BY HENRY ABBOTT
Now free for all: a 2021 TrueHoop post about Leon Black—one of the richest men in the world, and the founder of Apollo Global. Black also appears in a second newly-free TrueHoop post, about Jeffrey Epstein and Steve Bannon.
Leon Black paid Jeffrey Epstein $158 million. No one disputes that. Black says it was for tax advice.
Black founded Apollo Global, a private equity firm that’s an incredibly important source of NBA money. Apollo is where Adam Silver’s college roommate still works as a key executive. Born from the ashes of Michael Milken’s Drexel Burnham empire, Apollo has deep reach across sports, and spawned Josh Harris of the 76ers, Tony Ressler of the Hawks, and many others.
The big takeaway of the first now-free TrueHoop post is that Apollo’s investigation into Epstein and Black was inadequate. Two of the reasons: The lawyer from the Dechert law firm who conducted the investigation has reported Epstein ties going back decades, and the 22-page report broke with the recommendations of his own firm by neglecting to present evidence to support the report’s key claims.
The report concluded “Dechert has seen no evidence that Black or any employee of the Family Office or Apollo was involved in any way with Epstein’s criminal activities at any time.”
When it came out, William Cohan wrote in Vanity Fair: “Nice try, Leon. You must think we are pretty stupid, gullible, or insane to believe the tale you spun to Dechert.”
And so: if the official version is bogus, what’s the real version?
I read with interest when I saw that Leon Black just talked to the very same Cohan, who now works for Puck. It’s Black’s first interview since leaving Apollo Global in disgrace over Jeffrey Epstein and an array of other stuff.
Black, and the team of advisors who accompanied him to the interview, have had years to come up with some version of events explaining his relationship with Epstein before and after Epstein’s arrest.
The story they’re going with: shocking ignorance. If you read the free TrueHoop story, you’ll see that anyone who read newspapers over the last few decades knew more about Epstein than Leon Black says he did. Black says he saw Epstein with all kinds of women—in planes, in apartments, all over the place. And yes, Black knew Epstein got in trouble for something with a 17-year-old. But no, Black says, he didn’t think much of it. Cohan writes:
I asked Leon what he was thinking when, in 2006, this guy he had known for a decade—who was once on the board of his family foundation, and with whom he had discussed the nuances of his children’s personalities—was suddenly being investigated by state and federal prosecutors for pedophilia, and ended up in jail. “I took it seriously,” he told me. “But I didn’t take it that seriously. I mean, he was with a 17-year-old prostitute, got prosecuted for it, and got put away for a year,” he said, referring to Epstein’s extraordinarily controversial plea deal in 2008. “And, you know, according to him, even that person had shown an I.D. that she wasn’t underage. My feeling is, there are serious things and there are things that are less serious. I didn’t think this was the end of the world, frankly.”
He continued: “I mean, I’ve stayed incredibly close with Mike Milken. Mike Milken went to jail for two years. I stayed close with Alfred Taubman [the Sotheby’s owner who was convicted of price-fixing]. I stayed close with Martha Stewart. We’re still friends. They all went to jail. I didn’t think being with a 17-year-old prostitute who said that she had proof she was over 17 was that big a deal.”
While Black says Epstein’s exploitation of young women was undetectable, one of those young women says it was in the open and alarmingly common.
The million questions I have are in this post.
There’s another layer that I hope William Cohan will address as his Leon Black series continues: Everyone agrees Black is ardently and brilliantly competitive, with an incredible network and sharp elbows. He tends to win. Private equity barons obsessively collect and refine the insight and leverage to make big aggressive bets. That’s the game. It’s blatant from the legendary legal bills, the networking events, and the political donations. They want to know what the powerful insiders know.
Epstein could help with that. It seems incredibly likely—based on what was seized from Epstein’s mansion at the time of his arrest, the testimony of the women who were part of it, and Epstein’s own reported words—that Epstein ran a kompromat operation. Epstein might have had the best leverage on the planet. Glossy magazines and newspapers have published giant lists of all the powerful people who were in Epstein’s orbit, from Bill Clinton to Donald Trump.
Why would Black pay someone like Epstein $158 million and only ask for tax advice? Why would a ravenously competitive man like Black not seek Epstein’s help with the financiers, royals, and elected officials that Epstein evidently kept in his pocket?
It’s all icky and difficult to follow, with the whisper of intelligence. One of the most blatant intelligence-connected businesses ever was United Fruit. Leon Black’s dad bought United Fruit, then tumbled to his death (reportedly suicide) from its high-rise offices under suspicious circumstances. Leon’s business life brought many of his dad’s deep-pocketed associates into the tangled web that Milken wove. Apollo bought one of the CIA’s favorite contractors, Blackwater. There’s a former CIA executive on Apollo’s board right now.
Meanwhile, SEC filings showed that not long ago, Black, Apollo CEO Marc Rowan, and 76ers billionaire Josh Harris—the man who pays Joel Embiid’s salary—shared accounts worth tens of billions in the Caribbean. It’s one of the planet’s great fortunes.
How did they really get this money?
Many speculate Epstein was a spy. A prosecutor who went after Epstein reportedly said he was told to take it easy because Epstein “belonged to intelligence.” In Rolling Stone, Vicky Ward writes: “In the last 10 years of his life, Epstein bragged to various people, including journalists, that he was advising a whole assortment of foreign leaders who included Vladimir Putin, Mohammed bin Zayed, Mohammed Bin Salman, various African dictators, Israel, the British—and, of course, the Americans.”
What does all that influence get you, and does it work in the NBA, too?
Mohammed bin Zayed is especially interesting. His United Arab Emirates come up again and again in Epstein’s story, and in Apollo’s—where the Emirates have long been a key source of funding. The UAE has cut ahead of every other country in line to host NBA games—despite being well documented as a global hub of money laundering and assorted human rights abuses including the evident kidnapping of its own royal princesses. (After the Ukraine war led to deep sanctions against oligarchs, “wealthy Russians and their assets—including several superyachts and private jets—flocked to the UAE,” according to a 2023 briefing from the Soufan Center.)
This feels odd; Less than a decade ago Adam Silver withheld the All-Star game from North Carolina because of inequitable rules about bathrooms; now the word “Emirates” is NBA referee uniforms.
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