The Jeffrey Epstein Files 1: It Was Murder

With the announcement of US Attorney-General Pam Bondi releasing the Jeffrey Epstein documents and the extraordinary trial of the ex-Senior JP Morgan & Barclay's Bank executive - Jes Staley - who exchanged "Snow White" e-mails with Epstein, we are releasing the much-awaited final episodes of CrimeWaves investigation into the Jeffrey Epstein’s final days in prison.

We begin with the re-release our first five episodes investigating his death AND in the next two weeks, we will bring you three extraordinary new episodes.  

Highlights:  

-Cell doors were left unlocked in the Tier where Epstein was staying. Possible Murder.
-There was a “Ghost Count” on the night on his death: someone, somewhere among the correctional officers at the jail claimed that there was an extra person on the Wing with Epstein that night. Possible Murder. 
-Two long-term drug dealers turned high-level cooperators who were on the Tier where Epstein was kept are convinced that the authorities got it right. Epstein did commit suicide.

**

It is one of the most famous locked room deaths in American history.   
On July 6, 2019 Jeffrey Epstein was arrested and put into a cell of a downtown Manhattan detention center.   He was the most famous prison inmate in America.  He had hung out with Donald Trump, Bill Clinton, bankers and billionaires.  He was also a serial sexual abuser. 
Within thirty-five days - he was dead.  
Almost all of the world wondered how such a famous prisoner could die in jail.  
My students and I have spend the last year-and-a-half reading thousands of pages of legal documents, government reports, released internal emails, news media stories, books, and, conducting a series of astonishing interviews.
This is the story of what actually happened to Jeffrey Epstein.

#JeffreyEpsteindeath #JeffreyEpstein #TrueCrime #TrueCrimeColdCase #EpsteinMurder #EpsteinSuicide

Please subscribe, rate, review or like this episode of CrimeWaves at YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts.  
For more information on CrimeWaves please see - 
www.crimewavespodcast.com
www.declanhill.com
Twitter: declan_hill

Transcript

The Jeffrey Epstein Files 1 - It was Murder

Declan Hill:

He was the most famous prison inmate in America.
He had hung out with Donald Trump, Bill Clinton, bankers and billionaires.
He was also a serial sexual abuser.
On July 6, 2019, Jeffrey Epstein was arrested and put into a cell of a downtown Manhattan detention center.
Within 35 days, he was dead.
Almost all of the world wondered how such a famous prisoner could die in jail.
My students and I have spent the last three and a half months reading thousands of pages of legal documents, government reports, released internal emails, news media stories, and books.
We've also lined up a series of astonishing exclusive interviews.
And this is the investigation of what actually happened to Jeffrey Epstein.

**

Good morning, good afternoon and good evening wherever you are in the world.
Welcome to CrimeWaves.
My name is Declan Hill and I'm an Associate Professor of Investigations at one of the best universities in the world for crime scene investigation and forensic analysis.
That's the University of New Haven and the specific college is the Henry C. Lee College of Criminal Justice and Forensic Science.
In each episode of this podcast, our team, that's my students and I, interview one of the best investigators in the world on their cases.
The idea is that the students can learn some of the techniques, tools, and attitudes of the best in the world.
And the idea is also that you, the listener, can enjoy hearing how cases are actually solved.
Now this episode, the student researchers and producers are the brilliant Alex Klein and Jake Zenger.
On this episode, however, my students are the investigators.
They've spent the last three and a half months investigating one of the most famous deaths in America, Jeffrey Epstein.

“Breathe Epstein, Breathe”

He was found dead in his cell at 6.33am on August 10th, 2019.
As the guards frantically tried to revive him, performing CPR on his lifeless body, the other inmates in the high security tier began to chant, “Breathe Epstein, Breathe.”
The guards then, destroying any potential crime scene, moved his body to the prison infirmary where he was taken to the hospital and declared dead on arrival.
The most famous man in the American prison system at that time was dead within 35 days.
Here's how we're going to present this story.
The second series of episodes will be the case for the defense.
A long look at whatever evidence supports the official government verdict of self-harm.
It will be with a colleague of mine who was one of America's foremost crime scene investigators.
However, this series of episodes is the case for the prosecution.
It will feature the story of Epstein's time in jail, the context and the evidence.
There'll be three feature interviews that we will play almost in their entirety.
The first one will be David Schoen, a lawyer with whom Jeffrey Epstein consulted a few days before his death.
The second, Mark Epstein, Jeffrey Epstein's brother and nearest surviving relative who's going to be speaking on the record at length for the first time.
And lastly, we're going to have an interview with Dr. Michael Baden, one of the most experienced and well-known medical examiners in America.
Now note, none of these people think that Jeffrey Epstein committed suicide.
They all believe that this was murder.


“A Call to Arms”

Before we begin a request, in the two and a half years since we started the podcast, it's grown to be one of the top 5% podcasts in the world.
We have thousands of listeners, but here's what we ask of each one of you.
Please, we are at a university, so we're not asking for money, nor do we have ads during the podcast.
What we'd like is if you could right now put in a review or rating of the show.
If also, if you're new to the program, if you could please go back and check out some of the older episodes.
They're amazing.
We started CrimeWaves, for example, with the true story of how elements of the Irish mafia were running current day international boxing.
up to and including the heavyweight championships of the world.
We went on to show the links between the Vatican and notorious drug traffickers of the Ndrangheta.
Those are the worst organized criminals in contemporary Italy.
We also featured interviews with former mafia capos and the undercover cop Donnie Brasco.
So please go back, check out these episodes, rate, review, subscribe to the show.
Tell us what you think in the comments and notes section.
It helps boost the show.
We would love to hear from you and it's deeply appreciated.
Thank you.

