Palm Beach Police Department

The Palm Beach Police Department is the law enforcement agency of the Town of Palm Beach, the incorporated town occupying the coastal barrier island off the city of West Palm Beach. Formed on October 17, 1922 out of the office of town marshal created in 1911, it opened the first criminal investigation of Jeffrey Epstein in March 2005. Under Chief Michael Reiter, its detectives recommended felony charges for sexual activity with minors in May 2006; after the Palm Beach County State Attorney's Office under Barry Krischer instead obtained a single solicitation count from a grand jury, the department took the case to the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the origin of the federal investigation that ended in the Epstein non-prosecution agreement.¹²³

History

The town's first charter of 1911 created the office of town marshal, to which Joseph Borman was elected; Borman, "known as 'Mr. Palm Beach,'" patrolled from Singer Island to the Lantana Inlet on his own bicycle and became the first police chief when the department was formed in 1922, serving until 1946. The department moved into a station and jail at the site of the present Town Hall. After the 1928 hurricane martial law was declared and 171 members of the National Guard patrolled Palm Beach, and during the Second World War military police patrolled the town with its officers, "as the town was a major rest and relaxation point for servicemen." Its chiefs have included Joseph L. Terlizzese (1978 to 1998), Frank A. Croft (1998 to 2001) and Michael S. Reiter (2001 to 2009); Kirk W. Blouin led the town's police as Director of Public Safety from 2009 to 2018, and Nicholas P. Caristo became chief in 2019.¹

Earlier Reports About Epstein

The department had received information about Epstein before 2005. In March 2004 an officer documented a telephone complaint that a 17-year-old girl had been giving Epstein topless massages at his residence for several months for 200 dollars each, and that there were nude photographs of other girls throughout the house; the caller offered to cooperate. The report described the information as "unverified," and it was not pursued. On November 28, 2004 the police recorded information that young women had been seen coming and going from Epstein's house at 358 El Brillo Way; they suspected he was procuring prostitutes but opened no investigation because they had no evidence the women were minors and "typically did not investigate prostitution occurring in private residences."²

The 2005 to 2006 Investigation

In March 2005 the parents of a 14-year-old girl reported that a man had paid their daughter 300 dollars to give him a massage in his Palm Beach home. The department began investigating Epstein and two of his personal assistants, and the inquiry expanded to allegations that during 2004 and 2005 Epstein, through his assistants and some of the victims, regularly recruited local high-school-age girls to give him massages that led to sexual activity. According to the Justice Department's Office of Professional Responsibility, "Epstein was aware of the PBPD investigation almost from the beginning" and retained criminal defense counsel, who hired private investigators. When officers executed a search warrant at the house on October 20, 2005, they found computer monitors and keyboards and disconnected surveillance cameras, but the computers and storage media were gone. They recovered message pads recording calls from girls over two years, photographs of naked young females of indeterminate age, massage tables and one victim's high school transcript. The lead detective, Joseph Recarey, later told federal prosecutors he believed Epstein "may have been 'tipped off'" before the search.³⁴

The police brought the case to the State Attorney's Office without making an arrest. Recarey swore a probable cause affidavit on May 1, 2006 recommending four counts of unlawful sexual activity with a minor and one count of lewd and lascivious molestation. The same day Reiter sent Krischer probable cause affidavits and a case filing package on Epstein, one of his assistants and a young woman whom Epstein had first victimized and then used to recruit other girls, with a letter calling the office's "treatment of these cases [to be] highly unusual," urging Krischer "to examine the unusual course that your office's handling of this matter has taken," and asking him to consider disqualifying himself. Assistant State Attorney Lanna Belohlavek told OPR that her office and the police "were at a disagreement" over "what the state . . . could ethically charge," and that "the police were not happy with that." In a 2009 deposition Reiter testified: "I knew that it didn't really matter what the facts were in this case, it was pretty clear to me that Mr. Krischer did not want to prosecute this case." On July 19, 2006 the grand jury returned one count of felony solicitation of prostitution.³⁵⁶

Referral to the FBI

Before formally presenting the case, the department told an FBI agent in West Palm Beach that the State Attorney's Office was considering not charging Epstein or allowing a misdemeanor plea. In May 2006 the lead detective met the Assistant U.S. Attorney A. Marie Villafaña and the FBI case agent. According to Villafaña, he said that "pressure had been brought to bear on . . . Krischer by Epstein's attorneys," that the defense had hired private investigators to trail him and Reiter and had raised claims of police improprieties, and that the defense had "orchestrated the removal" of the first Assistant State Attorney on the case, "who was viewed as an aggressive prosecutor," by hiring a lawyer whose relationship with her created a conflict. He told them that flight logs of Epstein's airplane sometimes listed passengers only as "female," which he suspected might refer to underage girls, but that he could not confirm it. Reiter testified in 2009 that after the referral a Town of Palm Beach official criticized him, telling him the victims were not believable and that "Palm Beach solves its own problems." In August 2006 Villafaña told her supervisors she would meet Reiter "to convince him to relinquish the evidence to the FBI."⁴⁷

After the non-prosecution agreement was signed in September 2007, Villafaña reported that a federal prosecutor calling Reiter "knows not to tell Chief Reiter about the money issue, just about what crimes Mr. Epstein is pleading guilty to and the amount of time that has been agreed to," and was "telling Chief Reiter not to disclose the outcome to anyone." Reiter later testified that "the Epstein case was an instance of a many million dollars defense and what it can accomplish." Recarey died in May 2018.⁴⁸⁹