There are still mysteries around the money manager’s sexual habits but perhaps not enough people are asking the question: is Epstein running a Ponzi scheme?

…[The] 2002 New York magazine piece on Epstein raises several red flags.

…This kind of secrecy and exclusivity, viewed in the light of Bernie Madoff, is at the very least suspicious.

Another red flag is the way the money is managed. In 2002, Epstein’s company reportedly had around 150 employees …but these employees are all said to be “administrative.” He reportedly employs no analysts, portfolio managers or traders. All of the investment decisions are said to be made by Epstein himself.

…Is there any other multi-billion-dollar financial company run this way?

[Hint: No.]

…Epstein reportedly only accepts investments of $1 billion or more. There aren’t many people out there who can place $1 billion with anyone, much less entrust it to a single individual. If this is a scam, we expect that Epstein lowers the billion bar for “friends” who are permitted to place much smaller sums with him.

[Or the high buy-in keeps intrusive eyes away because of the nature of it being out of reach for even those who are very, very rich. …Not to mention the mystique it creates.]

…Yet another red flag is that Epstein takes absolute control of the money, leaving investors with no options about how it is invested. According to rumors, he gives them little information about what he does with it.

…There are no SEC filings disclosing Epstein’s holdings. Not one. It’s hard to see how he could be managing billions without ever tripping a disclosure trigger, unless he avoids the stock market altogether and only invests in private deals. This is another red flag.

…But given the red flags and the fact that he reportedly controls billions of dollars, isn’t it something worth looking into?

Is Jeff Epstein Also Running A Ponzi Scheme? – Business Insider

hmmmm

…No one really seems to know him or his history completely or what his arsenal actually consists of. He has carefully engineered [it that way.] People know snippets, but few know the whole.

“…He’s a classic iceberg. What you see is not what you get.”

…Under the mentorship of both Greenberg and current Bear Stearns C.E.O. James Cayne, he did well enough to become a limited partner—a rung beneath full partner. He abruptly departed in 1981 because, he has said, he wanted to run his own business.

…Several of Epstein’s Bear Stearns contemporaries recall that Epstein left the company very suddenly. Within the company there were rumors also that he was involved in a technical infringement, and it was thought that the executive committee asked that he resign.

…”Jeffrey said specifically, ‘I don’t want to work for anybody else. I want to work for myself.’” Yet, this is not the story that Epstein told to the S.E.C. in 1981 and to lawyers in a 1989 deposition involving a civil business case in Philadelphia.

In 1981 the S.E.C. ..took Epstein’s testimony …in part of what became a protracted case about insider trading.

…An investment from Stroll of $450,000, which Epstein put into oil. In 1984 Stroll asked for his money back; four years later he had received only $10,000. Stroll lost the suit, after Epstein claimed in court, among other things, that the check for $10,000 was for a horse he’d bought from Stroll.

Though he has claimed that he managed money for billionaires only, in a 1989 deposition he testified that he spent 80 percent of his time assisting people recover stolen money from fraudulent brokers and lawyers.

One friend recalls that when he took Canadian heiress Wendy Belzberg on a date he hired a Rolls-Royce especially for the occasion. (Epstein has claimed he owned it.)

Some friends remember that in the late 80s Epstein would offer to upgrade the airline tickets of good friends by affixing first-class stickers; the only problem was that the stickers turned out to be unofficial. Sometimes the technique worked, but other times it didn’t, and the unwitting recipients found themselves exiled to coach. (Epstein has claimed that he paid for the upgrades, and had no knowledge of the stickers.)

[Snicker… Oh, come on!]

…According to him, the flat fees he receives from his clients, combined with his skill at playing the currency markets “with very large sums of money,” have afforded him the lifestyle he enjoys today.

…Some of the businessmen who dine with him at his home …seem not all that clear as to what he actually does to earn his millions. …“The trading desks don’t seem to know him. It’s unusual for animals that big not to leave any footprints in the snow,” says a high-level investment manager.

…Since Leslie Wexner appeared in his life—Epstein has said this was in 1986; others say it was in 1989, at the earliest

[This story has a lot of holes and squishy spots, and Wexner’s a big one.]

