How did Epstein make his money?

This is a Global Player original podcast. This Epstein class as a whole, I think, if you look at the way it operates. you start to understand a lot. about your life. You start to understand a lot about why your life goes the way it goes, why your kids education is in the paltry condition it may be in, why your healthcare is threadbare. You start to realize that you're down there swimming downstream, just trying to make it through, and that upstream.

These are the people, these are the decision makers in many cases, these are the powerful elites who shape your life. And you start to see the character, the morality, the ways of thinking, the sense of human disposability. that prevail. in that Epcine class. That is Anand Giharadas, journalist, author, who has studied the Epstein file.

This powerful group of people who were very wealthy, who were hugely influential, and who were somehow bound together with Epstein at the centre. The enduring question always comes back to how Epstein. got rich. Was it blackmail? Was it fraud? Was it brilliance? How did he entangle so many others in that web? Welcome to the newsagents. The news agents.

Well joining us now Annan Kiordadas, who has written for the New York Times, The New Yorker, and now publishes The Inc., which essentially investigates money, power, politics. culture, who you'll hear speaking about the Epstein class a lot. In fact, he's publishing a series of deep dive articles with that name. Anna, just yesterday we saw a moment that actually left a lot of people scrabbling for words in the UK, which was the arrest of the former Prince Andrew, Andrew Mountbatten Windsor.

He is not the whole story, but he has found himself at the centre of the Epstein story, at least in this country. Will you just give us your sense of what it tells us? We live in an age of impunity.

And yesterday, the arrest of the former Prince Andrew was a good day for justice in that sense. In the sense that I think if you were to walk out of your studio or my home right now and talk to people on the street in London or New York about how they feel in general in this time we live in, they feel like They work hard, things often don't go in their favor, and that there's a group of very, very powerful people who can fail as much as they want.

Who can get us into bogus wars, who can tank our economy, who can traffic women, who can have sex with minors or whatever the case, individual case may be, and get away with it. And so when we see someone who's not just a powerful person, but once was a prince in your country, actually facing justice in a way, by the way, where in my country, the United States, virtually nobody

is facing any kind of similar justice despite all these revelations. In a moment like that it strikes me as quite a good thing. And I will say, if impolitely that I think one should not simply be satisfied with one former prince being arrested. I think the question of why that prince was allowed to operate that way, whether the royal family and how much, you know, they paid

on his behalf for silence. I think this is not just a moment about one man. It's a moment that calls into question why societies maintain the elites they do and in your case the royal family that you do. Yeah. And it's just worth underlining Anand that previously

Andrew Manbatten Windsor has denied any wrongdoing and so far no charges have been brought against him, so he is under arrest but has not yet been charged. Do you think that Andrew Mountbatten Windsor, in what you have studied, is exceptional in the sense that he was a member of a royal family or is it just the rich and powerful Some on the right, some on the left, some from mid western towns, some from the coast, whatever. They are all part of the same thing.

Yeah, there is an Epstein class that these files have revealed, have unmasked. And it's worth remembering that, as you say, The class is made up of people of different

flavors, right? And so many of us get distracted by the variety, the diversity. So if you're British, you focus on the British guy. If you're American, you focus on the Americans. If you're on the right, you look at all the leftists who are caught up in it. If you're on the left, You're hunting for evidence of whether Donald Trump was involved.

And I understand that kind of inclination, but I think what it distracts us from is seeing the class as a class, seeing this powerful social network as an organism of a kind, a shape-shifting global organism that though it took different forms and it had different expressions, was engaged in very similar ways of operating. And so, you know, part of the reason we're doing this new Epstein class series at the Inc is we want to expose not just names.

of which there are now an abundance in public, but an operating system. How does this work? And how does this have implications for your life? And so what Prince Andrew, the former Prince Andrew, was part of was a group of people who, as I said earlier, can fail as much as they want at whatever they want, can hurt people in certain cases, can simply show a callousness in their economic or business lives. And Who suffer no penalty?

