Filthy Rich Page 7

  Pursuant to a lawful subpoena I obtained Epstein’s private plane records for 2005 from Jet Aviation. The plane records show arrival and departure of Epstein’s plane at Palm Beach International airport. These records were compared to the cell phone records of Sarah Kellen. This comparison found that all the phone calls Kellen made to [Dobbs] and the victims were made in the days just prior to their arrival or during the time Epstein was in Palm Beach.

  Therefore, as Jeffrey Epstein, who at the time of these incidents was fifty one years of age, did have vaginal intercourse either with his penis or digitally with [names redacted], who were minors at the time this occurred, there is sufficient probable cause to charge Jeffrey Epstein with four counts of Unlawful Sexual Activity with a Minor, in violation of Florida State Statute 794.05(1), a second degree felony. As Epstein, who at the time of the incident was fifty two years of age, did use a vibrator on the external vaginal area of [name redacted], a fourteen year old minor, there is sufficient probable cause to charge him with Lewd and Lascivious Molestation, in violation of Florida State Statute 800.04 (5), a second degree felony.

  PART II

  The Man

  CHAPTER 20

  Jeffrey Epstein: 1953–1969

  Jeffrey Epstein’s mother, Paula, was the daughter of Max and Lena Stolofsky, who arrived in the United States as Lithuanian refugees. Relatives on that side of the family who remained in the old country would all perish in the course of Adolf Hitler’s campaign to exterminate European Jewry.

  Epstein’s father, Seymour, was a manual laborer, like his father before him. Seymour’s parents, Julius and Bessie Epstein, had emigrated from Russia and landed in Brooklyn, both of them with eighth-grade educations. They lived in Crown Heights, where Julius owned a house-wrecking company.

  Before landing a job with the city, Seymour had worked with his father.

  They were kind people, says Epstein’s childhood friend Gary Grossberg. Seymour was there for him at a difficult time, Grossberg says. When Grossberg was young, his parents divorced, and his father moved out of Brooklyn. Seymour and Paula took Gary in. Often they referred to him as their third son. “Paula was a wonderful mother and homemaker,” Grossberg remembers, “despite the fact that she had a full-time job.”

  Epstein, as a kid, was “chubby, with curly hair and a high, ‘hee-hee’ kind of laugh,” Beverly Donatelli recalls.* Beverly was two years older than Epstein, but thanks to his precocious talents, which allowed him to skip two grades, they graduated from Brooklyn’s Lafayette High School together, in 1969.

  “He was advanced,” Beverly remembers. “He tutored my girlfriend and myself in the summer. He taught me geometry in just two months.”

  When Beverly thinks of Epstein now, she recalls gentler times—long strolls down the Coney Island boardwalk, roller-coaster rides, stolen kisses. “That last year in school, I think he kind of loved me,” she says. “One night on the beach he kissed me. In fact, our history teacher made up a mock wedding invitation for Jeffrey and myself to show to the class. That seems pretty inappropriate now. But back then, we all thought it was funny. Jews and the Italians, that was pretty much who went to Lafayette High School. They didn’t socialize that much. And though my mother was crazy about him, she told me Jewish boys don’t marry Italians.”

  Through the haze of several decades, Beverly remembers Epstein as a kindhearted boy and something of a prodigy—a gifted young pianist as well as a math whiz.

  “I was talking to my girlfriends the other day,” she says. “There is nothing but nice we can say about him. He is actually the reason I went to college.”

  Beverly lost contact with Epstein over the years. But not long after Epstein’s fiftieth birthday, she got a call out of the blue.

  “He had a photo of us on the beach,” she says. “A friend noticed it at his birthday party. And Jeffrey said to the friend: ‘I bet she has a big ass now.’ So Jeffrey called me and invited me to his home on 71st Street. We hung out. We reminisced. He was the same Jeffrey. A gentleman.”

  The two never did speak again, but to this day Beverly sympathizes with her high school sweetheart.

  “I feel so bad for him,” Beverly says. “That’s how much I liked him.”

  Gary Grossberg was a year younger than Epstein and in the same class as Epstein’s kid brother, Mark, with whom Grossberg remains very friendly, though he hasn’t seen or spoken with Jeffrey in some time. Both brothers are good people, he says.

