Alan Greenberg

Alan Courtney "Ace" Greenberg (September 3, 1927 to July 25, 2014) was an American investment banker who ran Bear Stearns as chief executive from 1978 to 1993 and was its chairman from the firm's 1985 public offering until 2001. Jeffrey Epstein came to Bear Stearns in 1976 from the Dalton School through Greenberg, rose under him and James Cayne to limited partner, and kept his accounts at the firm until its 2008 collapse into JPMorgan Chase. After that sale Greenberg became vice chairman emeritus of JPMorgan, and in August 2010, according to the Virgin Islands, he asked the bank's general counsel, Stephen Cutler, for an exception to its policy on felon clients so that he could continue doing business with Epstein. Greenberg died five years before these communications became public.¹²³

Career

Greenberg was born in Wichita, Kansas, the grandson of Russian Jewish immigrants, and grew up in Oklahoma City. He attended the University of Oklahoma on a football scholarship, transferred to the University of Missouri, and joined Bear Stearns as a clerk in 1949 after it was the only firm of six to offer him a job. He took over the arbitrage desk, became a partner at 31, and succeeded Salim "Cy" Lewis as chief executive on Lewis's death in 1978, when the firm was a private partnership of about 1,000 employees and 46 million dollars in capital; by 1993, when he handed the post to Cayne, it had 6,300 employees and 1.8 billion dollars in shareholders' equity. He said he sought to hire people with "PSD" degrees, "poor, smart and a deep desire to become rich."¹

His discretion made him valuable to corporate raiders. His clients included Donald Trump and Henry Kravis's KKR, and he helped Trump accumulate 9.6 percent of Bally Entertainment in Trump's unsuccessful 1986 takeover attempt. "I put my children's accounts with him," Trump said in 2006. "That should tell you how much I trust him." In 2004 Greenberg appeared on Trump's television program The Apprentice. He was a member of the Society of American Magicians and performed at fundraising dinners for the Jerusalem Foundation, required Bear Stearns executives to give 4 percent of their salaries to charity, and in 1998 gave one million dollars to help poor elderly men buy Viagra.¹

When JPMorgan agreed on March 16, 2008 to buy Bear Stearns for 2 dollars a share, later raised to 10, after a run on the firm, Greenberg stayed on as vice chairman emeritus of JPMorgan. In a 2010 book he blamed Cayne for the firm's collapse. He died of complications from cancer at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York on July 25, 2014.¹

Epstein at Bear Stearns

Epstein, then a teacher of physics and mathematics at Dalton, came to Bear Stearns after tutoring Greenberg's son there, and was friendly with a daughter of Greenberg's. Under Greenberg and Cayne he rose to limited partner, which Fox Business, citing former executives, reported he had reached by 1980.²⁴ He left in March 1981 after an internal inquiry that concerned a Regulation D violation. Cayne said, "Jeffrey Epstein left Bear Stearns of his own volition. It was never suggested that he leave by any member of management." Greenberg said he could not recall. Contemporaries told Vanity Fair of rumors that the executive committee asked for Epstein's resignation after his two supporters, Greenberg and Cayne, were outvoted, and a former executive told Fox Business in 2019 that Epstein "left at our invitation ... it was very serious stuff."²⁴

Epstein's company Financial Trust Company held a large block of Bear Stearns stock until the firm failed. In a verified complaint of August 5, 2009 against Bear Stearns, filed in the U.S. Virgin Islands, Financial Trust named Cayne, Greenberg, Warren Spector, Samuel Molinaro and Alan Schwartz as the officers whose statements Epstein had relied on in holding the shares, which it sold in March 2008 for 34.99 and 3.41 dollars a share.⁵

The Felony Policy Exception

After the 2008 sale, Epstein's brokerage accounts passed to JPMorgan, where retaining a client with a felony conviction required the general counsel's approval. In June 2023 the Virgin Islands, suing JPMorgan over its Epstein relationship, quoted a bank email stating that Greenberg had gone to Cutler "for an exception to the felony policy" for Epstein; its statement of material facts placed the request in August 2010.³⁶ On January 19, 2011, while the bank's anti-money-laundering staff were pressing to end the relationship, a JPMorgan Securities employee wrote to Epstein's office: "Ace would love to speak to Jeffrey. Can you please call Ace at [number], or e-mail him a phone number where Jeffrey can be reached?" JPMorgan had withheld the email as outside the "negotiated scope of search" until the territory asked for it by name.³

The bank's counsel at WilmerHale answered that "following Epstein's guilty plea in 2008, people from legacy Bear Stearns, including Mr. Greenberg, in connection with post-acquisition transition of accounts, may have attempted to speak with Stephen Cutler, then JPMC's General Counsel, about application of JPMC's corporate policy requiring approval of its General Counsel ... to retain a brokerage account for a client with a felony conviction," that the decision "was made by Mr. Cutler," and that there was "no evidence that Mr. Greenberg had anything to do with Epstein's accounts at the Private Bank." The territory asked the court to compel production of emails between Greenberg and Epstein and between Greenberg and Jamie Dimon, Mary Erdoes, Jes Staley or Cutler about Epstein. JPMorgan's internal 2019 review, Project Jeep, had opened with the note that "There is a highbridge angle and one dating back to Bear."³⁷ Greenberg had died in 2014 and made no statement on these matters.