The amazing thing about this story is that nowhere in its 20,000-or-whatever-words-it-runs-to, nowhere does a "Ctrl F" return a single hit for "Crown". As in James Crown, deceased scion of the billionaire Chicago family, JPMorgan board member, Chairman of JPM's “Risk Policy Committee.” during the time that Morgan was facilitating Bernie Madoff [from Bank One Merger to Madoff's arrest], during the time that "The London Whale" was losing JPM money, ($6 Billion) to Boaz Weinstein and others and during the time that JP Morgan was dealing with Jeffrey Epstein. [again, from the time of the Bank One merger]
Chairman of the Risk Policy Committee.
Oh, and along with Leslie Wexner's right-hand-man John W. "Jack" Kessler, Mr. Crown set Jamie Dimon up to become Chairman of JPMorgan following JPM's merger with Bank One, then headed by Dimon, in 2004.
From The New York Times Magazine, September 8:
A Times investigation found that America’s leading bank spent years supporting — and profiting from — the notorious sex offender, ignoring red flags, suspicious activity and concerned executives.
One day in October 2011, Jeffrey Epstein walked into the cavernous lobby of 270 Park Avenue in Midtown Manhattan. The skyscraper was home to JPMorgan Chase, arguably the world’s most prestigious bank. The sex offender — who barely a year earlier was under house arrest after serving 13 months in a Florida jail — was ushered onto an elevator and whisked to a top floor where Jamie Dimon, the bank’s chief executive, and the rest of the senior leadership had their offices.
Epstein had long been a treasured customer at JPMorgan. His accounts were brimming with more than $200 million. He generated millions of dollars in revenue for the bank, landing him atop an internal list of major money makers. He helped JPMorgan orchestrate an important acquisition. He introduced executives to men who would become lucrative clients, like the Google co-founder Sergey Brin, and to global leaders, like Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel. He helped executives troubleshoot crises and strategize about global opportunities.
But a growing group of employees worried that JPMorgan’s association with a man who had pleaded guilty to a sex crime — and was under federal investigation for human trafficking — could harm the bank’s reputation. Just as troubling, anti-money-laundering specialists within the bank noticed Epstein’s pattern of withdrawing tens of thousands of dollars in cash virtually every month. These were red flags for illicit activity.
That was why Epstein was at the bank’s headquarters. JPMorgan’s top executive in charge of ensuring compliance with laws and regulations had already pushed to fire him as a client. Now Stephen Cutler, a former federal securities regulator and the bank’s general counsel, had added his voice to the chorus.
Epstein’s chief defender at the bank was Jes Staley, a top contender to one day succeed Dimon as chief executive. Staley persuaded Cutler to sit down with Epstein and “hear him out.” It was a high-stakes meeting for Epstein; his close ties to JPMorgan had been invaluable in his quest for money, influence and legitimacy. The bank lent him money. Staley dished confidential information to him. At Epstein’s behest, JPMorgan set up accounts — into which he routinely transferred huge sums — for young women who turned out to be victims of his sex-trafficking operations. It wired his funds overseas. It even paid him millions of dollars.
Epstein’s crimes have been exhaustively documented, and elements of JPMorgan’s relationship with Epstein have become public via legal proceedings in the United States and Britain. But the full story of how America’s leading lender enabled the century’s most notorious sexual predator has not been told. This account has been pieced together from thousands of pages of internal bank records, sealed deposition transcripts and other court documents and financial data, as well as interviews with people with direct knowledge of the Epstein relationship. Among the findings: Bank officials for more than a decade were anxious about Epstein’s prolific wire transfers and cash withdrawals — JPMorgan ultimately processed more than $1 billion in such transactions for him — and warned senior management about his suspicious activities. But on at least four occasions over five years, the bank’s leaders overrode those objections and continued to serve Epstein.
Joseph Evangelisti, a spokesman for JPMorgan, said in a statement that the bank’s relationship with Epstein “was a mistake and in hindsight we regret it, but we did not help him commit his heinous crimes.” He added, “We would never have continued to do business with him if we believed he was engaged in an ongoing sex trafficking operation.” The bank has pinned blame for the scandal on Staley, a trusted confidant to Dimon. “We now know that trust was misplaced,” Evangelisti said.
Tales of greed trumping ethics and morals are older than Wall Street itself, and the story of how and why JPMorgan spent years serving Epstein is a case study in that dynamic. But it is instructive in other ways as well. More than six years after his death in a Manhattan jail cell, where he was awaiting prosecution on federal sex-trafficking charges, mysteries continue to swirl around how Epstein amassed and deployed money and influence on a grand scale. Over time, those mysteries curdled into conspiracy theories — most of them unsubstantiated — that placed Epstein at the center of a vast global pedophilia ring or as a foreign intelligence operative compiling dirt on the rich and powerful. The Trump administration’s refusal to release files gathered by federal investigators as they built a case against Epstein — aside from unsuccessfully seeking to unseal an F.B.I. agent’s grand-jury testimony — has only added to the frenzied speculation.
