Scams,
Schemes, Ruthless Cons: The Untold Story of How Jeffrey Epstein Got Rich
For
years, rumors swirled about where his wealth came from. A Times investigation
reveals the truth of how a college dropout clawed his way to the pinnacle of
American finance and society.
David
Enrich Steve Eder Jessica Silver-Greenberg Matthew Goldstein
By David
Enrich Steve
Eder Jessica
Silver-Greenberg and Matthew Goldstein
The
reporters, who have been investigating Jeffrey Epstein since 2019, interviewed
dozens of his former colleagues, girlfriends, business partners and others.
They also dug through archives, reviewed photos, notes and emails and scoured
thousands of pages of public records.
Dec. 16,
2025
One
evening in early 1976, a bushy-haired Jeffrey Epstein showed up for an event at
an art gallery in Midtown Manhattan. Epstein was a math and physics teacher at
the city’s prestigious Dalton School, and the father of one of his students had
invited him. Epstein initially demurred, saying he didn’t go out much, but
eventually relented. It would turn out to be one of the best decisions he ever
made.
At the
gallery, Epstein bumped into another Dalton parent, who had heard tales of the
23-year-old’s wondrous math skills. The parent asked if he’d ever thought about
a job on Wall Street, according to an unreleased recording of Epstein and a
document prepared by his lawyers. Epstein was game. The parent dialed a friend:
Ace Greenberg, a top executive at Bear Stearns. Epstein, the friend told
Greenberg, was “wasting his time at Dalton.”
Greenberg
invited Epstein to the investment firm’s offices at 55 Water Street at the
southern tip of Manhattan. Epstein showed up in a turtleneck. Greenberg was
impressed — even though the young man didn’t have the foggiest idea of how Wall
Street worked. Greenberg had helped build Bear Stearns into one of the
industry’s scrappiest firms by eschewing the traditional investment-banking
practice of hiring Ivy Leaguers with M.B.A.s. He preferred what he called
P.S.D.s: those who were poor, smart and had “a deep desire to become rich.”
Epstein
fit the bill. He grew up in a working-class family in Coney Island. Friends
described him as a math whiz and a piano virtuoso. And, as Greenberg and his
colleagues would soon learn, he yearned for wealth. That trait had been
apparent as early as ninth grade: A classmate told us that Epstein predicted to
her that one day he would be very rich.
Before
offering Epstein a job, Greenberg had him meet another senior executive,
Michael Tennenbaum. His son happened to be a Dalton student, who reported to
his father that Epstein was popular with students and the school’s young female
staff members. Epstein went to Tennenbaum’s office overlooking New York Harbor
for an interview. “He was just a hell of a salesman,” Tennenbaum told us.
Epstein was hired.
It was an
extraordinarily lucky break for him — the first of many. Administrators at
Dalton, unimpressed with Epstein’s teaching, had asked him to leave the school
after the academic year ended. Now, just like that, he had a new job that paid
about $25,000 a year (roughly $140,000 in today’s dollars).
Greenberg
viewed the young man as a protégé. Early on, he invited Epstein to a dinner
party and seated him next to his 20-year-old daughter, Lynne, who told us that
she suspected it was a setup. The two hit it off and started dating. Word of
the new guy’s romance with the boss’s daughter spread quickly, granting Epstein
something akin to protected status at the firm.
Tennenbaum
soon became Epstein’s supervisor. “He was proving to be quite talented,”
Tennenbaum told us. But in late 1976, he received a disconcerting phone call
from the head of Bear Stearns’s personnel department. Employees had belatedly
gotten around to checking Epstein’s résumé, which stated that he had received
degrees from two California universities.
“Are you
sitting down?” the H.R. official asked Tennenbaum. “Neither school has heard of
him.”
Tennenbaum
was in a delicate spot. He asked Greenberg what to do. The response, Tennenbaum
told us, was that he should treat Epstein as if he were a normal employee — an
instruction that made clear that, thanks to his relationships, Epstein was in
fact not a normal employee.
He
summoned Epstein to his office. “You lied about your education,” he said.
“Yes, I
know,” Epstein calmly replied. He had never graduated from college. Tennenbaum
recalls being disarmed by the admission. Decades later, he would regard it as
an example of Epstein’s ability to manipulate his marks — in this case, him.
“Why did
you do it?” Tennenbaum stammered.
Without
an impressive degree or two, Epstein said, “I knew nobody would give me a
chance.”
This
resonated with Tennenbaum. He had benefited from his own share of second
chances over the years. And so he agreed to give Epstein one as well.
It was
perhaps the first example of Epstein getting caught cheating — and then
avoiding punishment thanks to his uncanny ability to take advantage of those in
positions of power. This would become a lifelong pattern, one that largely
explains Epstein’s remarkable success at amassing wealth and, eventually,
orchestrating a vast sex-trafficking operation.
Nearly
five decades later, and more than six years after his death, Epstein has become
an American obsession. The public fascination only intensified after President
Trump initially refused this year to release federal investigative records
about the infamous sex offender — before reversing himself under pressure.
Much of
the last quarter-century of Epstein’s life has been carefully examined —
including how, in the 1990s and early 2000s, he amassed hundreds of millions of
dollars through his work for the retail tycoon Leslie Wexner. Yet the public
understanding of Epstein’s early ascent has been shrouded in mystery. How did a
college dropout from Brooklyn claw his way from the front of a high school
classroom to the pinnacle of American finance, politics and society? How did
Epstein go from nearly being fired at Bear Stearns to managing the wealth of
billionaires? What were the origins of his own fortune?
