Filthy Rich

CHAPTER 20

Jeffrey Epstein: 1953-1969

Jeffrey Epstein’s mother, Paula, was the daughter of Max and Lena Stolofsky, who arrived in the United States as Lithuanian refugees. Relatives on that side of the family who remained in the old country would all perish in the course of Adolf Hitler’s campaign to exterminate European Jewry.

Epstein’s father, Seymour, was a manual laborer, like his father before him. Seymour’s parents, Julius and Bessie Epstein, had emigrated from Russia and landed in Brooklyn, both of them with eighth-grade educations. They lived in Crown Heights, where Julius owned a house-wrecking company.

Before landing a job with the city, Seymour had worked with his father.

They were kind people, says Epstein’s childhood friend Gary Grossberg. Seymour was there for him at a difficult time, Grossberg says. When Grossberg was young, his parents divorced, and his father moved out of Brooklyn. Seymour and Paula took Gary in. Often they referred to him as their third son. “Paula was a wonderful mother and homemaker,” Grossberg remembers, “despite the fact that she had a full-time job.”

Epstein, as a kid, was “chubby, with curly hair and a high, ‘hee-hee’ kind of laugh,” Beverly Donatelli recalls.* Beverly was two years older than Epstein, but thanks to his precocious talents, which allowed him to skip two grades, they graduated from Brooklyn’s Lafayette High School together, in 1969.

“He was advanced,” Beverly remembers. “He tutored my girlfriend and myself in the summer. He taught me geometry in just two months.”

When Beverly thinks of Epstein now, she recalls gentler times-long strolls down the Coney Island boardwalk, roller-coaster rides, stolen kisses. “That last year in school, I think he kind of loved me,” she says. “One night on the beach he kissed me. In fact, our history teacher made up a mock wedding invitation for Jeffrey and myself to show to the class. That seems pretty inappropriate now. But back then, we all thought it was funny. Jews and the Italians, that was pretty much who went to Lafayette High School. They didn’t socialize that much. And though my mother was crazy about him, she told me Jewish boys don’t marry Italians.”

Through the haze of several decades, Beverly remembers Epstein as a kindhearted boy and something of a prodigy-a gifted young pianist as well as a math whiz.

“I was talking to my girlfriends the other day,” she says. “There is nothing but nice we can say about him. He is actually the reason I went to college.”

Beverly lost contact with Epstein over the years. But not long after Epstein’s fiftieth birthday, she got a call out of the blue.

“He had a photo of us on the beach,” she says. “A friend noticed it at his birthday party. And Jeffrey said to the friend: ‘I bet she has a big ass now.’ So Jeffrey called me and invited me to his home on 71st Street. We hung out. We reminisced. He was the same Jeffrey. A gentleman.”

The two never did speak again, but to this day Beverly sympathizes with her high school sweetheart.

“I feel so bad for him,” Beverly says. “That’s how much I liked him.”

Gary Grossberg was a year younger than Epstein and in the same class as Epstein’s kid brother, Mark, with whom Grossberg remains very friendly, though he hasn’t seen or spoken with Jeffrey in some time. Both brothers are good people, he says.

“Jeffrey’s a brilliant and good person. He is also incredibly generous.”

Grossberg says he’s talked to Epstein about “the problem in Florida.” As he sees it, Epstein “got carried away…perhaps he was hanging around with the wrong people.”

Grossberg wonders, too, if the things that made Epstein special contributed to his eventual fall from grace.

“He was a diamond in the rough, you see,” Grossberg explains. “People recognized Jeffrey’s brilliance very early on. But he had a gift for recognizing opportunities very quickly. He started buying properties in Manhattan, including 301 East 66th Street. He asked his brother-did Mark want to join him? He did.”

Grossberg himself has had his ups and downs. At one point, he worked in a building owned by the Epstein brothers. There, he says, a porter told him a story about a little-known side of Jeffrey Epstein. The porter’s wife, who lived in South America, desperately needed an organ transplant. Epstein paid for the operation.

“That’s just typical,” Grossberg says. “That’s who he always was, long as I knew him.”

“Lafayette was a city school,” says another old classmate, James Rosen. “It was functional. There was nothing special about it.”

