How 'scammer' Jeffrey Epstein became a 'monster' on Wall Street

Six years after his death, billionaire financier Jeffrey Epstein continues to generate an abundance of headlines — many of them pertaining to the U.S. Department of Justice's (DOJ) files on his well-documented sex crimes. But an article published by the New York Times on December 16 focuses on a different part of Epstein's life: his emergence in the financial world during his youth and how he made his fortune by repeatedly "cheating."

In the article, Times reporters David Enrich, Steve Eder, Jessica Silver-Greenberg and Matthew Goldstein note that Epstein was 23 when, in 1976, he got an "extraordinarily lucky break" and was hired by a major Wall Street investment firm, Bear Stearns, despite his lack of experience. And after he was hired, the firm discovered that Epstein had lied about his education. But Bears Stearns' Michael Tennenbaum decided not to fire him.

"It was perhaps the first example of Epstein getting caught cheating — and then avoiding punishment thanks to his uncanny ability to take advantage of those in positions of power," the Times reporters explain. "This would become a lifelong pattern, one that largely explains Epstein's remarkable success at amassing wealth and, eventually, orchestrating a vast sex-trafficking operation…. Much of the last quarter-century of Epstein's life has been carefully examined — including how, in the 1990s and early 2000s, he amassed hundreds of millions of dollars through his work for the retail tycoon Leslie Wexner. Yet the public understanding of Epstein's early ascent has been shrouded in mystery."

The journalists add, "How did a college dropout from Brooklyn claw his way from the front of a high school classroom to the pinnacle of American finance, politics and society? How did Epstein go from nearly being fired at Bear Stearns to managing the wealth of billionaires? What were the origins of his own fortune?"

For the article, the Times journalists interviewed "dozens of Epstein's former colleagues, friends, girlfriends, business partners and financial victims."

"In his first two decades of business," Enrich, Eder, Silver-Greenberg and Goldstein report, "we found that Epstein was less a financial genius than a prodigious manipulator and liar. Abundant conspiracy theories hold that Epstein worked for spy services or ran a lucrative blackmail operation, but we found a more prosaic explanation for how he built a fortune. A relentless scammer, he abused expense accounts, engineered inside deals and demonstrated a remarkable knack for separating seemingly sophisticated investors and businessmen from their money. He started small, testing his tactics and seeing what he could get away with. His early successes laid the foundation for more ambitious ploys down the road. Again and again, he proved willing to operate on the edge of criminality and burn bridges in his pursuit of wealth and power."

Tennenbaum, according to the Times reporters, "regrets that he didn't end Epstein's career when he had the chance."

Tennenbaum told the Times, "I didn't realize that I was creating one of the monsters of Wall Street."

Read the full New York Times article at this link (subscription required).