Jeffrey Epstein
Blackmail and So-Called Primitive Accumulation
October 28, 2025
The depositions of brave survivors and the diligent efforts of investigative journalists have supplied us with a wealth of information about Jeffrey Epstein’s sex trafficking crimes. Yet, much of his personal history remains shrouded in intrigue. This is doubly true because Epstein was a Ponzi-swindler, blackmailer, industrial-scale exploiter of women, and even an intelligence cutout, who extensively self-mythologized. As a result, there is considerable perplexity about how Epstein acquired much of his vast fortune, which, according to Forbes, was estimated at nearly $600 million at the time of his death, having fallen from an all-time high of $800 million.1Giacomo Tognini, and John Hyatt, “How Jeffrey Epstein Got So Rich,” Forbes, July 25, 2025, https://forbes.com/sites/giacomotognini/2025/07/25/how-jeffrey-epstein-got-so-rich.
Antisemitic narratives have emerged within the space of this speculation, primarily based on Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell’s seeming connections to Israeli intelligence. As widespread revulsion grows over the genocide in Gaza—and as damning revelations threaten to engulf Donald Trump—far-right opportunists such as Tucker Carlson are exploiting public interest in the Epstein scandal to distance themselves from both a potentially lame-duck president and Israel’s ongoing slaughter. In doing so, they invoke the well-worn specter of a shadowy, transnational banking elite, framing Epstein’s network as proof of foreign interference rather than confronting the West’s strategic alignment with Israel and its complicity in genocide. This deflection, however, obscures a more profound truth: Epstein’s method, as an extortionist and habitual “collector of people,” was a manifestation of—rather than an aberration from—capitalism’s inner workings.2This characterization of Epstein was attributed to Ehud Barak and Nili Priel in David Enrich et al., “A Look Inside Jeffrey Epstein’s Manhattan Lair,” New York Times, August 5, 2025, https://nytimes.com/2025/08/05/us/jeffrey-epstein-mansion-photos.html.
Epstein’s career as a power broker engaged in sex trafficking, money laundering, and espionage embodies the dynamics of post-1970s shifts in capitalism marked by the resurgence of so-called primitive accumulation through asset stripping, personal forms of domination, the enclosure of knowledge, and the financialization of illicit capital flows. With the rise of digital surveillance technologies, his personalized blackmail networks can subsequently be read as a transitional form of coercion now eclipsed by automated statal and corporate architectures of data capture and control. Thus, Epstein’s trajectory exemplifies blackmail capitalism—an integral facet of the contemporary mode of accumulation, reflecting its coercive and violent logics. For Epstein, far from being merely a lurid detail, the compulsive production of kompromat was the structural engine of his entire wealth-building scheme, predetermining outcomes, entrenching power relations, and ultimately explaining the considerable overlap between his financial and sexual crimes.3Kompromat is a transliteration of borrowed NKVD slang and denotes damaging information about a person or group (usually a politician, businessperson, or public figure) used to create negative publicity or for blackmail purposes.
Amid the widespread speculation about Epstein’s life, volumes one and two of Whitney Webb’s One Nation Under Blackmail offers a compelling point of entry, grounding its meticulously researched investigation in verifiable and publicly available sources rather than conjecture.4Whitney Alyse Webb, One Nation Under Blackmail: The Sordid Union Between Intelligence and Crime that Gave Rise to Jeffrey Epstein, vol. 1 and 2 (Trine Day, 2022, EPUB). In the tradition of the muckraking exposé, she traces the intertwined history of clandestine power relations that link organized crime, multistate intelligence agencies, political power brokers, and their corporate patrons. Moreover, her broadly antiauthoritarian perspective shapes the book’s dual focus: documenting Epstein’s career and charting the illicit networks that created him.5While Webb often expresses anarchist-adjacent views, she also promotes cryptocurrency as a technological fix to centralized finance and state overreach. Yet, as critics of cryptolibertarian ideology such as David Golumbia argue, crypto is far from value-neutral and risks reproducing the very neoliberal and far-right logics Webb critiques. David Golumbia, The Politics of Bitcoin: Software as Right-wing Extremism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2016); David Golumbia, Cyberlibertarianism: The Right-Wing Politics of Digital Technology (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2024).
Nevertheless, Webb has little to say about the imperatives of capitalist accumulation, and as a result, does not situate the Epstein phenomenon within its broader socioeconomic context or explain the systemic forces that compel such behavior. To fully grasp the Epstein case, one must venture beyond the established sphere of production and exchange—garbed as it is in the gentlemanly formalities of contract law—into capital’s hinterlands, where “violence, fraud, oppression and plunder are displayed quite openly, without any attempt to disguise them.”6Rosa Luxemburg, The Complete Works of Rosa Luxemburg, vol. 2 (Economic Writings 2), ed. Peter Hudis and Paul Le Blanc, trans. Nicholas Gray and George Shriver (London: Verso, 2015).
Blackmail Capital
A close examination of his career accordingly reveals a broader structural logic with Epstein as emblematic of the current conjuncture. What, then, links Epstein’s blackmail operations to the darker currents of capitalism—human trafficking, vast pools of illicit money, shadowy corporate raiders, and political elites operating like criminal syndicates? And how does the same logic of wealth, power, and exploitation extend into predatory forms of state authority: outsourced security systems, public-private surveillance partnerships such as Palantir’s emerging digital panopticon, indiscriminate ICE raids, and the genocidal displacement of Palestinians through a brutal land grab?
