The Strange World of Jeffrey Epstein

The function was allegedly held at Branson's exclusive Kensington Roof Gardens, tickets on sale for a specified sum and donated items auctioned.  All proceeds towards the Find Madeleine Co. Ltd.

All well and good, nothing to say it didn't go ahead according plan but the aftermath was a bit of a damp squib.  No photographic evidence of the star-studded attendance, no photographic evidence of the auction in action, no evidence of a resounding success one would expect from a McCann oriented initiative.

Instead the observer is offered a few shots of shabby entrance, which frankly could be anywhere and pictures of a couple of z-list celebrities to enhance the event..

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Have I missed someone?

Knowing the McCanns penchant for celebrity status, I would expect to see something really spectacular.

A non-event methinks.

Throw away comment about old friendship with Prince Andrew right at the end of the Mail article.

Lots of photos in the article, but no mention or sign of the photo of him with his arm around Virginia Roberts.

Verdi:

'Instead the observer is offered a few shots of shabby entrance, which frankly could be anywhere and pictures of a couple of z-list celebrities to enhance the event.'


Clearly the entrance & no reason to suppose the event was a sham even if not that successful.


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Verdi wrote:

On the subject of  the knighted blighted Branson,  he - or his staff at his direction, gave Gerald McCann and Justine McGuinness a free passage to the USA onboard Virgin Atlantic in July 2008.  What's a couple of freebies to a billionaire?

Surely JULY 2007 - when he spent 5 days with Ernie Allen of ICMEC and NCMEC

I hope that they don't find Epstein has committed suicide...…..with three bullets in his head 

Verdi wrote:The function was allegedly held at Branson's exclusive Kensington Roof Gardens, tickets on sale for a specified sum and donated items auctioned.  All proceeds towards the Find Madeleine Co. Ltd.

All well and good, nothing to say it didn't go ahead according plan but the aftermath was a bit of a damp squib.  No photographic evidence of the star-studded attendance, no photographic evidence of the auction in action, no evidence of a resounding success one would expect from a McCann oriented initiative.

Instead the observer is offered a few shots of shabby entrance, which frankly could be anywhere and pictures of a couple of z-list celebrities to enhance the event..

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Have I missed someone?

Knowing the McCanns penchant for celebrity status, I would expect to see something really spectacular.

A non-event methinks.

Far from it [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.], because...

...I was actually there that cold January night, with my camera, to witness what went on.

I saw and photographed some of the many guests as they arrived, A-list, B-list and C-list celebs. David (Lord) Steel - whose party sheltered, inter alia, paedophiles Sir Cyril Smith and Sir Clement Freud - and his wife were there.

I placed myself behind one or two photographers, one of whom stood on a little yellow stand with the words 'Ian West' written on it. Ian West was a Norfolk man who went under the name 'muratfan' and used social media to publish all manner of really awful libels about me.

Clarence Mitchell was standing astride the entrance and in the end caught sight of me and eyeballed me. Nothing he could do about my presence there though.

Not everything printed by the press is rubbish [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]  

Tony Bennett wrote:

Verdi wrote:

On the subject of  the knighted blighted Branson,  he - or his staff at his direction, gave Gerald McCann and Justine McGuinness a free passage to the USA onboard Virgin Atlantic in July 2008.  What's a couple of freebies to a billionaire?

Surely JULY 2007 - when he spent 5 days with Ernie Allen of ICMEC and NCMEC

Yes sorry, that should be July 2007.

Keyboard malfunction.

Here's the little yellow 'muratfan' stool on this link:
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Sorry about the two lines of yellow text - I've been locked out of my blog and can't change it.

TonyBennett wrote:Not everything printed by the press is rubbish [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]

I'm not sure what that comment is supposed to mean .

My intended point was the absence of press coverage of the event, not something I would expect from team McCann who like to turn everything they touch into bullion. A splash across the morning headlines would be more in-keeping with their usual publicity stunts - indeed, there was more coverage of the launch of chinese lanterns across the nation and Europe, than the alleged star studded event.

I didn't include Lord David Steel's image along with the rest because I couldn't. I've now found this which isn't encrypted..

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I will also include the names of the line-up posted last night, for good measure..

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Gerry McCann, Martin Houghton-Brown, Chief Executive Missing People, Kate McCann and Francis Herbert, Secretary General, Missing Children Europe

The others pictured last night are Gloria Hunniford, Fiona Phillips and Paul Bowles.

According to press reports, the comedian Jack Dee was in attendance along with Nicky Campbell of Radio5.

Very lack lustre.

Jill Havern wrote:Here's the little yellow 'muratfan' stool on this link:
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Sorry about the two lines of yellow text - I've been locked out of my blog and can't change it.

Jill,

Thank you for the notes from Twitter above - VERY interesting if Wikipedia is being amended to suit Jeffrey Epstein and all his top-level 'contacts'. I think this story has a long way to run.

And yes, I couldn't find my photos from 2010, so thanks for providing the link. So Ian West/'muratfan' was fascinated enough with the McCanns to be there. Who is Ian West, really, and what is his connection with the McCanns. Is he another 'Nigel Nessling'? 

But SEE how close the links are.

McCanns to Richard Branson - ONE LINK. He puts on a special fund-raising do for the McCanns on the 1000th day that Madeleine had been reported missing. 1004 days since her actual disappearance? The event bolstered the abduction narrative, generated valuable new funds for the titanic legal struggle against Amaral, and drew together about 250 of the 'great and the good'.

Richard Branson to Jeffrey Epstein - ONE LINK. Very close friends. Both with islands a long way from prying eyes.

Richard Branson to Ernie Allen of ICMEC and NCMEC - ONE LINK - seen together (also with Branson's wife) on a photo I showed on the 'Podestas and McCanns - is there a connection?' thread. 

Richard Branson to childrens' charities connected to the McCanns.

And so it goes on...

How many believe that Epstein will end up in jail? I don't, for one moment. This goes too far up the elite scale, and he's going to walk. I hope that I am wrong, and he'll get the justice he deserves, but I am not going to hold my breath!

I have been reading Amazing Polly, on YouTube; she is very well informed about the Epstein business. It is, as sallypelt comments, far up the elite - and squillionaire - scale.

"Marketing ploy", if you please.

Thanks to CaKeLoveR for the ‘Amazing Polly’ link:
 
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If you’ve got half hour to spare some interesting stuff on here, no idea how accurate, but some Epstein background & also links to people involved in the recent NXIVM sex cult trial, plus other dubious connections.

From the limited evidence on record, it's my belief that Gerry McCann's trip to the USA in July 2007, was generated by Lady Catherine Meyer, in liaison with the wife of Tony Blair, Cherie Blair.

Kate McCann, according to her book (if it's to be believed), received a phone call from Cherie Blair on Tuesday 8th May 2007 thus..

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Under the circumstances, it's quite understandable that Gerry McCann, through the auspices of Lady Catherine Meyer,  would have met with Ernie Allen - after all, ostensibly that was the reason for the trip.  I therefore can't see any reason to presume some nefarious connection between Gerry McCann and Ernie Allen - certainly nothing to suggest a friendship, which I've seen suggested.

Gerry McCann comes across to me as an opportunist, a career and social climber who will stop at nothing to achieve his objectives.  I imagine him luxuriating in the opportunity for photo-shoots [sic] with high profile personalities and names with a handle.

In fairness, not that I think Gerry McCann warrants fairness, how would he (or anyone else for that matter) be aware of Ernie Allen's history or future shenanigans? This is too far fetched for my liking.

I believe the trip to the USA was an opportunity for him to showcase his persona.  He was accompanied by Justine Guinness,  I really can't believe she was part of a global child sex, paedophile, child trafficking conspiracy.

Keep it simple or there is a danger of ridicule - understandably in my view.

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You talking to me .... ?

New victims come forward as Epstein asks to be released from jail to his Manhattan mansion
 
By Julie K. Brownand David SmileyJuly 11, 2019 05:21 PM, Updated 8 hours 55 minutes ago
 
At least a dozen new victims have come forward to claim they were sexually abused by Jeffrey Epstein even as the multimillionaire money manager tries to convince a federal judge to allow him to await a sex trafficking trial from the comfort of the same $77 million Manhattan mansion where he’s accused of luring teenage girls into unwanted sex acts.
Following Epstein’s arrest Saturday in New Jersey, four women have reached out to New York lawyer David Boies, and at least 10 other women have approached other lawyers who have represented dozens of Epstein’s alleged victims in the past.
Jack Scarola, a Palm Beach attorney, said at least five women, all of whom were minors at the time of their alleged encounters with Epstein, have reached out to either him or Fort Lauderdale lawyer Brad Edwards.
“The people we are speaking to are underage victims in Florida and in New York. They are not individuals whose claims have previously been part of any law enforcement investigation,’’ Scarola said.
The new accusers are surfacing as Epstein’s attorneys argue their client is being tried on sex trafficking and conspiracy charges that for the most part were resolved years ago in Palm Beach. His legal team filed a motion Thursday for pre-trial release arguing that Epstein has maintained a “spotless” record since prosecutors in South Florida set aside a federal sex trafficking investigation a decade ago and allowed him to plead guilty to lesser state charges.
Epstein’s attorneys want Senior U.S. District Judge Richard M. Berman to free Epstein from his cell at the Metropolitan Correctional Center in Lower Manhattan and allow him to await trial from the $77 million Upper East Side mansion where prosecutors say he abused dozens of girls from 2002 through 2005.
Epstein, ahead of a Monday bond hearing, has offered to waive extradition rights and put up his Manhattan home and private jet as collateral. He also said he would consent to GPS monitoring, ground his jet, “demobilize” all his cars in New York and have trustees live in his home. And his brother, Mark Epstein, offered to put up his West Palm Beach home.
 
