On an autumn day in 2011, Jeffrey Epstein stepped into JPMorgan Chase’s headquarters at 270 Park Avenue and rode the elevator to the executive floors where the bank’s leaders, including Chief Executive Jamie Dimon, kept their offices. Epstein, who had pleaded guilty to a sex crime in Florida three years earlier, had a message for the bank’s top lawyer, Stephen Cutler: he had “turned over a new leaf,” he said, and powerful friends could vouch for him. “Go talk to Bill Gates about me.”
Key takeaways:
- Epstein was connected to Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu, not just former PM Ehud Barak
- He wired ‘hundreds of millions of dollars in payments to Russian banks and young Eastern European women‘
- Accounts for young women were opened without in-person verification (in one case a SSN could not be confirmed)
- Jes Staley was constantly running interference for Epstein vs. JPM compliance concerns
- At Jes Staley’s urging, compliance spoke with Epstein’s lawyer Ken Starr, who insisted “no crimes” had been committed.
- Epstein had accounts at JPM for at least 134 (!) entities
- JPMorgan funded/serviced pieces tied to Ghislaine Maxwell (millions, incl. $7.4M for a Sikorsky helicopter) and helped finance MC2, the modeling agency linked to Jean-Luc Brunel.
For more than a decade, JPMorgan Chase processed over $1 billion in transactions for Jeffrey Epstein – including hundreds of millions routed to Russian banks and payments to young Eastern European women, opened at least 134 accounts tied to him and his associates, and even helped move millions to Ghislaine Maxwell – including $7.4 million for a Sikorsky helicopter – while anti–money laundering staff repeatedly flagged large cash withdrawals and wire patterns aligned with known trafficking indicators, according to a new report from the NY Times following a six-year investigation that involved “some 13,000 pages” of legal and financial records. Funny how they sat on this until now – maybe it’s related to this, but do read on.
You must be logged in to post a comment.