We have
spent months trying to pierce this veil. We spoke with dozens of Epstein’s
former colleagues, friends, girlfriends, business partners and financial
victims. Some agreed to speak on the record for the first time; others insisted
on speaking confidentially but gave us access to never-before-seen records and
other information. We sifted through private archives and tracked down
previously unpublished recordings and transcripts of old interviews — including
one in which Epstein gave a meandering account of his personal and professional
history. We perused diaries, letters, emails and photo albums, including some
that belonged to Epstein. We reviewed thousands of pages of court and
government records.
What
emerged is the fullest portrait to date of one of the world’s most notorious
criminals — a narrative that differs in important respects from previously
published accounts of Epstein’s rise, including his arrival at Bear Stearns.
In his
first two decades of business, we found that Epstein was less a financial
genius than a prodigious manipulator and liar. Abundant conspiracy theories
hold that Epstein worked for spy services or ran a lucrative blackmail
operation, but we found a more prosaic explanation for how he built a fortune.
A relentless scammer, he abused expense accounts, engineered inside deals and
demonstrated a remarkable knack for separating seemingly sophisticated
investors and businessmen from their money. He started small, testing his
tactics and seeing what he could get away with. His early successes laid the
foundation for more ambitious ploys down the road. Again and again, he proved
willing to operate on the edge of criminality and burn bridges in his pursuit
of wealth and power.
Rung by
rung, Epstein climbed a social and financial ladder, often using young women as
a potent form of currency. His girlfriends, lovers and even exes helped elevate
his status inside a bank, got him hired to track down missing assets and gained
him entree to prestigious organizations. And deliberately or not, some of them
enabled him as he constructed a sex-trafficking operation that would later
ensnare hundreds of teenage girls and young women.
That
story starts at Bear Stearns, the place where Epstein learned how to win and
use power. The institution continued to enable him long after he had shown his
true colors.
More than
four decades later, Tennenbaum still regrets that he didn’t end Epstein’s
career when he had the chance.
“I didn’t
realize,” he said, “that I was creating one of the monsters of Wall Street.”
‘Deeply
offended’ by an internal investigation
Having
been let off the hook, Epstein was looking at a bright future. In 1980, Bear
Stearns named him a limited partner — one rung below a full partner — and
Epstein, who was 27 at the time, claimed that he was the youngest in the firm’s
history to join the partnership. He was pulling in about $200,000 a year (more
than $800,000 in today’s dollars). By then, Epstein’s dalliance with
Greenberg’s daughter had fizzled — she told us that she learned that Epstein
“lied about everything” — but his renown was growing.
He was
regularly flying to Palm Beach, Fla., to visit young women. That summer,
Cosmopolitan named Epstein its “bachelor of the month,” describing him as a
“dynamo” who “talks only to people who make over a million a year!” The
magazine encouraged interested parties to write to Epstein at his work address.
One
secret to Epstein’s early success was his close relationship with Jimmy Cayne,
a senior executive who would one day run Bear Stearns. Rumors, perhaps fueled
by envy, began to spread that Epstein was helping Cayne, who died in 2021, to
pursue women and score drugs, according to several of their colleagues. Cayne
raved to colleagues about Epstein and began introducing him to some of his most
lucrative clients.
“That’s
what really catapulted him,” Tennenbaum recalled, describing Epstein and Cayne
as “two sleazeballs.” Once or twice a week, Epstein would let it be known that
he was having lunch with the chief executive of a major company — meetings
apparently arranged by Cayne, said Elliot Wolk, who became Epstein’s boss after
Tennenbaum. Wolk surmised that Epstein’s appeal to these clients was partly his
charisma and partly his newfound understanding of complex trading strategies
that could save ultrawealthy clients huge amounts in taxes.
Epstein
was not content to simply climb the corporate ladder. In 1980, he flew on Bear
Stearns’s dime to a conference in the Caribbean. While there, he spent more
than $10,000 on jewelry and clothing for his latest girlfriend — and charged it
to the firm. The accounting department noticed the payments and flagged them to
the financial controller, who quickly concluded that the expenses were
improper, according to a person with direct knowledge of what happened. The
controller reported the matter to Greenberg, by then the chief executive. Once
again, there were no consequences.
More
serious trouble soon surfaced. When investment banks help companies go public,
they can dole out shares to favored clients before the stock begins trading on
public exchanges. Getting early access is a lucrative privilege, because the
value of the shares often spikes in the first hours of trading — yielding a
fast, low-risk profit for those initial holders. Bear Stearns executives
learned that Epstein was giving his girlfriend access to these “hot deals,” as
several of his colleagues recounted to us.
The firm
soon discovered yet another infraction: Epstein had lent $15,000 to a high
school buddy in a manner that violated federal rules governing brokers. And
there might have been more: The Securities and Exchange Commission would soon
conduct an insider-trading investigation into well-timed trades before an
attempted corporate takeover; the S.E.C. interviewed Epstein, though he was
never accused of wrongdoing.
In early
1981, Bear Stearns began investigating Epstein, and two senior executives
interrogated him about the girlfriend’s I.P.O. shares and the personal loan.
Epstein denied wrongdoing — and was “deeply offended” by the investigation, as
he later put it in a letter to his colleagues. The firm’s executive committee
decided to fine him $2,500 and suspend him for two months, according to a note
we reviewed that was sent to employees by the firm’s leaders. Rather than
accept this indignity, Epstein announced that he was resigning.
His
five-year tenure at Bear Stearns was over, but Epstein didn’t intend to slink
away from Wall Street. The connections and credentials he had collected at the
firm would prove indispensable as he sought to lure clients and financial
victims. By giving Epstein second chances, Bear Stearns paved the way for a
future that would far exceed anything that would have been possible if he had
stayed at the firm. Rather than shunning their ousted colleague, employees
would embrace Epstein and help him prosper.
A
$450,000 oil scam
One of
the Bear Stearns contacts who would prove invaluable to Epstein was a junior
saleswoman — and former Miss Indianapolis — named Paula Heil. She would expose
Epstein to a previously unseen world of wealth, privilege and possibilities.
