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HOW JPMORGAN ENABLED THE CRIMES OF JEFFREY EPSTEIN  
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David Enrich, Matthew Goldstein, Jessica Silver-Greenberg
September 8, 2025
The New York Times
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_ A Times investigation found that America’s leading bank spent
years supporting — and profiting from — the notorious sex
offender, ignoring red flags, suspicious activity and concerned
executives. _

, Photo illustration by Tyler Comrie and Hannah Whitaker for The New
York Times, Palm Beach Sheriff’s Office/Associated Press

 

The reporters, who started investigating Epstein more than six years
ago, reviewed more than 13,000 of pages of legal and financial records
for this article.

One day in October 2011, Jeffrey Epstein walked into the cavernous
lobby of 270 Park Avenue in Midtown Manhattan. The skyscraper was home
to JPMorgan Chase, arguably the world’s most prestigious bank. The
sex offender — who barely a year earlier was under house arrest
after serving 13 months in a Florida jail — was ushered onto an
elevator and whisked to a top floor where Jamie Dimon, the bank’s
chief executive, and the rest of the senior leadership had their
offices.

Epstein had long been a treasured customer at JPMorgan. His accounts
were brimming with more than $200 million. He generated millions of
dollars in revenue for the bank, landing him atop an internal list of
major money makers. He helped JPMorgan orchestrate an important
acquisition. He introduced executives to men who would become
lucrative clients, like the Google co-founder Sergey Brin, and to
global leaders, like Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel. He
helped executives troubleshoot crises and strategize about global
opportunities.

But a growing group of employees worried that JPMorgan’s association
with a man who had pleaded guilty to a sex crime — and was under
federal investigation for human trafficking — could harm the
bank’s reputation. Just as troubling, anti-money-laundering
specialists within the bank noticed Epstein’s pattern of withdrawing
tens of thousands of dollars in cash virtually every month. These were
red flags for illicit activity.

That was why Epstein was at the bank’s headquarters. JPMorgan’s
top executive in charge of ensuring compliance with laws and
regulations had already pushed to fire him as a client. Now Stephen
Cutler, a former federal securities regulator and the bank’s general
counsel, had added his voice to the chorus.

Epstein’s chief defender at the bank was Jes Staley, a top contender
to one day succeed Dimon as chief executive. Staley persuaded Cutler
to sit down with Epstein and “hear him out.” It was a high-stakes
meeting for Epstein; his close ties to JPMorgan had been invaluable in
his quest for money, influence and legitimacy. The bank lent him
money. Staley dished confidential information to him. At Epstein’s
behest, JPMorgan set up accounts — into which he routinely
transferred huge sums — for young women who turned out to be victims
of his sex-trafficking operations. It wired his funds overseas. It
even paid him millions of dollars.

Jes Staley, once the leading contender to succeed Jamie Dimon as chief
executive of JPMorgan, repeatedly went to bat for Jeffrey Epstein at
the bank.Credit...James Manning/PA Images, via Getty Images

Epstein’s crimes have been exhaustively documented, and elements of
JPMorgan’s relationship with Epstein have become public via legal
proceedings in the United States and Britain. But the full story of
how America’s leading lender enabled the century’s most notorious
sexual predator has not been told. This account has been pieced
together from thousands of pages of internal bank records, sealed
deposition transcripts and other court documents and financial data,
as well as interviews with people with direct knowledge of the Epstein
relationship. Among the findings: Bank officials for more than a
decade were anxious about Epstein’s prolific wire transfers and cash
withdrawals — JPMorgan ultimately processed more than $1 billion in
such transactions for him — and warned senior management about his
suspicious activities. But on at least four occasions over five years,
the bank’s leaders overrode those objections and continued to serve
Epstein.

Joseph Evangelisti, a spokesman for JPMorgan, said in a statement that
the bank’s relationship with Epstein “was a mistake and in
hindsight we regret it, but we did not help him commit his heinous
crimes.” He added, “We would never have continued to do business
with him if we believed he was engaged in an ongoing sex trafficking
operation.” The bank has pinned blame for the scandal on Staley, a
trusted confidant to Dimon. “We now know that trust was
misplaced,” Evangelisti said.

Tales of greed trumping ethics and morals are older than Wall Street
itself, and the story of how and why JPMorgan spent years serving
Epstein is a case study in that dynamic. But it is instructive in
other ways as well. More than six years after his death in a Manhattan
jail cell, where he was awaiting prosecution on federal
sex-trafficking charges, mysteries continue to swirl around how
Epstein amassed and deployed money and influence on a grand scale.
Over time, those mysteries curdled into conspiracy theories — most
of them unsubstantiated — that placed Epstein at the center of a
vast global pedophilia ring or as a foreign intelligence operative
compiling dirt on the rich and powerful. The Trump administration’s
refusal to release files gathered by federal investigators as they
built a case against Epstein — aside from unsuccessfully seeking
[[link removed]] to
unseal an F.B.I. agent’s grand-jury testimony — has only added to
the frenzied speculation.