**

A warning.
Look, throughout this episode and all this series, you're going to hear very unsettling details about murders, dead bodies, and the physical effects of death.
Please, don't play this episode in front of children or people who in any way would be sensitively affected.
Also, you're going to hear a great deal about suicide.
We have to include it because the entire premise of the government is that Epstein's death was self-induced.
So please, if any listener is in any way contemplating self-harm, please do not.
Please reach out to a counselor.
Here in Connecticut, their number is 1-800-273-8255.
That's 1-800-273-8255.
They are very good.
Please reach out to them.

**

I want to emphasize that the team of students and myself here at the Investigations Program at the University of New Haven are not Trump supporters, nor are we Biden people.
We're investigators.
We do not bring our political opinions to this particular table.
We find the facts and we let them speak for themselves.
I say this because this first series of episodes is the case for the prosecution.
The facts, evidence, and interviews that indicate that Jeffrey Epstein was killed by a person or persons unknown on the night of August 9th, 10th, 2019 in the Metropolitan Correctional Center.
It's a strong, powerful case.
Here's a few examples of what we're going to show you.

1.  The official counts on the prison floor show that there were at least      one or two mysterious people there in the middle of the night       that Epstein died.

2. The video system wasn't recording.

3. The prison authorities put Jeffrey Epstein in a prison cell for two weeks with a man who would be convicted of strangling people to death.





“An awful lot of very powerful people who would like this Epstein thing to go away.”

One of the problems in analyzing this case is that you have instantly walked into a culture war.
Here in America, if you watch Fox News, you are generally told that Jeffrey Epstein was murdered.
If you watch CNN, you are generally told that Jeffrey Epstein committed suicide, and anything else is a conspiracy theory.
It's a media framing that began within hours of the news being leaked from the prison that Epstein was dead.
Almost instantly, both the government official response and what's known as mainstream media declared his death a suicide and that anyone who thought differently was a conspiracy theorist.
Now under this framing, the range of conspiracy theorists became huge.
Tens of millions of people around the world simply could not believe that within 35 days of Jeffrey Epstein's arrest, he was dead.
For example, the Hollywood actor Patricia Heaton was one.
She tweeted, “I’m not a conspiracy theory, but there are an awful lot of very powerful people who would like this Epstein thing to go away.”
Bill de Blasio, who was the Democratic Mayor of New York at the time, was another.
He said when he was asked at an unrelated news conference in Queens several months later, “Something doesn't fit here. It just doesn't make sense that the highest profile prisoner in America, you know, someone forgot to guard him. I want to understand. I think everyone wants to understand what really happened. I don't know what the nature of the death was. I just know it should never have happened and we still don't have good answers.”

So, it's not a conspiracy to wonder if Jeffrey Epstein was murdered in prison. It's actually a very reasonable question to ask.

So here, through all the tabloid speculation and official denials, is what you need to know about the Jeffrey Epstein story while he was in that New York prison in the summer of 2019.


In telling you this, we're going to treat you as if you just landed from Mars.
That's probably not true.  You may already have a great deal of knowledge about the case, but just to make sure everyone is on the same page, we're going to speak as if you have no knowledge of Jeffrey Epstein or the case in any way.

The List of Murder Suspects

Let's begin with a list of the potential murderers, the types of people who would have really liked to see Jeffrey Epstein dead.

The Financial Establishment

The documents from court cases revealed now in 2023 show many things that we didn't know in 2019.
In his heyday, Jeffrey Epstein was a part-time pimp.
He provided women and girls to high, powerful men.
It's an old-age strategy for the social and financial climbers.
They use access to sex as the coin of corruption.
For example, Silvio Berlusconi, the former Prime Minister of Italy, ran Bunga Bunga parties.
Those were social events filled with powerful businessmen, politicians, and young women.
Note, he ran them personally.
Along with directing one of the world's biggest national economies, Berlusconi organized the sex parties so that those who went owed their personal loyalty directly to him.
It's the same strategy that the fascist official Antonio Samaranch, who became head of the International Olympic Committee in the 1980s and 1990s, used.
According to Andrew Jennings, the brilliant investigative author of Lords of the Rings, as a rising official in General Franco's fascist regime in Spain, Samaranch owed his rapid rise to his provision of women to higher-ranking officials.
Jeffrey Epstein was also a personal fixer and connector for some of the top banking institutions in the world.

The Rothschilds, for example, are a name synonymous with luxury and elite connections.
They helped bankroll the ruling families of Europe in their wars against Napoleon. And they worked with and paid Jeffrey Epstein tens of millions of dollars for his financial advice.

They weren't alone:

J.P. Morgan, Barclays Bank, the Democratic politician Stacey Plaskett, who represents the U.S. Virgin Islands, was soliciting donations from Jeffrey Epstein just two months before he was placed in jail. 

The governor of the U.S. Virgin Islands' wife worked for Epstein for eight years, including when he was serving time for sexual trafficking. Some of the released emails reveal that she tried to help him draft the legal response to sexual predators on the island with his help.  She didn't succeed, but that's an example of the kind of reach and influence that he had.

Thus, Epstein was a man who had a lot of high-powered influential friends at noon on July 16, 2019 as he flew back to New York on his private jet from Paris.  And by 9.38pm, the minute after he was locked in the Metropolitan Correctional Center, MCC in downtown New York, he had a lot of potential enemies.

I don't mean that some senior executive at a financial institution or politician put together a murder plot - “Who will rid me of this troublesome man?”

