Part 6 of 6 A Convenient Death The Mysterious Demise of Jeffrey Epstein...The Arrest The End Is Near ...Conclusion Conspiracy

A Convenient Death

The Mysterious Demise 

of Jeffrey Epstein 

by Alana Goodman &

Daniel Halper

16 The Arrest 

The End Is Near 

Mr. Epstein knew an astonishing number of rich, famous and powerful people, and had photos to prove it. He also claimed to know a great deal about these people, some of it potentially damaging or embarrassing, including details about their supposed sexual proclivities and recreational drug use.

JAMES B. STEWART 

Jeffrey Epstein inhaled his last breath of free air on July 6, 2019. Arriving on a private jet at New Jersey’s Teterboro Airport, the six-foot, 185-pound, now nearly all-white-haired sex predator would be picked up by federal authorities as his plane landed, arriving from Paris, France. [covid 19 seems convenient for a lot of sexual perverts dc]

He’d be fingerprinted and processed, eventually moved by the federal government to the Metropolitan Correctional Center in Manhattan. He would never walk free again. 

Federal records would reveal he’d been traveling with a Virgin Islands driver’s license, a Florida driver’s license, an American Express card, a UnitedHealthcare insurance card, a Medicare insurance card, a U.S. Customs and Border Protection boaters option card, and a passport. He would check in no personal belongings to MCC. 

The investigation of Epstein was being conducted by the federal prosecutors out of the Southern District of New York. But that was not the only federal law enforcement body pursuing charges. The U.S. Marshals Service was looking into whether he had filed his travel arrangements properly in accordance with laws surrounding registered sex offenders, which he had been since his first guilty plea in Florida more than a decade earlier. 

The charges Epstein had been brought in on were related to activities between 2002 and 2005. He was being accused of sex trafficking of underage victims in New York and Florida. The charging documents said there were dozens of victims. And, as Epstein had been known to do, the victims had allegedly been paid off in cash. 

The strange thing about the charges is that they did not cover more recent activities. And they appeared to piggyback off the earlier investigation into Epstein, which had of course resulted in his early guilty plea on state charges. It would not take Johnnie Cochran to envision that Epstein’s defense—and who wouldn’t have assumed there would be one?—would revolve around both a prior non-prosecution agreement he had signed with the feds in Florida and constitutional double-jeopardy questions. 

The attorney general of the United States, Bill Barr, the son of the man who likely hired Epstein at Dalton so many years earlier, would say that his co-conspirators were likewise being investigated. The so-called co-conspirators would remain uncharged and unnamed as of the time of this writing, despite there being ample evidence that Epstein had assistance in carrying out his crimes. 

Flight records of Epstein’s plane would indicate that he had gone to Monaco and Austria, according to The New York Times. 1 Sex offenders are legally required to alert authorities of their whereabouts and travel arrangements, but he alerted authorities only that he was traveling to France and the Virgin Islands. Big-time criminals who are successful at evading the law have been known to be picked up on far more minor crimes, but the U.S. Marshals Service had not made an arrest on these apparent illegal actions. 

More worrisome, girls were suspected of being aboard Epstein’s plane throughout his 2019 international travel. 

For the last few years, Epstein had been keeping a low profile. It had, until very recently, served him quite well. He had in a prior life flown too close to the sun. “It’s the Icarus story, someone who flies too close to the sun,” a reporter once told Epstein, giving him the elevator pitch on the story he was writing about the sex predator. 

“Did Icarus like massages?” Epstein responded, making a self-deprecating crack. 2 

The wealth and power he had so aggressively sought had helped him achieve his ultimate ambitions. He had come a world away from the childhood he despised in the working-class confines of Coney Island. His friendships with world leaders and business titans gave him prestige. His philanthropy won him accolades from the top scholars and scientists of his generation. And it helped him carry out his business, which most assuredly was not—and never was—money management. But he had flown too close to the sun. He got burned. 

This was not lost on him. “If my ultimate goal was to stay private, traveling with Clinton was a bad move on the chessboard. I recognize that now. But you know what? Even Kasparov makes them. You move on,” he reportedly told a friend. 3 

His predatory ways were known. He was toxic. 

And yet, in 2019, he was still going strong. Until his final arrest, he had not been stopped from continuing to traffic children, both for his sexual pleasure and for service of those still around him. 

