by Craig Unger
“And Ghislaine?” she wrote.
“Full Disclosure: I like her. Most people in New York do. It’s almost impossible not to.
“She is always the most interesting, the most vivacious, the most unusual person in any room. I’ve spent hours talking to her about the Third World at a bar until two a.m.”14
But in the end, Ward was most taken by a very different facet of Ghislaine’s personality: “When it comes down to things she really cares about . . . Ghislaine shows her vulnerability. And that vulnerability is key to understanding her friendship with Jeffrey.
“‘He saved her,’ I remember a close friend of mine telling me. ‘When her father died, she was a wreck; inconsolable. And then Jeffrey took her in. She’s never forgotten that—and never will.’” (When the highly ingratiating profile of Ghislaine was first published, Ward proudly tweeted about its appearance in Vanity Fair. But the article is no longer available on her site or the magazine’s.)
By the time Ghislaine settled in New York, she had become adept at navigating the transactional nature of New York celebrity society and, in the aftermath of her father’s death, played it to the hilt. “She was very funny, very engaging, very sharp. Fiercely bright, intuitive, and fast,” said Christopher Mason, a journalist, TV host, and writer of satirical songs whom Ghislaine took on to write songs for Epstein’s birthday.15 “But all of her conversation was about her astonishing access to power. Every conversation involved someone of staggering wealth and power.”
All of which were strong cards to play in taking on New York society. And to help her along, Ghislaine had a new man at her side, a new boyfriend, a thirty-eight-year-old financier who provided the kind of support she needed. His name was Jeffrey Epstein.
* * *
—
Having made the journey from the shtetl of Solotvyno, Ukraine, to the top of British society, Robert Maxwell was unrivaled in his ability to leap rigid British class barriers in a single bound, but Jeffrey Epstein may have given him a run for his money. The product of working-class Coney Island—his father had been a municipal parks department employee—Epstein, by the end of his life, hobnobbed with heads of state, Nobel laureates, billionaires, celebrities, and royalty.
He had hundreds of millions of dollars. He owned extraordinary homes all over the world. One, his seven-story, $77 million, fifty-thousand-square-foot Upper East Side town house, was said to be the largest private residence in New York City. Another, situated on a ten-thousand-acre ranch in New Mexico, reportedly made that town house “look like a shack” in comparison. And a third, on El Brillo Way in Palm Beach, Florida, was conveniently located just two miles from Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate, where Epstein and Ghislaine spent much of their time. Finally, Epstein had his own private island, Little Saint James, sometimes known as Little Saint Jeff’s, seventy-two acres of paradise off the east coast of Saint Thomas in the US Virgin Islands, replete with a helipad, a lagoon, cabanas, and a luxurious colonnaded villa boasting a large library, cinema, and detached Japanese bathhouse. And, of course, a house staff of seventy.
And then there were the women and young girls—scores of them, dozens of whom were in their teens, and whom Epstein passed around like party favors to some of the world’s most powerful men. All the while, he was secretly recording their activities, the tapes of which provided a hammerlock of kompromat, leverage, and influence.
Epstein’s ascent began in 1973, when, as a twenty-one-year-old college dropout, he was hired to teach math and physics at Dalton, the posh co-ed private school on Manhattan’s Upper East Side at which Donald Barr—the father of Attorney General William Barr—was headmaster. Whether Donald Barr actually hired Epstein before being dismissed himself is a matter of some dispute, but according to New York magazine, they were likely no more than ships passing in the night in that Barr was seen as so “authoritarian” and “undemocratic” that he was ousted before Epstein started work. “[Barr] was disliked by the faculty, he was highly controversial, he hadn’t raised much money, he was very conservative,” Dalton’s chairman told New York magazine.16
Barr was also the author of an eccentric 1973 novel called Space Relations, a science fiction story that depicts enslaved teenage girls who are forced to have sex with the powers that be, which was published the year before Epstein started teaching at Dalton.17 (That happenstance was enough to drive the price of a paperback copy of Barr’s novel up to $32,207.88 briefly on Amazon in August 2020.)
