American Kompromat

by Craig Unger

  In the end, I saw Ari as a freelance arms dealer/operative who implemented operations for Maxwell and others and who often seemed to have an unseen agenda, which, I presumed, was dictated by the highest bidder. In later years, he operated a consultancy out of Montreal called Dickens & Madson that counted Libya,40 Sudan, and Zimbabwe among its clients. Along the way, he amassed enough money to own a $9.6 million apartment on Park Avenue in New York.41

  But at the time, no one seemed to know the real story. He had access to so many deeply held secrets that it was impossible to dismiss him. Moshe Hebroni, the deputy director of Israeli Military Intelligence, told me that Ben-Menashe worked directly for him and had “access to very, very sensitive material . . . and that includes material that was not within his authority to know.”42 Similarly, Yehoshua Saguy, the former director of Military Intelligence, corroborated Hebroni’s account. And yet, if you listened to Ben-Menashe, trusted him, and printed his story verbatim, chances are your career would go up in flames.

  For all that, it was former attorney general Elliot Richardson who convinced me to listen to Ben-Menashe seriously. With his lantern jaw and impeccable Boston Brahmin credentials, Richardson was straight out of central casting as a model of probity. In 1973, during the investigation of the Watergate scandal, he had emerged as a figure of real moral courage when, as attorney general, he stood up to President Nixon by refusing to execute Nixon’s order to fire the special prosecutor investigating Watergate—instead resigning from his cabinet post. When I interviewed him in 1991, Richardson, then a partner in the white-shoe law firm of Milbank Tweed, had submitted sworn affidavits by Ben-Menashe on behalf of his client Inslaw, the tech company that had created the PROMIS software. I asked Richardson if he had submitted those affidavits as a legal gambit, a ploy, or if he genuinely believed what Ben-Menashe said. On background, he hemmed and hawed a bit in a way that let me know he couldn’t corroborate everything.

  Finally, Richardson went on the record. “Ben-Menashe is who he says he is,” he said, “and much of what he says is true.”

  Like any good lawyer, he had parsed his words carefully and, as a result, had left questions unanswered. But then he said something that helped me sharpen the focus of my inquiry. Richardson reminded me that often the people who are most knowledgeable about crime are themselves criminals, which is why it is common practice for prosecutors to get criminals to turn state’s evidence. Similarly, in the world of intelligence, the most knowledgeable people are intelligence agents, who, like criminals, are professional liars. So the real question shouldn’t be about the rectitude of Ben-Menashe or whether one could “trust” him. His character wasn’t the issue. The real question was what really happened.

  Back then, in 1991, mobster John Gotti was being prosecuted by the feds, and the key witness against him was underboss Salvatore “Sammy the Bull” Gravano. Reliable? Honest? Truthful? Hardly. Gravano was a sociopathic killer who had confessed to nineteen murders. But his probity—or utter lack thereof—was irrelevant. The larger point was that he was there at the scene of the crime. He knew what happened because he was present. Boy Scouts and choirboys might be ideal witnesses, but they are rarely on-site for mob whack jobs. Thugs like Gravano were. In the end, it was clear that Gravano was knowledgeable, and his testimony, once corroborated, was enough to convict Gotti. That, Richardson suggested, was how I should handle Ben-Menashe: Hear him out. Then corroborate or refute.

  Of course that’s easier said than done. The specifics of Epstein’s ties to Robert Maxwell remain murky, but there are at least three additional pieces of evidence that strongly suggest Maxwell knew Epstein and had transferred a significant amount of his assets to him.

  One knowledgeable source told me that Maxwell was involved with Epstein in various business projects, and that in the last year of his life, Maxwell likely put a significant sum—probably between $10 million and $20 million—in Epstein’s hands. The reason Maxwell transferred the money to him is unclear, but the walls were caving in on Maxwell, and Epstein may have been trying to keep Maxwell’s assets out of the hands of his creditors.

  And indeed, the mystery of what happened to Maxwell’s millions may also be the answer to questions about Epstein’s wealth. “We really don’t know anything about Maxwell’s ill-gotten gains,” says Martin Dillon, coauthor of Robert Maxwell, Israel’s Superspy with the late Gordon Thomas.43 “They were never traced. There are people saying that maybe Ghislaine was the kind of conduit for moving money to Epstein. But in the end, my personal view is that Epstein really was a money launderer. He wasn’t the great sort of whiz kid of Wall Street.”

