A multi-millionaire, not billionaire, pedophile who ran a sex trafficking operation on his private Caribbean island (Little St. James or ‘Orgy Island’), on his private jet (the Lolita Express), and at his several residences throughout the US. The federal government had mountains of evidence to put Epstein behind bars for decades for child sex-trafficking and serial molestation but in one of the biggest cover-ups of all time, gave him a sweetheart deal where he only served 13 months of an 18 month sentence in a private wing of a Palm Beach jail with 12 hr/day work leave. On the evening of July 6, 2019, just three days after a judge ordered the unsealing of the court records following a Mike Cernovich lawsuit to unseal the files (later merged with The Miami Herald suit), Epstein was finally re-arrested in New York on allegations of child sex trafficking, however he was ‘suicided’ while awaiting trial.
Epstein was a “spiritual’ math teacher (gematria?) at the Dalton School in Manhattan, a progressive elite private school for grades 4-12 that embraces the communist educational philosophies of John Dewey, from 1973-75 in spite of being a college drop-out. Epstein, who never completed college, was hired by Donald Barr. Donald Barr was a former OSS officer and the father of Trump’s Attorney General, William Barr.
Epstein, after making millions, apparently as a hedge fund manager though only one client can be identified, assembled a large, cult-like network of underage girls — with the help of young female recruiters — groomed to coerce rich and powerful people into having sex acts on his private plane or in his private residence in Miami, in a deep state blackmail scheme. Epstein was also suspected of trafficking minor girls, often from overseas, for sex parties at his other homes in Manhattan, New Mexico and the Caribbean, FBI and court records show.
A list of Epstein’s contacts compiled by a Florida house manager listed access information for the Queen of England, the current King of Saudi Arabia, former President Clinton (visited Epstein’s pedo island 27 times and Epstein was VIP guest to Clinton WH), former British Prime Minister Tony Blair, rock stars at the Mick Jagger and Michael Jackson level, fashion gurus, media moguls, and financiers at the Rothschild and Rockefeller level, among dozens of others wealthy, powerful contacts.
Lady Colin Campbell, a royal author and former reality TV contestant, has claimed in a television interview that the standoff between Andrew and the Department of Justice in the summer of 2020 was intended to protect former President Clinton. Campbell, a regular critic of Meghan Markle and Prince Harry, was asked whether Queen Elizabeth II’s third child had caused more damage to the royal family than Prince Harry and Meghan Markle. Campbell said:
“Let’s remember that President Bill Clinton, who is a far bigger name and a far heavier hitter on the world stage than Prince Andrew, was a far greater friend [of Epstein’s] and for far longer than Prince Andrew.
…Prince Andrew is to a large extent a distraction so that Bill Clinton will actually be kept out of the frame.”
Epstein’s “black book,” an exhibit to a court filing in a civil suit brought against Epstein by two of his minor victims, consisted of 181 pages that contain contact information for billionaires (Bronfman, Stern, Bloomberg, Koch, Wexner, Zuckerman, Kravis, Rockefeller), multimillionaires, celebrities, journalists, and socialites.
Interestingly, Epstein’s private jet shared the same tail number as a government contracted jet by Dyncorp when they were trafficking minors from Bosnia, the Balkan Islands, and Kosovo. The odds of these being 2 different planes is 1 in 900,000.
Facing a 53-page federal indictment, Epstein could have ended up in federal prison for the rest of his life. But on the morning of the breakfast meeting, a deal was struck — an extraordinary plea agreement that would conceal the full extent of Epstein’s crimes and the number of people involved.
Not only would Epstein serve just 13 months in the county jail, but the deal — called a non-prosecution agreement — essentially shut down an ongoing FBI probe into whether there were more victims and other powerful people who took part in Epstein’s sex crimes, according to a Miami Herald examination of thousands of emails, court documents and FBI records.
