David Enrich

He grew up in Coney Island in Brooklyn.

His dad was an employee of the New York City Parks Department.

He was really kind of scraping by growing up and then somehow starts to climb this ladder.

Right.

Right.

to that he was affiliated with intelligence services.

And the period from basically the mid-1970s to the early 1990s, for the most part, has been just a complete black box.

And so our goal, when we started reporting on this months ago, was to try and get inside that black box and figure out how Epstein got his start.

And the bottom line of how he did that was that he was an extremely successful con man.

He stole, he deceived,

he manipulated and he learned over and over again that he could do so basically with impunity.

It begins in 1976.

Epstein is a teacher at the Dalton School in Manhattan.

And he gets invited to a reception at an art gallery.

And he goes kind of grudgingly in his tongue.

And at the reception, he bumps into the parent of one of his students who is impressed with his math chops.

And the parent suggests that maybe he is wasting his time being a teacher and instead should consider a career in Wall Street.

And the parent then introduces Epstein to a guy named Ace Greenberg.

Yeah, who at the time was a top executive at Bear Stearns, which is this scrappy Wall Street investment bank.

And one of the ways in which it's scrappy is that it is not going to hire Ivy League MBAs.