When JPMorgan Compliance Officials Try to Kickstart Jeffrey Epstein As a client for years for his child sex crimes, bank executives clearly protested because he brought in new business—including wealthy clients like Google founder Sergey Brin.
According to controversial legal filings, Epstein introduced JPMorgan honoree Jes Staley to Google co-creators Brin and Larry Page in 2003. By 2011, the sex trafficker was considered “the largest revenue producer” for JPMorgan’s private bank and was known as “an advisor to the founders of Google,” according to US Virgin Islands government documents. Brin’s relationship with Private Bank has brought in more than $4 billion, a memo said.
Epstein has also introduced extremely wealthy clients to JPMorgan, including billionaires Glenn Dubin, Bill Gates, Leon Black, Mort Zuckerman and Thomas Pritzker, USVI said. Legal filings say Epstein’s other recommenders include Gates’ confidant Boris Nikolic, former Harvard president Larry Summers, the King of Dubai, Britain’s Prince Andrew, former Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak, current Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, UK politician Lord Peter Mandelson and former White House adviser David Gergen. (However, a spokesperson for Gates previously told The Daily Beast that the Microsoft mogul has “never” been a customer of JPMorgan.)
“Epstein is too big to fail,” the USVI noted in a memo filed Monday night, adding that JPMorgan continued to work with Epstein until he was arrested in 2019 for trafficking minors. Epstein was a JPMorgan client from about 1998 to 2013, when he was overthrown for years about suspicious cash withdrawals and damning news reports about his sexual abuse.
USVI argues in a lawsuit that JPMorgan acted as the financial arm of Epstein’s sex ring and, instead of preventing abuse, reaped huge profits through his connections. Bank deny these allegationssaid that the USVI was “complicit” in Epstein’s crimes and that the territory’s officials had a “reciprocal relationship” with him.
The latest court filings echo USVI’s claim in the complaint: the bank also turned a blind eye — in apparent violation of its own internal policies — when Epstein withdrew millions of dollars and paid for suspicious activities, even after his arrest.
The documents note that in 2004, JPMorgan opened “accounts and credit cards for two teenagers” who were “a model in NYC and a friend of Jeffrey Epstein.” Other transactions over the years include payments to “young women in Lithuania and Russia” and to “Russian models”, credit cards for monthly travel for young women “through Paris, Europe and the US Virgin Islands”, “payments of women’s tuition, hotels and rent” and “alleged ‘revoked’ credit cards” to an employer.
One profile includes a spreadsheet of payments to women, ranging from a few hundred or a few thousand dollars to more than $700,000. It also notes that in 2011, employees sent emails about Epstein’s “assistant or young girl he had brought back from Praque.” [sic],” noting that the girl opened an account with an Epstein-funded bank and that her debit transactions were “enlightening.” [sic] compared to the countless stories related to his escapes. Lots of beauty salons, lingerie shops, drug stores in ny palm beach and in st. thomas (his whereabouts). Plus so many videos of girls going wild… amazing she’s never been subpoenaed.”
The latest revelations come three months before a trial scheduled to take place in Manhattan federal court. Among other new charges, Epstein allegedly admitted to Staley that he had sex with young women for money after being arrested in 2006 for abusing multiple underage girls in Florida, though he denied they were underage. Staley allegedly reported Epstein’s claims to his boss, then the CEO of Mary Erdoes Private Bank.
“At that point, JPMorgan could have left Epstein immediately,” the USVI said in a memo, adding that former banker Douglas “Sandy” Werner once called Epstein “one of the most connected people I know in New York” and encouraged Staley to get close to him. This has clearly paid off. In 2004, declaring the undisputed facts noted, Brin became a client of JPMorgan’s San Francisco Private Bank. Staley introduced Brin to the bank’s chief executive there. Finally, Brin and executives from his family office, Bayshore Global, met with the big boys of Erdoes and JPMorgan.
JPMorgan even opened accounts for “all the girls and women publicly accused in 2006 of being recruiters, accomplices or victims,” including Ghislaine Maxwell, a British social networking site. who was convicted? in Epstein’s plans in 2021. “When Epstein was arrested, JPMorgan learned that it had paid more than $25 million to Maxwell from Epstein,” including $7 million to buy a helicopter, the document states.
