"While Mr. Epstein was a client of Deutsche Bank, his main business was Southern Trust Company, which generated more than $250 million in revenues during its existence, according to public records. Mr. Epstein created the company in 2013 and told government officials in the Virgin Islands that it was involved in DNA analysis and research.
Ms. George, in her civil forfeiture lawsuit, contends that Southern Trust was not in the business it claimed to be and that Mr. Epstein misled government officials in order to win a lucrative tax break. She told The New York Times in March that her office had not yet determined the kind of business Southern Trust was in."
A darkly comical commentary on the state of justice right now: none of the child rapists will face any consequences (well, except for Epstein, though he did get away with it for decades), but the _bank regulator_ takes the accounting issues very seriously!
Bank and securities fraud are accompanied by detailed records, a fact which tends to make it a lot easier to demonstrate that something illegal happened.
The amount of smoke and mirrors surrounding this entire case is incredible. It's sort of happening out in the open, with even the president seemingly involved to some degree, yet all details are conveniently hidden away. I'm expecting a somewhat chilling documentary 20 years from now on the subject.
Nobody has ever satisfactory explained where Epstein got all this money to begin with. He seems to have been running some sort of blackmail operation ensnaring wealthy people into criminal activity and videotaping them or otherwise recording it.
His first job was as a math teacher at a _girl's school_ run by the current Attorney General's father, and he seems to have leveraged that somehow into an investment job through one of the parents at the school, despite having no qualifications for that kind of work.
It seems worth noting that he went from working with young girls to sex trafficking them, and that the man who supposedly was going to get to the bottom of his murder is the son of the man who first gave him access to young girls.
As far as I understand it, he basically acted as a proxy for Les Wexner (and I wouldn't doubt if he was blackmailing him to stay in that position based on some of the accounts of the assault victims) and just treated Les's money as his own. These grand ideas about vaults full powerful people on tape are a lot less plausible than him just taking advantage of a single billionaire to fund his lifestyle.
What was the point of the pinhole cameras recording everything that happened at every one of his properties, then? And what was contained in the cache of CDs with labels like "Young [name] with [name]" which the FBI recovered from a safe in his NYC mansion?
Your idea of the situation is also at odds with what the victims themselves have reported and testified.
Once you become a front man for the intelligence agencies (yes, multiple) blackmail operations all normal accounting goes out the window. Part of it is probably from the blackmail, part of it probably from the agencies, he probably had a lot less control over it than it seemed I would venture to guess. Add in the normal organized crime angle and it's almost impossible to say.
His life has been under a microscope. If there was a smoking gun to be found, it would have been found. Nobody's opsec is that good, especially with number of people involved in the kind of conspiracy you describe.
They've been covered up, and the few reporters doing a deep dive are ignored and relegated to small corners of the internet. Whitney Webb being one of those.
Do you think anyone thought "If its this easy for me to launder money through DB, I wonder how easy it is for other people" and the corollary "What happens when the government realises every idiot and his dealer was using DB to launder money".
>Mr. Epstein created the company in 2013 and told government officials in the Virgin Islands that it was involved in DNA analysis and research.
This almost seems like he was acknowledging in a "wink-wink" manner the sexual nature of what was really happening.
DNA analysis and research requires a lot of talent and infrastructure and putting it on an remote island is not the best idea.
But calling engaging in sex "DNA analysis and research" is almost at the level of what passes as a joke in middle school. This almost seems like an inside joke between the Virgin Islands officials and Epstein about the true nature of what was really going on.
There might be more truth there than you think. One of the largely ignored and unacknowledged realities of the uber-wealthy elite is that they tend to be very interested in eugenics programs (of course under different names). Multiple people have stated that Epstein intended for his ranch in NM to be a place he had multiple women pregnant at a time so he could "seed the human race" with his superior genetics. Witness Maria Farmer says he and Maxwell and many others in the group were very open and serious about considering themselves genetically superior to the masses...
It's very common for the elite to openly reference what they're doing, crime-wise, because 1) It's easy to hide in plain sight, and 2) Who's going to stop them, you? Epstein's probably on an island right now.
Images of his body and the crime scene have been released to the public by the coroner.
In order for any of this speculation around him being alive is true, you realize that this conspiracy would have to involve dozens of people at least, right?
Look, I get the speculation around the circumstances of his death. He was a bad dude that had a lot of powerful friends. But to seriously consider that one or more of his friends would go out of their way to save his life by faking his death is completely ridiculous. If anything, his powerful friends had tremendous incentive to have him killed once he was detained.
Just because our world is being polluted by conspiratorial thinking doesn’t mean we can just stop thinking on a basic level. A plot to fake Epstein’s death makes absolutely zero sense. An ordered hit? Sure, there’s a logical explanation there. But a faked death is such a lazy and absent-minded conspiracy theory.