However, one of the themes of our age is the outsourcing of evil.
As listeners to CrimeWaves podcast know, President Obama enacted legislation against the research that makes COVID viruses thousands of times more deadly. So what did some ambitious, clever, and in my opinion, scummy scientists do? They offshored that dangerous research to Wuhan, China.

In this case, the security department of a major financial institution could hire a subcontractor who could hire a subcontractor who hires someone else to make the problem go away.

It is, in the criminal lingo of 18th century London, the Grand Toby.
No bank official or employee will ever know or condone what happened, but the problem is removed.

Their fear would have been justified. For the moment those jail doors closed behind Jeffrey Epstein, he was a marked man.
Many of his former friends were soon to be his enemy.
No one wanted their name linked to him.
One of the ways that people get out of these predicaments is that they turn government witness.
They negotiate some deal that names other people.

Jail Culture

A second potential source of murderers is the jail culture.
The man who was Donnie Brasco is a friend.
We've worked together at various events around the world.
40 years after he exposed various New York mob families, he still travels with a different passport under a different name.
I once asked him, “Why?”
He replied, “It's not the people I took down or their organizations, it's the up-and-comers, the young gangbangers who want to make a name for themselves. They're the ones that'll kill someone like me just to establish their street cred.”

So would it be for criminals in the MCC.

If they could kill a man like Jeffrey Epstein, it would establish their reputation in the world of scumbags and thugs for years.

There's also a political angle that if you're an American, you know without thinking. When I explain it, you'll be like, “Dude, why are you explaining things that are so basic?”  If that's you, please stand by while I speak to the British, Canadian, Australian, and other listeners.

On Friday, July 12, 2019, six days after Epstein entered detention, then-President Donald Trump fired his Labor Secretary, Alex Acosta.
Acosta had been the Florida legal official who, 11 years before, had signed off on Epstein's sweet deal that had seen him serve most of his prison time in his own home office in West Palm Beach.

To the largely Democratic New York prosecutorial establishment, this was manna from heaven.

They may not have managed to get the big man, Donald Trump, with a legal case, but this, the taking down of one of his cabinet ministers, was a massive coup.  So the longer the legal trial stretched on, the more embarrassment for the Trump administration.

Except if Epstein started naming Democratic politicians. Then it became an embarrassing problem for everyone in the political establishment.

Thus the political class in July 2019 was on tenterhooks.
Who and what would be named next in the Epstein case?

The Evidence 

“Epstein .. denies suicidality”

Let's begin this section with the very obvious:  Jeffrey Epstein never, ever spoke about suicide, self-harm, or even depression in any way.

To be fair to the psychology team at the MCC, they had had a number of interviews with him about suicide. They did this partly out of routine processing of all prisoners, but partly for a strange, violent incident that we're going to examine in detail later on.

From all the official reports that we have been able to find, on no occasion did Epstein ever speak about being depressed or in any way contemplating self-harm.

Never.

Here are some direct quotes from those reports.

1. “Epstein is seen by the psychology department daily and on each date adamantly denies suicidality or having any memory of what occurred on July 23rd, 2019.”

2. “Inmate 3 said he asked Epstein to please not kill himself or hang himself while Inmate 3 was his cellmate because Inmate 3 had a chance to go home soon. Epstein told Inmate 3 not to worry and that he was not going to cause Inmate 3 any trouble.”

3. “Epstein voiced concerns over being housed in the SHU. Epstein asked the chief psychologist to be single-celled. And if he were to be housed in the SHU, had also requested a shower, his property, pen, and a paper.”

That's another quote from the report on this meeting with the jail's chief psychologist. You can read that Epstein is concerned, mostly, not with depression, but with regular issues of personal hygiene.

“During this meeting, Epstein expressed concerns about a number of issues, including not yet receiving his property, not having enough water during his attorney conference, and a desire to attend recreation.”

4. “The chief psychologist told the investigators that Epstein and his attorney mocked her for thinking Epstein was suicidal… Upon reviewing a draft of this report, the chief psychologist noted that Epstein's attorney were not mocking her. The attorneys and Epstein were simply laughing at the fact that she was inquiring as to whether Epstein was suicidal and dismissing the possibility that Epstein could be suicidal… Epstein told the staff psychologist that he lived to enjoy life and that his future plans include fighting his criminal case and getting back to his normal life.”

“Most likely homicide”

The second point that stands out is that none of the people close to Jeffrey Epstein, those who knew him well or spent a lot of time in his company,
think his death was a suicide. 
This list includes his former girlfriend, Ghislaine Maxwell, who said in a TV interview that she doubted his suicide.
His then-current girlfriend, Karinia Shuliak, claimed through her lawyer that she was utterly surprised and devastated by the news of his death, and had no indications of self-harm from when they spoke.
The brilliant Miami Herald journalist Julie Brown, who spent years investigating and revealing Jeffrey Epstein's sexual trafficking and playing on the Florida legal system, has a chapter in her book, Perversion of Justice, entitled Jeffrey Epstein Didn't Kill Himself.
Epstein's legal team of Reid Weingartner and others appeared before a judge a week after his death and expressed themselves completely shocked by the verdict of suicide and appealed for an independent legal inquiry into Epstein's death.
You're also going to hear in interviews that the CrimeWaves team conducted.
His brother Mark Epstein speaking at length for the first time on this subject and one of Jeffrey Epstein’s lawyers David Schoen who spoke to him days before his death.
Both think his death was most likely homicide.