James Rosen is a retired postal worker. He lives in South Florida now, but, like Jeffrey Epstein, he’d grown up in Sea Gate.

“There was a lot of volatility at Lafayette,” Rosen recalls. “It was a blue-collar area that was, at one time, 90 percent Italian. Then a small amount of Jews moved in, and there was anti-Semitism. The Italians didn’t want the Jews to be there.”

Black families were moving in, too, he remembers, and Hispanic ones. But he says most of the animosity was aimed at Jews.

“There were fights in the schools. They thought we were going to take over.”

But Epstein seems to have made friends easily. Even then, his buddies-who called him Eppy-could see he was special. While they hung out on the beach, Epstein played the piano. Did homework. Worked on his prized stamp collection.

Innocent times.

CHAPTER 21

Jeffrey Epstein: 1969-1976

It’s the height of the Vietnam War. Students collide with college administrators. Hippies collide with hard hats. Kids with long hair collide with their parents. Jeffrey Epstein does not go in for any of that. At the age of sixteen, he’s taking advanced math classes at Cooper Union, an august institution in the East Village where Abraham Lincoln once spoke.

Thanks to a generous endowment, the school is tuition-free, though the application process is famously rigorous.

Epstein sails through it.

At Harvard or Yale, his accent would give him away. Epstein tawks like the Brooklyn boy he is. But Cooper Union is more open than any Ivy League school. It’s full of boys from Brooklyn, and, aside from his prodigious intellect, Epstein doesn’t stand out. He starts to make money by tutoring his fellow students. And in 1971, he leaves Cooper Union for the greener pastures of New York University, located a few blocks away. There, at the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences, he studies the mathematical physiology of the heart. But he never graduates from any college or university.

By 1973, Epstein is teaching at the Dalton School, a prestigious private school on the Upper East Side. Like Tavern on the Green, Grand Central Terminal, and the Century Association, Dalton is a New York institution-an elite K-12 rocket ship built for the children of New York’s ruling classes.

It’s not at all clear how Epstein, who has no college degree, ends up there.

And yet here he is, barely out of his teens and already a teacher of math and physics. “Go forth unafraid” is the Dalton School’s credo.

It’s a philosophy Epstein has adopted. For him, Dalton’s an excellent launching pad.

It’s nothing like Lafayette High School. The kids he’s teaching are rich-very rich. Their parents are extremely well connected. And despite Epstein’s outer-borough accent, he’s careful in his presentation. At any given moment, he’s one parent-teacher conference away from a whole new world of possibilities.

Because Dalton has an excellent student-to-teacher ratio, the parents get to know Epstein quite well. Before long, a Wall Street macher named Alan “Ace” Greenberg has taken a special shine to the young man who’s been tutoring his son Ted.

Like Epstein, Ace Greenberg came from a humble background.

The son of an Oklahoma City shopkeeper, he won a football scholarship to the University of Oklahoma, transferred to the University of Missouri following a back injury, and graduated in 1949. That same year, he moved to New York and, after a series of rejections at white-shoe firms-places that never would hire a Jew-landed a job at Bear Stearns, earning $32.50 a week as a clerk.

By 1958, he’d been made a full partner. Built like a pit bull, Greenberg smoked cigars, performed coin tricks for his friends, and always dressed in a bow tie. He was an all-elbows trader-gruff, cheap, and, above all, impatient. He was also a champion bridge player, a hunter of big game in Africa, and the firm but loyal leader of the team he’d built at Bear Stearns-an unusual team made up mostly of men who’d grown up in New York’s outer boroughs.

Greenberg didn’t care about MBAs or Ivy League diplomas. What he cared about was raw talent and drive. Greenberg cultivated risk takers, unconventional thinkers, and he looked high (and especially low) for his “PSDs”: men who, in his estimation, were poor, smart, and, above all, determined.

Jeffrey Epstein, the Dalton School teacher, fit Greenberg’s bill perfectly.

CHAPTER 22

Jeffrey Epstein: 1976-1981

According to several published reports, it was Ace Greenberg’s son, Ted, who introduced Epstein to Greenberg. But other sources say Greenberg’s daughter, Lynne, was dating Epstein at the time. According to them, that was how Epstein got into Bear Stearns-by charming a young and beautiful woman and using her to advance his career.

