Welcome to What Do They Own?, a new Curbed series where we take someone making headlines and try to figure out how much of the world they own, and by extension, how far they've gone to insulate themselves from the world.
Disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein became a registered sex offender in 2008, when he was convicted of soliciting and underage girl for prostitution at his Palm Beach Mansion. Often erroneously referred to as a billionaire, Epstein runs a shady money management firm based in the U.S. Virgin Islands, where he owns a 70-acre island, one of the places named in a recent suit alleging that he forced a minor he kept as a "sex slave" to have sex with Harvard Law professor emeritus Alan Dershowitz and Prince Andrew, Duke of York, on multiple occasions. His portfolio also includes a "stone fortress" in New Mexico and the Herbert N. Straus Mansion in Manhattan, both of which are mentioned in the current round of allegations.
The Herbert N. Straus Mansion
New York, New York
Often referred to as one of the largest townhouses in Manhattan—possessing 21,000 square feet and seven stories, 45,000 square feet and eight stories, or 50,000 square feet and nine stories, depending on who's describing it and when—the stone mansion at 9 East 71st Street was built in 1933. It was designed by society architect Horace Trumbauer for Herbert N. Straus, one of the heirs to the Macy's department store fortune, who died before it was completed.
It's been said that "entire 18th-century rooms were purchased to be shipped to New York and installed in the new mansion," and the Metropolitan Museum of Art does have a exhibit in its period rooms collection with fixtures from a French hotel acquired by Herbert's wife Therese in a timeline that would fit the mansion's construction. She donated them to the Met in 1943, a year before the mansion was converted into a convalescent home, after the Straus family donated it to the Roman Catholic Archbishopric of New York. These photos offer an interesting picture of the conversion process, which shows much of the interior fixtures stripped away.
In 1961, the mansion became home to the Birch Wathen School, which it remained until Leslie H. Wexner, the founding chairman of the Limited Inc., bought it in 1989 for $13.2M. Wexner hired architect Thierry Despont and interior designer John Stefanidis to help gut-renovate the 40-room home, showing it off in the December 1995 issue of Architectural Digest (sadly, the magazine's online archives don't go back that far). In 1996, the New York Times referred to the sumptuously decorated, expensively renovated pied-à-terre as the latest "puzzling" "status symbol of the ultra rich," when it reported that Wexner never spent more than a few months in the home. This was back when the scarcely used pied-à-terre was a smaller part of the Manhattan real estate makeup.
Back then, according to the Times,
Visitors described a bathroom reminiscent of James Bond movies: hidden beneath a stairway, lined with lead to provide shelter from attack and supplied with closed-circuit television screens and a telephone, both concealed in a cabinet beneath the sink. The house also has a heated sidewalk, a luxurious provision that explains why, while snow blankets the rest of the Eastern Seaboard, the Wexner house (and Bill Cosby's house across the street) remains opulently snow-free, much to the delight of neighborhood dogs.in 1995, Wexner turned the home over to Epstein, who was his protege and financial advisor (and much more, if you believe Gawker CEO Nick Denton's argument) because, on the face of it, his new wife "expressed greater enthusiasm for bringing up their two young children in Columbus, Ohio." Some say that Epstein paid just a dollar for the mansion, though it would seem to be well within his means at the time to pay full market value. Epstein then undertook his own renovation, not wanting "to live in another person's house." He is said to have spent $10M redoing the place.
In 2007, when model Maximilia Cordero filed suit against Epstein for statutory rape and sexual assault (the suit was later dismissed), her lawyer included a description of what has by now become a legendary piece of puerile decor in chez Epstein: "[The] defendant gave plaintiff a tour of his mansion, showing her a huge crystal staircase with a huge crystal ball by the railing, ceiling chandeliers, a lounge room with red chairs, a statute [sic] of a dog with a statute [sic] of dog feces next to it" (emphasis ours).
Vicky Ward, in her recently elaborated upon 2003 profile of Epstein, very memorably captured the experience of touring the residence:
The entrance hall is decorated not with paintings but with row upon row of individually framed eyeballs; these, the owner tells people with relish, were imported from England, where they were made for injured soldiers. Next comes a marble foyer, which does have a painting, in the manner of Jean Dubuffet … but the host coyly refuses to tell visitors who painted it. In any case, guests are like pygmies next to the nearby twice-life-size sculpture of a naked African warrior....Tea is served in the "leather room," so called because of the cordovan-colored fabric on the walls. The chairs are covered in a leopard print, and on the wall hangs a huge, Oriental fantasy of a woman holding an opium pipe and caressing a snarling lionskin. Under her gaze, plates of finger sandwiches are delivered to Epstein and guests by the menservants in white gloves.
