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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsJeffrey Epstein's Fortune May Be More Illusion
When federal prosecutors announced sex-trafficking charges against Jeffrey Epstein this week, they described him as a man of nearly infinite means. They argued that his vast wealth and his two private jets made him a flight risk.
Mr. Epstein is routinely described as a billionaire and brilliant financier, and he rubbed elbows with the powerful, including former and future presidents. Even after his 2008 guilty plea in a prostitution case in Florida, he promoted himself as a financial wizard who used arcane mathematical models, and he often dropped the names of Nobel Prize-winning friends. He told potential clients that they had to invest a minimum of $1 billion. At his peak in the early 2000s, a magazine profile said he employed 150 people, some working out of the historic Villard Houses on Madison Avenue.
Much of that appears to be an illusion, and there is little evidence that Mr. Epstein is a billionaire.
Mr. Epsteins wealth may have depended less on his math acumen than his connections to two men Steven J. Hoffenberg, a onetime owner of The New York Post and a notorious fraudster later convicted of running a $460 million Ponzi scheme, and Leslie H. Wexner, the billionaire founder of retail chains including The Limited and the chief executive of the company that owns Victorias Secret.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/10/business/jeffrey-epstein-net-worth.html
Botany
(70,516 posts)... Donald J Trump. Although both share a love for being creepy ass sexual preditors.
Tech
(1,771 posts)Blue_true
(31,261 posts)I have read nothing so far that makes me think that he ever was a billionaire. It is just absolutely incredible how he got away with what it seems he has been doing for so long.
BlueMississippi
(776 posts)Like many wealthy husbands who suddenly become poor when it's time to pay child support.
Merlot
(9,696 posts)Botany
(70,516 posts)Yup. Get rich married men in pictures and video of having sex w/underage girls and
then hit 'em up for money. He might have had Alan Dershowitz over a barrel.*
* https://www.democraticunderground.com/100212264917
dalton99a
(81,516 posts)Sneederbunk
(14,291 posts)Blue_true
(31,261 posts)my brain kept screaming "con artist". He worked at Bear Stearn, but Greenberg and Cayne were no boy scouts when it came to above board financial dealings.
brush
(53,788 posts)Wellstone ruled
(34,661 posts)made statements in early 2017 as the Comey firing was about to go down. I have the dirt on tons of people.
Scurrilous
(38,687 posts)blue neen
(12,322 posts)Our grifter-in-chief?