Destruction of Evidence

To be balanced, in our research we spoke with crime scene investigators. In particular, one of my university colleagues who's investigated homicides that look like suicides and the reverse.
They said that this complete surprise on the part of family and friends is often the case.  They spoke also about how each of us as humans have a public persona, another that we share with our family, and then a deeply private self.
The issue in many self-inflicted deaths is that many times family and friends are shocked and utterly surprised by the deaths.
However, we take note of it here for two reasons.
One, most of the investigations that my colleagues do to determine suicide or homicide is driven by physical investigation of the scene.
In the Epstein death, most of the crime scene, his jail set, his bed sheeting, his clothes, were utterly disturbed, if not destroyed.
A few days after the death, the FBI investigators allowed the prison authorities to quote, recycle, i.e. effectively destroy, most of the potential evidence.
Even the prison video system that could have shed additional light on the death was not working.
Thus an autopsy, the physical examination of the body is hugely important. We're also going to release an episode which features an interview with one of the only two doctors who actually examined Jeffrey Epstein's body.
He's a man with vast amounts of experience and he also declared it, most likely, a homicide.

A Hellhole Full of Dangerous, Deadly Goons

The second point is that most of the discussion of suicide in Jeffrey Epstein's case was actually only catalyzed by a bizarre incident in his cell three weeks before he died.
We're going to examine that incident in detail, but before we do, let's take a step back and speak about the conditions inside the Metropolitan Correctional Center, MCC, that Epstein was kept in.
The Metropolitan Correctional Center, MCC, is in the middle of Manhattan on 150 Park Road. It's a few blocks from the Brooklyn Bridge and a mile from Wall Street.
It's also a hellhole full of dangerous, deadly goons.
There were serial sexual abusers, rapists, drug traffickers, murderers, and those were just the guards.
Colin Akparanata was one.
In the context of the Jeffrey Epstein story, his case is worth noting.
He was an MCC guard and for six years, not six days or six weeks or six months, but for six years, he made sure that a variety of female inmates knew that if they wanted to get feminine products like tampons or extra food, they knew what they would have to do to make him happy.
After his conviction for abuse of sexual conduct, acting U.S.
Attorney Audrey Strauss said, “Colin Akparanata repeatedly abused his position of authority as a correctional officer at the MCC by sexually abusing inmates whose safety and security he was duty-bound to protect.
Today's sentence should send a strong message that correctional officers who abuse their authority and commit crimes will be held to account.”
Yeah.
If only that were so, because Akparanatha was not alone in this kind of behavior inside the MCC.
Rudell Mullings was another guard at the MCC. He raped a prisoner.
She would be eventually sentenced to 30 years in jail for murder, but in the sentencing of the guard, the prosecutor said that even then, she did not deserve to be violently sexually violated in her cell by the person that the state pays to protect her safety and security.
In the years since Epstein's death, there have been a number of these investigations and then convictions of MCC guards.
There was a supervisor in the guards who were trafficking drugs into the prison to some of the worst organized criminals in New York, a group called the Bloodhound Brims that federal agents describe as one of the most violent and fastest growing factions of the Blood Street and Prison Gang.
Here's the official indictment, “The defendants, together with others, known and unknown, carried out an extensive scheme involving bribery and the smuggling of contraband into and distribution of contraband within the Metropolitan Correctional Center, MCC, a federal jail in Manhattan, New York.
As part of this scheme, various of the defendants in the roles described herein, one conspired to introduce into the MCC substantial quantities of prison contraband, including but not limited to controlled substance.”
By the way, that means hard drugs, cell phones, note that, alcohol and cigarettes.
These were some of the guards who were working in the MCC while Jeffrey Epstein was in prison there.
It gets worse.
Not only were these corrupt prison guards at the MCC working with organized crime, they were writing them letters of recommendation.
One of the prison supervisors wrote one of the gang members a letter for their sentencing hearing after they were found guilty of racketeering, assault, and kidnapping.
The letter says in part, “He had proven himself to be a model inmate.”
This was the same criminal who was running a sophisticated drug smuggling ring in the prison.
The judge said from the bench, “That this was impressive and unless there is some sort of John Grisham novel and people are all corrupt and making all of this up about the criminal, it seems to me that it's unavoidable that the criminal's trajectory at the MCC contains a lot of good.”
Sadly for the judge, it was all a conceived, created plot that would have done credit to a John Grisham novel.
Sadly for the rest of us, it was just one of a series of plots between corrupt MCC guards and prisoners who smuggle in drugs, cell phones and even guns into the jail.
Some of the guards also beat a prisoner to death.
It was only discovered after Epstein's death and the state settled for a relatively small amount.
The common feature in all these scandals was that the crimes or cover-ups went on for years.
What this all means is that the MCC was not just a hellhole, it was also deeply corrupt.
When I was an investigative journalist, I worked on a documentary about drug smuggling guards and what they do to the honest guards.
In a prison guard culture of corruption, anyone good is labeled “a rat” and pushed aside and isolated. The corrupt guards intimidate any staff member who would blow the whistle on their corruption.
The union protects their members, no matter what the circumstances, and management doesn't want the scandals, controversies, or bad statistics that accountability brings.
What this culture of the rat brings is not only years of cover-up and complicity, but also incompetence. Anyone hard-working and honest is going to be pushed aside.
Days before Epstein's death, not only did the MCC staff release the wrong prisoner, they sent home a notorious bank robber with a free metro pass, they also missed the fact that a gangbanger in their jail facing murder and conspiracy charges was streaming live on Facebook for 32 minutes from inside the MCC on a covertly smuggled phone.
The New York Post reported that the smuggling between guards and prisoners was so bad that one of their law enforcement sources had told them, “The MCC has more phones than a Best Buy.”
It was in this context that the Associated Press did an investigation into the American prison system and discovered that, “29 prisoners escaped from federal prisons in an 18-month span, with nearly half of them still at large. At some institutions, doors are left unlocked, security cameras are broken, and officials sometimes don't notice an inmate is missing for hours.”
Remember that context when you hear about any official investigation or report on the Epstein death. Because this important context is never mentioned by the government investigators, or that the MCC security cameras were broken and officials didn't notice inmates missing for hours.
All of this were the conditions in that prison that Jeffrey Epstein entered on Saturday, July 6, 2019, 9.38pm. 

