Hyperion Air

Hyperion Air is the name of two companies that held aircraft for Jeffrey Epstein: Hyperion Air, Inc., a Delaware corporation with a registered address in Wilmington, which bought his Gulfstream jet N909JE in 1994, and Hyperion Air, LLC, organized in St. Thomas, U.S. Virgin Islands, on October 19, 2012, which held his helicopters until after his death. A 2007 federal draft indictment described Epstein as "president, sole director, and sole shareholder" of Hyperion Air, Inc., whose "sole business activities related to the operation and ownership of a Gulfstream G-1159B aircraft bearing tail number N909JE."¹² The corporation's account at JPMorgan Chase carried Epstein's aviation cash withdrawals from about 2011.³

Hyperion Air, Inc.

In 1994 Gulfstream sold a 1974 Gulfstream G-1159B, serial number 151, registered N979GA, to Hyperion Air Inc. of Wilmington. Epstein's pilot David Rodgers signed as chief pilot and Epstein signed as president; a special agent of the Federal Aviation Administration later noted that "the signature of EPSTEIN looks similar" to his signature on another aircraft's documents. The registration was changed to N909JE in May 1994. The name of Darren Indyke, Epstein's lawyer, appears on documents filed for Hyperion Air Inc. in 1999 and 2013. In November 2013 Hyperion sold N909JE to Starbridge Landing Inc. of Dover, Delaware, and on December 2, 2014 the aircraft was deregistered for export to Venezuela.¹

In March 2012 a 2001 Bell 430 helicopter, serial number 49078, registered N901RL, was registered to Hyperion Air Inc., with Indyke signing the application as corporate secretary. The registration was changed to N331JE in June 2012, and in August 2013 the helicopter was transferred to Hyperion Air LLC in St. Thomas. The FAA agent wrote that "the same players in the Inc and LLC are on the FAA registration paperwork," naming Indyke and Lawrence Visoski.¹

The 2006 Subpoena and the 2007 Draft Indictment

The chronological log of the Operation Leap Year investigation kept by the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Southern District of Florida records grand jury subpoenas returnable August 18, 2006 to Epstein's aviation companies Hyperion Air, Inc. and JEGE, Inc., issued with subpoenas to Chase, Colonial Bank, Washington Mutual and Capital One.⁴ The draft indictment prepared in that office in 2007 recited overt acts in which girls identified as Jane Does traveled "aboard the Gulfstream aircraft owned by Hyperion Air, Inc." NBC News reported that a May 2007 prosecution memorandum released in the Epstein Files sought approval to charge Epstein, JEGE, Inc., Hyperion Air, Inc. and three redacted co-conspirators in a sealed 60-count indictment.²⁵ No indictment was filed. The non-prosecution agreement of September 2007 disposed of the federal case, and Hyperion kept the Gulfstream for another six years.¹⁶

The grand jury subpoena log of the investigation, kept under Lions number 2006R01181 for grand jury FGJ 05-02 in West Palm Beach and its successor FGJ 07-103, assigns control number OLY-46 to a subpoena for the "business records" of "Hyperion Air, Inc, Custodian of Records," with an appearance date of May 8, 2007 and no return date entered. The next number, OLY-47, is the matching subpoena to the custodian of records of JEGE, Inc., on the same date. The preceding entry, OLY-45, sought account records from New York Strategy Group, LLC, with an appearance date of May 2, 2007; the log then records subpoenas OLY-51 to OLY-54 for the business records of the J. Epstein Virgin Islands Foundation, J. Epstein & Company, Epstein Interests and Financial Trust Company, all returnable June 12, 2007.⁷

The same file holds the office's correspondence with the defense lawyer Gerald Lefcourt over a subpoena to NES, LLC, an Epstein company; the letter enclosed further subpoenas to two NES employees, Eric Gany and Harry Beller. The subpoena's attachment asked for "all documents and information referring or relating to the transfer of fund to or from any account owned by NES, LLC to or from any account owned by JEGE, Inc., Jeffrey E. Epstein, Hyperion Air, Inc., Financial Trust Co., New York Strategy Group, Inc., J. Epstein Virgin Islands Foundations, Inc., and/or Epstein Interests," from January 1, 2003. A letter to Lefcourt of August 16, 2007, its signature redacted, answered his objections: "Mr. Menchel's comment to you about potential money laundering charges related only to a resolution of the case. In other words, if the sex offense case is resolved, the Office would close its investigation into other areas as well. The matter has not been, and it does not appear that it will be, resolved so the money laundering investigation continues, and Request Number 6 will not be withdrawn." The reference is to Matthew Menchel, chief of the office's Criminal Division until August 2007. The letter added: "the information provided regarding the pilots came from the corporate records of Hyperion and JEGE, Inc., not NES." The non-prosecution agreement was signed five weeks later.⁷