In Epstein’s lengthy alliance with JPMorgan, we found a more
mundane, if no less damning, explanation for Epstein’s remarkable
success. He was, in the words of one friend, the former Israeli prime
minister Ehud Barak, “a collector of people.”
[[link removed]] He
used those relationships to cultivate new connections and establish
his legitimacy. He traded favors and gossip and advice. He created an
aura of indispensability and of being so plugged-in that he bordered
on omniscience — traits that made him a vital asset for a worldwide
cast of government and business leaders. That, in turn, gave Epstein
access to more money and connections that he could use to power his
criminal activities.

But in 2011, this edifice of power and influence was at risk of
crumbling. His conviction and incarceration led some of his powerful
friends to back away and threatened to leave him an outcast from the
financial world. His relationship with JPMorgan was therefore more
important than ever. The fact that he remained a client in good
standing conferred on him respectability and helped him foster new
ties to corporate elites. He was determined not to blow it. Sitting in
Cutler’s office that autumn afternoon, Epstein assured the general
counsel that he had “turned over a new leaf.” And he rattled off
names of prominent figures who, he told Cutler, could vouch for his
character. “Go talk to Bill Gates about me,” Epstein said at one
point.

Afterward, Cutler sat alone, trying to figure out what to do. He kept
brooding for weeks. Epstein struck him as a smooth operator; it
wasn’t hard to imagine him charming powerful people. Yet Cutler
didn’t see how he would be able to explain to his female colleagues
that JPMorgan was keeping Epstein as a client, he would later say.
After a second conversation with Epstein, he informed Staley that he
still thought the bank should cut ties.

But the recommendation came with crucial caveats. Cutler considered
his primary job to be protecting JPMorgan from legal risks, and from
his perspective, the Epstein relationship was a threat to the bank’s
reputation. He did not see evidence that Epstein was using his
accounts for criminal purposes. As a result, he would not insist that
the bank expel him as a client. Nor would he escalate the matter to
Dimon, the chief executive.

And so Epstein was allowed to stay.

Jamie Dimon has said he did not “recall knowing anything about
Jeffrey Epstein” until 2019, even though his subordinates were
fighting over whether to keep him as a client.Credit...Tom
Williams/Associated Press

THE STORY OF JPMORGAN’S relationship with Epstein begins in the
late 1990s in the canyons of Manhattan’s financial district. Epstein
was in his 40s, a college dropout who briefly worked on Wall Street
after a time as a high school math teacher, and he had a gift for
making it seem as if he belonged. He had gone on to advise and manage
money for some big-name clients. In 1985, he opened a bank account at
a company that is now part of JPMorgan, but it wasn’t until more
than a decade later, as his wealth and renown grew, that he began
getting noticed at the bank.

A JPMorgan client suggested to Sandy Warner, the bank’s chief
executive at the time and a titan of American finance, that he meet
this up-and-comer. Warner invited Epstein to a meeting in his
20th-floor office in the bank’s neoclassical headquarters at 60 Wall
Street. (JPMorgan would move to Midtown a couple of years later.) The
pair talked about markets and policy, Warner recalled in an interview.
Epstein presented himself as a heavyweight, claiming to manage money
for the Rockefellers.

That meeting was followed by a well-attended gathering at Epstein’s
Manhattan home. Warner today insists that he was immediately creeped
out by Epstein. Even so, he phoned one of his lieutenants to encourage
him to meet Epstein, “who drops 50 names in an hourlong
conversation.” That lieutenant was Jes Staley.

Staley had joined JPMorgan in 1979 after graduating from Bowdoin
College in Maine with an economics degree. He worked for the bank in
Brazil, where he met his future wife, and then relocated to New York.
His star rose rapidly inside the storied investment bank. In 1999,
Warner promoted him to run JPMorgan’s private-banking division,
which catered to ultrawealthy clients. Not long after, at Warner’s
urging, Staley visited Epstein at his office in an old mansion across
the street from St. Patrick’s Cathedral in Midtown Manhattan. It was
the beginning of a long, fateful friendship. (Staley, as well as some
other current and former senior bank executives, did not respond to
our questions or declined to comment for this article.)

Epstein was on his way to becoming one of JPMorgan’s most important
clients. A 2003 internal report pegged his net worth at about $300
million. The report, which hasn’t previously been disclosed, noted
that Epstein’s occupation was advising wealthy individuals like
Leslie H. Wexner, the billionaire operator of brands like Victoria’s
Secret and the Limited, though bank documents at the time did not list
any other clients. That year, JPMorgan attributed more than $8 million
in fees to Epstein, making him the biggest revenue generator among
investor clients in the private-banking division.

But the report overlooked something that, had it been taken seriously,
might have dimmed the bank’s enthusiasm. In 2003, Epstein withdrew
more than $175,000 in cash from his JPMorgan accounts — a huge haul,
even for someone with millions at the bank. Outside investigators
later found that Epstein paid almost that exact amount to women that
year. JPMorgan recognized that those withdrawals needed to be reported
to federal regulators that monitor large cash transactions. But the
bank failed to treat those withdrawals as an early-warning system for
itself. Indeed, JPMorgan’s anti-money-laundering specialists
subsequently acknowledged that such withdrawals should have alerted
the bank to the possibility that Epstein was committing crimes.

