C’mon, I Can’t Be THAT Big of a Jinx, Can I?

In a post dated 14 June 2011, I confessed to a weird aspect of my writing.  It’s something that has haunted me since graduate school.  As I said then:

For whatever reason, when I wrote academic papers, or parts of the dissertation, some of the people featured in those pages croaked within a few months or so. I chalked it up to coincidence. But now, the phenomenon seems to have followed me into cyberspace. Some of the people I’ve mentioned here were alive when I posted about them, but have since passed away.

On 30 June this year, I wrote a post about Jeffrey Epstein, the presumed billionaire financial strategist who kept a stable of underage lassies for the pleasure of his highfalutin guests and himself.  Six days after I posted that, Epstein made the news again when federal authorities arrested him for sex-trafficking minors.   On 10 August, his jailers found his corpse hanging in his cell. 

For the record, that’s forty days after I posted about him.  I also have an alibi for 10 August.

What we know is limited, which makes his death all the more suspicious.  It’s now to the point where mainstream press has been seriously investigating a conspiracy explanation.  In a segment for CBS This Morning, interviewer Gayle King asked Epstein accuser Chauntae Davies if she thought Jeff’s death was suspicious.   Davies gave a slightly qualified, but emphatic yes, without further comment by CBS or its reporting that questioned the supposition.

[King]  Are you suspicious, Chauntae, about the circumstances of his death?  It’s been ruled a suicide.

[Davies] Yeah, I’m absolutely suspicious of it.  And I go back and forth because, you know, part of me thinks, okay so  he signed that will that he willed  two days before, so that is obviously a red flag that he, you know was planning to commit suicide.  But I feel, and I feel like some of the other victims would agree, his ego was so large, and he was so manipulative, and so intelligent, that I really strongly believe that he still thought he was going to get out of it.  And I think that he signed that will thinking he was going to get out of it and disappear; like hide that money and disappear....It’s hard to wrap my brain around him killing himself, because he just, I don’t see that.    

Although clearly labeling the supposition a “conspiracy theory,” a segment of Morning Joe gave credence to evidence of a conspiracy in Epstein’s death.


Figure 1.  Morning Joe segment

Indeed there were fishy circumstances in this case that merit attention if not out-and-out investigation.  On 23 July, guards found Epstein in his cell, unconscious, with multiple stab wounds in his neck.  When he came to, Jeffrey reckoned that his cellmate had stabbed him in the neck while he was dozing off.  Authorities, however, believed Epstein had made an attempt on his own life, and consequently ordered a suicide watch for him.  The suicide watch ended a few days before his death.  And on the night he died, guards charged with checking on him every thirty minutes failed to do so because they were sleeping on the job.  The autopsy noted that Epstein had suffered a broken hyoid bone, which isn’t something that you’d normally get if you hanged yourself.  Rather, it’s something that you’d certainly get if someone throttled you to death.*

More interesting than the facts surrounding the suspicious death of a conceited, well-connected lowlife is the information that has emerged since Epstein’s death.  What the mainstream and semi-mainstream press has uncovered during the past two months have given a much broader scope with respect to his criminal activities, but also has exposed a number of possible high-profile conspirators. 

I’ve been following several podcasts covering the case.  Broken: Jeffrey Epstein, Epstein: Devil in the Darkness, and a two-part series on What Really Happened?.  These shows have featured exclusive interviews with those involved with this story.  These chats have given us quite a bit to chew on:

1.  Senior Palm Beach (FL) Detective Joseph Recarey led the first investigation into Epstein’s sex-trafficking crimes, and found out right away that Epstein exerted pressure on local police departments by donating large amounts of money to them .  If that didn’t work, Epstein would hire goons (well, private eyes) to follow, harass, and even threaten public officials.

Not so surprising, many of the alleged victims interviewed by Recarey expressed not only their fear that word of their cooperation with police might get back to Epstein, but their disbelief that the police could protect them.

2.  Epstein represented himself as a billionaire.  His lifestyle and properties give us every indication that was true.  But apparently, his net worth at the time of death was $559 million and change.

Perhaps it’s the case where Epstein, like many other people, lived beyond his means and lied about his income.  But some suspect that he might have hidden the bulk of his estate from pending lawsuits filed by a growing number of complaints.  He might have secretly dispersed the money in offshore accounts, or among those he trusted in order to keep it out of the hands of the young women suing him. 

3.  In what might have been the most blatant example of flipping the finger to his accusers, Epstein might have bequeathed that $559 million to alleged co-conspirators in the sex-trafficking ring.  What’s worse, he registered his will in the US Virgin Islands.   Broken host Ariel Levy asked Roberta Kaplan, an attorney representing one of the plaintiffs, how this affected her case:

So that makes things very, very complicated for my client, and the many, many other women in her position.  The Virgin Islands is obviously a small jurisdiction. I’m quite sure they’ve never really ever handled anything like this before.

Added Robert Eberhardt, one of only five probate lawyers practicing in St. Thomas,

Carolyn Percell is one of them, and then Henry Carr is the other magistrate.  So, you know really and truly those are the two different people would be assigned the case.