But New York prosecutors — who say they found “an extraordinary volume of photographs of nude and partially nude young women and girls” while executing a search warrant at his Manhattan residence last weekend — have already argued that he’s likely to either flee the country or add to what they say are dozens of victims as young as 14 from New York to Palm Beach.
“I don’t care if he gives up his license and his jet, he still has the wherewithal to take off any time,” said Spencer Kuvin, a Palm Beach attorney who represents three Epstein accusers. “Think about it — if he was a plumber in Queens, do you think the judge would say ‘Yeah, let’s give him an ankle bracelet and send him home?’ ’’
 
BEHIND OUR REPORTING
Local Reporting Makes a Difference
In her year-long investigation of Palm Beach multimillionaire Jeffrey Epstein, Miami Herald reporter Julie Brown tracked down more than 60 women who said they were victims of abuse and revealed the full story behind the sweetheart deal cut by Epstein’s powerhouse legal team.
In the seven months since the Herald published “Perversion of Justice,”  a federal judge ruled the non-prosecution agreement brokered by then South Florida U.S. Attorney Alexander Acosta was illegal, and last week Epstein was arrested on sex trafficking charges in New York state.  
Investigative journalism makes a difference. Your support makes it possible. 
 
 
The hearing over whether to release Epstein, 66, will be the first in what should be a lengthy and highly watched trial.
Prosecutors say they have information that Epstein recruited and paid dozens of underage girls in the early 2000s to give him massages that became sexual assaults in his Manhattan and Palm Beach homes. The Miami Herald’s investigative series last November, [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.], detailed how Epstein allegedly paid girls more if they recruited other girls to come to his homes, creating a sexual pyramid scheme.
 
But Epstein’s attorneys argued in their motion Thursday that Geoffrey S. Berman, the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, was attempting to illegally and unconstitutionally prosecute their client over 14-year-old allegations that have already been resolved in South Florida.
 
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Epstein signed a non-prosecution agreement a dozen years ago with the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of Florida after federal agents identified three dozen girls who were allegedly victimized by Epstein at his mansion in Palm Beach. He was allowed to plead guilty to two lesser prostitution-related charges and serve 13 months in the Palm Beach County jail, during which his valet picked him up six days a week and drove him to his West Palm Beach office for work release. He registered as a sex offender and paid restitution to the identified victims, but avoided a prepared 53-page federal indictment.
“The [non-prosecution agreement] immunized Mr. Epstein from five distinct potential federal charges that may have been committed by Epstein ... from in or around 2001 through in or around 2007,” Epstein’s attorneys wrote Thursday.
They said language in the agreement — signed into place under President Donald Trump’s current labor secretary, Alexander Acosta, when he was U.S. attorney for Southern Florida — clarifies that the terms of the deal apply “globally” to a yearlong federal investigation in South Florida, and therefore prevents federal prosecutors in New York from pursuing the same allegations.
Prosecutors haven’t responded in writing to the motion, at least not yet. But U.S. Attorney Berman, who has no relation to the judge, already argued in a letter to the magistrate who oversaw Epstein’s arraignment this week that New York case law has already deemed that his office is not bound by the terms of the South Florida agreement.
“It is well settled in the Second Circuit that ‘a plea agreement in one U.S. Attorney’s office does not, unless otherwise stated bind another,’ ” Berman wrote Monday, adding that the agreement expressly states that it pertains exclusively to prosecutors in South Florida.
Trump: ‘We’ll have a look’ at Acosta’s Epstein link
President Trump said he'll look "very closely" at Labor Secretary Alex Acosta's handling of a sex trafficking case involving Jeffrey Epstein. Acosta was a federal prosecutor in South Florida when he was involved in a 2008 plea deal.
By Associated Press
Prosecutors and victims’ lawyers also believe that, given Epstein’s previous effort to intimidate victims and their families, it’s critical that the judge keep him behind bars and not grant him bail. He is facing up to 45 years in prison.
During the 2006-2007 probe in South Florida, federal agents considered charging Epstein with witness tampering because he used some of his employees to try to intimidate victims so that they wouldn’t cooperate with police, court records reviewed by the Herald show.
In one instance, a victim’s father told Palm Beach police that he had been followed by someone and forced off the road. He wrote down the car’s license plate number and police traced it to a private investigation company that had been hired by Epstein’s legal team, the police report about the incident said.
Epstein’s investigators also followed the then-Palm Beach police chief, Michael Reiter, and the lead detective in the case, Joe Recarey. Recarey said he was so concerned about the aggressive tactics Epstein was using that he would often switch vehicles in an attempt to throw them off.
“At some point it became like a cat-and-mouse game. I would stop at a red light and go. I knew they were there, and they knew I knew they were there. I was concerned about my kids because I didn’t know if it was someone that they hired just out of prison that would hurt me or my family,’’ Recarey told the Herald as part of its series on the case.
Recarey, who died shortly after he was interviewed by the Herald, said the victims, who were as young as 13, were scared to death of Epstein, and even more so because of the private investigators and defense lawyers who dug into every dark corner of their lives, and the lives of their brothers, sisters, parents and boyfriends.
“Jeffrey Epstein presents a very significant flight risk and I think that his proven pattern of intimidation of witnesses in the past is a strong indication there is reason to fear he would engage in the same kind of conduct again, particularly since he is facing now what amounts to life in prison,’’ Scarola said.
Scarola, though, thinks victims may have been comforted by the public appeal issued Monday by the FBI and U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York, asking for more victims and witnesses to come forward (1-800-CALL-FBI). It’s not clear how many, if any, have responded to his plea, but Scarola said the message was clear that victims would be treated better in New York than they were in South Florida, where Epstein’s plea deal with federal prosecutors was kept secret from his victims.
A Miami federal judge recently ruled that prosecutors broke a law to protect victims’ rights in not alerting them to Epstein’s plea deal.
“I believe that there was a fairly effective message that was delivered by New York authorities that victims need not fear that they will be treated in the same way that victims had been treated in South Florida,’’ Scarola said.
Still, Kuvin, the Palm Beach attorney, said his clients are not convinced that New York federal prosecutors will be able to make their case against Epstein stick. One of them is cooperating with SDNY, he said, but the others are skeptical.
“They are ecstatic that he [Epstein] has been arrested but skeptical that anything is going to happen because of what they’ve been through before. They are thinking ‘prove it, I won’t believe it until I see it.’ ’’ Kuvin said.
 
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Acosta has now been embarrassed enough to resign. His attempt on Wednesday  to shift the blame away from himself failed miserably.
 
 
Jeffrey Epstein: how US media – with one star exception – whitewashed the story
 
[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]  Sat 13 Jul 2019 06.00 BST
 
The Miami Herald exposed a vast criminal network and a government cover-up – but why the silence elsewhere?
 
When [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]approached a former police chief of Palm Beach, Florida, in 2017, hoping to get him to open up about his investigation of the child sex crimes for which the wealthy financier Jeffrey Epstein had been fleetingly jailed a decade earlier, she was surprised by how unresponsive he was.
 
Michael Reiter told Brown he had been down this road many times and was sick of it. As Brown [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]in a WNYC interview last month, Reiter said he had talked to many reporters and told them precisely where to find damning evidence against Epstein. But nothing ever came of it.
“He was convinced that a lot of media had squashed the story and he was fed up,” she said.
 
Reiter warned Brown what would happen were she to continue digging: “Somebody’s going to call your publisher and the next thing you know you are going to be assigned to the obituaries department.”
 
Brown did not heed his warning. She flung herself at the investigation and eventually persuaded Reiter to go on record. Her resulting, award-winning [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]last November exposed a vast operation in which 80 potential victims were identified, some as young as 13 and 14 at the time of the alleged abuse. She persuaded eight to tell their stories.
 
Somebody’s going to call your publisher and the next thing you know you are going to be assigned to obituaries
 
Brown also exposed a government cover-up in which Epstein got away with an exceptionally light sentence that saw him serve only 13 months in jail. She discovered that a “non-prosecution agreement” had been negotiated secretly in 2008 by the then top federal prosecutor in Miami, Alexander Acosta, that gave Epstein and his co-conspirators immunity from federal prosecution.
 
In 2017, Acosta was appointed by Donald Trump as labor secretary, a post that ironically is responsible for [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.].
 
The media’s handling – or mishandling – of the Epstein affair is a story of extremes.
It is a heartwarming success story, of how one intrepid reporter pierced the veil of secrecy and found the truth. Brown’s coverage has had consequences: Epstein was [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]last Saturday and indicted on new sex trafficking charges by New York prosecutors who praised her work. In the fallout, Acosta was [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.].
 
