Ramble On: That's Where The (Epstein) Money Is

Morning thoughts on Epstein, Trump, banks, banking, financial scandals, and following the money

Good morning! Here is today’s ramble:

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And here is a transcript, edited for clarity:

Good morning. As you’re watching this, is Friday morning, July 18th. As I’m recording it, it is Thursday afternoon, the 17th. It’s 2 16 p.m. I don’t know what’s happening right this second, but things do seem to be moving quickly.

I want to talk about, again, Epstein. I’m so tired of thinking about this guy, believe me, but there’s an element of the story that we need to focus on. Because people are talking about it a little bit, but not in a very concentrated way. And that’s how Epstein fits in with the banks, with bankers, with finance.

He was known as a finance guy, right? He had this reputation as this financial genius, this wizard of finance, even though he never did any work and nobody from Wall Street actually knew who he was. He was a fraud, but he had this reputation that he cultivated.

And obviously we’ve been talking about him a lot as Jeffrey Epstein: Sex Trafficker, which we should, and I don’t want to take any emphasis off of that, because that’s really important ,and it’s awful. But he’s also Jeffrey Epstein: Financial Fraudster. He’s also Jeffrey Epstein: Ponzi Schemer. And I want to talk a little bit about his relationship to banks, because of something that Senator Wyden of Oregon put out today, and also something that happened in Britain with Barclays Bank and the former CEO there, Jess Staley. I don’t think people are covering it that much. Or at least if they are, they’re not linking it back to the other things that are happening.

Big picture, now. Jeffrey Epstein is teaching math at Dalton and then, whoom!, as LB covered on the long talk that we had on Tuesday, Ace Greenberg of Bear Stearns, who was running Bear Stearns—Ace Greenberg, sketchy guy I’ve heard from my own sources—he’s running Bear Stearns. He plucks Jeffrey Epstein out of obscurity and gives him this high-level position. Nobody knows why. Epstein’s running private investment stuff. He’s doing that stuff. Ace Greenberg is told to get rid of him. He doesn’t. Instead, he moves him off to the side, to do offshores, as LB discovered in 2015.

So right off the bat, his first big job, other than the teaching gig, is, he’s doing these elaborate financial shenanigans at Bear Stearns—under the tutelage of a guy who is maybe not the, you know, most above-board CEO banker that we’ve ever had, in Ace Greenberg. From there, he goes to work for Douglas Leese. And then from there to Towers Financial with Steven Hoffenberg, who went to prison for a long time for running this Ponzi scheme at Towers Financial. And according to Hoffenberg, the person who actually ran the Ponzi scheme on the day-to-day was Jeffrey Epstein. So Epstein’s running a Ponzi scheme, which at the time was the biggest one that had ever happened before, before Madoff came along, right?

So that’s two things right off the bat that involved banks. They involved banks, they involved finance. Now, fast forward to now. Senator Wyden has been investigating Epstein’s finances now for some time, for a couple years, I believe. And specifically looking into the finances of a guy named Leon Black, an associate of Epstein, who runs or used to run the Apollo financial group. (I don’t know what any of these people are or what any of it means. The finance stuff to me is very fuzzy, which is why I think it’s important to talk about.) So apparently Leon Black paid Jeffrey Epstein $158 million in fees of some kind, as one does. And that’s what they’re looking into. That’s what the Senator was looking into.

Well, in the New York Times on Thursday, there’s a big article about all of these SARs,—that stands for Suspicious Activity Records—compiled by four banks, four big banks, involving Epstein, comprising about a billion and a half dollars in transactions. There were wire transfers in the tens of millions of dollars involving Jeffrey purchasing artwork for rich friends of his. There were fees from wealthy investors. And there were a lot of payments to women. Women from Russia, women from Belarus, women from Turkmenistan. You get the idea.

There were also, via JPMorgan, which is one of the banks that was being looked at, ties to two big Russian banks. So: payments moved along through these Russian banks, large payments at Russian banks that subsequently found themselves on the sanctions list. Okay? So that’s all going on.

There’s four banks. There’s JP Morgan, which had $1.1 billion in these transactions. Bank of America, which was the smallest of the four. Bank of New York, $378 million. And, of course, we can’t have a list of shady banks without including Deutsche Bank— $400 million in Epstein stuff. Just transactions, just money moving here and there that Epstein was overseeing, right?

Now, all of these Suspicious Activity Reports were submitted after, right after, Epstein’s arrest in 2019. Before that, they were taking their time with it.

I don’t know if you’ve tried lately, but any check that you try to deposit at a bank that’s larger than $10,000, you basically have to give blood to deposit the damn thing, right? The banks really do take good care to check where the money’s coming from, all of that stuff. They want to note of it. They want to know all of the things which are useful to know because we want to prevent organized crime from functioning. Meanwhile, Jeffrey Epstein, who’s presiding over an industrial-scale child sex trafficking operation, can just move tens, hundreds of million dollars along. They fill out the reports, but then they just kind of sit around and nobody really does anything with them. Everybody’s kind of looking the other way, it looks like.