JPMorgan did financial work for Epstein’s company that handled the
affairs of his private island Little Saint James in the U.S. Virgin
Islands. The bank later paid settlements to victims who were sexually
abused there.Credit...Emily Michot/Miami Herald/Tribune News Service,
via Getty Images

JPMorgan, however, was all in. Soon it opened accounts not just for
Epstein but also for his companies, including one that handled the
affairs of his private island, Little Saint James, off the coast of
St. Thomas in the U.S. Virgin Islands. The bank also provided
financial backing for Epstein to help Jean-Luc Brunel, a French
modeling scout who had been the subject of media reports about
drugging and raping women, start a modeling agency called MC2.
JPMorgan would ultimately open at least 134 accounts for Epstein, his
companies and his associates.

Wittingly or not, the bank was supporting important cogs in
Epstein’s sex-trafficking machinery. On the island, Epstein would
compel teenage girls and young women to give him nude massages and
have sex with him. Some of Epstein’s underage victims said MC2 lured
them to the United States with the prospect of paid modeling work. (In
2022, Brunel died by suicide in a French jail cell after being charged
with raping teenage girls.)

The millions of dollars in fees that Epstein was paying the bank was
only part of his allure. Arguably more important, he was identifying
potential new clients and business opportunities. In 2003, for
example, he introduced Staley to Brin, the co-founder of Google and
one of the world’s richest men. Brin hired JPMorgan to help manage
his immense fortune — he would eventually park more than $4 billion
in assets at the bank — a decision that Staley credited to Epstein.
Staley later said in a deposition that a parade of other Epstein
referrals — including to Gates, Elon Musk and Sultan Ahmed bin
Sulayem, an Emirati billionaire — followed, though not all became
clients.

 

Just as JPMorgan landed Brin, Epstein made an even more consequential
contribution to the bank’s growth. Hedge funds were all the rage
among America’s rich, and Staley thought that if he could offer
clients access to these investment vehicles, it would help distinguish
JPMorgan from rivals. As it happened, Epstein had a useful point of
contact: Glenn Dubin, who co-founded a $7 billion hedge fund called
Highbridge Capital Management, and his wife, Eva Andersson-Dubin, a
former Miss Sweden whom Epstein once dated. Epstein was the godfather
to the Dubins’ daughter, and photographs and paintings of the girl
were ubiquitous in Epstein’s colossal Upper East Side townhouse.
(Epstein would later name Andersson-Dubin as a beneficiary of his
estate. Her lawyer said she learned she was a beneficiary only after
his death and rejected the bequest.)

In 2004, with Epstein acting as middleman, JPMorgan agreed to pay $1.3
billion for a controlling stake in Highbridge. The acquisition would
turn into a landmark for the bank — and for Staley, who described it
as “probably the most important transaction in my professional
career.” Staley, who by then was running JPMorgan’s asset and
wealth management business, was soon reporting to Dimon, the bank’s
No. 2 executive and C.E.O.-in-waiting.

Epstein, for his part in arranging the Highbridge deal, pocketed a $15
million fee from the hedge fund that JPMorgan now controlled. The
payout reflected a crucial reality: Epstein was the rarest of
customers, one whose moneymaking potential extended far beyond his own
accounts. It was imperative to keep this superclient happy.

A few months later, in early 2005, Staley emailed an underling in the
private bank about bringing on another new client. Her name was
Ghislaine Maxwell. She was Epstein’s ex-girlfriend and remained
entwined in his life. (She would later be convicted of playing a
central role in his sex-trafficking operations and is serving a
20-year sentence.) “Ghislaine is a good friend of one of our very
big clients in the US,” Staley wrote. “Can we please try to help
her.” Epstein later transferred millions of dollars into Maxwell’s
JPMorgan account, including $7.4 million to buy a green Sikorsky
helicopter to fly people to Little Saint James.

Epstein’s waterfront home in Palm Beach, Fla., was the site of the
sex crime he was charged with in 2008. Even after he was a registered
sex offender, JPMorgan did not end its relationship with him.
Credit...Pedro Portal/Miami Herald/Tribune News Service, via Getty
Images

BY THEN, EPSTEIN’S ABUSE of young women and girls was attracting
the notice of law enforcement. In March 2005, the parents of a
14-year-old girl filed a complaint with the police in Palm Beach,
Fla., alleging that Epstein had molested her. The police opened an
investigation, and soon other teenage girls shared similar stories of
abuse. (Women have subsequently accused
[[link removed]] Epstein
of raping them as teenagers as far back as 1985.)

Even before the investigation became public, warning lights should
have been flashing inside JPMorgan. Epstein’s huge cash withdrawals
continued — a total of more than $1.7 million in 2004 and 2005,
according to records we reviewed — much of which was used to procure
girls and young women. Some of the withdrawals took place at the bank
branch in JPMorgan’s Park Avenue headquarters, where Epstein’s
accountant regularly arrived to cash huge checks written from
Epstein’s various accounts.

At Epstein’s request, the private bank also agreed to open accounts
for two young women without actually speaking to either of them.
Instead, one of Epstein’s minions provided bare-bones information,
and JPMorgan couldn’t confirm one woman’s Social Security number.
A banker was supposed to meet with the woman to verify her details but
never did, according to a report prepared for the U.S. Virgin Islands,
which later sued JPMorgan. (Evangelisti, the bank spokesman, said the
accounts “were properly verified and documented.”)

