstein forty to sixty girls, for which she was paid $200 each. Girls including Lesley Groff, Sarah Kellen, Nadia Marcinkova, and Adriana Ross recruited others as well.
Giuffre has given sworn testimony about her alleged sexual encounters with Epstein, Prince Andrew, and Alan Dershowitz. The other girls she worked with told similar stories. And so did the girls who recruited them—all the way to the top of the pyramid. In addition, there was Jean-Luc Brunel, his “models,” and his staff at MC2; and Peter Listerman, who had direct ties to the FSB and firsthand experience dealing with sexual espionage—Russian-style.
But when all was said and done, it was still unclear who had been captured on the videos, who had actual possession of them, and how they might be used. Had Epstein hidden them before he was taken into custody in 2008? Were they locked down in the custody of law enforcement officers and attorneys? Had Ghislaine hidden them? Were they seized by the sheriff’s office? The FBI?
And who would be interested in such kompromat?
Wall Street insiders, for sure. Israel was another possibility. Former Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak had allegedly been seen with both Robert Maxwell and Epstein shortly before Maxwell’s death in 1991. And he later got financing from Epstein for Carbyne, a company he started that handles emergency-response services.5 Barak had been a visitor to Jeffrey Epstein’s Upper East Side residence in 2016.
The Saudis were another possibility. That photo of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, a.k.a. MBS, was not there just for show, as one Epstein associate told me. They were genuinely close friends.
There was also Iran, the United Kingdom, and, of course, Russia, which realized that the rewards were potentially huge. In addition to Listerman, Russia had ties to Epstein through dozens of girls from the former Soviet Union who were participating in the Epstein operation. Reached by text in October 2020, shortly before publication, Listerman wrote back that he was suffering from COVID-19 and would not be able to respond to my questions until after the book’s deadline. In the past, according to the New York Post, he has told reporters, “I’m not a pimp, just [a] matchmaker.”6
* * *
—
Epstein’s ascent as a philanthropist in science and technology started even before he had been convicted for soliciting minors and served time. But after he got out of jail in 2009, the zeal with which the most prestigious academic institutions in the world accepted his largesse became vital to his quest to rehabilitate his reputation.
In 2003, the Jeffrey Epstein VI Foundation—VI, as in Virgin Islands—established the Program for Evolutionary Dynamics (PED) at Harvard, and Epstein donated $6.5 million to the program that year, the largest single donation he made to Harvard. After serving only thirteen months of an eighteen-month sentence in prison for procuring a girl under the age of eighteen for prostitution, he began using his association with Harvard and PED to rehabilitate his image, and, according to a review by Harvard’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences, likely made more than forty visits to the PED office in Cambridge to that end.7
According to the Harvard Crimson, the report also found that mathematics and biology professor Martin A. Nowak approved posting “flattering and false descriptions of Epstein’s philanthropy and support of Harvard.” Nowak was put on paid administrative leave as a result.
Starting in 2011, three years after his conviction, Epstein began meeting occasionally with Bill Gates, who, according to the New York Times, visited Epstein’s Seventy-First Street town house at least three times, staying into the night on one occasion. Employees of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation went there as well. Epstein had begun discussions with the Gates Foundation and JPMorgan Chase about overseeing a proposed multibillion-dollar philanthropic fund, an arrangement that could potentially be enormously lucrative for Epstein.8
Before long, Epstein had carved out a serious reputation for himself as a science and technology philanthropist. His credentials helped. A former member of the New York Academy of Science and a board member of Rockefeller University, he had also served on the advisory board of the Harvard Society for Mind, Brain, and Behavior.9
With tall young girls everywhere, most often blond, and his bathrooms stocked with penis- and vagina-shaped soaps, Epstein had created a world that served two wildly differing purposes. In addition to being the site of his sexual massages—often three times a day—and sex parties, Little Saint James was home to the Jeffrey Epstein VI Foundation (which Epstein endowed with a $30 million grant affiliated with Harvard) and hosted conferences on medical research, theoretical physics, string theory, and the like with world-renowned scientists such as Stephen Hawking.
In January 2012, the Jeffrey Epstein VI Foundation announced its sponsorship of a conference organized by MIT’s Marvin Minsky, a pioneer in artificial intelligence, with the headline “Top Scientists Meet to Discuss Greatest Threats to the Earth.” A key figure at MIT’s Artificial Intelligence Lab, Minsky, according to the Verge, co-wrote, with Seymour Papert, a groundbreaking 1969 book on self-training algorithms, Perceptrons, and later developed a computer display that was a forerunner to modern virtual-reality and augmented-reality systems.10
Two and a half months later, in late Mar
ch, the Jeffrey Epstein VI Foundation put out a press release declaring “Science Philanthropist, Jeffrey Epstein, Convenes a Conference of Nobel Laureates to Define Gravity.” In April, his foundation put out yet another bulletin: “Jeffrey Epstein, Science Philanthropist, Organizes a Global Doomsday Conference.” In 2013, he told journalist Edward Jay Epstein that he was funding a group in Hong Kong that was building the world’s smartest robot.
In 2014, he funded NeuroTV, an online network devoted to neuroscience. In 2015, as Gabriel Sherman reported in Vanity Fair, LinkedIn cofounder Reid Hoffman, who later apologized for his role in rehabilitating Epstein’s image, brought Epstein out to Palo Alto, California, for dinner with Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, and Peter Thiel, among others.11
Epstein had wormed his way into Musk’s world after he initiated regular contact with Kimbal Musk, who serves on the boards of two of his brother Elon’s companies, Tesla and SpaceX, and whom Epstein introduced to a woman he had previously dated. “It almost seemed a little more transactional,” one source told Business Insider.12 “The rumor has always been that Epstein facilitated introductions to beautiful women, looking for deal flow or access to capital.”
Of course, close ties to the heavyweights of the tech sector carried considerable clout in terms of legitimizing Epstein in the eyes of Silicon Valley, and Epstein pulled out all the stops to win them over. He told the New York Times that even though Silicon Valley techies “had a reputation for being geeky workaholics,” he found that they were hedonistic and regular users of recreational drugs, and he personally witnessed “prominent tech figures” taking drugs and setting up sexual assignations.13
It’s unclear what, if anything, Epstein intended to do with that knowledge. According to Mother Jones, Epstein put together lavish dinner parties with the likes of paleontologist and evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould and cognitive psychologist and linguist Steven Pinker as a way of creating his own “mini-university.”14 He had an extraordinary ability to assemble a group of great scientists and intellectuals.