Occasionally, I post stuff from others that I think deserves a wider audience. It does not technically have to come from a veteran but, that is how it usually shakes out. Below is a post from and retired Navy vet. If you should feel the urge to share it with others, use the provided like please so that he benefits from it.
https://substack.com/@williamefoster/note/p-187908190?r=4s8r0d&utm_source=notes-share-action&utm_medium=web
I have been planning to talk about Jeffery Epstein for a while and it kept getting pushed off, partially because of my accident but mainly because the story was so much bigger and more sprawling that I initially believed, at least the parts of the story that I felt folks should be paying more attention to.
It started with Noam Chomsky. When I heard about his connection, I – like many – was devastated. Chomsky is as responsible as any single source can be for my transition from a 21-year Sailor who voted for Reagen to whatever I am today. How could this world-class thinker on morality who I admired so much be risking it all for a few hours with some underage girl?
Then I noticed some things. For instance, Chomsky didn’t meet Epstein until he was 82-years old. Although invited, there is no indication he met him much or spent much time in areas where untoward activities could have occurred. I just didn’t believe that an 80+ year old intellectual who had recently retired from MIT and recently helped his wife of 50 years through her last days (cancer) was chasing young girls.
And that was because I didn’t understand who Jeffery Epstein was and what he did. Because we are a salacious people by nature, the girls get the most attention, but they were a means to an end, not the goal. What Jeffery Epstein was at heart was a connector. He wanted to have the most impressive rolodex in the world, to be known as the person who knew everybody.
In many ways, he seemed an impressive man. He skipped two grades of school. He was an accomplished pianist. He was one of those people who seemed to know a good bit about everything. He was also one of those people who didn’t know ENOUGH about anything. He was fired as a private school teacher and fired (well, encouraged to resign) from Bear Stearns (both jobs he talked his way into). He was charismatic enough that he always had a new opportunity but careless enough that those opportunities usually bit him in the ass eventually.
The girls were at the heart of it. One thing you will find if you read enough testimonies from former friends is that every one of them says something like “and he always seemed surrounded by the most beautiful women.” Those women were part of his game, a part along with the pitter-patter, the fact that he knew everyone, the private jet, they were another way to say “Hey, I’m someone important that you can’t afford to ignore.”
None of this is meant to minimize the horrors that most of these women endured or to say that Epstein’s role as a pimp and a trafficker wasn’t important or deserving of prosecution. I don’t want to minimize anything about that part of it. The name of every client should be released, and everyone involved should be punished for whatever their role was in this scheme. But what I do want to point out is that they are not the whole story. They are not where Epstein made his money. Overall, the girls probably cost him money. But he didn’t care because the girls conveyed the message he wanted to convey, “I’m important and I pull all these women, and I can hook you up with some of them if you are important enough to me.”
Epstein made his money through his friendships. He introduced person A to Person B and hoped person B would introduce him to Person C. Knowing Woody Allen let him get a job for a young kid as a film editing intern for Allen’s company. His very grateful uncle became a client for Epstein.
At its core, Epstein’s operation was elder abuse. That’s what he was looking for: the great white whale, $50 million a year in commissions. He got that from some. We know about Leslie Wexner, the billionaire owner of Victoria’s Secret, Abercrombie and Fitch and Bed, Bath and Beyond, among others. He was Epstein’s client for twenty years, even giving him complete power of attorney. He paid Epstein at least $200 million. Wexner eventually fired him, but that relationship opened a thousand other doors among the rich and powerful for Epstein. One was Leon Black, co-founder of Apollo Management who paid Epstein $150 million from 2012 till 2017. They later, in a recurrent pattern, had a falling out.
This was Epstein’s main scam. He invested in property and used his connections in inside trading and access to IPOs and all the usual ways. But his main thing was to know famous people who knew famous people and he could follow that daisy chain until it led him to a rich, old person he could convince to become a client. For instance, the emails are very clear about him procuring a girl for Kimbal Musk (who dated her for months) in an attempt to get closer to Elon Musk. In a rare compliment for Elon, he did seem to sense that something was up and repeatedly rebuffed him.
The main thing that struck me as I read report after report in this world was the utter vacuousness and vapidity of the supposed “elites.” Now, anyone who knows me knows that I already have a pretty dim default view of the people who make up this part of our society. That is, maybe someone can be a billionaire and a great person, but they will have to prove it to me because my initial viewpoint will be dim.