At Bear Stearns, Epstein started as an assistant to a trader on the American Stock Exchange and quickly worked up to junior partner, which meant that he was entitled to a share of the profits. Still in his twenties, he was running with the bulls, kicking down any doors that stood in his way.

The view from Ace Greenberg’s office, high above Madison Avenue in midtown, was striking. At night, the whole city was lit up like a stage set.

It was Epstein’s city now, to win or to lose. And there were women to go with the prize. Tall, beautiful women, blondes and brunettes, who wouldn’t have given a math teacher the time of day. Now they found Epstein exciting and handsome.

Greenberg’s gorgeous assistant was one of these women.

If Greenberg knew about their affair, he did not seem to care. Then again, Greenberg had other things on his mind. The Reagan era, when deregulation kicked into high gear, was still on the horizon. But there was already a decreasing amount of government oversight on Wall Street, and a new breed of bare-knuckle traders had begun to push every available limit. It was the start of the age of corporate raiders, and with Ace Greenberg looking out for him, Epstein had no reservations when it came to throwing his weight around. The golden boy’s gift for working the numbers earned him a place in the special-products division, where he worked on extremely complex tax-related problems for a select group of Bear Stearns’s wealthiest clients-an elite within the elite-including Seagram CEO Edgar Bronfman.

In the spring of 1981 Bronfman made a bid to take over the St. Joe Minerals Corporation. He offered forty-five dollars a share, or close to three times the value of St. Joe’s stock. The whole offer amounted to $2.1 billion in cash.

But St. Joe’s executives didn’t want to sell their 118-year-old company. In a press release, they called Seagram’s bid unsolicited and dismissed it as “grossly inadequate.” At which point the SEC decided to investigate.

There were allegations of insider trading. Within a few weeks, Bear Stearns’s employees were called in to testify.

Epstein got called in as well and categorically denied any wrongdoing.

But, as it turned out, he’d just resigned from Bear Stearns.

CHAPTER 23

Jeffrey Epstein: 1981

Epstein will always maintain that his resignation had nothing to do with the SEC’s investigation into Bear Stearns and Edgar Bronfman’s ill-fated attempt to take over St. Joe’s.

But of course this raises the question: Why did Epstein resign from Bear Stearns?

In his testimony before the SEC, Epstein says he was offended by the company’s investigation of a twenty-thousand-dollar loan he’d made to his friend Warren Eisenstein. Epstein didn’t know it at the time, he maintains, but if used to buy stock, such a loan might have been unethical, if not illegal.

On top of that, questions about Epstein’s expenses had come up.

In the end, Bear Stearns fined him $2,500-an embarrassing thing, to be sure. So much for making full partner anytime soon.

But $2,500 is not $250,000 or even $25,000. Who’d give up a job as junior partner over that?

Another one of Epstein’s bosses, James “Jimmy” Cayne, will say, “Jeffrey Epstein left Bear of his own volition.” Epstein wanted to strike out on his own, Cayne explains. But given the timing, some questions remain. Then there’s Epstein’s own testimony, given on April 1, 1981, before SEC investigators Jonathan Harris and Robert Blackburn:

Q:Sir, are you aware that certain rumors may have been circulating around your firm in connection with your reasons for leaving the firm?

A:I’m aware that there were many rumors.

Q:What rumors have you heard?

A:Nothing to do with St. Joe.

Q:Can you relate what you heard?

A:It was having to do with an illicit affair with a secretary.

As far as the investigators are concerned, this is new information; the first time a secretary’s name has come up. But they have no interest in Epstein’s office romance and press on:

Q:Mr. Epstein, did anyone at Bear Stearns tell you in words or substance that you should not divulge anything about St. Joe Minerals to the staff of the Securities and Exchange Commission? Has anyone indicated to you in any way, either directly or indirectly, in words or substance, that your compensation for this past year or any future monies coming to you from Bear Stearns will be contingent upon your not divulging information to the Securities and Exchange Commission?

A:No.

Whatever the reasons for his resignation, Epstein still gets his annual bonus of around $100,000 (roughly $275,000 in today’s dollars). The SEC never brings charges against him or any other Bear Stearns employee. And so the particulars of Epstein’s departure get folded up into the greater mystery surrounding the man. Did Epstein crash the rocket ship that Ace Greenberg had given him to pilot? Or did he take it and fly it out, over the horizon?

