Wealthy math teacher faces justice


Jeffrey Epstein with some random people

Can it be? Will Jeffery Epstein get his comeuppance?

Billionaire pedophile Jeffrey Epstein was arrested for allegedly sex trafficking dozens of minors in New York and Florida between 2002 and 2005, and will appear in court in New York on Monday, according to three law enforcement sources. Saturday’s arrest by the FBI-NYPD Crimes Against Children Task Force comes about 12 years after the 66-year-old financier essentially got a slap on the wrist for allegedly molesting dozens of underage girls in Florida.

The article also points out that it’s a mystery where he got his millions of dollars. He was a math teacher who broke bad into the lucrative world of hedge funds, but no one seems to know what he was doing, his employees were invisible, and he seems to have just one client. Something shady was going on, which makes me wonder if the reason he got such a sweetheart deal before is that he’s a key to unraveling a tangled web of nefarious activity by the rich and powerful.

Speaking of the rich and powerful, Alan Dershowitz sure seems to be sweating copiously suddenly.

Comments

  1. Matt G says

    Isn’t Epstein also the connection to the 13-year-old girl The Donald was indicted for raping?

  2. PaulBC says

    It sounds like he schmoozed his way into Bear Stearns and then leveraged that to start a hedge fund. This is not exculpatory in any way, but it doesn’t seem to be a huge mystery. Wikipedia:

    Epstein taught calculus and physics at the Dalton School in Manhattan from 1973 to 1975.[6] Among his students was a son of Alan C. Greenberg, chairman of the investment bank Bear Stearns.[5] In 1976, Epstein started work as an options trader at Bear Stearns,[6] where he worked in the special products division, advising high-net-worth clients on tax strategies.[6] Proving successful in his financial career, Epstein became a partner at Bear Stearns in 1980.[6]

    In 1982, Epstein founded his own financial management firm, J. Epstein & Co., managing the assets of clients with more than US$1 billion in net worth. In 1996, Epstein changed the name of his firm to the Financial Trust Company and, for tax advantages, based it on the island of St. Thomas in the U.S. Virgin Islands.[6]

  3. PaulBC says

    Anyway, I am sick of Derpowitz. I am pretty sure it started long before he came out as a Trumpie, but my memory of the world before Nov. 2016 is now very hazy.

    Wikipedia explains how his father taught him “to defend the underdog”. As far as I can tell, his notion of underdog is someone who is probably guilty but is rich enough to afford the best legal representation. I don’t fault him for doing his job, but these aren’t underdogs.

  4. Owlmirror says

    Isn’t Epstein also the connection to the 13-year-old girl The Donald was indicted for raping?

    Trump was never indicted for that alleged event. Yes, it supposedly happened at Epstein’s NY home, but 3 lawsuits were filed and then dropped before the 2016 election.

    The whole thing stank of political bullshit. But the more I learn about Trump, the more credible it seems that it could have happened.

  5. unclefrogy says

    you know this sure begins to rhyme with the last gilded age but it seems to me though, I was not there, that the corruption that goes along with golden ages is meeting a different experience with the law this time.
    hope it is a trend and not a one off
    uncle frogy

  6. blf says

    Isn’t Epstein also the connection to the 13-year-old girl The Donald was indicted for raping?

    Not an indictment (more on this below), but Yes: From How Did Trump and Clinton Pal Jeffrey Epstein Escape #MeToo? (June-2018, updated this year):

    Even President [sic] Trump was among the deviant philanthropist’s admirers. “I’ve known Jeff for fifteen years. Terrific guy,” Trump told New York in 2002. “He’s a lot of fun to be with. It is even said that he likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side. No doubt about it — Jeffrey enjoys his social life.”

    […]

    [Epstein’s] name resurfaced during the 2016 election season, when a woman using the pseudonym Katie Johnson filed a lawsuit against Trump, claiming he raped her at one of Epstein’s parties when she was just 13 years old. She dropped the suit months later.

    And also, albeit perhaps not involving hair furor:

    […] 15-year-old [Virginia Roberts] was working a summer job at Mar-a-Lago when Ghislaine Maxwell allegedly recruited her for Epstein in 1998. The alleged madam invited Roberts […] to make good money by learning massage therapy […].

    Found via Jeffrey Epstein, the convicted sex offender who is friends with Donald Trump and Bill Clinton, explained (apparently Dec-2018, also updated this year): “How a money manager to the super-wealthy used his ‘collection’ of famous friends to avoid a prison sentence for molesting young girls.”