Decades of scandals — in which banks facilitated drug smuggling,
human trafficking, money laundering, terrorism and even genocide —
gave rise to requirements that lenders vet their customers, closely
monitor their activities and flag suspicious transactions to the
government. Among its many lapses with Epstein, JPMorgan often failed
to alert federal watchdogs to transactions that the bank later
acknowledged were suspicious. And by opening accounts for young women
without meeting them, the bank was missing a well-known hallmark of
human traffickers: that they control victims’ interactions with the
outside world.

Not until Epstein was arrested and indicted in July 2006 on charges of
soliciting prostitution from a teenage girl did JPMorgan start paying
more attention. In a deposition in 2023, Staley said that he phoned
Dimon to tell him an important client had just been indicted and that
the two executives later met in person to discuss the situation.
(Dimon has denied this under oath.) “So painful to read,” Mary
Erdoes, who had succeeded Staley at the helm of the private bank,
emailed her boss, attaching an article about the indictment. Staley
responded that he had just met with Epstein the previous night.
“I’ve never seen him so shaken,” he typed on his BlackBerry,
saying that Epstein “adamantly denies” being involved with girls.

Mary Erdoes, a top JPMorgan executive, signed off on a new loan to
Epstein months after his indictment in Florida on a charge of
soliciting prostitution from a teenage girl. Credit...Steven
Ferdman/Getty Images

In private, Staley and Erdoes seemed to make light of their client’s
predilections. That August, Staley attended a Hamptons fund-raiser and
was struck by the crowd’s composition. “The ages between husband
and wives would have fit in well with Jeffrey,” he told Erdoes in an
email. She replied that Epstein’s name had come up at an event the
night before. An acquaintance noted how another prominent New York
businessman liked to surround himself with beautiful assistants.
“Lots of comparisons to JE,” Erdoes wrote, adding that people were
“laughing about Jeffrey.”

JPMorgan pulled together a team to decide what to do about their
indicted but lucrative client. Around this time, the Justice
Department charged
[[link removed]] another
bank customer, the actor Wesley Snipes, with tax fraud. JPMorgan
quickly kicked Snipes out of the bank, according to sealed court
records we reviewed. (Snipes was later convicted on tax-related
misdemeanors but acquitted of more serious fraud charges.)

But the Florida sex-crime charge against Epstein — even when coupled
with news that the Justice Department had opened its own investigation
into his activities — didn’t lead to a similar result. The team
assigned to the Epstein matter noted his suspicious pattern of large
cash withdrawals but, after discussing things with Staley and Erdoes,
opted to keep him as a client. The one condition: JPMorgan “will not
proactively solicit new investment business from him,” an internal
memo said. But that did not preclude continuing to lend him money. The
following year, Erdoes signed off on a new loan to Epstein. “I am
relieved to hear,” a banker wrote after learning that Erdoes had
approved the new credit line despite concerns raised by others within
the bank.

In 2008, the situation again seemed to grow untenable. A parade of
victims had sued Epstein for sexually abusing them, and the ugly
details in the court filings caught the attention of JPMorgan
executives. Then, in June, Epstein pleaded guilty to soliciting sex
from a minor and was sentenced to 18 months in the Palm Beach County
jail. It was a sweetheart deal — among other things, he avoided
prosecution on more serious allegations — but even so, he was now a
felon and a sex offender. The bank’s general counsel was supposed to
sign off on doing business with felons.

The rank and file in the private-banking division pushed to expel
Epstein. “No one wants him,” a banker noted in an email. The
decision was made to tell Staley that “we are uncomfortable with
Epstein” and that they shouldn’t bother going to Cutler, who had
become general counsel the previous year after being the top
enforcement officer at the Securities and Exchange Commission. They
should just boot him out of the bank.

 

Staley later testified under oath that he alerted Dimon to Epstein’s
guilty plea and that Dimon told him to talk to Cutler. Staley made no
secret about his desire to retain his star customer, and when he and
Cutler met, “the decision was made to keep Mr. Epstein as a PB
client,” according to an internal write-up. Around that time, as two
executives in the private bank emailed about whether Epstein’s
accounts would be closed, one of them said the decision was “pending
Dimon review.” Another internal email noted that Cutler was
reviewing Epstein-related documents “for Jamie.” Yet in his own
sworn deposition, Dimon said he did not “recall knowing anything
about Jeffrey Epstein” until 2019.

Regardless of who made the decision, Epstein remained a client —
“no change to relationship approach” was the final verdict — and
even during his jail sentence, JPMorgan continued wiring money from
his accounts to banks in Russia and Eastern Europe, where young women
were being drawn into his sex-trafficking network, according to sealed
court records.

All the while, Staley was regularly backchanneling with his buddy.
“I hope you’re hanging in there,” Staley wrote at one point.
“Just think of the island and my boat anchored in front.” (Staley
had a 90-foot yacht, Bequia
[[link removed]],
named after the Caribbean island on which he and his wife
honeymooned.)

Staley sailed his 90-foot yacht, Bequia, to stay on Epstein’s
private island in 2011, telling Epstein it was
“paradise.”Credit...Bing Guan/Bloomberg, via Getty Images

When Bernie Madoff’s Ponzi scheme collapsed in late 2008, Erdoes
asked Staley to call Epstein “to get the scoop” about how wealthy
clients in the Palm Beach area were faring. Around the same time, a
rumor was circulating that Dimon might become the Treasury secretary
in the Obama administration — in which case Staley would be a prime
contender to succeed him as chief executive. Staley emailed Epstein
about Dimon’s status. Epstein responded, “We can help push
Obama.”

