There are so many unanswered questions about the late convicted pedophile Jeffrey Epstein: How did he make a fortune supposedly worth more than $600 million? Why would the billionaire Leslie Wexner seemingly give him a Manhattan mansion worth some $56 million? Why would the billionaire Leon Black pay him as much as $75 million for some two-bit financial advice? Why would the billionaire Glenn Dubin and his wife, a former Epstein girlfriend, continue to pal around with him despite knowing about his monstrous behavior? Epstein has been dead more than a year now, so Wexner, Black, and Dubin are lucky that we may never know the answers to such questions, even if the incarcerated Ghislaine Maxwell, Epstein’s alleged longtime enabler, decides to start talking to prosecutors, instead of fighting the charges against her.
Another question that has intrigued me since July 2019 is why Epstein would dare return to the United States, from France, on July 6? After all, by then he had to have some inkling, at the very least, that he’d face certain arrest when he landed his private jet at Teterboro Airport in New Jersey. This was, of course, after Julie Brown, at the Miami Herald, had reexamined Epstein’s squirrelly plea agreement in 2008 and after Geoffrey Berman, the U.S. attorney in the Southern District of New York, had reopened the legal case against Epstein. He was a seriously wanted man. (As soon as he got off his jet in Teterboro, he was arrested.) What’s more, France has no extradition treaty with the U.S., and the French have, shall we say, a more permissive attitude toward allegations of pedophilia—witness the sanctuary the French have long offered the likes of Roman Polanski, the film director, and Gabriel Matzneff, the writer. Why would Epstein take the risk of leaving the comfort, and seeming security, of his $8.6 million Avenue Foch apartment to face near-certain peril in New York City?
In search of answers to these burning questions, I rang up Barry Levine, a former top National Enquirer editor and the author of The Spider, out today, about Epstein, Maxwell, and their “criminal web” of wrongdoing across the United States, the Caribbean, Europe, and the Middle East. It was clear from Levine’s guarded answers that in the writing of The Spider he has heard from the aggressive and threatening attorneys hired by the likes of Dubin, Wexner, and Black to minimize what comes out about them, Epstein, and Maxwell. Levine was understandably cautious. He has received, he said, “vicious responses” from various lawyers. What he would say about these three amigos was: “Each and every one, for the most part, was taken advantage of by Epstein in a different way.… There’s no question that there was money laundering taking place. I don’t want to connect any of these men to any wrongdoing whatsoever, but was there the possibility of blackmail? Absolutely. Was there money laundering taking place? Was there embezzlement taking place? Absolutely.”
As for Epstein and Paris, Levine said, the city was more of “a low-key escape” for Epstein and also a “jumping-off point” for travel that Epstein liked to do in the Middle East and in North Africa, particularly Morocco. He said there was “no question” that in his Paris apartment he engaged in the same kind of “criminality” with “underage women” that he did in Manhattan, at his ranch in New Mexico, and on his island in the Caribbean. According to Levine, the Avenue Foch apartment, in Paris’s Embassy Row, had “palatial” guest and servant quarters, a gym, and a massage room. There, Levine said, he entertained the likes of Bill and Melinda Gates, Prince Andrew, and former Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak. He said Steve Bannon paid Epstein a visit there some two years ago.
Despite the glories of Paris, Epstein mostly kept to himself while there. “While Paris may have had some of the best restaurants in the world, Epstein had his own chefs there and carried on in terms of his lifestyle, the lifestyle itself in terms of his diet, the temperatures he wanted to sleep in at night, what he watched on television, and so forth, his activities, his mannerisms,” Levine explained. “That didn’t change from whether it was New York or the island or New Mexico. He was very much a creature of habit. The only thing Paris gave him was a different locale. He was not somebody who traveled around the city a great deal. He did have an armored vehicle in terms of a very expensive car that would shuttle him from the airport and around town, but he was not an individual who was making the Paris nightlife scene.”
He said he was not able to figure out the precise reason why Epstein went to Paris on June 14. He said he had “taken off” from Paris four other times in 2019, including for a nine-hour trip to Morocco. He did spend time in Paris, Levine said, with Karyna Shuliak, a Belarusian dentist who was supposedly his last girlfriend. But none of it was out of the ordinary, he said. “For a guy like Epstein who traveled to such a great degree, from Paris to Teterboro was like taking a car service,” he continued. “It wasn’t out of the ordinary. It was really just a continuation of his lifestyle. He never really liked to stay in one place very long. He liked to move among his properties.”
Levine doesn’t buy the argument—the source of which was supposedly Epstein’s French butler speaking to the French press—that Epstein knew he was going to get “pinched” when he landed in Teterboro. Epstein’s “mindset,” he said, was that he was always “above the law.” He continued, “I truly believe he did not have any fear that he was going to return, at least immediately, to the United States and was going to be apprehended. Again, unlike the normal person who plans trips and so forth, for Epstein the world was just a series of car service rides. I mean, he would bounce around from Paris to Morocco or back, or return to Teterboro and jump off and then go back down to Palm Beach, or go out to the island for a couple of weeks. He was an antsy individual who never felt very secure being in one place too long.”