Prison chief reassigned over Epstein death
NEW YORK — Accused sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein signed a will declaring he was worth $577 million only two days before he hanged himself in a federal jail.
The 21-page will was filed in a Virgin Islands court and confirmed to the Daily News by an independent party on Monday.
In a bizarre twist of fate, one of the witnesses to the Aug. 8 signing was Mariel Colón Miró, a New York lawyer who worked for El Chapo during the Mexican drug lord’s recent trafficking trial in Brooklyn.
“Yes, of course, that is my signature. I was a witness,” Colón Miró said Monday when reached by the Daily News regarding the Epstein will.
“I can’t divulge more about my involvement. I can only confirm I was a witness,” she said. “At the moment, I have no other comment. There’s an investigation.”
Colón Miró was often at the side of Chapo’s beauty queen wife during the kingpin’s three-month trial that ended with a conviction in February. She was accused by prosecutors of smuggling a banned cellphone to the wife at one point, but the judge declined to sanction her.
Epstein’s will, meanwhile, provided no window into the beneficiaries of his vast estate, citing only a trust named for the year he was born.
Epstein’s brother, Mark, would have been entitled to the sex offender’s fortune if no will were left behind, according to the document.
Instead, Epstein left his fortune to “acting Trustees of The 1953 Trust.” But the members of the trust were not identified in the document filed by two New York lawyers, Darren Indyke and Richard Kahn.
The will shows Epstein signed it while he was locked up at Metropolitan Correctional Center in lower Manhattan awaiting trial for sex trafficking of underage girls. The acting director of the Bureau of Prisons was reassigned Monday, Attorney General William Barr announced, the latest fallout over the suicide of financier Jeffrey Epstein at a chronically understaffed federal jail.
Barr has said he was “appalled” by Epstein’s death Aug. 10 at the Metropolitan Correctional Center in New York City, where he was being held on federal sex trafficking charges after years of being dogged by accusations of sexually abusing girls.
Barr announced that the bureau’s acting director, Hugh Hurwitz, was being reassigned to run its re-entry services division and to help carry out President Donald Trump’s prison overhaul agenda. Barr named Kathleen Hawk Sawyer, who ran the prisons bureau from 1992 to 2003, to replace him. Two days later, the financier hanged himself in his cell, officials said.
The will emerged the same day federal prosecutors in Manhattan filed a notice formally dropping the charges against Epstein because of his suicide.
Assistant U.S. Attorney Alison Moe wrote that prosecutors had notified Epstein victims of his death.
“As this office has previously stated publicly, it remains committed to doing its utmost to stand up for the victims who have already come forward, as well as for the many others who have yet to do so,” Moe wrote.
A judge ruled earlier this year that prosecutors in Florida violated the law by keeping Epstein victims in the dark about a lenient nonprosecution agreement he signed in 2008.
Epstein’s will did not shed much new light on his fortune. He declared that his residences in the Upper East Side, Palm Beach, Fla., Stanley, N.M., Paris and two islands in the Virgin Islands were worth $180,603,063. He had $56 million in cash, according to the will.
His collection of planes, boats and cars were worth $18,551,700. The value of his art collection had not yet been determined, according to the will.
Meanwhile, an Epstein accuser, Alicia Arden, said that authorities’ mishandled allegations against him as far as back as the 1990s.
Arden said she filed a complaint with police in Santa Monica, Calif., in 1997 after Epstein groped her during what she believed was a modeling interview for Victoria’s Secret. Arden — who is believed to have filed one of the earliest sex crimes complaints against Epstein — said she never heard back from investigators inquiring about her complaint.
“If they would have taken me more seriously than they did, it could have helped all these girls,” said Arden, an actress and model. “It could have been stopped.