They
started dating before he left Bear Stearns; we tracked down a financial
self-help book Heil wrote in 1981 that was dedicated “to Jeffrey.” That year,
the couple traveled to England. While they were there, Heil took Epstein to
visit a rich acquaintance of hers, Nick Leese, at his family’s countryside
manor. There they met Nick’s father, Douglas Leese, a defense contractor with
extensive connections in the arms industry and the British government. He took
an immediate liking to Epstein.
Soon
Epstein was making regular trips to England and spending time in the Leeses’
rarefied world. Epstein tutored Douglas’s younger son, Julian, and Julian
taught him to shoot. Douglas mentored Epstein, let him tag along for meetings
with British and international elites and took him on as a consultant with an
expense account. Nick, meanwhile, introduced Epstein to up-and-coming Wall
Streeters, according to one, who recalls Epstein sitting quietly by himself
during a small gathering at a friend’s apartment in the early 1980s. “He looked
like someone who was taking notes in the corner,” he told us. Epstein was “part
of the family,” Julian later told Tom Pattinson, a British journalist who
shared the unpublished interview transcript with us. (Julian died in 2024.)
It was
perhaps Epstein’s first close experience with true generational wealth, and he
liked the taste enough to help himself to more. The relationship ended a couple
of years later when Douglas Leese accused Epstein of abusing his expense
account by charging personal flights on the Concorde and stays at luxury
hotels. “He was very cross and upset about it,” Julian said of his father. “And
he said he didn’t want to have any more to do with Jeffrey.”
Epstein
had been spending extravagantly, and despite his lofty compensation at Bear
Stearns and his work for Leese, he found himself strapped, even occasionally
bouncing rent checks. Back in New York, he joined forces with John Stanley
Pottinger, a lawyer who had recently left a senior post in the Justice
Department. Epstein, Pottinger and Pottinger’s brother rented a penthouse
office in the Hotel St. Moritz on Central Park South. (The broker, Joanna
Cutler, told us that Epstein initially stiffed her on the commission.)
According
to Epstein’s friend Bob Gold, Epstein and the Pottingers pitched tax-avoidance
strategies to wealthy clients, including some whom Gold believes Epstein met
through Bear Stearns. The short-lived business partnership has not previously
been reported — and is especially notable because decades later Pottinger would
team up with Brad Edwards to represent scores of women who accused Epstein of
sexually abusing them. (Edwards told us he knew only that Pottinger and Epstein
briefly shared an office, not that they were in business together. Pottinger
would later say he met Epstein through a client.)
Epstein
continued to take advantage of his past affiliation with Bear Stearns, despite
having left the firm under a cloud of suspicion. He surprised an acquaintance
by answering his home phone, where he took some business calls, by saying,
“Bear Stearns.”
And some
of Epstein’s former colleagues at the firm saw fit to maintain friendships with
him — friendships that would prove extraordinarily profitable for Epstein. One
was Clark Schubach, who had been one of Epstein’s managers. Speaking publicly
for the first time, Schubach told us he has fond memories of Epstein, who
struck him as an outer-borough striver — just like Schubach, who grew up in the
Bronx.
In 1982,
he introduced Epstein to Michael Stroll, who ran a pinball and video-game
company. Stroll trusted Bear Stearns and Schubach. He gave Epstein $450,000 —
about 10 percent of his net worth — to invest in a supposed crude-oil deal that
Epstein told him he was planning.
Within
two years, most of the money had vanished, Stroll later said in an unpublished
interview with Thomas Volscho, a professor at the College of Staten Island who
has spent years researching Epstein’s early years and shared some of his notes
and documents with us. Epstein began dodging Stroll’s phone calls; at one
point, he sent Stroll a quart of oil in an attempt to convince him that a deal
was, in fact, in the works. The dispute ended up in civil court, with Stroll
arguing that Epstein had promised to return his money but never did. In 1993,
Epstein prevailed on technical grounds, and a judge ruled that he wasn’t
personally liable. Decades later, Stroll remains bitter. “He’s a despicable
prick,” he told us.
The
Stroll scam marked a turning point for Epstein. He had already shown himself
capable of betraying friends and patrons who trusted him, but now he had
advanced from the flagrant abuse of expense accounts to apparently absconding
with hundreds of thousands of dollars. Stroll would later lament to Volscho: “I
unknowingly seeded his growth.”
Bounty
hunting in the Cayman Islands
During
his time with the Leese family, Epstein liked to tell people that he was a
“bounty hunter” who tracked down hidden money. The Leeses had rolled their eyes
— Epstein seemed to enjoy cultivating an air of mystery — but soon enough he
would be able to make good on that boast.
Around
1982, a mutual acquaintance introduced Epstein to Ana Obregón, a young Spanish
socialite and actress. On their first date, he sped her around Manhattan in a
Rolls-Royce. She was mesmerized by his charm and looks but ultimately just
wanted to be friends; in her 2012 memoir, after Epstein had been designated a
sex offender, she described him as “the perfect man I never fell in love with.”
Even as
Epstein was romancing Obregón, he had a serious girlfriend: Eva Andersson, a
model and former Miss Sweden. They began dating soon after she moved to New
York from a small town in her native country, and many of Epstein’s friends and
acquaintances have said she was the love of his life.
But that
didn’t stop him from pursuing other women — especially those with money or
connections. During his fling with Obregón, the brokerage firm Drysdale
Securities imploded. The Obregóns, along with a handful of other wealthy
Spanish families, soon hired Epstein to help track down their missing millions.
Now he really was a bounty hunter.
Epstein
brought on his friend Bob Gold, a former federal prosecutor, as his wingman.
Gold told us they spent more than a year trying to find the missing assets,
which Drysdale had apparently hidden through a byzantine network of offshore
banks and shell companies. They narrowed down the list of banks where the money
might be stashed but eventually hit a wall.
