I suspect Mr. Wolf would be more useful in this case.
ETA: @gracchus beat me to it. I was originally going to post Harvey Keitel’s performance in Point of No Return, but couldn’t find a good gif.
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If true, then it begs the question who he has or had kompromat on. Acosta? Trump?
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Reading the theories and knowing about the paedophilia, the blackmail one makes the most sense. He wouldn’t have had to do the Ponzi bit at all, since the blackmail targets weren’t expecting spectacular returns on their “investments” in his fund to begin with (people who asked to be let into the fund were rejected, probably because they’d ask questions after a year or two). Epstein just bungs their money in an index fund and collects his 2-20 “management fee” every year (with a very low 20 threshold), which results in $50-million or so annually once he has 20-30 wealthy paedophiles under his thumb. Minus expenses it would take less than a decade before he could live like a billionaire even if he wasn’t one.
I wouldn’t be surprised if he had something on Dolt45 (maybe not paedophilia, but something), but it may be beside the point. A big part of his racket was purchasing influence and insurance by doing powerful people “favours” (this is one of the expenses I just mentioned). Acosta was a relatively small fry at the time, so it’s more likely someone leaned on him on behalf of Epstein. That Biff had a relationship with Epstein and that Acosta eventually ended up in his cabinet would be an interesting “co-incidence” to untangle here.
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Money and girls.
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Surely blackmail. I’ve read various articles and comments theorizing blackmail; this twitter post by Quontian nicely summarizes the matter:
(1/13) Let’s take as our starting points two givens.
(A.) You are a committed, unrepentant pedophile
(B.) Because of your old job in private banking, you are very connected to lots of very, very wealthy peopleWe’ll also assume a goal:
(Z.) You want to become very rich
(2/13) The obvious route is, well, obvious: you could just be a pimp, offering underage prostitute services to very rich people. This has two problems: you’re very disposable (see: DC madam), and it’s also not super lucrative. You can’t charge millions of dollars up front.
(3/13) The second level though follows instantly: You don’t need to charge up front, just get them to have underage sex, and then blackmail them afterwards for hush money. Better ROI, but you’re still a liability, and producing and receiving big bribe money raises big questions.
(4/13) So, what to do? Well, the second idea has some merits. First, you need to recruit people in. Have lots of massive parties at your spacious home (check), invite top academics, artists, politicians to encourage people to come (check), and supply lots of young women (check)
(5/13) You don’t even have to do anything, and most people invited might even be totally unaware of the real purpose of the parties! But, sooner or later, some billionaire will get handsy, she’ll escort him to a room with a hidden camera, things happen. Morning after, you strike.
(6/13) You inform him she was really 15, but you offer him a nice, neat way to buy your silence: a large allocation to your hedge fund, which charges 2/20 (check). To ensure nobody else asks questions, you also take the extraordinary step of demanding power of attorney (check)
(7/13) The fund is offshore in a tax haven (check) and nobody will see the client list (check). Of course, you don’t really know anything about investing, instead making up some nonsense about currency trading (check), and nobody on Wall Street has ever traded with you (check)
(8/13) The fund itself doesn’t need investment personnel (check), only some back office people to process the wires (check). You don’t want to money from non-pedophiles, or they’ll notice you’ve just put it in a S&P 500 fund, so you reject all incoming inquiries (check)
(9/13) A $20 million wire from Billionaire X to you with no obvious reason will raise many questions, and the IRS will certainly want to know what you did to warrant it. A $5 million quarterly fee for managing $1 billion in assets? Nobody bats an eye.
(10/13) Because of this structure, you’re extraordinarily secretive about client lists (check) because they aren’t clients, they’re pedophiles paying you bribes, and they also are very secretive, which is why no letters or return streams ever leak (check)
(11/13) Occasionally you may also try this trick on other people: important political figures, mayors, prosecutors, etc. They don’t invest in the fund, but it’s nice to have them in your pocket. Others (academics, artists, etc.) can just be bought with money as a PR smokescreen.
