Filthy Rich Read online

  Ones that no boys from Brooklyn had even dreamed of.

  Andrew Levander was an assistant US attorney in the Southern District of New York’s Securities and Commodities Fraud Task Force. He was assigned to look into Drysdale’s collapse. The case he was building would result in fraud convictions for a number of Drysdale executives, and even today, Levander remembers Epstein bringing “a very attractive woman” to meet him when Epstein came to him in the course of the investigation.

  The woman was Ana Obregón.

  Levander told Ana that he was already working the case. A lawyer named Robert Gold, who was a former federal prosecutor himself, was assisting. And now Epstein would join them in the hunt for the monies.

  In effect, DGS had built a series of labyrinths, rabbit holes, deadfalls. And even investors who’d lost vast sums to the company were less than forthcoming when it came to speaking to the US attorney. Several of the investors were foreign. Some had violated their own countries’ laws pertaining to foreign investments.

  This was where Epstein—with his calm, confident air of discretion—came in.

  Ana Obregón gave Epstein power of attorney over any monies that he recovered. And though it took him three years, working with Robert Gold and the US attorney’s office, Epstein finally did make his way to the center of DGS’s maze and recover Obregón’s money.

  Most of it was being held in a bank in the Cayman Islands.

  Epstein’s agreement with Ana prevents us from knowing how much he recovered—and how much he kept. But given the amounts at stake, Epstein likely earned millions—or more—and to this day Ana Obregón has nothing but appreciation for what Epstein accomplished.

  “I know he’s had some problems,” she says. “I don’t want anything to do with that.”

  As for Epstein, he came out of the deal with a new modus operandi: from now on, he’d only work with the super rich.

  CHAPTER 25

  Eva Andersson: July 8, 1980

  Miss Sweden, Eva Birgitta Andersson, is wearing a dazzling white gown and sweating, ever so slightly, under the stage lights. But Bob Barker’s about to announce the winner of this, the twenty-ninth Miss Universe pageant, held in Seoul, South Korea, and Eva’s smile is as wide as the ocean.

  “And now that we know what Miss Universe will win, let’s see which five girls are still in the running!”

  Barker pauses, like the expert broadcaster he is. Eva’s chest tightens. There are twelve women on stage, all of them beautiful—even if they’re not quite as beautiful as Miss Sweden.

  “On this card are the names of five contestants who have received the highest total score from our judges in the personal interview, the swimsuit, and the evening gown competition.”

  Eva feels the camera pan across the stage—pan across her, standing in between Miss Scotland and Miss Puerto Rico.

  “As a result, they will be our five finalists. As I call each name, you will see a figure on your television screen. That is the total score received by the contestant since she became a semifinalist. But one thing I would point out to you: the point total is not necessarily a sign of who our eventual winner will be. Being first now is no guarantee of being first at the time of our judges’ final ballot.”

  Oh, get on with it, Miss Sweden thinks. And, as if by her command, Bob Barker does.

  “Now our five finalists. Good luck, girls! The first finalist is: Miss Sweden!”

  Eva’s hands fly up to her face. The time it takes her to walk to the front of the stage is all the time she needs to stop herself from crying.

  For Eva, it’s not meant to be. Miss USA, Shawn Weatherly, wins that year’s competition—she’ll go on to become a star on Baywatch. But Eva’s future is secure nonetheless. After the pageant, she’ll spend three years studying in Stockholm, finish med school at UCLA, and become a doctor of internal medicine.

  Along the way, she’ll meet Jeffrey Epstein.

  People who knew them when they were a couple say that Eva wanted to marry Epstein. One friend says he considered it seriously. In the end, Eva ended up with a man named Glenn Dubin, though she and Epstein remained very close. And if Eva was the proverbial “one who got away,” Epstein ended up dating other impressive women—world-class beauties—as he made his way in the world.

  Why didn’t any of the romances take? Perhaps there was always someone more fabulous waiting for Epstein around the corner. Perhaps none of these women satisfied Epstein’s deeper urges. But he did have a knack for keeping the women he’d dated by his side through thick and thin, long after he’d broken up with them.