In Epstein’s lengthy alliance with JPMorgan, we found a more mundane, if no less damning, explanation for Epstein’s remarkable success. He was, in the words of one friend, the former Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak, “a collector of people.” He used those relationships to cultivate new connections and establish his legitimacy. He traded favors and gossip and advice. He created an aura of indispensability and of being so plugged-in that he bordered on omniscience — traits that made him a vital asset for a worldwide cast of government and business leaders. That, in turn, gave Epstein access to more money and connections that he could use to power his criminal activities.
But in 2011, this edifice of power and influence was at risk of crumbling. His conviction and incarceration led some of his powerful friends to back away and threatened to leave him an outcast from the financial world. His relationship with JPMorgan was therefore more important than ever. The fact that he remained a client in good standing conferred on him respectability and helped him foster new ties to corporate elites. He was determined not to blow it. Sitting in Cutler’s office that autumn afternoon, Epstein assured the general counsel that he had “turned over a new leaf.” And he rattled off names of prominent figures who, he told Cutler, could vouch for his character. “Go talk to Bill Gates about me,” Epstein said at one point.
Afterward, Cutler sat alone, trying to figure out what to do. He kept brooding for weeks. Epstein struck him as a smooth operator; it wasn’t hard to imagine him charming powerful people. Yet Cutler didn’t see how he would be able to explain to his female colleagues that JPMorgan was keeping Epstein as a client, he would later say. After a second conversation with Epstein, he informed Staley that he still thought the bank should cut ties.
But the recommendation came with crucial caveats. Cutler considered his primary job to be protecting JPMorgan from legal risks, and from his perspective, the Epstein relationship was a threat to the bank’s reputation. He did not see evidence that Epstein was using his accounts for criminal purposes. As a result, he would not insist that the bank expel him as a client. Nor would he escalate the matter to Dimon, the chief executive.
And so Epstein was allowed to stay.
The story of JPMorgan’s relationship with Epstein begins in the late 1990s in the canyons of Manhattan’s financial district. Epstein was in his 40s, a college dropout who briefly worked on Wall Street before becoming a high school math teacher, and he had a gift for making it seem as if he belonged. He had gone on to advise and manage money for some big-name clients. In 1985, he opened a bank account at a company that is now part of JPMorgan, but it wasn’t until more than a decade later, as his wealth and renown grew, that he began getting noticed at the bank.
A JPMorgan client suggested to Sandy Warner, the bank’s chief executive at the time and a titan of American finance, that he meet this up-and-comer. Warner invited Epstein to a meeting in his 20th-floor office in the bank’s neoclassical headquarters at 60 Wall Street. (JPMorgan would move to Midtown a couple of years later.) The pair talked about markets and policy, Warner recalled in an interview. Epstein presented himself as a heavyweight, claiming to manage money for the Rockefellers.
That meeting was followed by a well-attended gathering at Epstein’s Manhattan home. Warner today insists that he was immediately creeped out by Epstein. Even so, he phoned one of his lieutenants to encourage him to meet Epstein, “who drops 50 names in an hourlong conversation.” That lieutenant was Jes Staley.
Staley had joined JPMorgan in 1979 after graduating from Bowdoin College in Maine with an economics degree. He worked for the bank in Brazil, where he met his future wife, and then relocated to New York. His star rose rapidly inside the storied investment bank. In 1999, Warner promoted him to run JPMorgan’s private-banking division, which catered to ultrawealthy clients. Not long after, at Warner’s urging, Staley visited Epstein at his office in an old mansion across the street from St. Patrick’s Cathedral in Midtown Manhattan. It was the beginning of a long, fateful friendship. (Staley, as well as some other current and former senior bank executives, did not respond to our questions or declined to comment for this article.)
Epstein was on his way to becoming one of JPMorgan’s most important clients. A 2003 internal report pegged his net worth at about $300 million. The report, which hasn’t previously been disclosed, noted that Epstein’s occupation was advising wealthy individuals like Leslie H. Wexner, the billionaire operator of brands like Victoria’s Secret and the Limited, though bank documents at the time did not list any other clients. That year, JPMorgan attributed more than $8 million in fees to Epstein, making him the biggest revenue generator among investor clients in the private-banking division.
But the report overlooked something that, had it been taken seriously, might have dimmed the bank’s enthusiasm. In 2003, Epstein withdrew more than $175,000 in cash from his JPMorgan accounts — a huge haul, even for someone with millions at the bank. Outside investigators later found that Epstein paid almost that exact amount to women that year. JPMorgan recognized that those withdrawals needed to be reported to federal regulators that monitor large cash transactions. But the bank failed to treat those withdrawals as an early-warning system for itself. Indeed, JPMorgan’s anti-money-laundering specialists subsequently acknowledged that such withdrawals should have alerted the bank to the possibility that Epstein was committing crimes....
....MUCH MORE
