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So it appears that JP Morgan may have allowed Jeffrey Epstein to continue using their financial services, so of course the Times leads with the most bombastic possible version of this claim. One could imagine an alternative headline like How JPMorgan Conducted its Usual and Customary Business. Probably there are intermediate versions of this headline that are closer to neutral.
Headlines aside, right wing media is picking it up because all the Epstein stuff draws lots of clicks but I'm wondering (and hopefully I'm not alone) whether this is fundamentally about getting upset when banks don't drop unpopular clients even when their relationship has nothing to do with the clients' bad behavior.
That is to say, contra the Times, JPMorgan didn't enable Epstein's crimes in anything but the most useless sense of the world. Sure, he used money from the banks to pay people -- but I'm sure lots of criminals withdraw money from a Chase ATM in the commission of a crime, which hasn't (till recently) been laid on the bank.
The other claim is that his friends in the bank intervened when some transactions were flagged (for what, no one really explains) but this only deepens the original question: even if he was guilty of sex crimes, that doesn't imply that his financial dealings weren't in order. It's not money laundering or fraud to pay for underage hookers -- it's child prostitution which is illegal in its own right.
Ultimately where this seems to end is back to a place where banks rightly fear that they are gonna be next on the Times' hitlist because they didn't drop a client fast enough.
If Epstein was as rich as he claimed to be without any of the wackier conspiracy conspiracies being true, he got the money by embezzling from Les Wexner. If any of the wackier conspiracies were true, he had a lot of foreign income he was being dishonest about the source of.
I personally think that Epstein's finances were above board and he simply wasn't as rich as he claimed to be (his lifestyle was consistent with the amount of money he could have made scummily but legally by charging Wexner 2-and-20 without providing alpha). But if I was the Feds I would have been going over his finances with a fine-tooth comb.
I don't think he embezzled from Wexner, even the most besotted suitor would have noticed millions drained away. But he did have a lot of control over Wexner's money and was able to spend it as if it were his own, in turn enabling him to present the façade of really, really wealthy guy (rather than just guy in charge of really, really wealthy guy's wallet).
I agree that, like a lot of the high-flying financial types of the time, it was all a house of cards and a downturn, bad luck, or close scrutiny would have shown that the emperor had no clothes. He genuinely had the most amazing luck in getting clear of the Florida sex abuse charges (as well as the dropped ball by the prosecution, as another commenter posted explaining the case in detail on here) and that is what motivates all the conspiracy theories about "was he really an intelligence asset? was he blackmailing people?"
Wikipedia does have a good précis of it all - lies, charm, connections and luck:
Which in turn would let him get more private finance business.
After all, when choosing finance guys, it's an important indicia of competence that the guy himself isn't broke.
Of course, this can be gamed -- lots of those guys are in deep debt to fund an appearance of wealth that they wish to parlay into business opportunity. And many are indeed a house of cards.
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