But there were 4,725 transactions total, according to Senator Wyden, and he would like further investigation by the Department of Justice, which, no surprise, Pam Bondi is probably not going to be doing, because her master, Donald Trump, would not want that to happen. But they have these reports. The Senator has the reports and he says, he tells the paper: “In this area of misinformation, these reports are the coin of the realm,” which I think is a good, good quote.

So you have all of this financial stuff going on during the time after Epstein was arrested and indicted and served time the first time around. So after 2008, 2009, you know, through the time when he was arrested again. So that’s like, what, 10 years where he was just allowed to operate with impunity.

Now, I mentioned this guy, Jes Staley. He worked at JPMorgan Chase. He was in charge of—some sort of wealth, the department of the bank that you and I don’t know exists, right? The high rollers, the whales, the people with real money bank with this guy, okay, at JPMorgan. And one of the people at JPMorgan, Sandy Warner, introduced Jes Staley to Jeffrey Epstein, I think in like around 1999, saying, “This is a guy you should know, he knows a lot of people,” whatever.

Well, Staley and Epstein become very close. And you can read about this. There’s a great article in The Guardian about it. All of the nauseatingly sycophantic emails and texts and things that he says to Jeffrey, you know, basically kissing his ass. But it got to the point where Staley was going to Jeffrey Epstein’s island while Epstein was in prison so that he could avail himself of the amenities. He and his family, his daughters, availing himself of the amenities at Jeffrey’s private island.

And then what happened was, he was made CEO of Barclays, which is the British bank. And to become the CEO of Barclays, there was some lobbying going on behind the scenes by Jeffrey Epstein, apparently. So he, meaning Staley, had to talk to the board to get this job, because I think the regulations in Britain are that way. And he was like, “I didn’t know anything about what Epstein was doing. We’re really not that close. He was the coffee guy,” whatever he said. And then come to find out, you’re reading these emails that were written over years of time and they’re clearly close friends. A couple of months ago, he admitted to having sex with one of Jeffrey Epstein’s employees. Not one of the girls, I should say; one of the grown-up women employees of Jeffrey Epstein. So he was around.

At one point Staley wrote, this is a quote, “The strength of a Greek army was that its core held shoulder to shoulder, and would not flee or break, no matter the threat. That is us.” He wrote that to Jeffrey. Also, Staley was one of the four people that Epstein wrote when he got out of prison. So these guys were obviously very close.

The powers that be in Britain found that they’d been misled. Maybe not lied to, maybe misled. And basically Staley had to leave his job. They fined him a little bit. And he’s no longer the CEO of Barclays. And what happened in the last month is that he tried to appeal the decision of the Financial Conduct Authority, and he lost the appeal. So he’s not allowed to work again in the financial sector in London.

This guy, Jes Staley, is not somebody we’ve heard of. I’d never heard of him before. He’s not somebody famous by any means. In fact, I think Staley was latching on to Epstein in a very starfucker way—in the same way that Epstein would latch himself onto Donald Trump in a very starfucker way. He just wanted to be close to all these famous people. And Les Wexner. You know, Epstein wanted everybody to know he knew Donald, he knew the Victoria’s Secret models, all this kind of stuff.

The point is that it’s not just the industrial-scale child sex trafficking. (I can’t believe I’m having to say these words, by the way. It’s really just disgusting that we’re even talking about this at all, that this isn’t immediately denounced as horrible and Trump hasn’t resigned in disgrace, but that’s never gonna happen.) It’s also the banking stuff, right? Like, there’s all this talk of, “Well, Russia paid this and Saudi Arabia paid that and this money went there.”

Well, how did it go from place to place? I don’t know. You know, I’m not any sort of an expert on economics and banking. This stuff is a puzzlement to me. I’m not suggesting anything. But if money moved, it had to move in some way, in some capacity. And it looks like, probably, if you were going to get a crooked guy to move your money around—Epstein is about as crooked a guy as you could possibly find.

So I think there’s a lot more that we can learn from these reports that the Senator has. Maybe that will find nothing. But I think we’re gonna find stuff because, again, always follow the money, find out what’s going on. I think the trafficking and the money obviously overlap. Let’s find out where they overlap.

And of course they overlap with Donald. Donald is also constantly dealing with banks, or trying to deal with banks, right? He’s constantly taking loans out all over the place. When he took office in 2016, he owed Deutsche Bank 300 million dollars, which is, you know, that’s real money, right? That’s not like a car loan, you know; that’s a lot of money. And everything just kind of just gets melted away into the ether. There’s so much stuff going on that we don’t really talk about that anymore. I don’t know what happened with that. I haven’t been able to find anything about it. And, you know, maybe he paid it back. I don’t know. Maybe there’s another loan out there. Who knows? The point is that Trump deals with banks.

And Epstein also deals with banks, and this money movement. And they were very good friends, and they had the same taste in, you know, their prurient activities, certainly. And I think that we need to look more at the money to find out what’s really going on.