“Epstein engaged in a pattern and practice of trafficking and sexually abusing young women and female children on this private, secluded island of Little St. James where Epstein and his associates could avoid detection of their illegal activity from Virgin Islands and federal law enforcement and prevent these young women and underage girls from leaving freely and escaping the abuse,” the U.S. Virgin Islands prosecutor Denise George would allege in a lawsuit filed in 2020 after his death. 4 

In fact, he had recently purchased, in 2016, another island, Great St. James, to help conceal these activities, the prosecutor asserted. The nearby island, divided up into three parcels valued together at nearly $23 million, allowed him “to further shield his conduct on Little St. James from view, prevent his detection by law enforcement of the public, and allow him to continue and conceal his criminal enterprise.” 

Moreover, according to the prosecutor, Epstein’s intent was to expand his operation. The island provided not only privacy but also more land on which to carry out his crimes. 

“The Epstein Enterprise maintained and made available young women and underage girls for the purpose of engaging them in forced labor and sexual activities and used coercion and deception to procure, abuse, and harbor its victims.” 

This criminal activity occurred until his arrest in 2019, according to the lawsuit. The number of girls involved is unknown. But it is believed that they may have been as young as twelve years old. 

One fifteen-year-old tried to escape the sex enslavement by swimming off the island, the lawsuit claimed. (A search party organized by Epstein located her, detained her, and took away her passport.) Another girl who allegedly tried to escape was threatened with “physical restraint of harm.” 

So how was Epstein able to still do it, despite being widely known as a pariah? Because he was also still known as a mover and shaker. His prior associations with the rich and powerful were still being used, despite his new pariah status. 

“The Epstein Enterprise deceptively lured underage girls and women into its sex trafficking ring with money and promises of employment, career opportunities and school assistance. The Epstein Enterprise preyed on their financial and other vulnerabilities, and promised victims, money, shelter, gifts, employment, tuition and other items of value.” 

Besides, the girls were told, they were just being asked to give the man a “massage.” It was, until the end, the same con Epstein had employed for decades. 

— 

Teterboro is the closest private airport to Manhattan. It caters to the rich and famous, especially those with their own airplanes, offering privacy and accessibility to high-status customers. It’s only twelve miles away, making it convenient for the rich and famous to land their private jets and get into the city in under thirty minutes. That summer morning, Epstein was headed to his home in New York City. 

So why did Epstein even return to the United States? Some have speculated that toward the end he lived his life in fear. That his scheme of treating world elites to forbidden—and illegal—goods was coming to an end. 

The recent attention to Epstein, which began when the media started to reexamine his sweetheart deal cut by the then prosecutor Alex Acosta, had started taking a toll on his lifestyle and business interests. Deutsche Bank, which had had a long relationship with Epstein, began to examine his finances and seek distance. He reportedly had dozens of accounts with the German-based bank, and had borrowed money from the financial giant. His relationship with the bank reportedly was so complex that it had a hard time cutting him off completely; it was apparently too difficult a task to close all his accounts because not all his accounts were easily identifiable as his own. 

Nevertheless, liquidity and borrowing began to get more difficult for him. And he had already been shut out of banks before. 

“He had been a client of JPMorgan’s private-banking division from the late 1990s until around 2013, five years after he had pleaded guilty to state prostitution charges,” The New York Times reported. 5 

But with the renewed attention to Epstein—first the Miami Herald pieces, then a tsunami of more critical and probing coverage—Deutsche Bank made the calculation that it was more damaging to its profits to keep him as a client than it would be to cut him off entirely. 

There was also widespread speculation among the financial community that Epstein had for years engaged in money laundering. No one could quite nail down how it was that he made his money, so certainly all profitable and even criminal enterprises remained possibilities. Deutsche Bank had its own theories. Wall Streeters in particular have long been keen to make these assumptions. The bank, it turned out, had similar concerns. 

“In 2015 and 2016, anti-money laundering compliance officers in Deutsche Bank’s offices in New York and Jacksonville, Fla., raised a variety of concerns about the work the bank was doing with Mr. Epstein,” the Times reported. 

“In addition, the compliance officers on at least one occasion noticed potentially illegal activity in one of Mr. Epstein’s accounts, including transactions in which money was moving outside the United States, two of the people said. The compliance officers produced a so-called suspicious activity report, but it is unclear whether the report was ever filed with the Treasury Department’s financial-crimes division.” 

These matters of internal concern were not enough to cut him off, however. “Despite the compliance officers’ misgivings, the bank continued to do extensive business with Mr. Epstein,” the paper said. 

The bank was willing to work with Epstein as long as it didn’t become public knowledge. 

