Epstein’s Ponzi Schemer Mentor Found Dead After a Welfare Check

Steven Hoffenberg, a convicted Ponzi schemer and one-time Wall Street mentor to multimillionaire sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein, was found dead in his Connecticut apartment this week after a survivor of Epstein’s abuse called local cops to do a welfare check.

Maria Farmer called Derby police to check in on Hoffenberg, 77, after she failed to reach him over the phone. The two had been friends for years and spoke nearly every day. “He was family to me,” Farmer told The Daily Beast on Wednesday. “I loved him.”

In Hoffenberg, Farmer saw a kind-hearted person who became another fall guy for Epstein. He was someone who lost his wealth and became estranged from most of his family after his criminal case. In prison, he became a born-again Christian. Farmer says that in recent years, he was one of a handful of people to support her during cancer treatments. Now it appears he died alone in his modest apartment not long after getting COVID.

On Thursday, Derby Police Lt. Justin Stanko told The Daily Beast that authorities believe a man discovered Tuesday at 8:08 p.m. is likely Hoffenberg but that they were waiting for the medical examiner to make a positive identification. “Every piece of evidence, his lease, paperwork, driver’s license… is pointing to the fact that it’s Mr. Hoffenberg,” Stanko said.

Stanko said that a preliminary autopsy showed no signs of foul play or trauma and that police believe Hoffenberg, who was found on his bedroom floor, had died of natural causes.

Hoffenberg’s estranged daughter, who asked not to be named, told The Daily Beast that he was not an active part of her life. They met a few times after his release from prison.

“He spent 20 years in prison,” she said. “I grew up with a single wonderful mother and never financially benefitted from any of his business. I had a very good life. He’s not a fixture.”

Other relatives of Hoffenberg couldn’t be reached.

Farmer said Hoffenberg struggled financially but wouldn’t accept help. She feared he was declining cognitively and had invited him to move in with her so she could look after him. “He would never allow me to do anything for him,” Farmer said. “He only wanted to do for others. He said, ‘Maria I’m spending the rest of my life on this earth helping people.’”

Hoffenberg told Farmer that he felt shame for trusting Epstein and taking him under his wing in the late '80s, after the financier left Bear Stearns. (Epstein had testified that his departure from the global investment bank followed a “reg d violation”; he’d lent a friend money to buy stock.)

“The world lost a true gentleman with one of the kindest hearts and one of the most loving souls I’ve ever met. He was so loyal. He was always there,” Farmer said of Hoffenberg.

The financier, however, didn’t always have a glowing reputation.

In 1995, Hoffenberg pleaded guilty to fraud and obstruction of justice in connection to his $460-million Ponzi scheme, then one of the largest in history.

A brash and cartoonish character, Hoffenberg made headlines in 1993 as the prospective buyer of the ailing New York Post—a deal that was upended when the SEC sued him, claiming his debt-collection firm Towers Financial Corporation had exaggerated income and assets. In 1994, Manhattan federal prosecutors charged him with falsifying Towers’ records to present higher revenues for investors buying the company’s securities. Prosecutors said Hoffenberg used the millions he reaped to repay debts and to fund his lavish lifestyle.

In 1997, Manhattan federal judge Robert Sweet sentenced Hoffenberg to 20 years in prison for defrauding thousands of investors in his debt-collection firm. (Before he died in 2019, Sweet would preside over Epstein victim Virginia Roberts Giuffre’s defamation suit against the sex trafficker's accomplice Ghislaine Maxwell.)

Sweet also ordered Hoffenberg to pay a $1 million fine and restitution of the $460 million he stole. Back then, The New York Times reported, “In fact, the money is gone, and those he defrauded got back less than a penny for every dollar they lost.” His sentence was longer than recommended by federal guidelines, in part because of victims’ letters that detailed to the court how they’d lost their life savings, retirement money, and other funds for health care and education.