And so that group Uh you know, which consists of everything from in its a actions uh as revealed by these files from actual sex trafficking and sex crimes. to simple information barter, to deal making and global connecting, to article trading. It's all kinds of activities revealed by these files. But this Epstein class as a whole, I think You start to understand a lot.

about your life. You start to understand a lot about why your life goes the way it goes, why your kids' education is in the paltry condition it may be in. Why your healthcare is You start to realize that you're down there swimming downstream, just trying to make it through, and that upstream, these are the people, these are the decision makers in many cases, these are the powerful elites who shape your life.

And you start to see the character, the morality, the ways of thinking, the sense of human disposability. That prevails in that Epstein class.

Do you think that the Epstein class, what you're describing, belongs in its own era? Do you think this is a story of impunity in the nineties, in the two thousands, in in twenty ten? Do you think We are substantially changed now, as a result of the financial crisis, as a result of bad wars fought, as a result of more transparency in social media. Do you think we're different?

In some ways, yes. I mean I I I think the biggest difference is that if you read through these Epstein files, they very much belong the kind of high watermark of globalization. And so there is a kind of world is flat, world is one that feels a little bit out of step with I think the age of of new nationalism that we are in. But I I think it's a mistake.

to view what we are learning as uh being about the past. I I was criticized the other day by Judd Apatat, the Hollywood writer and director, for saying I I was studying an old network. Well, when I read the names of not just Jeffrey Epstein, but Bill Gates. Uh when I read names uh like Donald Trump, when I read names like folks in the Emirates uh in the Middle East, when I read names of companies that are still dominant.

In the United States and around the world. It doesn't seem to me like an old network. And what it certainly is not old are the moves. This kind of global power elite whose loyalty is more to its own members than to people down below in the communities they represent, it's very much still with us and I think it's worth understanding how it works.

So that you can understand why your life is going the way it's going, and so that you can choose leaders who are actually not in these networks, not affiliated with these networks. Why we should keep asking ourselves, why is it? That so many of the people who happen to be in positions of influence over our lives happen to have not found it a problem. to consort with a convicted

Sex criminal. Let me just ask you something, because your argument could be like all rich men are bastards. And In a way it takes the onus off the individuals, doesn't it? I mean there was criminality because of specific behaviour towards actual women in many circumstances. And I wonder whether you sort of flatten it out. by a sort of like billionaires are bad, anyone who sort of connects to anyone else is bad. It takes it off the individuals themselves is my concern.

I've not said any of those things that you just said. I know you're, you know, exaggerating it. Look. I think it's a very important point, and I want to actually defer on this. to the survivors or these women who have many of them in books they have written and in public statements they have made and press conferences they have made, it has been these women who have often said, Do not let this just be a story.

of a small number of people committing sex crimes. This is a story about a power structure. These survivors have said this again and again. And it's important to remember why they are saying that. They are saying that because if this had just been some pervert In Florida or wherever, trying to pick up 15 year old girls off the street. And that was all he had going for it. I don't think he would have had a great run of luck.

And I think certainly after he was convicted, he would have had a pretty tough road of it. I don't think you can understand how he did what he did, Jeffrey Epstein. How he continued to do it, how he rehabilitated himself in society, if you don't understand the power structure. And let me make an analogy that I think is helpful. Let's take a different kind of crime, right? For years I was a reporter in in India for the New York Times.

You'd often have situations like in northern India, you have a problem of so-called honor killings. in rural communities where women who stray from what the norm is, have a boyfriend, have a dalliance, are even just suspected because they're seen somewhere in public with a young man they're not married to. Are killed, sometimes killed by their own father. Now, you could make the same argument. Let's just focus on the fathers.

Or family members who kill those girls. No one else is killing the girl. Someone is taking out a knife or a gun and killing the girl. No one else is killing the girl. But you'd have to reckon with the fact that there are large swaths of India where this does not happen at all. And I don't think you can understand why it happens a lot in some places and not in other places without understanding all the people who don't commit murder, but make murder possible.

