“Can you help us, please?”
The cops always need a translator, and Noel’s been asked to help out before. But this time the police officer’s voice is raspy, impatient.
“This time is different,” the officer says. “Something very special. You don’t have to accept. But if you do, you’ll have to keep things to yourself, completely.”
When he hears what the story is, Noel accepts.
“I’ll do it,” he says immediately.
The address he’s been given is 358 El Brillo Way. On his first morning, St. Pierre moves swiftly, sneaking a glance through the kitchen window at the four silhouettes standing inside. Three women, one of them quite short, with pigtails.
The fourth silhouette is that of a tall man.
The police have given him clear instructions. The work is unsavory, but so is the work Noel does every day. What the detectives want from him now are slips of paper with phone numbers, along with toothbrushes, condoms, discarded underwear. Anything that could provide DNA. He’s been told to use a special truck on the El Brillo run. Whatever he finds he’s to put aside in small trash bags he’ll deliver directly to the station at the end of every shift.
Jeffrey Epstein’s garbage will never arrive at Mount Trashmore.
As he drives to the police station, St. Pierre thinks about Epstein and what he’s been told. It’s a wonder to him that American kids would do what the police say these kids have done. American kids are rich, after all. Some of them just don’t know it, he guesses.
Americans always want more than they have.
Then again, children do stupid things. They don’t know any better. And St. Pierre’s trips to the house make one thing clear. These girls are young. Really young.
“I hope you can stop this man,” St. Pierre tells the cop.
The detective shoots him a sharp look, and St. Pierre nods.
“Please,” he says, more softly this time.
“Can we count on seeing you here tomorrow?”
The detective looks antsy, impatient again. In his hand he’s holding a scrap of paper that Noel St. Pierre has pulled from Epstein’s trash. Wendy Dobbs’s name is on it. Mary’s name is on it as well.
The detective can’t wait to get it to Chief Reiter’s office.
“As long as it takes, sir,” St. Pierre tells him. “Tomorrow, the next day. Whenever you need me.”
CHAPTER 11
Michael Reiter: September 2005
There’s a sense in which the Palm Beach PD functions as a foundation. From time to time, one of the town’s wealthy residents will walk in with a check followed by an inquiry. How much more would the police force need to make this remarkably safe community feel even safer?
A tax write-off? Sure. But why not? Coming from most, it’s a genuine gesture. One of appreciation for all they have and for all the department’s efforts to guard it. Donations are accepted graciously, gratefully. In 2004, the department had taken one from Jeffrey Epstein—the second donation he’d made to the Palm Beach PD—for ninety thousand dollars. Generous, even by the generous standards of Palm Beach. The donation, which Epstein delivered personally, was earmarked for a firearms training simulator. But that day Michael Reiter had thought something seemed off about Epstein.
Something an old cop would notice.
Reiter’s officers had told him about complaints they’d gotten a few months earlier—young women hanging around at the end of the block or coming and going at all hours from Epstein’s house. “There was some follow-up to that,” Reiter said in a deposition for B.B. vs. Epstein, a civil suit, brought by a victim, that Jeffrey eventually settled. “I think we may have encountered one or two of them. [We] may have done a little bit of surveillance or talked to neighbors as to whether or not they had seen that. I think we were of the general understanding that, yes, there were very attractive young women coming and going from Mr. Epstein’s residence.
“We did some level of further inquiry, and we were of the belief that they were all adults. And [we] were also of the belief that there was a possibility that there could be prostitution. But I mean that’s just not something that we heavily pursued—prostitution in private residences; it’s common everywhere in America. We didn’t believe that they were underage at that point, and so we had no further interest in it.”
Reiter had recalled those complaints on the day Epstein had shown up with his $90,000 donation. And when Reiter had walked Epstein downstairs, he couldn’t help but notice the tall, beautiful woman whom Epstein had brought with him to the station.
It struck him as strange that she was standing so stiffly, eyes cast downward, as though she were afraid to speak. Not a kid. But not a woman, either. Epstein did not introduce or even acknowledge her. To Reiter, this, too, seemed odd.