Then one
day in 1984, Gold went to Epstein’s apartment and found him playing a
Rachmaninoff concerto on the piano. All of a sudden, Gold says, Epstein began
riffling through a stack of documents and announced that he had solved the
mystery: The clients’ funds had ended up at a Canadian bank’s branch in the
Cayman Islands. To this day, Gold says, he isn’t sure how Epstein figured it
out. He and Epstein chartered a Lear jet and showed up at the bank. Gold warned
a bank manager that he could be in legal jeopardy if he didn’t hand over
millions of dollars’ worth of bond certificates. Gold and Epstein returned to
the United States with the securities. (Gold says he and Epstein later drifted
apart.)
Epstein
benefited handsomely from his efforts. Coupled with the fruits of his Stroll
scam, the payday meant Epstein had almost certainly surpassed an impressive
milestone: He was a millionaire.
‘You are
someone that’s going to help me get where I want to go’
By the
mid-1980s, Epstein had re-established himself at Bear Stearns, now as a valued
client. He was routinely calling his former manager, Schubach, to place orders
to buy or sell stocks, bonds and options. The firm earned commissions on
Epstein’s trades and therefore had an incentive to keep him happy.
In 1986,
Schubach hired a petite 23-year-old named Patricia Schmidt to be his assistant.
She told us that her main job was to be “eye candy,” but her other duties
included answering the phones. That put her in regular contact with Epstein.
One
evening, Schubach, who was a senior managing director, asked her to deliver a
sheaf of papers to Epstein at his apartment in the Solow Tower, a gleaming
black-glass building on the Upper East Side. Epstein welcomed her in, made her
tea and invited her to come back anytime to use the building’s rooftop pool.
Schmidt suspected that she was dispatched to Epstein because she was an
attractive young woman. “Clark knew exactly what he was doing sending me to
Jeff’s apartment,” she told us. “I was his leverage to Jeff.”
A week or
so later, Schmidt took Epstein up on the offer. A doorman let her in, and she
went straight to the pool. After she swam for a bit, Epstein arrived at the
pool to say hi. He suggested that she check out the sauna. When he followed her
in, Schmidt was surprised but not dismayed. He asked if he could give her a
massage. Schmidt said yes. It was the beginning of a sexual relationship, which
Schmidt chronicled in her diary and until now had remained secret.
Epstein
saw that Schmidt had potential to further his own ends. He routinely asked her
to go to the Bear Stearns library and research his prospective clients. He had
her give his clients and acquaintances tours of Bear Stearns or escort them to
dinner. Schmidt understood what was going on. “It was always about getting him
in a position of leverage,” she said. “I was his plaything. It was like, ‘You
are someone that’s going to help me get where I want to go.’”
Schmidt
wasn’t the only young assistant Schubach delivered to Epstein. In a bawdy book
compiled to celebrate his 50th birthday in 2003, another woman who worked at
Bear Stearns wrote about how Schubach took her to Epstein’s apartment and then
left — at which point Epstein blurted out, “You are a virgin, right?” The
letter goes on to describe Epstein, on a different occasion, tickling and
kissing her, and the entry includes a photo of her in a thong.
The
woman’s name was redacted by the congressional committee that released the
birthday book. But we reviewed an unredacted page of the book’s table of
contents. The woman’s name was Suzanne Ircha. She had just graduated from
college when she met Epstein. (In the early 1990s, when Ircha was trying to
start a Hollywood career, she turned to Epstein for a loan, according to notes
taken by one of Epstein’s assistants that we reviewed.) Ircha would become a
close friend of Melania Trump’s and would marry Woody Johnson, the owner of the
New York Jets and an heir to the Johnson & Johnson fortune, whom Trump
named as ambassador to Britain in his first term.
Schubach
acknowledged to us that he sent a few young female colleagues Epstein’s way
over the years. “I liked the guy,” he said. “If there was a single girl who he
might have liked, did I introduce them? Sure.”
A toehold
in America’s most exclusive social scene
One sign
of Epstein’s remarkable ascent was the place where he spent his days working.
By 1987, he was operating out of the Villard Houses, a complex of 19th-century
mansions on Madison Avenue that had been converted into luxury apartments and
offices. It was a venue befitting the era’s highest rollers, and Epstein
aspired to join this crowd.
He had
been put up in these plush surroundings by a new acquaintance, Steven
Hoffenberg, who ran a debt-collection company, Towers Financial. Hoffenberg was
also paying him about $25,000 a month (the equivalent of roughly $70,000 a
month today) as a consultant. Epstein and Hoffenberg soon refashioned
themselves as corporate-takeover specialists, trying unsuccessfully to buy
iconic companies like Pan American World Airways.
To
finance this attempted buyout blitz, Hoffenberg was constructing what turned
out to be an elaborate Ponzi scheme that bilked investors out of nearly $500
million. Hoffenberg, who a decade later would be sentenced to 20 years in
prison, claimed in court and in interviews that Epstein helped orchestrate the
fraud. (Hoffenberg died in 2022.)
Epstein
denied any involvement, but it is hard to believe he was in the dark about what
was happening. In 1988, he contacted Julian Leese and offered him an internship
at Towers. Despite his father’s enduring anger at Epstein, Leese accepted the
gig.
His
assignment was to help Towers raise money by selling what turned out to be
fraudulent bonds to international investors. Leese said he introduced
Hoffenberg to his father, who in turn introduced Hoffenberg to potential buyers
of the bonds. Among the customers to whom Julian Leese sold the Towers
securities were his godparents. “It was a disaster,” he recalled to Pattinson.
Epstein,
meanwhile, began soliciting millions of dollars from other acquaintances,
including Dick Snyder, the chief executive of Simon & Schuster, for what he
suggested were win-win investment opportunities. In 1988, Epstein and a few
other investors began buying shares of Pennwalt, a $1 billion chemical company.
