This Epstein story is not only about sex
Follow the money
It has been oft-reported that Jeffrey Epstein and his staff spent long hours arranging everything so that he could be with three women a day.
As if that’s all he was up to.
Billionaires like Leon Black, Bill Gates, and Glenn Dubin; the then-president of Barclays Bank Jes Staley; royals like Prince Andrew; and presidents like Bill Clinton—all of these powerful people employ staff to keep distracting strangers away. But it was Epstein who cut through all that. What are the odds some guy obsessed merely with his own closed-door libido would also be the best networker of all time?
Sometimes I wonder if this story breaks journalism. What murky forces might be at play between the likes of Donald Trump and Jeffrey Epstein might be better discussed through the lens of Richards Heuer, Jr. who wrote the longtime training manual for CIA intelligence analysts. Heuer explains that “the analyst is commonly working with incomplete, ambiguous, and often contradictory data.”
“Doubt is not a pleasant condition,” Heuer quotes Voltaire saying, “but certainty is absurd.” We have to analyze things through the fog.
And that’s where I think it’s simply incorrect to ignore parts of the story that are ironclad.
Most obviously: billionaire Leon Black bankrolled Epstein’s operation with more than $150 million (often reported as $158 million, Senator Ron Wyden’s office says at least $170 million).
Until we can explain that, we don’t know what Epstein was up to.
I’m a lifelong sportswriter who nowadays prefers to discuss the complexities of preventing injuries. (Epstein matters a lot, as immobility is the fourth-leading cause of death, this matters more.)
Epstein is the last thing I want to talk about. But the topic is unavoidable!
And I’m also a guy with a journalism degree, a curious mind, and a project in the TrueHoop archives looking into the dirty money in sports–which is enough to make me alarmed at the shallow nature of current Epstein discourse.
It’s about money.
In the early 1990s, the French bank Credit Lyonnais went on a mad lending spree that resulted in scandal, a bailout, and … when investigators were about to go through all the records, a headquarters in Paris that burned to the ground.
Credit Lyonnais reportedly invested with Robert Maxwell, who was reportedly working with Russian intelligence at the time on a scheme to offshore Russian riches. Maxwell and arms dealer Adnan Khashoggi were also reportedly working with Epstein at the time in London.
Credit Lyonnais reportedly invested with Steve Bannon, who was then a banker in California but became a key figure in Trump’s becoming president.
Leon Black says that Apollo was founded after a 1990 cold call from Credit Lyonnais resulted in the French bank eventually investing “about eight billion dollars.”
It all gets pretty outlandish from there, with the word “intelligence” appearing again and again. A Senate Intelligence Committee report explores the possibility that Trump may be vulnerable, politically, because of his behavior on a 1996 trip to Moscow with Black:
Several witnesses told the Committee that Geovanis … engaged in a pattern of behavior regarding women that made him, and potentially others around him, vulnerable to exploitation by the Russian intelligence and security services. …
Black … did not recall the event in the photograph. Black did recall going to a concert with Trump, followed by a "discotheque" where they may have met others, potentially including Geovanis, but Black's memory was unclear. Black later added that he and Trump "might have been in a strip club together."
The report then explains how common it was, in Russia at the time, for powerful men to be entrapped by hidden video of their misdeeds with women, especially prostitutes. “The Committee assesses that the hotel [where Trump stayed in 1996, the Ritz Carlton] likely has at least one permanent Russian intelligence officer on staff, government surveillance of guests' rooms, and the regular presence of a large number of prostitutes, likely with at least the tacit approval of Russian authorities.”
Journalist Catherine Belton wrote the most incredible, deeply researched account of the inner workings of the Russian oligarchy, called Putin’s People. In a section about oligarch Suleiman Kerimov, Belton writes:
Everything was dictated by the Kremlin. … It was a mafia system in which business was done on informal ‘understandings’ like those that ruled mafia groups. When the entire system was built on corruption, on kickbacks and access, every participant could be controlled. Putin and his men would have kompromat on everyone—from businessmen to state officials receiving bribes. It was a way to keep everyone on the hook, fully aware that at any time, if they stepped out of line, they could go to jail.
If I were an intelligence analyst, I’d wonder: has a method of doing business common to Russia been exported to the United States? If Epstein was in the business of collecting photos and videos that could control the rich and powerful, was he doing something that is business-as-usual in Putin’s circles? (And is that even new to the United States?)
Leon Black has deep business ties in Russia.