Either way, Epstein was out on his own.

For him, the future would only get brighter.

CHAPTER 24

Ana Obregón: 1982

Ana Obregón was one of the world’s most beautiful women and well on her way to becoming famous as such when she first met Jeffrey Epstein. For her, there would be film roles-in the 1984 Bo Derek vehicle Bolero, Ana Obregón gives the star a run for her money-and appearances on the covers of Spanish Playboy and Spanish Vanity Fair.

As for fortune, Obregón had that already.

Ana’s father was a very wealthy investor in Spain. But he also had serious problems. On June 15, 1982, a venerable stock- and bond-trading firm, the Drysdale Securities Corporation, announced that it was going out of business. Just that year, Drysdale had spun off a subsidiary operation called Drysdale Government Securities. And in May, DGS defaulted on $160 million in interest payments it owed on Treasury securities that it had borrowed. In doing so, DGS had dragged down its parent company.

A very well-connected group of Spanish families-including members of Spain’s royal family-had invested with Drysdale. Those investors stood to lose hundreds of millions of dollars. And Ana’s father was one of those investors.

What Ana wanted from Jeffrey Epstein was help in recovering her father’s money.

“My father, he’s done something stupid,” she told him.

A Spanish accent. A Brooklyn accent. They blended well together, and Ana was so very lovely.

It turned out that Epstein was willing to help.

“Something stupid, you see, with the money. The family money. Some-what do you call it? A scheme. He knew some of the people, but they lied to him. And now the money is gone.”

People who knew Jeffrey Epstein recall that he was bad off after his exit or ouster-whatever it was-from Bear Stearns. Moving from couch to couch for a while. Sleeping in his lawyer’s offices before settling down in an apartment in the Solow Tower, on East 66th Street.

It’s a bit hard to believe. After all, Epstein left Bear Stearns with a good deal of money. But Epstein’s lifestyle was expensive. He was a man on the make then, and Ana was still in her twenties, plying her craft at the Actors Studio-the New York City theater institution that Marlon Brando, Robert De Niro, Jack Nicholson, and Jane Fonda had all been members of.

Epstein told Ana that he’d formed a company, International Assets Group.

To Ana, this sounded very impressive. In fact, IAG was a small operation that Epstein was running out of his apartment. But if Ana had known that, would she have cared? She could already see that Epstein was brilliant. And though she would maintain that their friendship was strictly platonic, it was Ana who helped set Epstein on his course. Like other beautiful women he’d cultivate throughout his life, she opened doors to whole other kingdoms.

Ones that no boys from Brooklyn had even dreamed of.

Andrew Levander was an assistant US attorney in the Southern District of New York’s Securities and Commodities Fraud Task Force. He was assigned to look into Drysdale’s collapse. The case he was building would result in fraud convictions for a number of Drysdale executives, and even today, Levander remembers Epstein bringing “a very attractive woman” to meet him when Epstein came to him in the course of the investigation.

The woman was Ana Obregón.

Levander told Ana that he was already working the case. A lawyer named Robert Gold, who was a former federal prosecutor himself, was assisting. And now Epstein would join them in the hunt for the monies.

In effect, DGS had built a series of labyrinths, rabbit holes, deadfalls. And even investors who’d lost vast sums to the company were less than forthcoming when it came to speaking to the US attorney. Several of the investors were foreign. Some had violated their own countries’ laws pertaining to foreign investments.

This was where Epstein-with his calm, confident air of discretion-came in.

Ana Obregón gave Epstein power of attorney over any monies that he recovered. And though it took him three years, working with Robert Gold and the US attorney’s office, Epstein finally did make his way to the center of DGS’s maze and recover Obregón’s money.

Most of it was being held in a bank in the Cayman Islands.

Epstein’s agreement with Ana prevents us from knowing how much he recovered-and how much he kept. But given the amounts at stake, Epstein likely earned millions-or more-and to this day Ana Obregón has nothing but appreciation for what Epstein accomplished.

“I know he’s had some problems,” she says. “I don’t want anything to do with that.”

