rigorousintuition.ca

Irin Carmon
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New in @nymag: I obtained phone logs that show Jeffrey Epstein called Charlie Rose dozens of times, including to recommend potential assistants. I spoke to one who said she was sexually harassed by Rose. She told me, “I was being offered up for abuse.” http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/07/ ... tacts.html …



I'm supposed to be working right now...
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Replying to @irin @NYMag
This seems sort of interesting too - #SlickWilly on a plane with a woman later hired by the Clinton Foundation...



https://twitter.com/irin/status/1153306532588793856

Who Was Jeffrey Epstein Calling?
The Editors 6:00 A.M.

A close study of his circle — social, professional, transactional — reveals a damning portrait of elite New York.

Epstein in his townhouse in 2015. Photo: Christopher Anderson for New York Magazine


Perhaps, at long last, a serial rapist and pedophile may be brought to justice, more than a dozen years after he was first charged with crimes that have brutalized countless girls and women. But what won’t change is this: the cesspool of elites, many of them in New York, who allowed Jeffrey Epstein to flourish with impunity. For decades, important, influential, “serious” people attended Epstein’s dinner parties, rode his private jet, and furthered the fiction that he was some kind of genius hedge-fund billionaire. How do we explain why they looked the other way, or flattered Epstein, even as they must have noticed he was often in the company of a young harem? Easy: They got something in exchange from him, whether it was a free ride on that airborne “Lolita Express,” some other form of monetary largesse, entrée into the extravagant celebrity soirées he hosted at his townhouse, or, possibly and harrowingly, a pound or two of female flesh.
http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/07/ ... tacts.html

Why was Jeffrey Epstein visited by a JPMorgan Chase exec while serving time in Florida?

After Alex Acosta helped Jeffrey Epstein get off the hook in Florida for “soliciting prostitution from a minor,” Epstein is reported to have received a number of odd visits while in detention -- from young women and from powerful men.

One of the men was “James E. Staley, a top JPMorgan Chase executive and one of the highest-ranking figures on Wall Street,” reports the New York Times.

Why was a JPMorgan Chase exec visiting Jeffrey Epstein?

Apparently, to ensure that a pipeline of high-value clients kept flowing from the convicted sex predator and accused serial child sexual abuser to JPMorgan Chase.

Kate Kelly, Matthew Goldstein, Jessica Silver-Greenberg and James B. Stewart reporting for the New York Times:

Mr. Staley had good reason to maintain his relationship with Mr. Epstein, who received him at his Palm Beach office, where he had been permitted to serve some of his 13-month sentence in 2008 and 2009. Over the years, Mr. Epstein had funneled dozens of wealthy clients to Mr. Staley and his bank.

Mr. Epstein, who was charged this month with sex trafficking of teenage girls, liked to portray himself as a financial wizard, someone whose business and investing acumen made him indispensable to corporate executives and other leaders. But there is little evidence to support that notion. The financial services that Mr. Epstein dispensed appear to have been mostly pedestrian, and his list of clients small.

Mr. Epstein nonetheless managed to affix himself to a handful of prominent Wall Street veterans, including Mr. Staley, who is now chief executive of the British bank Barclays.

Mr. Epstein provided personal tax services to Leon D. Black, whose Apollo Global Management is one of the world’s largest private-equity firms. He discussed a major investment idea with and entrusted millions of dollars to Glenn Dubin, who ran the hedge fund Highbridge Capital Management. And, with Mr. Staley, he laid some of the early groundwork for JPMorgan to make a major acquisition — one that would vault Mr. Staley’s career to a higher plane.

JPMorgan declined to comment to the Times on any aspect of their 15-year relationship with Epstein.
https://boingboing.net/2019/07/22/why-w ... isite.html

ICIJ
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Verified account

Jeffrey #Epstein chaired a company registered in Bermuda called Liquid Funding. Here's his signature on 500 page document from the #ParadisePapers. http://bit.ly/2M57jGr

Jeffrey Epstein’s offshore fortune traced to Paradise Papers

Stephanie Keith/Getty Image
Fresh revelations raise the likelihood that sex offender Jeffrey Epstein cloaked his fortune in a series of offshore shell companies registered in notoriously secretive tax havens.

