What Jeffrey Epstein's bank knew

0:00For his 50th birthday in 2003, Jeffrey Epstein received a book. 238 pages of photos, mementos, and notes from family and friends. One particular entry has been scrutinized. It's a typed message within an outline drawing of a woman's silhouette. One line reads to Epstein, May every day be another wonderful secret. At the bottom, the name Donald J. Trump appears along with a signature.

0:28Matt Goldstein:I don't even know what they're talking about. Now, somebody could have written a letter and used my name, but that's happened a lot. That's President Trump back in July, shortly after the Wall Street Journal broke the story of the letter's existence. The book is now public. The House Oversight Committee subpoenaed it and released a redacted version on Monday. Trump and Epstein were known to be friendly around this time, though the White House continues to deny that the letter or signature are Trump's. Regardless, there are 237 other pages in Epstein's birthday book. They include well wishes, lewd references, and sex jokes, written by some of the most powerful people on earth, to a man federal prosecutors would later charge with sexually exploiting and abusing dozens of minor girls.

1:13It raises an unsettling question. How much did Epstein's associates know about what he was doing? So that is one of the great, great, another great mystery. Vicki Ward is a journalist who reported on Epstein around the time of that birthday and has covered him through his life and since his death in prison six years ago. We do know that there were a lot of bold-faced names, politicians, very rich men, who were on his planes, who may have visited the island, who came to dinner at his houses. and he was at the same time surrounded by beautiful women, many of whom were underage Myers, almost in plain sight.

2:01Consider this. A separate New York Times investigation has found that Jeffrey Epstein's bank grew suspicious about what he was doing, but continued to do business with him and profit from him anyway.

2:18From NPR, I'm Ari Shapiro.

2:30It's Consider This from NPR. A team of New York Times reporters has been digging into Jeffrey Epstein for years. They followed the money, the relationship between Jeffrey Epstein and the country's leading bank, JPMorgan Chase. And in an article out this week, they conclude that the bank enabled his crimes, even as evidence against him piled up. I spoke with Matt Goldstein, one of the reporters behind the story. How valuable were Jeffrey Epstein's accounts with J.P. Morgan? You know, they're valuable in the sense, obviously, he had a lot of money there. At the peak, he had about$300 million in his accounts.

3:07But you have to view him more than just the dollars. There were lots of transactions he was doing. obviously to run his sex trafficking operation for so many years. And he was also valuable in helping to bring business to the bank because his stock and trade was connecting people. You know, it's always unclear exactly how much he did in terms of bringing new business into the bank, but clearly he was very important in making introductions to some people at the bank. You write that he seemed to know everyone. Can you give us a couple examples? examples yeah i mean obviously you know it's been well known that leslie wexner who was the head of the limited victoria secret was his number one client they had also already been a client of jp morgan but that obviously further cemented the relationship later on he had connections with sergey brin from google bill gates who never became a client but they were working on a potential deal for bill gates and his his foundation leon black obviously was a big important client to epstein and was a client of the bank.

4:08There's some dispute over how much he introduced Benjamin Netanyahu to the bank, and Ehud Barak was also a person that he knew. Leaders of Israel, yeah. Yeah. You say that even before investigations into Epstein became public, warning lights should have been flashing inside J.P. Morgan. Explain why. Yeah, so, you know, he really becomes essentially what they call a private bank client in 1998. And that's like a special kind of, it's not like you or me going to a bank and having a checking account or like having to call 1-800 number on our credit card if we have a problem. And by 2003, they're already seeing a lot of big cash transactions being pulled out.

4:50Huge ones as much as$175 ,000,$1.7 million altogether by 2004. And this was money that was going to largely to make payments to women and people in his social circle. And the bank had an awareness of this, of where the money was going, and that should have raised more flags internally. So what pushback was there within the bank? Well, there was pushback. Early on, it starts. There are some people on the compliance and the anti-money laundering side who start to flag some of these transactions. They write emails. They're raising concerns. But at this point, he's become a favorite and important customer of this person, Jess Staley, who's a very critical and high-rising employee at the bank.

5:36And he basically vouches for Epstein. And what you start to have is this pattern where he vouches for Epstein. He says, there's no problem here. I know this guy. These things are okay. Don't worry about them. And maybe it's a little bit of human nature, but people sort of defer also according to his rank in the bank. So basically, the concerns don't really get elevated or go anywhere. Did Staley respond to your request for comment for this story? No, he didn't. Which I can tell you has been consistent throughout Staley or his lawyers have never responded in any way. In 2019, after Epstein was arrested in New Jersey and charged with federal sex trafficking offenses, J.P.

6:16Morgan filed a report retroactively flagging some 4 ,700 Epstein transactions as suspicious, totaling more than a billion dollars. what was going on there and how should those transactions have been handled in real time? Yeah, I mean, that's sort of the crux here that sort of shows that it's easy, obviously, to go back in time. And, you know, J.P. Morgan will tell you, well, we did the right thing. We went back and analyzed the reports and looked at them in a fresh light. But it's also clear that they could have done this back then. I mean, in fairness to J.P. Morgan, they were following some of these suspicious activities reports along the way, but not with the same kind of frequency that they should have judged by the$1.1 billion report that they filed.

7:00You want to sum up the problem here. It's sort of like an institutional fail. There are people along the way on at least four different occasions who raise the point there's a big reputational risk about us keeping him here, but no one feels they have either the power or they want to actually take that next step and say, okay, it's time to exit him from the bank. Well, what has J.P. Morgan said in response to your reporting? You know, they've stuck largely to the same party line, which has been they're very sorry about their relationship with Epstein. They're sorry that they ever did business with him and that it went on too long.

7:37But they firmly state that they had no idea they were helping to basically funnel money for his sex trafficking. And largely, they've thrown the blame on this guy, Jeff Staley. And they basically say they put too much faith in Staley. And if it wasn't for Staley, they would have exited him earlier. It's, you know, there's some truth to that, but it also becomes a convenient excuse, too. So your story gives us some glimpse into the special treatment that the ultra-wealthy can receive from major banks. What's your biggest takeaway from investigating that world? Yeah, like I said, it's this idea of the very close relationship nature of it.

8:17And it's sort of like we can all relate it to our own friends, that we can sometimes have blind spots about things that our friends do that we don't like or that we find hard to reconcile with. You have to be a little bit more dispassionate, particularly in terms of finance. And quite frankly, banks' jobs is to look for things like sex trafficking, to look for things like money laundering. And when you see a predominance kind of these kind of huge, hefty transactions going on on a regular basis time and time again, at some point, someone should say, you know, we got to pull the trigger here. You know, even if we are not totally convinced he's doing something wrong, it just doesn't smell right.

8:57That's New York Times business reporter Matt Goldstein. Thank you for joining us. Thanks for having me, Ari. This episode was produced by Catherine Fink and Connor Donovan. with audio engineering by Jay Sizz and Ted Meebane. It was edited by Patrick Jaron Watanana. Our executive producer is Sammy Yenigan.

9:20It's Consider This from NPR. I'm Ari Shapiro.