But there is also a less cheerful narrative. Why did the police chief’s appeals to the media fall on deaf ears? Why would so many years pass before the shocking extent of Epstein’s crimes and Acosta’s sweetheart deal were revealed by a local newspaper with severely limited resources?
 
In fact, the two extremes of the story are directly linked: Brown told WNYC one of the reasons she began looking into Epstein was that she was puzzled about the public silence surrounding him.
“There really was nobody pursuing this at all,” she said. “That was one of the things that intrigued me about this case. Why isn’t anyone standing up and screaming?”
 
‘I believe him … I’m Canadian’
 
That silence stretches all the way back to 2003, when Vicky Ward wrote a [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]for Vanity Fair. [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.], she was introduced to a mother and her two daughters from Phoenix, Arizona who alleged Epstein assaulted the girls, one of whom was 16 at the time.
Ward told the Guardian she spent a lot of time with the family discussing whether they should go public.
“They were frightened,” she said. “The mother told me that every night when she walked the dog she looked over her shoulder.”
I asked the women what they were going to do and they said they would lick their wounds and retreat
 
Eventually, the women agreed to go on the record, Ward said, and when Epstein was told about their accounts he went “berserk”. Epstein had already threatened to get a witch doctor to put a curse on Ward’s unborn children – she was pregnant with twins at the time – and now he campaigned to stop Vanity Fair publishing the allegations, even turning up unannounced at the office of the then editor, Graydon Carter.
 
Publication was delayed, then Ward was told the paragraphs on the abuse of the women had been deleted.
“I was extraordinarily upset,” she said. “I asked the women what they were going to do and they said they would lick their wounds and retreat, as this was exactly what they feared would happen.”
 
Ward believes Carter caved under Epstein’s pressure. She recalls confronting the editor about the excised paragraphs, and said she has a note in her archives that has Carter saying: “I believe him … I’m Canadian.”
 
Carter remembers events very differently. In his account there were legal issues around the women’s stories that prevented publication, most significantly that the women themselves were unwilling to go on the record.
In a statement to the Guardian, Carter said: “I respected the work Vicky Ward did at Vanity Fair but unfortunately her recounting of the facts around the Epstein article is inaccurate. There were not three sources on the record and therefore this aspect of the story did not meet our legal and editorial standards.”
Ward says she has documentary evidence that shows the women were emphatically prepared to go public, including fact-checkers’ and legal emails to Epstein from Vanity Fair asking for his response to the allegations made by both sisters.
The Guardian spoke to the mother of the girls, Janice Farmer. She said all three did speak to Ward in 2003 and told her on the record what Epstein had done, including allegations he had invited her youngest daughter, then 16, to his New Mexico ranch and molested her.
“I was hesitant to go public because I was worried about the safety of my daughters – by that point I didn’t trust Jeffrey at all,” Farmer said. “But I did want him to be exposed.”
She said she recalls vividly agreeing with Ward along with her daughters for their stories to be told in her Vanity Fair profile. She also said she recalls vividly her reaction when she learnt that part of the piece was not to be published.
“I felt angry,” she said. “I felt like Jeffrey’s money, power, connections – whatever – had been put into play.”
 
My journalism benefited from [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.] as we [started] giving these cases much more scrutiny
 
There is another complicating element to the story. In 2011, after Epstein had gone to jail, Ward wrote a [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]for Vanity Fair. In it she used language that was strikingly uncritical of Epstein, referring to him as “not without humor” and praising him for being highly knowledgable.
She referenced Epstein’s sex crimes as “sexual peccadilloes” and referred to her 2003 Vanity Fair profile of him, saying it had alluded to his sexual relationships with young women but “didn’t really go there, focusing instead on … how Jeffrey made his money”.
The piece went on: “This is not to say I didn’t hear stories about the girls. I did. But, not knowing quite whom to believe, I concentrated on the intriguing financial mystery instead.”
The Guardian put this blogpost to Ward and she said she regretted writing it. At that point, she said, the victims she had interviewed were not willing to talk. But nonetheless, “this blog did not need to be written – here I am toeing the Vanity Fair party line”.
 
‘My journalism benefited from [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]’
Fast forward to 2007, when Acosta reached his bizarrely lenient plea deal with Epstein. By then, investigators had identified 35 potential victims who said they had been lured into Epstein’s Palm Beach mansion and sexually assaulted.
Yet records obtained by the Miami Herald showed prosecutors led by Acosta actively worked with Epstein’s attorneys to minimize media coverage.
One of Acosta’s prosecutors wrote in an email to Jay Lefkowitz, an Epstein lawyer: “On an ‘avoid the press’ note … I can file the charge in district court in Miami which will hopefully cut the press coverage significantly. Do you want to check that out?”
That Acosta felt that he had to resign on Friday was an indication that the collective failure of US media to grapple with a story of serial sex trafficking and abuse that had been hiding in plain sight for years no longer holds true. In the wake of Brown’s exemplary reporting, the rest of the American media has fallen in line. Acosta paid the price.
That may in part be thanks to the [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.] movement that had not erupted when Brown began her investigation but did draw attention to her work when it was published. As she told [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]after Epstein’s arrest last weekend: “My journalism benefited from [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.] as we [started] giving these cases much more scrutiny.”
Mary Angela Bock, associate professor in the University of Texas at Austin’s school of journalism, said [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.] had dented the prevailing patriarchy that has existed in newsrooms for decades and that had led to sexual crimes being overlooked as merely “the way of the world”.
“[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.] has led to greater awareness among journalists that this is not OK,” she said. “This is not ‘boys being boys’. This is rape and sexual exploitation of children.”
 
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The Talented Mr. Epstein

Lately, Jeffrey Epstein’s high-flying style has been drawing oohs and aahs: the bachelor financier lives in New York’s largest private residence, claims to take only billionaires as clients, and flies celebrities including Bill Clinton and Kevin Spacey on his Boeing 727. But pierce his air of mystery and the picture changes. Vicky Ward explores Epstein’s investment career, his ties to retail magnate Leslie Wexner, and his complicated past.

By Vicky Ward

On Manhattan’s Upper East Side, home to some of the most expensive real estate on earth, exists the crown jewel of the city’s residential town houses. With its 15-foot-high oak door, huge arched windows, and nine floors, it sits on—or, rather, commands—the block of 71st Street between Fifth and Madison Avenues. Almost ludicrously out of proportion with its four- and five-story neighbors, it seems more like an institution than a house. This is perhaps not surprising—until 1989 it was the Birch Wathen private school. Now it is said to be Manhattan’s largest private residence.

Inside, amid the flurry of menservants attired in sober black suits and pristine white gloves, you feel you have stumbled into someone’s private Xanadu. This is no mere rich person’s home, but a high-walled, eclectic, imperious fantasy that seems to have no boundaries.

The entrance hall is decorated not with paintings but with row upon row of individually framed eyeballs; these, the owner tells people with relish, 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. In any case, guests are like pygmies next to the nearby twice-life-size sculpture of a naked African warrior.

Despite its eccentricity the house is curiously impersonal, the statement of someone who wants to be known for the scale of his possessions. Its occupant, financier Jeffrey Epstein, 50, admits to friends that he likes it when people think of him this way. A good-looking man, resembling Ralph Lauren, with thick gray-white hair and a weathered face, he usually dresses in jeans, knit shirts, and loafers. He tells people he bought the house because he knew he “could never live anywhere bigger.” He thinks 51,000 square feet is an appropriately large space for someone like himself, who deals mostly in large concepts—especially large sums of money.

Guests are invited to lunch or dinner at the town house—Epstein usually refers to the former as “tea,” since he likes to eat bite-size morsels and drink copious quantities of Earl Grey. (He does not touch alcohol or tobacco.) Tea is served in the “leather room,” so called because of the cordovan-colored fabric on the walls. The chairs are covered in a leopard print, and on the wall hangs a huge, Oriental fantasy of a woman holding an opium pipe and caressing a snarling lionskin. Under her gaze, plates of finger sandwiches are delivered to Epstein and guests by the menservants in white gloves.

Upstairs, to the right of a spiral staircase, is the “office,” an enormous gallery spanning the width of the house. Strangely, it holds no computer. Computers belong in the “computer room” (a smaller room at the back of the house), Epstein has been known to say. The office features a gilded desk (which Epstein tells people belonged to banker J. P. Morgan), 18th-century black lacquered Portuguese cabinets, and a nine-foot ebony Steinway “D” grand. On the desk, a paperback copy of the Marquis de Sade’s The Misfortunes of Virtue was recently spotted. Covering the floor, Epstein has explained, “is the largest Persian rug you’ll ever see in a private home—so big, it must have come from a mosque.” Amid such splendor, much of which reflects the work of the French decorator Alberto Pinto, who has worked for Jacques Chirac and the royal families of Jordan and Saudi Arabia, there is one particularly startling oddity: a 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.” People can’t help but feel it’s Epstein’s way of saying that he always has the last word.

