Flaunting It

If you were a billionaire with a thing about underage girls, but you'd been caught and forced to plead guilty--albeit to a minor charge--and had been required to register as a sex offender, back in 2008, how would you be conducting your affairs? Would you continue as if nothing had changed, or would you be, well, just a bit more discrete? It you picked "be just a bit more discrete" you'd be wrong--that is, if you were Jeffrey Epstein. According to an article by Holly Aguirre in Vanity Fair, Epstein flaunted his behavior.

Locals say Epstein was flying in underage girls long after his conviction for sex crimes—and authorities did nothing to stop him. “It was like he was flaunting it,” says an employee at the airstrip on St. Thomas. “But it was said that he always tipped really well, so everyone overlooked it.”

Oh. "He always tipped really well, so everyone overlooked it." Looks like there are no heroes in this story.


Ever since billionaire Jeffrey Epstein was arrested on July 6 on charges of sex trafficking, the media have been scrambling to make sense of what happened on Little St. James, his 70-acre private island in the Caribbean. But on nearby St. Thomas, locals say Epstein continued to bring underage girls to the island as recently as this year—a decade after he was forced to register as a convicted sex offender—and that authorities did nothing to stop him.

Two employees who worked at the local airstrip on St. Thomas tell Vanity Fair that they witnessed Epstein boarding his private plane on multiple occasions in the company of girls who appeared to be under the age of consent. According to the employees, the girls arrived with Epstein aboard one of his two Gulfstream jets. Between January 2018 and June 2019, previously published flight records show, the jets were airborne at least one out of every three days. They stopped all over the world, sometimes for only a few hours at a time: Paris, London, Slovakia, Mexico, Morocco. When they left St. Thomas, the employees say, they returned to airports near Epstein’s homes in Palm Beach and New York City.

Those weren't the only destinations. Switzerland, Italy, Kenya, and Brazil, too. And among the countries that he entered using his phony Saudi passport you can include: France, Spain, the United Kingdom, and Saudi Arabia. That's a lot of flying, and it's almost certainly only a partial list. No wonder those planes were airborne so much, nor is that amount of travel cheap.


Epstein made no attempt to hide the fact that he was flying all over the world in the company of young girls. Oh, except that one airport employee said that these very young looking girls "were always wearing college sweatshirts." Clever! But no one was fooled, and no one said anything. And remember--this wasn't just on a remote island or in foreign parts. It's well documented that Epstein has also been strolling around New York with very young girls all these years.

But, you ask, if airport employees knew all about Epstein, then surely law enforcement ...

No.

... it appears that local authorities did nothing to investigate Epstein’s repeated trips with young girls—let alone intervene—despite the fact that he was listed on the island’s registry of sex offenders. Chief William Harvey, a veteran of the Virgin Islands police department, tells Vanity Fair that he does not know who Epstein is, and is unaware of any investigation into him. Sammuel Sanes, a former senator for the Virgin Islands, says he is unaware of any special precautions taken by law enforcement to track the arrivals and departures of Epstein’s jet on St. Thomas, or the movements of his helicopter to and from his private island. 

... 

“My colleagues and I definitely talked about how we didn’t understand how this guy was still allowed to be around children,” says the former air traffic controller. “We didn’t say anything because we figured law enforcement was doing their job. I have to say that that is regrettable, but we really didn’t even know who to tell, or if anyone really cared.”

Of course I don't believe for a moment that "William Harvey, a veteran of the Virgin Islands police department," didn't know who Epstein was--and that's the really scary thing. What if law enforcement really was "doing their job"--as they were told to do it? From how high up the law enforcement chain of command would those type of instructions have come from? I'd say from pretty high up, and since we're talking about constant interstate and international travel--"the jets were airborne at least one out of every three days"--I just don't see how federals authorities weren't involved in this. We're talking about friends in high places. Very high places. So maybe Acosta was telling the truth when he was told that Epstein was "intelligence."

So, let's see. The plea deal was entered into by the Bush DoJ in 2008, and Epstein has been carrying on pretty much as usual for all the intervening years. That would be during the Obama-Clinton years, and we know that Epstein has always been a big time Dem giver. I'd say things are going to be getting very interesting.