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And then there is Epstein’s yet more structural explanation as to why
after prison 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 allied with an
institutional interest. You are part of government, or you want to be in
government, or you are connected to a bank or other portfolio, or you have
key relationships with certain corporations or industries. Because of my
situation, I have none of that. I have no institutional bona fides which makes
me in some sense one of the few independent sources of information and
actual honest 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 September, by the end of January I would have made $2.3
million. Alas, I did not.)
And something else, which perhaps also surely accounts for Epstein’s
continuing relationships with the rich and powerful:
Most everyone who is now of a certain age and certain ambition and
certain status grew up in, and found they were temperamentally suited to, the
new age of wealth that started in the late 1970s. A meritocracy on steroids,
or, as Vanity Fair would baldly and ingratiatingly dub it, the new
establishment, an increasingly parallel world, a self-invented one, at further
and further remove from the ordinary one. In some sense, Epstein is just one
version, picaresque, as well as louche, of this shared story.
He often tells, with some obvious marvel, his middle class to riches
tale. He was born in 1953 in Coney Island. His father worked for the city’s
Parks Department. His mother was a housewife. He has a younger brother,
Mark.
Epstein was distinguished by little other than his math talents. The
captain of the math team at Lafayette High school in Bensonhurst, he goes
on to Cooper Union where the tuition is free. He drops out after two years
and begins taking classes at the NYU’s Courant Institute of Mathematics.
Then, without a college degree, hence by a slight of hand, gets a job teaching
math and physics at Dalton in 1974. (A few years ago, during a chance
encounter with a former Dalton math department chairman, Margo Gumport,
I asked her about Epstein. She said he was the most brilliant math teacher at
Dalton in her 50-year career and that she had often wondered what had
become of him.)
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