What Jeffrey Epstein’s birthday book tells us about his Wall Street origins

How exactly did Jeffrey Epstein get his start as a consigliere to billionaires? Look no further than his 50th birthday book for clues.The book, which contains sexually explicit snapshots and hand-drawn images, concludes with a less-provocative section titled “Business.” It offers a rare glimpse into the Wall Street job that helped launch Epstein’s lucrative career as a money manager for businessmen like Les Wexner, the former owner of Victoria’s Secret.

The section includes letters from five former colleagues from Bear Stearns, the investment bank where Epstein worked for five years before hanging out his own shingle in 1981 as a financial advisor to the rich and powerful.

Inclusion in the book — assembled in 2003 by his longtime associate Ghislaine Maxwell, years before Epstein’s first arrest — is not an indication of wrongdoing. Ted Serure, a managing director at Jeffries, didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment. Calls and emails to Elliot Wolk and Ira Zicherman were not returned.

These letters offer a unique window into how some of Wall Street’s most powerful men viewed Epstein when he was starting out in finance.

He was an options trader in the early days of the industry

Alan “Ace” Greenberg, then a partner at Bear Stearns, hired Jeffrey Epstein — who was working as a math teacher at Manhattan’s prestigious Dalton School — to the firm in 1976.

“A parent at Dalton called my husband and said, ‘This kid is brilliant,'” Greenberg’s widow, Kathryn Olson Greenberg, told Business Insider. “My husband had the mindset to try someone out.”

Two years after hiring Epstein, Greenberg became the investment bank’s CEO.

In the birthday letter, Greenberg wrote that Epstein had been hired to trade stock options on the American Stock Exchange floor. Stock options, which give investors the ability to buy a stock at a fixed price, were becoming more common, but they were typically traded “over the counter,” or informally over the phone, instead of on a stock exchange. When Epstein was hired, the plan was for him to trade options more formally on the exchange floor, but he said, “no,” according to the letter. It’s unclear what transpired, but Greenberg’s missive noted that it was the last time the two disagreed.Olson Greenberg told Business Insider that “there was no relationship” between the two men after Epstein left the firm. She explained Greenberg’s message to Epstein by saying her husband, who died in 2014, “never would have said no” to someone asking him for a birthday letter.

He may have first learned of the wealthy Maxwell family from his time at Bear Stearns

Epstein quickly climbed the ranks at Bear Stearns, moving from trading on the floor to working with wealthy clients on tax issues and being named a limited partner in 1980.

He may have learned of Ghislaine Maxwell and her media mogul father, Robert Maxwell, through his work, according to a letter by Elliot Wolk, a longtime Bear Stearns employee.

At the time, Wolk ran an account for Robert Maxwell. Wolk’s letter suggests that Epstein, who “always had the ability to know everyone and be charming,” may have met, seen, or learned of Ghislaine as a result of this connection.

“Was that when you first discovered the Maxwell teenage daughter …” he wrote.

Ghislaine told Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche earlier this year that she met Epstein in 1991, a decade after he left Bear Stearns, and that her father never knew him.

Wolk did not respond to inquiries from Business Insider.

His mysterious Bear Stearns exit didn’t cost him powerful friends

A 2003 Vanity Fair profile raising questions about Epstein’s 1981 departure from Bear Stearns quoted insiders who said he left of his own accord to start his own firm while also reporting on rumors within the firm that he was forced to resign.

Olson Greenberg told Business Insider that she remembered Alan “Ace” Greenberg, who was CEO of Bear Stearns at the time of the departure, getting a phone call and being told that Epstein was going to be “fired” from the firm, though she did not know why.

Despite the murky circumstances surrounding his departure, he remained close with some of the most powerful people at Stearns.

Cayne, who went on to become CEO in 1993, wrote a birthday letter to Epstein wishing him “good health and good luck” that included an apparent chummy inside joke: “P/S – From a ‘six’ to another ‘six.'”

At least one Bear Stearns colleague went on to work for Epstein

Another former colleague who wrote a letter, Ira Zicherman, became one of the original trustees for Epstein’s foundation. The letter references travelling with Ghislaine Maxwell to Columbus, near where longtime benefactor Les Wexner lives, and also seems to conclude with an inside joke.

Epstein’s quick ascent after Bear Stearns was the stuff of legend

Ted Serure, the now-Jeffries managing director who spent many years at Bear Stearns, wrote about how he and Epstein started their careers together at the same desk 25 years earlier — only to take very different paths.

“Somehow I’m still behind the desk — you’re not…” Serure wrote. “I’m asking myself now what I’m still doing there, but it certainly helps define why you’re my hero.”

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