But if he had a dead man’s switch, wouldn’t it have been easier and lower risk to use state resources to penetrate his network and disable it? It’s not like a dead man’s switch is insurmountable, and when you’re entertaining these ideas of people who have vast amounts of power, doesn’t the simplest solution still make the most sense? How does an institution with an infinite amount of power fear one man? That’s the lazy paradox I see here. The government is all-powerful but wants to let one guy with a bunch of dirt on people live, even though they have the power to do whatever they want? And they choose to fake his death instead of coercing a prosecutor to slap him with charges that don’t stick or manipulating the jury? There are just so many more plausible ways that this plays out instead of faking his death.
As I said above, I think there are legitimate reasons to suspect foul play in his death. But a conspiracy involving the prison, the coroner and EMTs, the DA, whoever transported him, and whoever else you’d need to carry it out just gets so fantastical so fast. I’m not saying I believe the official story here, but people don’t consider the social implications of some of these conspiracies.
It’s like the people who think the moon landing was fake. Thousands of engineers, scientists, builders, etc. worked to get us to the moon. Anyone can read the source code from the mission today. Even with all of those people and resources poured into that project, nobody blew the whistle or leaked the press, how? That would’ve been one of the biggest political scandals in history if Kennedy/LBJ/Nixon got caught dumping tons of money into running fake NASA missions.
> It’s like the people who think the moon landing was fake
No. No it really isn't. Faking the moon landing would obviously take absurd amounts of effort. And honestly, the narrative on it is fucked anyways. These conspiracy theorists are really just smelling the stink from the overly confident "of course we did" narrative, which should instead be a "holy shit, the odds were against us and we probably shouldn't have made it."
In terms of faking a death, (I DONT BELIEVE THIS IS WHAT HAPPENED) all he'd really need is:
1. pay/threat the guards
2. turn off cameras
3. get a good enough replacement body
4. pay off any of the people who were doing autopsies or getting a really close interaction
5. photoshop
I don't think this is the most plausible answer, but fuck if I'm going to act like I know it didn't happen.
>In order for any of this speculation around him being alive is true, you realize that this conspiracy would have to involve dozens of people at least, right?
If Epstein's "death" had been witnessed by his cell mate, or the suicide watch he ought have been on, and if the cameras outside his cell worked, you'd be a lot more convincing right now.
The coroner in George Floyd's case said he died from a heart issue, despite the fact he was murdered on video from multiple angles.
So, there's immediate and highly visible precedent for coroner fraud. It's not like they're so well paid they can't take bribes, nor so connected as to be immune to pressure.
I'm not sure what I should believe when the forensic pathologist who ruled Epstein's death a suicide is the same guy who said that George Floyd's death was (seemingly-obviously) due to the neck compression: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Baden#Notable_cases
Seems like that wiki page says exactly the opposite. That Michael Baden was the forensic pathologist that disputed the idea that Epstein's death was suicide and stated that Floyd's death was due to mechanical asphyxia.
Did the coroner actually say it was a heart issue? I read simply that the heart issue may have contributed. Which I understood as, he may have been asfixiated a bit quicker due to the heart issue. Which doesn't actually change anything as far as the murder goes, but that was what I understood them to mean.
The Manhattan Project started in 1942, was penetrated by Soviet spies no later than 1943 (Klaus Fuchs), and was known to the whole world by 1945. It's not a great example of extended secret-keeping.
I'm willing to entertain/examine theories of either a hit, or a coordinated escape, and I'd argue those that aren't willing to entertain such are...sleeping.
Why would an organization as powerful as the government fear one person like Epstein so much that they’d do something like that? I think it’s fair to speculate that he was murdered, but a coordinated escape is such a fantasy.
Maybe he had a dead man’s switch? Ok, the US government is the greatest military power in history with advanced technology, that wouldn’t be an obstacle for them. Why couldn’t the DOJ coerce the prosecutor into assigning charges that don’t get him convicted?
There are just so many more plausible ways it could’ve been done. And when you dig into the details of executing such a plan to perfection while covering a ton of people across the government to do it and nobody leaks it to the press, it completely fails basic logic. It just does.
Insinuating that I’m “sleeping” is also a complete cop-out. You still haven’t explained how an institution with infinite power is so afraid of one guy that they’d go to these extraordinary links to save his life by faking his death instead of just killing him.
That could be the genesis of the name, but Epstein was also known to espouse a lot of eugenecist and transhumanist views and had ties to geneticists like George Church. So another possibility is he originally intended to do the research and then wound up using the entity for money laundering or blackmail instead.
Here's my thesis: The company collected DNA from the girls he trafficked after they copulated with the rich and famous... He then generated revenue by keeping the results of the DNA analysis secret ( for a fee ).
"While Mr. Epstein was a client of Deutsche Bank, his main business was Southern Trust Company, which generated more than $250 million in revenues during its existence, according to public records. Mr. Epstein created the company in 2013 and told government officials in the Virgin Islands that it was involved in DNA analysis and research.
Ms. George, in her civil forfeiture lawsuit, contends that Southern Trust was not in the business it claimed to be and that Mr. Epstein misled government officials in order to win a lucrative tax break. She told The New York Times in March that her office had not yet determined the kind of business Southern Trust was in."