Which perhaps explains the somewhat dire straits Epstein found himself in in the summer of 2019. Because while it is obviously true that he had enough money to last him the rest of his life, it does not do anyone much good if he either cannot access that money or has to store it in his mattress. 

Multiple sources who spent time with Epstein said they saw indications that he and Maxwell were collecting compromising material on their powerful circle of friends, either for their own private interests, for blackmail, or as part of a spy operation. Some of these impressions might have been due to Epstein’s self-aggrandizement. He openly encouraged speculation that he was involved with intelligence agencies. 

The friend said Epstein would also darkly hint that he had done work with the Central Intelligence Agency headquarters in Langley, Virginia. 

“He would occasionally make mentions of, ‘Well, in Langley they say . . . ’” said the friend in an interview. “I don’t know what that was about.” 

Laura Goldman, the friend of Ghislaine’s, said she believes that if there was a spy operation, then it was orchestrated by Ghislaine rather than Epstein, due to her foreign government contacts. 

“I really do think it was a spying operation,” said Goldman. “I think the world is sexist, and they think it was [Epstein in charge]. It was always [Ghislaine]. She’s the one with all the contacts; she’s the one that organized everything.” 

“I think that she sold to the highest bidder,” she added. “I don’t know if she was as devoted to Israel as [her father, Robert Maxwell] was. So, I’m not sure that it all went to Israel. Some of it may have gone to MI6, and other places.” 

Epstein often played up his involvement with foreign government officials. He told one friend that he provided financial services to the crown prince of Saudi Arabia. (A source close to the Saudi government denied that Epstein provided financial advice to the crown prince but said he did travel to the country on business.) When Epstein’s Manhattan home was raided by the feds in 2019, they found that he had an Austrian passport that listed a fake name and an address in Saudi Arabia, which he allegedly used in the 1980s. 

Epstein also had a close relationship with the former Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak. “I saw Ehud Barak at his house. I think [he met him] through business; they had some kind of financial dealings together,” said Epstein’s former attorney Dershowitz in an interview. “I remember one day I went to his house for a meeting, and on the board was a map of the Middle East, hand drawn. [Epstein] said that was drawn by Ehud Barak and it was his idea for how to resolve the Palestine-Israel conflict. That was interesting to see.” 

But Dershowitz said he saw no evidence that Epstein was involved in any sort of intelligence activity. “That’s bullshit. That’s just total bullshit. There were rumors around all the time, but he never worked for any intelligence,” said Dershowitz. “The rumor comes from the fact that he was close to Ghislaine Maxwell, and Ghislaine father, Robert Maxwell, was rumored to have worked for Mossad. I can’t imagine that any intelligence agency would hire Jeffrey Epstein; I just don’t think that’s possible. I don’t think he would fit the profile of who you get to work as an intelligence agent at any time. But who knows?” 

— 

Another unanswered mystery around Epstein is why he decided to return that fateful day in July, when the feds were waiting to place him under arrest. As one plugged-in source said, “He obviously decided it was worse to stay in Paris than to come back to New York. Right? Why would it be worse to be in Paris than in New York? Probably because he thought, after Khashoggi, whatever services he had been providing for Saudis, he was probably concerned that he might get dipped in acid, like Khashoggi. So he came back to New York to take his chances knowing that he’d be immediately arrested.” 

Jamal Khashoggi of course was the Washington Post columnist who was murdered inside a Saudi consulate in Turkey. He had entered the consulate to get paperwork necessary for his upcoming nuptials but had been brutally murdered and then allegedly dissolved in an acid substance so that his body could be carried out of the diplomatic posting without attention. The plot worked in part; he never walked out of there alive. But the Saudis got caught, and international uproar ensued. 

The source wondered whether Epstein feared a similar fate. “That’s where it gets back to this whole idea of he was providing services to Saudis and Iranians, whoever else he was providing. I mean it’s taboo everywhere, but it’s especially taboo over there. And so they have a lot of money,” the source added. 

Speaking of the whole Epstein scheme of providing young kids for the sexual pleasure of world elites, the source added, “He expanded his geography.” Operating in the United States alone, to an American clientele, might no longer have been viable, while operating abroad, in foreign lands, provided endless opportunities, if perhaps extrajudicial risks. 

A good friend of Epstein’s recalled in an interview a discussion he had about Saudi Arabia. The friend recalled asking Epstein for advice about the famously reclusive country before a visit. 

“What do you think about me going to Saudi Arabia?” the friend asked Epstein. 