The pact required Epstein to plead guilty to two prostitution charges in state court. Epstein and four of his accomplices named in the agreement received immunity from all federal criminal charges. But even more unusual, the deal included wording that granted immunity to “any potential co-conspirators’’ who were also involved in Epstein’s crimes. These accomplices or participants were not identified in the agreement, leaving it open to interpretation whether it possibly referred to other influential people who were having sex with underage girls at Epstein’s various homes or on his plane.
As part of the arrangement, Acosta agreed, despite a federal law to the contrary, that the deal would be kept from the victims. As a result, the non-prosecution agreement was sealed until after it was approved by the judge, thereby averting any chance that the girls — or anyone else — might show up in court and try to derail it.
This is the story of how Epstein, bolstered by unlimited funds and represented by a powerhouse legal team, was able to manipulate the criminal justice system, and how his accusers, still traumatized by their pasts, believe they were betrayed by the very prosecutors who pledged to protect them.
“I don’t think anyone has been told the truth about what Jeffrey Epstein did,’’ said one of Epstein’s victims, Michelle Licata, now 30. “He ruined my life and a lot of girls’ lives. People need to know what he did and why he wasn’t prosecuted so it never happens again.”
Alex Acosta was appointed as Donald Trump’s Labor secretary, but would resign under scrutiny when Epstein was arrested in 2019 following the unsealing of the federal documents related to the case. Get this eye-opening detail:
Acosta, in 2011, would explain that he was unduly pressured by Epstein’s heavy-hitting lawyers — Lefkowitz, Harvard professor Alan Dershowitz, Jack Goldberger, Roy Black, former U.S. Attorney Guy Lewis, Gerald Lefcourt, and Kenneth Starr, the former Whitewater special prosecutor who investigated Bill Clinton’s sexual liaisons with Monica Lewinsky.
Gerald Lefcourt was a law partner to the Sixties radical lawyer William Kunstler. Lefcourt is an iconic left-wing lawyer. Ken Starr is — well, you know who he is. Same with Dershowitz. Epstein covered all his political bases. Best lawyers money could buy.
The terms of Epstein’s special deal are jaw-dropping. Not only were things kept from his victims, but he was allowed to serve his sentence in a private wing of the Palm Beach prison, and allowed to leave during the day to work at a special office he set up for himself.
Here’s a description of the kind of girls he recruited:
Most of the girls came from disadvantaged families, single-parent homes or foster care. Some had experienced troubles that belied their ages: They had parents and friends who committed suicide; mothers abused by husbands and boyfriends; fathers who molested and beat them. One girl had watched her stepfather strangle her 8-year-old stepbrother, according to court records obtained by the Herald.
Many of the girls were one step away from homelessness.
“We were stupid, poor children,’’ said one woman, who did not want to be named because she never told anyone about Epstein. At the time, she recalled that she was 14 and a high school freshman.
“We just wanted money for school clothes, for shoes. I remember wearing shoes too tight for three years in a row. We had no family and no guidance, and we were told that we were going to just have to sit in a room topless and he was going to just look at us. It sounded so simple, and was going to be easy money for just sitting there.”
The kind of kids who were easy to manipulate, and whose parents wouldn’t have made trouble — and if they had, would have been easy to buy off, or make go away thanks to his connections with the establishment.
These connections paid off when Epstein’s crimes were finally uncovered:
Mike Fisten, a former Miami-Dade police sergeant who was also a homicide investigator and a member of the FBI Organized Crime Task Force, said the FBI had enough evidence to put Epstein away for a long time but was overruled by Acosta. Some of the agents involved in the case were disappointed by Acosta’s bowing to pressure from Epstein’s lawyers, he said.
In Part II of the story, reporter Julie K. Brown details how Epstein’s A-team of lawyers more or less owned Acosta and the federal prosecutors. The government’s abject failures were and are scandalous:
Acosta also described what he called a “year-long assault’’ on prosecutors by Epstein’s “army of legal superstars’’ who, he said, investigated individual prosecutors and their families, looking for “personal peccadilloes’’ to disqualify them from Epstein’s case.
