As JPMorgan compliance officials tried to boot Jeffrey Epstein as a client over the years because of his sex crimes against children, bank executives apparently resisted because he brought in new business—including wealthy clients like Google founder Sergey Brin.
According to bombshell legal filings, Epstein introduced JPMorgan honcho Jes Staley to Google co-creators Brin and Larry Page by 2003. By 2011, the sex-trafficker was considered the “biggest revenue producer” for JPMorgan’s Private Bank and known as “the advisor to the Google founders,” according to the document filed by the U.S. Virgin Islands government. Brin’s relationship with the Private Bank brought in more than $4 billion, one memorandum states.
Epstein also referred ultra-wealthy clients to JPMorgan including billionaires Glenn Dubin, Bill Gates, Leon Black, Mort Zuckerman, and Thomas Pritzker, the USVI says. The legal filing says other Epstein referrals included Gates confidant Boris Nikolic, ex-Harvard president Larry Summers, Britain’s Prince Andrew, former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak, current Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, UK politician Lord Peter Mandelson, former White House adviser David Gergen, and “the Sultan of Dubai,” who is likely businessman Sultan Ahmed bin Sulayem. (A spokesperson for Gates previously told The Daily Beast, however, that the Microsoft tycoon was “never” a JPMorgan client.)
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“Epstein was too big to fail,” the USVI notes in a memorandum filed on Monday night, adding that JPMorgan continued working with Epstein up until his 2019 arrest for trafficking minors. Epstein was a JPMorgan client from around 1998 to 2013, when he was ousted for years’ worth of suspicious cash withdrawals and damning news reports on his sexual abuse.
The USVI argues in a lawsuit that JPMorgan functioned as the financial arm of Epstein’s sex ring and, instead of stopping the abuse, enjoyed a profit bonanza through his connections. The bank denies these accusations, saying the USVI was “complicit” in Epstein’s crimes and that the territory’s officials had a “quid pro quo relationship” with him.
The latest court filings reiterate the USVI’s claims in its complaint: the bank also looked the other way—apparently in violation of its own internal policies—as Epstein withdrew millions and paid for suspicious activities, even after his arrest.
In 2004, the documents note, JPMorgan opened “accounts and credit cards for two teenagers” who were “models in NYC and friends of Jeffrey Epstein.” Other transactions over the years included 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 and U.S.,” “payments for women’s school tuition, hotel and rent expenses,” and a “‘revoked’ credit card” for an alleged recruiter who talked to the police.
One filing included a spreadsheet of payments to women, which ranged from a few hundred or a few thousand dollars up to more than $700,000. It also notes that in 2011, employees emailed about Epstein’s “assistant or young lady he brought over from Praque [sic],” noting that the girl opened accounts with the bank sponsored by Epstein and that her debit transactions were “enlighting [sic] as compared to countless stories related to his escapades. Lots of salon, lingerie shops, drug stores ny palm beach and in st. thomas (his places of residence). Plus lots of video like girls gone wild … surprised she was never subpoenaed.”
The latest revelations arrive three months before a trial scheduled in Manhattan federal court. Among other new accusations, Epstein allegedly admitted to Staley that he had sex with young women for money after his 2006 arrest for abusing scores of underage girls in Florida, though he denied they were underage. Staley allegedly reported Epstein’s claims to his boss, then Private Bank CEO Mary Erdoes.
“At that time, JPMorgan could have immediately exited Epstein,” the USVI states in a memorandum, adding that former bank chairman Douglas “Sandy” Werner once called Epstein “one of the most connected people I know in New York” and encouraged Staley to cozy up to him. This apparently paid off. In 2004, the statement of undisputed facts notes, Brin became a client of JPMorgan’s San Francisco Private Bank. Staley had referred Brin to the bank’s managing director there. Eventually, Brin and executives from his family office, Bayshore Global, met with Erdoes and JPMorgan bigwigs.
JPMorgan even opened accounts for “all the girls and women publicly alleged in 2006 to be recruiters, accomplices, or victims,” including Ghislaine Maxwell, the British socialite who was convicted in Epstein's scheme in 2021. “By Epstein’s arrest, JPMorgan knew it had made over $25 million in payments to Maxwell from Epstein,” including $7 million to buy a helicopter, the document states.
