A Convenient Death

by Alana Goodman

  These matters of internal concern were not enough to cut him off, however. “Despite the compliance officers’ misgivings, the bank continued to do extensive business with Mr. Epstein,” the paper said.

  The bank was willing to work with Epstein as long as it didn’t become public knowledge.

  Which perhaps explains the somewhat dire straits Epstein found himself in in the summer of 2019. Because while it is obviously true that he had enough money to last him the rest of his life, it does not do anyone much good if he either cannot access that money or has to store it in his mattress.

  Multiple sources who spent time with Epstein said they saw indications that he and Maxwell were collecting compromising material on their powerful circle of friends, either for their own private interests, for blackmail, or as part of a spy operation. Some of these impressions might have been due to Epstein’s self-aggrandizement. He openly encouraged speculation that he was involved with intelligence agencies.

  The friend said Epstein would also darkly hint that he had done work with the Central Intelligence Agency headquarters in Langley, Virginia.

  “He would occasionally make mentions of, ‘Well, in Langley they say . . . ’” said the friend in an interview. “I don’t know what that was about.”

  Laura Goldman, the friend of Ghislaine’s, said she believes that if there was a spy operation, then it was orchestrated by Ghislaine rather than Epstein, due to her foreign government contacts.

  “I really do think it was a spying operation,” said Goldman. “I think the world is sexist, and they think it was [Epstein in charge]. It was always [Ghislaine]. She’s the one with all the contacts; she’s the one that organized everything.”

  “I think that she sold to the highest bidder,” she added. “I don’t know if she was as devoted to Israel as [her father, Robert Maxwell] was. So, I’m not sure that it all went to Israel. Some of it may have gone to MI6, and other places.”

  Epstein often played up his involvement with foreign government officials. He told one friend that he provided financial services to the crown prince of Saudi Arabia. (A source close to the Saudi government denied that Epstein provided financial advice to the crown prince but said he did travel to the country on business.) When Epstein’s Manhattan home was raided by the feds in 2019, they found that he had an Austrian passport that listed a fake name and an address in Saudi Arabia, which he allegedly used in the 1980s.

  Epstein also had a close relationship with the former Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak.

  “I saw Ehud Barak at his house. I think [he met him] through business; they had some kind of financial dealings together,” said Epstein’s former attorney Dershowitz in an interview. “I remember one day I went to his house for a meeting, and on the board was a map of the Middle East, hand drawn. [Epstein] said that was drawn by Ehud Barak and it was his idea for how to resolve the Palestine-Israel conflict. That was interesting to see.”

  But Dershowitz said he saw no evidence that Epstein was involved in any sort of intelligence activity.

  “That’s bullshit. That’s just total bullshit. There were rumors around all the time, but he never worked for any intelligence,” said Dershowitz. “The rumor comes from the fact that he was close to Ghislaine Maxwell, and Ghislaine’s father, Robert Maxwell, was rumored to have worked for Mossad. I can’t imagine that any intelligence agency would hire Jeffrey Epstein; I just don’t think that’s possible. I don’t think he would fit the profile of who you get to work as an intelligence agent at any time. But who knows?”

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  Another unanswered mystery around Epstein is why he decided to return that fateful day in July, when the feds were waiting to place him under arrest. As one plugged-in source said, “He obviously decided it was worse to stay in Paris than to come back to New York. Right? Why would it be worse to be in Paris than in New York? Probably because he thought, after Khashoggi, whatever services he had been providing for Saudis, he was probably concerned that he might get dipped in acid, like Khashoggi. So he came back to New York to take his chances knowing that he’d be immediately arrested.”

  Jamal Khashoggi of course was the Washington Post columnist who was murdered inside a Saudi consulate in Turkey. He had entered the consulate to get paperwork necessary for his upcoming nuptials but had been brutally murdered and then allegedly dissolved in an acid substance so that his body could be carried out of the diplomatic posting without attention. The plot worked in part; he never walked out of there alive. But the Saudis got caught, and international uproar ensued.