As for Epstein, he came out of the deal with a new modus operandi: from now on, he’d only work with the super rich.

CHAPTER 25

Eva Andersson: July 8, 1980

Miss Sweden, Eva Birgitta Andersson, is wearing a dazzling white gown and sweating, ever so slightly, under the stage lights. But Bob Barker’s about to announce the winner of this, the twenty-ninth Miss Universe pageant, held in Seoul, South Korea, and Eva’s smile is as wide as the ocean.

“And now that we know what Miss Universe will win, let’s see which five girls are still in the running!”

Barker pauses, like the expert broadcaster he is. Eva’s chest tightens. There are twelve women on stage, all of them beautiful-even if they’re not quite as beautiful as Miss Sweden.

“On this card are the names of five contestants who have received the highest total score from our judges in the personal interview, the swimsuit, and the evening gown competition.”

Eva feels the camera pan across the stage-pan across her, standing in between Miss Scotland and Miss Puerto Rico.

“As a result, they will be our five finalists. As I call each name, you will see a figure on your television screen. That is the total score received by the contestant since she became a semifinalist. But one thing I would point out to you: the point total is not necessarily a sign of who our eventual winner will be. Being first now is no guarantee of being first at the time of our judges’ final ballot.”

Oh, get on with it, Miss Sweden thinks. And, as if by her command, Bob Barker does.

“Now our five finalists. Good luck, girls! The first finalist is: Miss Sweden!”

Eva’s hands fly up to her face. The time it takes her to walk to the front of the stage is all the time she needs to stop herself from crying.

For Eva, it’s not meant to be. Miss USA, Shawn Weatherly, wins that year’s competition-she’ll go on to become a star on Baywatch. But Eva’s future is secure nonetheless. After the pageant, she’ll spend three years studying in Stockholm, finish med school at UCLA, and become a doctor of internal medicine.

Along the way, she’ll meet Jeffrey Epstein.

People who knew them when they were a couple say that Eva wanted to marry Epstein. One friend says he considered it seriously. In the end, Eva ended up with a man named Glenn Dubin, though she and Epstein remained very close. And if Eva was the proverbial “one who got away,” Epstein ended up dating other impressive women-world-class beauties-as he made his way in the world.

Why didn’t any of the romances take? Perhaps there was always someone more fabulous waiting for Epstein around the corner. Perhaps none of these women satisfied Epstein’s deeper urges. But he did have a knack for keeping the women he’d dated by his side through thick and thin, long after he’d broken up with them.

When he was through with his girlfriends, Epstein would say, they graduated up, not down, the ladder, moving from the status of “lover” to “friend.”

In his estimation, these shifts always constituted a promotion.

The world was full of beautiful women. But for Epstein, friendship seemed to be a far more precious commodity.

CHAPTER 26

Jeffrey Epstein: 1984

How did Jeffrey Epstein make all his money?

Epstein would tell stories over the years about monies recovered from slippery characters. Sometimes, friends and former associates would say, he’d suggest he had ties to the government, giving listeners the impression that he was doing dangerous, glamorous work.

Others said that what Epstein really did, at this stage in his career, was much more banal. According to them, Epstein spent most of his time coming up with creative new ways for the rich to avoid paying taxes. The commission for tax-avoidance deals was enormous, although the number of deals Epstein was involved with is a matter of conjecture, as is his record of successes and failures.

But Epstein’s business model was evolving. He’d charge a flat fee. No fancy math. No percentages.

Pay me fifty million dollars. Or pay the IRS seven times that amount.

At first Epstein did not demand his fee up front. Instead he asked that the payment-often a substantial one-be put into escrow. If his strategy worked, he’d get paid. If not, the money bounced back to the client.

In the eighties, when tax rates on the top 1 percent were much, much higher than they are today, topping out at close to 50 percent, it was an extremely effective pitch. And then there were other ways to make money.

In 1982, Epstein sold his wealthy friends, his friends’ wealthy relatives, and others on an oil-drilling deal. One of the investors, Michael Stroll, had run Williams Electronics, an entertainment company known for the pinball machines it made.

Stroll put $450,000 into the oil deal.

