The billionaire financier Leon Black, one of Wall Street’s most powerful executives, was facing questions from clients after Jeffrey Epstein was arrested last year on federal sex trafficking charges. The two men had known each other for decades, and investors of Mr. Black’s investment company, Apollo Global Management, wanted to know how close they had been.
Such questions were valid, Mr. Black said, according to a transcript of a call with analysts in July 2019. He said in a letter that same day to investors that he had had a “limited relationship” with Mr. Epstein, a convicted sex offender, and had consulted him “from time to time” on personal financial matters.
But their connection was deeper than Mr. Black let on: The two men often socialized and dined together, and Mr. Black was a lucrative client for Mr. Epstein over the final decade of his life.
Mr. Black wired Mr. Epstein at least $50 million in the years after Mr. Epstein’s 2008 conviction for soliciting prostitution from a teenage girl, according to documents reviewed by The New York Times and interviews with four people with knowledge of the transactions. The transfers included $10 million to a foundation started by Mr. Epstein and consulting fees that were sufficiently unusual to draw scrutiny from Deutsche Bank, where Mr. Epstein kept his accounts. Two of the people said the total amount sent by Mr. Black to Mr. Epstein could be as high as $75 million.
It was not clear what kind of services Mr. Epstein provided to Mr. Black, whose $9 billion fortune can buy him access to the best lawyers and accountants in the world. Mr. Epstein, though he styled himself as a “financial doctor” to wealthy clients, was a college dropout who had worked on Wall Street for just a few years, demonstrated no great skill as an investor and had no formal training in tax and estate planning.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/12/b...gtype=Homepage
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