The other thought I had thinking about the money and all these transactions, all these wire transfers: Semyon Mogilevich, who was the head of the Russian mafia for years and years, famously wanted to control a bank, like a real legitimate bank, because it made it easier to move money around. He wanted to, you know, to make use of the SWIFT system. He wanted to be able to open deposits—all the things that you can do with a legitimate bank. He wanted to be able to do that because if you’re, you know, a huge crime operation, even if you’re an insanely wealthy one, you’re operating off book. So you can’t use the banking system unless you’re, you know, Ozarking it.

Mogilevich was trying to work around that. So all of these guys want legitimacy. They want legitimacy. They want to be able to have bank accounts and, better yet, to own the actual bank. What did Willie Sutton say? Why did you rob banks? He said, “That’s where the money is.”

And I think what these guys are up to is a larger scale of bank robbery. It’s plunder, really. But it’s that kind of plunder.

Again, I’m out of my element a lot here because I’m going to say right up front, I don’t know that much about the ins and outs of banking instruments and all that kind of stuff. But it seems to me that now we have this crypto, right? And Trump is obviously all over the crypto. He has lots of investments in it. There’s memecoin, there’s bitcoin, whatever it is. He and his sons, especially, are all over it.

But if you think of what Mogilevich was doing, the bank transfers and depositing money here, as CDs and cassettes, then crypto is like Spotify. We’re just going to stream this now. We don’t need to wait for Netflix to deliver the disc to our house anymore. We can just stream it.

And I think there’s something there. I don’t know where it’s going. And I think it probably has something to do with Trump’s weird, quixotic battle with Jerome Powell at the Fed—a man who he himself appointed and now can’t stand for reasons that are not abundantly clear to me.

Most people, I think, in the banking and finance world—including Jamie Dimon, the head of JPMorgan, who’s been there forever—all these people are pretty opposed to Trump messing around with the Fed and the independence of the Fed.

Already the value of the dollar has gone down. It’s going down under Trump. Nobody wants to talk about that either. I know there’s lots of other things going on, but if we get rid of the chair of the Fed, which regulates the money…The job of the Fed is to prevent bank runs and stuff like that, you know; it tries to inject some form of stability in an inherently volatile system. And it’s been around now for a hundred years, does the job very well historically.

Getting rid of Jerome Powell and replacing him with whatever half-wit MAGA weirdo Trump wants to appoint would be catastrophic. And I would think, I would like to think, that the big financial people, the wealth managers and the private equity—whatever the hell they are, I don’t even know what these titles are—you know, the people that have real money and real clout in the investment world, I would think they don’t want Powell to go. And they certainly don’t want some clown with a MAGA hat in there.

But maybe that has something to do with what they’re trying to do with the crypto, and they want to crash the economy somehow…I have no idea. It may just be that Trump just doesn’t like Jerome Powell and he wants the rates down and he’s just going to keep complaining about it. You know, looking for logic with anything Trump does at this point is an exercise in futility. And it drives me nuts when the legacy media attempts to find logic in what he’s doing.

So anyway, I’ll close with this: Vladimir Putin, as we know, president of Russia since, you know, 2000, whatever late 1999, December 31st, 1999, was put into a position of power by embracing the Russian mafia. Semion Mogilevich was active in getting him into that position. So the Russian mob and the ex-KGB operations in Russia are all of a piece, right? So you have a line that goes from Putin to Semion Mogilevich.

Well, Semion Mogilevich used to be business partners with Robert Maxwell. This is according to a book a British journalist wrote, a Maxwell biography. Mogilevich and Robert Maxwell were business partners. Robert Maxwell is of course the father of Ghislaine Maxwell, who’s Jeffrey Epstein’s partner—literally his partner in crime. And also, as LB discussed on Tuesday, was busy ushering around Epstein and introducing him to all these players in intelligence agencies and elsewhere to bring him up and through in kind of the same way that Ace Greenberg did, but on a larger scale.

Okay, so the point is, there’s a direct line from Putin to Mogilevich to Maxwell to Epstein to Trump. It’s a human centipede of garbage. And that’s what it is.

I don’t know what it all means ultimately, but I know that it’s bad for democracy and it’s going to be bad for our pocketbook because as long as there’s money to be had, as long as there’s money in the treasury of the United States, whether it’s in the school systems, whether it’s in the health systems, the military, whatever it is, now with this new budget for ICE—these people want to plunder it. And I feel like we really have to be careful not to let them do that. And one way to not let them do that is to know what kind of shenanigans they attempted before.

Hopefully Senator Wyden will be able to widen the investigation, and Pam Bondi will not be able to keep it under wraps. But you know, we’ll see what happens. By the time you’re watching this, Powell might already be gone—and I don’t know what’s going to happen if that happens. Such is the life in the Trump Redux. There’s just never a dull moment, as they say. So that’s all I got.

Again, I’m recording this now. It’s 2.36 p.m. on Thursday. So if anything happens weird in the meantime, forgive me.

I’m going write something for Sunday and then I’m off for a week. I’m taking an actual vacation. So you will not see me next Friday, but you’ll see me the week after that. I wish everybody a lovely summer weekend. Insofar as it’s possible, you know. Try not to just doomscroll the whole time. Try to go outside, enjoy the weather if you can.

And I really do feel like we shall prevail.