Episode 136: Charity Case dissects Jeffrey Epstein’s $630M victim fund—now stalled after 150 unexpected claims—and his liquidated assets, including Little St. James Island, while exposing Leon Black’s $22.5M payment via shell companies like BV70 LLC. The episode links Epstein’s offshore schemes (Liquid Funding Limited, Paradise Papers) to Apollo Global Management’s $350B empire, implicating figures like Buzzy Crongard (9/11 put options, Blackwater) and Wes Moore (Robin Hood’s military ties). Black’s tax dodges, Gratitude America’s charity loopholes, and Epstein’s grooming of the Dubin daughters reveal a web of elite financial misconduct, where hedge funds and philanthropy mask systemic corruption. [Automatically generated summary]
It's coming from Borneo, but I'm super excited for it.
How big?
Oh, you got to get them small because you got to break them like a horse.
You know, because they're mischievous little beasts.
And so, I mean, so my deal is a lot of organ grind are monkeys, but chimps playing drums, I think, is an untapped market that I could make a lot of passive income.
Because I've been reading about this passive income thing.
And what you do is you make money while you're not working and you have someone else work.
chimpanzee that's not no that's not passive income Yeah, it is.
Yeah, it is.
And you can also teach, you can teach simians of any variety to drop ship, too.
Drop chimp.
Yeah.
Do you question drums?
The drum set that you're going to teach him to play.
Yeah, yeah.
Will it be that kind that is like the one-man orchestra set?
So he's playing instruments at once.
His back's too bad for that.
Although I'll probably put them on the rack a couple of times and try to get them straighter.
But chimps have, this is the reason they could never overcome people because Cro-Mags never wanted to fuck them because they all look like hunchbacks.
don't i don't what Maybe I don't know what a chimpanzee looks like.
They're like little men with fucked up backs, right?
Oh, my God.
Admit scoliosis is fake.
Admit Scoliosis is Fake00:03:24
I pull the trigger.
Admit scoliosis is fake.
I like that this is like your new character, the guy who literally thinks that scoliosis is fake.
Scoliosis, there's, I've never seen proof that scoliosis is.
They told me I had it.
Look at me.
Yeah, you're looking great.
They're trying to make hunchbacks out of us, baby.
What is scoliosis?
That's why your back's fucked up.
Yeah, it's all curvy-wervy.
Can you get Oxy for that?
It's Wampy Wheels of the back.
Remember when I told you about Wampy Wheels?
You did in our unreleased episode.
Yeah.
Speaking of, to the people listening, Google Wompy Wheels.
Have fun with that one.
Yeah, I don't think Tesla's doing too.
I told you this yesterday, I think, off-air.
I mean, none of it was aired, but there's a guy near my house who I've been walking past the past, like, I haven't walked outside today, but the three days before this, who's just been sitting in this Tesla watching TV in the middle of the afternoon.
There's a full TV in there.
Maybe he's trying to get away from his kids.
Or his wife.
Maybe he lives there.
That's well, I thought that at first, but he didn't have enough stuff in there.
He had to have the backseat packed.
Anyways, I'm Brace.
I live in a Tesla.
My name is Liz.
Hello.
We are joined, of course, by Young Chomsky, who lives in an off-brand Chinese electric vehicle and is producing the record.
Excuse me, not the record, the podcast from there.
Hello.
I can't tell if he was yawning or glaring at me.
Yes, welcome to yourself.
Oh, this has been a bumpy ride already.
Yeah, yeah.
Well, it's about to get a lot bumpier.
You know what I read today, by the way?
No.
Real quick before we get into this episode?
Someone posted a job listing for a producer for a video show about podcasts.
Wait.
A video, like a, it's like a YouTube thing about podcasts?
I saw you post that, but I didn't look at it.
What is it?
You never read anything in the group chat.
No, I'm reading poetry in real life.
My favorite thing is when you don't read anything in the group chat and then like four hours later, you text us things that we've already sent you in the group chat.
I just want to be clear here.
I don't want to dwell on the group chat thing too long.
I fucking despise group chat.
I don't even like one-on-one chats.
It's because it's like you never know when to finish texting people.
And so with group chats, there's always this thing that I got to be looking at it.
You know how I have like 500 messages I haven't read on my phone.
I'm not going to catch up on that.
It's not fucking, you know, what do people catch up?
It's not breaking bad.
What?
Show.
You know, people always catching up on shows.
You don't want to read our messages.
It's fine.
I don't.
I'm sorry.
I am sorry.
I do want to read them.
You look really discouraging.
So this is what it said.
Are you passionate about podcasts?
We're looking for a digital video producer who understands the podcast industry, listens to all genres of pods.
You got your true crime and your comedy political.
That's it, actually.
And has a proven track record building and producing a daily weekly talk show that features the best podcasts available right now.
That's my favorite.
Who could have a proven track record building and producing a daily weekly talk show that features the best podcasts?
We're not reporting what you just did, Young Chomsky.
Vaccine Fillers Controversy00:10:03
I don't have to do that.
But who's doing this?
Who's put up the list?
I don't know.
Something I saw.
We got to get in on this.
Some big company, some big corporation.
Because people haven't thought about that, is that the podcast market's pretty full.
But what if you did a video?
Pivot to video from.
No one's really considered that podcast should do the video pivot.
Absolutely.
All right.
Well, we're talking today about one of our favorite subjects.
Scoliosis.
No, I'm just kidding.
We are talking about Jeffrey Epstein and the Nexus.
We are returning once again to the mines because there has been a new silver vein in the Comstock load of pedophilia.
Well, before we get into the big story with Epstein that came out last month, we should run down a couple things because, you know, we have the Gill A. Maxwell trial coming up.
As it stands, it is set for July.
That could change, but I kind of think it won't.
I feel like it's going to, I feel like we're going to.
Cosmically, I think it's going to happen.
And so hot New York summer where she's sweating through her blouse.
Here's my question.
COVID, will it be gone?
Are we going to have an in-person trial?
Do you think they're going to zoom her?
I don't know.
I actually don't know.
I think that they will zoom her just for interest of like, I don't know.
I don't base that on anything.
That's a spiritual truth I have.
They'll do it in Zoom.
But if they do it in person, I would absolutely love that.
Well, it turns out that she got the COVID vaccine.
Yeah.
I know.
She got it back in January.
So while your bean counting mother and your coupon clipping father are slaving away at their people over six, their Walmart greeter jobs, you know, unvaccinated, this woman, she got the jab.
Yeah.
To be fair, it's because she's in a vulnerable population.
Yes.
Well, it's true.