To date, Epstein’s known crimes reveal only a fraction of a much larger apparatus. Yet, the most visible aspects of his multidecade career structurally align with recent transformations in the capitalist mode of accumulation—most notably, the reemergence of capitalism’s original sin: the violence of so-called primitive accumulation. While human trafficking and mafia-style extortion may appear as extrajudicial vices or holdovers from an earlier social order, authorities throughout Epstein’s life turned a blind eye to his racketeering because his illicit activities were broadly indistinguishable from the sanctioned interests of his class—interests shaped by the imperatives of accumulation, competitive advantage, state-building, and war-making.
Ongoing accumulation by dispossession in the form of racial and gender-based violence, thus, “allows for the continual re-foundation on a world scale of the class relationship on which capitalist development rests.” Accordingly, it is this grim logic that also underpins Trump’s complaint that Virginia Roberts Giuffre was “stolen” from him by Epstein, as if she were already a trafficked object rather than his employee.
Under capitalism, wealth functions as a form of social power; consequently, at the heart of the Epstein story is his systematic exploitation of social inequality. Many of the disadvantaged young women recruited into his extensive sexual Ponzi scheme came from lower-income backgrounds—from Eastern Europe, Brazil, and even from Palm Beach County high schools. As a predator operating across multiple registers, Epstein exploited asymmetries of gender, wealth, power, and information, harnessing the very inequities that have expanded globally in recent decades. This aligns with broader trends within capitalism, such as growing wealth disparities, the systemic destruction of social safety nets, weak state enforcement, and the continuing growth of trafficking. As Werner Bonefeld notes, the persistence of such illicit practices—seemingly incongruous with the myth of modern development—demonstrates how Marx’s insight that “a great deal of capital, which appears today in the United States without a certificate of birth, was yesterday, in England, the capitalist blood of children,” remains a decisive judgement on contemporary conditions.7Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, vol. 1, trans. Ben Fowkes (London: Penguin Classics, 1990), 920, quoted in Werner Bonefeld, “The Permanence of Primitive Accumulation: Commodity Fetishism and Social Constitution,” Commoner, no. 2 (2001): 1, https://thecommoner.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/10/The-Permanence-of-Primitive-Accumulation-Bonefeld.pdf.
Similarly, Mariarosa Dalla Costa’s Marxist-feminist analysis draws our attention to the persistence of so-called primitive accumulation, once thought confined to capitalism’s bloody prehistory and characterized by the great enclosures.8Mariarosa Dalla Costa, “Capitalism and Reproduction,” in Open Marxism, vol. 3 (Emancipating Marx), ed. Werner Bonefeld, Richard Gunn, John Holloway, and Kosmas Psychopedis (London: Pluto Press, 1995). While accumulation by dispossession appears in hindsight as a “completed stage” on the path toward full capitalist development, Dalla Costa and the proponents of Open Marxism argue that such practices are suspended yet retained within contemporary capitalism, as described by Marx’s General Law of Capitalist Accumulation functioning as the sine qua non of production.9Robert Nichols, “Disaggregating Primitive Accumulation,” Radical Philosophy 194 (November/December 2015): 18–29, https://www.radicalphilosophy.com/article/disaggregating-primitive-accumulation. The transatlantic slave trade was abolished, yet multiple forms of unpaid labor remain a constant (most notably women’s domestic labor).10Mariarosa Dalla Costa and Selma James, The Power of Women and the Subversion of the Community (Petroluese Press).
As Dalla Costa observes, current inquiry into the sphere of reproduction in both advanced and developing countries reveals “the original sins of the capitalist mode of production,” showing that capitalist accumulation at a planetary level “still draws its life-blood, for…continuous valorisation from waged and unwaged populations.”11Mariarosa Dalla Costa, “Capitalism and Reproduction,” 7. For Marx, the general law is conceived as a governing abstraction that maintains equilibrium by producing a dispossessed, unwaged reserve army of labor, directly symmetrical to the scale of the industrial army of waged earners currently engaged in production. As he writes, the accumulation “of wealth at one pole is…at the same time the accumulation of misery, the torment of labour, slavery, ignorance, brutalisation and moral degradation at the opposite pole.”12Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, vol. 1, trans. Ben Fowkes, ed. David Fernbach (London: Penguin, 1990), 799.
As a social stratum, the dispossessed subproletariat represents a division within the division of labor, from capital’s standpoint, a seeming dross, “thrown hither and thither,” sloughed off from waged employment and vulnerable to direct commodification.13Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, trans. Daniel De Leon (New York: Labor News, 1951). As Dalla Costa points out, in cases of organ trafficking, “superfluous labour-power is literally cut to pieces [to] rebuild the bodies of those who can pay for the right to live.”14Mariarosa Dalla Costa, “Capitalism and Reproduction,” 10. Ongoing accumulation by dispossession in the form of racial and gender-based violence, thus, “allows for the continual re-foundation on a world scale of the class relationship on which capitalist development rests.”15Mariarosa Dalla Costa, “Capitalism and Reproduction,” 12. Accordingly, it is this grim logic that also underpins Trump’s complaint that Virginia Roberts Giuffre was “stolen” from him by Epstein, as if she were already a trafficked object rather than his employee.
