A tricky timeline in the Epstein case | Arkansas Democrat Gazette

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Information about Jeffrey Epstein is overwhelming. Yet I feel a responsibility to the victims to keep sorting it out. I have committed not to look away.

So I'm putting together a timeline to help understand what I have learned so far. This is information reported by reputable people in peer-reviewed publications.

Jeffrey Epstein was born in 1953 in Brooklyn, N.Y. He was raised in Coney Island in a working-class family. His father, Seymour Epstein, worked for New York City's Parks Department, and his mother, Pauline Epstein, was a school aide. He attended public school at Lafayette High in Brooklyn, where he skipped a grade.

He was remembered as being good at math, and told a classmate in ninth grade he was going to be very rich one day.

After graduating from Lafayette, Epstein spent a couple of years in college but left without graduating. Despite not having a degree, he landed a job teaching math and physics at prestigious private Dalton School on Manhattan's Upper East Side, hired by headmaster of Dalton at the time, Donald Barr, a former member of the OSS (precursor to the CIA), who you'd think would have had the resources to verify that Epstein had not graduated from college, supposedly a requirement before becoming a teacher at Dalton.

Barr was the father of William Barr, who would go on to become Donald Trump's U.S. Attorney General and head of the Department of Justice at the time Epstein died in DOJ Bureau of Prisons custody.

When Dalton named a new headmaster, Epstein was told to find a new job before the next school year. A wealthy parent of a Dalton student connected Epstein to Alan Ace Greenberg, an executive at Bear Stearns. Greenberg got him an interview at Bear Stearns with another exec who had a son at Dalton. He landed a job there to develop and market quantitative analysis for options. This was 1976; Epstein was 23 years old.

While working at Bear Stearns, Greenberg treated him as a protege. Epstein also started dating Greenberg's daughter. Two months into his Bear Stearns job they found out Epstein had never been to the two California colleges listed on his resume.

He talked his way out of it and wasn't fired. Three years later, they named him a limited partner. Through his Bear Stearns connections, including a shady guy named Jim Kane, he was introduced to some of the bank's most ultra-wealthy investment clients. He wooed many of them through schemes to save them money on taxes.

Epstein kept on breaking rules, being found out, and getting away with it, including spending $10,000 in 1980 on his corporate card for gifts for his girlfriend. After enough aberrations, Epstein was threatened with being fired and decided to resign.

He started dating another rich woman, Paula Heel, who introduced him in England to ultra-rich family the Leeses. They treated him like a son and gave him a taste of more extreme luxurious living.

Douglas Leese was an aristocratic British arms dealer. He made a fortune brokering the UK's then largest-ever arms deal, the sale of British fighter jets to the Saudi Arabian Air Force.

Leese mentored Epstein, took him to meetings, and hired him as a consultant. After a time, however, Epstein was caught charging personal flights on the Concorde to the Leese business account, and the relationship ended.

Epstein came back to New York and called himself a consultant. He got one of his clients to give him $450,000 for an oil deal. The money vanished. He then joined forces as a consultant with Stephen Hoffenberg, CEO of debt collection company Town Financial Corporation. They became partners, and although Epstein claimed he had no knowledge it was a fraud, they orchestrated the biggest to-date Ponzi scheme in American history, defrauding investors out of almost $500 million.

Hoffenberg later claimed Epstein was the mastermind behind the scheme, but didn't implicate him at the time because he said Epstein told him he was a cooperating witness for the DOJ in the past and had traction with them. Epstein denied knowing it was a fraud. Hoffenberg served 18 years in prison. Epstein faced no consequences.

Meanwhile, Epstein was soliciting millions of dollars from other investors. He used their money to generate big profits by saying he was going to buy a company with no intention of buying it, thereby increasing the value of the shares, and then refused to return their funds. There is no record of Epstein facing consequences or repaying the money.

At this point, he was deeply embedded in high society in New York, including becoming a board member of the prestigious New York Academy of Art in 1987. But his real money didn't show up until he met Les Wexner that same year.

On a flight to Florida, Epstein met a friend of Wexner, who was so impressed he suggested to Wexner that he reach out to Epstein for financial advice.

Wexner was a billionaire owner of The Limited, Victoria's Secret, and Abercrombie and Fitch. Soon, Wexner gave Epstein near-total control over his finances, including a power of attorney. Between 1991 and 2006, Epstein oversaw the sale of about $3.1 billion of stock from Wexner's company, making untold amounts.

He flew around on his plane. He stayed in Wexner's estate. He had seemingly radical access. He used Wexner's connection to lure other billionaires to do business with him, including Ken Lipper. It was revealed later that he also used his connection to Wexner's Victoria's Secret empire to lure girls by saying he scouted talent for Victoria's Secret.

In 2007, Wexner's wife discovered what she said was misappropriation of significant amounts of family funds, including that Epstein frequently bought property on behalf of the Wexners, sold it to himself at a fraction of the cost, and pocketed the money. They opted for a private settlement of $100 million from Epstein.

Another billionaire with speculated ties to Epstein during this period was Robert Maxwell. Born in Czechoslovakia, he was a Holocaust survivor who moved to England and re-invented himself as a British publishing baron, a member of Parliament in the U.K., and an alleged intelligence asset who changed his name four times by the time he was 23.

Toward the end of his life, Maxwell's empire was crumbling. He stole $590 million from his employees' pension funds to cover mounting business debts.

In the most recent Epstein file release, Epstein wrote an email that said that toward the end of his life, "Robert Maxwell threatened Mossad. He told them that unless they gave him 400 million euro to save his crumbling empire, he would expose all he had done for them."

Maxwell was found dead floating off his yacht which was named for his favorite child, Ghislaine. (This is Ghislaine Maxwell, currently imprisoned for the Epstein conspiracy.) Ghislaine immediately relocated to New York City.

In Ghislaine's mother's autobiography, she said that when she was penniless following her husband's death, an unnamed financier from New York City, to whom her husband had previously introduced her, bought her a London apartment because he was "grateful for her husband's service to Israel."

A photo from around that time is the first known photo of Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine together. They became inseparable for many years, first as romantic partners, then Ghislaine as his employee and criminal co-conspirator.

From there, Epstein built his criminal sex-trafficking ring.

To be continued in my Thursday online column.

Gwen Ford Faulkenberry is an author, teacher and award-winning columnist from Ozark. Email her at [email protected]. View Gwen's Smalltown Girl vodcast at https://www.arkansasonline.com/smalltowngirl