  “Jeffrey’s a brilliant and good person. He is also incredibly generous.”

  Grossberg says he’s talked to Epstein about “the problem in Florida.” As he sees it, Epstein “got carried away…perhaps he was hanging around with the wrong people.”

  Grossberg wonders, too, if the things that made Epstein special contributed to his eventual fall from grace.

  “He was a diamond in the rough, you see,” Grossberg explains. “People recognized Jeffrey’s brilliance very early on. But he had a gift for recognizing opportunities very quickly. He started buying properties in Manhattan, including 301 East 66th Street. He asked his brother—did Mark want to join him? He did.”

  Grossberg himself has had his ups and downs. At one point, he worked in a building owned by the Epstein brothers. There, he says, a porter told him a story about a little-known side of Jeffrey Epstein. The porter’s wife, who lived in South America, desperately needed an organ transplant. Epstein paid for the operation.

  “That’s just typical,” Grossberg says. “That’s who he always was, long as I knew him.”

  “Lafayette was a city school,” says another old classmate, James Rosen. “It was functional. There was nothing special about it.”

  James Rosen is a retired postal worker. He lives in South Florida now, but, like Jeffrey Epstein, he’d grown up in Sea Gate.

  “There was a lot of volatility at Lafayette,” Rosen recalls. “It was a blue-collar area that was, at one time, 90 percent Italian. Then a small amount of Jews moved in, and there was anti-Semitism. The Italians didn’t want the Jews to be there.”

  Black families were moving in, too, he remembers, and Hispanic ones. But he says most of the animosity was aimed at Jews.

  “There were fights in the schools. They thought we were going to take over.”

  But Epstein seems to have made friends easily. Even then, his buddies—who called him Eppy—could see he was special. While they hung out on the beach, Epstein played the piano. Did homework. Worked on his prized stamp collection.

  Innocent times.

  CHAPTER 21

  Jeffrey Epstein: 1969–1976

  It’s the height of the Vietnam War. Students collide with college administrators. Hippies collide with hard hats. Kids with long hair collide with their parents. Jeffrey Epstein does not go in for any of that. At the age of sixteen, he’s taking advanced math classes at Cooper Union, an august institution in the East Village where Abraham Lincoln once spoke.

  Thanks to a generous endowment, the school is tuition-free, though the application process is famously rigorous.

  Epstein sails through it.

  At Harvard or Yale, his accent would give him away. Epstein tawks like the Brooklyn boy he is. But Cooper Union is more open than any Ivy League school. It’s full of boys from Brooklyn, and, aside from his prodigious intellect, Epstein doesn’t stand out. He starts to make money by tutoring his fellow students. And in 1971, he leaves Cooper Union for the greener pastures of New York University, located a few blocks away. There, at the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences, he studies the mathematical physiology of the heart. But he never graduates from any college or university.

  By 1973, Epstein is teaching at the Dalton School, a prestigious private school on the Upper East Side. Like Tavern on the Green, Grand Central Terminal, and the Century Association, Dalton is a New York institution—an elite K–12 rocket ship built for the children of New York’s ruling classes.

  It’s not at all clear how Epstein, who has no college degree, en
ds up there.

  And yet here he is, barely out of his teens and already a teacher of math and physics. “Go forth unafraid” is the Dalton School’s credo.

  It’s a philosophy Epstein has adopted. For him, Dalton’s an excellent launching pad.

  It’s nothing like Lafayette High School. The kids he’s teaching are rich—very rich. Their parents are extremely well connected. And despite Epstein’s outer-borough accent, he’s careful in his presentation. At any given moment, he’s one parent-teacher conference away from a whole new world of possibilities.

  Because Dalton has an excellent student-to-teacher ratio, the parents get to know Epstein quite well. Before long, a Wall Street macher named Alan “Ace” Greenberg has taken a special shine to the young man who’s been tutoring his son Ted.

  Like Epstein, Ace Greenberg came from a humble background.

