J. Epstein & Co.

J. Epstein & Co. was the money-management business Jeffrey Epstein ran in New York from about 1988, after his consulting company International Assets Group and his engagement at Towers Financial Corporation. Epstein said it accepted only clients worth a billion dollars or more. Its one publicly acknowledged client was Leslie Wexner, founder of The Limited. By 2003 he had run the business for about fifteen years.¹

Offices and Clients

In 1987, according to sources Vanity Fair cited, Steven Hoffenberg set Epstein up in the offices he still occupied in 2003 in the Villard Houses on Madison Avenue, "across a courtyard from the restaurant Le Cirque," while paying him 25,000 dollars a month as a Towers consultant. Checks payable to "Jeff Epstein or Jeff Epstein & Co." totaling 215,000 dollars drawn on the accounts of Towers's Illinois insurance subsidiaries were listed as improper disbursements in a 1991 suit by the Illinois Department of Insurance.¹²

Epstein told people, "I was the only person crazy enough, or arrogant enough, or misplaced enough, to make my limit a billion dollars or more," and said his income came from flat fees and from playing the currency markets "with very large sums of money." He kept every client except Wexner secret. He dated his work for Wexner variously to 1986 and 1989, and when asked whether Wexner knew of his connection to Hoffenberg, said "it was certainly not the same time." A person who saw the contract between the two men said Epstein was involved in "everything, not just a little here, a little there. Everything!"¹ Fox Business, citing former Bear Stearns executives, reported that the firm "left a scant paper trail" and that Wexner took up the vast majority of Epstein's time.³

Finances

Papers from a 1995 rent dispute with the Villard offices' nonprofit landlord, the Municipal Art Society, included Epstein's financial statement for 1988, in which he claimed a net worth of 20 million dollars: 7 million dollars in securities, 1 million dollars in cash, nothing in residential property, and 11 million dollars in other assets including his stake in Riddell Sports. Towers's financial statements for 1988 showed a 400,000 dollar loan to Epstein in the year he invested 1.6 million dollars in Riddell alongside Robert Nederlander and Leonard Toboroff; Hoffenberg claimed the money came from him, and Epstein disputed the accuracy of the Towers reports. When the co-investors bought out his Riddell stake in 1995 for about 3 million dollars and asked him to guarantee access to a few million dollars against later disputes, Wexner signed for him.¹

Through his firms Epstein remained a large customer of Bear Stearns, which he had left in 1981. His St. Thomas company Financial Trust Company, incorporated in November 1998, later stated that "since 1981, Epstein has conducted hundreds of millions of dollars in transactions with Bear Stearns for his own, as well as his clients', accounts."⁴