Jeffrey Epstein, Howard Lutnick, and the disgraced former prince

0:00This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK.

0:30Andy Verity:to actually make you a better cook. Discover award-winning cookware at madeincookware.com. How did a boycott Jimmy become a billionaire from posting videos? On Good Bad Billionaire, we're going to find out how the world's most popular YouTuber, Mr Beast, made his fortune. He's buried himself in a coffin for days, counted to 100 ,000 on camera, and even recreated Squid Games, all in an attempt to go viral on the internet. But it all started when he gave a homeless man$10 ,000. So is he a philanthropist reshaping capitalism? Or is he just the king of the attention economy? Find out on Good Bad Billionaire.

1:05Andy Verity:Listen on BBC.com or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi there, it's Tristan Redmond, one of the hosts of the Global Story podcast from the BBC. And as a bonus for your feed, we're bringing you one of our best episodes of the week. Months on from the release of the Epstein files, it turns out there were still more revelations to come. In this episode, we heard about a whistleblower who unearthed new evidence suggesting that the US Commerce Secretary, Howard Lutnick, failed to disclose a business relationship with the paedophile financier Jeffrey Epstein. The story was part of an exclusive BBC investigation.

1:43Andy Verity:And if you find this interesting, then every weekday we tell one story where the world and America meet. This week, we also heard from the US broadcaster Roger Bennett, host of the Men in Blazers soccer podcast, about how this World Cup has changed America. I have not slept, I think, in about 39 days. But we'll sleep after the final. And to see this nation come alive in a way I think America really needed in this moment and to make memories along the way has been really profound. Yeah, but I'm barely standing up right now. You can find that and much more by searching for The Global Story wherever you get your podcasts.

2:23Andy Verity:Now, on to the show. Back in February, the BBC's Andy Verity was at his desk, combing through millions of newly released documents. When the Epstein files came out, I, like others, was tasked with going through these files and I spotted something rather familiar when I searched for Lutnik. Andy was looking for any files that referenced the US Commerce Secretary, Howard Lutnik. When I searched for Lutnik, more than 250 documents come up. He's in the files more than 250 times. And going through all of those, I came across one, which was a record of an interview that was given to the FBI. And I looked at the allegations and they sounded strangely familiar.

3:09I'd been hearing them for years. He spotted the name of one of his sources. I realised that actually what I'd been hearing from the whistleblower had real substance to it. Then we found out something more involving not just Lutnick, not just Epstein, but also our very own Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor.

3:32Andy Verity:In an exclusive BBC investigation, a whistleblower gives his first interview, revealing how he unearthed evidence suggesting that Howard Lutnick failed to disclose a business relationship with dead paedophile financier Jeffrey Epstein. From the BBC, I'm Tristan Redmond in London. And today on The Global Story, Howard Lutnick, Jeffrey Epstein and the disgraced former prince.

4:08Andy Verity:Andy Verity, Financial Investigations correspondent with the BBC. Great to have you back on the show. Good to be here. How did you hear about this story? Well, it's one of those stories where you've been thinking of doing it for years and years, but it's not quite there. So a man named Simon Andrews, who's at the centre of our story, he's a British whistleblower.

4:32We've just walked down a narrow path over a dune to be confronted by a spectacular sight here in Morgan Porth on the north coast of Cornwall, the Atlantic. So, why did you come to Cornwall, son? Andy, well, this is a place my wife and I always used to come down to. He now lives in Cornwall. In south-west England. In south-west England.

4:56Andy Verity:I'm a big ocean swimmer. Yeah, I do a lot of ocean swimming. It's been great for the mental health. Where he's recuperating because of a traumatic ten years, trying to expose malpractice and misconduct at his former employer. I would have flashbacks to incidents that had happened in the past. They're called dissociative seizures, where I was developing like a head movement, like your head shaking. And what have the doctors told you about what's caused that? That's due to the intense ordeal I've been through. I would say the retaliation that I've endured for 10 years. Retaliation for what? For my whistleblowing.