Epstein was a master manipulator who sometimes exaggerated or lied
about his access and power. It is not clear whether he had sway with
officials in Barack Obama’s inner circle at the time, though he and
a top Obama economic adviser, Lawrence Summers, were friendly. In any
case, there is no question that Staley and at least some of his
colleagues trusted Epstein.

Staley at times shared confidential information. As the world
descended into a deep financial crisis in 2008, Staley divulged to
Epstein that the bank was trying to buy one company and sell another.
The next month, he revealed that JPMorgan’s private bank had been
inundated by $44 billion in new assets in the past two weeks. He
disclosed that JPMorgan was working on a deal for the Pritzker family,
and he detailed the bank’s talks with the Federal Reserve about how
to stabilize the financial system. Over and over, Staley passed what
he later acknowledged was potentially market-moving information to a
criminal.

 

Epstein cultivated relationships with other JPMorgan bankers and
executives, and it is possible that Staley was not the only one
leaking to the sex offender. In the fall of 2009 — barely two months
after Epstein was released from jail and began a period of home arrest
— he learned that Staley was in line for a big promotion, this time
to run JPMorgan’s investment-banking division. He seemed to know
more about Staley’s future than Staley did. “I am told you are on
track,” Epstein wrote more than three weeks before Staley was
formally tapped for the job.

The public announcement made clear that Staley was now the
front-runner to one day inherit Dimon’s throne. “Jes has
impeccable character and integrity,” Dimon told Fortune magazine
[[link removed]].
(When Bin Sulayem emailed Epstein about Staley’s promotion, Epstein
implied that he himself had masterminded it.) Staley immediately began
turning to Epstein for advice. How much should he earn in the new gig?
How should he handle the job transition? What should his priorities
be? To that last question, Epstein urged Staley to embrace China,
perhaps by moving some banking operations there. He arranged for
Staley to get “a quick tutorial” about China from an
Oxford-educated expert.

What did Epstein get out of this? Clearly he wanted to endear himself
to bank executives. But there was more to it. In his New York
townhouse, Epstein kept framed stock certificates of iconic American
companies like General Motors, AT&T and JPMorgan. A felon and sex
offender under house arrest, he was at risk of becoming a pariah. Yet
he was also proving indispensable to top executives at one of the
world’s premier banks. The intimate relationship imbued him with
prestige in the eyes of those he hoped to impress.

Staley would later be asked under oath why Epstein introduced him to
the China expert. “Epstein relied on his network for his
legitimacy,” Staley answered. “And I, as running the largest
investment bank in the world, was part of that network for him.”

While Epstein was serving his sentence in Florida, Staley visited his
Zorro Ranch in New Mexico. “I owe you much,” Staley wrote to
Epstein from the ranch’s hot tub. Credit...Drone Base/Reuters

ONE OF THE ENDURING MYSTERIES about Epstein is why so many rich and
powerful men risked their reputations by continuing to spend time with
him after he was registered as a sex offender. Did they value his
advice? Consider him a friend? Like tapping into his network? Or was
it about sex with the young women who always seemed to be around him?

At least with Staley, the answer might have been all of the above.
While Epstein was under house arrest in November 2009, Staley visited
his sprawling Zorro Ranch in New Mexico, where girls and young women
later accused Epstein of raping and trafficking them. (Epstein
also discussed
[[link removed]] using
the desert compound as a venue for inseminating women in order to seed
the human race with his DNA.) Staley emailed Epstein while sipping
white wine in the hot tub. “Next time, we’re here together,” he
wrote. “I owe you much.” Other messages were littered with
apparent sexual references. “That was fun. Say hi to Snow White,”
Staley emailed in 2010. Epstein responded by asking which character he
would like next. “Beauty and the Beast,” Staley answered.

One day around then, while visiting Epstein’s New York townhouse for
a meeting, Staley had a conversation with a woman in her 20s. She had
been with Epstein since around 2003, making her one of the
longest-serving women in the retinue that surrounded Epstein. The
woman would later allege in a class-action lawsuit, which was
eventually settled, that Epstein sexually abused her for more than a
dozen years and that he forced her and other victims to engage in
commercial sex with “certain select friends.”

According to Staley, the woman suggested that he come by her apartment
in an Upper East Side building owned by Epstein’s brother. On the
appointed day, Staley arrived, and after chatting in the living room,
they went to her bedroom and had sex. Afterward, Staley took a shower.
He was out of the building in less than an hour and walked back to
work. (Staley, who is married, has publicly acknowledged having sex
with one of Epstein’s assistants, but the details have not
previously been reported. Staley swore in a deposition that it was his
only Epstein-connected sexual encounter.)

Late in 2010, JPMorgan approved $50 million of additional credit to
facilitate market trading by Epstein, whose criminal history would
have rendered him untouchable at many mainstream banks. By now, he had
about $212 million at the bank, nearly half of his estimated net
worth. Yet fresh concerns were brewing.