Wexner, through a trust, bought the town house in which Epstein now lives for a reported $13.2 million in 1989. …Public documents suggest that the house is still owned by the trust that bought it, but Epstein has said that he now owns the house.

…The entrance hall is decorated not with paintings but with row upon row of individually framed eyeballs; these, the owner tells people with relish, 

[and nothing to back it up but his say-so]

…were imported from England, where they were made for injured soldiers. Next comes a marble foyer, which does have a painting, in the manner of Jean Dubuffet … but the host coyly refuses to tell visitors who painted it.

[It strikes the peanut gallery that if a conman was going to pass off a knock-off, being coy would be a good way to do it.]

…the house is curiously impersonal, the statement of someone who wants to be known for the scale of his possessions.

[no shit?]

… On the desk, a paperback copy of the Marquis de Sade’s The Misfortunes of Virtue was recently spotted.

[well, duh!]

…stuffed black poodle, standing atop the grand piano. “No decorator would ever tell you to do that,” Epstein brags to visitors. “But I want people to think what it means to stuff a dog.”

[Seriously? Stuff a dog? Come on! …And no, it actually doesn’t sound like he’s referring to getting the last word at all.]

His real mentor, it might seem, was not Leslie Wexner but Steven Jude Hoffenberg, 57, who …is currently incarcerated in the Federal Medical Center in Devens, Massachusetts, serving a 20-year sentence for bilking investors out of more than $450 million in one of the largest Ponzi schemes in American history.

[OK, now we’re getting somewhere…]

…“He ‘inserted’ himself into the construction process of Leslie Wexner’s yacht…. That resulted in litigation down the road between Mr. Wexner and the shipyard that eventually built the vessel.” ..Evidently, Epstein stalled on paying Dickerson and Reily for its work. “It’s probably once or twice in my legal career that I’ve had to sue a client for payment of services that he’d requested and we’d performed … without issue on the performance,” says Forsberg. In the end the matter was settled, but Epstein claims he now has no recollection of it.

[How very Ponzi of him.]

 …Citibank is suing Epstein for defaulting on loans from its private-banking arm for $20 million. Epstein claims that Citibank “fraudulently induced” him into borrowing the money for investments. Citibank disputes this charge.

 

…Epstein’s financial statement for 1988, in which he claimed to be worth $20 million. He listed that he owned $7 million in securities, $1 million in cash, zero in residential property (although he told sources that he had already bought the home in Palm Beach), and $11 million in other assets, including his investment in Riddell. A co-investor in Riddell says: “The company had been bought with a huge amount of debt, and it wasn’t public, so it was meaningless to attach a figure like that to it … the price it cost was about $1.2 million.” The co-investors bought out Epstein’s share in Riddell in 1995 for approximately $3 million. At that time, when Epstein was asked, as a routine matter, to sign a paper guaranteeing he had access to a few million dollars in case of any subsequent disputes over the sale price, Wexner signed for him. Epstein has explained that this was because the co-investors wanted an indemnity against being sued by Wexner. One of the investors calls this “bullshit.”

The Talented Mr. Epstein | Vanity Fair

Bullshit indeed. [All emphasis: mine]

In 1982, according to those who know Epstein, he set up his own shop, J. Epstein and Co., which remains his core business today. The premise behind it was simple: Epstein would manage the individual and family fortunes of clients with $1 billion or more. Which is where the mystery deepens. Because according to the lore, Epstein, in 1982, immediately began collecting clients. There were no road shows, no whiz-bang marketing demos — just this: Jeff Epstein was open for business for those with $1 billion–plus.

His firm would be different, too. He was not here just to offer investment advice; he saw himself as the financial architect of every aspect of his client’s wealth — from investments to philanthropy to tax planning to security to assuaging the guilt and burdens that large sums of inherited wealth can bring on. “I want people to understand the power, the responsibility, and the burden of their money,” he said to a colleague at the time.

