Epstein jailed in FBI probe of sex crimes
— More than a decade MIAMI after receiving one of the most lenient sentences for a serial sex offender in U.S. history, multimillionaire Jeffrey Epstein has been arrested outside of New York, sources confirmed to The Miami Herald Saturday night.
Epstein was arrested at Teterboro Airport in New Jersey, according to one of the sources. However, about a dozen federal agents broke down the door to Epstein’s Manhattan townhouse around 5:30 p.m. to execute search warants, witnesses and sources said.
“We heard the loud banging and we walked over and saw all these FBI agents just pounding down the door,” the witness told the Herald.
Epstein, 66, is expected to be arraigned in federal court in New York on Monday on charges that he molested dozens of underage girls in New York and in Florida, the sources said. His arrest, first reported by The Daily Beast, comes nearly two weeks after the Justice Department announced that it would not throw out his 2008 non-prosecution agreement, even though a federal judge ruled it was illegal.
Rumors had been circulating for months that Epstein was under investigation on sex charges in the Southern District of New York. It’s not clear what instances those investigations involved, and the Herald had not been able to confirm the status of the New York probe.
Sources said he was arrested by the FBI pursuant to a sealed indictment that will be unsealed today. He is in custody in New York and a bail hearing is set for Monday.
“That bail hearing will be critical because if they grant him bail, he has enough money that he will disappear and they will never get him, a source in New York told the Herald.
Last November, the Herald published a series of stories, titled Perversion of Justice, that described the ways in which the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of Florida, Alexander Acosta, worked in conjunction with Epstein’s lawyers to engineer the non-prosecution agreement — and keep it secret from victims. Acosta is now President Donald Trump’s secretary of labor.
Sources told the Herald that the indictment includes new victims and witnesses who spoke to authorities in New York over the past several months.
Epstein sexually abused nearly three dozen girls, mostly 13-16 years old, at his Palm Beach mansion from 1999 to 2006, according to investigators. He used the girls to help recruit other young girls as part of an operation that ran similar to a pyramid scheme.