Mega Group

The Mega Group, formally called the Study Group, is a private association of wealthy Jewish American business owners founded in 1991 by Leslie Wexner, founder of The Limited, and Charles Bronfman, co-chairman of the Seagram Company. It met twice a year for seminars on philanthropy and Jewish affairs, charged annual dues of about 30,000 dollars, and grew from about 20 founding members toward 50. Its existence became public in a May 1998 Wall Street Journal article. The group was founded in the year Wexner gave Jeffrey Epstein power of attorney over his finances.¹²

The 1998 Disclosure

The Wall Street Journal article, headlined "Titans of Industry Join Forces To Work for Jewish Philanthropy" and published May 4, 1998, described an April 1998 gathering of about 20 of the members at the Manhattan apartment of the hedge-fund manager Michael Steinhardt. Bronfman was quoted on the group's low profile: "From the beginning we didn't want to be seen as a threat to anybody. And that still pertains. We don't want to be seen as the Sanhedrin," the high court of ancient Judaism. Members named in the account included Wexner, Charles Bronfman, his brother Edgar Bronfman Sr., then president of the World Jewish Congress, Steinhardt, Max Fisher, Leonard Abramson, Laurence Tisch, Charles Schusterman and Harvey Meyerhoff.¹

Epstein and the Wexner Circle

In July 1991, the year the Study Group was formed, Wexner granted Epstein a power of attorney over his personal finances, and Epstein managed Wexner's money through J. Epstein & Co. until the fall of 2007.² Wexner wrote in 2019 that "in the early 1990s Mr. Epstein became a trustee of The Wexner Foundation, but he had no executive responsibilities in the running of the Foundation." Vanity Fair reported in 2003 that in 1992 Epstein persuaded Wexner to put him on the board of the Wexner Foundation in place of Wexner's ailing mother, Bella Wexner, who recovered and demanded to be reinstated; Epstein said they settled the matter by splitting the foundation in two. The same account said Wexner had given Epstein "the power of fiduciary over all of his private trusts and foundations."³⁴

The Seagram name had appeared earlier in Epstein's record. The 1981 Securities and Exchange Commission inquiry that coincided with his departure from Bear Stearns concerned insider trading ahead of Seagram's tender offer for St. Joe Minerals, in which the financier Giuseppe Tome had used his relationship with Edgar Bronfman Sr. to obtain information; Epstein testified that he knew of no insider trading in St. Joe at Bear Stearns.⁴