intersting articles on epstein-wexner
https://nymag.com/nymetro/news/people/n_7912/
Another focus of curiosity is the relationship that Epstein has with his patron and mentor Leslie Wexner, founder and chairman of the Columbus, Ohio–based Limited chain of women’s-clothing stores. Wexner, who is said to be worth more than $2.5 billion by Forbes, became an Epstein client in 1987. “It’s a weird relationship,” says another Wall Streeter who knows Epstein. “It’s just not typical for someone of such enormous wealth to all of a sudden give his money to some guy most people have never heard of.” The Wexner-Epstein relationship is indeed a multifaceted one.
Given the secrecy that envelops Epstein’s client list, some have speculated that Wexner is the primary source of Epstein’s lavish life — but friends leap to his defense. “Let me tell you: Jeffrey Epstein has other clients besides Wexner. I know because some of them are my clients,” says noted m&a lawyer Dennis Block of Cadwalader, Wickersham & Taft. “I sent him a $500 million client a few years ago and he wouldn’t take him. Said the account was too small. Both the client and I were amazed. But that’s Jeffrey.”
Epstein’ s current residence in Manhattan — a 45,000-square-foot eight-story mansion on East 71st Street — was originally bought by Wexner for $13 million in 1989. Wexner poured many millions into a full gut renovation, then turned it over to Epstein in 1995 after he got married. One story has Epstein paying only a dollar for it, though others say he paid full market price, which would have been in the neighborhood of $20 million. Epstein then undertook his own $10 million gut renovation (special features: closed-circuit TV and a heated sidewalk in front of the house for melting snow), saying to friends: “I don’t want to live in another person’s house.”
There are other houses as well, including a sweeping villa in Palm Beach and a custom-built 51,000-square-foot castle in Santa Fe. Said to be the largest house in the state, the latter sits atop a hill on a 45,000-acre ranch. He had it built because of the month or so he found himself spending there, talking elementary particle physics with his friend Murray Gell-Mann, a Nobel Prize–winning physicist and co-chair of the science board at the Santa Fe Institute.
Epstein also owned a grand house (he has since sold it) near Wexner’s opulent manse at the center of the Limited magnate’s high-end housing development in New Albany, Ohio. New Albany was a lush sprawl of farmland on the outskirts of Columbus that Wexner, starting in 1988, turned into a rich village of multimillion-dollar Georgian homes surrounding a Jack Nicklaus–designed golf course. It was a massive development project, financed largely by Wexner himself. Epstein was a general partner in the real-estate holding company, called New Albany Property, despite putting only a few million dollars of capital into the project.
“Before Epstein came along in 1988, the financial preparations and groundwork for the New Albany development were a total mess,” says Bob Fitrakis, a Columbus-based investigative journalist who has written extensively on Wexner and his finances. “Epstein cleaned everything up, as well as serving Wexner in other capacities — such as facilitating visits to Wexner’s home of the crew from Cats and organizing a Tony Randall song-and-dance show put on in Columbus.” Wexner declines to talk about his relationship with Epstein, but it is clearly one that continues to this day. Not that it helped Epstein in any way to land Clinton. Wexner is a staunch Republican donor, and Epstein, aside from a small contribution to the president’s legal-defense fund, has given more to the likes of former senator Al D’Amato.