“A new kind of superrich”

Part 18: Opulence, oligarchs, cocaine, and intelligence

BY HENRY ABBOTT

You don’t have to read a lot of articles about Jeffrey Epstein to get the idea that he had deep connections to a lot of people with very deep pockets and very questionable morals.

In the wake of learning that Apollo Global founder Leon Black paid Epstein $158 million for unknown reasons, you have to wonder to what degree, if any, Epstein’s business network overlapped with Black’s business—which is also the NBA’s biggest source of cash. 

We pick up the story in the mid-1980s, when cocaine became a giant global business, the Soviet Union began to crumble, and opaque new avenues opened to wealth.