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Two more news reports provide a reason to think that pervert financier Jeffrey Esptein’s “suicide” in a federal jail might not have been a suicide after all.
The Washington Post reported Wednesday that at least eight jail officials knew not to leave the Deep State moneyman alone in his cell in the Special Housing Unit at the Metropolitan Correctional Center in New York, where Epstein was found dead on August 10.
And a lawyer for three of the registered sex offender’s victims, Britain’s Sun newspaper reported yesterday, received a cryptic phone call from a jail employee who said not to believe that Epstein took his own life.
Even before those facts surfaced, however, the circumstances of Epstein’s death were highly suspicious.
Epstein, a 66-year-old Wall Streeter who amassed a $577 million fortune as he operated a major sex-trafficking operation, was found on his knees, a sheet knotted into a noose around his neck and tied to his bed.
Federal prosecutors had indicted him on multiple counts of sex-trafficking girls, some as young as 14.
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Don’t Leave Him Alone
At minimum, the report in the Post suggests that heads must roll at the facility even if Epstein did commit suicide.
“At least eight Bureau of Prisons staffers knew that strict instructions had been given not to leave multimillionaire sex offender Jeffrey Epstein alone in his cell, yet the order was apparently ignored in the 24 hours leading up to his death, according to people familiar with the matter,” the newspaper reported.
Why ignored?
But “the fact that so many prison officials were aware of the directive — not just low-level correctional officers, but supervisors and managers,” the Post reported, “has alarmed investigators assessing what so far appears to be a stunning failure to follow instructions, these people said.”
The eight were not identified. The Post continued:
Investigators suspect that at least some of these individuals also knew Epstein had been left alone in a cell before he died, and they are working to determine the extent of such knowledge, these people said, cautioning that the apparent disregard for the instruction does not necessarily mean there was criminal conduct. The explanation, they said, could be simpler and sadder — bureaucratic incompetence spanning multiple individuals and ranks within the organization.
The former warden at a Supermax prison told the Post he couldn’t understand how Epstein was left alone “if people were given instructions” to the contrary.
Guards were supposed to check him every 30 minutes, but left him alone for hours. Epstein was on suicide watch briefly after an attempt on July 23 that left marks on his neck.
In that incident, guards rushed to Epstein’s cell when his cellmate at the time, Nicholas Tartaglione, began yelling, according to these people. Tartaglione told officers he had noticed Epstein had a bedsheet around his neck and appeared to be trying to kill himself, the people said.
Epstein denied that, they said, and told prison staff that he had been attacked — something Tartaglione denied.
Some MCC staff doubted Epstein’s claim that he was attacked, suspecting instead that he either faked a suicide attempt or intended to take his own life, the people familiar said.
The order to check Epstein every 30 minutes after his return to the special unit “was spelled out widely within the chain of command.”
Jail authorities put another inmate with Epstein after they booted Tartaglione, but moved that inmate out of the cell on August 9. They found Epstein hanged the next day.
Don’t Believe It Was Suicide
And now, the Sun reported, an attorney for three of the victims says the story is just that: a story.
“Spencer Kuvin, who accurately predicted that shamed financier would not last until his trial, told Sun Online he had been contacted by an anonymous prison worker who claimed it was ‘highly unlikely’ the perv killed himself,” the tabloid reported:
The prison source told Kuvin “every square inch” of the cells where Epstein was kept were covered by CCTV so there should have been a comprehensive video account of exactly what happened to Epstein.
Kuvin said: “I received a call from a supervisor at the MCC, which is the jail that Mr Epstein was held.
“The first words out of his mouth to be honest were, ‘Don’t believe what you are hearing’ in regards to Epstein’s death.”
Epstein, the attorney told the Sun, was in a “more secure unit, inside the SHU where the highest value targets were kept.” And surveillance cameras cover “every square inch,” the source told the attorney.
“If reports that there is no CCTV are true — it would mean that they’d either shut the cameras off or they were not functioning in some way. He says there’s no way that they would not have been able to see what was going on.”
Kuvin also confirmed a report in the New York Post that Epstein was in no frame of mind to commit suicide. Epstein, a source told the Post, thought he could beat the sex charges in New York with a double-jeopardy claim related to his plea deal in 2008 in Florida. As well, the source said, Epstein was upbeat with his lawyers.
“He was like, ‘I’ll see you Sunday,’” the source told the Post.
Kuvin says something similar:
“I met the man on three separate occasions…. He always seemed highly intelligent, arrogant, self-assured, confident. Never thought he did anything wrong, even in light of all the evidence against him, he basically just blamed the victims…. Someone with that type of ego just never struck me as someone that could possibly commit suicide…. This type of an act requires a certain amount of resolve. And he just never struck me as someone that could do that.”
Photo: AP Images