After publicly disclosing their stake, they announced that they were preparing
a bid to buy all of Pennwalt for $100 a share — about 40 percent above where it
was trading at the time.
Epstein
and his partners didn’t appear to have any intention of actually buying the
company. But Pennwalt’s stock shot higher in anticipation of a bidding war.
Presto: They could sell the shares and secure a significant profit. And Epstein
wasn’t shy about what he was doing. He befriended the journalist Edward Jay
Epstein (no relation) and explained it to him in detail; Ed Epstein then wrote
a column in Manhattan,inc. magazine in 1989 that outlined what was essentially
legal market manipulation. (The column in the long-defunct magazine, which we
found in the archives at Columbia University, didn’t name Epstein but described
him as “a 36-year-old friend who prefers to remain nameless.” Ed Epstein died
in 2024.)
But
Epstein’s perfidy ran deeper. Ed Epstein discovered that dozens of the people
Epstein recruited to invest in Pennwalt, including Snyder, had written to him
demanding that he repay their money. In other words, Epstein had lured
investors in, used their money to book big profits and then refused to return
their funds. There is no record of Epstein facing any consequences — or
repaying the money. A result was that by the end of 1988, he reported being
worth about $15 million, according to a previously undisclosed document from a
Swiss bank, which Thomas Volscho, the professor, shared with us.
Epstein
seems to have had a keen sense of which benefactors he could quickly suck dry,
leaving them angry and betrayed, and which were worth nurturing for the long
haul as sources of connections and prestige. One of those was Sir James
Goldsmith — a financier and European politician who was embedded in Manhattan’s
upper crust. One evening, he hosted a gathering at his mansion on the Upper
East Side. Among the guests was Stuart Pivar, who had amassed a fortune before
becoming a renowned art collector. When Pivar arrived, he encountered Epstein
playing a Beethoven sonata at a piano in Goldsmith’s spacious entrance hall.
Pivar told us he was transfixed: Epstein had an irresistible “magnetism” —
especially with “the beautiful daughters of famous, powerful men.”
Several
years earlier, Pivar, Andy Warhol and others founded the New York Academy of
Art, and in 1987 Epstein became a member of the organization’s board. It was
the first time he had joined a prominent board, and it represented a big step
toward his shedding his roots as a hungry P.S.D. He was already swanning around
New York with beautiful women and raking in tens of thousands of dollars a
month. Now he was beginning to ensconce himself in America’s most select social
scene. (In later years, after he left the board, his affiliation with the
academy would also help him draw at least one young woman into his web.)
Epstein’s
colleagues on the board included his ex, now married and named Paula Heil
Fisher, as well as a member of the Forbes family and Katie Ford, whose family
ran the Ford modeling agency. Epstein only occasionally showed up at board
meetings, according to records we reviewed from the academy’s archives, but he
had numerous opportunities to network with the academy’s illustrious
membership.
After
Warhol died that year, the academy threw a $150-per-person black-tie
fund-raiser in his honor featuring an art exhibition, a musical performance and
a dinner of cold snapper in vodka sauce. Photographers captured Tony Bennett,
Lynn Von Furstenberg and other stars and socialites arriving at the downtown
party. The evening’s invitation listed the event’s co-chairmen, fixtures of New
York’s arts and finance scenes.
The first
name was Mr. Jeffrey E. Epstein.
A
confidence man meets his most significant mark
A fateful
flight to Florida that year would launch Epstein from a mere millionaire into a
plutocrat with palatial estates, two private islands and luxury aircraft. The
transformation came about through a new client: Les Wexner, the billionaire who
built brands like the Limited and Victoria’s Secret. The two were introduced by
Wexner’s friend Robert Meister, an insurance executive who happened to sit next
to Epstein on the plane to Palm Beach. Meister suggested that Wexner get in
touch with Epstein for financial advice.
Wexner
soon had a financial adviser, Harold Levin, fly to New York to meet Epstein.
Levin told us that he spent an hour with Epstein in his office and immediately
got a bad vibe. He found a pay phone and called Wexner. “I smell a rat,” Levin
reported. “I don’t trust him.”
Wexner
apparently didn’t listen. About a year later, he hired Epstein to be Levin’s
boss. As far as Levin could tell, Epstein won the billionaire’s confidence by
falsely telling him that Levin had been stealing. Levin decided to quit rather
than work for Epstein. Before long, Wexner had given Epstein essentially free
rein by granting him power of attorney over his finances. Epstein’s name began
appearing in government filings as responsible for Wexner’s businesses and
charities. Some of Epstein’s phones had Wexner’s number on speed dial,
according to photos we reviewed.
Almost
immediately, Wexner’s colleagues grew alarmed by his embrace of Epstein. “I
tried to find out how did he get from a high school math teacher to a private
investment adviser,” the vice chairman of the Limited told The New York Times
in 2019. “There was just nothing there.” A Limited board member eventually
became so troubled by Epstein that he hired Kroll, the private investigations
firm, to see what could be unearthed about his past, according to Ed Epstein.
Even Meister realized he’d misjudged Epstein and urged Wexner to cut ties.
Once
again, Wexner didn’t listen, and thus became the most important contributor to
the staggering growth in Epstein’s fortune. One unsolved mystery of the Epstein
era is what exactly Wexner got out of their relationship. He has repeatedly
refused to answer questions, including ours. But Epstein’s modus operandi with
other wealthy men — including the private-equity billionaire Leon Black — was
to instill fear that their finances were a mess, that their advisers and even
family members were inept or exploiting them and that only one man had the
wherewithal to save them.
Epstein
appeared to deploy that playbook with Wexner — and to reward himself lavishly.
He seemed to be taking whatever he thought he deserved from Wexner’s accounts,
according to people who later learned what Epstein was doing. The amounts were
often measured in the tens of millions.