Dalton was the school of choice for stylish and affluent New York sophisticates. In the movie Manhattan, it’s where Woody Allen’s seventeen-year-old girlfriend, played by Mariel Hemingway, went to school. In real life, it was where John Lennon, director Sidney Lumet, Ralph Lauren, and Rupert Murdoch sent their children. Celebrity alumni include Claire Danes, Chevy Chase, Christian Slater, Jennifer Grey, and Anderson Cooper.
At Dalton, Epstein pushed the envelope in terms of testing how far a teacher could go in fraternizing with students. Wearing gold chains, a fur coat, and open shirts that exposed his chest, Epstein sometimes showed up unexpectedly at student parties and lavished attention on the teenage girls.18 Students thought he was creepy. As interim headmaster Peter Branch told the New York Times, Epstein “didn’t come up to snuff, so, ultimately, he was asked to leave.”
But before he was fired, Epstein attended a parent–teacher conference at Dalton at which he dazzled a student’s father with his brilliance. “This parent was so wowed by the conversation he told my father, ‘You’ve got to hire this guy,’” Lynne Koeppel told the Miami Herald.19 “Give Jeff credit. He was brilliant.” (At one point, Koeppel dated Epstein.)
Koeppel’s father, the late Wall Street banker Alan “Ace” Greenberg, wasn’t just another Dalton parent whose son happened to be tutored by Epstein.20 He was the feisty tough guy atop Bear Stearns who had built his investment bank into one of the hottest shops on Wall Street. Greenberg didn’t care about old money, WASP bloodlines, or the niceties of café society, and instead sought out hungry, young, aggressive, ethnic, bridge-and-tunnel talent that was “PSD,” as he put it: poor, smart, and filled with a deep, deep desire to get filthy rich. Epstein fit the bill perfectly.21
Greenberg was also friendly with Donald Trump, who, according to The Art of the Deal, typically began each morning with a call to him on the trading floor: “Alan is the CEO of Bear Sterns, he’s been my investment banker for the past five years, and he’s the best there is.”
At Bear Stearns, Epstein was Ace Greenberg’s protégé and became a limited partner, but he left in 1981 under mysterious circumstances. He later testified before a Securities and Exchange Commission investigation that gossip at his firm claimed that his departure had to with an illicit relationship with a secretary but that the real reason had to do with an improper loan he had made to a friend who was buying stock.
In 1981, Epstein started his own company, Intercontinental Assets Group, and six years later founded a money management firm called J. Epstein & Company. Its name was later changed to the Financial Trust Co., and its headquarters were moved to the US Virgin Islands, chiefly for tax purposes.
By 1986, Epstein reportedly oversaw a $15 billion fund for a list of wealthy clients whose names were a closely held secret, with the exception of billionaire retailer Leslie Wexner, the CEO and founder of the Limited, and, perhaps more famously, the man behind Victoria’s Secret. “I was the only person crazy enough, or arrogant enough, or misplaced enough, to make my limit a billion dollars or more,” Epstein said.22 He added that client fees plus his mastery of the currency markets had made him rich.
According to the New York Times, Wexner gave Epstein enormous sway “over his finances, philanthropy, and private life” and authorized him “to borrow money on his behalf, to sign his tax returns, to hire people and to make acquisitions.”23
But that didn’t explain everything. To be sure, Epstein was richly rewarded for managin
g Wexner’s money, which, according to Forbes, totaled $1.8 billion in 1988. Over the years, the Wall Street Journal reported, Epstein also had relationships with financier Leon Black, Johnson & Johnson heiress Elizabeth Ross (Libet) Johnson, and hedge fund billionaire Glenn Dubin that proved highly lucrative.24
But it didn’t add up. At his death in 2019, Epstein’s will put his net worth at more than $577 million.25 It is difficult to make a fortune like that without leaving a bigger footprint. And no one ever saw Epstein work. On Wall Street, the trading desks didn’t even know who he was. That in itself was suspect. No one makes that much money without leaving tracks. “He plays 26 hours a day,” one of his friends told New York magazine.26
Friends and associates were mystified as to exactly what Epstein did. Dozens of reporters have tried—and failed—to find Epstein’s other clients or other sources of income.
So where did his money really come from? “When I met him in the eighties, for Christ’s sake, he was a process server,” says Jesse Kornbluth, a longtime colleague of mine at New York magazine and Vanity Fair, whom Epstein had approached to write a book about him. (The project never went forward.)
