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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. His sport, the captain of the math team at Lafayette High school. HE goes on to Cooper Union where the tuition is free. He drops out after two years and begins taking classes at the NYU’s Courant Institute of Mathematics. Then, without a college degree, and a sleight 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 children ,divorce and money. “I found it as interesting as a physics experiment,” he recalled recently as we chatted about his life. “It did not really involve me. I could just stand back and watch the experiment unfold.” 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 with astonishment ,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 99 6e don’t you HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_022852