In addition to the town house, Epstein lives in what is reputed to be the largest private dwelling in New Mexico, on an $18 million, 7,500-acre ranch which he named “Zorro.” “It makes the town house look like a shack,” Epstein has said. He also owns Little St. James, a 70-acre island in the U.S. Virgin Islands, where the main house is currently being renovated by Edward Tuttle, a designer of the Amanresorts. There is also a $6.8 million house in Palm Beach, Florida, and a fleet of aircraft: a Gulfstream IV, a helicopter, and a Boeing 727, replete with trading room, on which Epstein recently flew President Clinton, actors Chris Tucker and Kevin Spacey, supermarket magnate Ron Burkle, Lew Wasserman’s grandson, Casey Wasserman, and a few others, on a mission to explore the problems of AIDS and economic development in Africa.

Epstein is charming, but he doesn’t let the charm slip into his eyes. They are steely and calculating, giving some hint at the steady whir of machinery running behind them. “Let’s play chess,” he said to me, after refusing to give an interview for this article. “You be white. You get the first move.” It was an appropriate metaphor for a man who seems to feel he can win no matter what the advantage of the other side. His advantage is that no one really seems to know him or his history completely or what his arsenal actually consists of. He has carefully engineered it so that he remains one of the few truly baffling mysteries among New York’s moneyed world. People know snippets, but few know the whole.

He’s very enigmatic,” says Rosa Monckton, the former C.E.O. of Tiffany & Co. in the U.K. and a close friend since the early 1980s. “You think you know him and then you peel off another ring of the onion skin and there’s something else extraordinary underneath. He never reveals his hand…. He’s a classic iceberg. What you see is not what you get.”

Even acquaintances sense a curious dichotomy: Yes, he lives like a “modern maharaja,” as Leah Kleman, one of his art dealers, puts it. Yet he is fastidiously, almost obsessively private—he lists himself in the phone book under a pseudonym. He rarely attends society gatherings or weddings or funerals; he considers eating in restaurants like “eating on the subway”—i.e., something he’d never do. There are many women in his life, mostly young, but there is no one of them to whom he has been able to commit. He describes his most public companion of the last decade, Ghislaine Maxwell, 41, the daughter of the late, disgraced media baron Robert Maxwell, as simply his “best friend.” He says she is not on his payroll, but she seems to organize much of his life—recently she was making telephone inquiries to find a California-based yoga instructor for him. (Epstein is still close to his two other long-term girlfriends, Paula Heil Fisher, a former associate of his at the brokerage firm Bear Stearns and now an opera producer, and Eva Andersson Dubin, a doctor and onetime model. He tells people that when a relationship is over the girlfriend “moves up, not down,” to friendship status.)

Some of the businessmen who dine with him at his home—they include newspaper publisher Mort Zuckerman, banker Louis Ranieri, Revlon chairman Ronald Perelman, real-estate tycoon Leon Black, former Microsoft executive Nathan Myhrvold, Tom Pritzker (of Hyatt Hotels), and real-estate personality Donald Trump—sometimes seem not all that clear as to what he actually does to earn his millions. Certainly, you won’t find Epstein’s transactions written about on Bloomberg or talked about in the trading rooms. “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.

Unlike such fund managers as George Soros and Stanley Druckenmiller, whose client lists and stock maneuverings act as their calling cards, Epstein keeps all his deals and clients secret, bar one client: billionaire Leslie Wexner, the respected chairman of Limited Brands. Epstein insists that ever since he left Bear Stearns in 1981 he has managed money only for billionaires—who depend on him for discretion. “I was the only person crazy enough, or arrogant enough, or misplaced enough, to make my limit a billion dollars or more,” he tells people freely. 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.

Why do billionaires choose him as their trustee? Because the problems of the mega-rich, he tells people, are different from yours and mine, and his unique philosophy is central to understanding those problems: “Very few people need any more money when they have a billion dollars. The key is not to have it do harm more than anything else…. You don’t want to lose your money.”

more than anything else…. You don’t want to lose your money.”

He has likened his job to that of an architect—more specifically, one who specializes in remodeling: “I always describe [a billionaire] as someone who started out in a small home and as he became wealthier had add-ons. He added on another addition, he built a room over the garage … until you have a house that is usually a mess…. It’s a large house that has been put together over time where no one could foretell the financial future and their accompanying needs.”

He makes it sound as though his job combines the roles of real-estate agent, accountant, lawyer, money manager, trustee, and confidant. But, as with Jay Gatsby, myths and rumor swirl around Epstein.

Here are some of the hard facts about Epstein—ones that he doesn’t mind people knowing: He grew up middle-class in Brooklyn. His father worked for the city’s parks department. His parents viewed education as “the way out” for him and his younger brother, Mark, now working in real estate. Jeffrey started to play the piano—for which he maintains a passion—at five, and he went to Brooklyn’s Lafayette High School. He was good at mathematics, and in his early 20s he got a job teaching physics and math at Dalton, the elite Manhattan private school. While there he began tutoring the son of Bear Stearns chairman Ace Greenberg and was friendly with a daughter of Greenberg’s. Soon he went to Bear Stearns, where, 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.

Thereafter the details recede into shadow. A few of the handful of current friends who have known him since the early 1980s recall that he used to tell them he was a “bounty hunter,” recovering lost or stolen money for the government or for very rich people. He has a license to carry a firearm. For the last 15 years, he’s been running his business, J. Epstein & Co.

Since Leslie Wexner appeared in his life—Epstein has said this was in 1986; others say it was in 1989, at the earliest—he has gradually, in a way that has not generally made headlines, come to be accepted by the Establishment. He’s a member of various commissions and councils: he is on the Trilateral Commission, the Council on Foreign Relations, the New York Academy of Sciences, and the Institute of International Education.

His current fan club extends to Cayne, Henry Rosovsky, the former dean of Harvard’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences, and Larry Summers, Harvard’s current president. Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz says, “I’m on my 20th book…. The only person outside of my immediate family that I send drafts to is Jeffrey.” Real-estate developer and philanthropist Marshall Rose, who has worked with Epstein on projects in New Albany, Ohio, for Wexner, says, “He digests and decodes the information very rapidly, which is to me terrific because we have shorter meetings.”

Also on the list of admirers are former senator George Mitchell and a gaggle of distinguished scientists, most of whom Epstein has helped fund in recent years. They include Nobel Prize winners Gerald Edelman and Murray Gell-Mann, and mathematical biologist Martin Nowak. When these men describe Epstein, they talk about “energy” and “curiosity,” as well as a love for theoretical physics that they don’t ordinarily find in laymen. Gell-Mann rather sweetly mentions that “there are always pretty ladies around” when he goes to dinner chez Epstein, and he’s under the impression that Epstein’s clients include the Queen of England. Both Nowak and Dershowitz were thrilled to find themselves shaking the hand of a man named “Andrew” in Epstein’s house. “Andrew” turned out to be Prince Andrew, who subsequently arranged to sit in the back of Dershowitz’s law class.

Epstein gets annoyed when anyone suggests that Wexner “made him.” “I had really rich clients before,” he has said. Yet he does not deny that he and Wexner have a special relationship. Epstein sees it as a partnership of equals. “People have said it’s like we have one brain between two of us: each has a side.”

“I think we both possess the skill of seeing patterns,” says Wexner. “But Jeffrey sees patterns in politics and financial markets, and I see patterns in lifestyle and fashion trends. My skills are not in investment strategy, and, as everyone who knows Jeffrey knows, his are not in fashion and design. We frequently discuss world trends as each of us sees them.”

By the time Epstein met Wexner, the latter was a retail legend who had built a $3 billion empire—one that now includes Victoria’s Secret, Express, and Bath & Body Works—from $5,000 lent him by his aunt. “Wexner saw in Jeffrey the type of person who had the potential to realize his [Jeffrey’s] dreams,” says someone who has worked closely with both men. “He gave Jeffrey the ball, and Jeffrey hit it out of the park.”

Wexner, through a trust, bought the town house in which Epstein now lives for a reported $13.2 million in 1989. In 1993, Wexner married Abigail Koppel, a 31-year-old lawyer, and the newlyweds relocated to Ohio; in 1996, Epstein moved into the town house. 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.

Wexner trusts Epstein so completely that he has assigned him the power of fiduciary over all of his private trusts and foundations, says a source close to Wexner. In 1992, Epstein even persuaded Wexner to put him on the board of the Wexner Foundation in place of Wexner’s ailing mother. Bella Wexner recovered and demanded to be reinstated. Epstein has said they settled by splitting the foundation in two.

Epstein does not care that he comes between family members. In fact, he sees it as his job. He tells people, “I am there to represent my client, and if my client needs protecting—sometimes even from his own family—then it’s often better that people hate me, not the client.”

“You’ve probably heard I’m vicious in my representation of my clients,” he tells people proudly; Leah Kleman describes his haggling over art prices as something like a scene out of the movie Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome. Even a former mentor says he’s seen “the dark side” of Epstein, and a Bear Stearns source recalls a meeting in which Epstein chewed out a team making a presentation for Wexner as being so brutal as to be “irresponsible.”

One reporter, in fact, received three threats from Epstein while preparing a piece. They were delivered in a jocular tone, but the message was clear: There will be trouble for your family if I don’t like the article.