“Oh, they’re going to cheat you and stab you in the back,” Epstein replied. 

“Did you have this experience?” 

“Oh yeah,” Epstein claimed. “I went to Saudi Arabia and the king wouldn’t let me fly my own plane, I had to fly on his plane, and so when I got there, they put me at the Marriott and they kicked every other person out of the Marriott because they didn’t want anyone else to have to stay with a Jew.” 

— 

Moreover, there was further cause for concern when the feds discovered cash, diamonds, and an Austrian passport in the raid. Epstein certainly had motive and means to flee the country. 

“Just this morning, the government became aware of a safe that contained a pile of cash, diamonds, a passport from a foreign country with a picture of the defendant under another name,” Alex Rossmiller, an assistant U.S. attorney, said in court. 6 

“The passport was issued in the name of a foreign country, it was issued in the 1980s, it is expired, it shows a picture of Jeffrey Epstein, and another name,” Rossmiller added. 

Even more disturbing, as Epstein’s lawyers negotiated with state prosecutors over a deal, it became clear that he was unwilling to accept any real restrictions on his interactions with young women and children as part of a settlement agreement. His attorneys quibbled with prosecutors over a clause that would bar Epstein from interacting with minors without a state-approved adult supervisor. Epstein also asked for a special exception regarding his “goddaughter”—one of Eva and Glenn Dubin’s daughters, who was eleven years old at the time. 

“I need to confirm that Mr. Epstein may be with his goddaughter without supervision,” wrote Epstein’s lawyer Guy Fronstin in the April 16, 2006, letter to state prosecutors. 

Epstein had a “fixation” with his goddaughter and displayed a nude photograph of her as a young child in his home, one of his friends recalled in an interview. 

“Suddenly there was a picture of a naked four year old . . . I said what the hell is that about, on the wall? He said that’s my goddaughter. He had some fixation with the goddaughter,” said the friend in an interview. 

“That put it together for me. Having a picture of a naked girl on the wall is bizarre . . . It wasn’t a sexual picture, but she didn’t have any pants on.” 

U.S. District Court Judge Richard Berman, who was overseeing the case, found the prosecution’s argument compelling. Despite Epstein’s offer to put up an astronomical $100 million bond, his bail request would be denied. He was deemed a flight risk and repeat offender likely to harm kids if he were ever to walk free again. 

“The crimes Mr. Epstein has been charged with are among the most heinous in the law principally, in the court’s view, because they involve minor girls,” Berman declared. 7 

“Mr. Epstein’s alleged excessive attraction to sexual conduct with or in the presence of minor girls— which is said to include his soliciting and receiving massages from young girls and young women perhaps as many as four times a day—appears likely to be uncontrollable,” he added. “It seems fair to say that Mr. Epstein’s future behavior will be consistent with past behavior.” 

This time Epstein’s stay in lockup would be different. And this time he would not get out alive.

CONCLUSION 

Conspiracy 

Epstein was hiding in plain sight. We all knew about him. 

CINDY MCCAIN 

There are many reasons not to believe the official account of Epstein’s death. We don’t need to know what happened to know we’ve probably been lied to. 

We were told there was nothing to see on footage taken outside his cell only to be told later that the footage didn’t exist. The death scene, which protocol requires be vigorously maintained so that investigations can be performed, was quickly touched. One expects in the case of a suicide to find the death tool on the person who killed himself or at the very least nearby. Nowhere in the coroner’s report was a tool that could have killed Epstein chronicled. The guards mysteriously did not do their jobs, the cameras mysteriously did not work, and the coroner changed her findings without additional evidence. 

Perhaps these are all coincidences. 

Perhaps not. 

It is easy to say that many benefited from his being dead. After all, now he cannot reveal the secrets. He cannot release the reams of blackmail footage he kept. He cannot speak from the grave. 

The stories that did emerge after his death did damage to the fortunes and reputations of many of the rich and powerful. Bankers like the Barclays CEO, Jes Staley, came under investigation by their own companies for their relationship with Epstein. Tech titans, like Bill Gates, Facebook’s CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, and LinkedIn’s CEO, Reid Hoffman, were all revealed to have varying degrees of friendship with the admitted sexual predator. 