Dershowitz, in an interview, denied that Epstein’s lawyers would ever investigate prosecutors.
Documents nevertheless show that Acosta not only buckled under pressure from Epstein’s lawyers, but he and other prosecutors worked with them to contain the case, even as the FBI was uncovering evidence of victims and witnesses in other states, FBI and federal court documents show.
A 53-page federal indictment had been prepared in 2007, and subpoenas were served on several of Epstein’s employees, compelling them to testify before a federal grand jury. The court records reveal that emails began to fly back and forth between prosecutors and Epstein’s legal team. Those emails show that federal prosecutors kept acquiescing to Epstein’s demands.
This raises a question: What, if anything, did Epstein’s investigators find out about Acosta and/or others on his team? Anything blackmailable? How else could one explain this kind of sniveling acquiescence?
During the investigation of Jeffrey Epstein citizen Donald Trump’s name came up. According to documents released on July 30th, 2020, the FBI attempted over and over to tie the famous New York developer to misconduct, but to no avail. The real Trump-Epstein relationship is purely adversarial – Donald Trump has been fighting Jeffrey Epstein since before, during, and after the time George Bush was lenient with him and Barack Obama did nothing to him.
First: “Trump barred Epstein from Mar-a-Lago “because Epstein sexually assaulted an underage girl at the club,” according to court documents filed by Bradley Edwards.” The same Bradley Edwards says Trump did this: “The only thing that I can say about President Trump is that he is the only person who, in 2009 when I served a lot of subpoenas on a lot of people, or at least gave notice to some pretty connected people, that I wanted to talk to them, is the only person who picked up the phone and said, let’s just talk. I’ll give you as much time as you want. I’ll tell you what you need to know, and was very helpful, in the information that he gave, and gave no indication whatsoever that he was involved in anything untoward whatsoever; but had good information, that checked out, and that helped us, and that we didn’t have to take a deposition of him.” (See video)
Next: “…the relationship with Mr. Trump turned so toxic that Mr. Epstein at one point told friends that he blamed Mr. Trump for his legal problems with the Palm Beach County police.”
During all of this what did Bush do? In 2008 the Bush DOJ established “a lenient non-prosecution agreement with registered sex offender Jeffrey Epstein” and during the process “they [Federal prosecutors] kept victims in the dark about” it. What did Obama do in all of this? Bradley Edwards says that “rather than work to correct the injustices done to the [Epstein] victims, the government spent 10 years defending its own improper conduct.” This includes the entire Obama presidency. And Robert Mueller was FBI director when the FBI took over the case and Epstein was given a lenient 13 month luxury wing jail stint (with 60hr/wk work leave) for his years of child sex abuse and running an international child sex trafficking ring.
The Trump DOJ finally changed this on July 6, 2019 by arresting Jeffrey Epstein “on charges of child sex trafficking and abusing dozens of underage girls.” The Trump DOJ also initiated the pursuit of those who helped Epstein by arresting “Ghislaine Maxwell, the one time girlfriend and alleged accomplice of accused sex-trafficker Jeffrey Epstein” on July 2, 2020. Maxwell was “charged by federal prosecutors in New York for her alleged role in recruiting, grooming and sexually abusing underage girls as young as 14 as part of a years-long criminal enterprise.”1
Part III of the three-part series personalizes the sordid Epstein epic.
The behavior of Acosta and the prosecutors is beyond contempt. They let this monster get away with raping and molesting over 100 underage girls. Why? Because he was rich and connected?
(USA Today) One of the easier ways to gauge some of Epstein’s net worth is through his real estate holdings and other possessions, which were listed in a July 8 court filing by the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York.
A court filing from the government and a filing by Epstein’s defense team both stated he owns six properties, along with other personal property. He appears to own the holdings through several shell companies named after trees – Maple Inc., Laurel Inc. and Cypress Inc. – according to online records.
