David Enrich

And you can see him progressing from one stage of this to the next and getting more ambitious and bolder and bolder the more times he pulls this off and the more times he gets away with it.

So Epstein around this time has been referring to himself as a financial bounty hunter, basically someone who tracks down hidden assets all over the world.

And as it happens, we're in the early 1980s at this point, he is dating a Spanish actress named Ana Obregón.

And it turns out that her family has just realized that they have lost millions of dollars in the implosion of a securities firm in New York.

And so they hire Epstein to track down their missing money.

And he pairs up with a friend of his who's a former federal prosecutor.

And together they spend the next couple of years trying to track down these missing assets.

And lo and behold, they find them.

They're in a bank in the Cayman Islands.

And Epstein and his buddy charter a jet, go down to Cayman.

And somehow walk away with millions of dollars of these securities.

They recover it and get paid a certain portion of that as a fee.

And so Epstein by this point is almost certainly a millionaire, which is really – it's quite an extraordinary turnaround for a guy who just a few years earlier was this working class guy trying to make a living as a high school teacher.

Right.

And to be frank, it's one of the things I've struggled with a little bit in reporting the story and in understanding the story, because Epstein, he likes to present himself as this financial genius.

We have not seen evidence to support that claim.

We do see here some glimmer of cleverness that does set him apart.

And so around this time, Epstein has amassed

enough money that he is gone from having been kind of chased out of Bear Stearns with his tail between his legs to now he returns to Bear Stearns, this time as a valued client.

He's doing lots of trading through the firm, which produces revenue for Bear Stearns, which makes Bear Stearns very eager to keep him in its good graces.