“The inmate least likely to harm Epstein”

The incompetence at the prison began early.
In his intake form, the prison authorities managed to get Jeffrey Epstein's ethnicity wrong. They marked him as a black man and that he had never committed a sexual assault. 
That's pretty difficult in a six-foot white guy who was probably the single most well-known sexual offender in the world.
It got worse.
After 23 hours, someone finally realized that putting a famous multi-millionaire executive charged with sex crimes in the general population of a prison was probably not a good idea.
Leaving aside that it took them 23 hours to have this brainwave, on July 7, 2019, the prison authorities transferred Epstein to the Special Housing Unit, SHU, a tier for either the toughest prisoners, Chapo Guzman, the Mexican drug lord, was one of them, or inmates like Epstein who were most likely to get beaten up.
The prison administration's choice of Epstein's cellmate was an interesting one.
In the words of the DOJ investigators, summation of their interview with the then warden, “Epstein was a high-profile inmate and that he initially selected inmate one to be Epstein's cellmate because inmate one was another high-profile inmate and the warden believed inmate one to be the least likely SHU inmate to harm Epstein.”
Epstein and Inmate 1 were housed together in cell Z05-124 in the M-Tier of the Special Housing Unit. In the Department of Justice report that was supposed to close the book on the Jeffrey Epstein death, the above quote about Inmate 1 is all you ever hear about this person.
That's odd, because Inmate One is perhaps the last inmate that a reasonable person might think that Epstein would be placed with in a small, confined space.
Here's the backstory of Inmate 1 that the Department of Justice investigators did not mention.

Down the road from Pleasantville in the state of New York is the Village Between Two Rivers of Briarcliff Manors.  It's a beautiful suburb surrounded by lovely wooden countryside, but it was also the scene of violence, drug trafficking, and murders by so-called Inmate 1.

His real name is Nicholas Tartaglione, and he was a police officer who had a long string of violent incidents in his law enforcement career.
He began by declaring himself a member of the mafia to a local journalist, and then beating him up so violently, at one point he repeatedly smashed the journalist's head against pavement, then, for good measure, arrested him for, “Resisting arrest.”
Tartaglione did this, or similar things to the journalist, on four separate occasions. The violence was so bad that a court awarded the journalist a $1.1 million dollar payout from Tartaglione's police department.
However, the police of Briarcliff Manor didn't try to fire Tartaglione for those incidents.  It was when he allegedly lied in the witness stand that they attempted to fire him.
It didn't work.
Tartaglione got his job back, only leaving the force on a disability pension a few years later.
Then, he turned to drug dealing.
However, in 2016, one of his deals went bad.
His Mexican accomplice somehow lost $200,000 of Tartaglione's money.
He went into hiding.
But eventually, accompanied by three relatives and friends, he went to Tartaglione's brother's bar to plead his case to Nicholas Tartaglione.
Big mistake.
He was killed on the spot.
Then Tartaglione and his other assistants put the three men in their car, drove them to a lonely farm, forced them to dig their own graves, and shot them.
When the FBI began to investigate the case, things got really bad. One of Tartaglione's alleged assistants, another police officer, shot himself in the head while sitting in his car as the federal agents approached it.
This is the man that prison authorities put Jeffrey Epstein in a cell with.
A man who would be convicted of those quadruple murders.
The man whom the warden described to government investigators as, “The inmate least likely to harm Epstein.”
It begs the question, what were the rest of the inmates like if  Tartaglione was the least likely to harm him?
It's also odd, because it's not as if the controversy or violence around  Tartaglione stopped when he was put in jail.
In another New York jail there was a, “Disciplinary incident” so bad that Tartaglione was sent to the MCC and the other jail refused to ever have him back.
So did three other jails in the state of New York.
Then, while at the MCC, Tartaglione was so badly beaten that his eye socket was fractured and he had to spend two weeks in the prison hospital.
Even more odd, just six days before Jeffrey Epstein was placed with him, Tartaglione was found to have - yes - a mobile phone in his cell, presumably smuggled into the cell by a guard.
Tartaglione claimed that another inmate had tossed him the phone moments before the guards entered the cell.
However, his lawyer asked the judge to stop police from examining the phone as there might be confidential legal information on it. Whereupon the judge wryly noted, either it's your phone or not.
The point is that, as we've already seen, there was a serious systemic trafficking of drugs and phones inside the MCC prison by corrupt guards.
But the really odd part?
Tartaglione's method of murder for at least one of his victims?
Strangulation.

The description of the murder from the assistant US prosecutor: “Tartaglioni eventually put a plastic zip tie around Luna's neck and pulled it tight, choking Luna and ultimately killing him.”

Very odd, because that's very close to the way Jeffrey Epstein would die, according to that independent medical examiner, Michael Baden.

Alex Klein

Tuesday, July 23rd, 2019 - 1.27 a.m.