Indeed, the statuesque woman was Nadia Marcinkova, a nineteen-year-old beauty who lived at Epstein’s home and was described, by another girl, in a recorded interview with Detective Recarey, as one of Epstein’s “like, slaves.”
In September, several months into the investigation, Epstein calls Reiter directly and asks: Has Palm Beach bought the firearms simulator yet?
Cautiously, Reiter tells him that they’re still doing research.
If the department needs more funds, Epstein says, he’ll be happy to provide them.
Reiter thanks him graciously and hangs up. But he’s certain now that Epstein knows about the investigation. Thinking about Epstein’s crimes in Palm Beach makes him shudder. And, Reiter knows, if the charges are true, things are going to get ugly and public.
Cops like Reiter are family men, fathers. Some see so much that they’re no longer surprised by the ways of the world. Still, it helps to hold on to a natural capacity for outrage. Thefts are easy to understand: you see something you need, so you take it. Even murders make a kind of sense once you understand the motivation. There’s great satisfaction in catching a murderer. But what Epstein’s been up to is hard to explain.
Who is this guy?
Reiter’s detectives will have to get into Epstein’s head. To nail him, they’ll have to know him. And to do that, they’ll have to get to know the people around him. The police already know about Wendy. That’s one procurer, but out of how many?
What kind of person would bring children to a child molester?
And—Reiter can’t shake the idea—other victims had to be out there. That lined up with what Epstein’s neighbor reported: there were many girls. He needed to find them as quickly as possible. It was a race against time.
As long as Epstein was free in Palm Beach, more girls were sure to arrive at the side of the house on El Brillo Way.
CHAPTER 12
Alison: September 11, 2005
It might start with the Palm Beach Daily News, which usually covers charity balls, equestrian events, and gallery openings. Reporters there would kill to sink their teeth into something so juicy. On top of that, Chief Reiter knows, Palm Beach is full of freelance paparazzi and seasoned semiretired journalists.
They’d kill for the story, too. For them, it’d be a real-life Body Heat.
Over at WPTV, the local NBC affiliate, the phone rings one day.
It’s a tip from a kid, sounding nervous. Something about girls from a local high school.
There’s a prostitution ring out in Palm Beach, says the boy.
The tip gets brought up in a midmorning meeting at which the producers divvy up ideas among the various reporters and newscasts.
“Where, exactly?” a producer asks.
“He didn’t say, exactly,” an intern replies. “He said that a very rich man was involved.”
“Who?”
“Didn’t say.”
“Did he leave a call-back number?”
“No. The kid sounded really young. Fourteen, fifteen years old.”
The producer thinks for a moment, makes a few scratches in his dog-eared notepad.
“Okay,” he says. “I’m not sure what we can do with that for the moment.”
At some point, some enterprising journalist will put enough pieces together to get a sense of the picture. Sooner or later, someone will talk. Maybe a parent. Maybe a cop’s girlfriend gets giddy at lunch. The girlfriend’s girlfriend mentions it to her husband, who says something to a golfing buddy in turn. Maybe the golfing buddy knows a reporter.
Or maybe some lawyer goes off the rez, blitzed off those martinis they serve at the Palm Beach Grill.
Sooner or later, there’s always talk. At that point, Chief Reiter’s job will get much, much harder—with Epstein on one side, the press on the other, and the chief taking flak from all sides. But right now, two months into Reiter’s investigation, the press is still speaking in whispers.
Right now, Reiter wants to keep it that way.
And, in the meantime, new pieces of the puzzle keep falling into place.
On September 11, a young woman named Alison gets pulled over by the police.* She’s carrying a small amount of marijuana. The patrol officer handcuffs her and puts her in the back of his vehicle. But Alison’s been in the back of a police car before, and she’s cocky and canny enough to pivot the conversation away from the dime bag she’s been busted with. She tells the officer a remarkable story about an older man engaging in sexual activities with high school girls. Alison knows about it firsthand, she says. She’s been going to the house on El Brillo Way since she was sixteen.