And she's a pedophile in prison, which is one of the most vulnerable populations.
And in fact, one of the most abused minority groups in America.
The short eyes, they call them, which is not my thing.
But yeah, so she got it.
And this was, I think she got it on like January 21st.
So likely she's she's she's getting her second shot soon.
Did it say which one she got?
She got a cocktail of all three.
No.
No, I couldn't find, I couldn't, because I was interested in that too, but I couldn't figure out which one she got.
Yeah, that sounds like the fanciest one.
It's the mRNA one, right?
They're all mRNA except for Sputnik.
No, the Chinese one.
There's one more that's that's not mRNA.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
But no, there's a couple mRNA Chinese ones.
But Sputnik's the one.
That's the one to get.
Yeah, that's the rarest.
Yeah, exactly.
I'm willing to be successful and we can't fucking get it.
Any price under $50 for it.
But yeah, no, she got it.
She's not, and because that was everyone's big prediction with Ghelane, is that she was going to die of COVID in prison because, you know, they can't snap her neck too.
But I'm thinking for those who are, because I don't think that's going to happen, but for those who are holding out for that, second shot, she could get sick.
She could die from it.
So, you know, you never know.
She could have, maybe she's got some fillers and get a little reaction going.
Does that happen?
They have said that there's a couple, a couple of people, or not a couple of people, but there has been reports that like, fillers are causing, or like women that have fillers are getting a kind of like immuno or like a, you know, allergic response basically to the to the vaccine, which kind of makes sense when you think about it.
We are never getting back to normal because listen, the fact that women with fillers possibly can't get this vaccine or that it could harm them in any way because because again, another minority group who you know, I I focus on a lot in my instagram searches and saved screenshots on my phone and stuff like that I, I don't understand.
So, like I okay, maybe I get the vaccine, I can go out, I can go to the club, I can party all night.
You know, I can do cocaine ketamine, all that kind of stuff.
If there's no women with fillers there, it's just me, and I can't be in a club alone.
That's um, that's the new normal baby.
I hate this.
I hate this.
Women, I will take out your fillers, hold them in a bag and put them back in after the vaccine is just, you know, whatever made you autistic or whatever, in order to make things back back to normal anyways.
Next up, we got Epstein's estate.
Being a little uh, shall I say Jewish i'm just around no no, I mean they are a little bit, you know, but it's, it's so.
Anyways, Epstein's got this giant estate right.
You know lots of money.
He's a rich guy, you know.
All his money goes up in there.
What is it like?
A 580 million or something?
Baby, baby 682 or something like that.
I don't know why I said that number, but I believe it's something like 682.
oh no six 630 million so they've the the the estate also set up sort of this fund Fund, right?
A victims' compensation fund.
The fund, they say, is you know, operated independently of this estate and it has to be replenished every so often, at least when it goes under a certain level.
And so the fund has been paying out.
I think they say they claim it's paid out about $55 million so far.
But now they have ceased those payments because they said, okay, well, we expect about 70 women to file claims, which who knows how they got that number.
But apparently, 150 women have filed claims.
So twice the amount.
They estate is so again, like not all of that money, not all that $630 million is in the victims fund.
A lot of that money is still in the estate and it's paying for a shit ton of different lawyers, I think from around six different firms.
It's also paying for aircraft detailing, for upkeep of the islands, all that kind of stuff.
And they are having a Robin Hood-style liquidity crisis.
Yeah, actually, you know that he's got both of the islands up for sale right now and the Palm Beach property.
Now, apparently, there was a potential buyer for the Palm Beach property.
That's all caught up.
But now they can't sell it because it's also part of the estate, which might need to be liquidated for victim spends, which that sounds totally backwards.
Then you think you should be able to sell it.
Apparently, it's a total nightmare.
The same thing with the islands, where there are apparently a couple buyers interested in Little St. James and Big St. James.
Who would buy that?
I don't know, but allegedly, this is like what the Miami Herald was reporting: that a couple buyers have actually signed, preemptively signed NDAs.
I saw that.
Because they might want to buy them.
And it's like, you know, Prissy Teigen, okay.
I'm wondering, like, it's probably, because you know how, like, if someone dies in a house, like the realtor has to tell you, which I think is fake.
I mean, I've actually never ever spoken to a realtor, so maybe it's not fake.
But I feel like everyone's, someone's died in every house, right?
Like, houses have been around forever.
And so, like, you get it cheaper if it's like a pedophile house or it's like a murder house or something like that.
I don't know.
Because if you buy the island, you're going to have fucking guys literally trying to go to that island like on their boats for the rest of your life.
I don't know.
Yeah.
Well, we'll get into why some people might want to buy that island that have nothing to do with.
It's literally a boat right away from where you can, like, the easiest place to hide millions and millions and billions of dollars.
Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.
For tax purposes.
Well, and like, of course, the island, you know, has a sundial where you can sacrifice people to, you know, both the sun and the hollow earth gods and stuff like that.
But like, again, I don't know how much it's going for.
I read 20 million one place seems a little cheap, but private islands are always cheaper than you'd think.
I've seen several viral posts about that.
So back to the estate.
The Attorney General from the Virgin Islands is seeking to freeze all of the estate's assets because they're saying that actually not enough is getting paid out or not anything at all, really.
Yeah.
It's a little confusing.
I know, because that's like a big discrepancy, whether the estate has paid out $55 million or whether it's barely paid out anything.
Right.
I don't totally understand.
It seems like a lot, like you said, most of the money seems to be going to lawyers and like upkeep.
I think the Virgin Islands, now, you know, we've talked about the Virgin Islands case against Epstein, and it seems to be like one of the strongest because it really does focus on the shell companies and the bank fraud, which we're going to get to a little bit later in the episode.
So it makes sense that they want to kind of freeze all these assets before they can claim they have nothing because they've paid out everything to a bunch of lawyers and estate upkeep, et cetera.
Exactly.
And that's the thing that I'm really interested in what will happen with the Virgin Islands case because from what I understand, Epstein was pretty tied up with like some pretty prominent Virgin Islands families too, politicians' families, stuff like that.
I know he employed, I think, the previous governor's wife.
And so I am, yeah, I'm a little curious because Virgin Islands, not exactly the largest local government pool there.
It is not the most populous place in the world.
And so, I mean, again, like Liz says, they have a pretty strong case, but we'll see what happens there.
But they are saying that there's essentially no money to pay out because all the money is tied up in assets.
So a couple new photos of Jeffrey came out.
Virgin Islands Ties00:14:31
Did you see these?
They were making the rounds on the internet.
I did.
I actually, I did.
I got them the analog way.
And I bought a National Inquirer at the Safeway.