In October 2006, JPMorgan employees accused Epstein of soliciting underage girls and held a “Quick Response” meeting to learn his regular cash withdrawals amounted to $80,000 a month and $750,000 a year. “JPMorgan is aware that between the time the incident was investigated by Palm Beach police and before Epstein pleaded guilty, they processed nearly $1.75 million in cash for Epstein,” the filing states.
About two years later—around the time Epstein was convicted in Florida—the JPMorgan Anti-Money Laundering (AML) compliance team created an “Overview of Human Trafficking,” which notes that “nearly two-thirds of the women trafficked for prostitution worldwide come from Eastern Europe.” At the same time, JPMorgan learned that Epstein had transferred tens of thousands of dollars to a woman he called his “Yugoslav sex slave.” The filing adds that “JPMorgan is also aware that it has paid out more than $1.2 million to girls or women, many with last names in Eastern Europe, from Epstein’s account between 2003 and 2008.”
“Starting in 2008, some payments were sent to high-risk locations, such as Belarus, Lithuania and Russia,” the document alleges.
One AML employee wrote in an email, “I fear that all our goodwill solicitations will go to HT. [human trafficking] work, if anyone should say we bank Epstein, a famous sleazy kid.
The filing says JPMorgan “processed payments of $678,741.57 and $607,804.30” to two alleged accomplices between 2006 and 2013. And in 2006, JPMorgan facilitated “millions of dollars in payments to other ‘rock star’ attorneys for Epstein, who the Bank knew were working to discredit Epstein’s alleged victims of the state and help Epstein’s alleged victims.”
JPMorgan also managed Epstein’s business with MC2 Model Management—the company run by the late Jean-Luc Brunel—while “knowing Epstein was accused of using a modeling agency that allegedly sold and abused underage girls.”
The filing says part of the bank’s reluctance to terminate Epstein was “personal.”
“Epstein has also been a personal resource to Staley and Erdoes, two business executives with whom JPMorgan does not dispute were involved in the decision to keep Epstein at the Bank,” the memo said. For his part, Erdoes “personally sought Epstein’s help in resolving a $600 million tax matter” for a person or entity redacted in court documents.
After Bernie Madoff’s Ponzi scheme was exposed in 2008, Erdoes asked Staley to get intelligence from Epstein, writing in an email: “glenn and I spent the night together. We have HUNDREDS of customers…. Can you call JE to get the scoop from down there?
Meanwhile, legal filings indicate that JPMorgan may have kept Epstein as a client not only because he helped make important referrals to wealthy men, but also because “they were trying to settle lawsuits against the bank, [including] one related to his investments at Bear Stearns.”
Despite the heinous charges against Epstein — and his arrest for soliciting an underage girl — JPMorgan executives and their friends often joke about their star clients’ preference for young girls. In May 2008, when Erdoes told a reporter via email that an event she was attending had “turned into a cheesy brokerage festival”, the person replied: “Epstein there with miley cyrus?” (At the time, Cyrus was 15 years old and a Disney Channel star.) And in 2012, the bank’s Chief Financial Officer of Wealth and Asset Management wrote of a mansion he recently visited: “Reminds me of JE’s house, except it’s more elegant and less nymph…” Erdoes simply replied, “Wow.”
And in 2011, JPMorgan employees nervously emailed a Law and Order SVU episodes and a follow-up story on Gawker that appear to be “directly aimed at Epstein.” The episode focuses on “‘a perverted billionaire who uses a private jet to seduce underage girls’. His parties make up the social page, he’s friends with a ‘former president’…”
However, JPMorgan’s CEO, Jamie Dimon, still maintains that he was unaware of Epstein’s close relationship with Staley and that the bank could not have known its star client had been involved in criminal activity. As he notes in the filing, he told CNN in 2023: “Having hindsight is a great gift.”
But Shaun O’Neill, a former FBI agent who is considered an expert on USVI’s legal papers, said the agency relied on financial institutions to report human trafficking and held JPMorgan responsible for turning a blind eye. He said danger warnings included “huge amounts of cash being dispersed,” “more than $3 million was paid by Epstein to women, many of whom have surnames in Eastern Europe,” and Epstein’s loan to MC2.
Had the FBI been alerted to this banking activity, O’Neill said, Epstein “would not have been able to continue his criminal activity from 2008 onwards.”
Epstein will be charged federally at a much sooner date, he said.
