Report: Financier Leon Black sent Epstein at least $50 million
Billionaire f inancier Leon Black, one of Wall Street’s most powerful executives, was facing questions from clients after Jeffrey Epstein was arrested last year on federal sex trafficking charges. The two men had known each other for decades, and investors of Black’s investment company, Apollo Global Management, wanted to know how close they had been.
Such questions were valid, Black said, according to a transcript of a call with analysts in July 2019. He said in a letter that same day to investors that he had had a “limited relationship” with Epstein, a convicted sex offender, and had consulted him “from time to time” on personal financial matters.
But their connection was deeper than Black let on: The two men often socialized and dined together, and Black was a lucrative client for Epstein over the final decade of his life.
Black wired Epstein at least $50 million in the years after Epstein’s 2008 conviction for soliciting prostitution from a teenage girl, according to documents reviewed by The New York Times and interviews with four people with knowledge of the transactions. The transfers included $10 million to a foundation started by Epstein and consulting fees that were sufficiently unusual to draw scrutiny from Deutsche Bank, where Epstein kept his accounts. Two of the people said the total amount sent by Black to Epstein could be as high as $75 million.
It was not clear what kind of services Epstein provided to Black, whose $9 billion fortune can buy him access to the best lawyers and accountants in the world. Epstein, though he styled himself as a “financial doctor” to wealthy clients, was a college dropout who had worked on Wall Street for just a few years, demonstrated no great skill as an investor, and had no formal training in tax and estate planning.
“Mr. Black received personal trusts and estates planning advice as well as family office philanthropy and investment services from several financial and legal advisers, including Mr. Epstein, during a sixyear period, between 2012 and 2017,” said Stephanie Pillersdorf, a spokeswoman for Black.
The business relationship ended in 2018 because of a “fee dispute,” and Black stopped communicating with Epstein, she said.
The fees from Black help explain a mystery about Epstein’s wealth: how a man who left behind an estate worth more than $600 million made money in the years after his most lucrative client, billionaire retail magnate Leslie H. Wexner, cut him off.
Some of the payments from Black are described in an internal report by Deutsche Bank, which served as Epstein’s primary banker from 2013 into 2019. The report was provided to regulators who fined the German bank over the summer for its failure to catch numerous red flags in Epstein’s financial activities.
Portions of the report reviewed by The New York Times describe a payment of $22.5 million in 2017 by a company called BV70 LLC, which the bank said owned Black’s yacht, to Plan D, the company that managed Epstein’s Gulfstream jet. When an employee in Deutsche Bank’s anti-financial-crime division inquired about the payment, she was told by another bank employee that it was a fee for consulting services provided by Southern Trust Co., one of the dozens of entities Epstein operated in the Virgin Islands. There was no explanation for why the payment went to Plan D.
The Deutsche Bank report also shows that BV70 made a $10 million donation in 2015 to a charitable foundation started by Epstein, Gratitude America, which made several million dollars in grants while Epstein was casting himself as a philanthropist. BV70 also planned to make another payment of $10 million to Epstein for advisory work, according to the report, although it was unclear if that payment was ever made.
And in 2014, Epstein received several million dollars in fees from Narrows Holdings, a company that Black — the chairman of the Museum of Modern Art — has used to purchase much of his billion-dollar art collection, according to two of the people with knowledge of the transactions. The details of the services Epstein provided in exchange for those fees are also unclear.
Epstein portrayed himself as a financial guru to the wealthy, although for many years his chief client was Wexner, founder of L Brands, which owns Victoria’s Secret. Epstein was first publicly accused of engaging in sex with underage girls in 2006, and Wexner said he cut ties with Epstein at the end of the following year. ( Wexner said last year that Epstein had misappropriated “vast sums” from him; Epstein had returned at least $100 million to Wexner, the Times has reported.)