Jeffery Epstein - The Saga - 3

Epstein was the president of the company Liquid Funding Ltd. between 2000 and 2007. The company was an early pioneer in expanding the kind of debt that could be accepted on repurchase, or the repo market, which involves a lender giving money to a borrower in exchange for securities that the borrower then agrees to buy back at an agreed-upon later time and price. The innovation of Liquid Funding, and other early companies, was that instead of having stocks and bonds as the underlying securities, it had commercial mortgages and investment-grade residential mortgages bundled into complex securities as the underlying security.  

Epstein invested $80 million between 2002 and 2005, in the D.B. Zwirn Special Opportunities hedge fund. In November 2006, Epstein, while under federal investigation for sex crimes, attempted to redeem his investment after he was informed of accounting irregularities in the fund. By this time, his investment had grown to $140 million. Zwirn refused to redeem the investment. Zwirn worried that Epstein's redemption could cause a "run on the bank" at the hedge fund. It is unknown how much Epstein personally lost when the fund was wound down in 2008. 

In August 2006, Epstein, a month after the federal investigation of him began, invested $57 million in the Bear Stearns High-Grade Structured Credit Strategies Enhanced Leverage hedge fund. This fund was highly leveraged in mortgage-backed collateralized debt obligations (CDOs). On April 18, 2007, an investor in the fund, who had $57 million invested, discussed redeeming his investment. At this time, the fund had a leverage ratio of 17:1, which meant for every dollar invested there were seventeen dollars of borrowed funds; therefore, the redemption of this investment would have been equivalent to removing $1 billion from the thinly traded CDO market.

The selling of CDO assets to meet the redemptions that month began a repricing process and general freeze in the CDO market. The repricing of the CDO assets caused the collapse of the fund three months later in July, and the eventual collapse of Bear Stearns in March 2008. It is likely Epstein lost most of this investment, but it is not known how much was his.

Epstein had begun to negotiate a plea deal with the U.S. Attorney's Office concerning imminent charges for sex with minors. In August 2007, a month after the fund collapsed, the U.S. attorney in Miami, Alexander Acosta, entered into direct discussions about the plea agreement.[62] Acosta brokered a lenient deal, according to him, because he had been ordered by higher government officials, who told him that Epstein was an individual of importance to the government.[46] As part of the negotiations, according to the Miami Herald, Epstein provided "unspecified information" to the Florida federal prosecutors for a more lenient sentence and was supposedly an unnamed key witness for the New York federal prosecutors in their unsuccessful June 2008 criminal case against the two managers of the failed Bear Stearns hedge fund. Alan Dershowitz, one of Epstein's Florida attorneys on the case, told Fox Business Network "We would have been touting that if he had [cooperated]. The idea that Epstein helped in any prosecution is news to me." 

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Epstein installed concealed cameras in numerous places on his properties to allegedly record sexual activity with underage girls by prominent people for criminal purposes, such as blackmail. Ghislaine Maxwell, Epstein's close companion, told a friend that Epstein's private island in the Virgin Islands was completely wired for video and the friend believed that Maxwell and Epstein were videotaping everyone on the island as an insurance policy. It was also reported that Epstein's mansion in New York was wired extensively with a video surveillance system. Epstein allegedly "lent" girls to powerful people to ingratiate himself with them and also to gain possible blackmail information. According to court records, he kept compact discs locked in his safe in his New York mansion with handwritten labels that included the description: "young [name] + [name]". Epstein partially confirmed that he had blackmail material when he told a New York Times reporter in 2018, off the record, that he had dirt on powerful people, including information about their sexual proclivities and recreational drug use.  

At the time of his death, Epstein was being held at the Metropolitan Correctional Center (pictured here in 2010), awaiting trial for sex-trafficking. In March 2005, a woman contacted Florida's Palm Beach Police Department and alleged that her 14-year-old stepdaughter had been taken to Epstein's mansion by an older girl. There she was allegedly paid $300 (equivalent to $380 in 2018) to strip and massage Epstein. She had allegedly undressed, but left the encounter wearing her underwear. 

Reference: Wikipedia