The most successful deal in the history of Apollo Global was a partnership between Apollo Global, Ares Management, and oligarch Len Blavatnik. Josh Harris (billionaire who controls the Philadelphia 76ers and Washington Commanders) and Tony Ressler (lead investor in the Atlanta Hawks) reportedly played key roles in resurrecting LyondellBasel from bankruptcy to great success.
In 2011, according to Reuters, Black “called it a privilege to help” the Russia Direct Investment Fund, a project of Putin’s to bring outside investment to Russia. And then the Reuters article adds this extraordinary detail: “Putin's spokesman, Dmitry Peskov said the prime minister later held a one-on-one meeting with Black to discuss Apollo's plans to invest in Russia.”
Black also told the Senate Intelligence Committee that on two different occasions he went to see Allen Vine, who works for the aforementioned oligarch, Kerimov. The Financial Times quotes sources speculating Kerimov may secretly invest for the Kremlin. Black says that when he got to Vine’s, he found Steve Bannon there. "Steve Bannon and I have a common friend, and I went over to see my friend and Bannon was meeting him for breakfast. And so on two occasions I spent time talking to Steve Bannon.”
Not long into poking around Epstein in 2021, I ended up on the phone with Epstein’s former business partner Steve Hoffenberg. Between that day, and Hoffenberg’s death a year and a half later, Steve and I spoke by phone many times. Hoffenberg’s message: “Epstein and his large group” executed one of the biggest crimes of all time, going back decades, and encompassing arms dealing, offshoring money, Robert Maxwell, Adnan Khashoggi, intelligence, and world leaders.
In Hoffenberg’s estimation, the most bizarre part of the story was that out of all that, the media cared only about sex.
Granted, Hoffenberg had issues as a source. He spent nearly two decades in prison for a Ponzi scheme, and pushed me relentlessly to cook up a way to get him some money in exchange for his insight. I paid him nothing and didn’t take his word for anything.
But on his bigger point, there was no need to take his word. There’s evidence galore in Congressional testimony, SEC filings, and award-winning books. It’s bizarre that the media has almost nothing to say about the money.
Senator Ron Wyden and his team are digging into Epstein’s money. A lot of what they have to go on is Apollo Global’s own internal investigation of the matter. Apollo’s conflicts committee commissioned the investigation from the law firm Dechert. When that report came out in 2021, it said that Black had paid Epstein … for tax advice.
It’s hard to find anyone who believes that. We went pretty deep on the many ways the Dechert Report is inadequate and even unprofessional. Among them: it provides little-to-no evidence to support its conclusions, it fails to address key questions, and it was created by a man named Andrew Levander who, in a vivid James Patterson story, has history with Epstein going back to the 1980s.
William D. Cohan published a story in Vanity Fair which quoted a lawyer calling the Dechert Report a “whitewash.” Cohan wrote: “Nice try, Leon. You must think we are pretty stupid, gullible, or insane to believe the tale you spun to Dechert, the Wall Street law firm, about your decades-long involvement with Jeffrey Epstein, the late convicted pedophile. Well I, for one, am not buying it, not any of it, and neither are many other smart Wall Streeters.”
Am I wrong to take the appearance of a coverup as a signal that the truth is … worth covering up? If it’s worth putting forth a high-class cover story, the real story is likely a humdinger, right?
What is that story?
I don’t know. But it seems to start at Credit Lyonnais, or before. Robert Maxwell tangled with intelligence and then died under mysterious circumstances before his daughter Ghislaine became Epstein’s best-known associate. Eli Black tangled with intelligence and then died under mysterious circumstances before his son Leon became Epstein’s key source of cash (while his firm Apollo Global became the NBA’s most important source of cash).
Trump just nominated Leon Black’s son for a key role overseeing U.S. investments in the developing world. Whatever it is, it’s far-reaching and about a lot more than sex.
Thank you for reading TrueHoop!
Heuer alert! Excellent read.
interesting stuff but also, offloading Epstein to Russian intelligence feels like exactly what US intelligence (and israeli) would do. I hear the voice of jon lovitz as the SNL pathological liar here....'yeah Russian intelligence..,.yeah yeah, thats it'. Air Lolita made countless trips to the island epstein suddenly owned, and those trips included a LOT of people who want that history erased. Ehud Barak visited epstein at his mansion in manhatten THIRTY SIX times. John Casablancas introduced trump to his 'wife'. And Casablancas was part of the epstein party circuit. Robert Maxwell was Mossad. Thats well known and verifiable. He had a state funeral in Israel. There is a t-shirt making the rounds with the the words MOSSAD across the chest and under that is 'its never an accident'. Arms deals go on irrespective of honey trap operations. Im not sure one is predicated upon the other in either direction.