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out after two years and begins taking classes at the NYU’s Courant Institute of Mathematics. Then, without a college degree, hence by a slight of hand, gets a job teaching math and physics at Dalton in 1974. (A few years ago, during a chance encounter with a former Dalton math department chairman, Margo Gumport, I asked her about Epstein. She said he was the most brilliant math teacher at Dalton in her 50-year career and that she had often wondered what had become of him.) It’s his first exposure to the wealthy. They have, he concludes, just as many problems as the people in Coney Island, just different ones, almost invariably involving divorce and money. “I found it interesting as a science experiment,” he recalled recently as we chatted about his life. “It did not really involve me. I could just stand back and watch.” Dalton fathers were attracted to him. Punch Sulzberger, the publisher of the New York Times, and a Dalton father at the time, tried to recruit Epstein to come to the Times. (Epstein recounts a story of riding with Sulzberger in his wood paneled station wagon to the family’s country estate and Sulzberger talking to the chauffer on a phone from the backseat to the front.) In 1976, another Dalton father, asking “wouldn’t you rather be rich than be a teacher?” introduced him to Bear Stern’s chief Ace Greenberg, a conversation Epstein recounts as this: Greenberg: “Everyone tells me you’re super smart in math and you’re Jewish and you’re hungry...so why don’t you start working here tomorrow?” Epstein: “What?” Greenberg: “If your supposed to be so fucking smart, don’t you understand English?” Epstein: “Ok. Count me in.” Hence, Epstein, like many in the late 70s, arrived on Wall Street. As will happen to a generation of others, by the fortuitous luck of being on Wall Street at that point in time, Epstein is transformed by a new, much faster, form of upward mobility than has ever before existed. With a facility for mathematics as well as for getting along with rich men, he transforms at an even faster rate than so many others who are also being quickly transformed. He moves into the penthouse of a new building at 66" Street and Second Avenue—still in the shadow of the Maxwell Plum era when the 60s on Second was the glamour address—a building that was he says, as a fond memory, full of “actresses, models, and euro trash.” (It would shortly HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_022755