“I am a 69-year-old woman who has been a teacher in the public schools of Texas for most of my adult life,” one victim wrote. “I invested almost all of my life's savings, $112,000. . . . Mr. Hoffenberg has taken away what would have been a nice retirement income for me. So as a result, I have returned to teaching and will probably have to do so as long as I am able.”

When Vanity Fair wrote a profile about Epstein in 2003, two years before Palm Beach cops began investigating him for molesting underage girls, Hoffenberg’s name surfaced in connection to the mysterious financier and his work for Towers. According to the report, Hoffenberg hired Epstein as a consultant and paid him $25,000 a month.

Three years after his 2013 release from prison, Hoffenberg sued Epstein, blaming him for the fraud and arguing he should help repay his thousands of scam victims.

Before he died, the Brooklyn native frequently commented to the press about Epstein and had accused the financier of being a “co-conspirator” in his Ponzi scheme. In one 2019 affidavit, Hoffenberg stated, “Epstein has remained free and has used and benefited from the ill-gotten gains he amassed as a result of his criminal and fraudulent activities.”

“He was my best friend for years. My closest friend for years,” Hoffenberg told CBS News of Epstein in 2019. “We ran a team of people on Wall Street, investment people that raised these billion dollars illegally. He was my guy, my wingman.”

Hoffenberg was also active on Twitter, where his bio still reads “NEW YORK POST C E O ( FORMER ), MEDIA, HOFFENBERG KNEW EPSTEIN FOR NINE YEARS, Epstein questions,” before listing his email address.

He frequently posted stories related to the Epstein case and in support of Farmer. He also posted tweets accusing Epstein and Maxwell of being spies. (Neither Maxwell nor Epstein appears to have commented about these foreign intelligence claims.)

Last summer, Hoffenberg suggested to Rolling Stone that Epstein “moved in intelligence circles” and had worked on projects with Maxwell’s media-mogul father, Robert, on his debts.

Hoffenberg had vowed to the press to help victims of his Ponzi scheme to recoup their losses by suing Epstein. He told NPR in 2019, “I’m the first one in the line to assist the victims. At 74, I’d like to go to the pearly gates assisting the victims.”

While some people balked at Hoffenberg’s public contrition, Farmer did not.

Farmer said she had tried reporting Epstein’s sexual abuse to the FBI in the mid '90s and had pushed for the U.S. Attorney’s Office to hold him accountable years before his 2019 arrest. From her perspective, the Manhattan U.S. Attorney made Hoffenberg a scapegoat for a crime she believes was masterminded by Epstein.

“I became his family and he became mine,” Farmer said of Hoffenberg. “Believe me, he had a lot of people that loved him.”

“It wasn’t someone in his family who suggested that the police go get him. I was the one who noticed he was gone.”

According to Farmer and her friend Michael Balcom, Derby cops initially seemed disinclined to check on Hoffenberg when Farmer phoned them on Saturday. “They said, ‘We’re not doing a wild goose chase’,” Farmer said, adding that the officer she spoke to was reciting information about Hoffenberg that seemed to be from Wikipedia. “This police officer starts laughing and spouting out all these horrible things about Hoff.”

Balcom, who is a former law enforcement officer, later called police on Farmer’s behalf when she wasn’t getting answers. He told The Daily Beast that he gave police an address for Hoffenberg on Sunday but didn’t hear back. He said that when he called the department again on Tuesday and warned he’d check on Hoffenberg himself, another officer agreed to visit the home. The officer found Hoffenberg dead at his residence.

But Stanko said that cops did respond to Farmer’s welfare-check requests but the address they initially received was incorrect. “Someone identifying themselves as a victim of Jeffrey Epstein was the one who initially called,” he said. “She was calling as a friend of Mr. Hoffenberg and stated she had not heard from him in several days. She was from out of state.”

Days later, Stanko added, a friend of “the initial caller” provided a second address.

“You can’t make everyone happy,” he said when asked about Farmer’s complaints that it took days for cops to find Hoffenberg. “The officer responded, contacted the landlord, tried to do a canvas. No one knew anything.”