Employees in JPMorgan’s anti-money-laundering division learned from
media reports that the Justice Department was investigating whether
Brunel’s MC2 modeling agency was feeding Eastern European girls and
women into Epstein’s suspected sex-trafficking network. Plus, there
were Epstein’s regular wire transfers, the credit cards and bank
accounts he requested for teenagers and young women and his voluminous
cash withdrawals. The anti-money-laundering employees were waking up,
even if they didn’t grasp the significance of what they were seeing.
“Sugar Daddy!” one exclaimed after noting that Epstein had sent
about $450,000 to an 18-year-old.

The bank’s head of compliance, William Langford, was especially
alarmed. “No patience for this,” he emailed a colleague. Langford
had joined JPMorgan in 2006 after years of policing financial crimes
for the Treasury Department. He knew — and had warned colleagues —
that companies can be criminally charged for money laundering if they
willfully ignored such activities by their clients. He saw
ultrawealthy customers as a particular blind spot; all the time that
private bankers spent wining and dining these lucrative clients could
cloud judgments about their trustworthiness. It looked like that was
what was happening with Epstein. One of Langford’s achievements at
JPMorgan was the creation of a task force devoted to combating human
trafficking. The group noted in a presentation that frequent large
cash withdrawals and wire transfers — exactly what employees were
seeing in Epstein’s accounts — were totems of such illicit
activity.

Early in the new year, Langford approached Erdoes, who was now running
JPMorgan’s asset-and-wealth-management group. He told her that
Epstein should be “exited.” Erdoes, however, said Staley was
responsible for the Epstein relationship — an odd deflection,
because Staley now worked in the investment-banking division, which
didn’t control Epstein’s private-banking accounts. Yet
JPMorgan’s “rapid response” team — activated at Langford’s
urging — reached a similar conclusion: Langford should talk to
Staley, because he “is friends with Epstein. He needs to understand
the potential backlash to the firm given all of the work done to root
out clients involved in human trafficking.”

Staley, Erdoes and other JPMorgan employees were among the visitors to
Epstein’s palatial townhouse on Manhattan’s Upper East
Side.Credit...Bebeto Matthews/Associated Press

The meeting took place in January 2011. Staley by then had a
reputation for running interference on Epstein’s behalf, repeatedly
telling colleagues that he would trust Epstein with his daughters. (He
meant it literally: Staley arranged for Epstein to coach one of his
daughters on her education and career.) Now he allotted all of 15
minutes for the discussion with Langford. Langford said in a
deposition that he started off by quickly explaining the
human-trafficking initiative. In that context, how could the bank
justify working with someone who had pleaded guilty to a sex crime and
was now under investigation for sex trafficking?

Staley pushed back, saying that Epstein hoped to get his plea deal
overturned in court. He told Langford to speak with Epstein’s
attorneys. Langford was surprised — he had never spoken to a
client’s criminal lawyer — but a month later, he got on the phone
with Ken Starr, the former special prosecutor who pursued Bill Clinton
for his sexual relationship with Monica Lewinsky and who was now
representing Epstein. “Got all my points in,” Starr reported to
his client afterward. “I said, no crimes, period. Inappropriate,
yes. criminal, no. Bragged on you.”

At the request of Langford and other executives, Staley asked Epstein
whether he was involved in sex trafficking. According to an internal
bank memo, Epstein replied that “there was no truth to the
allegations” and that he “was not expecting any problems” from
law enforcement. Staley seemed to believe him.

 

Langford now had a choice. He could make a fuss about Epstein by
talking to Dimon, appealing to the bank’s board of directors,
pushing Staley or going back to Erdoes. But, he said in the
deposition, he did none of those things.

That week, Staley sailed his yacht to Little Saint James. Epstein was
on his way to Paris, and Staley emailed to let him know that the
island was “paradise.” Days later, JPMorgan agreed to keep Epstein
as a client.

STALEY AND AT LEAST ONE OTHER EXECUTIVE ALERTED Epstein to the
bank’s heightened sensitivity about his constant cash withdrawals.
Apparently in response, Epstein altered his tactics. Instead of taking
cash out of his personal accounts, he withdrew money from a JPMorgan
account for Hyperion Air, which owned Epstein’s jets. In 2012, for
example, nearly $300,000 was withdrawn from Hyperion’s account, more
than enough to cover Epstein’s roughly $225,000 in payments to
procure women that year, according to records we reviewed. Epstein
told executives in the private bank that the withdrawals were to pay
for jet fuel and other aviation expenses.

Where was all this money coming from? Epstein’s nine-figure fortune
derived from multiple sources. Much originated with Wexner, the
Limited founder who, to the everlasting bafflement of his friends,
granted Epstein power over his personal finances and would later
accuse him
[[link removed]] of
misappropriating huge sums. After that billionaire cut ties to Epstein
around 2007, tens of millions of dollars poured in
[[link removed]] from
another billionaire, Leon Black, a founder of the private-equity firm
Apollo Global Management; Black, himself a JPMorgan client, said the
payments were for Epstein’s advice about taxes and estate planning.

 

And then there was JPMorgan. In addition to giving Epstein crucial
access to the global financial system, the bank directly enriched him.
There was $15 million from the Highbridge acquisition. And in 2011,
even as senior officials like Langford wanted Epstein out, the bank
paid him an additional $9 million. It was to settle a lawsuit that
Epstein had brought years earlier against the Wall Street firm Bear
Stearns, which JPMorgan bought in 2008. Erdoes went to Epstein’s
Manhattan townhouse to discuss the settlement.

