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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.
Indeed, and that also explains why the banks (in particular JPM) were so keen to maintain his business, because he did nothing with the money except hand it to them to ride the booming 90s equity market, so everybody got their cut. The private wealth division at JPM was making huge fees from Wexner (the kind of billionaire who would usually have a more shrewd family office) for pretty much nothing.
In Maxwell’s recent testimony they asked her about the house (legally transferred for almost nothing) and at last there was an answer there, too, namely that it was in lieu of “fees”. Epstein seduced Wexner, “invested” his money (unlike the Madoffs of the world for the kind of boring, safe returns best suited to that task) and then charged hedge fund fees. Why didn’t Wexner measure his returns against the market? Hard to say, maybe he was in too deep, didn’t care, assumed Jeffrey was a genius, liked the attention and friendship, was a little in love, or was just under the thumb of an overbearing and domineering mother (which is the historical record) and didn’t really think of it much.
But either way, a combination of a couple hundred million in fees from Wexner, reinvesting his own money, some shrewd early-90s real estate purchases in Manhattan (a few apartment buildings, as I recall) and the $170m from Leon Black (Epstein’s only other “client” even though he never managed his money and the one case where I suspect blackmail is possibly central) and his fortune is easily explained even with some blunders along the way.
Yeah, I'm just reading bits and pieces but it does seem to be that Epstein did a genuinely good job of sorting out Wexner's finances, was smart enough not to milk the cow too hard, and probably was a 'friend' (not sexual) for someone who didn't have a lot of friends due to all you describe. Plus, if Epstein was already hosting and/or arranging the kind of parties he later threw, then it would have done no harm (and maybe a lot of good) to Wexner's public image to be seen in the society pages with attractive twenty-something women on his arm. Nobody would expect him to be seriously dating those girls, but to be 'out and about' in public with them would have helped as cover for "oh, Wexner is too much of a playboy to get married yet" if there were rumours about his sexuality.
Wexner owned Victoria’s Secret before he met Epstein. He definitely wasn’t relying on Epstein to procure girls for him - the reverse seems more likely.
Oh, Epstein certainly used that connection to his advantage, but there's a difference between "guy has to hit on models who work for his business" (rather creepy and sleazy, low-class) and "guy who meets attractive young women at parties in the right social circles" (eligible bachelor).
The impression I'm getting - and admittedly this is all at second- and third-hand - was that Wexner was socially awkward/dominated by his mother enough that he couldn't manage this kind of thing (unlike Trump who had no problem hanging around the Miss World pageants or whatever). So having a fixer who can make sure photos of you with appropriate arm candy end up in the gossip columns and who manages your public profile, amongst other things, is very convenient and useful.
This profile from 1985 is fascinating; it's a guy who at age 48 still has Mommy very clearly holding on to the apron strings, he's a guy from Ohio who is now a big cheese in New York (and probably aware that he doesn't fit in with the circles he is now moving in - see that little line about "he doesn't pronounce 'La Grenouille' or even 'entrepreneur' right and it doesn't matter").
So someone like Epstein, charming and comfortable with that kind of society, who could help Les manage his social life, or manage it for him? Worth his weight in gold. Even setting aside any gay attraction, the important thing is that Epstein too was Jewish (and his Jewish heritage seems to be very important to Wexner) so that automatically makes him someone Wexner feels he can trust, someone with the same cultural identity, someone who gets it. Let Jeff manage the money while Les moves on to things he finds more important (new business deals, art and philanthropy) and, so long as profits are being made, what's to question?
(The irony about the perfect woman being someone who is not aggressive is that he ended up married at age 56 to a lawyer. Maybe I'm stereotyping lawyers, but that seems like the aggressive type to me!)
His preference was probably "not aggressive [romantically/toward him]" rather than "not aggressive [in general]", given the combination of socially awkward and "dominated by his mother".
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