On the other hand, Epstein is clearly very generous with friends. Joe Pagano, an Aspen-based venture capitalist, who has known Epstein since before his Bear Stearns days, can’t say enough nice things: “I have a boy who’s dyslexic, and Jeffrey’s gotten close to him over the years…. Jeffrey got him into music. He bought him his first piano. And then as he got to school he had difficulty … in studying … so Jeffrey got him interested in taking flying lessons.”

Rosa Monckton recalls Epstein telling her that her daughter, Domenica, who suffers from Down syndrome, needed the sun, and that Rosa should feel free to bring her to his house in Palm Beach anytime.

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.) Many of those who benefited from Epstein’s largesse claim that his generosity comes with no strings attached. “I never felt he wanted anything from me in return,” says one old friend, who received a first-class upgrade.

Epstein is known about town as a man who loves women—lots of them, mostly young. Model types have been heard saying they are full of gratitude to Epstein for flying them around, and he is a familiar face to many of the Victoria’s Secret girls. One young woman recalls being summoned by Ghislaine Maxwell to a concert at Epstein’s town house, where the women seemed to outnumber the men by far. “These were not women you’d see at Upper East Side dinners,” the woman recalls. “Many seemed foreign and dressed a little bizarrely.” This same guest also attended a cocktail party thrown by Maxwell that Prince Andrew attended, which was filled, she says, with young Russian models. “Some of the guests were horrified,” the woman says.

“He’s reckless,” says a former business associate, “and he’s gotten more so. Money does that to you. He’s breaking the oath he made to himself—that he would never do anything that would expose him in the media. Right now, in the wake of the publicity following his trip with Clinton, he must be in a very difficult place.”

According to S.E.C. and other legal documents unearthed by VANITY FAIR, Epstein may have good reason to keep his past cloaked in secrecy: his real mentor, it might seem, was not Leslie Wexner but Steven Jude Hoffenberg, 57, who, for a few months before the S.E.C. sued to freeze his assets in 1993, was trying to buy the New York Post. He 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.

When Epstein met Hoffenberg in London in the 1980s, the latter was the charismatic, audacious head of the Towers Financial Corporation, a collection agency that was supposed to buy debts that people owed to hospitals, banks, and phone companies. But Hoffenberg began using company funds to pay off earlier investors and service a lavish lifestyle that included a mansion on Long Island, homes on Manhattan’s Sutton Place and in Florida, and a fleet of cars and planes.

Hoffenberg and Epstein had much in common. Both were smart and obsessed with making money. Both were from Brooklyn. According to Hoffenberg, the two men were introduced by Douglas Leese, a defense contractor. Epstein has said they were introduced by John Mitchell, the late attorney general.

Epstein had been running International Assets Group Inc. (I.A.G.), a consulting company, out of his apartment in the Solo building on East 66th Street in New York. 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. He was also not above entering into risky, tax-sheltered oil and gas deals with much smaller investors. A lawsuit that Michael Stroll, the former head of Williams Electronics Inc., filed against Epstein shows that in 1982 I.A.G. received 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. “My net worth never exceeded four and a half million dollars,” Stroll has said.

Hoffenberg, says a close friend, “really liked Jeffrey…. Jeffrey has a way of getting under your skin, and he was under Hoffenberg’s.” Also appealing to Hoffenberg were Epstein’s social connections; they included oil mogul Cece Wang (father of the designer Vera) and Mohan Murjani, whose clothing company grew into Gloria Vanderbilt Jeans. Epstein lived large even then. 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.)

In 1987, Hoffenberg, according to sources, set Epstein up in the offices he still occupies in the Villard House, on Madison Avenue, across a courtyard from the restaurant Le Cirque. Hoffenberg hired his new protégé as a consultant at $25,000 a month, and the relationship flourished. “They traveled everywhere together—on Hoffenberg’s plane, all around the world, they were always together,” says a source. Hoffenberg has claimed that Epstein confided in him, saying, for example, that he had left Bear Stearns in 1981 after he was discovered executing “illegal operations.”

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 after his two supporters, Ace Greenberg and Jimmy Cayne, were outnumbered. Greenberg says he can’t recall this; Cayne denies it happened, and Epstein has denied it as well. “Jeffrey Epstein left Bear Stearns of his own volition,” says Cayne. “It was never suggested that he leave by any member of management, and management never looked into any improprieties by him. 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.’s Jonathan Harris and Robert Blackburn took Epstein’s testimony and that of other Bear Stearns employees in part of what became a protracted case about insider trading around a tender offer placed on March 11, 1981, by the Seagram Company Ltd. for St. Joe Minerals Corp. Ultimately several Italian and Swiss investors were found guilty, including Italian financier Giuseppe Tome, who had used his relationship with Seagram owner Edgar Bronfman Sr. to obtain information about the tender offer.

After the tender offer was announced, the S.E.C. began investigating trades involving St. Joe at Bear Stearns and other firms. Epstein resigned from Bear Stearns on March 12. The S.E.C. was tipped off that Epstein had information on insider trading at Bear Stearns, and it was therefore obliged to question him. In his S.E.C. testimony, given on April 1, 1981, Epstein claimed that he had found “offensive” the way Bear Stearns management had handled a disciplinary action following its discovery that he had committed a possible “Reg D” violation—evidently he had lent money to his closest friend. (In the 1989 deposition he said that he’d lent approximately $20,000 to Warren Eisenstein, to buy stock.) Such an action could have been considered improper, although Epstein claimed he had not realized this until afterward.

According to Epstein, Bear Stearns management had questioned him about the loan around March 4. The questioners, Epstein said, were Michael (Mickey) Tarnopol and Alvin Einbender. In his 1989 deposition Epstein recalled that the partner who had made an “issue” of the matter was Marvin Davidson. On March 9, Epstein said, he had met with Tarnopol and Einbender again, and the two partners told him that the executive committee had weighed the offense, together with previous “carelessness” over expenses, and he would be fined $2,500.

“There was discussion whether, in fact, I had ever put in an airline ticket for someone else and not myself and I said that it was possible, … since my secretary handles my expenses,” Epstein told the S.E.C. In his 1989 testimony he stated that the “Reg D” incident had cost him a shot at partnership that year.

What the S.E.C. seemed to be especially interested in was whether there was a connection between Epstein’s leaving and the alleged insider trading in St. Joe Minerals by other people at Bear Stearns:

Q: Sir, are you aware that certain rumors may have been circulating around your firm in connection with your reasons for leaving the firm?

A: I’m aware that there were many rumors.

Q: What were the rumors you heard?

A: Nothing to do with St. Joe.

Q: Can you relate what you heard?

A: It was having to do with an illicit affair with a secretary.

Q: Have you heard any other rumors suggesting that you had made a presentation or communication to the Executive Committee concerning alleged improprieties by other members or employees of Bear Stearns?

A: I, in fact, have heard that rumor, but it’s been from Mr. Harris in our conversation last week.

Q: Have you heard it from anyone else?

A: No.

A little later the interview focuses on James Cayne:

Q: Did you ever hear while you were at Bear Stearns that Mr. Cayne may have trader or insider information in connection with St. Joe Minerals Corporation?

Q: Did Mr. Cayne ever have any conversation with you about St. Joe Minerals?

Q: Did you happen to overhear any conversations between Mr. Cayne and anyone else regarding St. Joe Minerals?

And still later in the questioning comes this exchange:

Q: Have you had any type of business dealings with Mr. Cayne?

A: There’s no relationship with Bear Stearns.

Q: Pardon?

A: Other than Bear Stearns, no.

Q: Have you been a participant in any type of business venture with Mr. Cayne?

Q: Do you have any expectation of participating in any business venture with Mr. Cayne?

Q: Have you had any business participations with Mr. Theram?

A: No; nor do I anticipate any.

Q: Mr. Epstein, did anyone at Bear Stearns tell you in words or substance that you should not divulge anything about St. Joe Minerals to the staff of the Securities and Exchange Commission?

Q: Has anyone indicated to you in any way, either directly or indirectly, in words or substance, that your compensation for this past year or any future monies coming to you from Bear Stearns will be contingent upon your not divulging information to the Securities and Exchange Commission?

A: No.

Despite the circumstances of Epstein’s leaving, Bear Stearns agreed to pay him his annual bonus—which he anticipated as being approximately $100,000.

The S.E.C. never brought any charges against anyone at Bear Stearns for insider trading in St. Joe, but its questioning seems to indicate that it was skeptical of Epstein’s answers. Some sources have wondered why, if he was such a big producer at Bear Stearns, he would have given it up over a mere $2,500 fine.

Certainly the years after Epstein left the firm were not obviously prosperous ones. His luck didn’t seem to change until he met Hoffenberg.

One of Epstein’s first assignments for Hoffenberg was to mastermind doomed bids to take over Pan American World Airways in 1987 and Emery Air Freight Corp. in 1988. Hoffenberg claimed in a 1993 hearing before a grand jury in Illinois that Epstein came up with the idea of financing these bids through Towers’s acquisition of two ailing Illinois insurance companies, Associated Life and United Fire. “He was hired by us to work on the securities side of the insurance companies and Towers Financial, supposedly to make a profit for us and for the companies,” Hoffenberg reportedly told the grand jury. He also alleged that Epstein was the “technician,” executing the schemes, although, having no broker’s license, he had to rely on others to make the trades. Much of Hoffenberg’s subsequent testimony in his criminal case has proven to be false, and Epstein has claimed he was merely asked how the bids could be accomplished and has said he had nothing to do with the financing of them. Yet Richard Allen, the former treasurer of United Fire, recalls seeing Epstein two or three times at the company. He and another executive say they had direct dealing with Epstein over the finances. And in his deposition of 1989, Epstein stated that he was the one who executed “all” Hoffenberg’s instructions to buy and sell the stock. He called it “making the orders.” He could not recall whether he had chosen the brokers used.

