TERSON ht, and a Long Island mansion ran apartment. He’d also briefly e New York Post. rg had been taking money from vious investors. It was a classic est in history-and Hoffenberg rs in a federal prison. ted in the case? All that Hoffen- < Robert Gold.” t Gold, the former federal proserecover Ana Obregón’s money. Epstein until there were only a of limitations ran out. would always deny any wrong. Hoffenberg, he managed to avoid 112 CHAPTER 28 Robert Meister: 1985 R robert Meister, the vice chairman of a giant insurance brokerage and consulting firm called Aon, met Jeffrey Epstein in the mid-eighties, aboard a flight from New York to Palm Beach. Both men were flying first class. Each one thought the other looked familiar. They talked in the course of that flight, and Meister filed the conversation away, only to recall it in 1989. At that time, Les Wexner, who was Meister’s friend and a client of Meister’s insurance company, was complaining to him about the people managing his money. Wexner was a billionaire, but for all his wealth, his finances were in a tangle. Maybe Epstein could help. And perhaps Epstein would also be grateful for the introduction. Hard as it is to believe, there’s evidence to suggest that Epstein really had spent the last of his last Bear Stearns bonus-along with his share of the money he’d recovered for Ana Obregón-and was broke, again, at the time. 113 HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_009264¶
JAMES PATTERSON One estranged friend says that he had to loan Epstein money to pay the bill at Epstein’s garage, which had seized Epstein’s car for nonpayment. Another estranged friend says that Epstein didn’t have two nickels to rub together. Diana Crane, a former model, says that Epstein always had first-class upgrades he would give to his friends so they didn’t have to fly economy class. “No one knew where or how he got them,” Crane recalls. “Sometimes they worked, and other times they didn’t. I remember he saw a friend of mine wearing a Concorde jacket. He asked if he could borrow it for a day or so. My friend never got the jacket back. But Epstein would tell people he always flew on the Concorde-a total lie.” But even if Epstein were flush, Les Wexner would have been a big fish to catch. From the get-go, Meister’s wife, Wendy, had her suspicions about Epstein. About the way he presented himself and the way he worked himself into their inner circle. Before long, Wendy was calling Epstein the virus. But for Epstein, the Meisters weren’t the point. Wexner was. And hard as it is to understand why the billionaire would associate with a man who’d worked with a Ponzi king like Steven Hoffenberg, it turned out that Wexner and Epstein would get along perfectly well. 114 Ghislaine Maxwell R¶
obert Meister v Epstein, the b social ladder. T heiress from the Unite of the world’s most gla Maxwell was the the most famous-ev Robert Maxwell, was French Foreign Legio had gone on to becor hed become a media birth name was Jan L ded in disgrace in 19 side of his supersize y “The shtet! Soloty¶