The Last Days of Jeffrey Epstein, Part 4

I’m sharing an article that I wrote in 2021 which offers a glimpse of the kind of conversation and gatherings that went on in Epstein’s house. I hesitated to publish it then for all the reasons that it continues to remain difficult to write about Epstein with any particularity—why give Epstein a voice? It’s not his story; it’s his victims’ story (perhaps valid—but you learn a lot less). And yet I was too pleased with the accuracy of this view inside Epstein’s house not to publish it. My semi-cowardly solution was to make it the last chapter in a collection of old articles and essay’s that I was then publishing, a book called “Too Famous.” Collections are notoriously unread—I was, in effect, a writer looking to escape my readers. Well…the piece, “The Last Days of Jeffrey Epstein,” yet remains, IMHO, the only thing written about Epstein that offers any sense of how he got to be who he was and about the nature of this person who often seems only slight less omnipresent and monstrous than his old friend, Donald Trump. Anyway, several years after the fact, thanks for reading.

In part one, a group of advisors, including Ehud Barak, the former prime minister of Israel, gathered at Jeffrey Epstein’s mansion in New York to help him figure out how he might escape the legal noose tightening around his neck…in part two Steve Bannon takes up Epstein’s defense…in part three, Epstein meets at his Paris mansion with artful British PR men who have a plan to save him..in part four, the final part of “The Last Days of Jeffrey Epstein,” Epstein makes an ill-advised trip—among the most ill-advised trips in history—back from Paris to the U.S., where fate and the FBI are waiting for him on the airport tarmac in New Jersey...

Excerpted from Too Famous: The Rich, The Powerful, The Wishful, The Notorious, The Damned

Epstein returned briefly to New York in early June and then turned around and headed back to Paris for an unspecified duration. A friend asked Epstein how much time he was giving to thinking about his travails. Epstein said that, on most days, he didn’t think about them for more than twenty minutes. For his entire life, he said, he had been unbothered by what other people thought. That was why, he said, he was not a podiatrist in Brooklyn, because he had happily followed his appetites and ambitions. It was no different now. He lived the life he had dreamed about. He could afford the price. What more could he ask?

But why not just stay in Paris? He was being encouraged by friends to stay out of the United States until the situation became clearer. The immediate peril was that the Florida court would vacate his 2008 plea agreement. That in itself presented a further unclear situation. It was far from certain that the court could overturn an existing agreement between the Justice Department and a private citizen, and that, even if it did, it would do anything more than open the way for a suit against the DOJ by Epstein’s victims. This would be the DOJ’s problem. It didn’t change Epstein’s status—well, not necessarily.

Still, why not stay in Paris? If, if, everything went south, his lawyers judged it highly doubtful that, in a case for which Epstein had already served state time, France would extradite him to face a seemingly politically motivated federal charge. What’s more, Epstein was on the verge of pulling the trigger on the purchase of a vast property in Morocco—which had no extradition treaty with the United States.

A few weeks before, in New York, he had had an explicit discussion about this.

“Why don’t you just get out?” asked a friend of high standing and public respect.

“Because you can’t,” said Epstein, clearly having considered this. “The famous or the infamous can’t hide. Unless you have an entirely cooperative host government—Edward Snowden in Moscow—you’ll be hunted and snatched. Hit over the head, bundled into a car, loaded onto a private plane. If you’ve got money, and you can only even try to run if you have vast sums, your literal body becomes a currency. You’re a bounty. Every rich Jew becomes Eichmann.”

“Where don’t we have extradition treaties?” asked the friend.

“Mostly shithole countries. Places hardly better than jail. Chad. The Congo. Niger. Rwanda. Serbia. Djibouti. And no matter the treaty, these are exactly the kinds of places that would sell you out.”

Curiously, of course, these were exactly some of the places where Epstein had enthusiastic business relationships.

In early July, quite on a whim, he decided to return to New York the next day. That evening, a European diplomat, one of the most eminent in the world, in Paris for a few days, called Epstein. They had been friends for many years, with Epstein helping the diplomat through several health crises. The diplomat was surprised that Epstein, partial to never leaving his house, was willing to come out to a restaurant. But Epstein seemed, the diplomat judged, in a particular carefree mood. The diplomat questioned Epstein closely about his plans, openly wondering about the wisdom of Epstein’s New York trip. At one point, the diplomat became concerned that they were being eavesdropped on and perhaps shadowed.