  All of which meshes with a deposition given in 2010 by Maritza Vasquez, a bookkeeper for the MC2 Model Management agency, in a complaint against Epstein regarding sex trafficking in which she testified she had heard that Epstein “had a relationship with a woman that her father was very wealthy and that’s how he started his own money.”

  Vasquez couldn’t remember the woman’s name off the top of her head, so she asked the attorney to help her. “And if you tell me the name maybe I can remember.”

  “Ghislaine Maxwell,” came the answer.

  “Yes!” replied Vasquez.

  That meant Robert Maxwell was the source of Epstein’s money—or at least a significant portion of it. But it also raised other questions, one of which was whether Ghislaine and Jeffrey were following in Robert Maxwell’s footsteps in terms of having relationships with various intel agencies in Russia and Israel.

  Ben-Menashe told me they were later “recruited by Israeli intelligence, but not into the arms business or anything of that nature.” That was especially interesting given the fact that former prime minister Ehud Barak, the same Barak who had worked closely with Robert Maxwell, was years later, in 2016, photographed going to Epstein’s lavish town house on East Seventy-First Street.

  “My guess is that they were probably blackmailing people,” Ben-Menashe told me.

  I wanted to find out if he was right.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  SEX, SPIES, AND VIDEOTAPE

  When he met Ghislaine, Epstein, then in his midthirties, was not yet a master of the universe, but he was clearly headed in that direction. He had a lot going for him. Looks, for one thing. Frequently compared to Ralph Lauren, Epstein was handsome enough to have been selected as Cosmopolitan’s “Bachelor of the Month,” and he had made a name for himself accompanying beautiful women in London, New York, and elsewhere.

  Smarts, for another. Epstein was a quick study. He soaked up knowledge. To be sure, some thought he was merely a brilliant bullshit artist who embodied the dictum, as Jesse Kornbluth put it, that he was “someone who can talk about any subject for five minutes, but not for six. That was Jeffrey.”1

  But even if that was true, Epstein’s bullshit was state-of-the-art bullshit. World-class. That meant it was good enough to attract and ensnare the finest minds of Wall Street and Silicon Valley.

  And finally, Epstein had money. According to a report by Vicky Ward in Vanity Fair, in 1987, Hoffenberg paid Epstein $25,000 a month, and that was just the start.2 That was good money, certainly—about $700,000 a year in 2020 dollars—but many people on Wall Street had that kind of money. In the eighties, Epstein didn’t yet have great wealth, and he was not yet an integral part of that world. He was still an outsider looking in. Brash, ambitious, obsessed with money, power, and making it big, he had a ferocious hunger to become part of that world; he would do whatever it took.

  Enter Ghislaine Noelle Marion Maxwell, daughter of a rich media mogul, Oxford alumna, socialite, friend of British royalty, and Jeffrey Epstein’s entrée to society.

  Like any great power couple, Ghislaine and Jeffrey were more than the sum of their parts. Even though much of his money appears to have come from her father, Jeffrey had enough to restore the luxurious lifestyle Ghislaine had enjoyed while her father was still alive. And to Epstein, Ghisla
ine delivered an extraordinarily attractive transatlantic social network that included British royalty, heads of state, and New York and London society. That was Ghislaine at Chelsea Clinton’s wedding, in photos with Michael Bloomberg, Donald Trump, and the British royal family, through Prince Andrew, of course, who had hosted them at Windsor, Balmoral, and Sandringham castles and was a frequent visitor in the States.3

  A key component of the puzzle of Jeffrey and Ghislaine’s relationship had to do with her father. Ghislaine had been quite close to him—at least insofar as that was possible for Robert Maxwell, the father of nine who constantly traveled the globe.

