Tag: epstein

the epstein hotel

THE EPSTEIN HOTEL was on Vermont Avenue in Washington, DC. It was built in the Second Empire style for some diplomat but later after passing hands through successive generations of elite bureaucrats had been repurposed as a hotel and hostel. By the time I arrived one night, with just one suitcase, fresh off an Amtrak train from Newport News, Virginia, all of the single rooms had been booked and I was given a bunk in one of the hostel’s eight-bed dormitories.

This turned out to be a lovely space on the top floor with its own kitchenette, a nice view of some green memorial park, and plenty of guests. All of the other seven beds in the room were taken, and one of my bunkmates happened to be Heath Harrigan, an old high school chum, now a karate teacher and lifestyle influencer who had strong opinions on vaccines, chem trails and the like, and had accrued a following of thousands. Joe Rogan had even interviewed him.

He looked great — the supplements he sold on his channel were working, his hair was still dark and wavy — and he invited me in to what soon became a rather wild bunkbed party, with plenty of pretty university students and Japanese tourists who were also domiciled at the Epstein Hotel. It was good to see Heath again, but I was tired, and I crawled up to my top bunk. It was impossible to sleep. They were all arguing about the measles mumps rubella vaccine.

“Shut up,” I heard Heath tell one of the Japanese. “You don’t know what you’re talking about.”

The plan was to go to Boston to meet up with Bergerac, a former university friend who had taken on a teaching position and had an office in Cambridge, Massachusetts, just over the Charles. In my mind, Boston didn’t seem so far away from Washington, it was just a quick jaunt, like going to the supermarket for some butter or bread. Just a quick journey to Boston and I would be back. Bergerac had become quite knowledgeable since graduation and knew the details on the makings of all albums by The Who. Bergerac was tall, bearded, French, Jewish. I liked him immensely. Just a train to Boston to visit Bergerac and all would be jake.

Besides, there was no sleep going on at the Epstein Hotel. My roommates were too loud with their arguments over vaccinations and pillow fights. In the middle of the night, I got up to get a bottle of water from a vending machine in the common area, and maybe some salted peanuts. I began to wander the halls of the hotel. Everything had been refurbished in that light, beige, putrid colonial tone that many hotels in Washington and Alexandria and other such places are painted in. The air smelled of aged carpet, but it wasn’t a musty smell, just a hotel smell. There in the back hall, I encountered the man himself, Lord Epstein. This was him in his element, the Epstein Hotel. He was seated in a corner with two young blonde women beside him. These were Estonian women, maybe 25 years old. He was talking. They were laughing at his jokes.

“Sorry to intrude,” I told Epstein. He nodded a bit with that big ominous head of his and pretended that he didn’t hear me. He just watched them, swigging from a bottle of Perrier.

Returning to my room was complicated. All of those beige carpeted hallways, turns, dead ends. When I got back, the police had arrived. They were marking off the crime scene and taking photos. The two same young Estonian women I had seen before were sprawled out on the floor. They were both very dead, but otherwise looked quite peaceful, as if they were sleeping. Heath came over to me. He was holding a half-empty bottle of champagne and his shirt was off. His eyes were all bloodshot. Heath Harrigan said to me, in a tired, subdued voice, “Epstein stopped by, man. But the party got out of hand. Things got way out of hand. You should leave now.” That I did. I was on the next train to Boston, to meet with Bergerac, to talk about Tommy.

“Tommy can you hear me? Can you feel me near you?”

I whistled as Washington dissolved into Maryland. Before I knew it, we were in Philadelphia. Home free.

the keys to ghislaine maxwell’s apartment

“HERE,” HE SAID. “If you need a place to stay for a while, you can go to Ghislaine Maxwell’s apartment in Peconic City.” My father placed the set of keys into my hands and told me the address, which was 9 Nantucket Avenue, and drove me to the station. The trip out to Peconic City wasn’t long. He told me that the house was located next to a money broker. Atlantic Union, I believe. When I got out into the station, I turned left, as I had been instructed and found myself in a kind of shanty town made up of small shacks set up inside the building. “It’s not much,” I recalled my father telling me, “but no one will look for you there.” Was this “Nantucket Avenue?” I walked by the shanty town, where indigent women were out selling flowers and other things. I asked an old flower seller how to get to Nantucket Avenue, and she told me I had to go outside the building, through the station’s back entrance, and turn right.

I checked my possessions. A single gym bag full of clothes, my phone, my wallet, a paperback. I walked through the central atrium of the station and out the back entrance, just as instructed, and walked down a sidewalk to the right until I saw a series of modern homes set back from the road with green lawns, even in winter. Down one of these lawns, a whole parade of media figures and cameramen came in my direction, one woman speaking loudly in those clipped, made-for-broadcast tones about the plight of Ghislaine. At that moment, I wondered how my father had even had come to possess Ghislaine Maxwell’s keys or why he had sent me there.

Even at a distance, I could read the words “Nantucket Avenue” on one of the houses, all of which had peaked roofs and were built to incorporate Puritan architectural elements, a sort of House of Seven Gables for the big money age. Did my father really think this was a good place for someone like me to hide out? In front of one of the houses, someone had strung up some effigies of Jeffrey Epstein and Donald Trump, except had given them vampire fangs that dripped red blood. “Death to the Rich,” a sign read. Some yellow-toothed vagrants stood around the Epstein and Trump vampire effigies, panhandling, hoping to get a dime out of me.

The interior of the house was dull and contemporary and all of the walls were covered with large photographs of Ghislaine and Epstein vacationing in the Caribbean, wearing bleached white shirts that were so bright they made your eyes ache, khakis as crisp as morning toast, blue jeans that were so blue, they looked as if they had only been worn once and then tossed away. Epstein’s gray hair was always that unruly mop, trimmed to a desired, specified length. Ghislaine looked like she had once starred in a 1990s Bond film, perhaps as the sexy villainess who gets killed in the end. One picture though made my heart sink. It showed Epstein, Ghislaine, and British diplomat Peter Mandelson clustered around the deck of a yacht as Jorma Kaukonen played guitar. They were on the sea somewhere, drenched in a pink orange sunset.

Jorma was in on it too? Later, when the revelations came out, Jorma Kaukonen, the white-bearded, Finnish Hemingway-looking ex-lead guitarist of seminal San Franciscan psychedelic rock group Jefferson Airplane, who had transitioned into the rough-and-tumble bar room blues act Hot Tuna in the 1970s, denied all wrongdoing. Instead, he said that Epstein had been a fan of Hot Tuna, and that he had performed for him and his guests on occasion and was always well paid. “I’m just a blues musician,” Jorma said. “Simple as that.” When asked what Epstein’s favorite Hot Tuna song was, Jorma acknowledged that it was “Hesitation Blues.” “Epstein made me play it two times during every set,” Jorma had said in a beachside interview. “It started to annoy me.”

In the interview, Jorma wore his white fisherman’s sweater and seemed at ease in his skin. He had his glasses on and his arms were at his sides and he seemed to be hiding nothing. It was hard to believe that he had ever been anything other than a minstrel to the evil rich.