And I think a few weeks ago, I think that's kind of where they debuted.
And I took it home and then I lost it.
I don't think I even took it home.
I think I took it on a bus and lost it.
I don't know.
I didn't lose it at home.
I lost it somewhere, but it's gone.
That's the only thing.
Are you taking the bus?
Where are you taking the bus?
Taking the bus to the Safeway.
Anyways, they are some disturbing pictures, I would say.
Yeah, it looks like it's him on, you know, there's a bunch of different ones, but the big ones are the ones that really made people kind of, you know, raise an eyebrow.
It's him on his plane with what appears to be a very small child in his lap.
A couple other ones of him with what, like big bunny characters?
What were the characters?
It was the, what's the little pig man?
He's like a pig.
Piglet.
It was Piglet?
Yeah, he's got Piglet next to him.
Piglet is, I believe, his hand on Jeffrey Epstein's shoulder.
Oh, my God.
I know.
Yet another tarnished celebrity.
Yeah, so it's like him at Disney World or something with some kids, Piglet, some other characters, some other old men that their faces are blurred.
What it sounds like is that it's actually the Dubin family that we've, you know, we've talked about them a bunch on this podcast.
And we're actually going to talk about them some more today.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Glenn and Eva Dubin.
And I believe they're daughters.
They have a couple of daughters because Epstein's flight logs actually show him going apparently to Palm Beach or from Palm Beach to Kiss a Me, which is.
I don't like Florida Towns, you know, these names, they give me the fucking creep.
I'm sure, you know, actually, I feel like an asshole because maybe it's like a Native American name or something.
Kiss a me, though, I don't like that.
It's Kiss of Me.
I don't know.
Anyways, so this is them probably at Disney World in 2004.
And he's sort of like, you know, poking fun at the Dubin children.
Made a little creepier by the fact that Dubin's parents were maybe going to marry them off to, or one of them off to Jeffrey Epstein when they got older.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Just not, you know what?
Not a good look, Jeff.
Yeah, not a fan of these photos.
Unsafe.
Because there's really not a lot of pictures of Jeffrey.
I mean, they're actually, like, there's a lot of pictures of Jeffrey with teenagers, but there's not a lot of pictures of Jeffrey with like really young kids.
And I think that's what kind of makes it all the more fucked up, especially knowing, you know, these people, his later history, I mean, his history then with the Dubins and his later history with these daughters too.
Gives me the fucking willies.
So, like Glenn Dupin, we're talking about another guy who is both a allegedly uh,
probably a pedophile and b a power player in the world of finance.
And C, which is actually not like Glenn Dubin because he looks like he's in pretty good shape, poor scene and large and looks like if you, in a cartoon, you put a straw in someone's mouth and you keep blowing it and blowing it until they kind of blow up and they float away.
Yeah, talk about Piglets.
Exactly.
Yeah, this guy makes Piglet look like Chester Cheeto.
Cheeto, the little man who sees the Cheetos.
He's skinny.
Yeah, he's thin.
He's shaped like a Cheeto.
Oh.
Leon Black is not.
Leon Black is huge.
Yeah, he's a big boy.
He's a big boy.
He's a big boy and a big boy at finance.
You got that?
Yeah, he's actually kind of one of the biggest boys of finance.
We've talked about him a couple times in the podcast.
He's a major, major player in, I mean, private equity, investment banking, global capital.
I mean, this is a fucking serious, serious dude.
This is like someone that makes me nervous talking about that's how serious this dude is.
If this guy buys your company, you are getting restructured and fired.
Yeah, he so yeah, we've talked about him before.
In case you guys don't know who like exactly or you're just jumping in, Leon Black, he is the billionaire co-founder of Apollo Global Management, which is like a publicly traded, like massive, massive global capital firm, investment banking, private equity.
The firm itself is worth around 350 billion.
People have, I think Bloomberg is who was, they were estimating his personal wealth at somewhere around 10 billion.
It's safe to say that he is one of the most powerful men in the world.
He owns Chuck E. Cheeses.
Yeah, like I said, he is one of the most powerful men in the world.
Also famously, of course, bought Blackwater.
Yes, yeah, yeah.
Which that's the thing.
We'll get to this a little later.
But Leon Black connects to quite a lot of the things that we've talked about on this show in a disparate number of subjects.
But Apollo Global Management is a huge powerhouse company.
And Leon Black is its, well, it's its chairman.
And he got in a little bit of trouble when all, you know, remember, I mean, I'm sure that many of you do, when a lot of the Epstein stuff started coming out, some of his closer acquaintances started getting a little bit scrutinized.
And Leon Black was one of those guys.
Turns out that he was very close to one, Monsieur Epstein.
Yeah, we talked about this sometime last year.
It came out in the New York Times, and I think October, there was a story that came out.
The reporters were investigating Epstein's financials.
They found a bunch of payments that Leon Black or, you know, that Apollo made to Epstein that were around between like 25, 50 million.
They were looking at.
And it was a pretty big story in the New York Times and caused quite an uproar in the financial world.
That has now since been revised because what happened was following that New York Times investigation, Apollo hired this law firm, Deckert.
Is that how you say it?
I've been pronouncing it in my head Desher.
Because I imagine, you know, it's pedophile, France, you know, they probably connect those two things.
Yeah, they hired this, this sort of, I'm going to call them a white shoe law firm.
I don't really know what a white shoe law firm is.
I love saying, I know that they're like Wall Street law firms.
I assume this probably has offices near Wall Street.
Didn't really look into them.
I mean, I looked into the company a little bit, didn't look into where their office is located.
But yeah, they hired him.
They hired him essentially to investigate whether Leon Black, Well, had very close ties to Jeffrey Epstein.
Yeah, yeah.
I mean, it's on, you know, all these companies, this has been ongoing.
You guys, I mean, we've talked about the one that MIT did, the one that Harvard did.
All these, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Victory's Secret, of course.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
So these companies, they have to hire non-biased, impartial third parties to come investigate and release reports, especially when they're publicly traded, right?
Yeah.
And that's exactly what happened.
And didn't they come back with some good news?
We'll say that.
I'm a little confused about exactly how they conducted their investigation.
So there is a report.
The report does not have any like attached evidence to it.
Like we can't really review what they reviewed.
They said they spoke to about 20 individuals and they note some more than once, including due diligence.
Exactly.
Like, hey, listen, is there videos of this guy having sex with children and he was having to pay Epstein to not release them?
And if you said no, I mean, what can they do?
But yeah, they didn't subpoena anyone.
They can't subpoena anybody.
It's not like that.