Beyond regular exploitation through labor and guided by the abstractions of the general law, Jeffrey Epstein’s insatiable appetites, and those he unleashed in others, closely resemble that which Marx described as “the werewolf hunger of capital for surplus labour”—a voracity laid bare in London’s eighteenth- and nineteenth-century “child markets,” wherein parishes auctioned off orphans (so-called waste children) to employers as apprentices.16Werner Bonefeld, “The Permanence of Primitive Accumulation”; Aylsa Levene, “Parish Apprenticeship and the Old Poor Law in London,” Economic History Review 63, no. 4 (2010): 915–41, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-0289.2009.00485.x. Likewise, Epstein, who trafficked hundreds if not thousands of women and girls, profited from both lax enforcement and the numerous extractive privileges that capitalism affords his class. Addressing such abuses, Rosa Luxemburg extends Marx’s theory of primitive accumulation, arguing that capital’s ongoing expansion depends on the incorporation of “non-capitalist social strata” into the capitalist system, creating imperial zones of military plunder through conquest where freebooting private mercenary companies reign.17Rosa Luxemburg, The Accumulation of Capital (London: Routledge, 2004), 348.
It is therefore no surprise that, holding multiple passports, Epstein operated freely across informal gray zones and shadow economies, engaging in offshore money laundering and trafficking both arms and people while acting as an “access agent”—a sneak thief infiltrating influential circles, gathering intelligence, and amassing vast personal wealth in the process.18Among items seized from the Epstein house in 2019 was a long-expired “fraudulent” passport, listed by the US Department of Justice as “ONE CELLOPHANE CONTAINING; Austrian Passport with Epstein photograph.” “Epstein Files Phase One-A. Evidence List,” US Department of Justice, accessed October 7, 2025, https://www.justice.gov/ag/media/1391271/dl?inline. See also the coverage in the Guardian and New York Times. Victoria Bekiempis, “Jeffrey Epstein: Diamonds, Cash, and Fake Passports Found in Raid, Prosecutors Say,” Guardian, July 15, 2019, https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/jul/15/jeffrey-epstein-latest-house-arrest-request; Benjamin Weiser and Ali Watkins, “Jeffrey Epstein’s Safe Had ‘Piles of Cash’ and a Fake Passport, Prosecutors Say,” New York Times, July 15, 2019, https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/15/nyregion/jeffrey-epstein-news.html. Cloaked in the paradigm of sovereign impunity, the distinction between legal and illegal economic activity is thus rendered perspectival—determined from a class standpoint by whoever controls the monopoly on violence. Accumulative strategies, whether regulated or not, represent the dual aspect of the general law. On one side, sanctioned exploitation, reflecting what David McNally calls capital’s predominant “bloodless” image; on the other, the lawless expropriation of the dispossessed.19David McNally, Blood and Money: War, Slavery, Finance, and Empire (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2020), 2. These distinctions remain provisional, however, holding only at the point of initial value creation; once profits are laundered, the distinction becomes difficult to sustain.
As previously noted, such predatory dynamics are well reflected in the biographical details of Epstein’s ascent, comprehensively documented in One Nation Under Blackmail, which describes how he cultivated influence at the intersection of high finance, the arms trade, organized crime, and espionage.20Webb, One Nation Under Blackmail. From the late 1970s to the mid-1980s, Epstein initially appeared to acquaintances as a commonplace white-collar scam artist—a Mr. Ripley-type figure of dubious talents who would nickel-and-dime everyone he encountered.21Edward Jay Epstein, “My Tea with Jeffrey Epstein,” Air Mail, September 14, 2019, https://airmail.news/issues/2019-9-14/my-tea-with-jeffrey-epstein. By the early 2000s, however, he had risen to become what C. Wright Mills calls a “liaison man”: a self-styled power broker building consensus across elite corporate, political, cultural, and academic spheres.22C. Wright Mills, The Power Elite (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1956). In many respects, Epstein’s rise defies straightforward explanation and, therefore, a brief excursus into his biography, as presented by Webb, is warranted.
Biography
Throughout Epstein’s life, personal grifts and strategic alliances intersected; sexual coercion, financial misconduct, and institutional protection mutually reinforced each other, with kompromat functioning as their linchpin. Consequently, Epstein’s exploitation of informational asymmetries through blackmail served not only as a personal vice but also as the cornerstone of his overall wealth-building strategy.
Born in 1953 to lower-middle-class Jewish parents in Coney Island, Brooklyn, Epstein graduated from Lafayette High School and reportedly skipped two grades as a gifted child. He briefly attended Cooper Union before transferring to New York University’s Courant Institute for Mathematical Sciences, but left in 1974 without earning a degree. Despite lacking formal qualifications, however, Epstein began teaching at the prestigious Dalton School, a preparatory institution on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, where he taught senior students mathematics.