Without understanding all the people who look away, all the police inspectors who can't be bothered to come check it out, all the uncles. Who don't really like what the dad did, but won't say anything about it either. All the women in those communities who suffered the same patriarchy themselves but learned to shut up about it once they got to a certain age. In other words, yes.

In those cases, there is someone committing a very explicit crime, and that is the burning heart of that story, the way pedophilia is the burning heart of this Epstein story. But you don't understand how it happened and you can't stop it from happening again if you do not understand what I think about as the concentric circles of enablement that make the crime at the burning heart possible.

Are you describing something that is a completely new phenomenon? Is it just kind of morphed into something with Epstein that was much bigger? In the sense that look, there were Masonic lodges. The Masons would look out for each other. If you were a member of that, you were part of a slightly closed society where you would forgive wrongdoing, you wouldn't shop them to the police.

you would look out for each other's business interests, you'd help someone out if they were kind of on their uppers and were struggling. And that has gone on for decades, for centuries. I think that's right. There's always been tribes and and networks and so forth. I think what And in some ways you're right. This is this is another elite. It's another ruling class. Here's here's when I when I did a my my deep dive.

into the files and read through thousands and thousands of these emails. I think what struck me as new is that this is a highly global Networked elite in a way that simply would not have been possible in the times you were referring to, right? You one couldn't have maintained a correspondence. with twenty people in China very easily back in those days. So the people I'm writing about in this network are in many cases

Really part of a global 24-7 real-time network, right? Dubai, London, Paris, San Francisco, that is a kind of definitional feature of this network. And I think about, you know, your former Prime Minister Theresa May, who who said I think several years ago and almost a decade ago now, you know, if you call yourself a citizen of of the world, you're sort of a citizen of nowhere. And, you know, I have my disagreements with Theresa May, but I think that was actually an important statement.

that captures something about this group of people. This is a global network. These people live in certain places, often in multiple places, but they have no loyalty. to the places down below. I suspect most people listening to your show right now feel some specific loyalty. To the place where they happen to be sitting right now, listening to your show. That's how most people are. That's how most normal people are. I think if you read through the files, the Epstein release.

you encounter a group of people whose loyalty is to other members of their global elite network, not to any places they come from. And I think that actually is a bit of a distinguishing factor. I I think past ruling classes, for all their faults, and there were many, probably had some more of a sense that they actually came from a place. Breaking Prime Minister. app or the LBC app. Britain's conversation.

The news agents. Anand, you know, whenever you hear global elite, you always think George Soros. It must be him. But what you seem to be describing is not someone of a certain mindset. It's not that you adhere to a certain world view. It's that you could be from the far left, from the far right. But that you are just powerful and you have got things you can trade within that group.

that makes you essential. That's what I find surprising about what you're saying. Yeah, and I think that's really important because again, in a tribal age the of the kind we live in, everybody only wants to find the members of this network. That violates their ideological priors. That's unfortunately not what the files show. What the files show is.

far left to far right, atheists and religious leaders, academics, business people, all kinds of people. Right. And so you have to start asking yourself if We are down here, regular people, fighting it out. over left versus right. If we turn on our TV and we're seeing one person from the left, one person on the right, duking it out over whatever issue. And yet a lot of the same people, sometimes the same people we actually watch on TV fighting with each other, are behind closed doors.