  The son of an Oklahoma City shopkeeper, he won a football scholarship to the University of Oklahoma, transferred to the University of Missouri following a back injury, and graduated in 1949. That same year, he moved to New York and, after a series of rejections at white-shoe firms—places that never would hire a Jew—landed a job at Bear Stearns, earning $32.50 a week as a clerk.

  By 1958, he’d been made a full partner. Built like a pit bull, Greenberg smoked cigars, performed coin tricks for his friends, and always dressed in a bow tie. He was an all-elbows trader—gruff, cheap, and, above all, impatient. He was also a champion bridge player, a hunter of big game in Africa, and the firm but loyal leader of the team he’d built at Bear Stearns—an unusual team made up mostly of men who’d grown up in New York’s outer boroughs.

  Greenberg didn’t care about MBAs or Ivy League diplomas. What he cared about was raw talent and drive. Greenberg cultivated risk takers, unconventional thinkers, and he looked high (and especially low) for his “PSDs”: men who, in his estimation, were poor, smart, and, above all, determined.

  Jeffrey Epstein, the Dalton School teacher, fit Greenberg’s bill perfectly.

  CHAPTER 22

  Jeffrey Epstein: 1976–1981

  According to several published reports, it was Ace Greenberg’s son, Ted, who introduced Epstein to Greenberg. But other sources say Greenberg’s daughter, Lynne, was dating Epstein at the time. According to them, that was how Epstein got into Bear Stearns—by charming a young and beautiful woman and using her to advance his career.

  At Bear Stearns, Epstein started as an assistant to a trader on the American Stock Exchange and quickly worked up to junior partner, which meant that he was entitled to a share of the profits. Still in his twenties, he was running with the bulls, kicking down any doors that stood in his way.

  The view from Ace Greenberg’s office, high above Madison Avenue in midtown, was striking. At night, the whole city was lit up like a stage set.

  It was Epstein’s city now, to win or to lose. And there were women to go with the prize. Tall, beautiful women, blondes and brunettes, who wouldn’t have given a math teacher the time of day. Now they found Epstein exciting and handsome.

  Greenberg’s gorgeous assistant was one of these women.

  If Greenberg knew about their affair, he did not seem to care. Then again, Greenberg had other things on his mind. The Reagan era, when deregulation kicked into high gear, was still on the horizon. But there was already a decreasing amount of government oversight on Wall Street, and a new breed of bare-knuckle traders had begun to push every available limit. It was the start of the age of corporate raiders, and with Ace Greenberg looking out for him, Epstein had no reservations when it came to throwing his weight around. The golden boy’s gift for working the numbers earned him a place in the special-products division, where he worked on extremely complex tax-related problems for a select group of Bear Stearns’s wealthiest clients—an elite within the elite—including Seagram CEO Edgar Bronfman.

  In the spring of 1981 Bronfman made a bid to take over the St. Joe Minerals Corporation. He offered forty-five dollars a share, or close to three times the value of St. Joe’s stock. The whole offer amounted to $2.1 billion in cash.

  But St. Joe’s executives didn’t want to sell their 118-year-old company. In a press release, they called Seagram’s bid unsolicited and dismissed it as “grossly inadequate.” At which point the SEC decided to investigate.

  There were allegations of insider trading. Within a few weeks, Bear Stearns’s employees were called in to testify.

  Epstein got called in as well and categorically denied any wrongdoing.

  But, as it turned out, he’d just resigned from Bear Stearns.

  CHAPTER 23

  Jeffrey Epstein: 1981

  Epstein will always maintain that his resignation had nothing to do with the SEC’s investigation into Bear Stearns and Edgar Bronfman’s ill-fated attempt to take over St. Joe’s.

  But of course this raises the question: Why did Epstein resign from Bear Stearns?

  In his testimony before the SEC, Epstein says he was offended by the company’s investigation of a twenty-thousand-dollar loan he’d made to his friend Warren Eisenstein. Epstein didn’t know it at the time, he maintains, but if used to buy stock, such a loan might have been unethical, if not illegal.

  On top of that, questions about Epstein’s expenses had come up.

  In the end, Bear Stearns fined him $2,500—an embarrassing thing, to be sure. So much for making full partner anytime soon.

  But $2,500 is not $250,000 or even $25,000. Who’d give up a job as junior partner over that?