  The source wondered whether Epstein feared a similar fate. “That’s where it gets back to this whole idea of he was providing services to Saudis and Iranians, whoever else he was providing. I mean it’s taboo everywhere, but it’s especially taboo over there. And so they have a lot of money,” the source added.

  Speaking of the whole Epstein scheme of providing young kids for the sexual pleasure of world elites, the source added, “He expanded his geography.” Operating in the United States alone, to an American clientele, might no longer have been viable, while operating abroad, in foreign lands, provided endless opportunities, if perhaps extrajudicial risks.

  A good friend of Epstein’s recalled in an interview a discussion he had about Saudi Arabia. The friend recalled asking Epstein for advice about the famously reclusive country before a visit.

  “What do you think about me going to Saudi Arabia?” the friend asked Epstein.

  “Oh, they’re going to cheat you and stab you in the back,” Epstein replied.

  “Did you have this experience?”

  “Oh yeah,” Epstein claimed. “I went to Saudi Arabia and the king wouldn’t let me fly my own plane, I had to fly on his plane, and so when I got there, they put me at the Marriott and they kicked every other person out of the Marriott because they didn’t want anyone else to have to stay with a Jew.”

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  Moreover, there was further cause for concern when the feds discovered cash, diamonds, and an Austrian passport in the raid. Epstein certainly had motive and means to flee the country.

  “Just this morning, the government became aware of a safe that contained a pile of cash, diamonds, a passport from a foreign country with a picture of the defendant under another name,” Alex Rossmiller, an assistant U.S. attorney, said in court.6

  “The passport was issued in the name of a foreign country, it was issued in the 1980s, it is expired, it shows a picture of Jeffrey Epstein, and another name,” Rossmiller added.

  Even more disturbing, as Epstein’s lawyers negotiated with state prosecutors over a deal, it became clear that he was unwilling to accept any real restrictions on his interactions with young women and children as part of a settlement agreement. His attorneys quibbled with prosecutors over a clause that would bar Epstein from interacting with minors without a state-approved adult supervisor. Epstein also asked for a special exception regarding his “goddaughter”—one of Eva and Glenn Dubin’s daughters, who was eleven years old at the time.

  “I need to confirm that Mr. Epstein may be with his goddaughter without supervision,” wrote Epstein’s lawyer Guy Fronstin in the April 16, 2006, letter to state prosecutors.

  Epstein had a “fixation” with his goddaughter and displayed a nude photograph of her as a young child in his home, one of his friends recalled in an interview.

  “Suddenly there was a picture of a naked four year old . . . I said what the hell is that about, on the wall? He said that’s my goddaughter. He had some fixation with the goddaughter,” said the friend in an interview.

  “That put it together for me. Having a picture of a naked girl on the wall is bizarre . . . It wasn’t a sexual picture, but she didn’t have any pants on.”

  U.S. District Court Judge Richard Berman, who was overseeing the case, found the prosecution’s argument compell
ing. Despite Epstein’s offer to put up an astronomical $100 million bond, his bail request would be denied. He was deemed a flight risk and repeat offender likely to harm kids if he were ever to walk free again.

  “The crimes Mr. Epstein has been charged with are among the most heinous in the law principally, in the court’s view, because they involve minor girls,” Berman declared.7

  “Mr. Epstein’s alleged excessive attraction to sexual conduct with or in the presence of minor girls—which is said to include his soliciting and receiving massages from young girls and young women perhaps as many as four times a day—appears likely to be uncontrollable,” he added. “It seems fair to say that Mr. Epstein’s future behavior will be consistent with past behavior.”

  This time Epstein’s stay in lockup would be different. And this time he would not get out alive.

  CONCLUSION

  Conspiracy

  Epstein was hiding in plain sight. We all knew about him.