“Intrigue is your business,” said Epstein, unconcerned.

The next morning, Saturday, seven hours before his arrest, yet a bon vivant of unknown riches, careless, confident, untroubled, his Bentley idling outside ready to take him to the airstrip for private planes at Orly, Epstein, with gossipy zeal, called a friend in New York. The noose, he said, was about to seriously tighten. Not for him—at that moment, there was still no threat that he knew of, anywhere around him—but for the president. Deutsche Bank—the bank that had consistently stood behind both him and Trump—would, Epstein was confident, be forced to divulge its long history with the crooked president. After that it would be sixty days, tops ninety days, before the president was well and truly cooked. Epstein had more details to share. How about stopping by for breakfast tomorrow in New York? On the way to Orly, he called another friend—a high- ranking partner at a vaunted New York law firm-to share what he was hearing from Deutsche Bank and to schedule breakfast for Monday.

And there was another Trump aspect he seemed to be rushing back to the United States for—if only to gossip about. The journalist E. Jean Carroll had, in the past weeks, described in a new book and in an article in New York magazine how in the mid-nineties Trump had raped her in a dressing room in the department store Bergdorf Goodman. Epstein told one of his callers that he had seen Trump shortly after this happened and Trump had regaled him with the torrid details. Trump’s move now, Epstein theorized, would be to deflect from this story by revivifying the rape charges against Bill Clinton. He was eager to discuss this with Bannon.

On board the flight home was his girlfriend of seven years, a young woman from Belarus whom he had put through dental school, and two assistants, blond and tall, as he preferred—“The law firm of Comely & Comely,” as one friend yet felt free to joke.

Epstein spent most of the trip sending e-mails to friends he wanted to see during the few days he planned to spend in New York and to his New York assistant who would complete the scheduling. He especially wanted to get in another video session with Bannon. He’d been studying himself and sending the footage to movie friends for their critiques.

Thirty minutes out from Teterboro, a small airport in New Jersey that specializes in private aviation, the pilots were asked to confirm Epstein’s presence on the flight.

A suddenly alarmed Epstein directed his pilots not to proceed further and tried to get someone from his litigation team on the phone. Considering options, Epstein wondered if he could have the plane turn around and head back out of U.S. jurisdiction.

Most certainly not, he was advised.

He was counseled not to assume the worst. Although, knowing nothing was far from a good sign. Epstein himself had carefully cultivated his DOJ sources, precisely to keep abreast of any changes in its thinking. Weingarten, a former prosecutor and a close friend of the former attorney general Eric Holder, had deep DOJ sources, too.

As they fastened seat belts for landing, Epstein advised his girlfriend to turn around and go back to Europe as soon as possible.

Late in the afternoon—a muggy Saturday afternoon—FBI agents, accompanied by prosecutors from the Southern District of New York in the public corruption unit, served the arrest warrant as Epstein came down the stairs from his plane and took him into custody.

What Epstein felt, as he was driven, in handcuffs, into Manhattan to the MCC-Metropolitan Correctional Center, one of the vilest jails in the federal system—was, most immediately, annoyance at himself for missing the signs. He rethreaded the last six months of legal maneuvering without it making sense.

At just about the time of Epstein’s arrest, another group of FBI agents arrived with search warrants at Epstein’s East Seventy-First Street home. As members of the house staff tried to get one of the Epstein lawyers on the phone to advise them what to do, the FBI entered with a battering ram. The team removed all computers and other electronic devices and used a small explosive charge to open the house safe. Prosecutors publicly announced that they had found nude pictures of women who might appear to be underage, a thirty-year-old passport from Saudi Arabia with a phony name and Epstein’s picture, along with cash and diamonds. The FBI did not list in its findings a set of pictures that Epstein sometimes removed from the safe to show friends: a dozen or so snapshots from shortly before their quarrel in 2004 of Donald Trump at Epstein’s Palm Beach home posing with a variety of young women in various stages of undress—some topless-sitting on his lap, touching his hair, laughing and pointing at a suggestive stain on the front of the future president’s pants.

Of the two playboy friends who had ridden each other’s airplanes and shared a lifestyle in New York and Palm Beach, as well, on occasion, as sharing various girlfriends, one of them was in the White House while the other was headed to one of America’s darkest prison cells.

***

Epstein’s vertiginous fall might seem Romanov-like, or French Revolution- style. But yet he was confident that, if the street mob was against him, the law was on his side.