In other words, there’s only two magistrates in that entire jurisdiction to handle wills.  On top of that, Percell and Carr have to adjudicate traffic tickets, petty and major crimes, and other civil matters.  In short, this means that anything moving through that system can take up to ten years just to get onto the docket.  Eberhardt said that twenty years to resolve a contested will of this magnitude would be a very optimistic estimate.  And after all that, the victims might not win their case.  If they ever collect, these teeny-bopper plaintiffs might possibly receive some compensation in their little-old-lady years.

4.  There’s a possibility that the money could go to Epstein’s victims much sooner if a higher US court rules that Epstein’s entire estate came directly or indirectly from dirty (or in legal parlance “tainted”) money.  This not only refers to the money you got through crime, but all the wealth you derived from it.  In other words, if you rob a bank, then use that money to buy a lottery ticket that wins $250 million dollars, then the entire quarter billion is tainted money.  Moreover, you don’t even have to commit a crime for authorities to consider the money tainted.  For instance, if you received, as a present, a lottery ticket from your kid brother, who bought it with proceeds from his back-alley craps game, and later win $250 million, then, again, the whole quarter billion is tainted money.

In this case, Epstein definitely received tainted money during a time in his life when he was damn near penniless.  When Tower Financial Corp hired Epstein as a consultant, he received millions in fees for helping the firm carry out an elaborate Ponzi scheme..  Under Epstein’s direction, Tower purchased a couple of insurance companies, and issued bonds for them.  The bonds kinda acted as a loan, but with some differences.  Unlike a loan, in which payback is on an agreed schedule, investors may cash in their bonds anytime they doggone please.  In this case, since there wasn’t really anything backing up the bonds, if an investor cashed in, they’d have to cover it from the money they got from their core business, debt collection.

Epstein and firm CEO Steven Hoffenberg intended to use the money raised by this cash to stage a hostile takeover of Pan American World Airways (or for those with glowing memories of its service, Pan Am).   When Pan Am flight 103 crashed after a bomb explosion on 21 December 1988, Pan Am’s stock value also plummeted, and insurers covering the victims suffered massive hits.  For Epstein and Hoffenberg, this meant that the combination of Pan Am’s declining worth and the devastating insurance losses meant that they could no longer cover those bonds investors tried to cash them in. 

When the smoke cleared, Hoffenberg was found guilty of running a Ponzi scheme, and   served almost all of a twenty-year federal prison sentence.  Epstein didn’t even receive so much as a literal slap on the wrist.

5.  This above story and others highlight an issue that has baffled journalists covering this story for well over a decade.  It’s the question of where Epstein got his money.  More and more is coming out now about how little he knew with respect to financial planning, which is how he said he earned money.  As it turns out, much of what Epstein did consisted of hiding his clients’ assets away from various governments. 

6.  It’s becoming quite likely that Epstein had a more lucrative revenue source: blackmail.  He invited tons of wealthy and powerful men to his exclusive homes in Florida, New York and his private island (dubbed by some “Orgy Island,” or “Pedophile Island.”).  We’re now finding out that the bedrooms in which these illicit statutory-and-actual-rape-fantasies-come-true activities occurred were virtual sound stages.  According to former Palm Beach County Deputy Sheriff John Dougan, these movies existed on literally thousands of DVDs, and that authorities collected these in evidence following the raid on Epstein’s residence. 

Dougan wound up taking all of this material to Russia.  In an interview with Epstein: Devil in the Darkness producer James Robertson done before his (ahem!) relocation, he intimated that US Intel wanted them for blackmailing influential officials. 

[Robertson] Do you believe Epstein was a spy, or did have any, was under control of any kind by a foreign agency or government?

[Dougan] Well, it really depends on what you mean by ‘a spy.’  Do I think that Epstein was probably put up to getting some wealthy people to sleep with some underage women, so that he could be blackmailed, those people could be blackmailed by Western intelligence agencies?  Certainly, I do.

As convoluted as this seems, he's simply apprising Russian Intel on what US and UK Intel already have.  Seems fair, right?

Yeah, I don’t quite understand that either.  What’s worse is that Dougan’s credibility has come into question between the Epstein arrests.  He defected to Russia as an asylum seeker in 2016, and has since made a number of accusations against other Palm Beach authorities working the case, as reported in The New York Post.

What’s clear is that Epstein definitely had the wherewithal to compromise power players in industry, government, and (believe it or not) academia.

7. Because of his association with the scandal, Labor Secretary R. Alex Acosta resigned his Cabinet position on 19 July 2019.  I have no clue whether or not he’s in Epstein’s will, but he should be – especially since he’s recently lost his job.

The moral of this post, I guess, is to be so boring that I have no cause whatsoever to write about you. 

All kidding aside, even at this early stage there’s a possibility that the Epstein saga could be even wider, wilder and wtf in scope when all is said and done.

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*The Washington Post cited a 2013 study that found only 6% of hanging victims had broken hyoid bones.