It's basically all like you talk to them if you want to talk to them.
You hand over whatever papers, which, by the way, I'm sure those papers have been gone over with a fucking very carefully by some maybe, you know, not third parties before that.
And they came back with a something like a 20-page report.
Yeah, they filed it with the SEC.
Again, this is all because they're a publicly traded company.
So they got to file all this stuff.
It details, well, detail is kind of a strong word, but it details the social relationship that Epstein and Black had between basically what seems like the mid-90s and up until 2018.
Yes, which is quite a long time.
So this is from the report itself.
It says, Black was introduced to Epstein in the mid-1990s by a mutual friend.
Following the introduction, they grew to know each other better and developed a personal relationship.
While Black and Epstein discussed estate planning, philanthropy, and related issues over the years, Black did not engage Epstein to provide him with any services until 2012.
Well, there's one thing that's a little weird about that because, I mean, maybe they're being very precise in their language here, but Epstein was on the board of the Leon Black Family Foundation for I think from like 2011 or something like that, or 2008, and he was taken off the board in 2013.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
So they did engage him in that way.
Well, they're specifically talking about the services that he contracted Epstein to do, which is what's being disputed.
So initially, Black viewed Epstein as someone who was very intelligent and knowledgeable regarding issues related to estate planning and taxation.
I've got some things to say about that in a second.
Black also was impressed by Epstein's connection to many prominent figures in business, politics, and science.
I love the idea that Leon Black couldn't meet with people and Epstein had to introduce one of the most powerful guys in the world.
Exactly.
I mean, this guy made-I mean, that's the wild thing about this: this guy makes Epstein look like a fucking twerp when it comes to money.
Right?
And so that's what that's what's really blowing my mind about this because it's not like Leon Black couldn't have met Bill fucking Clinton if he wanted to.
He introduced Black to well-regarded researchers at Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, ding, ding, ding, and encouraged Black to donate to charitable causes that supported scientific development.
In 1997, Black appointed Epstein as one of their initial directors of the Black Family Foundation, which was established for the purpose of facilitating contributions by Black and his family.
Okay, blah, blah, blah.
Black was further impressed when he learned that David Rockefeller had appointed Epstein as a director to the board of Rockefeller University.
This appointment was consistent with Black's understanding that Epstein was extremely knowledgeable about science and technology, as well as a strong proponent of scientific research and development.
So we've like gone through this a bunch of times.
The idea that Epstein was extremely knowledgeable about science and technology is four Pinocchios, four Pinos to that.
Basically, any first-hand sort of witness statements about Epstein talking about technology is literally him getting bored when anyone actually does talk about technology and then asking, you know, verbatim, what's this got to do with pussy?
Yeah, he just like kind of like fears off and makes like dick jokes.
Like he's exactly.
And Ghelene does too.
I mean, we're not exactly dealing with fucking brain trust here.
And so I think this is trying to make Black look like, you know, some sort of babe in the woods who meets this guy who's like this fucking whiz kid and gets taken in by him, right?
That's kind of what everyone says: is that like, oh, I was charmed by this magnificent figure who seems, you know, well, pretty regarded himself.
And like, you know, any actual like in-depth profile of Jeffrey Epstein, you're not left with the impression that you're dealing with a fucking, you know, unknown genius here.
No.
So it continues.
Black compensated Epstein for his work in amounts that were intended to be proportional to the value provided by Epstein.
All right.
Those payments for work performed over the period 2012 to 2017 totaled $158 million.
So that's much, much bigger than what the New York Times initial report was.
Yeah, yeah.
By several orders.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
I mean, that's what's so funny.
It's like, well, I guess I just forgot I paid him like an extra $100 and something million dollars.
Yeah.
So in 2013, payments were memorialized and signed in unsigned agreements.
After that point, payments were made on an ad hoc basis based on Black's perceived value of Epstein's work.
Decker to see no evidence suggesting that Black ever compensated Epstein for any service other than Epstein's legitimate advice on trust and estate planning, tax issues, issues relating to artwork, black's airplane, black's yacht, and other similar matters, philanthropic issues, the operation of the family office, etc.
Okay, so I want to pause on this for a second because this has come up a couple times, which is that Epstein was providing legitimate tax advice that he was, that he was, you know, he provided a service that no one else could, which seems to be like WizKid financial tax accounting.
Now, I want to be clear for a second: Epstein is not a certified CPA, he is not an accountant.
Apollo Management is one of the largest global financial firms in the entire world, in the history of the world.
The idea that they don't have a massive accounting firm that is capable of shielding them from paying too much in taxes is ridiculous.
The fact that the idea that Leon Black, one of the richest men in the history of the world, doesn't have a robust tax team that doesn't include someone as unsavory and as a like personal liability as convicted pedophile Jeffrey Epstein.
Because remember, he is, this is after his conviction.
Convicted Pedophile's Financial Tricks00:15:50
This is post-conviction, exactly.
I mean, the whole thing is absurd.
It's a little bit absurd.
Yeah.
And so the question that then comes out is really like, okay, so what is Black paying Epstein for?
Like, I don't believe, come on, that he's saving him $158 million in tax liabilities.
They're saying he saved him a billion dollars.
$2 billion.
Right.
That's what's so wild to me because, I mean, Black obviously has an army of accountants.
You know, like, he is not a man who is lacking for resources in any single way.
And of course, we know that there's basically zero evidence that Epstein ever did a day of work in his life.
I mean, post-Bear Stearns.
So, you know, that leaves us with a few options of what Jeffrey Epstein might have been providing in the way of services to our man Leon Black.
Of course, the one that immediately comes to mind, because remember, we're dealing with Jeffrey Epstein here, is that perhaps there are some incriminating photographic or video evidence of Leon Black engaged in unsavory activities with very young people.
I mean, obviously, you know, not to retread this, but you know, Epstein in every fucking room and all parts of his airplane and stuff like that, wired up with cameras, had a lot of rich people and a lot of very young people meeting in very close proximity.
You know, you don't have to be a fucking Epstein-level genius to come up with what you could do with that in terms of making a little bit of money.
But there's, you know, another sort of option, too, that I think is curious, and it could be a combination of both, is that Jeffrey Epstein seemed to be pretty good at basically like moving people's money around.
Yeah.
And kind of doing what you might call a little light money laundering.
Yeah.
So this is from the Wall Street Journal.
Mr. Black believed a witness and witnesses generally agreed that Epstein provided advice that conferred more than $1 billion and as much as $2 billion or more in tax savings.
So it also supports, they continue, excuse me.
It also supports Mr. Black's contention that he paid Epstein a fee he believed was roughly equivalent to 5% of the value that the late financier generated on an after-tax basis.