Weingarten, too, while raging against the perfidy of prosecutors and the stark politics that were at play, saw the law as, ultimately, a straightforward get-out-of-jail card. The indictment was not to be unsealed until Monday morning, but prosecutors in the Southern District took Weingarten through the particulars. Epstein was being charged with sex trafficking— the same charge that the Justice Department had agreed not to prosecute him for if he pleaded guilty to the state prostitution charge twelve years before. The government was now unilaterally disregarding that deal, and, so many years later, commencing that exact same prosecution. The deal in Florida isn’t binding in New York, the SDNY prosecutors now averred, with a level of disingenuousness astounding to Weingarten. The Justice Department had never, to Weingarten’s knowledge, made a deal in one jurisdiction and countermanded it in another. Who, then, in that event, would ever make a deal with the DOJ? It couldn’t stand.

The immediate problem, however, was that, under the sex trafficking statutes, in one of the few instances in the U.S. criminal code, there was an exception to the basic constitutional requirements of bail and due process—there was a presumption against bail. The sex trafficking laws were meant to ensnare and hold the new era of borderless criminals, sex crime lords, who, like drug crime lords, had unlimited resources and an international playing field often beyond extradition treaties. They also included as traffickers anyone who profited off of sex with a minor—that was where Epstein fell, albeit it seemed quite a leap to justify how he might have profited. This meant that Weingarten and the rest of the Epstein team had little more than twenty-four hours to come up with a fail-safe bail proposal to overcome the presumption of flight.

Weingarten, as much Epstein’s friend as his lawyer, suddenly realized that he had never done the kind of proctology-level exam of Epstein that he would have done on most other clients. But now, in order to convincingly impede his flight, the court would need to know that Epstein’s resources were firmly constrained. Not just his planes grounded, passport impounded, guards posted, and ankle bracelet in place, but his fortune put effectively under lock and key. The true nature of Epstein’s finances was known only to the compartmentalized Epstein himself. And if he had $500 million in evident assets—the number that was hurriedly settled on—it was not unreasonable to assume that Epstein, the international man of mystery, with a fortune of unclear provenance, had at least that amount again hidden somewhere else. By Monday morning all that could be submitted to the court was a cursory one-page overview of the $500 million.

Epstein had been brought up through the underground tunnel that connected the MCC to the Federal Courthouse. Rather than touch the soiled bedding, Epstein, the germaphobe, had, without sleep, stood and paced for the past two days in his cell. A bit after noon, a marshal in a TV sort of garb―T-shirt, nylon jacket announcing U.S. MARSHAL, baseball cap-came in through a side door and stood legs apart, hands crossed, in front of a side door. Ten or fifteen minutes later, Epstein seemed to be pushed out, a child at a first recital, and, for a second, hesitated. Then he slowly shuffled forward, head down. His blue prison shift was wrin- kled and soiled, a brown streak down the left side. He was unshaven, his gray hair wild. It seemed surprising he had the strength to pull out his own chair at the defense table. The faces of people within days or weeks of death can often seem aghast and uncomprehending, their eyes already seeing another world. Epstein looked as bad.

Weingarten, understanding that the one-pager outlining the $500 million was hardly going to suffice—even if they were willing to sacrifice it all, they needed to somehow show there wasn’t another $500 million hidden about-asked for a continuance on the bail hearing. Another week.

***

Epstein, the sixty-six-year-old man, whose lap of luxury was as over—cosseted and splendid as any, was yet regarded as someone who could do the time. He was, after all, an ex-con. He regarded himself as someone who could do the time.

A prison story he liked to tell was about the visit he received in his Florida jail from a prison rabbi, who strongly suggested he opt for the kosher meals, prepared by a Jewish charity that employed an outside caterer—the food was handled under strict rabbinical supervision. If possible, the rabbi added, a contribution would of course help. A grateful Epstein had immediately authorized a gift of $50,000. And in short order, he had his daily kosher meal—a slice of white bread and slice of American cheese.

Once, at a dinner party at his Paris home, one guest was the former head of the Port of Djibouti—whose strategic nexus in the Horn of Africa made it a fabled center of corruption—who had also spent time in jail. Together the two men, with adventurers’ bravura, assured the others at the table that real-world prison, as opposed to Hollywood prison, was as manageable for the savvy as anything else.