5:37I've been talking to him for five years. He was introduced to me by a colleague in 2021 and told me things he knew about Howard Lutnick and Jeffrey Epstein and the Royals. And of course I was interested, but I also didn't feel it was quite there in terms of the levels of proof we needed in order to show any links. But this year with the Epstein files, all that changed. So I went back to him, I said, did you know you're in the Epstein files? It turns out that an interview he gave to the FBI in 2020 and 21, where he was making some of these allegations, was also in the Epstein files, and his name had been unredacted.

6:15So he was there against his wishes. So I thought, well, if his name's out there anyway now, no point staying anonymous, and convinced him to give us an interview.

6:24Andy Verity:So you went to meet this whistleblower, Simon Andridge. What can you tell us about him? Well, he's 57 years old. He grew up in a working class house with not much money. But then in the late 80s, he started going to the City of London, the financial district. And he did well. He rose in his career. He had a very successful, lucrative career, where he was first at the Japanese bank Nomura and then went on to BGC Partners, which is owned or was owned by President Trump's Commerce Secretary, Howard Lutnick. But he found himself when he moved from the bank to this firm of brokers, owned and controlled by Howard Lutnick, in a very different working atmosphere.

7:09He described to me how when someone did their first trade, arranged their first trade, the brokers would bang their phones. They would bang their phones until they ran around the trading floor and then they'd be doused with water. And it's a very macho atmosphere as well on this trading floor, according to him. He also starts to hear about what he calls false accounting. The firm would deny it. Money is charged to his desk's broken commission pool, the pool of money that goes towards their bonuses and their pay, which he thinks is improperly charged. He starts to try to raise this internally, concerned about false accounting, not least because he has the responsibility to sign off the accounts.

7:48And then he doesn't get a satisfactory response. At the same time, he's under huge pressure.

7:54Andy Verity:I have a chest pain. My arm goes numb. And then I'm like in a panic. I have to walk to the Gold Street Hospital down in Wall Street. It's about a five minutes walk. And I collapse on the pavement. i get brought into the er the a and e he has a heart attack the cardiologist suddenly there's a blood clot and it's like emergency stations taken into an operating theater they're shaving me suddenly uh they're taking the blood clot out of my heart and he subsequently has met his condition deteriorates and in spite of that he he says he was put under pressure when he was in hospital for example, to attend a video conference when he was in no state to because he was in the middle of an emergency and a dispute broke out.

8:43Andy Verity:I'm in the A &E. He's sending me messages for not turning up to a video conference, which had been scheduled while I was in the emergency. The firm says he didn't carry out his responsibilities. He says it was whistleblower retaliation and they sacked him in January 2017. So since then, he's been in dispute with them and looking for any further information he can find. BGC, as I say, deniers and allegations, but that put him on a collision course with them. They say his allegations are categorically false and that they've been investigated by authorities and in their view, they lack credibility.

9:18Andy Verity:Okay, so at this point in our story, Simon has left the company. Howard Lutnick, who runs the whole operation at this point, is moving towards a career in politics. Who is he and what's he up to at this point? Howard Lutnick came from a working class New York background and joined a firm called Cantor Fitzgerald way back in the late 80s, one of the best known Wall Street firms. And in the late 90s, he took control of it. And in 2004, he founded BGC Partners. But what he's best known for, Howard Lutnick, is September the 11th, 2001, because Cantor Fitzgerald occupied a couple of floors right at the top of one of the Twin Towers.

9:59and of course at 8.46am on September 11th a plane crashed in. As it happened, Howard Lutnick was not at the tower at that time because he'd been dropping off his son at kindergarten. In New York though, he's fated by President Trump and others as a 9-11 hero. He rebuilt the firm in spite of losing his brother and his best friend and that's in a way the first thing you know about Howard Lutnick.

10:24Andy Verity:Before the Epstein files are actually released, how much do we know about the alleged links between Mr. Lutnick and Mr. Epstein? What we did know is that they both knew Trump. So Epstein knew Trump and Lutnick knew Trump. They were both in New York. They were in that scene of wealthy people and billionaires who knew each other at celebrity events, etc., etc. And then after Trump's first term, when he started to think about running again, and when he succeeded in getting into office, as Howard Lutnick took charge of his transition team. Trump then promotes him to become his trade secretary. So for most people around the world, they'll know him as the man who imposed tariffs on the rest of the world.

