Jeffrey Epstein carefully cultivated a circle of prestigious and powerful friends by exploiting the aura of money and mystery that surrounded him — but the hint of a dark side was always there.
Now, in the wake of his blockbuster arrest on child sex trafficking charges, some of those high-flying former pals may be quaking in their boots.
During a news conference Monday announcing Epstein’s indictment, Manhattan US Attorney Geoffrey Berman dramatically pointed to the suspect’s mug shot on a poster, and the FBI’s New York chief, William Sweeney Jr., urged anyone who has been “victimized” or “has additional information” on the multimillionaire financier to immediately call the feds.
But the appeal was not just meant for victims of the convicted pedophile, former Justice Department prosecutor Bradley Simon said Tuesday. The underlying message, he said, is: Call us before we come a-calling on you.
“If there are people out there who facilitated or participated in Jeffrey Epstein’s crimes, they would probably be well-advised to seek counsel, and for their counsel to make overtures to the US attorney,” said Simon, now co-chair of the white-collar criminal defense practice at Phillips Nizer.
“Earlier is better than later in these types of cases.”
Epstein, 66, rose from middle-class origins in Coney Island to amass a fortune that includes a $77 million Upper East Side townhouse, a $12 million estate in Palm Beach, Fla., a 7,500-acre ranch in New Mexico and a private island — called “Little St. James” — in the US Virgin Islands, which he claims as his primary residence.
During the early 2000s, his growing prominence in Manhattan’s social circles led to a profile in Vanity Fair magazine that listed former President Bill Clinton, Great Britain’s Prince Andrew, Revlon chairman Ronald Perelman and several Nobel Prize-winning scientists among his friends and admirers.
A list of contacts identified as Epstein’s “Little Black Book” was published by the now-defunct webSite Gawker in 2015 and contains hundreds of names, including those of celebrities, politicians and other A-listers, with their phone numbers and email addresses blacked out.
Notable entries include former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, Gov. Andrew Cuomo, actor Alec Baldwin, singer Jimmy Buffett, industrialist David Koch and former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger.
Epstein treated some of his rich and powerful pals to trips aboard his Boeing 727, with Clinton revealed in 2016 to have flown on the private jet airliner at least 26 times between 2001 and 2003, according to flight logs obtained by Fox News.
The plane was nicknamed the “Lolita Express” in media reports following the first wave of underage sex abuse allegations that led to Epstein’s 2008 conviction in Florida.
In a statement following the announcement of Epstein’s indictment, Clinton’s office said he only “took a total of four trips” on the plane to Europe, Asia and Africa, and that he “knows nothing about the terrible crimes” that Epstein has admitted or is accused of committing.
Epstein began teaching physics and math at Manhattan’s elite Dalton private school, where he tutored the son of Alan “Ace” Greenberg, chairman of the since-shuttered Bear Stearns investment bank.
He parlayed that side hustle into a job as an options trader at Bear Stearns, where he was named a limited partner before quitting in 1981 to open his own money-management firm — J. Epstein & Co. — that he claimed catered only to billionaires.
Although various news outlets have repeatedly called him a billionaire, he’s never made the definitive list compiled annually by Forbes magazine, which has cited “so much uncertainty around his numbers.”
“The source of his wealth — a money-management firm in the US Virgin Islands — generates no public records, nor has his client list ever been released,” the magazine said in 2010.
Vanity Fair described Epstein as being “very generous with friends,” and quoted Rosa Monckton, former CEO of Tiffany & Co.’s British operations, recounting how he extended an open invitation for her to bring her daughter, who has Down syndrome, to his home in Palm Beach.
But Monckton also called Epstein, with whom she had been close friends for about two decades, “very enigmatic.”
In a characterization that came to seem eerily prescient, the article also said Epstein — who has never married or had kids — was “known about town as a man who loves women — lots of them, mostly young.”
In 2008 it became clear just how young, when Epstein struck a plea bargain in Palm Beach to two counts of solicitation of prostitution, one involving a minor, and served 13 months of an 18-month sentence.
An award-winning exposé by the Miami Herald last year detailed how Epstein struck the deal by scoring a nonprosecution agreement from then-Miami US Attorney Alex Acosta — now President Trump’s secretary of labor — despite allegations he had molested or abused about 80 girls, mostly 13 to 16 years old, in his pink waterfront mansion.
Epstein has pleaded not guilty in the latest case and is jailed pending a bail hearing next Monday.