  When he was through with his girlfriends, Epstein would say, they graduated up, not down, the ladder, moving from the status of “lover” to “friend.”

  In his estimation, these shifts always constituted a promotion.

  The world was full of beautiful women. But for Epstein, friendship seemed to be a far more precious commodity.

  CHAPTER 26

  Jeffrey Epstein: 1984

  How did Jeffrey Epstein make all his money?

  Epstein would tell stories over the years about monies recovered from slippery characters. Sometimes, friends and former associates would say, he’d suggest he had ties to the government, giving listeners the impression that he was doing dangerous, glamorous work.

  Others said that what Epstein really did, at this stage in his career, was much more banal. According to them, Epstein spent most of his time coming up with creative new ways for the rich to avoid paying taxes. The commission for tax-avoidance deals was enormous, although the number of deals Epstein was involved with is a matter of conjecture, as is his record of successes and failures.

  But Epstein’s business model was evolving. He’d charge a flat fee. No fancy math. No percentages.

  Pay me fifty million dollars. Or pay the IRS seven times that amount.

  At first Epstein did not demand his fee up front. Instead he asked that the payment—often a substantial one—be put into escrow. If his strategy worked, he’d get paid. If not, the money bounced back to the client.

  In the eighties, when tax rates on the top 1 percent were much, much higher than they are today, topping out at close to 50 percent, it was an extremely effective pitch. And then there were other ways to make money.

  In 1982, Epstein sold his wealthy friends, his friends’ wealthy relatives, and others on an oil-drilling deal. One of the investors, Michael Stroll, had run Williams Electronics, an entertainment company known for the pinball machines it made.

  Stroll put $450,000 into the oil deal.

  But in 1984, Michael Stroll wanted his money back. Despite repeated demands and requests for a full accounting of what Epstein owed him, he got $10,000 back on his $450,000 investment. Eventually he sued Epstein in federal court for the remaining $440,000—the case went on for a number of years. In court, Epstein told the judge that the $10,000 he’d returned was actually the payment for a horse Stroll had sold him.

  Like many cases involving Epstein, this one was settled out of court, the terms of the final agreement kept secret.

  CHAPTER 27

  Steven Hoffenberg: July 10, 1987

  Before there was Bernie Madoff, there was Steven Hoffenberg.

  In 1987, Hoffenberg was the head of Towers Financial Corporation, a company that bought debts, such as unpaid medical bills, at a very steep discount while pressing the debtors to repay in full. He’d started the company fifteen years earlier with two thousand dollars and just a handful of employees. Thanks, in part, to a grueling work ethic, he’d turned that into a much bigger concern, with twelve hundred employees and stock that traded over the counter. But Hoffenberg still spent fifteen hours each day, six days a week, in his office.

  He wanted more. Hoffenberg was a Wall Street outsider. A Brooklyn boy. A college dropout, like Epstein.

  One thing Hoffenberg wanted was respect. The other was someone who was familiar with Wall Street’s inner workings. Jeffrey Epstein, who had traded options for Bear Stearns, fi
t the bill.

  Hoffenberg began paying twenty-five thousand dollars per month for Epstein’s expertise as a consultant.

  The SEC had already looked into Hoffenberg’s affairs, settling with him out of court in a matter relating to unregistered securities. But Hoffenberg was dangling a very big prize.

  In the 1980s, several major financial players were involved in the greenmailing of publicly traded companies. What greenmailing means, in practice, is that a brokerage house or group of investors will start buying shares in companies that seem to be vulnerable to takeover attempts. To ward off the attempts, executives at those companies will buy the shares back at a premium. It’s risky, but very often the investors stand to make a handsome profit.

  Yet another thing Hoffenberg wanted was to take over Pan American World Airways. The iconic airline had already entered its downward trajectory, but it was still a giant.

  For Hoffenberg, the greenmailing profits could have been huge.

  According to Hoffenberg, Epstein handled the attempted takeover of Pan Am—a deal that went sideways almost immediately.