11:07Andy Verity:Jeffrey Epstein and Howard Lutnick, correct me if I'm wrong, are actually neighbours at one point. Is that right? That's right. Anybody could look it up and discover that actually that Howard Lutnick lived at one house and they shared a wall. And he's admitted this publicly to the New York Post in a Pod Force One podcast in October 2025. Now, his story in October 2025 was that he'd gone around once. He'd only ever seen Jeffrey Epstein once in 2005. And he'd had a little tour of the house with his wife. He says that he was shown a massage table and that Jeffrey Epstein made an inappropriate comment.

11:46I say to him,

11:48Andy Verity:massage table in the middle of your house? how often you have a massage and he says every day and then he like gets like weirdly close to me and he says and the right kind of massage and howard luknick's initial account is that he then looked at his wife and they said we're leaving pretty soon and in the six or eight steps it takes to get from his house to my house my wife and i decided that i will never be in the room with that disgusting person ever again. None of us knew that until very recently, though. All you saw on the public record before he gave that interview was the fact that they had been neighbours in New York and they both knew Trump.

12:36Andy Verity:OK, so that happens in 2005. It's said that they then cut off contact. But then in February of this year, there's this bombshell with the release of the Epstein files Now, I remember Howard Lutnick's name coming up in them at the time. Appearing in the files is not an implication of any wrongdoing. But can you remind us what the files actually said about those links with Epstein? Well, what emerged in the files was evidence that appeared to contradict the accounts he'd given in public to the New York Post. What we learned in February then was that there was evidence that he'd been to Jeffrey Epstein's island just around Christmas 2012.

13:22A photo emerged showing Howard Lutnick looking very summery on the island with Jeffrey Epstein and his son. Now, that photo was actually taken down initially, withdrawn from release. But Internet sleuths had spotted it and screenshotted it and circulated it on social media. and so it had to be re-released.

13:47Andy Verity:Did you in fact make the visit to Jeffrey Epstein's private island? I did have lunch with him as I was on a boat going across on a family vacation. So just after that photo emerged in the Epstein files, Howard Lutnick appeared at a committee hearing where he was asked about his links to Epstein. He confirmed he'd visited the island with his family. I met Jeffrey Epstein when I moved to a house next door to him in New York. And I met him then. Over the next 14 years, I met him two other times that I can recall. Two times. But apart from that meeting at the House in 2005 when they were neighbours and the two visits after that, Lutton was saying after that point he had very little to do with Epstein.

14:34Andy Verity:Over a 14-year period, I did not have any relationship with him. I barely had anything to do with that person. And this is where my whistleblower, Simon, discovers that wasn't the end of the story.

14:57Andy Verity:OK, so February 2026, the massive trove of Epstein files have been released. How do you realise that you have a new lead on the story at this point? Well, it was all a race because all the media outlets were trying to find things out. And I'm an investigations correspondent. And so, of course, I spent inordinate amounts of time searching the US Department of Justice's Epstein Library, which now had millions of documents on it. And then I saw my whistleblower's name, Andres, and I knew he'd spoken to the FBI. This was clearly a record of the time that he did. In fact, he had two times when he spoke to them, or maybe three in 2020 and 2021.

15:38And these showed him making allegations about Howard Lutnick and his closeness to Epstein and the royals.

15:44Andy Verity:OK, so you find Simon Andrews' name in the Epstein files. You reach out to him. What happened next? I said, you'll never guess what. You're in the Epstein files. Yeah, you were the first person to tell me that I was in the Epstein files, which I was completely, you know, just completely shocked about. He was like stunned and took a while to take it in and then started delving through the Epstein files himself. Everyone was searching Lutnick. Howard Lutnick had a particular email which was HWL. He knew because he'd worked there that senior people at BGC used their initials on their emails. So he searched under HWL Howard William Lutnick and found material that no one else had found and sent it to Congress and that's what changed the game for him.