So that's, you're right, a tax savings of $1 billion to over $2 billion.
Now that is fucking huge.
That's a lot of money.
And I want to, you know, we were talking earlier about Little St. James and the Virgin Islands, right?
What do we know about the Virgin Islands?
Well, they're very close to the British Virgin Islands.
Yes.
You know what happens over in the British Virgin Islands?
Well, a lot of money gets sent over there and maybe disappears a little bit, maybe gets moved from this account to that account.
Maybe it gets handed off in a briefcase to somebody in an office building with 800 fucking accounting firms listed in one office.
That kind of thing.
Yeah.
Yeah, absolutely.
And in fact, like, you know, again, let's remember.
I don't know if you do remember the company Liquid Funding Limited?
I do.
I do.
Because on this show, I never really had to say the word liquid before we started doing this fucking show.
And now I feel like I'm saying it every other fucking day.
So Liquid, yeah, for people who don't remember, Liquid Funding Limited was one of the companies that Epstein was a chair of that was partially owned by Bear Stearns.
And this was all revealed in the document dump called The Paradise Papers, which released a kind of, you know, a bunch of tax filings from these, the like cottage industry of, you know, legal setups that just create and create and create shell companies, right?
And that just, you know, are tax shelters for a lot of people.
So Liquid Funding Limited was incorporated in Bermuda by Appleby law firm.
You know, it's very likely that it was also, you know, as we've talked about, bailed out by the Fed in the 2008 crisis, which is pretty funny.
So Epstein had a lot of great success in setting up shell companies, which is something to note.
And I do want to mention again that Little St. James is really just a quick boat ride or a private jet plane ride.
Or even a helicopter ride.
Yeah, which by the way, when you're chartering a private plane, you don't have to go through customs.
I mean, I know it sounds ridiculous, but I'm talking about like briefcases full of money.
You know, like you just watched the Wolf of Wall Street, didn't you?
I did indeed.
I did.
I watched both Wolf of Wall Street and The Big Short.
Oh my God.
You're just like, Mr. Moneybanks over here.
Sorry, you make $850 off of GameStop, you know, maybe it starts to go to your head a little bit.
But you remember the scene where they're strapping dollars going through customs, right?
Well, you don't even have to do that when you're just hopping from one island to the next in, you know, in the Caribbean.
Yeah, you know, absolutely.
I mean, I mean, people, you know, again, this stuff might sound far-fetched to you, but like, you know, when we're talking about hedge funds and these money on this level, what you're really talking about is organized crime, but legal, right?
And so like these people, they do operate on what I would call a gangster basis.
And absolutely, this stuff is not out of the question whatsoever.
I mean, look, this guy is dealing with a convicted pedophile and known convicted pedophile.
This isn't like, you know, you know, all those people who claimed, oh, I didn't know about the conviction and stuff like that.
Leon Black knew through and through what he was dealing with here.
His lawyers he dealt with at the company knew through and through what they were dealing with here.
And they realized that it was worth the risk to pay him whatever they were paying him for whatever service he was providing.
Yeah.
And something that's even crazier too is that if Black and Apollo and Decker, whatever, it's all the same, they want to keep contending that they were paying, that Black was paying Epstein for like legitimate, totally legitimate business services, then why did Black go to such a length to hide the payment?
Yes.
So in 2017, a $22.5 million payment is made by a company called BV70 LLC.
This is the one that says it's a company that owns Leon's yacht, right?
He said that this is one of the legitimate services.
It was a payment to Plan D, which is a company that manages Epstein's Lolita Express.
So you guys see there's all these different, they set up these shell companies and corporations that move money across, you know, their own assets, right?
Yeah.
So apparently a Deutsche Bank internal employee was asked about the payment and was told by another Deutsche Bank employee that it was a fee for a consulting service provided by the Southern Trust Company, which is another one of Epstein's.
Epstein's companies.
Exactly.
Absolutely no explanation for the payment.
There's also reports that, you know, BV70, which by the way, BV sounds a lot like British Virgin Island.
Yes, yeah, They made a $10 million donation to some Epstein foundation called Gratitude America.
Epstein was also setting up, I mean, that's the other thing.
He's always charities.
Mutual aid.
He was doing a lot of mutual aid.
So much mutual aid.
And I mean, remember, I mean, again, like, this is probably no secret to anybody who listens to this podcast, but all rich person charities, bar none, are a way to avoid taxes or to move money around or to lie and cheat and steal.
You know, it's, it's not, this is, these, Epstein was not exactly the charitable type, right?
I mean, the man was a tyrant.
Leon Black, same fucking thing.
And so whenever you hear about charities, these guys, imagine they're just like Moore Shell companies.
Yeah.
Except Leon Black's Leon Black's charities.
I looked through all of their like filings.
I think only you can't get any before 2011.
But 2011, all that they donated was $500,000 to the Tony Blair Faith Foundation.
And then they start bumping it up in later years and adding the Clinton Global Initiative.
Of course.
Lovely causes.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
I want to say too that Yves Smith over at Naked Capitalism did some work looking in on this.
And she had some interesting things to say.
I'm just going to read a little bit from her.
She says, let's be charitable and use Black's maximum applicable tax rate.
A marginal tax rate of about 50%.
That would be the maximum for federal, New York State, and New York City income taxes.
That means the amount of Leon Black personal income subject to Epstein's wizardry, again, charitably assuming he managed to find a way to bring Black's taxes from 50% to zero, would be double the savings.
So $2 to $4 billion.
We're talking about personal income that Apollo or that, you know, that Leon Black was reporting.
Now, what's confusing is that where is that income coming from?
Yeah.
Yeah.
Because that level of income coming from a public company like Apollo would have to be reported on a 10K on his public filing, right?
And at that point, when that kind of money gets reported publicly, it's really going to be, it's going to be really fucking difficult to fuss around with, to do any kind of accounting with, right?
So I mean, it's just very, very clear.
I mean, it's, there's absolutely no possible way.
I'm saying, there is no possible way that what Epstein was doing was fussing around with taxes.
There's just absolutely not.
No, Epstein is not sitting there with his little fucking pince naz on in a library, you know, on a fucking oak desk, going through Leon Black's tax filings in order to, you know, shave off a few dollars here, a few dollars there.
I mean, it's ridiculous on the face of it.
And that proves that this report, I mean, you know, that makes me think rather that this report is, I mean, of course it's a total fucking setup job, right?
I mean, Leon Black is not going to hire somebody.
He's not going to hire a Trunon to look through his fucking records with Jeffrey Epstein and his messages back and forth and stuff like that.
