This week, the New York Times awoke from its slumber to publish an extensive investigation on Jeffrey Epstein that purported to put to rest the question of how the man made his money early in his career. In it, the Times dismisses the possibility that Epstein could have worked for or adjacent to intelligence agencies. “Abundant conspiracy theories hold that Epstein worked for spy services or ran a lucrative blackmail operation, but we found a more prosaic explanation for how he built a fortune,” the paper wrote.
To the paper’s credit, their journalists have put into the record some details that took an impressive effort to track down. For instance, the paper reported about Epstein’s business associates in the early 1980s:
Epstein had been spending extravagantly, and despite his lofty compensation at Bear Stearns and his work for [Douglas] Leese, he found himself strapped, even occasionally bouncing rent checks. Back in New York, he joined forces with John Stanley Pottinger, a lawyer who had recently left a senior post in the Justice Department. Epstein, Pottinger and Pottinger’s brother rented a penthouse office in the Hotel St. Moritz on Central Park South. (The broker, Joanna Cutler, told us that Epstein initially stiffed her on the commission.)
The Times deserves credit, we suppose, for digging up that nugget from his one-time broker—but had the paper decided to look up rather than look down, they may have noticed something a bit more revelatory in their own reporting.
Stanley Pottinger, as it happens, was a notable figure in the scandal that became known as Iran-Contra, in which the CIA used Israel as a middleman to move off-the-books weapons to Iran. In the early 1980s, under the CIA’s supervision, Pottinger advised an Iranian banker on shipping embargoed arms to Iran using fraudulent paperwork and overseas “dummy companies”—in the very same period that Pottinger and Epstein worked together selling “tax-avoidance” strategies from a penthouse by Central Park. Pottinger’s system eventually gave rise to a network of covert intermediaries shipping arms around the world; the CIA’s profits became a slush fund used to illegally bankroll the insurgent Contra army, who waged a war against Nicaragua’s leftist government while simultaneously trafficking cocaine to the United States.
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