‘Poor, smart and desperate to be rich’: How Epstein went from teaching to Wall Street | Miami Herald

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 an eight-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 by accused by dozens of underage girls with far more serious crimes — and received a remarkably lenient sentence, courtesy of a U.S. attorney who later become President Donald Trump’s labor secretary.

Epstein launched his financier career during a parent-teacher conference at Dalton in 1976 when he dazzled a student’s father with his intelligence. Epstein confided that he wasn’t cut out to be a teacher. He envisioned himself on Wall Street.

“This parent was so wowed by the conversation he told my father, ‘You’ve got to hire this guy,’ ” recalled Lynne Koeppel, daughter of the late Alan “Ace” Greenberg, an executive at Bear Stearns investment bank. “Give Jeff credit. He was brilliant.”

Greenberg was also impressed by Epstein, then 23, a two-time college dropout and son of a parks department employee. Greenberg, son of an Oklahoma City women’s clothing store owner, rose from Bear Stearns clerk to CEO and had an affinity for what he called “PSDs” — poor, smart and desperate to be rich.

“That was Jeff,” Koeppel said. “He was very smart and he knew how to woo people, how to schmooze. He’s personable and makes good company.”

Did Epstein purposely place himself at Dalton to get a foot on the ladder to jet-setting, celebrity-mingling high society?

“If that was his plan, it worked,” she said.

Epstein, now 66, started his job at the Dalton School at age 21 without a degree and taught high school students only a few years younger than he was.

Students remember an informal personality, often joking with students. He was popular with female pupils, despite a mixed reputation.

“Epstein was considered a little creepy by the girls,” alumna Karin Williams said. “I won’t say that the girls didn’t like him. But they thought he was odd.”

Despite his short stint, Epstein left an impression.

“He’s the only man who I’ve ever met who had a full-length fur coat,” said Williams, who remembered the coat as Epstein’s flamboyant 1970s fashion statement at a school with a conservative dress code.

Student-teacher relationships were not unheard-of at Dalton, according to several former students. It was a permissive time in the United States, and 40 years before #MeToo. However, no one who spoke to the Herald recalled Epstein engaging in a relationship or initiating unwanted physical contact with them.

“In retrospect, you could see how maybe he was looking for young nymphs,” said alumna Heidi Knecht-Seegers. “But I didn’t have a class with him and I was one of the few who didn’t drink or smoke or go to parties.”

Epstein rose through the Bear Stearns ranks quickly, making partner by 1980 as reported in a 2002 New York Magazine profile on him. But while Epstein impressed traders and hedge fund managers on Wall Street, many of his students were less taken.

“To me he didn’t belong there,” Maya Travaglia, who had Epstein for 10th grade math, said. “It just felt very unformed. He didn’t command the class.”

Joshua Persky, who graduated from Dalton in 1977, had Epstein for physics.

“I thought he was okay,” Persky said of Epstein’s teaching ability. “Once in a while, he could not complete a complex homework problem, which I didn’t mind either.”

Peter Thomas Roth, who later founded an eponymous skin care company, had a different impression, calling him “amazing” on Facebook. In addition to 12th grade physics, Epstein tutored Roth in statistics to prepare him for the Wharton School at Penn.

Still, some kids complained to the school administration, Persky remembers.

“I think it was unusual that a school focused on quality education would hire a person with no experience and no college degrees, especially when the teachers we knew there were excellent,” said E. Belvin Williams, a former Dalton board member and associate dean of the Teachers College at Columbia University. “My hunch is he had some contacts with parents or board members.”

By comparison, Travaglia noted, her geometry teacher the following year was Yves Volel, an activist and Haitian presidential candidate who was assassinated in the late ‘80s. Volel’s style was much more rigorous.

Ultimately, Epstein’s haphazard, uninspired teaching led to his dismissal after the ‘75-’76 school year, according to Peter Branch who was the head of the high school.

“It was determined that he had not adequately grown as a new teacher to the standard of the school,” Branch said.

The Dalton School is one of a group of New York private schools well known for their demanding academics. And like its peer institutions, Dalton is expensive. Tuition in the mid-‘70s was about $3,200 for high school students. Today it’s over $50,000. The school occupies a well-kept-but-unassuming brick building just off of Park Avenue.