Real estate
9 East 71st Street, New York, New York: Epstein’s Maple Inc. bought the 1930 luxury townhouse in 2011 for the nominal sum of $10, according to the deed filed with the Office of the City Register. The seller was a corporation linked to both Epstein and Leslie Wexner, the chairman and CEO of L Brands, the corporation with flagship brands Victoria’s Secret and Bath & Body Works.
Federal prosecutors estimated the value of the mansion in Manhattan’s Upper East Side neighborhood at $77 million. The New York City Department of Finance said the property’s estimated market value was $75 million in 2018-19, and then dropped it to $55.9 million for 2019-20.
But the city’s estimates are known to be “very haphazard,” says Jonathan Miller, CEO of Miller Samuel Inc., a New York appraisal firm. For a better comparison, Miller pointed to a similar Upper East Side townhouse owned by financier Philip Falcone that sold for $77.1 million in June.
Epstein’s place is uniquely wide at 50 feet, Miller says. “That is unusually rare and a premium for street frontage,” he says.
358 El Brillo Way, Palm Beach, Florida: In 2018, the Palm Beach County property appraiser estimated the market value of the five-bedroom, seven-bathroom property on 0.77 acres at nearly $12.5 million.
49 Zorro Ranch Road in Stanley, New Mexico: The property sits on 7,599 acres and includes several structures, including a main dwelling of 33,339 square feet, according to online records at the Santa Fe County Assessor’s office. The 2019 appraised value was $18.1 million, according to Gus Martinez, the county’s assessor.
Epstein shared his scheme with scientists and other confidants over the years, according to four people who were in on the plan – which “reflected his longstanding fascination with what has become known as transhumanism: the science of improving the human population through technologies like genetic engineering and artificial intelligence,” according to the report.
“On multiple occasions starting in the early 2000s, Mr. Epstein told scientists and businessmen about his ambitions to use his New Mexico ranch as a base where women would be inseminated with his sperm and would give birth to his babies, according to two award-winning scientists and an adviser to large companies and wealthy individuals, all of whom Mr. Epstein told about it,” according to the report.
Little Saint James, U.S. Virgin Islands: Spanning about 72 acres, based on Google Earth’s measuring tool, the island is valued around $20 million, according to an estimate from Farhad Vladi, founder of the real estate brokerage Vladi Private Islands that specializes in listing private islands for sale worldwide. Vladi based his estimate on comparable sales in similar areas but has not been to the island itself.
Paris, France: Federal prosecutors also named a property in Paris that Epstein owned, but didn’t provide any additional details such as an address or type of property. Other media outlets report the property is located on the famed Avenue Foch, where current properties are listed for sale between $1.6 million and $5.4 million, according to Sotheby’s International Realty.
The butler who managed Jeffrey Epstein’s posh Paris pad claims he waited on a rotation of famous faces including Prince Andrew, Bill and Melinda Gates, Ehud Barak as well as Steve Bannon, according to a report by the NY Post. The butler, who only identified himself as Gabriel, came forward about the convicted pedophile’s celebrity guests during his 18-year career working at the $8 million pied-à-terre, FranceInfo reported. Sources told Page Six last year that Epstein was meeting with Bannon at his Upper East Side apartment as he tried to forge political connections.
Great St. James Cay Island: Sultan Ahmed bin Sulayem asserted that Epstein made the purchase without his permission or involvement. (source)
Vehicles
Epstein owns at least 15 vehicles, according to the New York State Division of Criminal Justice Services, which provides information on registered sex offenders and their assets so that the public can track their whereabouts.
Those include a Bentley, a Cadillac Escalade, seven Chevrolet Suburban SUVs, a Chevrolet Express cargo van, a Hummer, two GMCs and a Land Rover Range Rover.