And so, yeah, I mean, the whole thing's a put on, right?
Like, we still don't know.
And we probably won't know, at least until, you know, maybe I get my hands on the guy exactly what he was paying for.
Yeah.
Well, what's happened now is that he said he's stepping down as CEO, but he's going to remain as chairman of the board, which is like, this is all bullshit anyway.
Exactly.
So they're just, it's like the Wexner shuffle, right?
You know, and that's the thing.
That's the thing, is it really looks like, you know, Wexner was Epstein's benefactor for quite a long time.
And then, when a fee dispute, just like what happened with Leon Black, you know, arises in, I think it was like around 2008, we got, you know, Epstein's not taking in a lot of money between 2008 and 2012.
All of a sudden, Black steps in 2012 and starts bankrolling the guy.
Yeah.
And so, you know, there is a bit of a handoff there from, you know, it's a patronage system.
The question is, of course, what services were the patrons proceeding?
So Leon Black, again, the guy is a total fucking crook, but he's not just a crook.
He's a crook on Wall Street.
And as we talked about in the last episode, what they did with Aaron Goode, Wall Street is kind of inseparable from another thing that we like to talk about on this show, which is less than savory characters in our nation's history who might have had an outsized role or at least some role in pushing things around, maybe doing a little 9-11, maybe doing the white helmet, stuff like that.
So, one of the guys who was on this thing that was an accountability board over there at Apollo was a guy named Buzzy Crongard.
You might remember him from, I can't remember which one, but one of the 9-11 episodes we did with Ben.
He was the former executive director of the CIA.
But not just that, he was the head of the investment arm at a little investment firm called Alex Brown, which was part of Deutsche Bank at the time.
This was in the late 90s.
He, the huge, basically what happened, and the reason that a lot of people know this guy's name is a huge amount of put options were put onto two airline stocks, United and American.
That was on 9-11.
They purchased 95% of the put options on those two stocks.
By the way, which is funny, you know, when I was sort of reading up on this again, Snopes says that this is false, that there's any sort of insider trading going on in regards to 9-11 and these airline stocks, because Alex Brown are an investment firm with no conceivable links to the hijackers.
I can think of one conceivable link to the hijackers.
Anyways, you know, that's he becomes executive director of the CIA.
He is recruited personally by another 9-11 hero, George Tennant.
And he joins, in fact, this connects him to another thing.
The episode recently, the episode we just had, he joined the Blackwater board two months before the big Blackwater hearings in Congress started.
His brother, Howard Cookie Crongard, was, I believe, the inspector general at the State Department and actually had to leave his job because he was telling people not to investigate Blackwater and he was helping cover up forced labor trafficking in Kuwait.
That is his brother, Cookie.
So we've got Cookie and Buzzy Crongard.
Only Buzzard.
I understand what you're about to say here.
What's up with that?
Well, as Cookie's Cookie, Cookie makes very clear.
Cookie was the lady name.
I called Cookie a couple days ago.
You did?
Yeah, I did not get an answer, but I did call.
I just wanted to see if the number worked.
You can get it.
It's not hard.
I won't say it or anything like that.
But I just mean Cookie's a girl's name.
Yeah, yeah.
Cookie is a girl's name.
Cookie is not only a girl's name.
Cookie is a girl that you might meet at like the Gold Club's name.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Buzzy, though, that's a classic American Nazi name.
That's like 50s, like real, you know, shaved side, fucking buzz cut Marine guy name.
And these guys love doing 9-11.
But that's not all about this guy.
He's not just on the board of Blackwater.
And of course, he's actually put on the board of Blackwater in September.
I think the hearings start in November.
So obviously, you know, this has something to do with it.
In 2005, he actually joined the board of DLA Piper, which is one of the biggest international law firms.
It's a law firm that also has a lot of curious connections.
Obviously, it's a big law firm.
So, you know, I'm sure a lot of people work there.
But specifically, a couple of guys work there that are a little germane to the conversation.
One of those is Jose Maria Asnar, the former prime minister of Spain, who Virginia Jeffrey accused, not by name, but basically any read of the evidence would show it as this guy of allegedly raping her.
And it's also where George Mitchell is a chair.
George Mitchell, of course, is referenced by Virginia Jefferies when she said her body was put on a banquet for him.
And I believe Steven Pinker was the other person she's referencing sort of in that part of her testimony.
It also employed until I think a couple months ago, a little guy named Doug M. Hoff, who is the first guy to be in the ladies' job at the White House.
Strange Charities in Afghanistan00:14:57
What are they called?
Second gentleman.
Second gentleman.
God, Doug M. Hoff works there, huh?
Yeah, yeah.
It's kind of weird when you see places like this and you just see them all.
It's like the gang's all here.
Exactly.
You know, it's real creepy.
Real, real creepy.
Well, the gang actually continues to roll through the saloon doors because Apollo owns, like we mentioned, Blackwater.
Well, they own what Blackwater became.
I mean, Blackwater is still technically around.
I think it's just a, yeah, Constellus.
And through that, they own something called the Olive Group.
Olive Group is, let's just say it's in a similar industry to Constellus and Blackwater and, you know, triple canopy and all these things.
And that until I think about 2007 employed a guy named James Lemusier.
James LeMussier was referenced in our last episode we did with Aaron Goode when I was talking about the guy who was thrown out of a third story window in, I believe, Istanbul and was so sad, committed suicide, of course.
He is a British gentleman who started the White Helmets, which is a totally normal organization.
It's just like any McDonald's franchise or anything like that.
I don't know why you would ever.
It's as American as McDonald's.
I'll tell you that.
Yes, it is.
And they won an Oscar.
It's a good group.
And so, of course, like we mentioned, he also owns Blackwater.
And Blackwater, you know, I mean, Eric Prince isn't, of course, at what Constellus, Blackwater is now Constellus, but that is another guy who likes setting up quite a lot of shell companies.
And I would be remiss without mentioning this because I really, really dig this, is that Leon Black's father, Eli Black, got his start at fucking Lehman Brothers.
Then, of course, later owned what had been the United Fruit Company.
I think he merged it with, I can't remember the company he merged it with, but it became United Brands.
And he jumped out of his high-rise office building after getting caught bribing Oswald Oswaldo Lopez Ariano, who was the Honduran president with a $1.25 million dollars.
Of course, we all know the story with fucking United Fruit Company.
I mean, you know, massacres, slavery, plantation, disrupting not the social, political, and like any kind of fabric you had in South America, Central America, they disrupt it.
They'll take your kid out front and fucking shoot him in front of you.
I mean, it's one of the most horrible companies in the world.