The wealthy financier accused of systematically assaulting and trafficking numerous underage girls tried this week to convince a federal judge in New York to allow him to go free on bail, partially by detailing his fortune for the court.

This request was rejected today, but the revelation of documents by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists’ partners McClatchy and the Miami Herald underscores the challenge the courts will face as his case proceeds.

The most extensive document — amounting to 500 pages detailing the activities of an Epstein offshore vehicle — comes from the Paradise Papers trove, millions of files leaked from the Bermuda-founded offshore services provider Appleby.

The files reportedly show that, by the mid-2000s Epstein’s firm had joined a roster of the world’s wealthiest people and corporations in working with Appleby, and therefore gaining a skilled group of experts to help it navigate the secretive and low-tax world of offshore finance, the new report states.

From at least 2000 to 2007, Epstein chaired a company registered in Bermuda called Liquid Funding Ltd. This entity was partially owned by the investment bank Bear Stearns, where Epstein had worked, according to the report. The bank’s collapse would help set in motion the 2008 financial crisis.



Epstein’s offshore company was loaded up with some of the financial products — like mortgage-backed securities and collateralized loan obligations — that would become synonymous with the financial excesses leading to the financial crisis.

According to the Miami Herald and McClatchy, Liquid Funding had commercial mortgages and investment-grade residential mortgages bundled into complex securities.

“The three main credit rating agencies — Standard & Poor’s, Fitch Ratings and Moody’s Investors Service — all helped Bear Stearns create the securities in a way that would allow the creative product to get a gold-plated AAA rating,” the Miami Herald and McClatchy reported.

The task of determining Epstein’s wealth has been a significant factor in the decision of whether he is released from jail pending trial. Prosecutors cited Epstein’s wealth as making him more likely to flee ahead of a trial date.

The Herald and McClatchy reporters were able to reach one director, Marcus Klug, listed in the leaked documents as helping administer Epstein’s offshore vehicle.

Klug, now a member of the governing board of Bundespensionskasse AG, a large Austrian pension fund, confirmed he was a director of an Epstein company when he worked for an Austrian insurance company that had invested in Liquid Fund, according to the Herald and McClatchy.

Liquid was evidently a shell company and its directorship duties appeared pro forma.

“There was neither a physical board meeting or a call between board members,” Klug explained to the Herald and McClatchy, adding of Epstein, “I never met him.”
https://www.icij.org/investigations/par ... +-+Twitter

When Jeffrey Epstein was serving time in Florida for soliciting prostitution from a minor, he got a surprising visitor: James E. Staley, a top JPMorgan Chase executive and one of the highest-ranking figures on Wall Street.

Mr. Staley had good reason to maintain his relationship with Mr. Epstein, who received him at his Palm Beach office, where he had been permitted to serve some of his 13-month sentence in 2008 and 2009. Over the years, Mr. Epstein had funneled dozens of wealthy clients to Mr. Staley and his bank.

Mr. Epstein, who was charged this month with sex trafficking of teenage girls, liked to portray himself as a financial wizard, someone whose business and investing acumen made him indispensable to corporate executives and other leaders. But there is little evidence to support that notion. The financial services that Mr. Epstein dispensed appear to have been mostly pedestrian, and his list of clients small.

Mr. Epstein nonetheless managed to affix himself to a handful of prominent Wall Street veterans, including Mr. Staley, who is now chief executive of the British bank Barclays.

Mr. Epstein provided personal tax services to Leon D. Black, whose Apollo Global Management is one of the world’s largest private-equity firms. He discussed a major investment idea with and entrusted millions of dollars to Glenn Dubin, who ran the hedge fund Highbridge Capital Management. And, with Mr. Staley, he laid some of the early groundwork for JPMorgan to make a major acquisition — one that would vault Mr. Staley’s career to a higher plane.

Mr. Black, Mr. Dubin and Mr. Staley were not Mr. Epstein’s biggest business relationships: That distinction belongs to Leslie H. Wexner, the billionaire founder of the L Brands retail empire, which included Victoria’s Secret and The Limited. He gave Mr. Epstein broad powers to invest his fortune for nearly two decades.

In the weeks after Mr. Epstein’s arrest, it has become clear that he lied about the identities of some of his clients and the services he was providing, part of a successful effort to create the illusion of a sophisticated investor and management guru advising a who’s who of corporate America.