  Steven Hoffenberg still has a lot to say on the subject. But in listening to him, one must bear in mind that in 1995, he pleaded guilty to criminal conspiracy and fraud charges involving a $460 million swindle, a familiar scheme to anyone who followed the Bernie Madoff case.

  Like so many others, Hoffenberg had tried to fly very high without the necessary updraft. And despite all the hours he spent at the office, he’d also developed a taste for the high life. He bought his own jet, a luxury yacht, and a Long Island mansion to go with his expensive Manhattan apartment. He’d also briefly owned a controlling interest in the New York Post.

  To cover his tracks, Hoffenberg had been taking money from investors and using it to pay previous investors. It was a classic Ponzi scheme—one of the biggest in history—and Hoffenberg ended up spending nineteen years in a federal prison.

  Why was Epstein not implicated in the case? All that Hoffenberg will say when asked is: “Ask Robert Gold.”

  Another source suggests that Gold, the former federal prosecutor who had helped Epstein recover Ana Obregón’s money, kept the US attorney away from Epstein until there were only a few weeks left before the statute of limitations ran out.

  As for Epstein himself, he would always deny any wrongdoing. Despite his proximity to Hoffenberg, he managed to avoid the blast radius.

  CHAPTER 28

  Robert Meister: 1985

  Robert Meister, the vice chairman of a giant insurance brokerage and consulting firm called Aon, met Jeffrey Epstein in the mid-eighties, aboard a flight from New York to Palm Beach. Both men were flying first class. Each one thought the other looked familiar. They talked in the course of that flight, and Meister filed the conversation away, only to recall it in 1989. At that time, Les Wexner, who was Meister’s friend and a client of Meister’s insurance company, was complaining to him about the people managing his money.

  Wexner was a billionaire, but for all his wealth, his finances were in a tangle. Maybe Epstein could help. And perhaps Epstein would also be grateful for the introduction. Hard as it is to believe, there’s evidence to suggest that Epstein really had spent the last of his last Bear Stearns bonus—along with his share of the money he’d recovered for Ana Obregón—and was broke, again, at the time.

  One estranged friend says that he had to loan Epstein money to pay the bill at Epstein’s garage, which had seized Epstein’s car for nonpayment.

  Another estranged friend says that Epstein didn’t have two nickels to rub together.

  Diana Crane, a former model, says that Epstein always had first-class upgrades he would give to his friends so they didn’t have to fly economy class.

  “No one knew where or how he got them,” Crane recalls. “Sometimes they worked, and other times they didn’t. I remember he saw a friend of mine wearing a Concorde jacket. He asked if he could borrow it for a day or so. My friend never got the jacket back. But Epstein would tell people he always flew on the Concorde—a total lie.”

  But even if Epstein were flush, Les Wexner would have been a big fish to catch.

  From the get-go, Meister’s wife, Wendy, had her suspicions about Epstein. About the way he presented himself and the way he worked himself into their inner circle.

  Before long, Wendy was calling Epstein the virus.

  But for Epstein, the Meisters weren’t the point. Wexner was.

  And hard as it is to understand why the billionaire would associate with a man who’d worked with a Ponzi king like Steven Hoffenberg, it turned out that Wexner and Epstein would get along perfectly well.

  CHAPTER 29

  Ghislaine Maxwell: 1991

  Robert Meister was not the only friend who helped Jeffrey Epstein, the boy from Coney Island, on his way up the social ladder. There was also Ghislaine Maxwell, a wealthy heiress from the United Kingdom who’d retained her ties to some of the world’s most glamorous and scandalous jet-setters.

  Maxwell was the youngest and most favored child of one of the most famous—even infamous—men in Europe. Her father, Robert Maxwell, was a Czech refugee who had fought in the French Foreign Legion and with the British in World War II and had gone on to become a member of Parliament. By the 1960s, he’d become a media baron. Born into a Hasidic family—his birth name was Ján Ludvík Hyman Binyamin Hoch—Maxwell died in disgrace in 1991 after falling or perhaps jumping off the side of his supersize yacht, the Lady Ghislaine.

