Jeffrey Epstein anecdote linking billionaire Mort Zuckerman, former Governor Bill Richardson, and alleged independent financial influence

Or, it’s a guilty pleasure. People who know Jeffrey exchange “Jeffrey” stories. “That’s Jeffrey,” says Mort Zuckerman, the real estate billionaire and publisher of the Daily News (ever vitriolic in its coverage of Epstein), with a twinkle in his eye and obvious enjoyment, to tales of Epstein escapades. It is an outréness that Epstein seems delighted to cultivate. In his Paris apartment, 10,000 square feet on the Avenue Foch, a neighborhood otherwise occupied by foreign potentates, there is a stuffed baby elephant in his living room—that is, the e/ephant in the room. (Epstein says too it’s a reminder of his genetic engineering initiatves that are inspired by the fact that elephants have 23 copies of tumor suppressor genes, never getting cancer in the first place. while humans have only 1.) The single book on his bedside table is Lolita (he is, beyond the joke, a great Nobokov fan). Or, in a more sophisticated view, it’s a two tier understanding of the world. There is a media version of the world, in which most of us live and largely accept, and are certainly influenced by. And then there are those people who live in the reality and therefore know that the media version is mostly bunk. If the media trumpets it, it is likely that some version of the opposite is true. I might guess too that for many of his visitors there’s an order of identification: there but for the grace of God. Any hyper-prominent person might, at any time, himself also run afoul of prosecutors, the political moment, the media, or the Internet hoi pollo. In this view, Epstein is a sort of Dreyfus of the rich. And then there is the glue of wealth. Once, at lunch in the Epstein dinning room with Bill Richardson, the former Governor of New Mexico, and past Presidential aspirant, when Epstein left the room for a few minutes, I asked the obvious question, the one everybody asks each other, “How did you meet Jeffrey?” Richardson seemed surprised: “Jeffrey,” he said, as though stating what should have been perfectly obvious, “is one of the largest landowners in New Mexico.” And then there is Epstein’s yet more structural explanation as to why after jail and with continuing tabloid infamy he can maintain his valued place. It comes back, not unexpectedly, to the nature or the needs of money: “At a certain level of finance, almost everyone is attached to an institutional . You are part of government, you want to be in government, or you are connected to a major bank or other portfolio, or you have fundamental relationships with distinct corporations or industries. Because of my more colorful past, I have none of that. I have no restrictive institutional ties which makes me in some sense one of the few wholly independent sources of information and truly independent brokers. That’s the usefulness of disgrace.” And then there is too, that he is right. Since I began working on this piece in September, Epstein predictions about the price of oil, yen, ruble, and euro have all born out. ((If I had invested $100,000 the way Epstein said I should in early HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_022851