But in 1984, Michael Stroll wanted his money back. Despite repeated demands and requests for a full accounting of what Epstein owed him, he got $10,000 back on his $450,000 investment. Eventually he sued Epstein in federal court for the remaining $440,000-the case went on for a number of years. In court, Epstein told the judge that the $10,000 he’d returned was actually the payment for a horse Stroll had sold him.

Like many cases involving Epstein, this one was settled out of court, the terms of the final agreement kept secret.

CHAPTER 27

Steven Hoffenberg: July 10, 1987

Before there was Bernie Madoff, there was Steven Hoffenberg.

In 1987, Hoffenberg was the head of Towers Financial Corporation, a company that bought debts, such as unpaid medical bills, at a very steep discount while pressing the debtors to repay in full. He’d started the company fifteen years earlier with two thousand dollars and just a handful of employees. Thanks, in part, to a grueling work ethic, he’d turned that into a much bigger concern, with twelve hundred employees and stock that traded over the counter. But Hoffenberg still spent fifteen hours each day, six days a week, in his office.

He wanted more. Hoffenberg was a Wall Street outsider. A Brooklyn boy. A college dropout, like Epstein.

One thing Hoffenberg wanted was respect. The other was someone who was familiar with Wall Street’s inner workings. Jeffrey Epstein, who had traded options for Bear Stearns, fit the bill.

Hoffenberg began paying twenty-five thousand dollars per month for Epstein’s expertise as a consultant.

The SEC had already looked into Hoffenberg’s affairs, settling with him out of court in a matter relating to unregistered securities. But Hoffenberg was dangling a very big prize.

In the 1980s, several major financial players were involved in the greenmailing of publicly traded companies. What greenmailing means, in practice, is that a brokerage house or group of investors will start buying shares in companies that seem to be vulnerable to takeover attempts. To ward off the attempts, executives at those companies will buy the shares back at a premium. It’s risky, but very often the investors stand to make a handsome profit.

Yet another thing Hoffenberg wanted was to take over Pan American World Airways. The iconic airline had already entered its downward trajectory, but it was still a giant.

For Hoffenberg, the greenmailing profits could have been huge.

According to Hoffenberg, Epstein handled the attempted takeover of Pan Am-a deal that went sideways almost immediately.

Steven Hoffenberg still has a lot to say on the subject. But in listening to him, one must bear in mind that in 1995, he pleaded guilty to criminal conspiracy and fraud charges involving a $460 million swindle, a familiar scheme to anyone who followed the Bernie Madoff case.

Like so many others, Hoffenberg had tried to fly very high without the necessary updraft. And despite all the hours he spent at the office, he’d also developed a taste for the high life. He bought his own jet, a luxury yacht, and a Long Island mansion to go with his expensive Manhattan apartment. He’d also briefly owned a controlling interest in the New York Post.

To cover his tracks, Hoffenberg had been taking money from investors and using it to pay previous investors. It was a classic Ponzi scheme-one of the biggest in history-and Hoffenberg ended up spending nineteen years in a federal prison.

Why was Epstein not implicated in the case? All that Hoffenberg will say when asked is: “Ask Robert Gold.”

Another source suggests that Gold, the former federal prosecutor who had helped Epstein recover Ana Obregón’s money, kept the US attorney away from Epstein until there were only a few weeks left before the statute of limitations ran out.

As for Epstein himself, he would always deny any wrongdoing. Despite his proximity to Hoffenberg, he managed to avoid the blast radius.

CHAPTER 28

Robert Meister: 1985

Robert Meister, the vice chairman of a giant insurance brokerage and consulting firm called Aon, met Jeffrey Epstein in the mid-eighties, aboard a flight from New York to Palm Beach. Both men were flying first class. Each one thought the other looked familiar. They talked in the course of that flight, and Meister filed the conversation away, only to recall it in 1989. At that time, Les Wexner, who was Meister’s friend and a client of Meister’s insurance company, was complaining to him about the people managing his money.

Wexner was a billionaire, but for all his wealth, his finances were in a tangle. Maybe Epstein could help. And perhaps Epstein would also be grateful for the introduction. Hard as it is to believe, there’s evidence to suggest that Epstein really had spent the last of his last Bear Stearns bonus-along with his share of the money he’d recovered for Ana Obregón-and was broke, again, at the time.