Mr. Epstein boasted of having advised Elon Musk after the Tesla founder’s impulsive Twitter posts sent shares plummeting last summer. He has claimed to have worked closely with Lawrence Summers, the former Treasury secretary and Harvard president. He has told others he was a tax consultant to the Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates. Representatives for the three men told The New York Times that there was no truth to Mr. Epstein’s statements.

A decade ago, he tried to woo Nicholas and Thomas Pritzker, two scions of the family that created the Hyatt Hotel chain, by inviting a top scientist in the field of virtual reality to meet them in New York, according to a person who attended. He contended that billionaires like the Pritzker family needed his advice because he had special insights that could translate the ideas of mathematicians into workable financial strategies. The Pritzkers never considered working with him, according to a person close to the family.

Some of the investment ideas he trumpeted to would-be clients appeared far-fetched. One supposed strategy was to constantly make overnight loans to banks around the world. (There is no sign of Mr. Epstein having actually made any such loans, and it is hard to imagine such a strategy generating substantial profits, since overnight loans generate minuscule interest rates and last for only a matter of hours.)

Yet starting in the 1990s, Mr. Epstein — whose Wall Street experience consisted of a five-year stint at the investment bank Bear Stearns — managed to build a small but powerful finance network.

Mr. Black, the Apollo founder, was a widely respected figure on Wall Street when he met Mr. Epstein in the late 1990s. Before long, Mr. Black had entrusted Mr. Epstein with periodically providing a variety of tax and estate-planning services, according to a person close to Mr. Black. It was an unlikely assignment: Armies of lawyers and accountants have expertise in those fields; Mr. Epstein did not.

Over the next 15 or so years, including after Mr. Epstein pleaded guilty to prostitution charges in 2008, Mr. Black met with Mr. Epstein at his palatial townhouse on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, according to people who were there.

Mr. Black also put Mr. Epstein on the board of his family’s main foundation in 2000. According to public charitable filings, he remained on the board of the Debra and Leon Black Family Foundation until 2012, although a spokeswoman for the foundation, Carolyn Sargent, said he actually resigned in 2007.

In 2011, Mr. Epstein invested in a small publicly traded company, Environmental Solutions Worldwide, along with Mr. Black and his four children. And in 2015, an investment vehicle owned by Mr. Black contributed $10 million to a charity that Mr. Epstein started after his Florida incarceration, according to tax documents and a person familiar with the transaction.

In the clubby world of Wall Street, one connection often begets another, and Mr. Epstein around 1999 connected with Mr. Staley — one of Mr. Black’s good friends. Mr. Staley at the time was running JPMorgan’s private bank, which caters to wealthy individuals and where Mr. Epstein was a client.

Mr. Epstein and Mr. Staley soon became friends, and Mr. Epstein began referring rich individuals to Mr. Staley, who over the next decade converted dozens of those referrals into clients of JPMorgan’s private bank, according to a person with knowledge of the relationship.

One introduction proved especially valuable: Mr. Epstein connected Mr. Staley with Mr. Dubin, who at the time was running Highbridge, one of the country’s largest hedge funds, according to people familiar with the relationship. Mr. Epstein knew Mr. Dubin because he had once dated Eva Andersson, before she married Mr. Dubin.

A few years later, in 2004, Mr. Staley orchestrated a deal in which JPMorgan bought a majority stake in Highbridge. Mr. Dubin, and the Highbridge co-founder Henry Swieca, became JPMorgan employees. It is not clear whether or how Mr. Epstein was compensated for helping broker that deal.

“Mr. Staley has never engaged or paid fees to Mr. Epstein to advise him, or to provide professional services, either in his various roles at JPMorgan, or personally,” said Stephen Doherty, a spokesman for Barclays, Mr. Staley’s current employer.

The Highbridge deal helped elevate JPMorgan’s asset-management division — which at the time was under Mr. Staley’s leadership — into a major player in the fast-growing hedge fund world, and it cemented Mr. Staley’s role in the bank as an up-and-comer. (Mr. Swieca left the bank in 2009, and Mr. Dubin left in 2013.)