16:35What did he find? So there's several dimensions. One is that we already knew that there was evidence that what he'd said about not seeing Jeffrey Epstein after 2005, not being in the room with him, was at the very least misleading because we saw the pictures of him on Jeffrey Epstein's island in 2012. That came out in February. But then emails emerged, spotted by our whistleblower, that showed that actually there was a message to Jeff from Howard setting up the meeting. And then subsequently it emerged that on the 28th of December 2012, an agreement with that date on it was drawn up for a company, an advertising technology company called Adfin.

17:23And investors in that company signed on the document were both Jeffrey Epstein and Howard Lutnick.

17:31Andy Verity:OK, so just to be absolutely clear, Howard Lutnick says that he cuts off contact with Jeffrey Epstein in 2005. Subsequently, there is evidence that they are still in contact. How has he addressed and explained the fact that they are still in contact? It would appear whether or not they're having lunch on an island in the Caribbean or they're exchanging emails about a company called Adfin. How does he justify all that? Well, he's asked in Congress in May when he knew that Jeffrey Epstein was also an investor in this Adfin company. He said not until this year, 2026. But this other email under HWL, which Simon Andrews discovered, shows he's discussing Adfin directly with Epstein in May 2018, which would appear to contradict its account.

18:27Here's the exact quotes in May 2018. Epstein asks, on another note, what do you think the prospects for Adfin are? Now, if Howard Lutnick had been unaware that Jeffrey Epstein was an investor in this company, which he had also invested in, then wouldn't he have said, oh, Jeffrey, I didn't know you were also an investor in Adfin. But he doesn't say anything like that in this email exchange. He answers, producing revenue finally, this is their year. Next 12 months, they need to become economically self-sufficient. You see elsewhere in the files, the chief executive of Adfin seeking meetings with both Lutnick and Epstein.

19:09Altogether, this evidence is one of the reasons why Democrats on the House Oversight Committee have accused Lutnick of lying and have been calling for his resignation. We should make it clear that Howard Lutnick has not been accused of any wrongdoing in connection with Epstein, and he told the House Oversight and Reform Committee, quotes, I unequivocally condemn the conduct attributed to Jeffrey Epstein and everyone who participated in his illegal activities. The survivors of his crimes deserve our respect and support. The White House, speaking on behalf of Lutnick, said, quotes, the BBC's pathetic and desperate attempt to slander Secretary Lutnick will do nothing to change the fact that he's been the most consequential commerce secretary in modern history.

19:50Andy Verity:But if their names were both on the same document to do with an investment in this company, Adfin, does that mean that they were together in the same place signing this document? Not necessarily. But what you do know then is that they were discussing Adfin in 2018, eight years before, as Lutnick claimed to Congress, he knew that Epstein was an investor. 10 years after Epstein was convicted of sex offences and, let's see, 13 years after, according to Lutnick's account, he resolved with his wife never to be in the room with that disgusting person ever again. How did a boycott Jimmy become a billionaire from posting videos?

20:34On Good Bad Billionaire, we're going to find out how the world's most popular YouTuber, Mr Beast, made his fortune.

20:40Andy Verity:He's buried himself in a coffin for days. Counted to£100 ,000 on camera. And even recreated Squid Games, all in an attempt to go viral on the internet. But it all started when he gave a homeless man$10 ,000. So is he a philanthropist reshaping capitalism? Or is he just the king of the attention economy? Find out on Good Bad Billionaire. Listen on BBC.com or wherever you get your podcasts.

21:07Andy Verity:After unearthing the emails about this business relationship, Andy's whistleblower Simon Andridge continued to dig through the Epstein files. He started sending stuff to me, which kept on making my jaw hit the floor. He found a story that links Howard Lutnick and Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor in a proposed business deal that in the background, Jeffrey Epstein was advising Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor's advisors all about.

21:42Let me tell you more. Howard Lutnick was approached by a lawyer in London who had an idea for how Howard Lutnick might lend Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor£1 million. And in exchange, they would enter a joint venture whereby Andrew would bring his contacts. So rich individuals, sovereign institutions, sovereign wealth funds, all those people he'd met on his travels in his previous role as trade envoy and in his role as a royal as well. So he knew lots of people. We know he knew, for example, oligarchs in Kazakhstan. We know he knew lots of people in Eurasia. He knew people in Africa, wealthy individuals.