  Their affinity was mutual. According to The Final Verdict, by Tom Bower, a BBC journalist who wrote two books on Maxwell, he once said of his children in an interview for National Public Radio, “I love my youngest daughter, Ghislaine. The rest are a cold lot. Like their mother; and they want to live off what others earn.”4

  Even in her youth, Ghislaine had ambitions to manage the Mirror Group.5 In the early eighties, Ghislaine, then in her twenties, appeared in Mirror Group newspapers nearly as much as her father—presumably at his behest. And even though he died bankrupt and hundreds of millions of dollars in debt, Maxwell nevertheless was able to grant Ghislaine a $100,000-a-year allowance (about $190,000 in 2020 dollars) when she moved to New York—a sum she continued to receive long after his death.

  In the end, however, none of it served her well. Much as he said he loved Ghislaine, according to The Final Verdict, she could be intimidated by him, especially when she became the target of his imperious temper. “I am very sorry that my description of the dinner this morning was inadequate and made you angry,” she wrote to him after apparently failing to give an appropriately detailed and respectful report. “I should have expressed at the start of our conversation that I was merely presenting you with a preliminary report of the evening and that a full written report was to follow. . . . Please forgive.” All of which was followed by the requisite litany of sycophantic messages from various makers and shakers.6

  “I think in his home, she never really learned the difference between right and wrong,” said Bower.7 “She was dominated by him, and she learned from him to worship wealth and money and power and influence and really had very little sentiment for what might be called the little people. . . . By the time he died in 1991, she was a pretty cracked character. She really was flawed by then.”

  Toward his last years, Maxwell made sure Ghislaine traveled with him all around America because he wanted her company. And he clearly included her in some of his more underhanded undertakings.

  No stranger to corporate skulduggery, Ghislaine had acted as a courier for her father in sensitive matters—especially in the last year of his life, when he expanded into New York and was facing crushing debt. According to The Final Verdict, it was Ghislaine, then twenty-eight, who flew over from London on the Concorde with her nine stock certificates worth about $200 million (about $400 million in 2020 dollars) to take to her father’s lawyer, Ellis Freedman, showing that Macmillan Publishing, which Maxwell had bought in 1989, in turn owned the Berlitz chain of language schools, with hundreds of locations all over the world.

  Freedman instantly got them reissued as twenty-one new certificates with one major change—instead of citing Macmillan’s ownership, the certificates were to name the owner as Bishopsgate Investment Trust, a private company owned by Maxwell. His lawyer may or may not have realized it, but removing Macmillan from the ownership certificates meant that Maxwell could put the $200 million to work for his personal use.8

  But it is still unclear how much Ghislaine really knew about the dark side of her father’s world. When she went into her father’s Lady Ghislaine office after his death and ordered the shredding of his documents, had she read them? Was she privy to his secrets? Did she know about her father’s ties to the KGB? To Mossad? Did she understand his ties to Vladimir Kryuchkov and Ehud Barak? How he worked with both of them but for neither? What did Jeffrey know? And would the two of them play out her father’s game?

  * * *

  —

  Whatever her plan, Ghislaine had seen Donald Trump as a vital connection for Epstein early on. In the late eighties, she had worked for her father in London, first at Pergamon Press, then in another Maxwell division that specialized in corporate gifts. Thinking Trump would be a great catch as client for her venture, she realized she had a terrific connection through her father, who knew Trump fairly well in the late eighties, as we have seen, as a rival, bidding unsuccessfully to buy the New York Post, inviting him to party aboard the Lady Ghislaine, and attending hugely extravagant society soirees.9

  Naively assuming that her father would appreciate her initiative, Ghislaine asked him to call Trump. However, according to Nicholas Davies’s Death of a Tycoon, even though she was his favorite daughter, Maxwell erupted.

  “Have you got your bum in your head?” he said.10 “Why the fuck would Donald Trump want to waste his time seeing you and your crappy gifts when he has a multimillion-dollar business to run?”

  But her father was wrong. In the end, Trump spent plenty of time with Ghislaine and Epstein. In fact, he fit in quite well with them. Arrivistes all—be it Epstein’s Coney Island, Maxwell’s Ukrainian shtetl, or Trump’s Queens—they had all come from the wrong side of the tracks. And at some point in their lives, Robert Maxwell, Trump, and Epstein all had ties to foreign intelligence agencies and to arms dealers like Khashoggi.

