HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_022738.jpg

“You can’t spend a billion dollars, you can just relocate it to a different investment class. And you can’t give away a billion dollars without a vast staff, in effect going into the business of giving away money, yet another business you are likely to know little about.” At just about this point in the narrative, the questions or the incredulity begins in social circles and eventually in the media. He begins to acquire the major symbols of riches but does this without position, public holdings, or obvious paper trails. In essence, the formulation is, how can a person have enough money to merit increasing attention, but no clear way of having gotten it. Epstein gets stuck in that tautology. He may be rich, but he is without institutional protection or bona fides. He is a questionable substrata of wealth. He’s a freelancer. That’s the rub: he doesn’t work for anyone. Without institutional credentials he’s... well, nobody knows what. For a period, one part of his activities he says is recovering monies for countries looted by exiled dictators or military strongmen. If early in his career he might seem like a sort of George Peppard (there’s a physical resemblance) in Breakfast at Tiffany’s, a charming hustler, later he’s George Peppard in Banacek, a smart and astute operator. Then, in his telling, he’s representing a series of vastly wealthy people and families. He’s not just doing their bidding or their investing, he’s helping them to imagine the ambitions of their wealth. They’ ve satisfied their business dreams. Now there are the separate challenges and possibilities of their actual wealth. In essence, as he becomes more public the response to this, as a function of envy and the media’s need for definition, is “bullshit.” True, there is no clear alternate narrative. No one is accusing him of anything, accept, sometimes, guilt by association. (In addition to Robert Maxwell, who will be accused of fraud, there’s Steven Hoffenberg, briefly a New York high flyer, who went to jail for a Ponzi scheme, for whom Epstein acted as a consultant.) But the characterization persist: if it’s not clear, it must be murky. Sure, Goldman Sachs partners and tech fortunes, but what to make of a Coney Island, Zelig-like no-namer? In 1994, just at the moment when Prince Charles is on television acknowledging his love for Camilla Parker Bowles, Jeffrey Epstein is sitting with his arm around Princess Diana at a dinner at the Serpentine Galley in London (Diana is wearing her “revenge” dress that evening). Graydon Carter, into his second years as editor of Vanity Fair, is also at the dinner. Epstein’s rise and Carter’s rise are not, with a little critical interpretation, that different. Both are a function of the age of new money, both are helped HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_022738