The 2017 Bentley Mulsanne is easily worth the most, with an estimated sticker price of about $224,827 in good condition from a used car dealer, according to Kelley Blue Book. The rest of the vehicles would have a collective trade-in value of more than $225,000, based on Kelley Blue Book values for used cars in good condition.
Federal prosecutors also said Epstein owned two planes, with at least one capable of international travel. In a court filing, defense lawyers said that Epstein sold one of the private jets in June 2019 and would ground the other as part of a bail settlement.
How did he earn his money?
Early years: Epstein got a job in his early 20s teaching math and physics at The Dalton School, a college prep school on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. According to a 2003 Vanity Fair report, Epstein tutored the son of Alan “Ace” Greenberg, the legendary chairman of Bear Stearns, then a New York-based investment bank, securities trading and brokerage firm.
Wall Street debut: That connected helped Epstein to join Bear Stearns, where he was mentored by both Greenberg and then-CEO James Cayne, according to the report. Epstein rose to the rank of limited partner, one step below full partner. But he left the company abruptly in 1981 under a cloud of controversy.
Epstein at the time said he wanted to run his own business, Vanity Fair reported, but there were rumors of technical infringement that Cayne and Epstein denied. Greenberg says he can’t recall, according to the report.
On his own: In August 1981, Epstein formed his own company, Intercontinental Assets Group Inc., listed at his apartment on Manhattan’s East 66th Street, New York incorporation records show.
Six years later, he founded J. Epstein & Co., a money management firm based in New York, online financial records show. He later changed the company’s name to The Financial Trust Co. and shifted its headquarters to the U.S. Virgin Islands, chiefly for tax purposes, according to Fortune magazine and other published reports.
And, in 1993, Epstein founded Financial Strategy Group Inc., a company based at his Palm Beach home, online financial records show.
Friends in high places
As his business career advanced, Epstein met two more men who would impact his financial fortunes.
Leslie Wexner: The first was Wexner, his partner in the Manhattan townhouse and chairman and CEO of L Brands (includes Victoria’s Secret, Bath & Body Works, and Pink). Epstein and Wexner hit it off from the start, according to Vanity Fair.
Wexner’s Victoria’s Secret also worked with an Epstein-funded modeling agency accused of supplying Epstein with underage girls.
They teamed up on plans and construction of a model town in New Albany, Ohio. An online business record for The New Albany Company LLC showed Epstein at one point was the business’ president and Wexner was the chief executive officer. The New Albany Company LLC website doesn’t mention Epstein.
Wexner also has been the only client of Epstein’s money management firm to be publicly identified, according to a 2010 Forbes report. No other public records have been found. Wexner representatives have said the L Brands executive severed ties with Epstein many years ago.
From Bloomberg, “Victoria’s Secret Has More Than a Jeffrey Epstein Problem”:
L Brands’ efforts to distance itself from Epstein may not have been all that clean a break. Epstein at one point had a $1 million investment in MC2 Model Management, according to a sworn deposition by a former company bookkeeper. MC2 is owned by Jean-Luc Brunel, a Frenchman who is alleged in a civil lawsuit to have brought girls as young as age 12 to the U.S. for sexual purposes and provided them to his friends including Epstein. Brunel even visited Epstein when he was first imprisoned in 2008. Victoria’s Secret continued to work with MC2-represented models after Wexner severed ties with Epstein. At least three MC2 models walked in Victoria’s Secret’s 2015 fashion show, and the agency’s models were at auditions in 2017 and 2018. They’ve also posed for its catalogs and website. In a 2014 letter to Brunel, his business partner, MC2 President Jeff Fuller, cited worries by Saks, Nordstrom, Macy’s, and other clients about Brunel’s friendship with Epstein. There was no mention of concern on the part of Victoria’s Secret.
Steven Jude Hoffenberg: During the 1980s, Epstein met Hoffenberg, who ran Towers Financial Corp., a company that the Vanity Fair report identified as a collection agency that was supposed to buy debts people owed to hospitals, banks, and phone companies.
