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by Tyler Durden
September 09, 2025
from
ZeroHedge Website
Source
On an autumn day in 2011, Jeffrey Epstein stepped into
JPMorgan Chase's headquarters at 270 Park Avenue and rode the
elevator to the executive floors where the bank's leaders, including
Chief Executive Jamie Dimon, kept their offices.
Epstein, who had pleaded guilty to a sex crime in
Florida three years earlier, had a message for the bank's top
lawyer, Stephen Cutler:
he had "turned over a new leaf," he said, and
powerful friends could vouch for him.
"Go talk to Bill Gates about
me"...
Key takeaways:
-
Epstein was connected to Israeli PM
Benjamin Netanyahu, not
just former PM Ehud Barak
-
He wired 'hundreds of millions of dollars
in payments to Russian banks and young Eastern European
women'
-
Accounts for young women were opened
without in-person verification (in one case a SSN could not
be confirmed)
-
Jes Staley was constantly running
interference for Epstein vs. JPM compliance concerns
-
Epstein had accounts at JPM for at least
134 (!) entities...
-
JPMorgan funded/serviced pieces tied to
Ghislaine Maxwell (millions, incl. $7.4M for a
Sikorsky helicopter) and helped finance MC2, the
modeling agency linked to
Jean-Luc Brunel.
For more than a decade, JPMorgan Chase processed
over $1 billion in transactions for Jeffrey Epstein, including,
hundreds of millions routed to Russian banks
and payments to young Eastern European women, opened at least
134 accounts tied to him and his associates, and even helped
move millions to Ghislaine Maxwell - including $7.4 million for
a Sikorsky helicopter - while anti-money laundering staff
repeatedly flagged large cash withdrawals and wire patterns
aligned with known trafficking indicators, according to a new
report from the NY Times following a six-year investigation that
involved "some 13,000 pages" of legal and financial records.
Funny how they sat on this until now - maybe it's
related to this, but do read on.
Illustration via FT
Inside JPMorgan, the debate over whether to keep Epstein as a client
had been simmering for years.
Epstein was lucrative.
His accounts held more than $200 million and
generated millions in fees, and he opened doors to wealthy prospects
and world leaders.
He had helped midwife the bank's 2004 purchase of
Highbridge Capital Management, earning a $15 million
payday.
Senior bankers credited him with introductions to
figures such as Sergey Brin and Benjamin Netanyahu.
Sure enough, just as more bank employees were
losing patience with Epstein in 2011, he began dangling more
goodies.
That March, to the pleasant surprise of
JPMorgan's investment bankers in Israel, they were granted an
audience with Netanyahu. The bankers informed Staley, who
forwarded their email to Epstein with a one-word message:
"Thanks." (The bank spokesman said
JPMorgan "neither needed nor sought Epstein's help for
meetings with any government leaders.")
And around that same time, Epstein presented
an opportunity that, like the Highbridge deal years
earlier, had the potential to be transformative.
This one involved
Bill Gates, who had only
recently entered Epstein's orbit...
Source
In an apparent effort to ingratiate - and
further entangle - himself with his bankers and the Microsoft
co-founder, Epstein pitched Erdoes and Staley on creating an
enormous investment and charitable fund with something like $100
billion in assets.
NY Times
Compliance leaders urged the bank to "exit" the
felon after anti-money laundering personnel flagged a yearslong
pattern of large cash withdrawals and constant wires that, in
hindsight, matched known indicators of trafficking and other illicit
conduct.
Instead, top executives overrode objections at
least four times, allowed accounts for young women to be opened with
scant verification, and paid Epstein directly - the aforementioned
$15 million tied to a hedge-fund deal and $9 million in a
settlement.
Even in 2011, as concerns mounted, internal notes
referenced decisions "pending Dimon review," while Jes Staley,
a senior executive and Epstein confidant, traded sexually suggestive
messages ("Say
hi to Snow White") and shared confidential bank
information with the client.
Exact dollar figures and destinations across years:
-
$1.7M in cash (2004–05) and earlier $175K
cash (2003).
-
$7.4M wired to buy Maxwell's Sikorsky
helicopter.
-
$50M credit line approved in 2010 even
post-plea; ~$212M then at the bank (about half his net
worth).
-
$176M moved to Deutsche Bank after the
2013 exit.
JPM of course regrets everything - calling their
relationship with Epstein,
"a mistake and in hindsight we regret it, but
we did not help him commit his heinous crimes," Joseph
Evangelisti, a JPMorgan spokesman, said in a statement.
"We would never have continued to do business
with him if we believed he was engaged in an ongoing sex
trafficking operation."
The bank has placed much of the blame on Jes
Staley, then a rising executive and close confidant of Epstein.
"We now know that trust was misplaced,"
Evangelisti said.
A Client too Valuable to Lose
Epstein's ties to JPMorgan reached back to the late 1990s, when
then-Chief Executive Sandy Warner met him at 60 Wall Street
and urged a lieutenant, Mr. Staley, to do the same.
Epstein soon became one of the private bank's
top revenue generators.