Indeed, an aspect of the fury against him now was that he had seemed to manage his prison time in Florida with quite some facility. Midway through his sentence there he had secured rare daytime release privileges. Then, when he was finally released, he held a party at his Palm Beach house for his prison guards.

“Hello?” said Bannon, happily trying to explain Epstein’s Houdini character to a friend. “Hello? Of course he’s an intelligence asset. We just don’t know whose.”

***

If Epstein’s press had seemed as bad as it could be, in truth, up until his new arrest, he was yet someone of specialized mendacity, a little-known figure in a scandal blurring into #MeToo and anti-Trump lanes.

Bannon had wanted to do some polling, believing that most of the country had never heard of Epstein—and that this would be where to start to rehabilitate him, with people who didn’t know who he was in the first place. Indeed, with people who found Trump appealing.

But in the hours after his new arrest, Epstein became, quite literally overnight, an international household name. The devil had been captured. The worldwide media was shocked, aroused, fascinated, fevered, absolute in its assertions. Epstein was a pedophile; he was also a pimp and sex trafficker, supplying his powerful circle with underage girls; and, doubling down, he was a blackmailer, leveraging the unspeakable secrets, of which he undoubtedly had secretly recorded evidence, of the rich and powerful.

Six days after his arrest, a New York Times editorial, formalizing guilt by association, declared, “At this point, anyone who has shaken hands with Mr. Epstein in recent decades should be scrutinized.”

With the prosecutor and victims’ lawyers briefing on the courtroom steps, Epstein’s lawyers now moved to hire the $3-million-a-month British PR firm to develop and manage a last-ditch media effort. But the firm said that there was little it believed it could do at this point.

Epstein had drawn federal judge Richard Berman. Among district court judges, Berman was regarded as one of the most sensitive to media influence and most concerned with his own press. When the bail hearing reconvened Judge Berman came with a sheaf of recent articles that he read into the record. He also opened the court to statements from any women who claimed to be an Epstein victim, even if they were not part of the government’s case against him. Then, in the name of the victims’ dedicated efforts to bring him to trial, Judge Berman denied bail, meaning Epstein would stay in jail for at least another three weeks until his appeal to the second circuit.

***

Maneuvering to stay out of the prison population, Epstein was buying enough of his lawyers’ time to keep him in the lawyers’ room at the MCC from morning until evening. When his lawyers had no more time to spare, they in turn hired lawyers who had babysat El Chapo, the Mexican drug lord and, before Epstein, the most famous MCC prisoner. Paying thousands of dollars an hour, Epstein mulled his situation.

There were two likely scenarios, Epstein believed. The White House, through the Justice Department, was looking to press a longtime Republican obsession, and Trump ace-in-the-hole, and get Epstein to flip and reveal the sex secrets of Bill Clinton—Trump, if he was obsessed with Clinton, which he was, was also obsessed with what Epstein knew about Clinton and, likely, especially in the days after the E. Jean Carroll rape story, badgering whoever could be badgered to squeeze him. Or, in the other scenario, the Southern District of New York, which, according to many reports, was hot on Trump’s tail, had moved through its public corruption unit—with its focus on bribery of public officials, it could avoid having its investigations approved by Washington—to arrest Epstein and pressure him to flip on Trump. That is, SDNY had slipped Epstein’s arrest past Trump’s attorney general and watchdog Bill Barr—who, indeed, oddly recused himself after the arrest and then hurriedly (at Trump’s urgings, Bannon was sure) unrecused himself.

There were many likely holes in these theories. What’s more, they did not account for the more obvious likelihood that Epstein was just one more fallen sexual villain, his time up. No matter, in Epstein’s view—shared by Weingarten—that did not mean there wasn’t, even in this climate, a deal to be made.

Here was the question: How much was he at the very center of the power struggles of the day, a figure to be reckoned with at the highest levels of government, versus, how much had he been utterly rejected by respectable society, eager now to rid itself of his presence and memory?

The latter reality seemed to be winning.

Indeed, it could be that even if the government wanted to make a deal with him, he was too universally reviled to make a deal with.

In a blow that some later speculated turned out to be fatal, his closest friend and confidante, Dr. Eva Andersson Dubin turned on him. A model, former Ms. Sweden, and Epstein girlfriend in the late 1980s, Epstein had put her through medical school and introduced her to her husband, Glenn Dubin, a hedge fund billionaire. They spent holidays together, and Epstein doted on their children. The Dubins now downplayed the details of their association with Epstein, expressed regret at ever having known him, and denied that they had given Epstein the honorific of godfather to their three children.