Mr. Epstein, meanwhile, invested $10 million in Highbridge through a financial consulting firm he owned in the Virgin Islands. He withdrew the money — which by then was worth about $30 million — from Highbridge in 2013, around the time that Mr. Dubin stepped down from the hedge fund.

Mr. Dubin has described Mr. Epstein as a friend and has provided him with financial advice. On one occasion, in the early 2000s, he recommended that Mr. Epstein invest in a new hedge fund run by Daniel Zwirn. Mr. Epstein invested up to $80 million via his consulting company, Financial Trust, according to court papers. At its peak, the investment was worth $140 million.

Mr. Dubin and Mr. Epstein parted professional ways after Mr. Zwirn’s fund shut down and Mr. Epstein sued, according to a person close to Mr. Dubin. The two men, however, continued to socialize, with Mr. Epstein joining the Dubins at their Palm Beach, Fla., home for a large Thanksgiving celebration in 2009, according to an email that Ms. Dubin sent to Mr. Epstein’s probation officer. The letter was first reported by Business Insider.

Ellen Davis, a spokeswoman for Mr. Dubin and his wife, said that the “Dubins are horrified by the new allegations” against Mr. Epstein. The statement added, “Mr. Dubin’s business relationship with Mr. Epstein, which ended more than a decade ago, was extremely limited. The Dubins were loyal friends and mistakenly believed Mr. Epstein, a person they had known for decades, had rehabilitated himself after his 2008 plea and deserved a second chance.”

Mr. Staley and JPMorgan, too, stuck with Mr. Epstein for years after his guilty plea — a period in which, according to prosecutors, Mr. Epstein engaged in an extensive sex-trafficking operation. It wasn’t until around 2013, when Mr. Staley left JPMorgan, that Mr. Epstein ceased being a JPMorgan client.

Spokesmen for JPMorgan declined to comment on any aspect of their roughly 15-year relationship with Mr. Epstein.

Freeman Rogers and Steve Eder contributed reporting.

Wombaticus Rex wrote:He himself is clearly a front to get SAF money into USA.

8bitagent » Tue Jul 23, 2019 2:08 am wrote:news that the Gambino mob boss Francesco Cali was gunned down not by a rival mafia figure, but by a hardcore online Trump loving "Qanon" conspiracy nut, who was convinced Cali was a "deep state" figure.
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/ma ... p-n1032331

it appears suspect Anthony Comello, 24, gunned down Cali in an off-base belief that the mob figure was "deep state," a secret organization out to take control of the U.S. government

For years, beginning in the early ’90s, she and Epstein cut glittering figures on the Manhattan, N.Y., and Palm Beach, Fla., social circuits, with Maxwell taking the lead. While people who knew Epstein in Palm Beach described him as “very odd” and said “he didn’t go out much,” those who know Maxwell described her as “vivacious,” “warm” and “effusive.”

Her family knew Trump before Epstein arrived on the scene, and she continued to socialize with Chelsea Clinton after Epstein was jailed on sex offenses.

Maxwell first grew close with the Clintons after Bill Clinton left office, vacationing on a yacht with Chelsea Clinton in 2009, attending her wedding in 2010, and participating in the Clinton Global Initiative as recently as 2013, years after her name first emerged in accounts of Epstein’s alleged sexual abuse.

“Ghislaine was the contact between Epstein and Clinton,” a person familiar with the relationship said. “She ended up being close to the family because she and Chelsea ended up becoming close.” Lawyers for Maxwell did not respond to requests for comment, and a spokesperson for Clinton disputed the idea that the two women were ever close.

Trump’s ties to Maxwell and her late father, the publishing tycoon Robert Maxwell, meanwhile, go back even further, to at least the late 1980s.

One regular on the social scene in Palm Beach and other exclusive locales recalled attending an event at Ascot, the English horse track, around the late 1990s, where, upon entering the racetrack’s “royal enclosure,” the person saw Epstein sitting with the royal family.

Much of Epstein’s access to Clinton’s world also flowed through Maxwell. “The Clintons were relatively intimate with her,” a Maxwell friend said.

In 2002 and 2003, flight logs reportedly show that Bill Clinton flew on 26 flight legs on Epstein’s private jet.

Adam Klasfeld
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BREAKING: Jeffrey Epstein just filed a notice of appeal on his bail denial. cc: @CourthouseNews


This observation last week held up well, but in fairness, it wasn't a hard call.



