Jeffrey Epstein (nonfiction)
Jeffrey Edward Epstein (born January 20, 1953) is an American financier and registered sex offender.
Epstein began his career at the investment bank Bear Stearns, before forming his own firm, J. Epstein & Co.
Epstein was convicted in 2008 of soliciting a 14-year-old girl for prostitution, for which he served 13 months in "custody with work release" as part of a plea deal where federal officials had identified 36 victims. The plea deal was made by Alexander Acosta, who was then the United States Attorney for the Southern District of Florida, who agreed to grant immunity from all federal criminal charges to Epstein.
Epstein was arrested again on July 6, 2019, on federal charges for sex trafficking of minors in Florida and New York.
He died on August 10, 2019, reportedly after hanging himself in his Manhattan prison cell. Three weeks previously, Epstein had been found unconscious in his jail cell with injuries to his neck and was placed on suicide watch, which ended twelve days before he died.
Origins of wealth
NY Mag
This article at NY Mag suggests that Epstein made his money not as a hedge fund manager, but as a blackmailer, as evidenced by:
- Epstein says he acquired his wealth as a hedge fund manager for billionaires, starting at a young age
- All high-level hedge fund managers know each other and do business with each other
- The high-level fund manager interviewed by NY Mag had never done business with Epstein or heard of anyone doing business with him
- Epstein had an office staff but handled all of the billionaire clients by himself alone
Quontian
This Twitter post by Quontian presents a closely reasoned argument that Epstein is a blackmailer pure and simple:
... a quick little THREAD to explain my theory of what the Epstein story really is ... a neat little explanation that IMO perfectly fits the known facts (0/13):
(1/13) Let's take as our starting points two givens.
(A.) You are a committed, unrepentant pedophile
(B.) Because of your old job in private banking, you are very connected to lots of very, very wealthy peopleWe'll also assume a goal:
(Z.) You want to become very rich
(2/13) The obvious route is, well, obvious: you could just be a pimp, offering underage prostitute services to very rich people. This has two problems: you're very disposable (see: DC madam), and it's also not super lucrative. You can't charge millions of dollars up front.
(3/13) The second level though follows instantly: You don't need to charge up front, just get them to have underage sex, and then blackmail them afterwards for hush money. Better ROI, but you're still a liability, and producing and receiving big bribe money raises big questions.
(4/13) So, what to do? Well, the second idea has some merits. First, you need to recruit people in. Have lots of massive parties at your spacious home (check), invite top academics, artists, politicians to encourage people to come (check), and supply lots of young women (check)
(5/13) You don't even have to do anything, and most people invited might even be totally unaware of the real purpose of the parties! But, sooner or later, some billionaire will get handsy, she'll escort him to a room with a hidden camera, things happen. Morning after, you strike.
(6/13) You inform him she was really 15, but you offer him a nice, neat way to buy your silence: a large allocation to your hedge fund, which charges 2/20 (check). To ensure nobody else asks questions, you also take the extraordinary step of demanding power of attorney (check)
(7/13) The fund is offshore in a tax haven (check) and nobody will see the client list (check). Of course, you don't really know anything about investing, instead making up some nonsense about currency trading (check), and nobody on Wall Street has ever traded with you (check)
(8/13) The fund itself doesn't need investment personnel (check), only some back office people to process the wires (check). You don't want to money from non-pedophiles, or they'll notice you've just put it in a S&P 500 fund, so you reject all incoming inquiries (check)
(9/13) A $20 million wire from Billionaire X to you with no obvious reason will raise many questions, and the IRS will certainly want to know what you did to warrant it. A $5 million quarterly fee for managing $1 billion in assets? Nobody bats an eye.
(10/13) Because of this structure, you're extraordinarily secretive about client lists (check) because they aren't clients, they're pedophiles paying you bribes, and they also are very secretive, which is why no letters or return streams ever leak (check)
(11/13) Occasionally you may also try this trick on other people: important political figures, mayors, prosecutors, etc. They don't invest in the fund, but it's nice to have them in your pocket. Others (academics, artists, etc.) can just be bought with money as a PR smokescreen.
(12/13) And, of course, the scam can be kept going as long as people are willing to pay, which is forever. If you're ever caught, just lean on some of your other friends in government to lean on the prosecutor to get you a sweetheart deal. There's almost zero risk.
(13/13) And the last piece of the puzzle is the evidence. You'd want it somewhere remote, but accessible: a place the US can't touch but you have an excuse to visit all the time to update. Remember that offshore fund?
I bet there's a *very* interesting safe deposit box there.
Two small points of clarification:
- This scheme works just as well if the billionaires are in on it from the getgo as a way to buy sex; I assumed that was obvious but I guess not.
- There’s no need to invoke the Mafia/Russia/Mossad/CIA/etc, that’s just needlessly overfitting.
Death: suicide or murder?
Boing Boing user LurksNoMore comments on Epstein's reported suicide:
It’s quite possible that this was a genuine suicide; based on what I’ve seen, Epstein must have known he was about to get nailed to the wall, and spend a long time, possibly the rest of his life, in prison as a known child molester. Him deciding to take the quick way out wouldn’t be too surprising.
However, due to the circumstances, it sure looks goddamn suspicious. I hope the investigations continue, and that his collaborators, like Ghislaine Maxwell, and customers get outed and punished.
In the News
Fiction cross-reference
Nonfiction cross-reference
External links:
- Jeffrey Epstein @ Wikipedia
- Hedge fund managers have some thoughts on what Epstein was doing @ NY Mag
- Comment @ Boing Boing