At first the cop’s skeptical. He hasn’t heard about the investigation into Jeffrey Epstein’s affairs. And, after all, Alison is a burnout. But back at the station, he finds out that Alison has not been bullshitting him.
The investigation is real.
Alison’s name and cell phone number match up with messages that have been pulled from Epstein’s trash. Instead of copping to a misdemeanor, she becomes another Jane Doe in the case that Chief Reiter’s colleague, Detective Joe Recarey, is building against Jeffrey Epstein.
The story Alison ends up telling is extremely disturbing.
Like Mary, she says, she was recruited in high school. She tells cops that Epstein would call her his “number one girl”—although, she suspects, there were many others.
Recarey takes her statement. In the excerpts that follow (transcribed from a tape recording made by the Palm Beach police), D stands for “Detective Recarey,” and V stands for “victim.”
D:Well, ah, start from, like, how you met him, and then I’ll—I’ll take you through.
V:Okay. Um, we [Alison and a female friend] worked at Hollister together in the Wellington Green mall, and I was mentioning to her how I wanted extra money to go to Maine…I wanted to go camping for the summer, and I couldn’t afford a plane ticket. And—she goes, “Oh, well, you can get a plane ticket in two hours.” I said, “What are you talking about?” Like, what are you—that didn’t make any sense to me, a plane ticket in two hours; what are you talking about? And she goes, “Oh, we can go give this guy a massage, and, um, he’ll pay two hundred dollars for, like, forty-five minutes or an hour.” And that’s all she told me—no details, no nothing.
…
She said that he wanted cute girls, so I looked cute, did my best. I didn’t—I didn’t think that it was what it was. I wasn’t naive enough to think that he was gonna pay me two hundred dollars just for nothing—I, I don’t know, like, I don’t know what was going through my head. I absolutely don’t know. And I—the back of my mind was thinking, oh, well, it could be legitimate, but I was also thinking, you know, at the same time, is she fucking crazy? Like, this guy’s not gonna pay you money for not doing anything, not letting him cop a feel or nothing. You know? So I didn’t know what to think, I was like, “Oh…if he does something that I have a problem with, then I’ll leave.”
…
D:Who were you introduced to?
V:One of his girlfriends. One of his, like, slaves that he has live with him. And when I say “slaves,” like, one of the girls that he bought to, like, have sex with him. Um, I was introduced to one of them probably, like…Sarah. I was introduced to Sarah. Um, that’s his assistant, I think. I think they have sex, but I don’t know. Um, I was introduced to his assistant Sarah, and she’s the one who told me that he would be ready in a second. And from there I met various other girls. I don’t really—I didn’t pay attention to who they were, though….So…we were waiting on the couch in the bathroom, and, um, Jeffrey comes up, and he’s like, “Hey, I’m—I’m Jeffrey.” He just introduced himself, and he hands—I remember this ’cause I was pissed off that she got paid to bring me. Like, I was pissed off. He hands her a wad of hundred-dollar bills and says, “Thank you,” and she says, “I’ll wait for you downstairs,” and I was like, “All right, I’ll see you in a little while.” And that’s how I was brought to Jeffrey.
…
Um. Hold on—I’m remembering. I’m, like, picturing in my head. I wore a skirt. I remember specifically what I wore: I wore a skirt and just a regular T-shirt. And I was massaging his legs, and he asked me to take off my skirt. And I said—I think I said no at first. And he’s like, “Come on, you’re not showing”—he talked me into it, basically. He’s like, “Oh, you’re not showing anything,” or [he] did something; I don’t even know. So I ended up taking off my skirt, and then he goes—well, I think he just started touching, you know, the top of me. So—and then he asked me.
D:When you’re saying “the top of you,” you mean your breasts?
V:Yeah. And then he asked me to take off my shirt. So I took off my shirt, but I kept my underwear on. And I wouldn’t take my underwear off: I told him no. And he still paid me the same amount. And that was that. I went home.
…
D:So, in other words, he—
V:Finished with himself and that was it. Yeah, he ejaculated. Specifically.
