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In 1976, another Dalton father, asking “wouldn’t you rather be rich than be a teacher?” introduced him to Bear Stearn’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 you’re 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. By the fortuitous luck of being there at that point in time, Epstein was propelled by a much more explosive form of upward mobility than had ever before existed. With a facility for mathematics as well as for getting along with wealthy men, he got rich at an even faster rate than so many others. He moved 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 become the Studio 54 era, where Epstein, who has, proudly, even militantly, never had drink or taken any drugs, was a regular). If on one side of Wall Street there were the salesmen (the Wolf of Wall Street model), on the other side there was a new sort of finance type able to HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_022879