As a teacher at Dalton, he had witnessed firsthand the troubled attitudes of some of the poor little rich kids under his charge; at Bear, he had come to the realization that, counterintuitively, the more money you had, the more anxious you became. For a middle-class kid from Brooklyn, it just didn’t make sense.

From the get-go, his business was successful. But the conditions for investing with Epstein were steep: He would take total control of the billion dollars, charge a flat fee, and assume power of attorney to do whatever he thought was necessary to advance his client’s financial cause. And he remained true to the $1 billion entry fee. According to people who know him, if you were worth $700 million and felt the need for the services of Epstein and Co., you would receive a not-so-polite no-thank-you from Epstein.

It’s nice work if you can get it. Epstein runs a lean operation, and those close to him say that his actual staff — based here in Manhattan at the Villard House (home to Le Cirque); New Albany, Ohio; and St. Thomas, where he reincorporated his company seven years ago (now called Financial Trust Co.) — numbers around 150 and is purely administrative. When it comes to putting these billions to work in the markets, it is Epstein himself making all the investment calls — there are no analysts or portfolio managers, just twenty accountants to keep the wheels greased and a bevy of assistants — many of them conspicuously attractive young women — to organize his hectic life. So assuming, conservatively, a fee of .5 percent (he takes no commissions or percentages) on $15 billion, that makes for a management fee of $75 million a year straight into Jeff Epstein’s pocket. Nice work indeed.

….It’s a weird relationship,” says another Wall Streeter who knows Epstein. “It’s just not typical for someone of such enormous wealth to all of a sudden give his money to some guy most people have never heard of.” The Wexner-Epstein relationship is indeed a multifaceted one.

Given the secrecy that envelops Epstein’s client list, some have speculated that Wexner is the primary source of Epstein’s lavish life — but friends leap to his defense. “Let me tell you: Jeffrey Epstein has other clients besides Wexner. I know because some of them are my clients,” says noted m&a lawyer Dennis Block of Cadwalader, Wickersham & Taft. “I sent him a $500 million client a few years ago and he wouldn’t take him. Said the account was too small. Both the client and I were amazed. But that’s Jeffrey.”

…Again, facts are hard to come by. [Speaking of which, where did the author get all of this info???] A working day for Epstein starts at 5 a.m., when he gets up and scours the world markets on his Bloomberg screen — each of his houses, in New York, St. Thomas, Palm Beach, and New Mexico, as well as the 727, is equipped with the necessary hardware for him to wake up, roll out of bed, and start trading. He will put some calls in to his private banker at JPMorgan to get a reading as to how wealthy investors — the best gauge of market sentiment, he believes — are reacting to the market’s movements. Then he will call currency traders in Europe. On a given day, he will spend ten hours or so on the phone — after all, he is running $15 billion essentially by himself.

Strangely enough, given his scientific obsessions, he is a computer-phobe and does not use e-mail. “I like to hear voices and see faces when I interact,” he has said.

…Given the huge sums he has to invest, he focuses on assets with extremely high liquidity, like currencies — though he dabbles in commodities and real estate as well. Those who know him say he is an impulsive, quick-to-change-his-mind trader, still governed by Ace Greenberg’s trader’s maxim: If the stock is down 10 percent, sell it. He has been on the short side of the Brazilian real, and those close to him say bets there have paid off in spades. He recently took a long position on the euro before its rebound on the basis that Europeans were too proud to see their currency sink any lower against the dollar. His next targets: an across-the-board short of the German stock exchange and a possible attack on the Hong Kong dollar peg in light of the recent disclosure of North Korea’s nuclear-weapons program.

Jeffrey Epstein: International Moneyman of Mystery

The fawning him in this article is a hoot viewed through the lens of 20/20 hindsight. Interesting (and apparently unsubstantiated) details about how Epstein made his money is interesting though. A contrived fairy tale, with glimmeringly romantic details which simply do not add up.

Wexner just gave him the largest residence in NYC?

Those who know him? Like who? The PR stunt folks who delivered these details to the author for this story?

Conveniently there is no paper trail or email to support any of these fanciful notions of an investment wunderkind?

Come on!