Oh Look, The NYT Solved The Mystery Of How Jeffrey Epstein Got His Money!

Short version: scamming and charm.

Photo by rc.xyz NFT gallery on Unsplash

Happy Epstein Files week! Attorney General Pam Bondi has until Friday to release the government’s files, which means President Donald John Trump is gonna be on a real tear. He would much rather the national conversation be about what an asshole he is, rather than the unsettling possibility that he might be as guilty as Epstein is, of the same crimes and/or worse!

How would we know if he wasn’t? We’d have to see the full unredacted Epstein Files to find out, Pam.

In the meantime, here is your latest Epstein files news!

This morning The New York Times has tackled and solved the years-long mystery: just where did all of Epstein’s money come from?

Short version, with old-fashioned confidence-man-style scamming. He did it so effectively that when time ran out on one scam, he just pivoted to the next one, as he was constantly cultivating men and women who became extraordinarily willing to help him. He had the rich-people-manipulation skills of a young Anna Delvey/Sorokin, and boy, did he use them! As the NYT summarises:

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.

No wonder he and Trump were best friends.

This is weird: the father of the lady Junior just got engaged to, Bettina Anderson, shows up at the end. Harry Loy Anderson Jr. was the president of the Palm Beach National Bank & Trust Company, where Epstein had held accounts since the early 1990s. In 1999, when Epstein was trying to use his US Virgin Islands property to get millions in tax breaks for his main company, Financial Trust, Anderson wrote a letter to the USVI’s Industrial Development Commission, vouching for Epstein’s character, that he was “a gentleman of the highest integrity,” and that he “enjoys an excellent reputation in our community.” Later, Epstein’s house manager said in a deposition that he was using Anderson’s bank to pay some of Epstein’s victims, too.

Once again, what a small cabal of elites it is! And Anderson was sure not alone in being charmed and gushing about the guy.

Epstein got his job as a Bear Stearns trader, it seems, from the parent of one of his students at the Dalton School, who noticed that Epstein was good at math, suggested he get a job on Wall Street, and called up a buddy. Good timing! Epstein had just been asked to leave at the end of the school year, and his flirting with female students had not gone unnoticed.

And this was no ordinary pal! It was Bear Stearns executive Alan Courtney “Ace” Greenberg. Epstein had zero experience in business or finance, and not even an idea how the stock market worked. But Greenberg was into “hiring what he called people with PSD degrees — non-MBAs who were poor, smart and desirous of riches.” And Epstein was that! (Detail from Greenberg’s obituary: “In 1998, he gave $1 million to the Hospital for Special Surgery in Manhattan to provide Viagra to men who could not afford it.” A wangdonger is a terrible thing to waste!)

And Epstein was, said another executive, a “hell of a salesman.” For himself, the most! Bear Stearns soon learned that he’d lied about having two college degrees, and in fact had zero. But Epstein made a sad face and whinged that he’d lied because otherwise no one would give him a chance, the appeal worked, and he kept his job.

It also helped that by that point he was dating Greenberg’s daughter. And had picked up stock marketing quick, advising clients on complex transactions, and how to dodge taxes. In 1980, at age 27, he was made a limited partner. And then pulled all sorts of crap, like charging $10,000 of jewelry and clothes for a girlfriend on the company card, giving insider access to a girlfriend, and lending money to a high school friend against SEC rules. For all that, the firm’s executive committee decided to fine him $2,500 and suspend him for two months. The incredible charm of this guy must have made Wilbur the pig look like a dented can of Spam.

But by the time Epstein was suspended and fined, he didn’t need the job anymore. He had another girlfriend whose son he had tutored who introduced him to Douglas Leese, a guy with serious money, generational British kind of wealth. Epstein soon started taking advantage there too, charging personal flights on the Concorde and stays at luxury hotels to Leese’s expense account. That ended the friendship, but again, didn’t matter, because Epstein had already moved on to greener marks.

He and lawyer John Stanley Pottinger and Pottinger’s brother rented a penthouse in the Hotel St. Moritz on Central Park South, stiffed the broker on her commission, and then briefly set up their own tax-avoider helper business. Interestingly, decades later Pottinger would team up with Brad Edwards to represent scores of women who accused Epstein of sexually abusing them.

From there, sounds like Epstein simply scammed money. Like $450,000 from video-game executive Michael Stroll, which Epstein promised to invest in an oil company, and Stroll says Epstein simply kept. Then a big break came when the family of Spanish socialite Ana Obregón, and then other Spanish families, hired him to track down money that went missing when the brokerage firm Drysdale Securities collapsed. Somehow he did it, the commission made him a millionaire, and he returned to Bear Stearns as a client of his former manager.

And once again, Epstein used his charm with women, seducing his former manager’s pretty young assistant, and using her to access the Bear Stearns library for him, and to charm prospective clients. “It was always about getting him in a position of leverage,” said the assistant. “I was his plaything. It was like, ‘You are someone that’s going to help me get where I want to go.’” Another of Epstein’s assistants, Suzanne Ircha, would become a close friend of Melania Trump’s and went on to marry Woody Johnson, the owner of the New York Jets and an heir to the Johnson & Johnson fortune, and Trump’s first-term ambassador to Britain. There’s so much that they share, though the oceans are wide and mountains divide!

And then, what do you know, more scamming. Epstein refashioned himself as a corporate-takeover specialist, with a friend, Steven Hoffenberg. Short version, the two raised money for takeovers that didn’t happen, and took the money. Epstein denied all knowledge, and Hoffenberg claimed it was Epstein’s idea. A decade later Hoffenberg would be sentenced to 20 years for his part, but once again, Epstein walked away unscathed. More than unscathed! He wormed his way into New York Society, joining the board of the New York Academy of Art in 1987, which is how he met victim Maria Farmer and her sister Annie. Maria was the one who got creeped on by Trump in front of Epstein, and reported their gross behaviors to the FBI twice, in 1996 and 2006. And nobody did a damn thing!

Then in 1982 Epstein met Leslie Wexner, billionaire brand owner and Epstein’s biggest fish. Wexner’s financial adviser at the time, Harold Levin, told him he “smelled a rat,” that Epstein’s explanations of currency trading did not make sense, and the guy did not even have a computer in his office. Nevertheless, Wexner was so charmed he ended up signing over power of attorney to Epstein.

Levin ended up quitting after Epstein told Wexner that Levin had been stealing. It was a technique he would later use to snare billionaire Leon Black: “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.” Again, very Trumpy!

Here is a strange coincidence: Mike Jeffries, the former CEO of another Wexner brand, Abercrombie and Fitch, is currently on trial for sex trafficking and prostitution charges, also!

Anyway, by 1992, he had met Ghislaine Maxwell, and you know plenty about the rest.

So, there is one decades-long mystery solved! Turns out these rich people are not that different from you and me, other than being friends with Jeffrey Epstein, who had that whole child rape sex cabal thing going. They’re easily charmed, reluctant to acknowledge when they’ve been scammed, and not very good at math.

What other new things will we learn this week? Can’t wait!

[New York Times gift link / Vanity Fair]

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