Making Epstein his protégé, Hoffenberg set him up an office at the Villard Houses, a historic landmark on Madison Avenue, with a $25,000 monthly payment as a consultant, the report said.
The two men launched what proved to be unsuccessful efforts to take over Pan America World Airways in 1987 and Emery Air Freight in 1988, the report said.
Hoffenberg in 1995 pleaded guilty to federal charges stemming from a $460 million Ponzi scheme. The scam involved selling fraudulent notes and bonds, using money from later investors to pay interest that was owed to earlier investors.
The investigative reporter, Vicky Ward, who researched and wrote the Vanity Fair piece claims that Vanity Fair whitewashed her article on billionaire Jeffrey Epstein in 2002 in an attempt to shield Epstein from legal scrutiny.
“I uncovered many concrete, irrefutable examples of strange business practices and it soon became quite clear: Jeffrey Epstein was most certainly not who and what he claimed to be.”
“I was a little mystified at how benignly he responded to my questions about his suspicious business activities. The thing I noticed was that he was much more focused on another topic: He would ask me again and again, ‘What do you have on the girls?’”
“I did indeed have something ‘on the girls’ — three remarkably brave first-person accounts from a mother and her two daughters about how Epstein had tried to seduce both daughters, the younger sister then only 16.”
After submitting her final draft, Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter told her that he was cutting out all the information about Epstein’s victims, claiming Epstein was “sensitive” about mentioning the young girls.
“After I filed the piece, I was told that Graydon Carter was cutting the testimony of Maria Farmer, her mother, and her sister from the piece, erasing all mention of these brave women who had come forward with their stories of abuse.”
Telling lawsuits
Hoffenberg, who was sentenced to 20 years in prison, later accused Epstein and his firm The Financial Trust Co. of being “co-conspirators” in the Ponzi scheme Hoffenberg had pleaded guilty to. In the 2016 lawsuit, Hoffenberg alleged that Epstein’s firm was a “fifty billion dollar hedge fund.”
Hoffenberg later withdrew the lawsuit. A similar lawsuit was filed last summer by Tower Financial note and bondholders but was dismissed.
Charitable giving
Another indication of Epstein’s wealth could be his ‘charitable’ donations over the years. Harvard received a $6.5 million contribution from him in 2003. Other donations went to a building at the Ivy League school as well as research to a history professor and a Harvard psychologist.
Press releases for the Jeffrey Epstein VI Foundation claim other contributions, but it’s unclear how many of the charities actually received the advertised donations, according to an NBC News report.
Another foundation linked to Epstein, U.S. Virgin Islands-based Gratitude America, Ltd. made a $150,000 donation to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a $375,000 contribution to the International Peace Institute in 2017, the organization’s IRS tax return shows.
His largest contribution may have come from a previous Epstein charity called the C.O.U.Q. Foundation and the financier’s Financial Trust Co. The two organizations in 2008 gave a $46.7 million combined contribution of stock and other assets to a Wexner family nonprofit called the YLK Charitable Fund, the fund’s tax return shows.
The massive donation came as the relationship between the Epstein and Wexner was fraying, according to a report from CNBC.
Why is Epstein called a billionaire?
It seems the billionaire status may have come from a lawsuit filed by Epstein’s alleged victims who were suing him for emotional pain he caused when they were teenage girls, according to a May 14, 2010 article in The Palm Beach Post. Epstein’s lawyers said he was worth “more than nine figures,” but it appears they never provided any financial documentation backing the assertion up.
There seems to be no good reason to characterize Epstein as a billionaire, according to Forbes magazine in 2010 when explaining his absence from its ranking of the country’s and world’s richest individuals.
“The guy … is NOT A BILLIONAIRE. We repeat: not a billionaire,” Forbes wrote then about its findings. “More likely he is worth a fraction of that. Because of so much uncertainty around his numbers, he’s never been included in the Forbes 400 list of the richest Americans.”
Source: Yahoo News
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