  CINDY MCCAIN

  There are many reasons not to believe the official account of Epstein’s death. We don’t need to know what happened to know we’ve probably been lied to.

  We were told there was nothing to see on footage taken outside his cell only to be told later that the footage didn’t exist. The death scene, which protocol requires be vigorously maintained so that investigations can be performed, was quickly touched. One expects in the case of a suicide to find the death tool on the person who killed himself or at the very least nearby. Nowhere in the coroner’s report was a tool that could have killed Epstein chronicled. The guards mysteriously did not do their jobs, the cameras mysteriously did not work, and the coroner changed her findings without additional evidence.

  Perhaps these are all coincidences.

  Perhaps not.

  It is easy to say that many benefited from his being dead. After all, now he cannot reveal the secrets. He cannot release the reams of blackmail footage he kept. He cannot speak from the grave.

  The stories that did emerge after his death did damage to the fortunes and reputations of many of the rich and powerful. Bankers like the Barclays CEO, Jes Staley, came under investigation by their own companies for their relationship with Epstein. Tech titans, like Bill Gates, Facebook’s CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, and LinkedIn’s CEO, Reid Hoffman, were all revealed to have varying degrees of friendship with the admitted sexual predator.

  Others fell from grace. The director of the MIT Media Lab, Joi Ito, was forced to leave his post over the donations he accepted from Epstein. The billionaire Leslie Wexner’s career came to an unceremonious end when it was announced on February 20, 2020, that he would no longer be the CEO of L Brands and that a majority stake of Victoria’s Secret would be sold off.1 Another billionaire, Glenn Dubin, announced his own retirement just a couple of weeks earlier. “This Epstein thing has been toxic for him,” the New York Post reported a hedge fund manager as saying.2

  There are no doubt others whose secrets are still hidden, either in that cache of photos or elsewhere.

  It’s clear that Epstein would do anything to keep the power he had wanted his whole life. Maybe someone even more powerful than Epstein decided that allowing him to live was more of a risk than arranging for his death. There are plenty of other theories, and certainly some that haven’t even been thought of yet.

  It’s only fair to say, however, that we will probably never know the true story in full. The reason for this is simple. Consider this question: Who would you believe to tell you what happened? The elite, the press, our political leaders, or law enforcement? These are the institutions every American has been told since childhood that can and should be trusted, because they have the best interests of all people at heart. But these are the very same institutions that shielded Jeffrey Epstein for years.

  Epstein hobnobbed with the people who ran these institutions for years, even after his crimes were known. Go back through the archives of The Palm Beach Post, recall the blaring 2011 headline in the New York Post labeling Epstein a “perv,” reread the litany of evidence in the pages of The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal. His scumminess had never escaped the reporters and editors at the broadsheets and tabloids. Epstein was known. His actions were no secret.

  Cindy McCain, the wife of the late senator John McCain, admitted as much in a January 2020 public appearance. “Epstein was hiding in plain sight,” she said at the State of the World 2020 Conference in Florida.3 “We all knew about him. We all knew what he was doing, but we had no one that was—no legal aspect that would go after him. They were afraid of him. For whatever reason, they were afraid of him.”

  McCain would add that an Epstein victim went to school with one of her own children. “I hope he’s in hell right now,” she said.

  And yet because Epstein was rich, because his friends were powerful, and, perhaps most important, because he had beaten the law before, it seemed as if he would get away with his crimes forever. At least that seems to have been his plan.

  Epstein was made by the elites and for the elites. The wealthy helped him along every step of the way, and they shielded him during his life. It’s unlikely that many of them would have an unbiased story of the truth—or would reveal if a member of their circle had bumped him off to prevent more stories from coming to light. And what reason do we have to trust those who said nothing about him during his life but now gossip about him now?

  Epstein also had used the media to his advantage—appearing like a savior and using his new celebrity position to better ingratiate himself with the Upper East Side crowd he so craved to be a part of. Could we ever trust the people who kept up fawning coverage of this monster for years to tell us what “really happened” in the last moments of his life?