Once Epstein's defense bail memo is properly read as an appellate motion--noting 2nd Circ. precedent--it becomes clear why Berman -- quite a careful, thoughtful, methodical judge to begin with -- would take his time with this.

Berman also took his time in the Zarrab case.


From Epstein's original bail request:

Note the Second Circuit precedent Epstein cites to argue for a bespoke prison in his N.Y. mansion. Expect this to be part of his appeal, but also recall Judge Berman rejected his application on several other grounds. https://www.documentcloud.org/documents ... 16-19.html …



The details of any Second Circuit ruling will matter. Epstein's appeal can be rejected for several reasons, including flight risk, danger to community, etc., but it's important where panel will fall on rich people buying pre-trial jails that have been likened to "gilded cages."


Revisit some of my reporting on this from earlier this month for more history on this, before Epstein's proposal got decisively rejected in Judge Berman's recent ruling.
https://twitter.com/KlasfeldReports?ref ... r%5Eauthor

Lock Me Up in My New York Mansion, Jeffrey Epstein Says
ADAM KLASFELDJuly 11, 2019
MANHATTAN (CN) – Wealthy pedophile Jeffrey Epstein asked a federal judge Thursday for leave to await trial inside his $77 million mansion — an Upper East Side building that allegedly doubled as his sex-trafficking hub, where authorities claim to have recovered a large stash of child pornography.


This photo shows the East Side residence of wealthy financier Jeffrey Epstein, a convicted sex offender who has been arrested in New York on sex trafficking charges, Monday July 8, 2019, in New York. (AP Photo/Bebeto Matthews)
“Mr. Epstein stands ready and willing to pay for 24-hour armed guards should the court deem it necessary or appropriate,” Epstein’s attorney Reid Weingarten wrote in a 15-page letter.

U.S. District Judge Richard Berman, who is presiding over Epstein’s case, is unlikely to find the convicted child sex-offender’s proposal appropriate.

In the unrelated 2016 trial of Reza Zarrab, a gold trader who perpetrated the biggest money laundering scheme to Iran in U.S. history, the veteran jurist struck a blow against the phenomenon of well-healed criminal defendants buying cushy bail packages.

Zarrab wanted to await trial in a Manhattan high-rise that The New York Times described as a “gilded cage,” sparking a passionate opinion from Judge Berman against a two-tiered system of justice for the rich and poor.

“Most importantly, the defendant’s privately funded armed guard proposal is unreasonable because it helps to foster inequity and unequal treatment in favor of a very small cohort of criminal defendants who are extremely wealthy, such as Mr. Zarrab,” Berman wrote at the time.

Acknowledging the Zarrab precedent, Epstein’s attorneys claimed such a ruling would discriminate against the rich.

“Those reservations, though admirably motivated and sincerely held, raise substantial equal protection concerns,” the memo argues. “They impair the statutory right to release on the least restrictive conditions in the circumstances presented – an inherently individualized determination – based largely on socioeconomic status, a suspect if not invidious classification.”

“Avoiding ‘inequity and unequal treatment’ rooted in such dubious socioeconomic distinctions – doing ‘equal right to the poor’ and ‘rich’ alike – are imperatives that run both ways,” it continues.

Epstein’s attorneys appear poised to fight a constitutional battle challenging that precedent, citing other cases where millionaires and billionaires were able to prepare for trial in luxury.

“More precisely, we realize that Your Honor objects to the measure as more akin to custody than release, finding it inequitable for wealthier defendants to ‘buy their way out’ of jail pending trial,” the motion states. “Nonetheless, a band of other courts in our area have endorsed the procedure, and the Second Circuit has affirmed its use.”

Listing 14 measures to keep their client from fleeing, Epstein’s attorneys will have to do more than defend systemic inequalities in the U.S. criminal justice system. They will have to persuade Judge Berman and, failing that, appellate courts, that a registered sex offender of unknown wealth who owns properties around the world is not a danger to the community or a risk of flight.