To win approval from the Illinois insurance regulators for Towers’s acquisition of the companies, Hoffenberg promised to inject $3 million of new capital into them. In fact, in his grand-jury testimony Hoffenberg claimed that he, his chief operating officer, Mitchell Brater, and Epstein came up with a scheme to steal $3 million of the insurance companies’ bonds to buy Pan Am and Emery stock. “Jeffrey Epstein and Mitch Brater arranged the various brokerage accounts for the bonds to be placed with in New York, and I think one in Chicago, Rodman & Renshaw,” Hoffenberg reportedly said. Then, said Hoffenberg, while making it appear as though they were investing the bonds in much safer financial instruments, they used them as collateral to buy the stock. “Epstein was the person in charge of the transactions, and Mitchell Brater was assisting him with it in coordination on behalf of the insurance companies’ money,” Hoffenberg claimed at the time.

At one point, according to Hoffenberg, a broker forged the documents necessary for a $1.8 million check to be written on insurance-company funds. The check was used to buy more stock in the takeover targets. Meanwhile, in order to throw the insurance regulators off, the $1.8 million was reported as being safely invested in a money-market account.

United Fire’s former chief financial officer Daniel Payton confirms part of Hoffenberg’s account. He says he recalls making one or two telephone calls to Epstein (at Hoffenberg’s direction) about the missing bonds. “He said, ‘Oh, yeah, they still exist.’ But we found out later that he had sold those assets … leveraged them … [and] used some margin account to take some positions in … Emery and Pan Am,” says Payton.

Epstein’s extraordinary creativity was, according to Hoffenberg, responsible for the purchase by the insurance companies of a $500,000 bond, with no money down. “Epstein created a great scheme to purchase a $500,000 treasury bond that would not be shown … [as] margined or collateralized,” he reportedly told the grand jury. “It looked like it was free and clear but it actually wasn’t,” he said.

Epstein has denied he ever had any dealings with anyone from the insurance companies. But Richard Allen says he recalls talking to Epstein at Hoffenberg’s direction and telling him it was urgent they retrieve the missing bonds for a state examination. According to Allen, Epstein said, “We’ll get them back.” He had “kind of a flippant attitude,” says Allen. “They never came back.”

Epstein, according to Hoffenberg, also came up with a scheme to manipulate the price of Emery Freight stock in an attempt to minimize the losses that occurred when Hoffenberg’s bid went wrong and the share price began to fall. This was alleged to have involved multiple clients’ accounts controlled by Epstein.

Eventually, in 1991, insurance regulators in Illinois sued Hoffenberg. He settled the case, and Epstein, who was only a paid consultant, was never deposed or accused of any wrongdoing. Barry Gross, the attorney who was handling the suit for the regulators, says of Epstein, “He was very elusive…. It was hard to really track him down. There were a substantial number of checks for significant dollars that were paid to him, I remember…. He was this character we never got a handle on. Again we presumed that he was involved with the Pan Am and Emery run that Hoffenberg made, but we never got a chance to depose him.”

“From the government’s discovery in the main sentencing against Hoffenberg it would seem the government was perhaps a bit lazy,” says David Lewis, who represented Mitchell Brater. “They went for what they knew they could get … and that was the fraudulent promissory notes [i.e., the much larger and unrelated part of Hoffenberg’s fraud, based in New York State]…. What they couldn’t get, they didn’t bother with.”

Another lawyer involved in the criminal prosecution of Hoffenberg says, “In a criminal investigation like that, when there is a guilty plea, to be quick and dirty about it, discovery is always incomplete…. They don’t have to line up witnesses; they don’t have to learn every fact that might come out on cross-examination.”

Epstein was involved with Hoffenberg in other questionable transactions. Financial records show that in 1988 Epstein invested $1.6 million in Riddell Sports Inc., a company that manufactures football helmets. Among his co-investors were the theater mogul Robert Nederlander and attorney Leonard Toboroff. A source close to this transaction claims that Epstein told Nederlander and Toboroff that he had raised his share of the money from a Swiss banker, whose identity they could not be allowed to know. But Hoffenberg has claimed the money came from him, and Towers’s financial statements for that year show a loan to Epstein of $400,000. (Epstein has said he can’t remember the details and has disputed the accuracy of the Towers financial reports.)

Around the same time, Nederlander and Toboroff let Epstein come in with them on a scheme to make money out of Pennwalt, a Pennsylvania chemical company. The plan was to group together with two other parties to take a substantial declared position in the stock. According to a source, Epstein was supposed to help Nederlander and Toboroff raise $15 million. He seemed to fail to find other investors, say those familiar with the deal. (Epstein has said he was merely an investor.) He invested $1 million, which he told his co-investors was his own money. But in his 1989 deposition he said that he put in only $300,000 of his own money. Where did the rest come from? Hoffenberg has said it came from him, in a loan that Nederlander and Toboroff didn’t know about.

Two things happened that alarmed Nederlander and Toboroff. After the group signaled a possible takeover, the Pennwalt management threatened to sue the would-be raiders. Epstein was reluctant initially to give a deposition about his share of the money, telling Toboroff there were “reasons” he didn’t want to. Then, after the opportunity for new investors was closed, co-investors recall Epstein announcing that he’d found one at last: Dick Snyder, then C.E.O. of the publisher Simon & Schuster, who wanted to put up approximately $500,000. (Neither Epstein nor Snyder can now recall the investment. Yet in the 1989 deposition Epstein said that he had recruited Snyder, whom he had met socially, into the deal.)

According to a source, Toboroff and Nederlander told Epstein that Snyder was too late, but, without their realizing it, Hoffenberg has claimed, Snyder wrote a check to Hoffenberg and bought out some of his investment. But then Snyder wanted out.

“Nederlander started to get these irate calls from [Snyder,] who wasn’t part of the deal, saying he was owed all this money,” says someone close to the deal. Toboroff and Nederlander were baffled.

Eventually, a source close to Hoffenberg says, Hoffenberg paid Snyder off.

Just as Nederlander and Toboroff were growing wary of Epstein, he became increasingly involved with Leslie Wexner, whom he had met through insurance executive Robert Meister and his late wife. Epstein has told people that he met Wexner in 1986 in Palm Beach, and that he won his confidence by persuading him not to invest in the stock market, just as the 1987 crash was approaching. His story has subsequently changed. When asked if Wexner knew about his connection to Hoffenberg, Epstein said that he began working for Wexner in 1989, and that “it was certainly not the same time.”

Wherever and whenever it was that Epstein and Wexner actually met, there was an immediate and strong personal chemistry. Wexner says he thinks Epstein is “very smart with a combination of excellent judgment and unusually high standards. Also, he is always a most loyal friend.”

Sources say Epstein proved that he could be useful to Wexner as well, with “fresh” ideas about investments. “Wexner had a couple of bad investments, and Jeffrey cleaned those up right away,” says a former associate of Epstein’s.

Before he signed on with Wexner, Epstein had several meetings with Harold Levin, then head of Wexner Investments, in which he enunciated ideas about currencies that Levin found incomprehensible. “In fact,” says someone who used to work very closely with Wexner, “almost everyone at the Limited wondered who Epstein was; he literally came out of nowhere.”

“Everyone was mystified as to what his appeal was,” says Robert Morosky, a former vice-chairman of the Limited.

Much of Epstein’s work is related to cleaning up, tightening budgets, and efficiencies. One person who worked for Wexner and who saw a contract drawn up between the two men says Epstein is involved in “everything, not just a little here, a little there. Everything!” In addition, he says, “Wexner likes having a hatchet man…. Whenever there is dirty work to be done he’d stick Jeffrey on it…. He has a reputation for being ruthless but he gets the job done.”

Epstein has evidently been asked to fire personal-staff members when needed. “He was that mysterious person that everyone was scared to death of,” says a former employee.

Meanwhile, he is also less than popular with some people outside Wexner’s company with whom he now deals. “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,” says Lars Forsberg, a lawyer whose firm at the time, Dickerson and Reily, was hired to deal with litigation stemming from the construction of Wexner’s Limitless—at 315 feet, one of the largest private yachts in the world. 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.

The incident is one of a number of disputes Epstein has become embroiled in. Some are for sums so tiny as to be baffling; for instance, Epstein sued investment adviser Herbert Glass, who sold him the Palm Beach house in 1990, for $13,444—Epstein claimed this was owed him for furnishings removed by Glass.

In 1998 the U.S. Attorney’s Office sued Epstein for illegally subletting the former home of the deputy consul general of Iran to attorney Ivan Fisher and others. Epstein paid $15,000 a month in rent to the State Department, but he charged Fisher and his colleagues $20,000. Though the exact terms of the agreement are sealed, the court ruled against Epstein.