He bought
a waterfront mansion in Palm Beach for $2.5 million, about a mile from Donald
Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate. Epstein and Trump had become pals in New York, and
Epstein was a regular at Trump’s Atlantic City casino; a former executive there
recently told CNN that the two men seemed to be best friends. In Florida,
Epstein began hanging out at Mar-a-Lago, attending parties featuring N.F.L.
cheerleaders and “calendar girl” contestants.
He bought
another mansion, on 30 acres in New Albany, Ohio, where Wexner was building an
enormous real estate development. He ditched his one-bedroom in the Solow Tower
and began leasing a grand marble townhouse on the Upper East Side — the former
residence of Iran’s deputy general consul — for $15,000 a month. (According to
lawsuits that we reviewed, the owner of the Solow building sued Epstein for not
paying rent. The townhouse’s owner — the U.S. government — sued him for
illegally subletting. The owner of the Villard Houses, where he by now leased
his own office, made similar accusations.)
Epstein
cruised around Manhattan in a Rolls-Royce Silver Spirit. He began donating
thousands to politicians — and developing relationships with them. In 1989,
Epstein accompanied Wayne Owens, a Democratic congressman from Utah, on a trip
to the Middle East to explore ways to promote business ties between Israel and
its neighbors. Epstein apparently was invited in his capacity as a finance
expert, but he struck participants as out of his depth and bored.
Dan
Gordon, a screenwriter who was part of the entourage, says he warned Owens that
Epstein was showing disrespect by his slovenly attire in meetings with Israel’s
Benjamin Netanyahu and Shimon Peres and Saudi Arabia’s crown prince at the
time, Abdullah bin Abdulaziz Al Saud — the types of connections that Epstein
would cultivate in the years ahead. One of Owens’s aides, Michael Yeager,
recalled Epstein boasting about his Indiana Jones-like pursuit of hidden assets
and his close ties to Wexner.
Aside
from the money, Wexner’s greatest value to Epstein was that he imbued him with
new credibility and credentials. In 1989, Ken Lipper, a prominent fund manager,
was standing in a ski-lift line in Aspen, Colo., when a stranger approached
him. It was Epstein. He said he worked for Wexner, who wanted to invite Lipper
to a party in Aspen. Lipper, according to the person who recounted this to us,
had no idea how Epstein, who was traipsing through the snow on foot, had
tracked him down. But Wexner was a billionaire, and so Lipper attended the
party and then met privately with Epstein, who put millions of Wexner’s dollars
into one of Lipper’s funds. In a previously unreported act of dishonesty,
Epstein later claimed on a regulatory filing that he was employed by that
Lipper fund.
Epstein
also posed as a Victoria’s Secret talent scout, prompting more executives to
complain to Wexner about his conduct, to no avail. He began citing his work for
Wexner to prove his bona fides to banks, regulators and journalists. For most
of his life, Wexner would be his only publicly known client.
A new
girlfriend, and enabler, arrives
Epstein
was about to meet someone who would usher him into even more elite circles
while also playing a central role in his darkest crimes. His nearly decadelong
romance with Eva Andersson came to an end around 1990. In Epstein’s telling,
the split was the result of a mutual realization that his future did not
include “staying in one place and having a family.” The two remained close
until Epstein’s death.
Shortly
after their breakup, Epstein was introduced to Ghislaine Maxwell, the daughter
of the British media baron Robert Maxwell. Their first get-together, arranged
by a mutual friend, was at Epstein’s office at the Villard Houses, she has
said. When the domineering Robert Maxwell learned that his daughter was
spending time with Epstein, he contacted Ace Greenberg and Jimmy Cayne, both of
whom he was close to, to see what they knew about their former Bear Stearns
employee. Greenberg and Cayne apparently vouched for Epstein.
That
November, Robert Maxwell died suddenly as his business unraveled. Ghislaine
Maxwell flew to New York, distraught and short on cash. Epstein came to her
aid, financially and socially. When a memorial event was held for her father at
the Plaza Hotel — owned at the time by Trump — Epstein sat next to Maxwell, he
in white tie, she in shimmery blue. By 1992, they were an item.
It was
around this time that Epstein apparently began grooming and abusing hundreds of
teenage girls and young women. Maxwell was later convicted of playing a central
role in his sex-trafficking operation and is serving a 20-year prison sentence.
She recently told Todd Blanche, the deputy attorney general (and Trump’s former
personal lawyer), that Epstein was her “lifeline.”
His
friends told us that Maxwell tried to train him on social niceties, on what to
wear, on how to act like an aristocrat. Not all the lessons took, but with her
roster of glamorous connections, Epstein became even more of a staple of
Manhattan’s exclusive social scene.
At one
elegant soiree, he met the ABC News journalist Catherine Crier and held forth
about the scientists he knew. Crier told us that, a few months later, she and
Epstein attended a movie screening at the Plaza. As guests milled around in
formal wear, Epstein stood out in a white T-shirt. At the event, Crier
introduced him to her friend Elliot Stein, a prominent investment banker. Stein
later connected Epstein with Leon Black, who would ultimately replace Wexner as
Epstein’s most lucrative client. This was Epstein at his most productive,
leveraging one relationship to create another, over and over and over.
While he
was dating Maxwell, Epstein continued to see other young women — and to flaunt
them with powerful men. One of them was Stacey Williams, a former Sports
Illustrated swimsuit model, whom he met at a Christmas party that Trump threw
at the Plaza. In 1993, Epstein took Williams by Trump Tower. Williams has said
that Trump groped her and that Epstein later chastised her for letting it
happen. (Trump has denied it.)