Hanging out, breaking bread, revealing that All that fighting on TV is kind of just a game. And what they're actually doing is helping each other, helping each other stay in power, helping each other have access to information that is not available to the rest of us. I think it raises a question of whether we in Britain, in the United States, elsewhere, have been tricked.

into thinking that we are each other's enemies, that we are each other's problem, that your neighbor two doors down who flies a flag you don't like is the great obstacle to your visions of the world. In fact, what these files reveal, and I mean this as a profoundly optimistic point, is that your neighbors are not your biggest problem. Your uncle you no longer speak to over Brexit or Trump is not your biggest problem. Your biggest problem, the people who are most responsible.

for you not feeling in your life the progress you aspired to, you not feeling confident that your children will have a better future than you did, is a group of people who are all in cahoots with each other, who all behave as though they are on the same team. And maybe it's time some of us down here in the regular world started acting like we are on the same team. Maybe it's it's time we started acting with some of the solidarity. There's something we can learn.

from these elites. Maybe we should have some of the same solidarity as as regular people that they have as stratospheric power elites. Okay, so help us perhaps dig into the origins of all this because

Once you've described a global powerful elite, the real question is where did that money come from? And when we're looking at Epstein, You're trying to work out this kid from Coney Island that was a maths teacher at Dalton that kind of talked his way into a job that he probably shouldn't have got. How did the money start rolling in to a place where He became the centre of it where people looked up to him, where people wanted to do things for him.

We heard yesterday, I mean, very briefly, from Les Wexner, the billionaire businessman from Ohio, who, by all accounts, was the guy that who sort of started him off, gave him his fortune, or maybe he would now say was victim to Epstein. What do you understand and and of where the Epstein money came from. But there's been a lot of remarkable reporting uh in the New York Times and elsewhere answering that question. And so yeah, this is first of all a guy who comes out of

Coney Island in Brooklyn, which if you think you know, you think about London, think about like the furthest edge of the edge. Coney Island is known to most New Yorkers as a as kind of the in-city amusement park, roller coasters, whatever. This is not the elite. This is not people who are central. These are people who live, you know, within a half an hour drive of Manhattan, but it may take three generations.

If you really work hard to get from Coney Island to Manhattan, right? We have these places in every major city in the world. That's the place he was from. And by all accounts, came out of that place with a burning desire to not end up in that place. Right, born in Coney Island or or raised in Coney Island, but not not to die there, and wanted to be in Manhattan. By the way, very similar story that Donald Trump has.

that kind of outer borough on the edge of the city, hunger to be accepted by the elites at the core. As you say, Jeffrey Epstein got a job teaching at Dalton, the prestigious private school in the Upper East Side of Manhattan. He was the kind of person I think he, you know, before he was grooming teenage girls, he was charming and you could say grooming lots of people. He was, you know, uh, by all accounts convincing various dads

at Dalton to offer him jobs. You know, how often do you hear about a teacher at a school being dangled job offers for all the dad's companies, but but this is the kind of guy who was. Uh he takes a job at Bear Stearns, a big financial house.

He is both sort of exposed for lying about his education, but he somehow talks his way out of it saying that, you know, he came from a background where if he was honest about his background he wouldn't have gotten in and his kind of, you know, working class made good boss was moved enough by that story to tolerate him and keep him. He was dating a senior person's daughter at Bear Stearns.

And from there, you know, started to both socially network himself in New York and move into areas of managing money for other people, including eventually Les Wexner. And For a while it was a question of how did he make all this money and how do you make so much money as a money manager? There now is a lot more suggestions. that what he was doing was scamming people from the beginning, that he was mismanaging money, that part of the his kind of money management style was to move money

But is it is it right that Wexner gave him like power of attorney over all his That's uh that's the reporting I've seen is that, you know, uh you do. And by the way, I think it's not entirely uncommon when you hire people to manage them. I mean, I have an accountant. If my accountant wanted to steal my money, I think my accountant probably has, you know, ways to do that.

