"People taking what they wanted."

Intelligence, and Jeffrey Epstein, at the Dalton School

The kind of leverage that gets you the money to purchase an NBA overlaps with … stuff that never came up in high school U.S. History. The series began in February, which is a good place to start if you’re new here. Thank you for coming along on this journey as I learn, and for supporting TrueHoop in this work. (This can’t happen without subscriptions. Links to the entire series so far at the bottom.) Where we left off key leaders of World War II-era American intelligence had alarming business ties to Hitler’s regime. One former agent came to run a ritzy private school in Manhattan.

BY HENRY ABBOTT

In the Boston Globe in 1971, Pulitzer-prize winner William A. Henry III called Donald Barr “a tweedy, genial, mass of a man, a chortler with a welcoming smile, the image of a favorite uncle.” 

That was generous, for two reasons. First, Barr—the headmaster of the Upper East Side’s Dalton School—started fights. Much about the school, from its Manhattan setting to its celebrity parents, was libera…