As Wexner
prepared to wed the lawyer Abigail Koppel, Epstein helped prepare a prenuptial
agreement to protect the billionaire’s assets. Williams told us that when the
time came to sign it in January 1993, Epstein instructed her to deliver the
document to Wexner’s office in a sexy outfit, along with a joking message: Was
he sure he wanted to get married? Williams says she felt uncomfortable about
being wedged into Wexner’s affairs, but she grudgingly delivered the agreement,
without complying with the wardrobe request.
Using
donations to reach the Clintons and Rockefellers
On a
freezing Thursday in February 1993, Epstein and Wexner arrived at 1600
Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington. Just weeks earlier, Bill Clinton had been
sworn in as the 42nd president. It was the first of many visits Epstein would
pay to the Clinton White House.
Epstein
had become a political donor — including, later that year, $10,000 to help
refurbish the White House, earning him a spot at a reception with the Clintons
— and that gave him a certain amount of cachet with the new president. But
Epstein had something else going for him as well: a new connection named Lynn
Forester.
Forester
told us that she met Epstein at a reception for George Mitchell, the Senate
majority leader, whom Epstein had befriended. Forester was a successful
telecommunications executive, but she rose to greater prominence through her
marriage to Andrew Stein, the Manhattan politician who in 1993 ran
unsuccessfully for New York City mayor. The end of his mayoral campaign
coincided with the end of their 10-year marriage. Now Forester and Stein were
feuding over how to divvy up millions of dollars, and Epstein apparently
convinced Forester that he could protect her from getting ripped off. It was a
version of the same tactic he used to get in Wexner’s good graces years
earlier.
A source
told us that Epstein called one of Stein’s lawyers, claimed that Forester had
empowered him to negotiate on her behalf and demanded that Forester, as the
couple’s primary breadwinner, walk away with a greater share of the assets.
(Forester told us she has “no idea” whom Epstein contacted, nor “why he thought
he was empowered to do anything on my behalf.”)
It was an
opportune moment for Epstein to ingratiate himself with Forester, whom Clinton
had appointed to a White House advisory commission. On at least one occasion,
Forester brought up Epstein in a brief private conversation with the president,
according to a letter, first reported by The Daily Beast, that she wrote that
mentioned Epstein. He became a regular visitor to the White House, sometimes
with a girlfriend in tow, according to records housed at Clinton’s presidential
library. (Forester says she has “no recollection of having anything to do with
Epstein and the White House.” She says she cut ties with him in 2000, after he
deceived her on a property transaction. “I was a very small part of Epstein’s
life, and he was a blip on mine,” she said.)
By 1995,
Clinton and Epstein were sufficiently chummy that he wrote a get-well-soon note
to Epstein’s ailing mother. “Hang in there,” the president scrawled on a yellow
Post-it, which Epstein saved and we reviewed. (“The president knew nothing
about this guy,” said Angel Ureña, a spokesman for Clinton. “Nobody did.”)
Around
the same time, Epstein began developing relationships with the scions of two of
America’s wealthiest families.
One was
Libet Johnson, Woody Johnson’s sister and also heir to the Johnson &
Johnson fortune. Epstein oversaw a trust that held some of her land, and
Maxwell told Blanche that Epstein in the mid-1990s provided Johnson with the
same sorts of services that he offered Wexner. In 1994, Johnson gave more than
$2 million to his J. Epstein Foundation, according to filings we found in
Indiana University Indianapolis’s repository of old charitable records.
Epstein
used the foundation to procure access to prestigious organizations and
influential people — including David Rockefeller, the heir to the industrial
fortune. Soon after the foundation was established in the early 1990s, it began
donating tens of thousands of dollars to Rockefeller University, a prestigious
research institution, and the Trilateral Commission, which Rockefeller had
established as a forum for some of the world’s most powerful figures to discuss
global problems.
The
donations appeared to have their desired effect. In 1995, Rockefeller welcomed
Epstein to the board of Rockefeller University, according to prepared remarks
we found in his family’s archive. Around then, Epstein hosted Rockefeller at
his Manhattan mansion to discuss with a small group of wealthy people how to
best pass on money and values to younger generations, according to someone who
was there. Epstein also became a member of the Trilateral Commission. A program
for a dinner in 1998 celebrating the commission’s 25th anniversary noted the
evening’s participants, including Epstein and Forester, who were listed as a
pair. (Forester said she didn’t recall attending.)
Henceforth,
Epstein would relentlessly cite his Rockefeller connections, even claiming that
he managed money for the dynastic family. A person who was close to Rockefeller
and helped manage his money told us that this was not true. Epstein, he said,
didn’t even pitch Rockefeller on any investments.
Epstein
was also beginning to dole out money to Harvard University, where he was keen
to cultivate connections with high-profile academics. One of those was the law
professor Alan Dershowitz. In the summer of 1996, Dershowitz was at his house
on Martha’s Vineyard when he got a call from Forester. She was on the Vineyard
with Epstein, who she said was a Harvard donor and wanted to meet Dershowitz.
Dershowitz
told us that Epstein showed up at his Chilmark home later that day toting
vintage Champagne. The pair took a walk around a nearby pond, and Epstein, the
inveterate name-dropper, informed Dershowitz that he was close with Harvard
figures, including Larry Summers, an economics professor then serving in the
Clinton administration. But the main topic was Wexner, who Epstein said had
taught him “how to be rich.” Wexner’s birthday was approaching, and Epstein
wanted Dershowitz to attend a dinner in his honor. Dershowitz ended up flying
to Ohio on one of Epstein’s planes along with Senator John Glenn. Shimon Peres
— the recent Israeli prime minister, whom Epstein met years earlier during the
Middle East trip with Representative Owens — was among the other dinner guests.
(The following year, Forester hosted a party on Martha’s Vineyard where Epstein
mingled with guests including Dershowitz and Britain’s Prince Andrew.)
