The Bequia, a grand teak-trimmed yawl, swung to its anchor off Little St. James, Jeffrey Epstein’s Caribbean retreat.
Aboard that day in April 2015 was its owner, Jes Staley, one of the business and political figures Epstein had cultivated to place himself at the nexus of money and power. For a few hours that afternoon, Staley -- soon to rise to the top of Barclays Plc, one of the grand old names of British banking -- visited Epstein on the private island, accompanied by his wife Debora.
Their sojourn coincided with an unusual chapter in the strange, sordid saga of a wealthy financier accused of sexually abusing and exploiting teenage girls and who, that afternoon, had been a registered sex offender for almost six years.
The allegations had first emerged a decade earlier, but Epstein was still working his Wall Street connections, even as coverage of the scandal reached a new pitch and his yearned-for rehabilitation started to slip from his fingers.
It was one more act by a Zelig-like figure who’d managed to charm and cajole his way to a billionaire’s lifestyle. He kept prowling for business, often finding receptive audiences at some of the most famous banks and investment firms.
At JPMorgan Chase & Co., for instance, he kept up a long, mutually beneficial relationship through the elite private-banking unit, according to people familiar with the matter.
He met with Wall Street titans, including billionaire Leon Black, invested with former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak and secured plum stock allocations in dozens of initial public offerings. His foundation, meanwhile, supported initiatives long beloved on Wall Street, such as Mount Sinai Hospital and Harvard’s Hasty Pudding Institute of 1770.
A full picture of those years -- between his 2008 guilty plea in Florida to two state counts of soliciting prostitution, one involving a minor, and his arrest in July on federal charges of sex-trafficking minors -– is elusive at best.
But the portrait pieced together from interviews and information from government filings reveal how the enigmatic college dropout never stopped trying to build his fortune and remain in the game. While there’s no suggestion of any wrongdoing on the part of his Wall Street connections, it all no doubt makes uncomfortable reading for them.
“They must be concerned that their experiences with Epstein, which so far had mostly flown under the radar, are now being more fully analyzed,” said Bill Moran, a litigation and crisis-management lawyer with Otterbourg in New York. “They all have to be concerned about reputations being tarnished.”