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Case 1:19-cv-03377 Document 1-8 Filed 04/16/19 Page 8 of 16
http://www.vanityfair.com/news/2003/03/jeffrey-epstein-200303

He was also not above entering into risky, tax-sheltered oil and gas deals with much smaller
investors. A lawsuit that Michael Stroll, the former head of Williams Electronics Inc., filed
against Epstein shows that in 1982 I.A.G. received an investment from Stroll of $450,000, which
Epstein put into oil. In 1984 Stroll asked for his money back; four years later he had received
only $10,000. Stroll lost the suit, after Epstein claimed in court, among other things, that the
check for $10,000 was for a horse he’d bought from Stroll. “My net worth never exceeded four
and a half million dollars,” Stroll has said.

Hoffenberg, says a close friend, “really liked Jeffrey…. Jeffrey has a way of getting under your
skin, and he was under Hoffenberg’s.” Also appealing to Hoffenberg were Epstein’s social
connections; they included oil mogul Cece Wang (father of the designer Vera) and Mohan
Murjani, whose clothing company grew into Gloria Vanderbilt Jeans. Epstein lived large even
then. One friend recalls that when he took Canadian heiress Wendy Belzberg on a date he hired a
Rolls-Royce especially for the occasion. (Epstein has claimed he owned it.)

In 1987, Hoffenberg, according to sources, set Epstein up in the offices he still occupies in the
Villard House, on Madison Avenue, across a courtyard from the restaurant Le Cirque.
Hoffenberg hired his new protégé as a consultant at $25,000 a month, and the relationship
flourished. “They traveled everywhere together—on Hoffenberg’s plane, all around the world,
they were always together,” says a source. Hoffenberg has claimed that Epstein confided in him,
saying, for example, that he had left Bear Stearns in 1981 after he was discovered executing
“illegal operations.”

Several of Epstein’s Bear Stearns contemporaries recall that Epstein left the company very
suddenly. Within the company there were rumors also that he was involved in a technical
infringement, and it was thought that the executive committee asked that he resign after his two
supporters, Ace Greenberg and Jimmy Cayne, were outnumbered. Greenberg says he can’t recall
this; Cayne denies it happened, and Epstein has denied it as well. “Jeffrey Epstein left Bear
Stearns of his own volition,” says Cayne. “It was never suggested that he leave by any member
of management, and management never looked into any improprieties by him. Jeffrey said
specifically, ‘I don’t want to work for anybody else. I want to work for myself.’” Yet, this is not
the story that Epstein told to the S.E.C. in 1981 and to lawyers in a 1989 deposition involving a
civil business case in Philadelphia.

In 1981 the S.E.C.’s Jonathan Harris and Robert Blackburn took Epstein’s testimony and that of
other Bear Stearns employees in part of what became a protracted case about insider trading
around a tender offer placed on March 11, 1981, by the Seagram Company Ltd. for St. Joe
Minerals Corp. Ultimately several Italian and Swiss investors were found guilty, including
Italian financier Giuseppe Tome, who had used his relationship with Seagram owner Edgar
Bronfman Sr. to obtain information about the tender offer.

After the tender offer was announced, the S.E.C. began investigating trades involving St. Joe at
Bear Stearns and other firms. Epstein resigned from Bear Stearns on March 12. The S.E.C. was
tipped off that Epstein had information on insider trading at Bear Stearns, and it was therefore
obliged to question him. In his S.E.C. testimony, given on April 1, 1981, Epstein claimed that he
had found “offensive” the way Bear Stearns management had handled a disciplinary action

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