  Another one of Epstein’s bosses, James “Jimmy” Cayne, will say, “Jeffrey Epstein left Bear of his own volition.” Epstein wanted to strike out on his own, Cayne explains. But given the timing, some questions remain. Then there’s Epstein’s own testimony, given on April 1, 1981, before SEC investigators Jonathan Harris and Robert Blackburn:

  Q:Sir, are you aware that certain rumors may have been circulating around your firm in connection with your reasons for leaving the firm?

  A:I’m aware that there were many rumors.

  Q:What rumors have you heard?

  A:Nothing to do with St. Joe.

  Q:Can you relate what you heard?

  A:It was having to do with an illicit affair with a secretary.

  As far as the investigators are concerned, this is new information; the first time a secretary’s name has come up. But they have no interest in Epstein’s office romance and press on:

  Q:Mr. Epstein, did anyone at Bear Stearns tell you in words or substance that you should not divulge anything about St. Joe Minerals to the staff of the Securities and Exchange Commission? Has anyone indicated to you in any way, either directly or indirectly, in words or substance, that your compensation for this past year or any future monies coming to you from Bear Stearns will be contingent upon your not divulging information to the Securities and Exchange Commission?

  A:No.

  Whatever the reasons for his resignation, Epstein still gets his annual bonus of around $100,000 (roughly $275,000 in today’s dollars). The SEC never brings charges against him or any other Bear Stearns employee. And so the particulars of Epstein’s departure get folded up into the greater mystery surrounding the man. Did Epstein crash the rocket ship that Ace Greenberg had given him to pilot? Or did he take it and fly it out, over the horizon?

  Either way, Epstein was out on his own.

  For him, the future would only get brighter.

  CHAPTER 24

  Ana Obregón: 1982

  Ana Obregón was one of the world’s most beautiful women and well on her way to becoming famous as such when she first met Jeffrey Epstein. For her, there would be film roles—in the 1984 Bo Derek vehicle Bolero, Ana Obregón gives the star a run for her money—and appearances on the covers of Spanish Playboy and Spanish Vanity Fair.

  As for fortune, Obregón had that already.

  Ana’s father was a very wealthy investor in Spain. But he also had serious problems. On June 15, 1982, a venerable stock- and bond-trading firm, the D
rysdale Securities Corporation, announced that it was going out of business. Just that year, Drysdale had spun off a subsidiary operation called Drysdale Government Securities. And in May, DGS defaulted on $160 million in interest payments it owed on Treasury securities that it had borrowed. In doing so, DGS had dragged down its parent company.

  A very well-connected group of Spanish families—including members of Spain’s royal family—had invested with Drysdale. Those investors stood to lose hundreds of millions of dollars. And Ana’s father was one of those investors.

  What Ana wanted from Jeffrey Epstein was help in recovering her father’s money.

  “My father, he’s done something stupid,” she told him.

  A Spanish accent. A Brooklyn accent. They blended well together, and Ana was so very lovely.

  It turned out that Epstein was willing to help.

  “Something stupid, you see, with the money. The family money. Some—what do you call it? A scheme. He knew some of the people, but they lied to him. And now the money is gone.”

  People who knew Jeffrey Epstein recall that he was bad off after his exit or ouster—whatever it was—from Bear Stearns. Moving from couch to couch for a while. Sleeping in his lawyer’s offices before settling down in an apartment in the Solow Tower, on East 66th Street.

  It’s a bit hard to believe. After all, Epstein left Bear Stearns with a good deal of money. But Epstein’s lifestyle was expensive. He was a man on the make then, and Ana was still in her twenties, plying her craft at the Actors Studio—the New York City theater institution that Marlon Brando, Robert De Niro, Jack Nicholson, and Jane Fonda had all been members of.

  Epstein told Ana that he’d formed a company, International Assets Group.

  To Ana, this sounded very impressive. In fact, IAG was a small operation that Epstein was running out of his apartment. But if Ana had known that, would she have cared? She could already see that Epstein was brilliant. And though she would maintain that their friendship was strictly platonic, it was Ana who helped set Epstein on his course. Like other beautiful women he’d cultivate throughout his life, she opened doors to whole other kingdoms.