  And then, of course, there were our leaders. To most of us they held exalted titles, by election or by birth. To Jeffrey Epstein they were powerful political connections that he carefully collected. Presidents and royalty were in his Rolodex. They took his money and in turn bestowed respect and reverence on him, the kind of legitimacy that only comes with a warm welcome into eminent institutions like the Trilateral Commission and the Council on Foreign Relations. And they also gave him their most limited resource—time. And as that time went on, it was they who seemed to need him. He was always ready with a private plane to help out a friend, or an invitation to an exotic locale, or a luxurious mansion or private island offered up for an intimate getaway. The horrifying nature of that intimacy—and the need for all the privacy—would become apparent only later, after much downplaying and stonewalling. Should we now believe Epstein’s powerful friends when they tell us what happened to him?

  Even law enforcement, whose mission is to treat everyone as equal before the law, was happy to take his contributions and use them—for what? To fight the worst in society? When it came time to investigate Epstein, they would cut him the sweetest of sweetheart deals. And while they were at it, they’d leak every step of the investigation to the perp himself so he’d have a heads-up of what was coming his way well before anything went down. But now their accounts of this high-profile criminal’s demise are supposed to be accepted without question?

  Epstein’s crime wave was not some outside attack on our collective sense of decency. It was something worse—an inside job. And one that could have been carried out only with a methodical, slow-burning plan and lots and lots and lots of help.

  But whatever happened to Epstein, one irony is clear: Epstein, the man who recorded everyone, failed to record his final act.

  So, no, of course we cannot rely on the media, academics, politicians, or law enforcement to tell us simply that Epstein offed himself alone in a federal holding cell. These are the same people who harbored one of the worst homegrown terrorists America has ever produced.

  And now we are left grappling with the insane story of Jeffrey Epstein, his life and his death, the shattered lives touched by his web of depravi
ty, and one horrible lingering question: How many more like him did he leave behind?

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  It is especially difficult to write a book in mere months and on a topic continually breaking, often altering various story lines and reporting paths. That was predictable when we signed up for the gig.

  But the story of Jeffrey Epstein was too important to pass up. The story of a great con with explosive and criminal deviance, entrapping America’s most coveted and reviled class. At the time of his death, Epstein was perhaps the most hated man in America. His reputation has not gotten better, nor will it. And in the end the story is much worse and more pernicious than even we believed.

  More than ever, we’re cognizant of the people who suffered. Our hearts go out to Epstein’s victims. We hope that by shedding light on at least a part of what they endured, and how Epstein did it, we’ll be able to help them.

  We could not have written A Convenient Death alone. We are very grateful to our editor, Bria Sandford, for coming up with this idea—and masterfully seeing it through. Bria is a joy to work with. And her steady hand and clear vision helped improve the manuscript, from start to finish. Thanks also to Nina Rodríguez-Marty.

  Our agents, the team at Javelin, orchestrated this project from the get-go, putting us together and offering sage advice and thoughtful feedback. They were great. Special thanks to Keith Urbahn, Matt Latimer, and Dylan Colligan.

  We are especially grateful to the sources who took time and energy to explain the inner workings of Epstein and his orbit. Some of them are named throughout the book. Others, for fear of reprisal, wished to remain anonymous. Even in death few dare to be associated with Epstein.

  We would also like to thank the other reporters whose work we often relied on throughout this book. Their work was pioneering, often insightful, and ballsy. So thanks go to Vicky Ward, Julie K. Brown, William D. Cohan, James Patterson, John Connolly, Tim Malloy, Laura Goldman, Bob Fitrakis, Carol Felsenthal, Conchita Sarnoff, Nick Bryant, James B. Stewart, and many fine reporters and editors at the Daily Beast, the New York Post, The New York Times, and The Wall Street Journal.