A 2003 internal report estimated his net
worth at $300 million and attributed more than $8 million in
fees to him that year.
Even then, there were warning signs. In 2003
alone, he withdrew more than $175,000 in cash.
Bank employees recognized the need to report
large cash transactions to federal monitors but failed to treat the
withdrawals as a signal of deeper risk.
In the years that followed, compliance staff
repeatedly expressed alarm over Epstein's wires, cash activity and
requests to open accounts for young women with minimal verification.
One internal note, describing large transfers to
an 18-year-old totaling,
"about 450,000 since opening," read: "Sugar
Daddy!"
Still, influence carried weight. Epstein was
prized not only for his personal balances but for the business he
brought in.
Through his network, which included hedge fund
founder Glenn Dubin and a constellation of billionaires and
officials, he introduced potential clients and helped shape the
bank's strategy.
The Highbridge deal was heralded
internally as,
"probably the most important transaction" of
Mr. Staley's career.
Internal Dissent, Repeatedly
Overruled
From 2005 to 2011, the bank's leaders revisited the Epstein question
several times.
In 2006, after a Florida indictment alleging
solicitation from a teenage girl, JPMorgan convened a team to decide
whether to exit the client. The bank swiftly jettisoned another
customer, the actor Wesley Snipes, when he faced tax charges.
It did not do the same with Epstein. Instead, it
imposed a narrow restriction - not to "proactively solicit" new
investments from him - while continuing to lend and move his money.
Within the bank, even casual exchanges betrayed an awareness of
Epstein's proclivities.
"So painful to read," Mary Erdoes, now
head of asset and wealth management, emailed upon seeing news of
the indictment.
Mr. Staley replied that he had met Epstein the
prior evening and that Epstein "adamantly denies" involvement with
minors.
At other moments, the tone turned flippant.
Describing a Hamptons fundraiser, Mr. Staley
wrote that the age gaps among couples,
"would have fit in well with Jeffrey," to
which Ms. Erdoes replied that people were "laughing about
Jeffrey."
By 2008, after Epstein pleaded guilty and
registered as a sex offender, pressure mounted to end the
relationship.
"No one wants him," one banker wrote.
Mr. Cutler, the general counsel, would later say
he viewed Epstein as a reputational threat:
"This is not an honorable person in any way.
He should not be a client."
Yet he did not insist on expulsion, and the
matter was not escalated to Mr. Dimon. Epstein remained.
In early 2011, William Langford, head of compliance and a
former Treasury official,
urged that Epstein be "exited."
He warned that ultrawealthy clients could warp
judgment and that patterns in Epstein's accounts resembled those of
trafficking networks.
The bank's head of compliance, William
Langford, was especially alarmed.
"No patience for this," he emailed a
colleague.
Langford had joined JPMorgan in 2006 after
years of policing financial crimes for the Treasury Department.
He knew - and had warned colleagues - that
companies can be criminally charged for money laundering if they
willfully ignored such activities by their clients.
He saw ultrawealthy customers as a particular
blind spot; all the time that private bankers spent wining and
dining these lucrative clients could cloud judgments about their
trustworthiness.
It looked like that was what was
happening with Epstein.
One of Langford's achievements at JPMorgan
was the creation of a task force devoted to combating
human trafficking.
The group noted in a presentation that
frequent large cash withdrawals and wire transfers - exactly
what employees were seeing in Epstein's accounts - were totems
of such illicit activity.
...
Langford said in a deposition that he started off by quickly
explaining the human-trafficking initiative. In that context,
how could the bank justify working with someone who had pleaded
guilty to a sex crime and was now under investigation for sex
trafficking?
NY Times
Mr. Staley pushed back, relaying Epstein's
insistence that allegations would be overturned.
Days later, the bank agreed to keep the accounts
open.
Money, Access
and a Second Chance
Even as internal skepticism grew, Epstein stayed in touch with his
former private banker, Justin Nelson, and continued to
surface in meetings involving Leon Black, a billionaire
client.
Staley remained close to Epstein for years,
exchanging personal messages and visiting his residences, even as he
ascended to run Barclays.
In 2019, after Epstein was arrested on federal
sex trafficking charges and later died by "suicide" in a Manhattan
jail, investigators, journalists and regulators turned anew to his
banking relationships.
JPMorgan launched an internal review, code-named Project Jeep,
and filed belated suspicious activity reports flagging about 4,700
Epstein transactions totaling more than $1.1 billion.
The bank settled civil claims with Epstein's
victims for $290 million and with the U.S. Virgin Islands for $75
million, without admitting wrongdoing.
No executives lost their jobs.
Mr.
Jamie Dimon, who testified
that,
he did not recall knowing about Epstein
before 2019,
...remains one of the most powerful figures in
American finance.
To
Bridgette Carr, a law professor
and anti-trafficking expert retained by the Virgin Islands, the case
poses a larger question about incentives.
JPMorgan, she concluded, enabled Epstein's
crimes.
"I am deeply worried here that the ultimate
message to other financial institutions is that they can keep
serving traffickers," she said.
"It's still profitable to do that, given the
lack of substantial consequences."
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