To Epstein’s critics, the resolution of the Bear Stearns litigation
was a fresh chance for JPMorgan to cut off the sex offender. And those
critics now had a powerful new ally: Cutler, the general counsel.

Back in 2008, Cutler had signed off on Epstein remaining a customer.
Now things were different. “This is not an honorable person in any
way,” Cutler emailed Erdoes, Staley and others in July 2011. “He
should not be a client.” Staley, however, insisted that the
relationship was safe. Surely, if billionaires and prime ministers
trusted Epstein, so could JPMorgan. Plus, it was a matter of fairness.
Epstein had served his time. He deserved a second chance, Staley
argued.

That was when Cutler invited Epstein to the bank’s headquarters for
a meeting, the first of two conversations he had with the felon that
fall. (Epstein also tried to arrange a meeting with Dimon, though
there is no evidence that he was successful.) Around then, Cutler also
learned that Epstein was classified as a Level 3 sex offender, meaning
he had a high risk of committing additional crimes. Yet despite his
misgivings, Cutler didn’t insist upon dismissing him.

It was another blown opportunity — and it showed how, despite the
bank’s later attempts to pin the blame on Staley, responsibility for
Epstein was shared across the institution. Executives like Cutler and
Langford, while united in believing that he was a threat to the
bank’s reputation, didn’t take a stand. Elsewhere in the bank, the
combination of a thirst for profits and Epstein’s knack for making
himself seem indispensable proved potent and hard to kick, the
financial equivalent of a powerful narcotic.

Sure enough, just as more bank employees were losing patience with
Epstein in 2011, he began dangling more goodies. That March, to the
pleasant surprise of JPMorgan’s investment bankers in Israel, they
were granted an audience with Netanyahu. The bankers informed Staley,
who forwarded their email to Epstein with a one-word message:
“Thanks.” (The bank spokesman said JPMorgan “neither needed nor
sought Epstein’s help for meetings with any government leaders.”)
And around that same time, Epstein presented an opportunity that, like
the Highbridge deal years earlier, had the potential to be
transformative.

 

This one involved Bill Gates, who had only recently entered
Epstein’s orbit. In an apparent effort to ingratiate — and further
entangle — himself with his bankers and the Microsoft co-founder,
Epstein pitched Erdoes and Staley on creating an enormous investment
and charitable fund with something like $100 billion in assets. The
so-called donor-advised fund would be seeded with billions from the
Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. More would come from JPMorgan
clients. The bank would collect fees for administering the fund.
Naturally, Epstein hoped to get a slice, too.

The idea gained traction inside JPMorgan — it was given the code
name Project Molecule — but never came to fruition, apparently too
big and complex to get off the ground. Epstein was frustrated, but in
a few months he faced a much greater problem at the bank: His patron
was suddenly on the outs.

DIMON HAD SEVERAL CORE TRAITS as the leader of America’s biggest
bank. One was his willingness to micromanage; a 2010 profile
[[link removed]] in this
magazine mentioned that “Dimon seemingly meddles in every detail.”
The tendency is hard to square with his insistence that he didn’t
know Epstein was a client even as his subordinates battled about the
propriety of working with him. (As David Boies, one of the lawyers
representing Epstein’s victims, told us, either Dimon knew about
Epstein and lied in a sworn deposition or his subordinates kept him in
the dark. “Neither is good,” Boies said.)

Another defining characteristic was Dimon’s habit of ruthlessly
cycling through top executives. In 2009, Dimon pushed aside the two
longtime executives running the investment-banking division and
replaced them with Staley, who immediately became Dimon’s heir
apparent. But by 2012, Staley was out of favor. That summer, in the
wake of an investing fiasco
[[link removed]] that
cost the bank billions, he learned that Dimon planned to shake up his
leadership team — including by demoting him. (Dimon and others
suspected that Staley had been leaking information about the so-called
London Whale scandal to the media.)

Staley broke the bad news to Epstein, who had spent years nurturing
his relationship with the would-be chief executive. Epstein devised a
plan to salvage his investment. The British bank Barclays was
searching for a new chief. Epstein enlisted a London power broker to
plant seeds about Staley with senior bank officials. Staley was
interviewed for the job, but it ultimately went to a Barclays
executive. Six months later, in January 2013, Staley decided to leave
JPMorgan after 33 years.

Stephen Cutler (second from right), JPMorgan’s general counsel,
wanted the bank to cut ties with Epstein in 2011 but ultimately
didn’t insist on it, and the relationship continued.Credit...Daniel
Rosenbaum for The New York Times

Epstein’s days at the bank also were numbered. That same month,
federal banking regulators issued a cease-and-desist order
[[link removed]] against
JPMorgan for anti-money-laundering lapses, including not adequately
monitoring its customers’ transactions and failing to report
suspicious activities to the government. The order was part of a wave
of government actions
[[link removed]] against
the bank, and it prompted the compliance department to get more
aggressive — including when it came to Epstein. As part of a broader
effort to reduce risk in the private-banking division, his accounts
were among those marked as ripe for elimination.

Epstein’s personal banker, Justin Nelson, balked; he prepared a memo
trumpeting Epstein’s large volume of business with JPMorgan and
noting that despite his status as a sex offender, he was “still
clearly well-respected and trusted by some of the richest people in
the world.” But when JPMorgan convened its latest meeting to
determine Epstein’s future, the decision was made to kick him out of
the bank.