The year
after meeting Epstein, Dershowitz wrote an opinion piece for The Los Angeles
Times arguing that the age of sexual consent should be lowered to 15. Epstein
seemed to see the potential of nurturing a relationship with the prominent
lawyer. He introduced Dershowitz to Jimmy Cayne so that Bear Stearns could
manage his money. And he persuaded the investor Orin Kramer, whose hedge fund
already held tens of millions of Wexner’s dollars, to let Dershowitz invest,
too.
But
Kramer’s hedge fund soon suffered calamitous losses, and Dershowitz’s
six-figure investment was annihilated. Epstein demanded that Kramer make
Dershowitz whole and threatened to make his life miserable if he refused. They
eventually negotiated a compromise: Kramer would refund Dershowitz’s investment
if Epstein agreed to keep at least $30 million of Wexner’s money in the
struggling hedge fund. As a result, Kramer would receive enough fees from
Wexner to cover the cost of reimbursing Dershowitz.
Keeping
Dershowitz happy proved prescient. He would become one of Epstein’s
highest-profile and longest-serving defenders. In 2005, the parents of a
14-year-old girl in Palm Beach told the police that Epstein had sexually abused
her; that led to state and federal criminal investigations. Dershowitz and
other lawyers engineered a sweetheart deal in which Epstein escaped federal
prosecution, pleaded guilty in Florida to soliciting prostitution from a minor
and received a light jail sentence. (He also had to register as a sex
offender.)
Presumably
without intending to, Wexner had subsidized Epstein’s long-term and fruitful
cultivation of Dershowitz.
‘I told
you I would make it very big’
In 1999,
Julian Leese knocked on the imposing wooden door of Epstein’s Manhattan
townhouse. It had been years since he’d last seen Epstein, when Leese interned
for Towers and lost his godparents’ money, and even longer since Leese and his
family taught a young Epstein to shoot and to mix with aristocrats shortly
after his departure from Bear Stearns. As Leese recounted to the journalist Tom
Pattinson for a podcast, he had let Epstein know he would be in town, and
Epstein, now 46, invited him to his Upper East Side residence for tea.
A butler
waved him inside. Soon Epstein descended the sweeping staircase. “My boy,” he
declared, “I told you I would make it very big.”
There was
no doubt about that: Epstein was fantastically wealthy. His company’s financial
documents around then indicated that he was worth more than $100 million — an
amount that would grow substantially in the years ahead. Much of that appeared
to have flowed to Epstein from Wexner, who would later claim that he “had
misappropriated vast sums of money.”
Bear
Stearns remained his preferred Wall Street brokerage firm, but he was on his
way to becoming a coveted client of JPMorgan Chase, whose chairman was
impressed by Epstein’s claim that he managed money for David Rockefeller. Until
2013, as we reported this year, JPMorgan would provide Epstein with an array of
services that enabled his sex-trafficking operation.
Epstein
had by now amassed a huge real estate portfolio — including Little St. James,
an island off the southeastern coast of St. Thomas in the U.S. Virgin Islands.
Epstein and a rotating cast of his victims and celebrity guests moved among his
properties on a fleet of private aircraft.
Epstein’s
pace of raping, abusing and trafficking girls and young women was accelerating.
Ultimately, he would face accusations from hundreds of women. Little St. James
was an ideal, out-of-the-way venue for his crimes.
But there
was something else that was attractive about Little St. James. The U.S. Virgin
Islands was an unusually welcoming place for Epstein to do business. The
territory’s law enforcement and financial regulations were notoriously lax, its
politicians acquiescent. And the islands had created a series of generous tax
incentives to lure businesses from the mainland.
Epstein
applied for one of those breaks, which would enable his main company, Financial
Trust, to avoid most taxes — a potential savings of tens of millions of dollars
a year.
On a
balmy afternoon in April 1999, Epstein appeared at a hearing before the
Industrial Development Commission, which would consider (and ultimately
approve) his application.
To vouch
for his character, Epstein had turned to Harry Loy Anderson Jr., the president
of the Palm Beach National Bank & Trust Company, where Epstein had held
accounts since the early 1990s. Anderson — whose daughter is now engaged to
Donald Trump Jr. — wrote a letter stating that Epstein was “a gentleman of the
highest integrity” and that he “enjoys an excellent reputation in our
community.” (Epstein’s house manager later said in a deposition that he was
using Anderson’s bank to pay some of Epstein’s victims.) The letter, not
previously reported, was submitted to the development commission and was
obtained by the journalist Wayne Barrett; we found it in his archives at the
Briscoe Center for American History at the University of Texas, Austin.
In the
hearing room, Epstein unspooled a fantastical version of his life story,
according to a transcript of the meeting that we obtained from the U.S. Virgin
Islands. He had willingly left a job at Bear Stearns to become “a financial
doctor” to the wealthy. One of those clients, Wexner, had helped develop his
“sense of integrity.” He’d later grown close to the Rockefeller family,
advising them “on certain financial issues.”
By the
end, the commission’s members and staff were eating out of his hands, joining
the long list of people and institutions who, knowingly or not, would become
Epstein’s enablers. One seemed to be fishing for stock tips. Others jostled for
him to locate his company on their islands in the territory. Another asked if
Epstein would consider teaching a course at the local university. “I’d love
to,” Epstein replied. “As I said outside this room, I believe that the future
of the Virgin Islands is really with the young people.”
And he
thought he had something to teach them. One of his classroom priorities, he
mused, would be to educate them on “the ethics of business — which is very
difficult nowadays.”
David
Enrich is a deputy investigations editor for The Times. He writes about law and
business.
Steve
Eder has been an investigative reporter for The Times for more than a decade.
Jessica
Silver-Greenberg is a Times investigative reporter writing about big business
with a focus on health care. She has been a reporter for more than a decade.
Matthew
Goldstein is a Times reporter who covers Wall Street and white-collar crime and
housing issues.
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