Wexner offers some insight into his friend’s combative style. “Many times people confuse winning and losing,” Wexner says. “Jeffrey has the unusual quality of knowing when he is winning. Whether in conversations or negotiations, he always stands back and lets the other person determine the style and manner of the conversation or negotiation. And then he responds in their style. Jeffrey sees it in chivalrous terms. He does not pick a fight, but if there is a fight, he will let you choose your weapon.”

One case is rather more serious. Currently, 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.

The legal papers for another case offer a rare window into Epstein’s finances. In 1995, Epstein stopped paying rent to his landlord, the nonprofit Municipal Arts Society, for his office in the Villard House. He claimed that they were breaking the terms of the lease by not letting his staff in at night. The case was eventually settled. However, one of the papers filed in this dispute is 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.”

Epstein’s appointment to the board of New York’s Rockefeller University in 2000 brought him into greater social prominence. Boasting such social names as Nancy Kissinger, Brooke Astor, and Robert Bass, the board also includes such pre-eminent scientists as Nobel laureate Joseph Goldstein. “Epstein was thrilled to be elected,” says someone who knows him.

After one term Epstein resigned. According to New York magazine, this was because he didn’t like to wear a suit to meetings. A spokesperson for the Rockefeller board says Epstein left because he had insufficient time to commit; a board member recalls that he was “arrogant” and “not a good fit.” The spokesperson admits that it is “infrequent” for board members not to be renominated after only one term.

Still, the recent spate of publicity Epstein has inspired does not seem to have fazed him. In November he was spotted in the front row of the Victoria’s Secret fashion show at New York’s Lexington Avenue Armory; around the same time the usual coterie of friends and beautiful women were whisked off to Little St. James (which he tells people has been renamed Little St. Jeff) for a long weekend.

Thanks to Epstein’s introductions, says Martin Nowak, the biologist finds himself moving from Princeton to Harvard, where he is assuming the joint position of professor of mathematics and professor of biology. Epstein has pledged at least $25 million to Harvard to create the Epstein Program for Mathematical Biology and Evolutionary Dynamics, and Epstein will have an office at the university. The program will be dedicated to searching for nature’s algorithms, a pursuit that is a specialty of Nowak’s. For Epstein this must be the summit of everything he has worked toward: he has been seen proudly displaying Harvard president Larry Summers’s letter of commitment as if he can’t quite believe it is real. He says he was reluctant to have his name attached to the program, but Summers persuaded him. He rang his mentor Wexner about it, and Wexner told him it was all right.

An insatiable, restless soul, always on the move, Epstein builds a tremendous amount of downtime into his hectic work schedule. Yet there is something almost programmed about his relaxation: it’s as if even pleasure has to be measured in terms of self-improvement. Nowak says that, when he goes to stay with Epstein in the Caribbean, they’ll get up at six and, as the sun rises, have three-hour conversations about theoretical physics. “Then he’ll go off and do some work, re-appear, and we’ll talk some more.”

Another person who went to the island with Epstein, Maxwell, and several beautiful women remembers that the women “sat around one night teasing him about the kinds of grasping women who might want to date him. He was amused by the idea…. He’s like a king in his own world.”

Many people comment there is something innocent, almost childlike about Jeffrey Epstein. They see this as refreshing, given the sophistication of his surroundings. Alan Dershowitz says that, as he was getting to know Epstein, his wife asked him if he would still be close to him if Epstein suddenly filed for bankruptcy. Dershowitz says he replied, “Absolutely. I would be as interested in him as a friend if we had hamburgers on the boardwalk in Coney Island and talked about his ideas.”

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The Epstein case is further un-ravelling. Clinton is embroiled and so is HRH Airmiles Andy. A private jet called the Lolita express.Really?

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The UK establishment and their limpid media really don't want to expose this story to the public, especially the perverse circle linkages; Underage girls procured for sex. A british HRH,  Ghislaine Maxwell; see her fathers 'Daily Mirror'. An ex US president. Blair.
Perhaps this is the story that had to be covered up.

We have queried the 'last photo' and the Lolita-esque imagery and often asked Why?

Verity wrote:It makes you wonder if Richard Branson named his Virgin enterprises after the Island or the sex parties with underage girls.

I trust this comment is tongue in cheek ?

Richard Branson started his first business venture at the tender age of 20'ish, Virgin Records on London's Oxford Street, bargain music in rebellion against the giants that dominated the music industry. The brand name Virgin was, I believe, a suggestion made by a Branson colleague because it was a new business. Nothing to do with nubile flesh or his later passion for the Virgin Islands.

Where is the evidence that Branson has been involved in any way with the procurement of underage boys and girls for sex orgies?

Branson's privately owned exclusive Necker Island is certainly a magnet for the rich and famous, a playground where anything goes, a virtual knocking shop but I've never seen anything to suggest, let alone prove, that he's been involved with trafficking children or teenagers for sex abuse. For the record, Branson represents just about everything I despise but that doesn't make him a child molester, or facilitator. Neither does his befriending or being acquainted with someone who is.

Necker Island is not secluded. Anyone with a few thousand quid to spare can book a holiday on the island, heck, when Branson's not in permanent residence, you can even rent his pad - if you can afford it.

This is really quite bizarre. A giant leap has been taken from a three year old child disappearing from a low-key family holiday resort (back to basics) to a connection with global child abuse and trafficking, linking just about every name who is in some way connected in politics, business, social, show business and so on.

I need to rest .

Welcome to ego island: It's not just Obama. Branson's shamelessly invited legions of celebs and royals to his Caribbean idyll - and all for the greater glory of one man and his brand

Sir Richard Branson has welcomed several celebrities to his private island resort
Necker Island, located in the Caribbean, visited by Barack and Michelle Obama
Island has become 'a priceless PR asset for Branson and the Virgin brand'

By Alison Boshoff for the Daily Mail

Published: 22:12, 8 February 2017 | Updated: 00:59, 9 February 2017

Barack Obama could have picked anywhere in the world to take his wife on that ‘very nice vacation’ he’d promised her after standing down as Leader of the Free World.

So, one has to ask why he opted for Sir Richard Branson’s personal Caribbean paradise, Necker Island?

Of course, the certainty of blue skies, golden sand and warm seas would appeal, and the privacy such a hideaway affords.

But Necker is a party island, beloved of the celebrity hoi polloi, from Kates Moss and Winslet to ex-Baywatch star David Hasselhoff and the odd royal, global guru or head of state who fancies a freebie.

Anyone, in fact, who doesn’t mind sharing a hot tub with the host for obligatory selfies, or being snapped joshing around with him on the beach or in the water — and then seeing those photographs shared with millions.

For even if you are a personal guest of Sir Richard, there is a price to be paid for a trip to Necker as the Obamas are discovering.

The island has become a priceless PR asset for Branson and the Virgin brand, boosted even further in recent years by the shameless and strategic use of social media to showcase his celebrity guests to their hordes of followers.

Ever since Branson acquired Necker in 1979 for about £180,000, he has busied himself inviting the great, the good (and not-so-good), and the merely famous to enjoy it. Often, it is when they are down on their luck, perhaps after a high-profile spell in rehab or a headline-generating failed love affair.

But what a coup it was to reel in the Obamas and how thoughtful of him to give his friend Barack — they are in ‘close alignment’ apparently on climate change, conflict resolution, prison and drug reform and all sorts of other do-gooding — a chance to try the risky watersports his high office denied him for eight years.

The photos of the former president learning to kitesurf — Virgin just happens to sponsor kitesurfing competitions — were posted on Branson’s blog and made front pages around the world. The accompanying video has been viewed millions of times.

The 66-year-old billionaire’s sycophantic musings on the general wonderfulness of Mr and Mrs Obama are only marginally less nauseating than the shot of a beaming Barack playfighting — what was he thinking — with Branson as they lounge together in the back of a boat.

Branson’s hunger for publicity — any publicity — is legendary, but the Obamas are widely regarded as a couple who displayed real class and integrity in the White House. Was the louche luxury of Necker really their cup of tea?

In a 2015 TV documentary about the island, Branson, posing like a second-rate Hugh Hefner, boasted about how often his good-looking staff ended up sleeping with the guests.

A management team had once tried to put a stop to it all but the diktat hadn’t lasted a weekend. ‘That is not the way this island would run very well,’ Branson sniggered.

Meanwhile, Necker’s head of finance, ‘Milly’, boasted how she loved to let guests eat sushi off her naked midriff. ‘I love that I get to be an accountant and then go lay on a table and get people to suck soy sauce out of my belly button. Who else gets to do that?’ she said.

Perhaps Barack and Michelle eschewed sushi night during their ten-day trip to Necker and nearby Moskito (which Branson also owns).

Sir Richard, who is worth £4 billion and has been based on Necker (a tax haven coincidentally) full time since 2013, was not in residence when the Obamas arrived in the British Virgin Islands on his private jet late last month.

However, he couldn’t resist trailing the VVIP visit by posting a picture of himself and the former president (taken earlier) for his 1.3 million followers on Instagram. Nor could he pass up on gate-crashing their holiday as the new photos show. One can only hope that he didn’t bid them farewell in his traditional manner — by baring his bottom at them.