Photo Credit: Stephen Ogilvy via Wikimedia Commons
This position was likely secured through the influence of Donald Barr, the father of the future US Attorney General William Barr. Both Barrs reportedly had links with the Office of Strategic Services and the CIA, and William Barr would later play a significant role in the Iran-Contra coverup.23Barr advised George H. W. Bush to issue preemptive pardons to six Iran-Contra defendants (including former defense secretary Caspar Weinberger and CIA official Duane Clarridge). Throughout the 1950s, Donald Barr organized a series of conferences on “the identification, guidance, and instruction of the gifted,” and in 1967 Epstein attended the Interlochen Center for the Arts (a program that hosts gifted students). Webb suggests that Barr’s interest in promoting “gifted college dropouts” may have influenced Epstein’s unconventional hiring.24Webb, One Nation Under Blackmail, vol. 2, 10. Between 1990 and 2003, Epstein donated to Interlochen, sponsoring a scholarship lodge, and was later, along with Ghislaine Maxwell, accused of grooming a student. See also Kate Briquelet, “Epstein Had His Own Lodge at Interlochen’s Prestigious Arts Camp for Kids,” The Daily Beast, July 11, 2019, https://www.thedailybeast.com/jeffrey-epstein-had-his-own-lodge-at-interlochens-prestigious-arts-camp-for-kids-in-michigan/. Former Dalton students allege that Epstein fraternized inappropriately while at the school, from which he was ultimately dismissed in 1976, with his records scrubbed—a likely indication of misconduct. 25Webb, One Nation Under Blackmail, vol. 2, 11–13.
Through the Dalton connection, Epstein came to the attention of Alan Greenberg, then a partner and later the CEO of Bear Stearns, who was known to favor employees who were “poor, smart and had a deep desire to become rich.”26Alan C. Greenberg, Memos from the Chairman (New York: Workman Publishing, 1996, EPUB), 11. Epstein fit the bill and Greenberg offered him a position as an assistant floor trader. Mentored by Greenberg, Epstein began working with wealthy clients and was rapidly promoted, gaining intimate knowledge of US tax codes and offshore banking. He was abruptly dismissed from the company, however, over a “technical infringement” which Securities and Exchange Commission records suggest was due to insider trading. The dismissal coincided with a failed corporate takeover by the Bronfman-owned Seagram Company Ltd., but Epstein was seemingly never charged.27Webb, One Nation Under Blackmail, vol. 2, 13–14.
Webb provides a series of detailed explanations for why Epstein escaped prosecution, primarily involving the reputational protection of important Bear Stearns clients, such as the Bronfmans.28Webb, One Nation Under Blackmail, vol. 2, 14–18. Epstein’s “abrupt resignation” thus not only shielded Greenberg, but also protected wider networks implicated in the insider trading scheme. The episode marks a nascent pattern of evading accountability and, perhaps more importantly, Epstein’s recognition of the possibilities of using reputation management as an effective form of protection. It also appears to be the earliest instance of a strategy he would later perfect, which he called “playing the box”—a self-protective grift designed to leave his targets powerless to seek recourse, often for reasons of “sheer social embarrassment.” 29Attributed to Steven Hoffenberg. Vicky Ward, “Was Jeffrey Epstein a Spy?” Rolling Stone, October 22, 2021, https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/jeffrey-epstein-steven-hoffenberg-intelligence-agencies-spy-1197708/.
...where trust and covenants are scarce, blackmail functions as a mechanism to secure transactions within gray and illicit markets...For Epstein, this strategy was enabled through a synthesis of sexual and economic leverage, revealing the necessity of dispossession and direct personal domination central to his scheme.
Throughout the 1980s, Epstein operated under the company name Intercontinental Assets Group. According to friends and confidants, he described himself as a financial “bounty hunter” recovering money “looted by African dictators” for extremely wealthy clients. The same acquaintances, however, also suspected him of concealing such assets. In addition, his future associate Steven Hoffenberg claims that, at the time, Epstein was being “trained” in arms trading by Adnan Khashoggi while also maintaining close ties with the British MI6-connected arms dealer Douglas Leese.30Webb, One Nation Under Blackmail, vol. 2, 18–24.
Leese, along with Mark Thatcher, had brokered the record-breaking £45 billion Al-Yamamah arms deal between British Aerospace and Saudi Arabia. Although Khashoggi and Leese sat on opposite sides of the agreement, both were reportedly clients of Epstein’s Intercontinental Assets Group, which was simultaneously cultivating a close partnership with the CIA-favored Bank of Credit and Commerce International.31The Bank of Credit and Commerce International was a global bank involved in significant financial crimes and money laundering, of which the CIA admitted being aware. Mark Hosenball. “The CIA’s BCCI Laundry,” Washington Post, August 11, 1991, https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/opinions/1991/08/11/the-cias-bcci-laundry/6c69ffbf-42d3-46ee-ba86-b8ad03adb685/. Foreshadowing Epstein’s later operations, Khashoggi acted as a middleman between the United States, Saudi Arabia, and Israel, demonstrating how access and influence could be systematically mobilized to move arms and orchestrate lucrative deals in diplomatic gray areas, while, at the same time, securing immunity.32“If one offers money to a government to influence it, that is corruption. But if someone receives money for services rendered afterwards, that is a commission.” Adnan Khashoggi, 1976, quoted in Anthony Sampson, The Arms Bazaar: The Companies, the Dealers, the Bribes (New York: Hodder and Stoughton, 1977), 183.
