Under-Examined Aspects of the Epstein Story

Why was he working with arms dealers? Was he involved in money laundering? What were his ties, if any, to organized crime?

This is a Quick Hits piece on the Epstein story. Several aspects of this case, I think, are being lost or under-examined.

One such aspect is the source of Epstein’s money as it relates to his ties to money laundering and covert money transfers. This could very well have been his primary business — his main source of income — with any blackmail he may have also been doing, at least initially, being a secondary business that primarily serve his intelligence clients.

Another such aspect is the alleged ties of those close to him — for example, Leslie Wexner, Epstein’s early and most important angel — to organized crime. This seems to have been a nexus of interconnected activities — money laundering, covert money transfers, service to various states for covert activities like Iran-Contra, but possibly others.

And of course, there’s the blackmail, though no real blackmail acts have been uncovered or alleged.

To help your own thinking, consider this 2019 piece by Whitney Webb, published at Mint Press News. Some of it touches on the intelligence allegations — the primary focus of her article — but other sections deal with the subjects mentioned above.

Excerpts from Webb’s article appear below. Emphasis is mine throughout. Bracketed statements in italics are also mine. I hope reading it helps.

Epstein in the 1980s:

For those who have examined Epstein’s ties to intelligence, there are clear links to both U.S. intelligence and Israeli intelligence, leaving it somewhat open to debate as to which country’s intelligence apparatus was closest to Epstein and most involved in his blackmail/sex-trafficking activities. A recent interview given by a former high-ranking official in Israeli military intelligence has claimed that Epstein’s sexual blackmail enterprise was an Israel intelligence operation run for the purpose of entrapping powerful individuals and politicians in the United States and abroad.

In an interview [updated link here, paid post; archived here] with Zev Shalev, former CBS News executive producer and award-winning investigative journalist for Narativ, the former senior executive for Israel’s Directorate of Military Intelligence, Ari Ben-Menashe, claimed not only to have met Jeffrey Epstein and his alleged madam, Ghislaine Maxwell, back in the 1980s, but that both Epstein and Maxwell were already working with Israeli intelligence during that time period.

Involvement in Iran-Contra:

In an interview [updated link here, paid post; archived here] last week with the independent outlet Narativ, Ben-Menashe, who himself was involved in Iran-Contra arms deals, told his interviewer Zev Shalev that he had been introduced to Jeffrey Epstein by Robert Maxwell in the mid-1980s while Maxwell’s and Ben-Menashe’s involvement with Iran-Contra was ongoing. Ben-Menashe did not specify the year he met Epstein.

Ben-Menashe told Shalev that “he [Maxwell] wanted us to accept him [Epstein] as part of our group …. I’m not denying that we were at the time a group that it was [sic] Nick Davies [Foreign Editor of the Maxwell-Owned Daily Mirror], it was Maxwell, it was myself and our team from Israel, we were doing what we were doing.” Past reporting by Seymour Hersh and others revealed that Maxwell, Davies and Ben-Menashe were involved in the transfer and sale of military equipment and weapons from Israel to Iran on behalf of Israeli intelligence during this time period.

Other covert arms deals and money transfers:

[A]s MintPress reported in Part IV of the investigative series “Inside the Jeffrey Epstein Scandal: Too Big to Fail,” Epstein was involved with several arms dealers during this period of time, some of whom were directly involved in Iran-Contra arms deals between Israel and Iran. For instance, after leaving Bear Stearns in 1981, Epstein began working in the realms of shadow finance as a self-described “financial bounty hunter,” where he would both hunt down and hide money for powerful people. One of these powerful individuals was Adnan Khashoggi, a Saudi arms dealer with close ties to both Israeli and U.S. intelligence and one of the main brokers of Iran-Contra arms deals between Israel and Iran. Epstein would later forge a business relationship with a CIA front company involved in another aspect of Iran-Contra, the airline Southern Air Transport, on behalf of Leslie Wexner’s company, The Limited.

Possible ties to organized crime:

As was noted in a Mintpress series on the Epstein scandal, much of Epstein’s funding also came from Ohio billionaire Leslie Wexner, who has documented ties to both organized crime and U.S. and Israeli intelligence.

I may expand on the organized crime angle later. Are they a nexus, the mob and the security state? They’ve been intermittently in bed since World War II, when the Mafia got religion in the fight against Germany and attended the same church we all did.

There’s more in Webb’s piece than I’ve touched on. If you have the minutes, I suggest giving it a read.