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The top cop in Palm Beach, Florida, during the initial investigation of deceased Deep State financier Jeffrey Epstein says someone warned the rapist that police would search his Palm Beach mansion.
Police first looked at Epstein as a child-rape suspect in 2005, and evidence that should have been in the home was missing, former Palm Beach Police Chief Michael Reiter told NBC’s Dateline. And state and federal prosecutors, he said, seemed uninterested in pursuing the case.
Epstein was under federal indictment for his crimes when he supposedly hung himself in his jail at the Metropolitan Correctional Center in New York City on August 10. Jail authorities found him dead.
But for good reason, more than a few people question his supposed suicide.
Cameras Gone
In an interview broadcast on Friday, Reiter told Dateline that his office began looking at Epstein in 2005 when a 14-year-old victim’s mother called cops to say he was abusing the girl.
Detectives believed the girl, Reiter said. “They said, ‘This is credible. This is believable,’” he said. “Our sense just from sitting in the room with the first victim was that this is something we’ve absolutely got to get on.”
The first victim led to others who also revealed the sordid details of their abuse, including Epstein’s use of sex toys.
“The stories were all the same,” Reiter told Dateline. “They all could describe the house in detail. They could describe what happened.” Even the victims’ description of Epstein’s body matched.
“We realized that this was basically a way of life for Epstein,” Reiter told Dateline. “And it didn’t take too long to realize that a lot of people were involved in this…. This was a very prolific sexual predator.”
And so cops began gathering evidence. Searching his trash uncovered notes that were clearly about “massages and sex,” yet so bold was Epstein that he “had flowers delivered to one of the victims who was in a performance at her high school, congratulating her at the end of the performance.”
But the pervert might have been unafraid for a good reason. He thought he wouldn’t be prosecuted.
Reported Dateline, “As the months wore on with the police building their case, odd things began to happen” that led cops to believe someone tipped off Epstein. “The place had been cleaned up,” Reiter said. Though some evidence was still there, Reiter told Dateline, a computer that contained the footage from the home’s surveillance cameras was missing. “And all the wires were left hanging there,” Reiter said.
As well, Reiter believes Epstein’s attorneys somehow received probable-cause affidavits that cops submitted to prosecutors. “Minute details that nobody else knew that were in those documents were being refuted and contrary information provided by the defense,” Reiter said.
Those prosecutors, he said, claimed the victims weren’t credible and were reluctant to move against the wealthy financier.
Federal Probe
That pushed Reiter to involve the FBI. That probe went nowhere as well, thanks to Alexander Acosta, President Trump’s former labor secretary and the federal prosecutor at the time in Florida. He resigned from Trump’s cabinet after the media disclosed his involvement in Epstein’s plea deal in 2008 with state prosecutors.
Acosta “basically said in a very measured manner that the defense in this case has successfully delayed and frustrated their investigation and their prosecution of the case,” Reiter said.
Maybe, but as Vanity Fair reported, Acosta dropped the federal prosecution of Epstein and permitted him to plead guilty to lesser state charges, supposedly because he was connected to one or more intelligence agencies, or perhaps because of his connection to Prince Andrew.
Giuffre: “I Couldn’t Believe It”
And that connection also figured prominently in the Dateline exposé. Victim Virginia Giuffre recalled the night in London that Ghislaine Maxwell, Epstein’s reputed procuress, ordered her to have sex with the prince. Giuffre, now 36, was 17 at the time.
Maxwell “woke me up in the morning and said you’re gonna meet a prince today,” Giuffre said.
After the four left a nightclub that evening, Giuffre told Dateline, “I hop in the car with Ghislaine and Jeffrey, and Ghislaine said he’s coming back to the house, and I want you to do for him what you do for Epstein. I couldn’t believe it.”
After the sex was over, Giuffre said, Andrew said “thank you and some kind of soft sentiments like that and left. I just couldn’t believe it. I couldn’t believe that even royalty were involved.”
Photo of Jeffrey Epstein’s Palm Beach residence: AP Images