Let’s get back to Chomsky for a minute because I don’t want to seem like I am letting him off. No, I don’t believe he was with young girls or knew much about it. I do believe he was an old person involved in monetary difficulties (because of litigation after his wife’s death) and he ran into a shark who ripped him off. But I also believe he wasn’t as curious as he should have been. And, most disappointingly but backed by his emails, I believe he was willing to overlook at least some degree of Epstein’s crimes.
That is what is most illuminating about the world. A man who became famous for his humanity and for calling out those who financed violence around the world was willing to overlook very real crimes among people who he knew. But the global elite was willing to overlook the thousands of our friends who died of overdoses if Johnson and Johnson’s, Purdue Pharmaceuticals, and AmerisourceBergen’s stocks continued to go up. They were willing to support George Bush’s cesspool of an administration and watch millions of Iraqis die as long as Raytheon and Boeing continued to increase. They are willing to support the pro-genocide part of both parties right now. Jamie Dimon is as responsible for the housing crisis as any single figure. How is he doing right now?
That’s almost funny as he remains the chairman of JP Morgan Chase, a powerful bank who Epstein utilized for years. He had over $200 million stored there and would constantly wire his contact there, Jess Staley, for cash transfers to pay women. The bank was required to file suspicious activity reports with the U.S. government but failed to do so. Eventually, in 2012 after Staley left, they dropped Epstein as a client. They eventually paid about $300 million in total to various groups of victims, a rounding error for a bank that makes $50 billion a year in profit, not even .1%.
In Epstein’s emails, the three most common names are Bank of America, JP Morgan Chase, and Deutsch Bank. That’s the story I want. NONE of Epstein’s many crimes could have occurred without major banks turning a blind eye to his activities. There is a current lawsuit with BoA filed by a survivor under the name “Jane Doe.” Courts recently allowed two claims to continue but dismissed four, including the most serious. A similar case against Bank of New York Mellon was dismissed in its entirety. Deutsch Bank eventually paid regulators $150 million in 2020 but didn’t close Epstein’s accounts until after his final arrest and still were giving him large sums of cash for unknown purposes in 2019.
In my mind, that’s the biggest story and what I want the answers to. How many Epstein’s are there? How many fucking assholes are being propped up by banks that simply do not care what they are enabling as long as they get their fees? What new regulations, if any, do we need?
This has gone on enough but I do want to point out one more thing. What a deep dive into the emails will show you is that this is the biggest scandal of our lifetimes by a country mile. Who the clients are is obviously a big part of it and one we all want to know. How the banks helped is another. But there are so many weird little oddities.
- Trump, Trump, Trump, of course. Was Trump “banging” his former assistant Madelaine Westerhout. The emails seem to indicate that he bragged about it but he isn’t a reliable source, obviously, and the emails contain a LOT of unreliable information.
- Epstein gave money to “Friends of the IDF” and other Israeli military charities. How deep were his connections?
- In 2018, he purchased 330 gallons of sulfuric acid! Now, I don’t believe most of the more salacious parts of the emails, murder and cannibalism, but what the hell was this for? It does seem to have a routine use, to lower the PH of water for desalination, but still.
- Leslie Wexner. Dude was involved for 20 years. Can anyone be CEO of a half dozen major companies and make that much money and be blind to what was going on? It stretches credibility to say the least.
- Sultan Ahmed Bin Sulayem. He is the CEO of Dubai Ports World and is connected to a chilling email that says “I loved the torture video.”
- Salvatore Nuara. We don’t know much. He was a detective in the NYPD who had previously been in trouble with a different escort service and was listed as a contact of Epstein. Certainly some questions here.
There is so much more. There is very little information about whether Epstein did or did not blackmail people. Personally, I don’t believe it. It’s not good business and doesn’t seem to fit him. But maybe he did want the possibility for insurance? His various homes were riddled with cameras and CDs of videos were found after his arrest, none of which we’ve seen.
My main goal here was just to say that there is so much more here than just the salacious aspects and I hope that somehow, someway we get a full accounting of all the people that enabled this barbarity, not just the one dead guy and the one president. It took a village to let this happen and that village needs to be burned down.
ADDENDUM: Things are happening so fast. Ahmed Bin Sulayem lost his position on February 13th while I was writing this. Brad Karp, whom I didn’t mention by name but was the source of the Woody Allen story, resigned earlier this week. Howard Lutnick may not survive. The owner of the NY Giants is in hot water. It’s a good start.
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