Makes East India Company, well, no, it's kind of just exactly like the East India Company.
And Leon Black himself got his start at Drexel, which was, of course, founded by a guy named Francis Drexel, his son.
Anthony Drexel really took it to new heights, later became JP Morgan, which, you know, we all know about J.P. Morgan here.
But something I thought was really interesting and really isn't germane to any of this, but I thought was kind of a fun fact is that Anthony Drexel's niece was literally a canonized saint by the Catholic Church.
But anyways, Leon Black got a lot of strange connections.
And by strange connections, I mean the guy is fucking spooked up to the gills.
So there's one last kind of fun random thing I want to mention because I don't know what got me on this, but I was like on Twitter the other day, just refreshing the little feed, checking out the news.
Big mistake.
It's the end of the day.
And this news item pops up that the CEO of the Robin Hood Foundation is stepping down.
Now, I don't want to confuse anyone.
We're not talking Robin Hood, the app that we talked about last week.
This is the charity.
This has nothing to do with investing.
Well, unclear there, but it is certainly not the app.
The Robin Hood Foundation is a big, very, very big, famous New York society charity.
This is like really, really the big wigs.
This is all the hedge fund guys are big dealers in the Robin Hood Foundation.
And I remember I was reading this and said, you know, Wesmore, who's the CEO, is to step down.
And I was like, Robin Hood, that sounds so familiar.
I know that I've read something in connection with Epstein and I was looking at it.
Of course, you know who's the co-founder of Robinhood Foundation?
That would be Glenn Dubin.
Glenn Dubin, yes, whose kids were photographed on Jeffrey Epstein's lap.
Now, I was like, wait a second.
And I've asked a couple of quote-unquote journalists about this.
I've yet to hear back.
If any of you are listening, look into this.
I have some questions.
And I was like, huh, I wonder if him stepping down, the CEO stepping down, has anything to do with Leon Black?
Because Robin Hood actually partnered with the like Leon Black and his fucking wife.
What's her name?
I can't remember.
Deborah.
She produced the play Jersey Boys.
She won a Tony for it.
My God, her fucking Tony award-winning wife.
I also didn't mention this earlier, but Leon Black owns the painting, The Scream.
God, what an asshole.
That is like real asshole level owning something like that.
Yeah.
Well, there's four of them.
Just buy a fucking poster on Redbubble like everyone else.
You know what I'm saying?
Mm-hmm.
Anyway.
So they partnered with, they partnered with Robin Hood last year.
They were like funding, they're basically like totally funding the New York City like COVID relief effort.
It was something like $30 million.
It was a huge investment, or it's not an investment, excuse me, it's charity.
It was a big charity donation that the blacks made alongside Robin Hood.
So, you know, it would make sense that with all this news about Leon stepping down with a bunch of scrutiny going into Apollo's funds and their different transactions, that someone with those kind of connections would maybe want to get out of the, you know, get out of the spotlight.
But it's like a pretty big deal.
You know, this charity under Wesmore's tenure, they raised over $230 million just last year.
And in total, it was four years in excess of $650 million.
That's a fucking lot of money.
And the major, major hedge fund guys are all like, this is really where they pour their money because it goes into like poverty efforts in New York City.
And so it makes them feel like they're giving back to their, you know, like in their backyard where they came up, whatever.
There's like a whole plot line on billions about this, which if anyone watches that show, you'll know exactly what I'm talking about.
Anyway, so I just got to go through a little wormhole that I went into because this is like fucking weird.
And I was like, Liz did have a mental breakdown about this yesterday.
I can attest.
It's super weird, man.
So I was like, who the fuck is this guy who's the CEO, right?
Because that's what I want to know, Wes Moore.
I look at his face, his face, very smooth.
Oh, yeah.
The man looks like an egg.
Absolutely.
Incredibly smooth.
I mean, unblemished.
Completely unblemished, which is very strange because he has a very decorated military career.
Very strange.
But anyway, he is New York Times best-selling author twice now.
Good friend.
I'll be honest.
Hold on.
I feel like that's not that hard because your publisher just gets people to.
Yeah, because your publisher just has someone buy like a million copies of the book.
It pumps it up.
Like anybody who writes a book, if your book isn't a New York Times best-selling book, then you're getting ripped off by the publisher.
Yeah, I think that's a good call.
So I'm just going to read a little bit from his bio and we'll just walk through how I kind of like slowly drove myself crazy yesterday.
Before becoming CEO at Robinhood, Wes was the founder and CEO of Bridge EDU, an innovative tech platform addressing the college completion and job placement crisis.
Now that should set off some alarms.
He was at Deutsche Bank and Citigroup from 2007 to 2012.
Okay, so I'm like, that's a little weird.
Great.
Yeah.
Neither of those have any weird connections whatsoever.
Yeah, but okay, whatever.
A lot of people go into investment banking, right?
It's just all the banks are shitty.
Practically all the guys I know do.
It's shitty.
Okay.
So it turns out he was a Rhodes Scholar in 2000.
You know who else was a Rhodes Scholar, right?
Cecil Rhodes, the guy who invented Rhodesia.
No, Mayor Pete.
Mayor Pete was a Rhodes Scholar.
Yes.
All right.
So get this.
So named a Rhodes Scholar in 2000.
He studied at Oxford.
Then he went to London to work for Deutsche Bank.
Before that, serving 10 months with the Army's 82nd Airborne Division in Afghanistan.
There, and this is from his official bio.
Okay, so this guy's just putting it out there.
There, he helped revise a program to win over Taliban fighters, boosting its enrollment from six when he arrived to 500 by the time he left.
A lot of guys revise a program to win over Taliban fighters.
Very interesting.
So, I'm like, huh, let me see if I can find out any more information about this because what is that?
That's very considering the Taliban's political and military position in Afghanistan at this moment.
Seems like maybe that promotion was a little bit unwarranted.
So, guess where he went after that?
A White House fellow at the State Department as a special assistant to Condoleezza Reis.
Very cool.
Very cool.
Love Condi.
He studied international relations and economics at Johns Hopkins.
Now, I just want to say one thing.
If you know anyone who has studied both international relations and economics, stay away.
Cut him out of your life.
Yeah.
Also, dangerous motherfuckers.
If they're combining that with either Chinese or Arabic, citizens arrest them.
Well, okay.
So this guy, I just want to, this is like, I was reading this and I sent this to you and you didn't fucking believe me.
You're like, what are you getting this?
This can't be real.
So this is from an interview he did with C-SPAN.
I don't know.
He says, well, actually, I interned with the Department of Homeland Security.