Declan Hill

Jeffrey Epstein was in cell Z05-124 in the M-Tier of the SHU for 16 days with Nicholas  Tartaglione.
However, at approximately 1 27 a.m.on July 23rd, 2019, something happened between Jeffrey Epstein and Nicholas  Tartaglione.
Epstein was then taken out of the cell with a wound around his neck.
The prison officials and the later Department of Justice, DOJ investigators, were stymied by the meaning of it.
Nicholas Tartaglione claims that he was woken up in the middle of the night by Jeffrey Epstein's body falling on him. He got up, wrenched a cloth noose off Epstein's neck, roused the guards, and thus, he claims, saved Jeffrey Epstein's life.
Jeffrey Epstein was then moved to a suicide unit inside the MCC and he was later faced possible sanctions for self-harm.
However, there seems to be no effort to bring in any outside medical expert to assess the wounds for self-harm or any proper rigorous investigation of the incident.
After Jeffrey Epstein's death, prison officials say that there were three possible explanations of the incident.

1. Epstein tried to commit suicide.

2. Tartaglione attacked him.

3. Epstein and Tartaglione worked together to create an incident that would allow Epstein to be granted bail as it would be deemed too dangerous for him to be kept in prison. In short, Epstein paid Tartaglione to attack him.

To examine those claims, my students and I made a simple chart. We looked at who, said what, when. The results are clear and consistent.
Jeffrey Epstein on that first night, July 23rd, and the next day, July 24th, said to MCC staff that he had been attacked by  Tartaglione.
He also said to the MCC supervisors, the people above the regular correctional officers, that he had been warned that if he said anything about an attack, the MCC staff would, “not care.”
However, by the third day, July 25, 2019, Jeffrey Epstein seems to have developed a full-blown case of prisoner amnesia and, “Could not remember what had happened” when asked by MCC supervisors, staff, or psychologists.
But he did repeat the story of a premeditated attack on him by Nicholas Tartaglione on August 1, 2019, to his lawyer, David Schoen, as we heard in his interview.
According to reports in the New York Times, Jeffrey Epstein was by this time paying off at least three other prisoners, putting money in their commissary accounts in the prison, something that the New York Times described as “Classic protection payment.”
  Tartaglione's defense was that he had saved the life of America's most famous inmate, and that the whole incident was yet another example of the discrimination he faced inside the MCC.  To be fair, at least the story of discrimination by the MCC staff had been previously supported by the judge in the preparation of his murder case.
The judge threatened to cite jail authorities for contempt of court because the conditions that  Tartaglione was kept in were so bad.
After Epstein died,Tartaglione's lawyer specifically requested that prison authorities keep a video of that July 23rd night for future reference.
Tartaglione is facing the death sentence and his lawyer claims that that video taken from outside the jail cell might prove him innocent.
It no longer exists.
Prison authorities allowed that video to be deleted.

Alex Klein

July 25th to 30th 2019.

Declan Hill

Jeffrey Epstein spent the next five days, July 25th to 30th, on what the MCC describes as “suicide” and/or “psychological watch.”
Despite the fancy words, it's a pretty basic system. People on the suicide watch were not supervised by a psychologist or a nurse. Rather, other inmates were paid one dollar an hour to look at the person who was behind a plastic screen, lights on for 24 hours, single bed, no books permitted.
One report by one of those inmates monitoring the suicide watch wing described chatting with Epstein until two o'clock in the morning.
The men spoke about both driving taxis in New York. Epstein claimed to have been a cabbie in his early days. But his real interest that night was figuring out how to survive in prison. The more experienced prisoner gave him what he described as a class-in-jail culture. What to do, what to say, and what not to say.
Again, to repeat a theme of this series, Jeffrey Epstein, throughout his, “Suicide watch”, did not express any thoughts, desires for self-harm.
Rather, in these reports, we see that his focus was figuring out how best to deal with difficult circumstances.
Occasionally, a report will indicate him as, “Sitting with his head in his hands” or “Staring at the walls.”
However, for a rich, wealthy, 66-year-old man taken from his private jet on the way back from prison, now finding himself in a hellhole of a maximum security wing, this might be expected.

Alex Klein

Tuesday, July 30th, 2019

Declan Hill

On July 30th, a week after the incident in Epstein's cell, two things occurred.

First, Epstein is returned to the Special Housing Unit. He's placed in cell number Z06-220 and the L-Tier of the Special Housing Unit. He is “bunkies" with a second inmate. A man who would later declare to investigators that he asked, “Epstein to please not kill himself or hang himself while Inmate 3 was his cellmate because Inmate 3 had a chance to go home soon.
Epstein told Inmate 3 not to worry and that he was not going to cause Inmate 3 any trouble.”
It was now the early days of August 2019 and Epstein met with David Schoen as we heard.  Schoen reported that Jeffrey Epstein was forward-looking, aggressive in his legal strategy, and had laughed with a prison psychologist when asked about self-harm.
Jeffrey Epstein was spending 12 hours a day with his lawyers.
It was partly a robust, forward-looking legal strategy.
It was partly, according to the New York Times, a self-defense scheme. Every minute he spent with his lawyers was time away from the SHU and potential violence.

The second thing that occurred on July 30th was that half the cameras in the Special Housing Unit. Specifically the ones filming the L-tier, where Jeffrey Epstein was located, would suffer what the FBI would later call “a catastrophic failure.” So for the next 10 days and nights until Epstein's death, they were not recording anything.
No jail staff did anything to fix the problem.
And remember, some of those MCC prison guards were working with members of organized crime in the jail.
So who was told what and when about the failure with the video system?
America's most famous prisoner was essentially unsupervised, unfilmed, and unprotected for the next nine days.