There’s a focus on the arts at Dalton. Notable alumni include Anderson Cooper, Claire Danes, Sean Lennon — the son of John Lennon and Yoko Ono — and a long list of actors, artists and musicians. Curriculum, according to the school website, follows “the Dalton Plan,” which encourages each student to make their own educational choices.

The school offered a rich assortment of classes in 10 languages, including Russian; printmaking, jewelry-making, sculpture and drawing classes with nude models.

Persky performed in modern dance with Jennifer Grey — “Baby” from “Dirty Dancing” — and Shauna Redford, daughter of Robert Redford.

Epstein arrived during a key transition period for the Dalton School. The previous headmaster, Donald Barr, father of current Attorney General William Barr, had recently departed over disagreements with the board of trustees. Barr was a conservative headmaster who clashed with the progressive parents.

“Donald Barr was a very authoritarian headmaster,” Karin Williams said

Following Barr’s departure, T-shirts and sneakers were incorporated into the dress code. Blue jeans and “long male hair” were still prohibited, according to The Daltonian, the school’s newspaper. Travaglia remembers administrators measuring the length of girls’ skirts during the Barr years.

Barr left the school a semester before Epstein arrived and it’s unclear whether Barr had a hand in hiring him. Branch, who served as interim headmaster in the latter half of 1976, did not remember who hired him.

Apart from Epstein, Dalton has weathered a few of its own scandals in recent years. In 2013, a school email to boosters and donors included a confidential list of children who had been rejected. And a New Jersey federal court lawsuit alleges that Gardner Dunnan, the headmaster who succeeded Barr, had sexually assaulted a female student that he let stay in his apartment in 1986. The case has been transferred to the Southern District of New York, where Epstein is being prosecuted for alleged sex trafficking.

Epstein built a career out of making connections with the well connected. He got his start at Dalton and never moved far away. At Dalton, he was surrounded by the young girls he became fixated on as an alleged sexual predator, and schools became his preferred hunting ground.

His most recent accuser, Jennifer Araoz, said she was approached by one of Epstein’s recruiters when she was a 14-year-old freshman outside The Talent Unlimited High School on East 68th Street, a handful of blocks from his mansion. She was brought to him by a woman in her 20s, and he showed her his opulent townhouse, full of statues and taxidermy, while white-gloved staff offered her wine and cheese, according to her court filings and an NBC interview. She was paid $300 for her visits until the day a massage turned into rape, Araoz said.

Her story mirrors those of other victims, who said he preyed on young teens who often had artistic aspirations.

At the Interlochen School for the Arts in Michigan, Epstein targeted 13-year-old Nadia Bjorlin, according to her mother, who told the Daily Mail that Epstein offered to be her “godfather” and foster her singing career. Bjorlin’s mother rejected his advances; Nadia went on to become a soap opera star.

Araoz and Bjorlin had both lost their fathers shortly before Epstein approached them.

Epstein, a talented pianist who attended Interlochen summer camp as a kid, donated $17,000 and a new cabin to the school.

He constructed an image of himself as a wealthy philanthropist and intellectual, donating money from his foundations to arts organizations, scientists, Harvard University, the Santa Fe Institute think tank and cancer research funds.

He gave $180,000 to Ballet Florida in West Palm Beach, some of that earmarked for therapeutic massages.

The all-girls Hewitt School, located about four blocks from his New York mansion, received $15,000.

Epstein gave $75,000 to Dalton, the place that provided the springboard to what he would become.

The last time she saw her old teacher, a Dalton alumna recalled, Epstein was crossing Park Avenue at 71st Street with Woody Allen and his young wife, Soon-Yi.

Miami Herald investigative reporter Nicholas Nehamas contributed to this report.

Linda Robertson

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Linda Robertson has written about a variety of compelling subjects during an award-winning career. As a sports columnist she covered 13 Olympics, Final Fours, World Cups, Wimbledon, Heat and Hurricanes championships, Super Bowls, Soul Bowls and Orange Bowls, Cuban defectors, LeBron James, Tiger Woods, Roger Federer, Lance Armstrong, Tonya Harding. She golfed with Donald Trump, fished with Jimmy Johnson, learned a magic trick from Muhammad Ali and partnered with Venus Williams to defeat Serena. She now chronicles our love-hate relationship with Miami, where she grew up.