D:That was the first time you went there?
V:Mm-hmm.
D: And—I know, take a deep breath, I know, I can see it in your eyes already. From then on, you went there multiple times?
V:I had problems with it. [With] what happened the first time. But three hundred dollars for forty minutes—that was a lot for a sixteen-year-old girl making six bucks an hour.
D:So you’re saying you’re sure you were sixteen now?
V:Um, I don’t want to say I’m sure of my age. I was under seventeen, one hundred percent.
…
D:Okay. Um, when you—the first time you went, when he masturbated, did you see?
V:[giggles]
D:His member?
V:Oh, I thought you were going to ask me if I saw, like, his come.
D:No.
V:I saw all of the above.
D:You saw him naked, fully naked? Fully naked?
V:Yeah, a hundred percent naked. He had a towel on for some of it, but that doesn’t mean anything. Like, he was naked.
D:He took off the towel?
V:I saw everything, yeah.
…
I mean, I’m sorry, he is circumcised, my bad. He’s circumcised, a hundred and ten percent sure. A matter of fact, he has some sort of birth defect. On his thing. I don’t know what it is [giggles]; I’ve never really looked at it, because I’ve never done anything where I had to touch it. I’ve never touched it—out of the whole time I worked for him, I never touched his penis. Like, he—I’m pretty sure he rubbed it against me, but I’ve never ever been, like, “Okay, I’m letting you do this” or “I’m gonna do this to you.” Um, it’s really weirdly shaped. I don’t know—do you want me to, like, tell you this?
…
I’m just really embarrassed. Um, it’s like a teardrop, like a drop of water. It’s really fat at the bottom and skinny at the top, where it’s attached. And he never gets fully hard, ever. Like, I just could tell by looking at it—like, by looking you can obviously tell if you’re hard or not, and I could tell that he wasn’t.
…
D:The next time you went, or as you continued to go, did it escalate more?
V.Mm-hmm. I actually—I don’t remember h
ow long it took for me to start working for him regularly, from the first time I went there. But I started working every day. Every single day he was in the country I would be there…And, um, I told him that I wouldn’t let him put anything inside of me; that was my rule. Nothing inside of me—no fingers, no, no nothing, absolutely nothing inside of me. He increased my pay to three or four hundred dollars as long as he could touch me. Um, I still never—I, I swear I never touched him, the whole entire time I never, ever touched him. Um, but he, he—
D:How many times would you say you went?
V:Hundreds. Hundreds. I was—he used to tell me I was his favorite. He bought me a car. He bought me—
D:This Jeep that you’re driving?
V:No. I had a brand-new Dodge Neon. I got a plane—I got a plane ticket to New York; I got spending money whenever I wanted. Like, I was in there deep. I was—he asked my parents to emancipate me so I could live with him. Or he didn’t ask my parents, he asked me to ask my parents, I’m sorry. He actually wanted me to come live with him.
D:As, like, a girlfriend?
V:Sex slave, whatever you want to call it. Yeah. Um, but it escalated—he, he just increased my pay, as long as he could touch me. I wouldn’t let him put anything inside of me. And then one day he just did, one day he just put his hand, like, his fingers—and, um…
D:How long, would you say, from the very first time you went?
V:Months. Honestly, I never kept track, like, of, of what happened when. I just can tell you in which order things progressed.
…
It was—it was, like, towards the middle and end of my school year. But I remember that for the last, like, six or eight weeks of high school, I didn’t have a car ’cause I gave it back to him. Because he—he asked me to have sex with him and, like, like suck him and stuff [giggles], and I was just like, no. Definitely not. I was like, “I’ll let you touch me, but I’m not gonna do that.”
…
Yeah, the car was a Dodge Neon 2005. He got it for me before the New Year, because I remember I got it—it was an edition that was a year before they were supposed to come out. So if I got it, I obviously didn’t get a 2006, ’cause that’s this year. I got a 2005 Neon in 2004. Seven miles on it when I got it. The car was awesome [giggles].