August 9, 2019

The day before Epstein's death followed the same routines as the previous ones.  At approximately 8 a.m., he was escorted downstairs to an attorney-client room, and he spent the next 10 hours sequestered with his New York lawyers.
However, there were two major differences.
First, his bunkie, or cellmate, was moved out of Z06-220, and he was not replaced.
There were dozens of largely self-excusing pages of explanations as to why the warden had taken the Friday off or any of the other supervisors and guards didn't replace him with another person.
Secondly, the judge in another case involving Jeffrey Epstein's ex-girlfriend, Ghislaine Maxwell, released over 2,000 pages of testimony and discussion about Jeffrey Epstein's sex life and trafficking network.
The world, or at least the section that was interested in the story, could read, among other things, that Jeffrey Epstein had been interested in dominant sex and had ordered various books on Amazon about the subject.
However, his lawyers report that Epstein was unfazed by this release of documents and that his final words to them were, essentially, “See you soon.”

Alex Klein

Friday, August the 9th, 2019, 7.20 p.m.

Declan Hill

Jeffrey Epstein was escorted back to the SHU by a guard.
Here he was allowed to make a private phone call from the shower unit.
The guard even plugged the phone into the wall for him.
Now this ran counter to protocol in this, the most secure area of the jail.
Prisoners were only supposed to have limited personal calls, 15 minutes once a month, that were to be monitored by prison guards.
Yet for some reason, still not explained by any investigation, the guards in the SHU allowed Jeffrey Epstein to have a private phone call that was unmonitored.
When they asked him who the call was to, Jeffrey Epstein replied, “My mom.”
However, his mother had died in 2004.
The chief psychologist of the MCC was furious when they heard about this unmonitored call.
They speculated that they could have been bad personal news, a Dear John call that could have tipped Epstein into suicide.
The last call was to Bylo-Russia.
The person he spoke to was his long-time girlfriend, Karinia Shulyak. She had said through intermediaries that the call was perfectly normal.
Jeffrey Epstein was forward-looking and told her that he was anticipating bail hearing on August the 12th. That was the Monday coming up. But in case that he didn't go well, they may not be able to speak for about a month.
He hung up the phone.
Then Jeffrey Epstein was escorted back to his cell Z06220.
His cellmate had been removed hours before.
Jeffrey Epstein was now alone for the first time since he'd arrived at the Metropolitan Correctional Center.

Alex Klein

Saturday, August the 10th, 2019 Midnight.

Declan Hill

In the midst of all the examination of the Jeffrey Epstein scandal, there is another issue that has largely gone unexamined.
The official paperwork indicates that at midnight, in the special housing unit, purportedly the most secure in the entire prison, that there was one, if not two, extra people there.
They call it a “Ghost Count.”
You can call it a ghost, phantom, or spirit, whatever you want.
But the paperwork shows that the supervisor in the Central Command Center wrote in his report that at the SHU at midnight, “73 parenthesis plus 1 close parenthesis.”
73 plus 1.
The official regulations at the jail stated that every few hours the guards were supposed to count all the inmates in the units.
There were supposed to be official counts at 4 and 10 p.m. and then midnight, 3 a.m., 5 a.m. to keep an accurate track of who was in the jail at what time.
However, such was the levels of incompetence and corruption that most of these counts of inmates were not done.
The paperwork was fake to pretend as if it had been done.
But on that night in the SHU unit, there were supposed to be only 72 people.
However, the paperwork indicates that at midnight there was an extra person, a plus one.
Look, mistakes can happen, particularly in a place as incompetent, as corrupt as the MCC. However, what's bizarre and has never been properly explained, that it is at 3am and 5am the count of the inmates was correct.
It was put down as 72.
The problem is that those counts were never done.
The guards supposedly protecting some of the most dangerous and famous prisoners in America were mostly asleep. The video of their office where they were working shows them snoozing at their desk and occasionally awake and doing some other online shopping, but not doing the official counts or leaving their unit to inspect any of the SHU.
Remember, the cameras on the inmates were not working. So no one can actually see what occurred in the L-tier that night.
But what's strange and bizarre is that the official count had an extra person at midnight.  
Then, without any proper explanation, that person vanishes by 3am.

Alex Klein

Saturday, August the 10th, 2019, 6 a.m.

Declan Hill

The two guards who spent the night sleeping, shopping, and not counting or supervising any of the inmates on the special housing unit now got themselves together and picked up a delivery of breakfast trays.
They delivered the trays around the SHU and got to Z06220, Jeffrey Epstein's cell, at 6.30 a.m.
The first guard went in and claims to have immediately discovered Jeffrey Epstein, quote, with an orange string, presumably from his sheet or shirt, tied to the top portion of his bed bunk.
He shouted to his partner.
She pressed a body alarm, summoning help.
He gave CPR to Epstein.
At one point, he shouted in desperation, “Breathe, Epstein, breathe.”
The other inmates of SHU began to mock them.
They started to chant from their cells, “Breathe, Epstein, breathe.”
Two minutes later, approximately 6.33am, their supervisor arrived.
The first guard said, “We screwed up, it's my fault, not hers.”
Ten minutes later, approximately, they move Jeffrey Epstein's body to the prison infirmary.
The emergency medical team, that's the outside ambulance guys, arrive at approximately 6.45am.
It's not clear if anyone had been giving Epstein CPR, but the EMT responders gave Epstein the usual medicines in these cases.
They also intubated.
They gave three rounds of epifrene.
“Access was started. I.O. was initiated. No pulse had been found.
No shock was advised. And the inmate was prepared for transport to a local hospital.”
At 7.10 a.m. the EMT people took Jeffrey Epstein to the Beekman Hospital.
The ambulance arrived at 7.20 a.m.
And almost immediately, a doctor there declared Jeffrey Epstein was dead.
D-O-A.
Dead on arrival.
He had presumably been dead for hours.
Jeffrey Epstein, the most famous prison inmate in America, was dead.
And at that point, no one knew what had happened.