Moreover, Webb suggests that during the mid-1980s, Epstein became involved with Israeli military intelligence (Aman), which was then commanded by the future Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak. Barak would thereafter meet with Epstein on multiple occasions. During the same period, Epstein entered the orbit of publishing magnate Robert Maxwell, a Czech-born British wartime intelligence officer who allegedly maintained backchannel contacts with both the KGB and the Mossad.33Maxwell built his publishing empire, Pergamon Press, by pioneering the pay-to-play model for academic scientific journals. He began by publishing scientific papers he had gleaned from the ruins of post-Second World War Germany while serving as a British intelligence officer. The UK Foreign Office (FO) considered Maxwell a “thoroughly bad character and almost certainly financed by Russia,” suggesting ties to the KGB. Lydia Bell, “FO Suspected Maxwell Was a Russian Agent, Papers Reveal,” Telegraph, May 22, 2003, https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/1445707/FO-suspected-Maxwell-was-a-Russian-agent-papers-reveal.html. In addition, Seymour M. Hersh and his source Ari Ben-Menashe claim Maxwell’s involvement in the entrapment and abduction of Israeli nuclear whistleblower Mordechai Vanunu are highly suggestive of links to Mossad, yet this remains contested. Seymour Hersh, The Sampson Option: Israel’s Nuclear Arsenal and America’s Foreign Policy (New York: Random House, 1991), 312–13. Most accounts linking Epstein to Israeli military intelligence appear to stem from former Mossad agent Ari Ben-Menashe. Nonetheless, such claims remain materially unsubstantiated. Journalist Vicky Ward, however, reports that according to his then business associate Steven Hoffenberg, Epstein worked for “national security interests.” Other sources told Ward that he operated on behalf of multiple governments, including Israel.34Supporting the view that Epstein worked for Israeli intelligence, he did visit Israel in 2008 at the time of his first indictment with a view toward moving there. Vicky Ward, “Was Jeffrey Epstein a Spy?” The original source for this claim is the Palm Beach Daily News (citing a spokesperson from the Tel Aviv Hilton), which reported that Epstein was “spending Passover, meeting with Israel research scientists, and taking a tour of military bases.” Shannon Donelly, Palm Beach Daily News, April 27, 2008, https://www.newspapers.com/article/palm-beach-daily-news-epstein-went-to-is/90641483/.
Hoffenberg, the founder of Towers Financial Corporation, first met Epstein in 1987, before hiring him to sell securities. Leese had earlier introduced the pair and, together, Hoffenberg and Epstein attempted a corporate raid on Pan Am—a bid that ultimately failed following the Lockerbie bombing. Just a few years later in 1993, Towers Financial Corporation abruptly collapsed when the Securities and Exchange Commission accused it of selling hundreds of millions of dollars in unregistered securities, making it one of the largest Ponzi schemes in history.35Webb states that Hoffenberg and Epstein sold “$272 million in promissory notes, where they were “offering returns of 12 to 16 percent and marketing them largely to people of modest means, among them widows, retirees and people with disabilities.” Webb, One Nation Under Blackmail, vol. 2, 33. Hoffenberg pleaded guilty and was sentenced to twenty years in prison, while Epstein, his co-conspirator, who had by then left the company, remained unnamed at trial. Hoffenberg later claimed that Epstein had designed the scheme alone and, in 2016, filed a lawsuit against Epstein. Equally significant, it was during this period that Epstein forged two of his most defining connections: Leslie Wexner and Donald Trump, both of whom were seemingly linked to organized crime.36Webb references the 1985 investigation into the murder of The Limited accountant Arthur L. Shapiro shortly before he was due to give evidence to the IRS. A Columbus police memo documents the proximity of Wexner’s business associates to the Genovese-LaRocca crime family. Epstein began working with Wexner as his sole money manager only a year after the Shapiro murder. Webb, One Nation Under Blackmail, vol. 2, 95–98. Trump Tower and Trump Plaza were built using overpriced ready-mix concrete bought from mob controlled suppliers and unions, something brought to light as part of broader investigations and indictments into mafia racketeering, bid-rigging, and inflated concrete costs. David Cay Johnston, “Just What Were Donald Trump’s Ties to the Mob?” Politico Magazine, May 2016, https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2016/05/donald-trump-2016-mob-organized-crime-213910/.
In 1991, the sudden collapse of Robert Maxwell’s Mirror Group sent shockwaves through financial markets, severely denting investor confidence after it was revealed that Maxwell had been raiding the company’s pension funds to prop up his heavily leveraged, failing businesses. Of the approximately £460 million misappropriated from the pension fund, only around £100 million was ever recovered and returned to former Mirror Group employees. While not definitively proven, a report in the Telegraph suggests that Epstein likely assisted Ghislaine Maxwell in concealing funds pilfered from the Mirror Group. The pair, who initially posed as husband and wife, would remain secretive about their early dealings. 37Jack Hardy, “Jeffrey Epstein Helped Ghislaine Maxwell’s Father Robert Hide His Millions, BBC Series Claims,” Telegraph, April 1, 2022, https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2022/04/01/jeffrey-epstein-helped-ghislaine-maxwells-father-robert-hide/.
By this time, Epstein was already closely associated with billionaire Wexner, tightening the two circles of influence. Wexner was the powerful CEO of The Limited Inc., a hugely successful global retail firm based in New Albany, Ohio—a town largely redeveloped by Wexner himself. While there is no firm evidence linking the exposure of Wexner’s holdings to the collapse of the Mirror Group, the emergence of Ghislaine Maxwell within Wexner’s orbit via Epstein raises intriguing questions about motive. Were Epstein and Wexner instrumental in hiding the missing fortune?
