Jeffrey Epstein’s Endgame: One Last Shot to Stay in Wall Street’s Favor

(Bloomberg) -- The Bequia, a grand teak-trimmed yawl, swung to its anchor off Little St. James, Jeffrey Epstein’s Caribbean retreat.

Aboard that day in April 2015 was its owner, Jes Staley, one of the business and political figures Epstein had cultivated to place himself at the nexus of money and power. For a few hours that afternoon, Staley -- soon to rise to the top of Barclays Plc, one of the grand old names of British banking -- visited Epstein on the private island, accompanied by his wife Debora.

Their sojourn coincided with an unusual chapter in the strange, sordid saga of a wealthy financier accused of sexually abusing and exploiting teenage girls and who, that afternoon, had been a registered sex offender for almost six years.

The allegations had first emerged a decade earlier, but Epstein was still working his Wall Street connections, even as coverage of the scandal reached a new pitch and his yearned-for rehabilitation started to slip from his fingers.

It was one more act by a Zelig-like figure who’d managed to charm and cajole his way to a billionaire’s lifestyle. He kept prowling for business, often finding receptive audiences at some of the most famous banks and investment firms.

At JPMorgan Chase & Co., for instance, he kept up a long, mutually beneficial relationship through the elite private-banking unit, according to people familiar with the matter.

He met with Wall Street titans, including billionaire Leon Black, invested with former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak and secured plum stock allocations in dozens of initial public offerings. His foundation, meanwhile, supported initiatives long beloved on Wall Street, such as Mount Sinai Hospital and Harvard’s Hasty Pudding Institute of 1770.

A full picture of those years -- between his 2008 guilty plea in Florida to two state counts of soliciting prostitution, one involving a minor, and his arrest in July on federal charges of sex-trafficking minors -– is elusive at best.

But the portrait pieced together from interviews and information from government filings reveal how the enigmatic college dropout never stopped trying to build his fortune and remain in the game. While there’s no suggestion of any wrongdoing on the part of his Wall Street connections, it all no doubt makes uncomfortable reading for them.

“They must be concerned that their experiences with Epstein, which so far had mostly flown under the radar, are now being more fully analyzed,” said Bill Moran, a litigation and crisis-management lawyer with Otterbourg in New York. “They all have to be concerned about reputations being tarnished.”

For Epstein, 2015 was a pivotal year.

It didn’t start well for him. An affidavit filed in federal court containing new accusations of sexual abuse drew attention to the secretive Florida plea deal and to the allegations that had long haunted him. Weeks later, the now-defunct website Gawker published his “little black book” of more than 1,000 names from the worlds of politics, business, the media and European high society.

The wheels of a wider scandal were in motion. Bold-face names were surfacing. The story was becoming a tabloid monument to the way the powerful exert their money and influence.

Still, doors on Wall Street remained open:

• Epstein guided at least one wealthy acquaintance to JPMorgan’s private bank, once run by Staley, according to the person familiar with the matter. A JPMorgan spokesman declined to comment. Staley was working at hedge fund BlueMountain Capital Management when he visited the island, which he joined in 2013 from JPMorgan.
• Apollo Global Management’s Black met with Epstein at the company’s New York offices. Black dispatched Apollo co-founder Marc Rowan to attend a meeting at Epstein’s Manhattan mansion with representatives of Edmond de Rothschild Group to discuss how the two firms could work together more closely, people with knowledge of the meeting said. Florence Gaubert, a spokeswoman for Edmond de Rothschild, said she wasn’t aware of any meeting and that the bank has no business links with Apollo or Epstein.
• BV70 LLC, a charity controlled by Black, donated $10 million to Epstein’s foundation Gratitude America, even as the New York Attorney General’s Office questioned whether another of Epstein’s foundations was complying with state registration requirements.
• Epstein invested in a partnership started in 2015 by Barak, prime minister from 1999 to 2001, according to the Israeli newspaper Haaretz.

In 2015, Epstein became more peripatetic. The number of flights by his private planes increased markedly over the next four years, according to JetTrack, with trips to and from New York, the U.S. Virgin Islands, New Mexico and Paris. He acquired a second private island off St. Thomas, Great St. James, in 2016, though JetTrack records indicate he was spending less time in the USVI.

Within months of the Bequia sailing from Little St. James, Staley cut ties to Epstein, according to a person with knowledge of the situation. The banker was in the running for the top job at Barclays, a position that required interviews and approvals by U.K. regulators. The wisdom of breaking from Epstein became apparent when the British press reported on their relationship.

The pair had professional dealings for about 15 years. Epstein played a role in JPMorgan’s acquisition of hedge fund Highbridge Capital Management, a deal that elevated Staley within the bank. The banker had visited Epstein in Florida when he was serving 13 months in jail in Palm Beach.

Staley has had no contact with him since becoming chief executive officer of Barclays, the person said. JPMorgan also cut the cord by at least 2016, a person familiar with the situation said.

Still, Epstein maintained access to Wall Street for another couple of years. For example, filings for Gratitude America show it recorded investment income in 2017 of $899,417 from 52 trades, most of which involved IPOs. “The IPO trading is evidence of Mr. Epstein’s level of access to the offerings,” said Jacob Frenkel, chair of government investigations and securities enforcement at Dickinson Wright.

The unraveling began when the Miami Herald published a series in November 2018 -- the title was Perversion of Justice -- chronicling Epstein’s manipulation of the criminal justice system in order to avoid federal prosecution in Florida. Labor Secretary Alexander Acosta, who was the lead prosecutor in that case, resigned last month as his role drew criticism.

Earlier this year, Deutsche Bank AG kicked Epstein out as a client, closing his accounts as federal authorities were preparing to charge him. At the time of his arrest, he was worth more than $500 million, according to a financial disclosure form filed in connection with his request for bail. It was denied, and he remains in jail at the Metropolitan Correctional Center in Manhattan.

--With assistance from Katherine Burton, Neil Weinberg, Michelle F. Davis and Tom Maloney.

To contact the reporters on this story: Tom Metcalf in London at tmetcalf7@bloomberg.net;Harry Wilson in London at hwilson57@bloomberg.net;Stefania Spezzati in London at sspezzati@bloomberg.net

To contact the editors responsible for this story: Pierre Paulden at ppaulden@bloomberg.net, ;David Gillen at dgillen3@bloomberg.net, Anne Reifenberg

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