(12/13) And, of course, the scam can be kept going as long as people are willing to pay, which is forever. If you’re ever caught, just lean on some of your other friends in government to lean on the prosecutor to get you a sweetheart deal. There’s almost zero risk.
(13/13) And the last piece of the puzzle is the evidence. You’d want it somewhere remote, but accessible: a place the US can’t touch but you have an excuse to visit all the time to update. Remember that offshore fund?
I bet there’s a very interesting safe deposit box there.
Two small points of clarification:
- This scheme works just as well if the billionaires are in on it from the getgo as a way to buy sex; I assumed that was obvious but I guess not.
- There’s no need to invoke the Mafia/Russia/Mossad/CIA/etc, that’s just needlessly overfitting.
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In this particular case, people were willing to overlook the trafficking/rape because of the money.
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“Just this morning the government became aware of a safe that contained a pile of cash, diamonds, a passport from a foreign country with a picture of the defendant under another name,” Assistant U.S. Attorney Alex Rossmiller told U.S. District Judge Richard M. Berman.
“The passport was issued in the name of a foreign country, it was issued in the 1980s, it is expired, it shows a picture of Jeffrey Epstein, and another name,” Rossmiller said, adding the passport showed Epstein’s residence as Saudi Arabia.
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If I were Epstein I might:
…
What other options exist?
Run for President.
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I’ve mentioned before that I know some folks in Law enforcement specializing in this sort of thing, as well as a bunch of victims advocacy people. And I’m pretty sure I’ve even met the prosecutors handling this. And Epstein came up over the weekend.
Apparently your NY US attorneys never liked the Epstein deal, but as more and more details came out they got straight up livid. And its Acosta they’re livid at. One person told me in a 40 year career they’d never even heard of a prosecutor, especially federal, having that many victims and potential witnesses. And preparing a 50+ page charging document. Only to offer a deal. Not even in public corruption cases. People seem to think he got something in exchange, either from Epstein or one of his connections. Likely political. And these people are loaded for bear. They’re bringing experts, retired task force members, advocacy lawyers etc. Just to pack the gallery during the bail hearing and fill out the background during the press conference. And it sounds like they’re gunning for Acosta.
I’d say he’s toast. This is a group of officials responsible for breaking up some the largest trafficking rings, and some of the largest child porn investigations in history. Their cases operate on the international level. And more recently federal attorneys in NY have been taking a hard line on public and law enforcement corruption. Spent years insanely quietly investigating the Suffolk County DA and PD until they could stick their Police Chief in prison and go after the DA who runs the county machine.
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If I were Acosta I’d be talking about how the system is rife with reflexive deference to the rich, and how billionaires simply aren’t prosecuted. Talk about how America is a plutocracy and that’s why the deal was made, because Acosta believed that the other option was for Epstein to get away with it through systemic corruption.
Because if it isn’t that then it’s plainly a bribe or Acosta being implicated in Epstein’s crimes.
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The impression I got from this weekend’s conversation is that the groups of investigators involved don’t consider that a possibility. Nor do they seem to think Acosta was simply disinterested or unprepared for this sort of case (which is often a big problem). Primarily because he did the work. Its not like he just didn’t follow up, or refused to believe accusers, or punted for political reasons. His office did the investigation. They talked to the victims. The grand jury was spooled up and the indictment ready to go. Apparently enough to easily put Epstein away for life, and to support a wide ranging investigation. Then suddenly offer a deal? And it sounds like the guy started discouraging witnesses as well. That sorta screams corruption.
Publickly Acosta could probably take that tack. But he’s already gained the attention of a bunch of people you really don’t want to gain the attention of. And I think any further attempts to play himself as the put upon hero, just trying to get the bad man punished it gonna piss those people off far more.
There’s this federal inter-jurisdiction task force for trafficking/child exploitation out of Brooklyn. Some of the cases they’ve done have taken 10+ years and sent hundreds to jail. If they’ve just arrested Epstein then they’ve been looking at him for years, and they’re not gonna stop with one guy. That’s just not the sort of case they do.
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Evidence of blackmail: is it there?
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