That same year, The Limited acquired Southern Air Transport (SAT), a former CIA airline notorious for its role in covert operations during the Iran-Contra affair, including shuttling weapons between the United States, Israel, and the Nicaraguan anticommunist guerrillas—a scandal that first came to light when the Sandinistas shot down an SAT C-123K transport.38Barry Bearak, “Intrigue Trails Airline Linked to Iran, Contras,” Los Angeles Times, December 26, 1986, https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1986-12-26-mn-454-story.html. Following Wexner’s acquisition, SAT relocated to Rickenbacker, Ohio, a move that Webb claims Epstein managed logistically.39Webb, One Nation Under Blackmail, vol. 2, 230–34.
Maria Farmer, a former art student employed by Epstein in the mid-1990s (during which he posed as a patron of the arts), has stated that Epstein always appeared to be Wexner’s employee. Farmer alleges that she was kidnapped and confined at Wexner’s New Albany property, deeded to Epstein some four years earlier, where Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell assaulted her. She further asserts that the sexual kompromat that the pair collected via hidden cameras, which Maxwell was keen to point out, was routinely sent to Wexner.40Webb, One Nation Under Blackmail, vol. 2, 263; Sarah Ellison and Jonathan O’Connell, “Epstein Accuser Holds Victoria’s Secret Billionaire Responsible, as He Keeps His Distance,” Washington Post, October 5, 2019, https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/epstein-accuser-holds-victorias-secret-billionaire-responsible-as-he-keeps-his-distance/2019/10/05/1b6baf6c-d0d3-11e9-b29b-a528dc82154a_story.html; “Jeffrey Epstein Accuser Says His House Had Cameras ‘Monitoring Private Moments,’” CBS News, July 11, 2019, https://www.cbsnews.com/news/jeffrey-epstein-accuser-maria-farmer-says-his-house-under-constant-tv-surveillance/.
As Wexner’s foremost employee, the billionaire granted Epstein the ultimate power of attorney over The Limited, appointing him as a trustee on the board of the Wexner Foundation. Meanwhile, Epstein also began to expand his network and influence through a philanthropic organisation known as the Study Group (or MEGA), which had links to Birthright Israel and the Hillel Foundation—both established by Wexner and the Bronfman family to promote Israeli interests.41Gabriel Sherman, “The Mogul and the Monster: Inside Jeffrey Epstein’s Decades-Long Relationship With His Biggest Client,” Vanity Fair, June 8, 2021, https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2021/06/inside-jeffrey-epsteins-decades-long-relationship-with-his-biggest-client. Nevertheless, this raises a critical question: Why would a billionaire such as Wexner grant Epstein such extensive executive power?
In interviews, Webb has speculated that Epstein may have served as a financial “bagman” for Wexner—acting as a money courier, cash handler, or launderer—using Wexner’s wealth to establish his exclusive offshore trust that was reported to have offered financial services, including tax avoidance strategies, for ultra-wealthy clients seeking to mitigate liabilities such as IRS audits or costly divorce settlements.42Webb variously suggests that Epstein operated as a financial bagman for Leslie Wexner, much as Meyer Lansky had done for the Bronfman family a generation earlier. Lansky, long known as the mob’s “accountant,” helped institutionalize organized crime with Lucky Luciano in the 1930s, pioneering the use of offshore banking to conceal and launder illicit profits. Along with the Bronfman family in the 1940s, Lansky channeled weapons to the Haganah, Zionist paramilitaries operating in Mandatory Palestine. Webb, One Nation Under Blackmail, vol. 1, 68–71. After Epstein’s first arrest in 2007, Leon Black, founder of the equity firm Apollo Global Management, emerged as Epstein’s principal client following the deterioration of Epstein and Wexner’s relationship. Wexner’s abandonment of Epstein may thus underscore the principal role of Epstein’s offshore portfolio management activities. If the scheme were to unwind, Epstein—as a sex offender and known swindler— would simply be left holding the bag, providing clients with plausible deniability.
Building on this, one might speculate that Epstein employed a multifaceted approach, combining introductions between former models and wealthy clients—and, in many cases, procuring underage girls for them—with sexual kompromat and offshore financial structures, thereby putting his targets in situations that left them vulnerable to reputational or marital crises. Yet, by presenting himself as both a matchmaker and a discreet financial fixer, Epstein could profit from the very predicaments he helped orchestrate, offering to conceal their wealth under the guise of friendship.
Within such contexts, where trust and covenants are scarce, blackmail functions as a mechanism to secure transactions within gray and illicit markets, operating alongside money laundering and financial manipulation. For Epstein, this strategy was enabled through a synthesis of sexual and economic leverage, revealing the necessity of dispossession and direct personal domination central to his scheme.
The Double-Edged Sword
Beyond patterns of affiliation, however, why does blackmail persist as a social phenomenon within late capitalism?43See Thompson, Whigs and Hunters, on the etymology of blackmail and the 1723 Black Act, which targeted poachers contesting the usurpation of the commons. The enduring poacher and gamekeeper analogy persists in financial contexts, as with Epstein’s dual role tracing and concealing offshore funds. E. P. Thompson, Whigs and Hunters: The Origin of the Black Act (London: Allen Lane, 1975). Furthermore, why does extrajudicial coercion remain necessary, particularly within clandestine, trust-based networks operating outside the scope of established contract law?
