Jeffrey Epstein's early career as a math teacher at Dalton linked to elite social circles

in the late 1970s. A meritocracy on steroids, or, as Vanity Fair would baldly dub it, the new establishment, an increasingly parallel world, a self-invented one, at further and further remove from the ordinary one. Epstein’s is just one version, albeit picaresque and louche, of this shared story. Epstein often tells, with some obvious marvel, his middle class to riches tale: born in 1953 in Coney Island, father worked for the city’s Parks Department, mother a housewife. The captain of the math team at Lafayette High school in Bensonhurst, he went on to Cooper Union where the tuition is free. He dropped out after two years and began taking classes at the NYU’s Courant Institute of Mathematics. Then, without a college degree, hence by a slight of hand, he got a job teaching math and physics at Dalton in 1974. (A few years ago, during a chance encounter with a former Dalton math department chairman, Margo Gumport, I asked her about Epstein. She said he was the most brilliant math teacher at Dalton in her 50-year career and that she had often wondered what had become of him.) Dalton was his first exposure to the wealthy. They have, he concluded, just as many problems as the people in Coney Island, but different ones, almost invariably involving divorce and money. “I found it interesting as a science experiment,” he recalled recently as we chatted about his life. “It did not really involve me. I could just stand back and watch.” HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_022909