In mid-July, Erdoes returned to Epstein’s townhouse. A deputy
prepared talking points. Erdoes was to tell Epstein that “the
repetitive nature of your cash transactions is a problem for us and
our relationship with you.” Banking regulators had “a very low
tolerance for cash activity when combined with your personal
history.” These were essentially the same arguments that JPMorgan
employees had made as far back as 2006. Finally, the bank was acting
on them.

 

That fall, Epstein began moving his $176 million from JPMorgan to his
new home at Deutsche Bank. (Years later, Deutsche would pay more than
$100 million in settlements with victims and regulators who sued over
the bank’s relationship with Epstein.) But JPMorgan was not ready to
fully part ways with Epstein. He remained in regular contact with
Nelson, his personal banker. A big reason was Epstein’s relationship
with Leon Black, the private-equity billionaire. Epstein was acting as
an intermediary between the bank and Black, trying to secure him loans
and other financial services.

Erdoes and at least one other senior JPMorgan executive knew that
Nelson was continuing to interact with Epstein, and for years after
JPMorgan ostensibly washed its hands of its notorious client, the
banker included Epstein in meetings with Black, showed up at
Epstein’s Manhattan townhouse and even visited his Zorro Ranch in
New Mexico. It was a testament to Epstein’s remarkable staying power
— and to JPMorgan’s inability, when potential profits were on the
line, to just say no.

STALEY AND EPSTEIN were both gone from JPMorgan, but they remained
close. There were dinners at Epstein’s townhouse, supportive
messages (“The strength of a Greek army was that its core held
shoulder to shoulder, and would not flee or break,” Staley wrote to
his friend in 2015. “That is us”) and a visit that year with his
family to Epstein’s island. Later in 2015, Staley landed a plum job:
the chief executive of Barclays. Given Epstein’s role in putting
Staley on the bank’s radar three years earlier, he deserved at least
partial credit for what would most likely be Staley’s final act.

For a spell, everyone was happy. But in the summer of 2019, Epstein
was arrested on his plane after it landed at Teterboro Airport in New
Jersey, and federal prosecutors charged him with sex trafficking; he
then died by suicide in his jail cell. Suddenly, investigators,
journalists and others were racing to understand how this man had
prospered for so many years. His longtime bank was an obvious place to
look.

JPMorgan went into damage-control mode. It opened an internal review
— code name: Project Jeep — and discussed Epstein at board
meetings. Late that year, the bank did something it should have been
doing all along: It filed a report with federal regulators that
retroactively flagged as suspicious some 4,700 Epstein transactions
— totaling more than $1.1 billion and including hundreds of millions
of dollars in payments to Russian banks and young Eastern European
women who were brought to the United States, according to
investigators working for Senator Ron Wyden who have been digging
into Epstein’s financial backers
[[link removed]].
Banks are required to file such reports in real time to alert law
enforcement to things like money laundering, sex trafficking and drug
dealing. Doing it after the fact might have provided JPMorgan with
legal cover, but it did nothing to help identify Epstein’s crimes as
they were happening.

The bank’s current and former executives began pointing fingers.
Erdoes and others blamed Staley for pushing to keep Epstein as a
client. (The bank even sued him; the litigation was settled under
confidential terms.) Staley — who would resign
[[link removed]] from
Barclays in 2021 and be barred
[[link removed]] from
being an executive in the British financial-services industry after an
investigation into his relationship with Epstein — faulted Erdoes
and others. Dimon said under oath that the decision to keep Epstein
ultimately rested with Cutler.

The fallout for JPMorgan has been limited. In 2023, it paid $290
million to settle a lawsuit brought by roughly 200 of Epstein’s
victims and an additional $75 million to resolve related litigation
brought by the U.S. Virgin Islands, where many of Epstein’s crimes
took place. The payments were a rounding error for a company that
raked in more than $50 billion in profits that year. (The bank
didn’t admit wrongdoing and is trying to force its insurers to cover
some of the litigation costs.) No regulator took action against
JPMorgan. No executives lost their jobs. Dimon remains one of the most
powerful bankers in the world.

The apparent impunity alarmed Bridgette Carr, a law professor and
human-trafficking expert whom the U.S. Virgin Islands hired after
Epstein’s death to analyze JPMorgan’s role. Carr concluded that
the bank enabled his crimes. “I am deeply worried here that the
ultimate message to other financial institutions is that they can keep
serving traffickers,” she told us. “It’s still profitable to do
that, given the lack of substantial consequences.”

Susan C. Beachy and Julie Tate contributed research.

_DAVID ENRICH is a deputy investigations editor for The New York
Times. He manages a team of reporters and write about law and
business._

_MATTHEW GOLDSTEIN is a New York Times Business reporter focusing on
white collar crime and the financialization of the housing market._

_JESSICA SILVER-GREENBERG is an investigative reporter for the
Business section of The New York Times._

_Subscribe to the NEW YORK TIMES
[[link removed]]_

* Jeffrey Epstein
[[link removed]]
* J.P. Morgan
[[link removed]]
* Sex Trafficking
[[link removed]]
* Jamie Dimon
[[link removed]]
* Billionaires
[[link removed]]

*
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