JPMorgan’s Relationship with Epstein Reveals a Dark American Truth

There are not many words you can use to describe how much influence Jeffrey Epstein accumulated among the country’s power elites without doubling or tripling your entendres. Better to let The New York Times illustrate what it was all about.

Epstein had long been a treasured customer at JPMorgan. His accounts were brimming with more than $200 million. He generated millions of dollars in revenue for the bank, landing him atop an internal list of major money makers. He helped JPMorgan orchestrate an important acquisition. He introduced executives to men who would become lucrative clients, like the Google co-founder Sergey Brin, and to global leaders, like Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel. He helped executives troubleshoot crises and strategize about global opportunities.

But a growing group of employees worried that JPMorgan’s association with a man who had pleaded guilty to a sex crime—and was under federal investigation for human trafficking—could harm the bank’s reputation. [Ed. Note: Ya think?] Just as troubling, anti-money-laundering specialists within the bank noticed Epstein’s pattern of withdrawing tens of thousands of dollars in cash virtually every month. These were red flags for illicit activity.

We should all have learned by now that the owners and operators of major Wall Street banks have the ethics and public morality of Gaboon vipers. These gombeen bastards nearly blew up the world in 2008 and walked away clean. Meanwhile, they were enabling the biggest flesh peddler in American history.

That was why Epstein was at the bank’s headquarters. JPMorgan’s top executive in charge of ensuring compliance with laws and regulations had already pushed to fire him as a client. Now Stephen Cutler, a former federal securities regulator and the bank’s general counsel, had added his voice to the chorus.

Epstein’s chief defender at the bank was Jes Staley, a top contender to one day succeed Dimon as chief executive. Staley persuaded Cutler to sit down with Epstein and “hear him out.” It was a high-stakes meeting for Epstein; his close ties to JPMorgan had been invaluable in his quest for money, influence and legitimacy. The bank lent him money. Staley dished confidential information to him. At Epstein’s behest, JP Morgan set up accounts—into which he routinely transferred huge sums—for young women who turned out to be victims of his sex-trafficking operations. It wired his funds overseas. It even paid him millions of dollars.

Sounds like there are a few accessories after the fact walking around free. The numbers Epstein was dealing in are staggering. It’s like Madoff without the fraud.

Epstein was on his way to becoming one of JPMorgan’s most important clients. A 2003 internal report pegged his net worth at about $300 million. The report, which hasn’t previously been disclosed, noted that Epstein’s occupation was advising wealthy individuals like Leslie H. Wexner, the billionaire operator of brands like Victoria’s Secret and the Limited, though bank documents at the time did not list any other clients. That year, JPMorgan attributed more than $8 million in fees to Epstein, making him the biggest revenue generator among investor clients in the private-banking division.

But the report overlooked something that, had it been taken seriously, might have dimmed the bank’s enthusiasm. In 2003, Epstein withdrew more than $175,000 in cash from his JP Morgan accounts—a huge haul, even for someone with millions at the bank. Outside investigators later found that Epstein paid almost that exact amount to women that year. JPMorgan recognized that those withdrawals needed to be reported to federal regulators that monitor large cash transactions. But the bank failed to treat those withdrawals as an early-warning system for itself. Indeed, JPMorgan’s anti-money-laundering specialists subsequently acknowledged that such withdrawals should have alerted the bank to the possibility that Epstein was committing crimes.

Yeah, but...

JPMorgan, however, was all in. Soon it opened accounts not just for Epstein but also for his companies, including one that handled the affairs of his private island, Little Saint James, off the coast of St. Thomas in the U.S. Virgin Islands. The bank also provided financial backing for Epstein to help Jean-Luc Brunel, a French modeling scout who had been the subject of media reports about drugging and raping women, start a modeling agency called MC2. JPMorgan would ultimately open at least 134 accounts for Epstein, his companies and his associates.

Wittingly or not, the bank was supporting important cogs in Epstein’s sex-trafficking machinery. On the island, Epstein would compel teenage girls and young women to give him nude massages and have sex with him. Some of Epstein’s underage victims said MC2 lured them to the United States with the prospect of paid modeling work. (In 2022, Brunel died by suicide in a French jail cell after being charged with raping teenage girls.)

It’s amazing how these smart guys never notice what was going on below them. CDOs? Bullshit mortgage bonds? Rigged ratings agencies? How were we supposed to know? Sex trafficking? Obvious laundering of massive amounts of cash? Could have fooled us. The fact is that in both cases there were people warning these geniuses of the impending catastrophes: Brooksley Born in the case of the crash of ’08 and, evidently, in the case of Jeffrey Epstein, a whole lot of people in JPMorgan’s watchdog operations. The bank continued to do business with Epstein even as investigators were running him to ground. Morgan floated a loan to him a) shortly after Epstein had been indicted for a sex crime in Florida and b) while an internal JPMorgan task force allegedly was examining the bank’s relationship with Epstein.

They couldn’t quit him, any more than they could quit the mortgage-backed-securities carousel as it spun the economy into middle-earth.

Read the whole thing and realize how deep the corruption at the top of American society goes and how little of it trickles down to the rest of us. At least Carnegie built libraries.