One estranged friend says that he had to loan Epstein money to pay the bill at Epstein’s garage, which had seized Epstein’s car for nonpayment.

Another estranged friend says that Epstein didn’t have two nickels to rub together.

Diana Crane, a former model, says that Epstein always had first-class upgrades he would give to his friends so they didn’t have to fly economy class.

“No one knew where or how he got them,” Crane recalls. “Sometimes they worked, and other times they didn’t. I remember he saw a friend of mine wearing a Concorde jacket. He asked if he could borrow it for a day or so. My friend never got the jacket back. But Epstein would tell people he always flew on the Concorde-a total lie.”

But even if Epstein were flush, Les Wexner would have been a big fish to catch.

From the get-go, Meister’s wife, Wendy, had her suspicions about Epstein. About the way he presented himself and the way he worked himself into their inner circle.

Before long, Wendy was calling Epstein the virus.

But for Epstein, the Meisters weren’t the point. Wexner was.

And hard as it is to understand why the billionaire would associate with a man who’d worked with a Ponzi king like Steven Hoffenberg, it turned out that Wexner and Epstein would get along perfectly well.

CHAPTER 29

Ghislaine Maxwell: 1991

Robert Meister was not the only friend who helped Jeffrey Epstein, the boy from Coney Island, on his way up the social ladder. There was also Ghislaine Maxwell, a wealthy heiress from the United Kingdom who’d retained her ties to some of the world’s most glamorous and scandalous jet-setters.

Maxwell was the youngest and most favored child of one of the most famous-even infamous-men in Europe. Her father, Robert Maxwell, was a Czech refugee who had fought in the French Foreign Legion and with the British in World War II and had gone on to become a member of Parliament. By the 1960s, he’d become a media baron. Born into a Hasidic family-his birth name was Ján Ludvík Hyman Binyamin Hoch-Maxwell died in disgrace in 1991 after falling or perhaps jumping off the side of his supersize yacht, the Lady Ghislaine.

“The shtetl Solotvyno, where I come from, it is no more,” Maxwell said a few months before his demise. “It was poor. It was Orthodox. And it was Jewish. We were very poor. We didn’t have things that other people had. They had shoes, they had food, and we didn’t. At the end of the war, I discovered the fate of my parents and my sisters and brothers, relatives, and neighbors. I don’t know what went through their minds as they realized that they’d been tricked into a gas chamber.”

Maxwell’s own death was followed by an international scandal. It turned out that he’d stolen hundreds of millions of pounds from his companies’ pension funds and used them to prop up his empire. Two of his sons were tried for conspiracy to commit fraud and ultimately exonerated. But Ghislaine, who had grown up in luxurious surroundings and counted the Duke of York, Prince Andrew, among her intimates, could not escape the dark shadow her father had cast. Looking to start fresh, she took the Concorde to New York City.

At first, it seems, Maxwell and Epstein were lovers. “She was madly in love with Jeffrey,” says a longtime friend of Ghislaine’s. Then they became something more. Ghislaine took care of Epstein’s travel arrangements. She managed his household and opened doors that very few Brooklyn-born Jewish boys could have passed through. According to lawsuits and witness testimony, she also became one of several women who procured young girls for Epstein.

She was not jealous, according to people who knew her back then. If anything, Ghislaine seemed to take pleasure in satisfying Epstein’s needs.

Ghislaine introduced Epstein to a fabulous world that the Brooklyn boy knew nothing about. One friend jokes that she taught Epstein the difference between a fish fork and a salad fork. But despite-or was it because of?-Maxwell’s devotion to Epstein, she, too, graduated from girlfriend to friend status. According to Jane Doe 102 vs. Jeffrey Epstein, a civil complaint filed in 2009 by a woman later identified as Virginia Roberts, one of the services Maxwell provided for Epstein was the procurement of underage women. (Through her lawyer and in court papers, Maxwell has vehemently denied any involvement with Virginia, with any other young woman Epstein was involved with, or with any criminal activities committed by Jeffrey Epstein. In a 2016 answer to a defamation lawsuit brought by Roberts, Maxwell called the allegations fabricated for financial gain.)

The case of Nadia Bjorlin, who was thirteen when she was first noticed by Epstein, raises questions in this regard, at least in the eyes of her mother.