At the time, Kornbluth said, Epstein was spending a lot of time with Leon Black, the multibillionaire investor who was then managing director of Drexel Burnham Lambert, at that point one of the biggest investment banks in the country. Black later was cofounder, chairman, and CEO of private equity giant Apollo Global Management, which manages more than $300 billion in assets.
In October 2020, the New York Times reported that Black wired Epstein at least $50 million and perhaps as much as $75 million in the years after Epstein’s arrest.27
“Epstein and I talked a lot about Leon Black,” Kornbluth told me. “Leon Black had a huge department of the top tax lawyers in the country. What the fuck did Leon Black need with Jeffrey Epstein? Was Jeffrey a genius beyond anyone he’d ever talked to? Maybe. I have no idea.” Similarly, the fact that Epstein had lobbied—successfully!—to get ready access to Microsoft’s Bill Gates raised more questions than it answered. “What did Bill Gates see in Jeffrey? Once you’ve snared Bill Gates, you can’t go higher. In order to buy any of this, you have to assume that Jeffrey was an incredible genius.”
The Times cited Stephanie Pillersdorf, a spokewoman for Black, who said, “Mr. Black received personal trusts and estates planning advice as well as family office philanthropy and investment services from several financial and legal advisers, including Mr. Epstein, during a six-year period, between 2012 and 2017.”28
But in the end, it was unclear exactly what services Epstein provided for those fees.
Another associate of Epstein’s, the journalist and author Edward Jay Epstein (no relation to Jeffrey), then a columnist for Manhattan, Inc., was also approached by the financier, who was trying to get someone—Ed Epstein, for example—to write about his business.
“What is your business?” Ed Epstein asked.
“I’m sort of a financial bounty hunter,” Jeffrey replied.
A financial bounty hunter?
That meant Jeffrey got paid to hunt down money, as Ed Epstein recounted in a column he wrote in Air Mail, Graydon Carter’s digital weekly.29 “He described the convoluted network for hiding money in Andorra, Fiji, Gibraltar, and the Cayman Islands in such vivid detail that I thought he might be in the business of hiding as well of finding it. He dropped so many names in the realm of money machinations—such as Adnan Khashoggi, Aristotle Onassis, and Sheikh Zayed bin Sultan Al Nahyan—that his stories, though intriguing, didn’t quite add up.”
It didn’t add up because Khashoggi, Onassis, and Al Nahyan already had plenty of money and needed to hide what they had. Hiding money—that was Epstein’s game. For all sorts of purposes: tax evasion, laundering illicit riches, marriages that had gone south. If a multibillionaire’s marriage was on the rocks, why not stash a few billion away in an offshore shell company just in case he was sued for divorce? Sometimes Epstein said he worked for governments to recover money looted by African dictators. Other times those dictators hired him to help them hide their stolen money.30
In addition, sometime in the eighties, Epstein met Steven Hoffenberg, who later ran the New York Post but was then head of a collection agency called Towers Financial Corporation.31 According to New York magazine, Hoffenberg had met Epstein through Douglas Leese, an arms dealer about whom little is known except that he made his fortune by putting together defense packages for various governments around the world. (Epstein has claimed he was introduced to Hoffenberg by John Mitchell, the Nixon attorney general and convicted felon.)32
According to testimony in Parliament by British MP George Galloway, Leese was a middleman who handled some of the secret commissions for a dubious multibillion-pound deal with the Saudi royal family.
“[Epstein’s] a genius,” Hoffenberg said Leese told him. “He’s great at selling securities. And he has no moral compass.”33
To Hoffenberg, who went prison for a $450 million Ponzi scheme, that last attribute was an especially desirable trait. Epstein had everything Hoffenberg could want.
Released in 2013 after spending eighteen years in federal prison, Hoffenberg told the Washington Post that the entire scam was actually engineered by Epstein, who escaped unscathed and uncharged. “Jeffrey was the best hustler on two feet,” he said. “Talent, charisma, genius, criminal mastermind.”
“He’s got a gift that’s extraordinary, where he controls the people he meets and manipulates them totally with his charisma,” Hoffenberg says on the four-part Netflix documentary Jeffrey Epstein: Filthy Rich. “You can’t grasp the magnitude of this man’s controlling effect.”