...Palantir-style systems can profile, target, and influence individuals impersonally, folding such capacities into existing state-corporate security architectures. In this sense, Epstein’s niche as a bespoke wetware operator has been subsumed by algorithmic, institutionalized, and far more scalable tools of perception management and geopolitical shaping—until finally, in his New York jail cell, he too became redundant.
Epstein was engaged in manufacturing sexual kompromat, a form of “participant blackmail” arising from a preexisting social relationship between blackmailer and target.44Mike Hepworth, Blackmail: Publicity and Secrecy in Everyday Life (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1975), 76. Such methods resemble pressure tactics used in boiler room scams and multilevel marketing schemes, leveraging shame to enforce silence, thereby preventing irreparable reputational damage and often creating obligations that can be called upon for future favors. The social function of blackmail, then, is to establish trust in ill-defined domains where contract law holds no sway. It is particularly effective among high-status individuals who stand to lose not only their reputation but also face significant financial costs (such as those associated with expensive divorce settlements). Moreover, wherever perceived sexual deviancy—whether real or imagined—is weaponized, blackmail can take on forms that echo historical patterns of domination.45Hepworth, Blackmail, 103.
Blackmail can also function as a reciprocal trade-off or compromise. As Whitney Webb’s book highlights, alongside the anticommunist Red Scare of the 1950s—during which Trump’s mentor Roy Cohn served as special counsel to Senator Joseph McCarthy—the Lavender Scare targeted closeted queer people in public service with equal zeal. Webb argues that these intertwined dynamics compelled public figures vulnerable to such allegations—such as J. Edgar Hoover, Roy Cohn, and powerful men in their circle—to maintain a system of mutual blackmail, ensuring each other’s silence and complicity while banking political favors.46Webb, One Nation Under Blackmail, vol. 1, 63.The Red and Lavender Scares are thus best understood as state-sanctioned forms of blackmail, chilling progressive speech and free association while hardening up the state’s perceived vulnerabilities.
Photo Credit: Los Angeles Times
These historical campaigns closely resemble today’s International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance-based accusations of antisemitism or Hamas affiliation, which are regularly used to silence criticism of Israel. Similarly, Trump’s tariff threats and the strategies outlined in The Art of the Deal illustrate how coercive leverage can shape transactional outcomes. In this respect, policymakers and war makers share many similarities with ordinary blackmailers, employing threats and leverage to enforce compliance.
The blackmailer’s offer, at any scale, has a double edge. On one hand, it promises protection and freedom from threat; on the other, it demands tribute to avert violence or reputational ruin. Hence, in cases of extortion, the blackmailer straddles supply and demand, “producing both the danger, and, at a price, the shield against it.” This is something to bear in mind as Ghislaine Maxwell blackmails a sitting president from jail, threatening to expose him, while, at the same time, offering to clear his name. Likewise, the state’s provision of protection from local and external threats similarly qualifies as a form of racketeering, whereby “banditry, piracy, gangland rivalry, policing and war…all belong to the same continuum.”47Charles Tilly, “War Making and State Making as Organized Crime,” in Bringing the State Back In, ed. Peter Evans, Dietrich Rueschemeyer, and Theda Skocpol (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 170–71.
The difference between legitimate and illegitimate force consequently matters little. As anthropologist Anton Blok’s study of the mafia in rural Sicily asserts, it is beside the point to ask whether mafia violence is legitimate, since the term is “fraught with so many implications that it may best be avoided.”48Anton Blok, The Mafia of a Sicilian Village, 1860–1960: A Study of Violent Peasant Entrepreneurs (New York: Harper & Row, 1974), 172. From the state’s standpoint, the extrajudicial violence of the mafia is unlicensed. Nevertheless, the mafia has historically played a significant role in electoral machines in both Italy and the United States. Politicians depend on votes, and in Sicily, the mafia of the villages provided crucial leverage over peasants, acting as an intermediary between political candidates and the electorate. As Blok explains, this “patron-broker-client” relationship—whereby, in return for voter coercion, politicians shield mafiosi from the full force of the law—represents a mutual exchange of political favors, strengthening ties within what Roy Cohn would later call the “favor bank.”49Roy Cohn’s mastery of New York’s “favor bank” epitomized the strong overlap between blackmail and elite networking. Marie Brenner, “How Donald Trump and Roy Cohn’s Ruthless Symbiosis Changed America,” Vanity Fair, June 28, 2017, https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2017/06/donald-trump-roy-cohn-relationship.
Furthermore, historically, the activities of war-making, resource extraction, access to credit, and capital accumulation have intersected. As a result, the emergence of the modern European state is a contingent byproduct of efforts to centralize authority and increase efficiency in war. In return for protection, states levied taxes to fund extraterritorial adventures, further advancing the drive toward capital accumulation. These measures sought to monopolize violence and diminish competing power holders both internally and externally, thereby establishing unmatched sovereignty.50Tilly contends that the foundation of the modern nation-state rests on the interdependence between war-making and state-making—activities that closely resemble, on a larger scale, the extortion rackets of organized crime. He further argues that the only real difference between state coercion and extrajudicial racketeering is that the former establishes legitimacy by exerting sovereign control over the monopoly on violence. Tilly, “War Making and State Making as Organized Crime,” 169–91. Fernand Braudel contends that acts of piracy at sea and banditry on land were not merely random acts of lawlessness, but were often tolerated, supported, or even legitimized by powerful city-states and the lords who profited from them. Before the adoption of standing armies, emergent states in times of war thus enlisted privateers, freebooters, and hired bandits to undertake “disguised war.”51Fernand Braudel, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II, vol. 2, trans. Siân Reynolds, (London: Collins, 1973), 866.