Alex Klein

Saturday August the 10th 2019 7.10 a.m.

Declan Hill

They destroyed the crime scene. 
Back on L-tier unit of the special housing unit in the Metropolitan Correctional Center guards and their supervisors were not at their best. There's a photo of the cell door with yellow crime scene tape on it. The problem is that the tape is obviously broken and unsealed. It looks more like an amateur tourist photo than a professional crime scene.
The news had been out on social media since 8.19am.
An unexplained but accurate message appeared on 4chan detailing the correct responses of the paramedics and Jeffrey Epstein's death.
By 8.42am, the mainstream media, CBS in this case, were reporting that Epstein was dead. And almost immediately, they were declaring it an alleged suicide.
But during that time, and all the way for the next six hours until FBI investigators arrived, the MCC staff allegedly left the crime scene unguarded.
The FBI investigators did get to the cell at 1.20pm and they took some material from the room. However, they eventually allowed prison staff to “recycle” or destroy much of the rest of the material that was in that room.
It was the beginning of a shockingly bad investigation into the death of America's most famous inmate.

Alex Klein

Sunday, August the 11th 2019 - 10 a.m.

Declan Hill

The medical examination on Jeffrey Epstein's body was done by two doctors.
One, a staff medical examiner for the city of New York who presumably had got the bad shift Sunday morning on a hot summer day in August.
The second medical examiner was one of the most famous investigators in American law enforcement, Dr. Michael Baden.
He was the former chief medical examiner for New York and had worked on just about every famous case of celebrity death in recent American history, including the OJ Simpson case and George Floyd's death.
The CrimeWaves team interviewed him for over an hour and we have a special episode in the Jeffrey Epstein Files of this conversation.
For now, a summary.
The attending New York City doctor declared the finding undetermined.
But Dr. Michael Baden concluded on the evidence that he saw that day that Jeffrey Epstein was far more likely to have been killed by homicide than suicide.
This was due to the location of the marks on the neck, the lividity traces, the state of the blood vessels in and around the eyes.
These physical clues and in particular the breaking of the neck in three separate places to Dr. Baden indicated that Jeffrey Epstein had been murdered.
Dr. Baden has not, as you will hear, changed his mind.
 
Friday, August 15th, 2019 

It was now that things got really strange.
First, the City of New York Chief Medical Examiner, Barbara Sampson, declared that Jeffrey Epstein's death was a suicide.
It's not clear upon what evidence that she took this step.
Dr. Michael Baden, to this day, declares himself mystified as to why she would have done such a thing.
And next was an announcement on Monday, August 19th.
The Attorney General of the United States, Bill Barr, publicly declared that Epstein's death was not murder, but a perfect storm of screw-ups.
He might have been right.
Despite all the indications that we looked at in this episode and the expert testimony of Dr. Baden, the Attorney General may have been right.
However, for the chief of all American law enforcement to announce early in a potential investigation the results.  It just doomed any chance for proper inquiry.
Because after Barr's announcements, what do you know?
Every report, every memo, every document written after that announcement confirmed what their boss's boss's boss's boss's boss had declared:
It was a bunch of screw-ups. No chance of any murder here.
Everyone, move on. Look at something else.
Again, the government officials may be right, but here's a brief list of some of the things that investigators did not do.

1. The FBI did not examine all of the sheets or all of the nooses that were purportedly found in Jeffrey Epstein's cell for DNA.

2. The FBI even allowed prison officials to destroy most of the material in Jeffrey Epstein's cell. They did not box them up or place them in storage, but allowed most of the material to be destroyed.
Why?

3. Nor did the FBI ever state definitively why the video system was not recording in the SHU unit for 10 days. They list it as “a catastrophic failure.” 
But what kind? Sabotage? Age of equipment?
And why were those particular video cameras, the ones purportedly surveilling some of the most famous prisoners in America, out of action, but not others in the prison?

4. Eleven inmates who were on the SHU L-tier with Jeffrey Epstein that night either did not agree to speak or were never interviewed by investigators.

Why not?

5. Of the three inmates that did agree to speak with a legal counsel present in their room, two declared, seemingly in prison lingo, that they saw and heard nothing.
The only inmate who does speak to investigators contradicted the story of the MCC guards, adding details to his story that the guard's testimony indicates he could not have witnessed or they were not telling the truth.
 
It has not been followed up on.

6. Of all the perfect storm of screw-ups, the only people to actually get punished were the two lowest-rung guards in the jail.
They were charged criminally. After all, they had fallen asleep on duty, completely neglected to check in on the prisoners, and then faked the logbook to cover up their crimes.

However, none of those things seemed to be abnormal in that particular jail.

Eventually, their prosecution was deferred, and they were given 100 hours of community service. However, in November 2023, one of the guards was named in a lawsuit. She had gotten another job at another New York jail, and one of her supervisors claimed that the guard had beaten her up because she had an accent.

7. The warden of the MCC, purportedly in charge of this hellhole of incompetence, corruption, and outright criminality?
He's got a job running another jail.
Which begs the question, how bad do you have to be to lose your job in the American prison system?

What's needed in the Jeffrey Epstein case is a proper independent inquiry to determine clearly what happened that night of August 9th/10th, 2019.

For more information on the case, please do listen to our interview with Dr. Michael Baden, the medical examiner.

In the New Year, I'm going to present another episode, the case for the defense, suicide. On the appalling conditions inside the Metropolitan Correctional Center that could have driven Jeffrey Epstein to suicide.
In the meantime, on behalf of the students, and in this episode series, it was the brilliant Alex Klein and Jake Zenger who did fantastic work.
and myself.

Thank you for listening to CrimeWaves.

**

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