Jeffrey Epstein pleaded not guilty in New York federal court on Monday to sex-trafficking charges following his arrest over the weekend. The wealthy financier, pictured here in 2017, will have to remain behind bars until his bail hearing on July 15. (New York State Sex Offender Registry via AP)
None of the measures proposed by Weingarten prohibits Epstein from contacting his alleged victims. Prosecutors claim that the 66-year-old has a history of attempting to “harass or tamper with witnesses” through his proxies, relating one incident in which his private investigator trailed an unnamed father, who was “forc[ed] off the road.”

The U.S. Attorney’s Office in Manhattan, whose reply memo is due on Friday, declined to comment on Epstein’s request.

On Monday, the day Epstein’s indictment was unsealed, Assistant U.S. Attorney Alex Rossmiller told a federal magistrate that the tycoon’s finances were a mystery.

“The defendant has refused to answer any questions about his income or assets for the pretrial services report, so the scope of his wealth and his assets remains entirely concealed to the government and to the court,” Rossmiller had said.

Weingarten offered to disclose Epstein’s finances under seal to Berman, who has issued high-profile rulings favoring transparency from the earliest days of his career. Before becoming a federal judge, Berman presided over Queens Family Court and allowed for press access in a child custody dispute involving Carl Everett.

If Epstein’s finances hit the public light, such information could resolve a longstanding controversy over how he makes his money and whether he is billionaire.

Though prosecutors called Epstein a man of “nearly infinite means,” Tthe New York Times reported that this reputation might be “more illusion than fact.”

Epstein’s bail hearing is scheduled for Monday.
https://www.courthousenews.com/lock-me- ... tein-says/

Jo Becker

Exclusive: @DeutscheBank this year filed a suspicious activity report alerting the government to potentially illegal activity in the accounts of Jeffrey Epstein, who was moving money outside US, sources tell me and @davidenrich



Bank says it is also cooperating with prosecutors.


Deutsche Bank

Deutsche Bank is closely examining any business relationship with Jeffrey Epstein, and we are absolutely committed to cooperating with all relevant authorities
https://twitter.com/Jo_Becker/status/11 ... 7249353729

Jeffrey Epstein photographed partying with future Trump cabinet secretaries after release from jail
Published 1 day ago on July 22, 2019 By Travis Gettys

Jeffrey Epstein was photographed nearly a decade ago, just after his release from jail, partying with two future Trump cabinet secretaries and former New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani.

The well-connected financier attended a 2010 dinner party hosted by David and Julia Koch after a screening of “Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps” that was attended by Giuliani, Steve Mnuchin and Wilbur Ross, among others, reported The Daily Mail.


Epstein had been released two months earlier from jail in Florida after pleading guilty to state charges of procuring a person under 18 for prostitution and felony solicitation of prostitution.


That non-prosecution agreement, which was widely criticized at the time as too lenient, was reached with future Trump labor secretary Alex Acosta.

Epstein, now 66, was arrested earlier this month on sex trafficking charges after the Miami Herald published a series of investigative reports about the plea agreement, which also led to Acosta’s resignation.

00:01
00:44


The Wall Street Journal published an article about the dinner party a few days later and noted that Giuliani and Epstein had walked out of the theater around the same time, and quoted one observer noting the “beautifully done meeting of the prosecutor and the felon.”

Designers Tory Burch and Tamara Mellon, billionaires Henry Kravis and Steve Schwarzman and publicist Peggy Siegal also attended the event.

Epstein’s friendship with President Donald Trump, as well as former president Bill Clinton, has also come under renewed scrutiny following his recent arrest.
https://www.rawstory.com/2019/07/jeffre ... from-jail/

seemslikeadream » Tue Jul 23, 2019 1:38 pm wrote:

Lock Me Up in My New York Mansion, Jeffrey Epstein Says

Iamwhomiam » Tue Jul 23, 2019 4:05 pm wrote:Cordelia, the photo of the mansion you've included above is the building Epstein leased from the US Gov't., the same he illegally sublet at 34 E.66th St.

The mansion Epstein owns and has asked the court to be locked within in lieu of being imprisoned while awaiting trial, is located at 9 East 71st Street.

Elvis » Tue Jul 23, 2019 11:58 am wrote: SAF money is a kind of IMF loan, yes? How does that work, getting SAF money into the US? And Musk's role in that?

(I've assumed that IMF loans were mostly designed to return all the wealth to the US.)