    Snopes confirms a civil lawsuit was filed against hair furor (not an indictment) for raping a 13 year old, Lawsuit Charges Donald Trump with Raping a 13-Year-Old Girl (June-2016): “A civil suit against Donald Trump alleging he raped a 13-year-old girl [who used the pseudonym Katie Johnson] was dismissed in California in May 2016, refiled in New York in June 2016, and dropped again in November 2016.”

  7. Owlmirror says

    Here’s the Jezebel article describing a reporter’s multiple attempts to speak to the victim.

    Final paragraph:

    But even given Trump’s moderately disgusting track record with women, the fact is that a cadre of men have been shopping this Katie Johnson story around for nearly a year, while repeatedly refusing requests to interview the supposed victim. The facts speak less to a scandal and more, perhaps, to an attempt at a smear—one that finally, after months of clumsy maneuvering, is gaining speed.

  8. Owlmirror says

    Shit. I wrote the years wrong for the second two lines.

    Doe v. Trump et al, filed in New York on 06-20-2016

    Doe v. Trump et al, filed in New York on 09-30-2016

  9. says

    I’ve noticed a suspicious trend among financial types to describe the more successful ones as “brilliant” – but I suspect it’s more that they’re lucky gamblers or inside traders. The most successful ones are the ones who figure out an angle, which is closed later because it’s illegal or cheating (e.g: Michael Milken) I have yet to hear a successful Wall St type described as an “energetic parasite” so I suspect that even that game is rigged.

  10. PaulBC says

    @Marcus Ranum “I’ve noticed a suspicious trend among financial types to describe the more successful ones as “brilliant””

    This is not suspicious or limited to people in finance. There is a tendency to want to explain success and failure, not just chalk it up to hazard. It’s accentuated when people want to ascribe success to their own merit or if they can’t do that, to those they share an affinity with.

    Certainly a lot of tech innovators weren’t the only ones with an idea or even the best at implementing it, but just happened to be the first ones to commercialize it successfully it, leveraging first mover advantage. National leaders nearly always get credit for circumstances largely beyond their control.

    You can’t reset history and do a controlled experiment, but clearly luck plays a major role. Usually, you need some level of competence to take advantage of it, but the formula to being most successful is to surpass a minimum level of competence and have the best luck, rather than having the most “merit.”

  11. says

    From a report on Julie Brown’s coverage of Epstein/Trump:
    he said Epstein’s relationship with fellow Palm Beach resident Donald Trump was “friendly.” “They went to dinner parties at each other’s houses, Trump was also on his plane. Probably not as much as a lot of other people because, you know, Trump had his own plane. But they had a lot of social relationships. And the other interesting thing is Trump had a modeling agency, and Epstein also had a stake in a modeling agency, which they suspect he used to bring in underage girls from overseas.”

  12. Pierce R. Butler says

    PaulBC @ # 4: Epstein taught calculus and physics at the Dalton School in Manhattan from 1973 to 1975.

    I certainly hope Pedo Patrol investigators are interviewing his then-students now.

  13. answersingenitals says

    Marcus Ranum @ 13: It’s easy to be brilliant, just don’t be stupid. But for we humans that is a rare talent.

  14. robro says

    The Miami Herald ran a story on this today. They also sited the NYT. They’ve been digging into Epstein since at least 2016 and also one of his prime enablers: Alexander Accosta, our current Secretary of Labor, friend of the D man, and former US attorney in South Florida. He’s accused of getting Epstein a sweet deal in the earlier cases and keeping the deal secret from the victims.

  15. chrislawson says

    I find this a much more plausible source of foreign extortion than the so-called “pee tapes”.

  16. embraceyourinnercrone says

    How was he qualified to be a teacher?!? According to anything I can find he never finished college. So what business did the Dalton school have in hiring him in the first place?

    According to his bio, he took some classes in physics at Cooper Union from 1969 to 1971. He left Cooper Union in 1971 and attended NYU’s Courant Institute, where he took courses in mathematical physiology of the heart, leaving that school, too, without a degree.

    http://nymag.com/nymetro/news/people/n_7912/

  17. embraceyourinnercrone says

    And apparently Attorney General Barr’s father was headmaster of the Dalton School and was the one who hired Jeffrey Epstein to teach there

  18. mountainbob says

    Oh, my! Do not remember ever reading of a hedge fund operator or the like who had high moral character and a sense of responsibility for anyone outside that orbit. Dershowitz and Starr are perfect examples of those who pander to the wildly rich and are equally without character. And, yes, I know that every accused person is entitled to effective defense against the charges levied.