$1.08B through JPMorgan, $1.3B through Deutsche, $170M from Leon Black. I spent weeks mapping the Epstein money trail and the post-conviction numbers are the what stood out the most. Not the flight records everyone talks about.
Started this because I wanted to understand the flight logs better and ended up barely caring about them. The money side is where the actual story is and almost nobody talks about it that way.
Quick context on what I was working from. Senate Finance Committee reports (Wyden's people did most of the heavy lifting here), House Oversight material, the JPMorgan and Deutsche Bank SARs that came out in the USVI litigation, ICIJ's Paradise Papers stuff, and whatever I could pull from the DOJ release under the Transparency Act. I obviously did not read 3 million pages but did read enough to map the structure and I'm still digging through parts of it.
A few things I keep coming back to: JPMorgan ran $1.08 billion through 134 separate Epstein accounts. one hundred and thirty four. For one client, and when they finally dropped him in 2013 – FIVE years after he pled guilty, one of their relationship managers walked him over to Deutsche Bank the same week. Deutsche opened 40+ accounts for him and pushed another $1.3 billion through before they cut ties.
Leon Black is the one I can't get past though. Co-founder of Apollo. Paid Epstein $170 million between 2012 and 2017, all post-conviction. $70 million of it in 2014 alone, no written contract, nominally for "tax and estate planning." The USVI settlement filings flat out say Black's payments helped fund the trafficking operation in the islands. He paid $62.5 million to make the claim go away and Apollo's board basically shrugged.
Ghislaine got $92.5 million from Epstein across 176 wires. there are 46 shell companies sprawled across USVI, Bermuda, Delaware. one of them, Southern Trust Company, was registered as a "DNA research company", investigators couldn't find evidence any actual research ever happened. assets on the books: $391 million. a fake DNA company holding almost $400 million. The part that actually got me and what I wasn't expecting: of the 19 documented financial flows I was able to map, 18 of them happened AFTER the 2008 conviction, not before. Everyone who mattered knew exactly what he was and the money didn't slow down, it got bigger. That's what seemed the most significant. It wasn't ignorance, it was a decision.
I built a dashboard where you can poke at the shell company structure, the banking flows, the timelines, the settlements. Links in the comments. All sources are public record, none of this is speculative.