And when I was there, it was actually the Office of Homeland Security.
In 2001, pretty much a couple of months after the attack, talking about 9-11, when Governor Ridge was first brought in by President Bush to be the first director of Homeland Security, he wanted to look at some asymmetric threats and not just, you know, what we know about the things, what we might not know.
I was doing research at the time at Oxford.
Now, remember, this is his PhD that he's doing.
But I had pretty much started even before the attacks on the rise and ramifications of radical Islam in the Western Hemisphere, where I specifically focused on Hezbollah.
Yeah.
Sorry, it's hard not to laugh.
On Hezbollah, Hamas, and Al-Qaeda and the operations that they were doing in South America, the Caribbean, and in Canada.
So reading between the lines there, anybody who has followed the saga of the State Department getting fucking just so oiled and worked up over Hezbollah in South America, they're always talking about this supposed giant network of Hezbollah operatives coming out of Venezuela.
And so that, I'm sure, they had him ginning up some bullshit there where he's like, oh yeah, Hezbollah is, you know, creating some missile base and fucking, you know, some bringing a nuke to Caracas or something like that.
I mean, this guy, if you're doing this kind of research, I mean, you're a real fucking creep.
So he's at Oxford.
He's studying Hezbollah's reach in South America, which is like the spookiest thing.
By the way, after studying international relations and economics at Johns Hopkins, I mean, that's like, you know, you want to get a job in the ruling class.
That's what you study, right?
Yeah.
So he takes a break from that because he hears the call of duty as he interns at DHS.
Then he finishes at Oxford and he says immediately after that, I start doing investment banking.
Naturally.
And this guy, living dialectic, master dialectician.
He's bringing together everything.
The big reason why I wanted to do investment banking was because I knew the importance of understanding the global financial markets in terms of understanding policy.
I knew that I wanted to focus on policy and I wanted to, you know, long-term make real, you know, substantial changes in the public policy arena.
But I also knew also you have to understand, you have to understand budgets.
You have to understand global markets.
You have to understand international business.
I mean, it's all just, you know, total bullshit.
So he's working for Deutsche Bank.
He says they are fantastic, fantastic place.
Really, what a model company has.
So I've heard.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Really?
Funny enough, he's now removed that he worked at Deutsche from his LinkedIn, but I'm sure that has nothing to do with their recent scandals.
But he couldn't stop praising them in this interview.
So I just want to say that I was very confused about what he was doing in Afghanistan.
I did another little look at what, you know, this program, this, this kind of like, you know, he says he's trying to win over Taliban.
Like Evan McMullen.
Yeah, so he was deployed to the border.
He says he was right on the border between Pakistan and Afghanistan.
You guys, I can't make this up.
This is so crazy.
He's on the border of Pakistan and Afghanistan where he says he worked very closely with Psyops to develop education camps for ex-terrorists to welcome them back into the Afghani government.
Oh, yeah, yeah.
I'm sure they were thrilled.
That's like anybody who sort of knows the history of what goes on in Afghanistan is the border region.
I mean, especially over the border in Pakistan, that is the kind of place you want to go to if you are working for the CIA.
And, you know, obviously there's troops there as well.
But any, any sort of, I mean, they're basically, I cannot stress enough how much of either a failure or possibly a real success these operations probably were.
So as you can imagine, I'm sort of like slowly losing my mind a little bit as I'm reading this, this piece on Bloomberg about this guy, the biggest fucking, I mean, the biggest, biggest charity in New York City for, you know, ruling class money.
I mean, this thing is fucking huge.
Their annual fundraisers have like Pharrell and Beyoncé.
You know, They're fundraising hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars.
Jewel Watch Fundraising00:02:52
Um, and so I'm reading this thing, and it ends with: uh, you know, thanks to Westmore's transformational leadership, Robin Hood is at the strongest point in our 30-year history, said Robin Hood's co-founder and board member, Paul Tudor Jones.
Again, co-founder, the title he shares with one, Glenn Dubin.
Robin Hood has convened a search committee headed by board vice chair Dina Powell McCormick, including Paul Tudor-Jones, board chair John Griffin, and board members Jeffrey Canada and Mary Airdos.
Now, and I was like, Mary Airdos, where is that name?
Now, I know that name, right?
Now, that is one of the higher-ups at JPMorgan Chase.
Classic.
Then I remembered a little piece in the New York Times that came out right when Epstein was arrested back in July of 2019, when it came out that J.P. Morgan Chase continued to work with Epstein after his arrest.
This is from the New York Times.
When compliance officers at JPMorgan Chase conducted a sweep of their wealthy clients a decade ago, they recommended that the bank cut its ties to the financier Jeffrey E. Epstein because his accounts posed unacceptable legal and reputational risks.
Yet, Mr. Epstein, who has been charged with sex crimes and pleaded guilty in 2008 to solicitation of prostitution, remained a JPMorgan client until 2013.
The main reason, according to six former senior executives and other bank employees familiar with the matter, was that Mary C. Airdos, one of JP Morgan's highest-ranking executives, intervened to keep him as a client.
Part of her rationale was that Mr. Epstein played a lucrative role recruiting new customers to JPMorgan's private banking division, which caters to ultra-wealthy people and families.
That made him an especially coveted client.
I mean, Christ, all this stuff is just a series of concentric circles linked together like the Olympic rings.
The gang's all here, baby.
In every way, in everything we look at, the gang is always here.
It's like cheers.
But with pedophiles.
Yeah.
So as usual, we got hedge fund mania here on Truanon.
We can't stop talking about hedge funds.
I just love a good thing that either makes or loses money.
And sometimes both.
Yeah.
Which is called a hedge.
This is real businessman shit, right?
Brace's Richard Jewel Watch00:01:11
It's good.
I don't.
Can we sell to one of these?
What?
So, what?
Like, could a hedge fund buy us?
Yeah, sure.
They could buy whatever they want.
They got all the money in the world, baby.
Yeah, I still don't, I still don't really get what these people do, but it seems like they do a lot of it.
Did you watch Richard Jewel?
Haven't watched Richard Jewel.
Are we doing Jewel Watch?
Yeah, so I told Brace this yesterday, but I want everyone on the podcast to know because we're going to now be checking in every episode to see if Brace has watched Richard Jewel.
And we're calling this Jewel Watch.
So this is now Jewel Watch 2021.
Grace, have you watched Richard Jewel?
I have not watched Richard Jewel.
All right, well, this has been Jewel Watch.
My name is Lynn Wood.
Bryce Belden.
I'm Liz.
The music today is by Unknown Mortal Orchestra.
We are, of course, joined by our producer, Young Chomsky.