  “The shtetl Solotvyno, where I come from, it is no more,” Maxwell said a few months before his demise. “It was poor. It was Orthodox. And it was Jewish. We were very poor. We didn’t have things that other people had. They had shoes, they had food, and we didn’t. At the end of the war, I discovered the fate of my parents and my sisters and brothers, relatives, and neighbors. I don’t know what went through their minds as they realized that they’d been tricked into a gas chamber.”

  Maxwell’s own death was followed by an international scandal. It turned out that he’d stolen hundreds of millions of pounds from his companies’ pension funds and used them to prop up his empire. Two of his sons were tried for conspiracy to commit fraud and ultimately exonerated. But Ghislaine, who had grown up in luxurious surroundings and counted the Duke of York, Prince Andrew, among her intimates, could not escape the dark shadow her father had cast. Looking to start fresh, she took the Concorde to New York City.

  At first, it seems, Maxwell and Epstein were lovers. “She was madly in love with Jeffrey,” says a longtime friend of Ghislaine’s. Then they became something more. Ghislaine took care of Epstein’s travel arrangements. She managed his household and opened doors that very few Brooklyn-born Jewish boys could have passed through. According to lawsuits and witness testimony, she also became one of several women who procured young girls for Epstein.

  She was not jealous, according to people who knew her back then. If anything, Ghislaine seemed to take pleasure in satisfying Epstein’s needs.

  Ghislaine introduced Epstein to a fabulous world that the Brooklyn boy knew nothing about. One friend jokes that she taught Epstein the difference between a fish fork and a salad fork. But despite—or was it because of?—Maxwell’s devotion to Epstein, she, too, graduated from girlfriend to friend status. According to Jane Doe 102 vs. Jeffrey Epstein, a civil complaint filed in 2009 by a woman later identified as Virginia Roberts, one of the services Maxwell provided for Epstein was the procurement of underage women. (Through her lawyer and in court papers, Maxwell has vehemently denied any involvement with Virginia, with any other young woman Epstein was involved with, or with any criminal activities committed by Jeffrey Epstein. In a 2016 answer to a defamation lawsuit brought by Roberts, Maxwell called the allegations fabricated for financial gain.)

  The case of Nadia Bjorlin, who was thirteen when she was first noticed by Epstein, raises questions in this regard, at least in the eyes of her mother.

  Bjorlin’s Iranian-born mother spoke to a British tab
loid some years ago about her family’s disturbing experience with Maxwell and Epstein. Bjorlin’s father, a celebrated conductor of classical music, had died a year earlier, the mother said. She believed that this made the girl a vulnerable and easy target.

  “She was at school at the famed Interlochen Arts Center, in Michigan, when she met Epstein,” the mother said.

  “My daughter was a singer. She was a baby. She was a skinny little girl, not mature for her age. She was thirteen, but everyone thought she was nine or ten.

  “Epstein was a big donor, and he heard about Nadia and that her father had died, so she was vulnerable, and he contacted her. He said, ‘Here’s my number.’

  “He kept saying, ‘Come—will you come?’ He said he wanted to help mentor her. I wouldn’t let her meet him. What sort of a man approaches a young girl and asks to meet her?”

  In the meantime, Maxwell had become friendly with the family. “I trusted Ghislaine; she was like a mother,” Bjorlin’s mother recalled. “She was always calling my house.

  “Ghislaine didn’t want me to meet Epstein, but I did anyway, and I asked what he wanted with Nadia. He said he wanted to help her singing career. He said, ‘I’d like to be like a godfather.’ It felt creepy.

  “I had a bad vibe about him and said, ‘Stop!’ I told him, ‘No, thank you. She doesn’t need your help.’ I kept Nadia away from him. She never met him alone. She never went anywhere with him.”

  Despite her suspicions, it took Epstein’s arrest to make Bjorlin’s mother wonder whether Maxwell and Epstein hadn’t been sizing her daughter up for his stable of underage women.