Ehud Barak, who had joined the Prime Minister’s race in Israel and whose association with Epstein immediately became a campaign issue, declared, “Like many respectable people in the U.S., in retrospect, I would have preferred never to have made contact with him.”

And Bannon, too, seemed suspiciously unavailable.

The list of those who had eagerly accepted his friendship but who now rejected and reviled him grew every day.

On July 23, Epstein appeared to try to commit suicide. His lawyers believed he had cooked up the scheme with his cellmate, who, for a fee, was helping steer him to somewhat better prison accommodations.

After this, he began a frantic effort to rewrite his will.

He named a trust as his single beneficiary, a move shielding his ultimate heirs and creating a further barrier to litigants and their lawyers.

This was not necessarily so much a desperation move as it was a characteristic one. For almost every one of his friends he would sooner or later urge them to see their financial lives in highly personal fashion. In part, this was the root of his relationship with wealthy men, to help them see their wealth as a living, emoting, vital part of themselves. Your fortune reflected your life. Your life reflected your fortune. Own it. The fact that he was updating his affairs was not necessarily a sign that he was thinking of ending his affairs.

He believed he had nine lives, at least.

And yet, coolly, he might have judged himself to have played them to the end. Hence, a suicide not of despair but of finality and accomplishment.

But, more immediately, the news was in fact fairly good.

In an all-hands-on meeting with his lawyers on Friday, August 5, he was told that his bail appeal would be filed with the Second Circuit on Monday. The expectation was that the Second Circuit would reverse the district court, or, failing that, return the case to Judge Berman with instructions that he could not take evidence from news accounts or base Epstein’s flight risk and danger to the community on circumstances more than a decade old.

What’s more, his lawyers believed that, beyond high conspiracy, they had identified a low conspiracy to explain the government’s strange and hurried actions. In this, the Florida judge, Judge Marra, was about to throw out the DOJ’s 2007 non-prosecution agreement (NPA). This would have been deeply embarrassing to the DOJ; as well, it was unlikely that the DOJ would have been able to prosecute Epstein again. It would be the DOJ, not Epstein, hung out to dry. Hence, the fallback: have another jurisdiction prosecute him under the guise of new issues; that would remove any need for Judge Marra to actually throw out the NPA and directly challenge the DOJ. But to accomplish the switch to New York, it appeared that secret grand jury testimony was, improperly, sent to the SDNY prosecutors— just the kind of technicality that might hopelessly taint the prosecution.

That day, Epstein, still the player, sent a note through his lawyers to Bannon noting that, as now appeared to be true, China’s strategy in the trade war was to use its negotiating position to manipulate its currency downward. Just the point that Epstein had repeatedly made!

Sometime before morning, either in an almost unimaginable act of violence against himself, such that he would have had to repeatedly slam himself against a sheet tied around his neck until he crushed his Adam’s apple, or by a hand or hands unknown as guards overseeing the most infamous prisoner in federal custody conveniently slept, Epstein was dead.

***

For two weeks, the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner of the City of New York was unable to confirm the cause of death after an autopsy, finding suspicious circumstances, until, without apparent new evidence, it suddenly confirmed suicide. Videotapes outside Epstein’s cell, which would have captured anyone entering it, went missing. “That fucking jail is a hundred yards from the courthouse and fifty yards from the U.S. Attorney’s office and the very idea that something could have happened, and it gets harder and harder to think it didn’t, just turns me upside down,” said a grieving Weingarten.

A longtime friend of Epstein’s, the investigative journalist Edward Jay Epstein (no relation), much of whose career has been focused on disputed deaths, noted that not only was his suicide implausible, with its lack of means and with the extra attention on a high-profile prisoner, but that, equally, so was his murder, requiring the complicity of the FBI and virtually every prosecutor in the Southern District. It was like, he said, Roberto Calvi, the 1970s Vatican banker caught in a financial scandal and found hanging from the Blackfriars Bridge in London-there was no way he could have strung himself from the bridge and yet no way, without boats and hoists, anyone else could have hung him there, either.

A few hours before his death, Epstein had relayed through his lawyers a note of reassurance to a friend: “Pretty crazy. But still just hanging around—no pun intended.”