Others fell from grace. The director of the MIT Media Lab, Joi Ito, was forced to leave his post over the donations he accepted from Epstein. The billionaire Leslie Wexner’s career came to an unceremonious end when it was announced on February 20, 2020, that he would no longer be the CEO of LBrands and that a majority stake of Victoria’s Secret would be sold off. 1 Another billionaire, Glenn Dubin, announced his own retirement just a couple of weeks earlier. “This Epstein thing has been toxic for him,” the New York Post reported a hedge fund manager as saying. 2 

There are no doubt others whose secrets are still hidden, either in that cache of photos or elsewhere. 

It’s clear that Epstein would do anything to keep the power he had wanted his whole life. Maybe someone even more powerful than Epstein decided that allowing him to live was more of a risk than arranging for his death. There are plenty of other theories, and certainly some that haven’t even been thought of yet. 

It’s only fair to say, however, that we will probably never know the true story in full. The reason for this is simple. Consider this question: Who would you believe to tell you what happened? The elite, the press, our political leaders, or law enforcement? These are the institutions every American has been told since childhood that can and should be trusted, because they have the best interests of all people at heart. But these are the very same institutions that shielded Jeffrey Epstein for years. 

Epstein hobnobbed with the people who ran these institutions for years, even after his crimes were known. Go back through the archives of The Palm Beach Post, recall the blaring 2011 headline in the New York Post labeling Epstein a “perv,” reread the litany of evidence in the pages of The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal. His scumminess had never escaped the reporters and editors at the broadsheets and tabloids. Epstein was known. His actions were no secret. 

Cindy McCain, the wife of the late senator John McCain, admitted as much in a January 2020 public appearance. “Epstein was hiding in plain sight,” she said at the State of the World 2020 Conference in Florida. 3 “We all knew about him. We all knew what he was doing, but we had no one that was—no legal aspect that would go after him. They were afraid of him. For whatever reason, they were afraid of him.” 

McCain would add that an Epstein victim went to school with one of her own children. “I hope he’s in hell right now,” she said. 

And yet because Epstein was rich, because his friends were powerful, and, perhaps most important, because he had beaten the law before, it seemed as if he would get away with his crimes forever. At least that seems to have been his plan. 

Epstein was made by the elites and for the elites. The wealthy helped him along every step of the way, and they shielded him during his life. It’s unlikely that many of them would have an unbiased story of the truth—or would reveal if a member of their circle had bumped him off to prevent more stories from coming to light. And what reason do we have to trust those who said nothing about him during his life but now gossip about him now? 

Epstein also had used the media to his advantage—appearing like a savior and using his new celebrity position to better ingratiate himself with the Upper East Side crowd he so craved to be a part of. Could we ever trust the people who kept up fawning coverage of this monster for years to tell us what “really happened” in the last moments of his life? 

And then, of course, there were our leaders. To most of us they held exalted titles, by election or by birth. To Jeffrey Epstein they were powerful political connections that he carefully collected. Presidents and royalty were in his Rolodex. They took his money and in turn bestowed respect and reverence on him, the kind of legitimacy that only comes with a warm welcome into eminent institutions like the Trilateral Commission and the Council on Foreign Relations. And they also gave him their most limited resource— time. And as that time went on, it was they who seemed to need him. He was always ready with a private plane to help out a friend, or an invitation to an exotic locale, or a luxurious mansion or private island offered up for an intimate getaway. The horrifying nature of that intimacy—and the need for all the privacy —would become apparent only later, after much downplaying and stonewalling. Should we now believe Epstein’s powerful friends when they tell us what happened to him? 

Even law enforcement, whose mission is to treat everyone as equal before the law, was happy to take his contributions and use them—for what? To fight the worst in society? When it came time to investigate Epstein, they would cut him the sweetest of sweetheart deals. And while they were at it, they’d leak every step of the investigation to the perp himself so he’d have a heads-up of what was coming his way well before anything went down. But now their accounts of this high-profile criminal’s demise are supposed to be accepted without question? 

Epstein’s crime wave was not some outside attack on our collective sense of decency. It was something worse—an inside job. And one that could have been carried out only with a methodical, slow burning plan and lots and lots and lots of help. 

But whatever happened to Epstein, one irony is clear: Epstein, the man who recorded everyone, failed to record his final act. 

So, no, of course we cannot rely on the media, academics, politicians, or law enforcement to tell us simply that Epstein offed himself alone in a federal holding cell. These are the same people who harbored one of the worst homegrown terrorists America has ever produced. 

And now we are left grappling with the insane story of Jeffrey Epstein, his life and his death, the shattered lives touched by his web of depravity, and one horrible lingering question: How many more like him did he leave behind?

notes & source

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