Few people wield more power in New York City real estate than Andrew Farkas.
In the last few years, Mr. Farkas’s company has acquired the Sheraton Times Square, the third largest hotel in New York City, for $373 million and has listed the Lexington Hotel, a historic property whose guests have included Marilyn Monroe and Joe DiMaggio, for $275 million. Developers and brokers refer to him as “the legend of real estate.”
Mr. Farkas, 65, is the founder of Island Capital, a merchant bank, and has also been a powerful political benefactor, especially to former Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo, to whom he has donated millions and whom he employed in a lucrative role when Mr. Cuomo was out of office. He is also friendly with President Trump and has invested in projects of Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law.
But a 127-slip marina he owned in the U.S. Virgin Islands has put the billionaire real estate investor in a new and troubling spotlight. His co-owner was Jeffrey Epstein, whose private island served as the grim center of a sex-trafficking operation that was just a few miles south of the marina.
Through a spokeswoman, Julie Wood, on Tuesday, Mr. Farkas addressed his association with Mr. Epstein publicly for the first time. He said the relationship was always entirely a business one. “He regrets their association and condemns Epstein’s crimes,” Ms. Wood added.
On Wednesday, in another release of files, House Democrats shared 10 photographs and four videos of Mr. Epstein’s home on the secluded island. Accusers have said he brought teens and girls as young as 11 to the property for sexual abuse.
Mr. Farkas’s name appears in Mr. Epstein’s personal emails, which were among the documents and electronic correspondence released earlier by Congress in large batches.
Mr. Farkas does not appear to write any emails himself in the correspondence that was released, but Mr. Epstein invokes his name when writing to others. He wrote “my friend Andrew Farkas,” when he told a visitor that she could hitch a ride on Mr. Farkas’s plane.
The emails do not suggest Mr. Farkas was involved in criminal behavior or impropriety. But they reveal a window into one of Mr. Epstein’s longest business partnerships and shed light on a St. Thomas business deal of Mr. Farkas, involving the marina.
Island Global Yachting, a luxury harbor company, began in 2005 when Mr. Farkas founded the marina business. It eventually grew to include marinas around the world. In 2007, as part of that growth, Mr. Farkas bought the St. Thomas marina, American Yacht Harbor.
Though the first explosive allegations of abuse and trafficking against Mr. Epstein had already made headlines, Mr. Farkas offered Mr. Epstein a deal to split the ownership on the marina a few months later. Mr. Epstein operated his businesses from an office in St. Thomas from 2013 up until his death in 2019, a move that earned him more than $300 million in tax breaks from the U.S. Virgin Islands.
In the decade after they struck up a business partnership, Mr. Epstein and Mr. Farkas had regular phone calls, documents and daily schedules show. Sometimes they met in person for breakfast in New York — on a Friday in October 2014, Mr. Epstein’s house manager, Jojo Fontanilla, was sent to McDonald’s to get four Egg McMuffins for them to share while they talked.
And on one occasion, Mr. Epstein even offered the use of Mr. Farkas’s plane to visitors in need. In January 2014, he received a frantic email from a longtime aide to Larry Summers, who was then a professor at Harvard University and president emeritus. She and her family were stranded in St. Thomas, she said, and needed a flight out.
Mr. Epstein responded immediately.
“My friend Andrew Farkas has a pretty full plane to New York tomorrow but can take one or two of you,” he wrote. “My cars and drivers are at your disposal.”
The aide and her 11-year-old daughter were flown back on Mr. Farkas’s plane the next day.
Mr. Epstein’s stake in the marina was essentially unknown until 2018, when Jennifer Doelling, the chief financial officer of Island Global Yachting, revealed it during a deposition for a tax audit lawsuit.
After news of the partnership leaked out, Mr. Farkas sent an email in 2019 to Island Capital board members.
“The situation is regrettable. Had we been aware of the vile and unspeakable allegations made recently, IGY never would have entered into this transaction,” he wrote.
Mr. Epstein was first charged, on a single count of prostitution, in 2006, one year before the marina deal became final, although allegations had been swirling for years. The victim in the charge had been 14 years old. He pleaded guilty to that charge in 2008.
Mr. Farkas added in the email to the board that Mr. Epstein had been only a passive investor in the project, and that negotiations for the ownership split had begun before he was charged with any crimes.
The Epstein estate has said it sold Mr. Epstein’s stake in Island Global Yachting in 2021. The next year, Mr. Farkas sold the company for $480 million.
The marina was a small part of Mr. Farkas’s portfolio, which is grounded in New York. He is the scion of a family that built the department store chain Alexander’s, which in the second half of the 20th century was as deeply woven into the fabric of middle-class New York life as Target is today.
Mr. Farkas built his own empire buying up troubled rental properties and transforming them into cash flow; his rise coincided with that of Mr. Cuomo.
The two men became partners of sort, with Mr. Cuomo earning more than $2.5 million as vice president at Island Capital when he was not in office. Mr. Farkas served as finance chairman for several of Mr. Cuomo’s campaigns, including his successful 2010 bid for governor. This past year, during Mr. Cuomo’s failed mayoral bid against Zohran Mamdani, Mr. Farkas gave $250,000 to an anti-Mamdani political action committee.
Mr. Farkas also tried to team up with Mr. Cuomo on a marina in Puerto Rico. (That project fizzled.)
During the heat of this fall’s mayoral election, Mr. Mamdani’s campaign released an attack ad that highlighted the failed Puerto Rico partnership and tied it to Mr. Epstein.
“Farkas’s previous partner on luxury marinas in the Caribbean?” the candidate said to the camera. “Jeffery Epstein.”
In the statement through Ms. Wood, his spokeswoman, Mr. Farkas distanced himself from Mr. Epstein, saying the two had been business partners, not friends.
The emails show, however, that Mr. Epstein clearly considered the developer an ally until the end.
Weeks before he was arrested by federal agents on sex trafficking charges and just months before he died by suicide in a jail cell, Mr. Epstein — always focused on image rehabilitation — wanted to give a donation to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
For years, Mr. Epstein had touted his donations to M.I.T. to burnish his image, giving $850,000 between 2002 and 2017. But with allegations against him piling up, the university had rejected his latest gift of $25,000. So in May 2019, wanting to salvage things, he dashed off an email to an M.I.T. official.
And he dropped the name of a friend.
“I can have Andrew Farkas” give the gift on my behalf, Mr. Epstein wrote, noting that Mr. Farkas had also given contributions, in his own name, to Harvard University.
Eight minutes later, he wrote again. “How should Farkas give the money?” It appears the contribution was never made, and Mr. Epstein was arrested weeks later.
Debra Kamin is an investigative reporter for The Times who covers wealth and power in New York.
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