So he was able to scam these people. But the remarkable part of the story is, again, most people would probably get caught. He figured out I think a lot of social insurance. that allowed him to keep going and keep doing it. And what I mean by that is I think as an outsider to the heart of the New York City elite, he sort of socially mapped it. In a way that maybe is not obvious to people who are just in it. Right. I I I think of him sometimes as a as a bit of a foreign correspondent.

in New York. He was able to see what these different things we're doing, what the charity galas are actually doing. How you if you if you go to that club, people will see you in this way. How if you go to this restaurant, people see you in that way. And he was able to build for himself a sense of his own inevitability. in the social elite, even when he was, you know, on the on the upswing and then was scamming, was stealing, was throwing lavish parties, was

Creating this sense, this aura around himself that he was a man in the mix, a man in the night. Do you think he ever actually made any money? I mean, do you think he was good at making money? Or are you imagining now it was just a a clever Ponzi scheme? I have no idea. I mean I think he was a probably a s a smart person who I've seen these interviews that he did with Steve Bannon, the Trump

strategist and whisperer where he's talking in in detail about different financial instruments and this and that. I mean I you know, I don't know if he made any of that money legitimately. I don't think doing things legitimately seemed particularly important to him. One of the things that we're gonna we're gonna do in this Epcine class series is actually look at One of the ways that he made money was by going to people who had big fortunes. And he had a s he had a move.

Which we're gonna write about in a in a forthcoming chapter of the Epstein class series, which is that he would try to convince these older people that their children or other advisors they had were mismanaging their money.

And you can see that I've read through many of the emails where he's sort of planting this seed that your kids are idiots and they're squandering your fortune. Now if you think about wealthy people, wealthy people of certain age who may not be able to dive into all their accounts online, the basic anxiety.

is that this is all gonna return to the mean, right? That you're gonna that famous quote about the third generation, you know, the first generation builds it, second maintains it, third squanders it, right? You are living in that terror. That your kid's gonna be that third generation. Your whole project is to defy that proverb or that saying. And he played perfectly into that.

anxiety by telling you your kids are squandering it, your kids are messing it all up. Let me manage your family office instead for you and then it would cost millions of dollars a year uh in fees and services.

An awful lot of people named in these files are running for the hills. Formerly Prince Andrew has been arrested. There are other people who are very fearful that they might get a knock on the door. from the police. Does this mean that this global elite has dispersed, it's gone? You started our conversation by talking about impunity.

Is there now a recognition that this impunity cannot go on? Or does this elite just shape shift and reform itself? It's a great question. And I don't think we know the answer yet. This answer is gonna be decided place by place. police station and prosecutor's office one at a time. Look. There's no question that as a larger kind of socio-political fact about the world, we continue to live in an age not only of impunity, but of extraordinary power concentration.

when you think about survivors like these women, are not just up against the normal things a survivor of sexual assault or rape is up against, which is the fear of talking in a police station, the fear of of having your reputation smeared, etcetera. The things any woman in any such case, however small local

it might feel, but you're also up against an incredibly powerful, well funded group of people. Given the number of women we've seen come forward, justice obviously doesn't look like one arrest. It would start to look like hundreds. Right? It certainly doesn't.

of arrest. If you read Virginia Geoffrey's excellent memoir, Nobody's Girl, she describes in quite vivid detail the people she was trafficked to before she was 18 years old. Presumably a lot of those some of those people may be dead, some of them are still out there. So we need to see a lot of arrests. And so that's a kind of a base layer of accountability for the sex crimes. But I do think for everybody watching or listening to this.

I do think there's also a more kind of subtler, but in a way more chronic form of impunity for which there needs to be accountability, which is you have a choice. about the kinds of people you choose as leaders. And the kinds of people you venerate and idolize. Um These elites operating in this way do not operate in this way in a vacuum. They operate in this way if and when they can. And so we have to think about as regular citizens, how do we not elect people who are in these kinds of networks.

How do we actually put more trust in people who have movements and regular citizens at their back rather than powerful donors. Look at who we continue to elect in so many countries around the world. Look at who ends up in cabinets around the world, right? These are our choice.

We continue to choose people who do not have our best interests at heart again and again and again. So can I ask you one thing, Annan? Because you mentioned Steve Bannon and the kind of language that you're using now has been, ironically, the kind of language that Steve Bannon has been throwing at America. for the last decade and a half. You know, the elites, the globalists, the people that are screwing you, the people that are making you poorer.