Bjorlin’s Iranian-born mother spoke to a British tabloid some years ago about her family’s disturbing experience with Maxwell and Epstein. Bjorlin’s father, a celebrated conductor of classical music, had died a year earlier, the mother said. She believed that this made the girl a vulnerable and easy target.

“She was at school at the famed Interlochen Arts Center, in Michigan, when she met Epstein,” the mother said.

“My daughter was a singer. She was a baby. She was a skinny little girl, not mature for her age. She was thirteen, but everyone thought she was nine or ten.

“Epstein was a big donor, and he heard about Nadia and that her father had died, so she was vulnerable, and he contacted her. He said, ‘Here’s my number.’

“He kept saying, ‘Come-will you come?’ He said he wanted to help mentor her. I wouldn’t let her meet him. What sort of a man approaches a young girl and asks to meet her?”

In the meantime, Maxwell had become friendly with the family. “I trusted Ghislaine; she was like a mother,” Bjorlin’s mother recalled. “She was always calling my house.

“Ghislaine didn’t want me to meet Epstein, but I did anyway, and I asked what he wanted with Nadia. He said he wanted to help her singing career. He said, ‘I’d like to be like a godfather.’ It felt creepy.

“I had a bad vibe about him and said, ‘Stop!’ I told him, ‘No, thank you. She doesn’t need your help.’ I kept Nadia away from him. She never met him alone. She never went anywhere with him.”

Despite her suspicions, it took Epstein’s arrest to make Bjorlin’s mother wonder whether Maxwell and Epstein hadn’t been sizing her daughter up for his stable of underage women.

CHAPTER 30

Leslie Wexner: 1993

Leslie Wexner, the richest man in Ohio, is a proud midwesterner. Born into the rag trade (Wexner’s parents were Russian-Jewish immigrants), he grew up to be a straight shooter-taciturn and camera-shy.

For several years running, his 315-foot boat, the Limitless, was the largest yacht owned by an American.

Wexner’s employees loved him, and he was known to be fiercely loyal to them.

In time, he’d come to see the same qualities in Jeffrey Epstein.

“Everyone was mystified as to what [Epstein’s] appeal was,” says Robert Morosky, a former vice chairman of the clothing retailer the Limited, founded by Wexner.

“Almost everyone at the Limited wondered who he was,” another former employee of Wexner’s recalls. “He literally came out of nowhere.”

But it seems that Epstein did work hard to untangle Wexner’s finances. And it appears he succeeded. “Jeffrey cleaned that up right away,” a former associate of Epstein’s says.

The two men became all but inseparable.

“Very smart, with a combination of excellent judgment and unusually high standards,” Wexner said of Epstein at the time. “Also, he is always a most loyal friend.”

When Wexner wanted to break up with a woman he’d been dating for several years-a woman who moved to Ohio and converted to Judaism to make him happy-he dispatched Epstein to do the dirty work.

When Wexner hired a decorator for his Ohio mansion and wanted someone to verify the authenticity of several expensive antiques, Epstein flew in his friend Stuart Pivar, the renowned art collector and author. (According to Pivar, most of the antiques were cheap imitations.) When Wexner traveled abroad, he’d bring back trinkets and gifts for Epstein. When Wexner wanted to see Cats, Epstein arranged to have the cast perform in his mansion.

In Ohio, Wexner’s associates whispered about his relationship with Jeffrey Epstein. In New York, they wondered about Epstein’s role in Wexner’s 1993 marriage to Abigail Koppel.

At thirty-one, Koppel was twenty-four years Wexner’s junior. It was Epstein who negotiated the prenuptial agreement and orchestrated its very strange signing. Abigail signed the agreement in her law office. Wexner signed it in his office. According to an associate of Epstein’s who was present, Epstein brought a Sports Illustrated swimsuit model along to Wexner’s office, as if to make the point that there are other beautiful women in the world. As a joke, Epstein placed the agreement on the model’s belly and had Wexner sign it right there.

Epstein asked his friend: “Are you sure you want to do this?”

“Yes, Jeffrey,” said Wexner. “Quite sure.”

“It was an uproarious scene,” Epstein’s associate recalls. “Just Jeffrey being Jeffrey. That was his gestalt.”