Upstairs, to the right of a spiral staircase, is the "office," an enormous gallery spanning the width of the house. Strangely, it holds no computer. Computers belong in the "computer room" (a smaller room at the back of the house), Epstein has been known to say. The office features a gilded desk (which Epstein tells people belonged to banker J. P. Morgan), 18th-century black lacquered Portuguese cabinets, and a nine-foot ebony Steinway "D" grand. On the desk, a paperback copy of the Marquis de Sade's The Misfortunes of Virtue was recently spotted. Covering the floor, Epstein has explained, "is the largest Persian rug you'll ever see in a private home—so big, it must have come from a mosque." Amid such splendor, much of which reflects the work of the French decorator Alberto Pinto, who has worked for Jacques Chirac and the royal families of Jordan and Saudi Arabia, there is one particularly startling oddity: a stuffed black poodle, standing atop the grand piano. "No decorator would ever tell you to do that," Epstein brags to visitors. "But I want people to think what it means to stuff a dog." People can't help but feel it's Epstein's way of saying that he always has the last word.
*Shudders.*
In 2001, the New York Post reported that Epstein and Prince Andrew celebrated the registered sex offender's release from jail with a party at the mansion. Virginia Roberts, one of the litigants in a Florida lawsuit against Epstein's prosecutors, alleges that the second time she was coerced into having sex with prince Andrew was at Epstein's Manhattan mansion in 2001.
Little Saint James
U.S. Virgin Islands
Epstein owns the entire 70-acre island of Little Saint James, which has its own Wikipedia page. (The U.S. Virgin islands is also where his money management firm is based.) The Daily Mirror recently flew a helicopter over what they dub the "isle of sin," and came back with some pretty good shots of what Epstein has built there: a colonnaded villa-style compound designed by luxury resort and hotel designer Edward Tuttle, with a large library, a cinema, surrounding cabanas, and a detached Japanese bathhouse. The island is where Epstein's alleged "sex slave" Virginia Roberts claimed he made her take part in orgies, including one where she was allegedly forced to have sex with Prince Andrew.
According to the Mirror, the island could at one time be rented for £4K (~$6K) a night. Over the years, it's hosted the conferences held by the Jeffrey Epstein VI Foundation, which have drawn the likes of Stephen Hawking. Roberts claims she met Bill Clinton once on the island, when he was there to dine with Epstein. Court papers claim that at other times, visitors included "prominent American politicians, powerful business executives, foreign presidents, a well known prime minister and other world leaders."
Oddly enough, providing the third instance of a weird non-animate animal on an Epstein property, in 2009, a blogger based on the island of St. John claimed that this image showed a "fake lawn ornament cow" that was seen in different locations on Epstein's island throughout the construction process.
Palm Beach Mansion
Palm Beach, Florida
Epstein's Palm Beach mansion, once valued at $6.8M, was at the center of the undercover investigation that eventually led to Epstein pleading guilty to a single state charge of soliciting prostitution, becoming a registered sex offender, and serving 13 months out of an 18-month sentence.
According to a rather lurid Daily Beast article published in 2010, a police search of the property turned up:
large, framed photos of nude young girls, and similar images... stashed in an armoire and on the computers seized at the house (although police found only bare cables where other computers had been). Some bathrooms were stocked with soap in the shape of sex organs, and various sex toys, such as a "twin torpedo" vibrator and creams and lubricants available at erotic specialty shops, were stowed near the massage tables set up in several rooms upstairs.
Zorro Ranch
Stanley, New Mexico
In 1993, Epstein purchased a 7,500-acre ranch in Stanley, New Mexico, from the late former New Mexico governor Bruce King. He named the ranch "Zorro," and proceeded to build a 26,700-square-foot hilltop mansion that was once said to be the largest home in the state, and has been described as a "stone fortress."
A 1995 article in The New Mexican said that Epstein's initial plans for the residence described a main house that "will be similar to a Mexican hacienda, with an open-air entry into a courtyard with high-ceiling hallways, stone columns and a central fountain. The living room will measure about 2,100-square-feet, larger than the average house in Santa Fe County. The home will have an elevator, eight bathrooms, four fireplaces and three bedrooms." According to more recent report, Epstein recieved a county permit to build a small airplane hangar and air strip on the ranch.
Epstein has been reported as saying his New Mexico home "makes the town house look like a shack." According to records accessed on Property Shark, the structures on the property were last appraised in 2013 at $18,186,406.
In the recent court filing in Florida, Roberts names Zorro Ranch as one of the place she was sexually abused by Epstein, as well as forced to have sex with Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz. The Last time Epstein made news in New Mexico, it was when it was revealed that he attempted to contribute to the reelection campaign of former Attorney General and gubernatorial candidate Gary King in 2006.
Foch Avenue Apartment
Paris, France
Epstein owns an apartment on Paris' ritzy Avenue Foch.
A Boeing 727
Not technically a piece of real estate, but also kind of a flying piece of real estate. Said to be the only reason Bill Clinton was ever friends with Epstein—that and his campaign donations to democrats—though many in the conservative media are surely speculating otherwise. In September of 2002, Clinton had a weeklong tour of South Africa, Nigeria, Ghana, Rwanda, and Mozambique coming up to promote anti-AIDS efforts, and former Clinton advisor Doug Band encouraged Epstein to come along and provide the ride. Kevin Spacey and Chris Tucker were there, too, which sounds like it must have been kind of weird.
If you know of any part of Jeffrey Epstein's property portfolio we missed, please drop us a line.
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