Hoffenberg’s allegations have not been fully corroborated, but he made similar charges in a 2018 lawsuit, in which he alleged that he and Epstein operated “a classic Ponzi scheme from the late 1980s to mid-1990s. They succeeded in soliciting over five hundred million dollars in investments from participants, all of which they misappropriated for improper and personal uses.”34 In another interview, in Quartz, Hoffenberg explained that Epstein’s ties to the crime were not explored because he pleaded guilty, and “when you plead guilty, you don’t go in for elaborate discovery.”35
Mind you, this was taking place around 1987, when Donald Trump initiated his long friendship with Jeffrey Epstein and the two of them palled around with real estate investor Tom Barrack, just after Trump made his first trip to Moscow. As Michael Wolff put it in Fire and Fury, they were a trio of “nightlife Musketeers” on the New York scene.36
Trump later recalled Epstein in those days. “Terrific guy,” he famously told New York magazine.37 “He’s a lot of fun to be with. It is even said that he likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side. No doubt about it—Jeffrey enjoys his social life.”
* * *
—
Throughout the late eighties, Ghislaine had been involved with a man who had been described as the great love of her life, Count Gianfranco Cicogna, an heir to the Ciga hotels chain who helped mold Ghislaine into a stylish socialite. But that relationship ended in 1990.
By then, Jeffrey Epstein had been sighted in Robert Maxwell’s Daily Mirror Building in London’s Holborn Circus by Ari Ben-Menashe, the renegade Israeli agent who happened to work with her father on pirating Inslaw’s PROMIS software and selling it to third parties.
Ben-Menashe told me that his encounter with Jeffrey Epstein took place during a period when Maxwell was dealing directly with Ehud Barak, then head of Israeli military intelligence (and later prime minister), and sometimes with Yitzhak Shamir, the Israeli prime minister at the time. Maxwell was close to KGB chief Vladimir Kryuchkov during the same period, but such potentially conflicting loyalties fazed Maxwell not a whit.
“Maxwell was with Maxwell,” said Ben-Menashe. “He didn’t care. He worked for Israel. He worked with the KGB. In Israel, he was a reg
ular in [Prime Minister] Shamir’s office. He wasn’t working for Mossad, but for Israeli Military Intelligence, when Barak was head of it.”
According to Ben-Menashe, Maxwell was trying to figure out a place for Epstein to work that tied him to the Israelis. “Jeffrey Epstein was a young guy at the time, about my age, working with Maxwell,” Ari told me. “Nobody at the time put any importance to it. He was just a nice Jewish boy from New York. And nobody really knew what he was up to. And he started a fling with Maxwell’s daughter. And to my understanding, they found each other.”
The only problem with that story was the source: Ben-Menashe was trouble.
I learned that back in 1991 when I debriefed him as he and I traveled around the United States on Newsweek’s dime, with Ben-Menashe spinning tales of how the Reagan-Bush campaign put the fix on the 1980 presidential election, of how Israeli intelligence worked with Robert Maxwell on illicit arms deals to Iran, and of a clandestine Israeli pipeline to arm brutal Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein.
It didn’t take long to figure out that Ben-Menashe was a reporter’s nightmare in that he was both knowledgeable and unreliable. Some of the best sleuths in the world debriefed him and cited him in their work, including Seymour Hersh, former National Security Council staffer Gary Sick, and congressional investigators.
Ari had disclosed explosive revelations to Time magazine about illegal arms sales to Iran that were later corroborated in the Iran-Contra probe. In Hersh’s book The Samson Option, Ben-Menashe revealed that Nicholas Davies, one of Robert Maxwell’s top editors at The Mirror, was involved in illegal arms deals to Iran.38 Arms dealers and former CIA operatives all over the globe confirmed some of the most sensitive parts of Ari’s stories. Much of what he said was true. All of it was startling.
But at the same time, Ben-Menashe was being dismissed by Israel officials as a renegade and fraud who was nothing more than a low-level translator. When Ben-Menashe took a lie-detector test for ABC News, he failed miserably.39 His stories were said to be riddled with inconsistencies and unproven allegations. Word went out that he was a liar, a fabricator, and a fraud.