And yet here he was, right in the centre of it. So how would you know as a voter? Genuinely, who to believe? That's such an excellent question. And by the way, a lot of some of those things Steve Bannon says, not certainly not most, but some of them, c you could also hear in a Bernie Sanders or others.

I think you're right. And I I think it's it's important to say first of all that In the United States, the triumph of Trumpism the second time is that they won by convincing people in many ways that there is this. unaccountable global elite that doesn't care about regular people. And then having come into office, they have incarnated that indifference. as

profoundly and cruelly as one could ever imagine. So what a vo voter needs to do is judge these people by what they're doing, not by what they're saying. But more importantly, if you look at the Trump Policy agenda what he promised and certainly what he has done. It sadly has not been anything.

to rein in the power of the super rich or very powerful global elites. It has been to make life harder for regular people, to gut the structures of opportunity for regular people, while in fact enriching himself. So as a citizen, unfortunately you have to move beyond the rhetoric and see who is who is weaponizing my fear to get rich versus who is actually interested in making my life better. Anan Gridharidas. Great to have you on. Thank you. Thank you so much for having. Thank you so much.

The news agents. An Ann sets out a very compelling theory of power and how all these people were bound together. And it sort of sounds conspiracy theory-ish that there's This global elite and we don't know what they're doing. And I kind of probably think that may be overstated. There were sort of times when it seems quite

small stuff that they were trying to get done. Can someone get someone a visa to go to Russia? Can someone get a meeting with Vladimir Putin? No, they didn't manage to get a meeting with Vladimir Putin. So this global power elite were not that power.

Well wait a sec. I think you've put your finger on it now because the point is they were doing things outside the system that everyone else used. Most people go to a consulate, most people fill in a form, most people go to the authority that is relevant. They don't just call a mate. And that's the point of what you're describing here. Something that looks small, something that might just be an invitation to a dinner, something that might just be a can you tap up so and so I'm gonna be

Staying down the road. That's how these deals get done. That is where power lies. And by doing that, you are locking out ninety-nine point nine percent of the rest of the world. Yes, but don't we all have our own network? If we want to get things done, we know we need a new visa to go to America. We know somebody at the embassy who we can ring up. We're not ordinary Joes.

Either. But you do that in a I think you do that in a professional capacity. That's all I'd say. You do that in a professional capacity. You don't do it because you've got a mate. Right? Well well I don't know. I mean I just think that mates look out for each other and we say, Oh I want to find out about such and such or you want theatre tickets or you want this or you want that and you sort of know people. I'm part of where I live

There's a WhatsApp group of people. Does anyone know a good plumber? And has anyone got a babysitter? I've got a crisis tonight, I've got spare tickets for this. Does anyone want them? Because that does not give you ungodly power. No. I mean I would say having a plumber in this country probably does give you ungodly power. But that aside, you know, getting your radiator fixed. is not the same as getting to know about a Euro billion bailout.

in Europe, for example. Yeah, of course. But then you're talking about Degrees of. Degrees of Not this is something that we haven't seen. I think that elites have always existed. I mean I think what the Epstein was. If you were a plumber and you brought your son to work, right?

Everyone would be going, Isn't that great? He's the plumber and he's teaching his son how to like fix a radiator. That's a great thing to do. If you were the Prime Minister and you took your son to a NATO gathering, everyone would be going, Oh my god, that's Neptune, that's terrible. Right? So of course there are degrees, and that is all to do with how much power you wield in the first place. And I suppose the thing about the Epstein thing, which is

So extraordinary, terrible, shocking and because there is sexual abuse of underage girls at the heart of this as well as the trading in power. Is the fact that what is it? The the list of names are so diffuse from academic To right wing agitators, to left wing intellectuals, from members of royal families around the world, to sheikhs from the Middle East.

They're all brought together by Epstein. That's the kind of thing that makes this different from anything else we've seen. We'll be back on Monday. Have a good weekend. Bye-bye. Bye for now. This has been a Global Player Original Production.