© 2024 WLRN
MIAMI | SOUTH FLORIDA
Play Live Radio
Next Up:
0:00
0:00
0:00 0:00
Available On Air Stations

‘Poor, Smart And Desperate To Be Rich’: How Epstein Went From Teaching To Wall Street

The Dalton School
Jeffrey Epstein in the Dalton School 1976 yearbook

Before Jeffrey Epstein managed money for the world’s rich and powerful, he was educating their teenage children.

Epstein, the accused sex trafficker awaiting a bail ruling in a Manhattan jail, taught math and physics at the Dalton School, a private K-12 institution whose students are the sons and daughters of New York City’s elite. It was there on the aristocratic Upper East Side in the mid-1970s that a charming, bright young man with a head for numbers catapulted from his Coney Island roots to a double life of astounding wealth and disturbing depravity.

By the time he was 45, Epstein was living 18 blocks from Dalton in a nine-story mansion now worth $77 million, one of several posh homes where investigators say he molested dozens upon dozens of young girls, who were recruited to give him massages and coerced into sex acts. He followed a similar pattern at his waterfront estate in Palm Beach, where he pleaded guilty in 2008 to soliciting prostitution — despite being charged with far more serious crimes against underage girls — and received a remarkably lenient sentence, courtesy of a U.S. attorney who would later become President Donald Trump’s labor secretary.

Read more at our news partner the Miami Herald.

More On This Topic