  For all three men and Ghislaine, as well, the sex trade was part of the equation. Robert Maxwell’s sexual appetite was well known to Mossad, and as a result, according to Gordon Thomas’s Gideon’s Spies, the Israeli intelligence service made arrangements during the tycoon’s visits to Israel so that “he was serviced from one of a stable of prostitutes the service maintained for blackmail purposes.”11 (Given his immense girth, it was said, Maxwell preferred fellatio.)12

  And Maxwell, like Epstein and Trump, was not merely a consumer. Through much of the eighties, the Bulgarian cooperative bank that Maxwell owned had laundered millions for Semion Mogilevich, the multibillionaire who was one of the richest and most powerful men in the world of human trafficking.13

  As for Trump himself, at least twenty-five women have made sexual assault allegations against him, including the rape of underage girls.14 Many of the charges are still pending and may never come to court. In 2002, when he began partnering with the Bayrock Group, the real estate development company in Trump Tower, he brought into his orbit a host of oligarchs and mobsters involved in money laundering, sex trafficking, and child prostitution. According to documents that were part of an investigation by Turkish law enforcement authorities, in 2010, Bayrock founder Tevfik Arif entertained associates with nine escorts, a couple of whom who were allegedly as young as thirteen and fourteen years old.15 Arif denied all charges filed and was later acquitted, but the indictment portrays billionaire oligarchs shipping in teenage girls from Russia and Ukraine to have sex with them and their wealthy friends.

  Finally, there was Ghislaine, who, at this writing, was jailed in Brooklyn awaiting trial on charges of procuring and sexually trafficking underage girls for Epstein.

  It was a world of unimaginable decadence. The epicenter of the operation was Epstein’s enormously opulent Upper East Side town house. As a dwelling, it was less a home than a deliberately, extravagantly staged showcase, a calculated spectacle that declared to the world that Epstein, a college dropout from a middle-class Brooklyn family, had been embraced securely in the bosom of the powers that be. And Epstein meant the real powers that be.

  Indeed, his collection of esteemed friends may have been his most prized possession of all. His notorious “black book” of contacts shows the rarefied circles in which he traveled—Nobel laureates, heads of states, British royals, Wall Street power brokers, and A-listers in every glamour profession.

  In the good old days, one might have run
into Deepak Chopra or former Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak at Epstein’s home while he juggled phone calls from Woody Allen and former treasury secretary and Harvard president Larry Summers. The black book and the passenger manifests for Epstein’s private plane—which have shown up in court documents, thanks to evidence obtained from Alfredo Rodriguez, his house manager and a keeper of the black book—a list of about 1,500 people, many of whom are the boldfaced names familiar to tens of millions of Americans.* All of which was compiled largely by Ghislaine and friends with ties to a decaying European aristocracy, New York society, and global celebrities.

  For rock and roll fans, there was Mick Jagger, Michael Jackson, Brian Ferry, and Rupert Wainwright. There were actors Ralph Fiennes, Kevin Spacey, and Griffin Dunne; comics John Cleese and Joan Rivers; and arbiters of fashion like designer Tom Ford, supermodel Naomi Campbell, and British Vogue editor Hamish Bowles.

  From the political set, there was Bill Clinton and his cronies Douglas Band and Ron Burkle; former New Mexico governor Bill Richardson; and boatloads of Kennedys. There were Nobel Prize winners and the top scientists in the world. And royals from Queen Elizabeth on down, including Prince Andrew, a close friend of Epstein’s and Ghislaine’s, and Andrew’s ex-wife, Sarah Ferguson, Duchess of York, and the irrepressible Saudi prince Bandar bin Sultan Al Saud.

  There were business, entertainment, and media moguls such as Rupert Murdoch, Conrad Black, and Richard Branson. Associates included Henry Kissinger, British prime minister Tony Blair, and dozens of other household names. The personal framed photos in Epstein’s office included shots of Steve Bannon, Bill Clinton, and Mohammed bin Salman, better known today as MBS, the Saudi crown prince who is widely believed to have orchestrated the brutal murder of Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi. It was said that MBS was not just an acquaintance, but a real friend of Epstein’s.