HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_022894.tif

It’s an absurdly vast house, among the largest in Manhattan, but the dining room is windowless, creating a hermetic or stop-time sense, broken only by the household staff ferrying in time-of-day-appropriate foods and beverages. In sweatshirt, draw-string pants, palm beach slippers, and half glasses, Jeffrey Epstein sits at the head of the table. He spends most of his day in the dining room in front of a laptop and beside a row of reading glasses (there are a lot of them in case, apparently, he misplaces a pair, but being quite meticulous he never does) advising or instructing a startling collection of the rich and powerful, who are slotted in on an hourly basis. The apartness of Epstein’s dining room might seem to offer some buffer for a super rich man who attends to even more fabulously rich men (and the occasional extremely rich woman). But with the paparazzi often posted near by, the outside world is dangerously close too. Once I arrived for a visit and found several police cars blocking the street and thought the worst—they’d come for Jeffrey. But it was a security detail for a controversial head of state who was visiting him. His subject, on this morning in early November during a set of interviews he’s agreed to have with me about his life and views, is “hyper wealth.” His subject is always wealth—how capital should react to the given global political, economic, and cultural moment. The faux-baronial quality of the dining room is disturbed by an ever-present white board, where he scribbles HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_022894