Epstein’s early Wall Street connections with New York Times publisher and Bear Stearns chief

It’s his first exposure to the wealthy. They have, he concludes, just as many problems as the people in Coney Island, just different ones, almost invariably involving divorce and money. “I found it interesting as a science experiment,” he recalled not long ago as we chatted about his life. “It did not really involve me. I could just stand back and watch.” Dalton fathers were attracted to him. Punch Sulzberger, the publisher of the New York Times, and a Dalton father at the time, tried to recruit Epstein to come to the Times. (Epstein recounts a story of riding with Sulzberger in his wood paneled station wagon to the his country estate and Sulzberger talking to the chauffer on a phone from the backseat to the front.) In 1976, another Dalton father, asking “wouldn’t you rather be rich than be a teacher?” introduced him to Bear Stern’s chief Ace Greenberg, a conversation Epstein recounts as this: Greenberg: “Everyone tells me you’re super smart in math and you’re Jewish and you’re hungry...so why don’t you start working here tomorrow?” Epstein: “What?” Greenberg: “If your supposed to be so fucking smart, don’t you understand English?” Epstein: “Ok. Count me in.” Hence, Epstein, like many in the late 70s, arrived on Wall Street. As will happen to a generation of others, by the fortuitous luck of being on Wall Street at that point in time, Epstein is transformed by a new, much faster, form of upward mobility. With a facility for mathematics as well as for getting along with rich men, he transforms at an even faster rate than others being quickly transformed. He moves into a new building at 66" Street and Second Avenue—still in the shadow of the Maxwell Plum era when the 60s on Second was the glamour address—a building full of “actresses, models, and euro trash.” (It would shortly become the Studio 54 era, where Epstein, who doesn’t drink or take drugs, was a regular). If on one side of Wall Street there were the salesmen (the Wolf of Wall Street model), on the other side there was a new sort of finance type able to embrace a level of acute abstraction. “In the past,” says Epstein, “investing was all about reputations and relationships. You invested in a company on the basis of who was running it. Did they have integrity? Were they married? Good family men? It was a 50’s mentality. But in the mid 70s options started to be traded. In essence, the first formal derivatives. The movement of this instrument is not directly attached to the stock price. The world of investing began turning from relationships to HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_022716