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situation, I have none of that. I have no institutional bona fides which makes
me in some sense one of the few independent sources of information and
actual honest brokers. That’s the usefulness of disgrace.”
And then there is too, that he is right. Since I began working on this
piece in September, Epstein predictions about the price of oil, yen, ruble,
and euro have all born out. (If I had invested $100,000 the way Epstein said
I should in early September, by the end of January I would have made $2.3
million. Alas, I did not.)
And something else, which perhaps also surely accounts for Epstein’s
continuing relationships with the rich and powerful:
Most everyone who is now of a certain age and certain ambition and
certain status grew up in, and found they were temperamentally suited to, the
new age of wealth that started in the late 1970s. A meritocracy on steroids,
or, as Vanity Fair would baldly and ingratiatingly dub it, the new
establishment, an increasingly parallel world, a self-invented one, at further
and further remove from the ordinary one. In some sense, Epstein is just one
version, picaresque, as well as louche, of this shared story.
He often tells, with some obvious marvel, his middle class to riches
tale. He was born in 1953 in Coney Island. His father worked for the city’s
Parks Department. His mother was a housewife. He has a younger brother,
Mark.
Epstein was distinguished by little other than his math talents. The
captain of the math team at Lafayette High school in Bensonhurst, he goes
on to Cooper Union where the tuition is free. He drops out after two years
and begins taking classes at the NYU’s Courant Institute of Mathematics.
Then, without a college degree, hence by a slight of hand, gets 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.)
It’s his first exposure to the wealthy. They have, he concludes, just as
many problems as the people in Coney Island, just different ones, almost
invariably involving divorce and money. “I found it interesting as a science
experiment,” he recalled not long ago as we chatted about his life. “It did not
really involve me. I could just stand back and watch.”
Dalton fathers were attracted to him. Punch Sulzberger, the publisher
of the New York Times, and a Dalton father at the time, tried to recruit
Epstein to come to the Times. (Epstein recounts a story of riding with
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