Branson has described Necker as ‘a wonderful magnet to attract wonderfully interesting people’. Indeed. As the Obamas become part of the Necker Nexus, what’s on offer and who’s who on the sun loungers?

YOUR ISLAND GUIDE

If you are lucky enough to be a friend of Branson’s, then it will probably cost you nothing to stay on Necker. Mere mortals, however, need to shell out £40,000 a night.

As such, the island has been a canny investment, too, with an affluent corporate clientele scrambling with oligarchs to book a holiday, wedding or honeymoon there. So what do you get for your money?

The Great House on Necker was rebuilt after a fire caused by a lightning strike in 2011 in which Kate Winslet famously rescued Branson’s 87-year-old mother Eve (although the feisty Mrs Branson later disputed the claim).

It reopened in 2013 with six bedrooms and a master suite, each with a king-sized bed, en suite bathroom and balcony.

Branson’s private residence, Temple House, is also available to rent (from £5,510 per night) when he’s elsewhere, as is a smaller property, the Love Temple (£3,418), next door.

There are six Balinese style villas nearby (£3,713), each with a private outdoor dining area. Guests can also be accommodated in the four luxury cabins on his catamaran, the Necker Belle.

The island is considered to be ‘full’ when there are 34 guests in situ.

They are looked after by 60 staff, including three five-star chefs who can dish up anything from a fine dining tasting menu to floating sushi bars (when Milly’s not available) or a beach barbecue.

The new Beach House provides an entertainment complex, with a bar, cinema and a dining area for up to 40 people, and a viewing deck overlooking the island’s two tennis courts.

There are two pools plus water-skiing, kitesurfing and parasailing on offer, or guests can just enjoy the wild life, including 200 flamingos, lemurs, a pair of iguanas, and tortoises.

THE CELEBRITIES

KATE WINSLET: The Oscar-winning actress visited in August 2011, with children Mia and Joe, and then-boyfriend, male model Louis Dowler, to join a house party made up of Branson family and friends.

During the drama of that house fire, she fell for fellow guest Ned Rocknroll, Branson’s nephew and now her husband.

RONNIE AND SALLY WOOD: Ronnie chose Necker for his 2012 honeymoon with third wife Sally, who is 39 to his 69. He has known Branson for years — the Stones signed to Virgin Records in 1992.

DAVID HASSELHOFF: The ex-Baywatch star enjoyed a post-panto sojourn with Welsh girlfriend Hayley Roberts in 2012 — and got to meet his ‘hero’ Ronnie Wood there.

Hasselhoff and Branson became friends after the latter made a guest appearance, water-skiing, on Baywatch.

RACHEL HUNTER: Branson has known the Kiwi model and former Mrs Rod Stewart for years.

In 2011, she helped him promote a charity dinner in Auckland and the following year she had a holiday in Necker. (Rod, of course, is Ronnie Wood’s best friend.)

NATALIE IMBRUGLIA: The actress and singer is a close friend of Branson’s daughter, Holly.

HARRY STYLES: One Direction star Harry popped over to Necker in 2013 after his romantic holiday with singer Taylor Swift on nearby island, Virgin Gorda, ended abruptly.

A photograph of Styles with Branson and two blondes in a hot tub was duly shared with millions.

KATE MOSS: Following the ‘Cocaine Kate’ scandal and her spell in rehab, Branson invited supermodel Moss to Necker in 2005, where she had a fling with a friend of Branson’s son, Sam — male model Jamie Burke, 11 years her junior.

PETER GABRIEL: Branson calls the former Genesis star and fellow environmentalist a ‘good friend’, and Gabriel spent Christmas 2012 on Necker when he played piano for late night sing-alongs.

SIR MICK JAGGER: Mick has been spotted on Necker — a short hop from his own holiday home on Mustique.

GEENA DAVIS: The actress spent her 1993 honeymoon with second husband, film director Renny Harlin, on Necker.

Inspired by island life, they made a pirate film in 1995, Cutthroat Island — one of the biggest flops in cinematic history.

RUBY WAX: Comedian and counsellor Ruby Wax, a guest of Branson, wrote in the Visitors’ Book: ‘For this kind of luxury, you can beat me to a pulp.’

HARRISON FORD: The actor enjoyed a water-sports holiday (he paid) in the mid-Nineties with his teenage children and then wife Melissa Mathison.

MEL GIBSON: After visiting in the mid-Nineties he was so impressed he bought his own island, Mago, in Fiji, in 2005.

HEATHER MILLS McCARTNEY: She had a holiday on Necker at Branson’s invitation a few months before her marriage to Sir Paul ended in 2006.

She returned for a £250,000 week-long ‘divorceymoon’ in July 2008 with a party of 20 friends, including her vegan shoe designer, the owner of a local B&B and her estate agent.

ROBERT DE NIRO: Actor De Niro is remembered for partying all night back in the early 2000s.

As a token of his gratitude he had a wooden Buddha shipped to the island. Sadly, this was destroyed in the 2011 fire.

EDDIE MURPHY: Comedian Eddie Murphy had his honeymoon with wife Nicole and four bodyguards in 1993 on Necker.

He spent hours watching videos of his own movies and listening to music. The couple divorced in 2005.

GEORGE MICHAEL: The late singer holidayed on Necker in 2005 and more recently had a very private birthday party there.

MARIAH CAREY: Singer Mariah Carey, who was briefly signed to Virgin Records, has been to Necker several times as Branson’s guest.

In 2004, she was the star turn on a TV show about Necker, and was seen flirting with her host on an enormous four-poster bed.

DEMI MOORE: Visited several times at the height of her fame — although nowadays she holidays at her former husband Bruce Willis’s house on the Turks and Caicos Islands.

KELLY BROOK: The TV presenter and model has been to Necker at least twice. In 2012 she posted pictures of herself frolicking on the beach.

In 2015 she was back again, with pictures on Instagram of herself as ‘Castaway. Necker.’

BORIS BECKER: The former Wimbledon winner is a repeat visitor to Necker, taking part in Branson’s Necker Cup –— a six-day pro-am tournament — in 2013, 2014 and 2015.

In 2015, he posted pictures of himself and wife Lilly relaxing in a hot tub between matches.

THE ROYALS

PRINCESS DIANA: One of the first famous faces spotted on Necker was the late Princess of Wales in 1990 with Princes William and Harry, her mother Frances Shand Kydd, and her two older sisters and their children.

SARAH FERGUSON: A long-standing friend of Branson, the Duchess of York has taken numerous breaks on Necker and was there to celebrate his 60th birthday in 2010.

BEATRICE AND EUGENIE: Princess Bea holidayed on Necker in 2012 with her now ex-boyfriend Dave Clark who worked for Branson’s Virgin Galactic space operation. Both girls — along with their mother —attended the island wedding of Holly Branson in December 2011.

KATE MIDDLETON: The Duchess of Cambridge is a close friend of Holly Branson. During her brief split from Prince William in 2007, she took a holiday on Necker.

PRINCE HARRY: Prince Harry attended close pal Sam Branson’s 27th birthday party on Necker in 2012. Another friend indiscreetly posted a picture on Facebook of the Prince lying apparently drunk on the beach. He was back on Necker in 2015 for New Year.

THE POLITICOS

NELSON MANDELA: The late president of South Africa was a founding member, with Branson, of The Elders, a Virgin-backed not-for-profit group who meet on Necker in the ‘Elder’s Temple’ to consult on poverty, climate change and HIV.

Other Elders include KOFI ANNAN, the former secretary general of the United Nations and ARCHBISHOP DESMOND TUTU who recalled that rock star Peter Gabriel gave him his first ever swimming lesson there.

JIMMY CARTER, the former US president, is another Elder who has enjoyed Necker’s delights.

TONY BLAIR: The former Prime Minister was invited to Necker in 2008 to join an ‘environmental war room’ discussing global warming problems with other leading figures in business and politics. (And Cherie, of course, came, too.)

PS NO ROOM AT THE INN FOR ...

BRAD PITT and JENNIFER ANISTON wanted to spend their honeymoon in 2000 on Necker, but the island was fully booked.

And it is said that oligarch ROMAN ABRAMOVICH tried to book a vacation, but Branson intervened.

Perhaps he just didn’t fancy someone even richer than him checking out the soft furnishings.

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Now a USA Senator found dead in Her Home after uncovering possible links to Sexual abuse of Minors by Mr Epstein?

CIA/FBI just clearing up the damage limitation exercise mode, Skull & Crossbones club connection to previous Senators Deaths, Weekend Breaks away from Home?

sharonl wrote:

willowthewisp wrote:Now a USA Senator found dead in Her Home after uncovering possible links to Sexual abuse of Minors by Mr Epstein?

CIA/FBI just clearing up the damage limitation exercise mode, Skull & Crossbones club connection to previous Senators Deaths, Weekend Breaks away from Home?

That begs the questions of why did Diana, Jill Dando and Brenda Leyland die?

Hi sharon, I forgot to mention that the Senator was investigating Child Abuse from Arkansas, anyone know who was from Arkansas and dresses becoming"soiled", also add in Child abuse from Storm damaged regions and the murky World of William & Hilary, disappearances of person's?