In October 2006, JPMorgan employees flagged Epstein’s felony charges of soliciting underage girls and held a “Rapid Response” meeting that delved into his frequent cash withdrawals of up to $80,000 a month and $750,000 a year. “JPMorgan knew that in the time period of the incidents investigated by the Palm Beach police, and prior to Epstein’s plea, it had handled nearly $1.75 million in cash withdrawals for Epstein,” the filing states.
About two years later—around the time Epstein was convicted in Florida—JPMorgan’s Anti-Money Laundering (AML) compliance group created a “Human Trafficking Overview,” which noted that “nearly two-thirds of the women trafficked for prostitution worldwide come from Eastern Europe.” At the same time, JPMorgan knew that Epstein transferred tens of thousands of dollars to a woman he referred to as his “Yugoslavian sex slave.” The filing adds that “JPMorgan also knew it had made more than $1.2 million in payments to girls or women, many with Eastern European surnames, from Epstein’s accounts from 2003 to 2008.”
“Beginning in 2008, several payments were sent to high-risk locations, such as Belarus, Lithuania, and Russia,” the document alleges.
One AML employee wrote in an email, “My fear is will all our touting of good will on the HT [human trafficking] work, if anyone should ever say yet we bank Epstein, a known child sleaze.”
The filing says JPMorgan “handled $678,741.57 and $607,804.30 in payments” to two alleged co-conspirators from 2006 to 2013. And in 2006, JPMorgan facilitated “millions of dollars in payments to Epstein’s other ‘rock star’ lawyers who the Bank knew were working to discredit Epstein’s victims and help Epstein avoid federal sex-trafficking charges.”
JPMorgan also managed Epstein’s business with MC2 Model Management—the agency run by the late Jean-Luc Brunel—while “knowing Epstein was accused of using the supposed modeling agency to traffic and abuse underage girls.”
Part of the bank’s reluctance to terminate Epstein, the filing says, was “personal.”
“Epstein was also a personal resource to Staley and Erdoes, two business executives who JPMorgan does not dispute were involved in the decision to maintain Epstein at the Bank,” the memorandum says. For her part, Erdoes “personally sought Epstein’s help in resolving a $600 million tax issue” for a person or entity that is redacted in the court document.
After Bernie Madoff’s Ponzi scheme was exposed in 2008, Erdoes asked Staley to get intel from Epstein, writing in an email: “glenn and I have been going back and forth all night. We have HUNDREDS of clients …. Can you call JE to get the scoop from down there?”
Meanwhile, the legal filings indicate that JPMorgan may have kept Epstein on as a client not only because he helped make important introductions to wealthy men, but also because “it was trying to settle lawsuits had had against the bank, [including] one related to his investments at Bear Stearns.”
Despite the heinous allegations against Epstein—and his arrest for soliciting an underage girl—JPMorgan execs and their pals often joked about their star client’s predilections for young girls. In May 2008, when Erdoes told an email correspondent that an event she was attending had “turned into a cheezy broker fest”, 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 CFO of the bank’s Asset and Wealth Management wrote about a mansion he’d recently visited: “Reminded me of JE’s house except it was more tasteful, and fewer nymphettes...” Erdoes only responded: “Wow.”
And in 2011, JPMorgan employees emailed anxiously about a Law and Order SVU episode and a subsequent story on Gawker that appeared to “be aimed directly at Epstein.” The episode centered on “‘a billionaire pervert flying in underage girls for sex’ on his private jet. His parties make the society page, he’s friends with a ‘former president’ …”
Nevertheless, JPMorgan’s CEO Jamie Dimon has maintained he was ignorant of Epstein’s close relationship with Staley, and that the bank could not have known its star client was engaged in criminal activity. As the filing notes, he told CNN in 2023: “Hindsight is a fabulous gift.”
But Shaun O’Neill, a former FBI agent who is quoted as an expert in the USVI’s legal papers, said the agency relies on financial institutions to report trafficking and suggested JPMorgan was culpable for looking the other way. He said red flags included “the sheer amount of cash being dispersed,” “more than $3 million was paid by Epstein to women, many of whom had Eastern European surnames,” 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 onward.”
“Epstein would have been federally charged at a much earlier date,” he said.