The JPMorgan Account

JPMorgan's due diligence report on Hyperion Air, Inc., dated January 23, 2009, noted that "This entity is 100% owned by Jeffrey Epstein"; the bank's internal description of the account's purpose, approved in November 2006, was "Managing payments for operational expenses of personal aircraft." The forensic accountant Jorge Amador, retained by the Government of the United States Virgin Islands in its suit against JPMorgan, identified eight JPMorgan accounts and ten entities "purportedly related to Epstein's personal aircraft."³

Of at least 134 currency transaction reports JPMorgan filed on Epstein accounts between September 3, 2003 and November 1, 2013, 15 concerned the Hyperion account ending 4332. Amador wrote that "beginning in or around 2011, Epstein's cash transactions were funneled through Hyperion Air," which "it appears, was done per the advice of" John Duffy, then chief executive of JPMorgan's private bank. A March 28, 2012 internal email quoted Duffy:³

This is a better fact pattern than I thought. JE and I spoke about his pattern of cash withdrawals. His answer was "fuel payments in foreign countries." Some of the countries were OFAC listed. I did ask him to withdraw this cash from his aviation account for these payments. Clearly he is doing this.

The reference is to the sanctions lists of the Office of Foreign Assets Control. Between October 2011 and November 2013 the Hyperion account issued 548,751.87 dollars in checks payable to "Cash," most in round amounts of 30,000 or 40,000 dollars, which Epstein's accountant Harry Beller signed and endorsed. A JPMorgan "Verify & Confirm" review of March 9, 2013 recorded that the "large cash withdrawals from the account [were] for fuel expenses when traveling to foreign countries." Amador found no fuel receipts or other documentation in the account records, and noted that Epstein continued to pay two fuel vendors from his personal account between March 2011 and July 2013. Between 2011 and 2013 the Hyperion account also made eleven foreign currency transactions totaling 224,655.79 dollars, nine of them purchases of euros or British pounds, on none of which JPMorgan filed a currency transaction report.³

In a December 2014 email a Southern Trust Company employee was described as "currently working on the scanning and shredding for all of the entities, FTC, LSJ, Zorro, NES, JEGE, Hyperion, and JEVIF," hired "as a temporary college intern-type person to deal with shredding sensitive documents as a summer project."⁸

Hyperion Air, LLC

The operating agreement of Hyperion Air, LLC, dated October 19, 2012, was signed by Epstein as "Sole Member."³ The territory's complaint against his estate described the company as organized that day with Epstein and his chief pilot Larry Visoski as managers, and as the owner of a Bell helicopter (N331JE) and a "Keystone" helicopter (N722JE) that Epstein used "to transport young women and underage girls between St. Thomas and Little St. James"; the complaint dated Epstein's shell-company formations to the period after his 2010 registration as a sex offender in the territory, stating that "most of these companies were created in 2011 and 2012."⁹

N722JE was a 2008 Sikorsky S-76C-2 that Epstein's company Air Ghislaine, Inc., later Freedom Air International, had bought in 2008 and sold on July 26, 2011 to ASI Wings LLC of Hartford, Connecticut. On June 13, 2019, three weeks before Epstein's arrest at Teterboro, ASI Wings sold it back to Hyperion Air LLC, with "Lawrence P. VISOSKI Jr." signing as manager. Visoski signed the bill of sale of May 13, 2021 by which Hyperion sold it to Industrial Integrity Solutions Inc. of Ontario, California. The name of the buyer's chief financial officer, who signed for Industrial Integrity Solutions, is redacted in one production of the FAA correspondence and legible in another.¹¹⁰ The same individual signed, as manager, the aircraft security agreement of May 11, 2021 by which N550GP, LLC, a California company at 2151 East Convention Center Way in Ontario, pledged to Bank of Hope the Gulfstream G550, serial number 5173, then registered N212JE "(Pending change to N550GP)," that Plan D LLC had sold on December 22, 2020.¹¹ N331JE was sold in May 2020 to CMG Aircraft Leasing Inc. of Miami, a broker, which resold it the same day to QIR Air Resources LLC of Salt Lake City; its registration became N430D in July 2020.¹

Federal Interest

On August 18, 2021 an Assistant U.S. Attorney in the Southern District of New York, then preparing the trial of Ghislaine Maxwell, sent the FAA's Law Enforcement Assistance Program in Atlanta a list of search terms that included "Hyperion Air LLC," "Air Ghislaine," "Thomas World Air LLC" and "Freedom Air Petroleum LLC." The FAA special agent replied the same day: "In 2015/2016, DEA S/A was interested in EPSTEIN and his aircraft," naming an agent of the Drug Enforcement Administration's Saint Thomas Resident Office, and "In August 2019, the FBI in Atlanta, GA was interested in aircraft linked to EPSTEIN." The agent's search found "No other aircraft registered to or indexed to Hyperion Inc or LLC, and none to Ossa Properties Inc."¹

The territory named Hyperion Air, LLC as a defendant, with Indyke, Richard Kahn, the estate, Plan D LLC and other Epstein companies, in the suit it settled on December 1, 2022 for more than 105 million dollars.⁹¹²