When demobilized, such irregulars typically continued their enterprises. This dynamic persists today, with the prevailing use of private military companies, including the Wagner Group, Erik Prince’s Blackwater, or the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation. Such strategic actors are often employed to secure extraction zones abroad while policing and incarcerating surplus populations domestically. If, as Luxemburg suggests, global stagnation impels capital to blur the boundaries between public and private power and between war and peace, then outsourced armies and private intelligence outfits—entities that fuse militarism with capital—are likely to emerge as the primary beneficiaries of accumulation strategies suited to the current conjuncture.
Epstein’s career exemplifies how the battlefield now extends both within and beyond the state, reflecting a profound interdependence between finance, logistics, and war.52See Deborah Cowen, The Deadly Life of Logistics: Mapping Violence in Global Trade (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014. In this context, hybrid warfare, or the “weaponization of everything,” flourishes in spaces where corporate, criminal, and intelligence networks exploit illicit flows, rely on proxies and cutouts, move capital beyond scrutiny, and shape public consensus while lobbying for ever-weaker oversight.53Within 5GW, “intelligence operations are thus ubiquitous and constant, regardless of alliances and formal treaties.… They involve everything from hacking to physical intrusion, cultural contamination to outright violence. An individual operation may be compromised, cancelled or concluded, but the intelligence wars are neither declared nor ever truly ended. Is there a better metaphor for the new world of inter-state conflict?” Mark Galeotti, The Weaponization of Everything: A Field Guide to the New Way of War (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2023), 204. Within this paradigm, low-intensity coercion is routine, with financial and informational strategies serving as leverage to circumvent the need for direct military confrontation. Such outsourced operations both ruthlessly strip resources from the internal public sphere while simultaneously destabilizing the extractive frontiers, which Luxemburg identifies as the “non-capitalist strata.”54For examples of accumulation through privatization, see David Harvey, The New Imperialism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003).
As Webb documents, Epstein and his backers were thus well-positioned as private intermediaries, providing nonkinetic support for proxy wars—laundering money, influence, and reputations to ensure the smooth flow of arms and covert operations —a role that became increasingly necessary following the CIA’s exposure during the Iran-Contra affair. Such shadow structures are an expression of the reifying power identified in Marx’s general law, whereby class control over the monopoly on violence—often enforced along racialized and gender-based lines—distinguishes exploitation in production from expropriation and dispossession. This separation produces an orthogonal structure both inside and outside the state, whereby soft power and hard power operate in tandem to secure global accumulation.
After his initial arrest and plea deal in 2007, Epstein sought to rehabilitate his reputation and adapt to emerging digital surveillance technologies. In 2015, he partnered with Ehud Barak to invest in a 911 emergency dispatch startup, Reporty Homeland Security (later rebranded as Carbyne). Leaked emails reveal the pair explored opportunities within the tech surveillance industry, forging connections with Palantir founder Peter Thiel and Israeli signals intelligence (Unit 8200), while simultaneously offering members of Vladimir Putin’s inner circle ways to evade sanctions.55US treasury files show Epstein had “hundreds of millions of dollars” in transactions with now sanctioned Russian banks. Matthew Petti, “Inside Jeffrey Epstein’s Spy Industry Connections,” Reason, August 27, 2025, https://reason.com/2025/08/27/inside-jeffrey-epsteins-spy-industry-connections/. Epstein initially aimed to pitch Reporty to Thiel, although the bid was considered premature. He later invested $40 million in Thiel’s Valar Ventures, signaling his credibility as a tech-sector investor.
Despite Epstein’s efforts within the emerging field of spyware, artificial intelligence and algorithmic data collection, by 2019, his ability to wield influence had largely waned. Webb is correct in observing that his methods of blackmail had lost efficacy with the rise of Silicon Valley titans as a new power elite. Epstein’s “old economy” techniques for cultivating elite ties—hoarding sexual kompromat and laundering capital—were manual forms of intelligence gathering, dependent on personal access, sexual exploitation, and human compromise. By contrast, Palantir-style systems can profile, target, and influence individuals impersonally, folding such capacities into existing state-corporate security architectures. In this sense, Epstein’s niche as a bespoke wetware operator has been subsumed by algorithmic, institutionalized, and far more scalable tools of perception management and geopolitical shaping—until finally, in his New York jail cell, he too became redundant.
Nevertheless, the broader point for the left is not whether Epstein ended it himself, but that the era of parapolitical logics he embodied has evolved into far more penetrating technologies of control and compromise. At the time of his death, Epstein was not merely an anachronism, but a prefiguration of systems that now hew ever more closely to capital’s inhuman abstractions—where surveillance no longer relies on interpersonal leverage but enacts impersonal violence at massive scale.