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run afoul of prosecutors, the political moment, the media, or the Internet hoi polloi. In this view, Epstein is a sort of Dreyfus of the rich. And then there is the glue of wealth. Once, at lunch in the Epstein dinning room with Bill Richardson, the former Governor of New Mexico, and past Presidential aspirant, when Epstein left the room for a few minutes, I asked the obvious question, the one everybody asks each other, “How did you meet Jeffrey?” Richardson seemed surprised: “Jeffrey,” he said, as though stating what should have been perfectly obvious, “is the biggest landowner in New Mexico.” And then there is Epstein’s yet more structural explanation as to why after prison and with continuing tabloid infamy he can maintain his valued place. It comes back, not unexpectedly, to the nature or the needs of money: “At a certain level of finance, almost everyone is allied with an institutional interest. You are part of government, or you want to be in government, or you are connected to a bank or other portfolio, or you have key relationships with certain corporations or industries. Because of my situation, I have none of that. I have no institutional ties which makes me in some sense one of the few wholly independent sources of information and actual honest brokers. That’s the usefulness of disgrace.” And then there is too, that he is right. Since I began working on this piece in September, Epstein predictions about the price of oil, yen, ruble, and euro have all born out. ((If I had invested $100,000 the way Epstein said I should in early September, by the end of January I would have made $TK million. Alas, I did not invest.) And something else, which perhaps also surely accounts for Epstein’s continuing relationships with the rich and powerful: Most everyone who is now of a certain age and certain ambition and certain status grew up in, and found they were temperamentally suited to, the new age of wealth that started in the late 1970s. A meritocracy on steroids, or, as Vanity Fair would baldly and ingratiatingly dub it, the new establishment, an increasingly parallel world, a self-invented one, at further and further remove from the ordinary one. Epstein is just one version, albeit picaresque, as well as louche, of this shared story. He often tells, with some obvious marvel, his middle class to riches tale: born in 1953 in Coney Island, father works for the city’s Parks Department, mother a housewife. The captain of the math team at Lafayette High school in Bensonhurst, goes on to Cooper Union where the tuition is free. He drops HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_022754