MONEY TO BURN: The Unvarnished Truth About Leon Black, Apollo, and the Rise of a New Wall Street, by William D. Cohan
The financier Leon Black may be entitled to his own wall in the rogues’ gallery of Jeffrey Epstein’s enablers. Between 2012 and 2017, Black gave Epstein a staggering $158 million — or more than $170 million if you count a big loan that Epstein had not made good on when he hanged himself in his jail cell in 2019. Not only did the revelations of these payments put a premature end to Black’s Wall Street career, they ensured that he would be remembered not as one of the great dealmakers of his time but as Epstein’s most generous client.
In “Money to Burn,” the journalist William D. Cohan offers a detailed account of Black’s rise and fall. A former investment banker himself, Cohan is nothing if not thorough, and “Money to Burn” is a coup of reporting, based on extensive interviews with Black, his business partners and many others who are often quoted at great, and at times trying, length.
Cohan is telling two stories, really. One is about Black. The other is about the private equity firm he built, Apollo Global Management, which has been at the center of Wall Street’s ongoing transformation from a place dominated by relatively staid banks and brokerage houses to a more shadowy realm ruled by “alternative asset managers” who raise and lend their own capital.
Black’s arc makes for an almost perfect parable for the corrupting influence of money. His father, Eli, was settling into life as a Long Island rabbi when he pivoted in the mid-1940s. A career in finance, he reasoned without apparent irony, could be just as rewarding as one in the pulpit, as long as “men of virtue” were in charge.
Eli Black became enormously successful, the architect and chief executive of an international conglomerate called the United Brands Company. But his life ended tragically: In early 1975, with the company facing mounting financial problems and a bribery scandal, he leaped out the window of his 44th-floor office in Manhattan’s Pan Am Building.
None of this ultimately deterred Leon from going into finance. Armed with a pair of Ivy League degrees (Dartmouth College, Harvard Business School), he started his career in 1977 at Drexel Burnham Lambert, the junk-bond powerhouse where men of virtue were in distinctly short supply.
When Drexel was forced into bankruptcy in 1990, following a protracted federal investigation into illegal trading, Black launched Apollo. He and his new team raised hundreds of millions of dollars to get started. Their plan was to leverage this money to gain control of distressed companies and then have their way with them.
As Cohan makes clear, sucking profits out of struggling businesses was hard work that often entailed logic-defying feats of financial engineering and self-dealing. Needless to say, Black and his partners fared a lot better in these ventures than the employees or customers of the entities they bought. A series of sexual assaults at an Apollo-owned acute-care facility in Iowa helped prompt a Senate report, whose title — “Profits Over Patients: The Harmful Effects of Private Equity on the U.S. Health Care System” — speaks volumes and yet may still understate the matter.
Bargain hunting became not just a career but an avocation for the billionaires who ran Apollo. In 2011, Josh Harris, an Apollo co-founder and Black protégé, bought a big stake in an N.B.A. franchise, the down-on-their-luck Philadelphia 76ers. Another co-founder, Marc Rowan, set his sights on the Long Island surf town of Montauk, where, to the fury of many locals, he turned an affordable seafood shack into an upmarket one that, in 2019, served a $54 lobster Cobb salad and $795 bottles of rosé.
I guess everyone needs a hobby. Black’s was art. In 2012, he spent nearly $120 million for Edvard Munch’s 1895 drawing of “The Scream.” By then, Black had long been friendly with Epstein, whom he had met at a wedding in 1996. He would eventually fork over tens of millions of dollars to the convicted pedophile and registered sex offender.
Black spoke at length to Cohan about his interactions with Epstein, presumably believing that this book might help him clear his name. And Cohan gives Black plenty of room to mount his defense, however preposterous it may seem: Black claims that he paid Epstein these exorbitant sums — many multiples of what a first-rate Wall Street trusts-and-estates lawyer would charge, as Cohan notes — solely for his tax- and estate-planning advice.
Cohan seems skeptical, but neither does he fully endorse the alternative and seemingly far more credible explanation: that Epstein was less financial adviser than personal fixer for Black, helping him manage his illicit relationships with numerous women.
The news of Black’s entanglement with Epstein first broke in 2019. Then, in March 2021, Guzel Ganieva, a young Russian woman to whom Black had paid millions of dollars in hush money, wrote on Twitter that she’d been sexually abused by him.
Days later, Black stepped down from Apollo, naming Rowan — not Harris, who had long aspired to succeed him — as chief executive. A few months after that, Black filed a RICO suit against Harris and Ganieva, accusing them of conspiring to make her sexual-abuse claims public in an effort to push him out. Black’s complaint compares Harris to “Shakespeare’s Iago,” alleging that once Harris knew he was being passed over for the big job at Apollo, he turned his wrath on his former mentor.
“It’s hard to imagine that that’s where we’re at,” a befuddled Harris told Cohan about Black’s charges. Indeed, reading Black’s unhinged theories about Harris, a different Shakespeare character comes to mind: King Lear. The lawsuit was dismissed by a federal judge in Manhattan in 2022. A year later, though, Black prevailed in a civil suit that Ganieva had filed against him, accusing him of defamation and sexual assault.
In laying out this sordid saga, Cohan offers a lot of conflicting claims. It’s my one real gripe with this book: Cohan is so focused on allowing his subjects to have their say — and, perhaps, on making the most of his considerable access — that he delegates too much of the storytelling to them rather than forcefully shaping the narrative himself.
Last March, a few of my colleagues at The New York Times made a convincing case that Epstein’s services included helping Black obscure millions of dollars that he paid to a dozen women, at least some of whom he had sexual encounters with, a report that Black denied. For whatever reason, in “Money to Burn,” Cohan doesn’t reach his own conclusion about the mystery at the heart of Black’s story: What, exactly, was he paying Epstein for? The resulting picture of Black’s relationship with Epstein — and, in turn, of Black himself — is blurry.
Setting this issue aside, “Money to Burn” is an engaging and valuable work, a portrait of a man and a milieu whose inexhaustible devotion to the accumulation of personal wealth may test your faith in capitalism. What’s more, if Black’s hope was that Cohan would help redeem his character, he may be disappointed with the final product, which closely chronicles his tawdry descent into infamy.
And yet the joke may be on us. Since Black’s departure, Apollo has moved more aggressively into the private-credit markets, exploiting its advantage over banks and brokerage houses, whose debt loads and lending practices are much more heavily regulated. Business is booming. By 2029, Apollo aims to have $1.5 trillion in assets under management — more than the G.D.P. of Indonesia. Black has been thoroughly disgraced in the court of public opinion, but he is still Apollo’s largest individual shareholder. With an estimated personal fortune of around $15 billion, he is surely richer than ever.
MONEY TO BURN: The Unvarnished Truth About Leon Black, Apollo, and the Rise of a New Wall Street | By William D. Cohan | Portfolio | 667 pp. | $40
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