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Page 5 The Talented Mr. Epstein; Lately, Jeffrey Epstein's high-ying style has been drawing oohs and aahs: the bachelor nancier lives in New York's largest private residence, claims to take only billionaires as clients, and ies celebrities including Bill Clinton and Kevin Spacey on his Boeing 727. But pierce his air of mystery and the picture changes. VICKY WARD explores Epstein's investment career, his ties to retail magnate Leslie Wexner, and his complicated past Vanity Fair March 2003 Epstein is charming, but he doesn't let the charm slip into his eyes. They are steely and calculating, giving some hint at the steady whir of machinery running behind them. "Let's play chess," he said to me, after refusing to give an interview for this article. "You be white. You get the first move." It was an appropriate metaphor for a man who seems to feel he can win no matter what the advantage of the other side. His advantage is that no one really seems to know him or his history completely or what his arsenal actually consists of. He has carefully engineered it so that he remains one of the few truly baffling mysteries among New York's moneyed world. People know snippets, but few know the whole. "He's very enigmatic," says Rosa Monckton, the former C.E.O. of Tiffany & Co. in the U.K. and a close friend since the early 1980s. "You think you know him and then you peel off another ring of the onion skin and there's something else extraordinary underneath. He never reveals his hand... He's a classic iceberg. What you see is not what you get." Even acquaintances sense a curious dichotomy: Yes, he lives like a "modern maharaja," as Leah Kleman, one of his art dealers, puts it. Yet he is fastidiously, almost obsessively private-he lists himself in the phone book under a pseudonym. He rarely attends society gatherings or weddings or funerals; he considers eating in restaurants like "eating on the subway"-i.e., something he'd never do. There are many women in his life, mostly young, but there is no one of them to whom he has been able to commit. He describes his most public companion of the last decade, Ghislaine Maxwell, 41, the daughter of the late, disgraced media baron Robert Maxwell, as simply his "best friend." He says she is not on his payroll, but she seems to organize much of his life-recently she was making telephone inquiries to find a California-based yoga instructor for him. (Epstein is still close to his two other long-term girlfriends, Paula Heil Fisher, a former associate of his at the brokerage firm Bear Stearns and now an opera producer, and Eva Andersson Dubin, a doctor and onetime model. He tells people that when a relationship is over the girlfriend "moves up, not down," to friendship status.) Some of the businessmen who dine with him at his home-they include newspaper publisher Mort Zuckerman, banker Louis Ranieri, Revlon chairman Ronald Perelman, real- estate tycoon Leon Black, former Microsoft executive Nathan Myhrvold, Tom Pritzker (of Hyatt Hotels), and real-estate personality Donald Trump-sometimes seem not all that clear as to what he actually does to earn his millions. Certainly, you won't find Epstein's transactions written about on Bloomberg or talked about in the trading rooms. "The trading desks don't seem to know him. It's unusual for animals that big not to leave any footprints in the snow," says a high-level investment manager. Unlike such fund managers as George Soros and Stanley Druckenmiller, whose client lists and stock maneuverings act as their calling cards, Epstein keeps all his deals and clients secret, bar one client: billionaire Leslie Wexner, the respected chairman of Limited Brands. Epstein insists that ever since he left Bear Stearns in 1981 he has managed money only for billionaires-who depend on him for discretion. "I was the only person crazy enough, or arrogant enough, or misplaced enough, to make my limit a billion dollars or more," he tells Al3R Research Profile I aNt modified 6. It 200? For internal use only CONFIDENTIAL - PURSUANT TO FED. R. CRIM. P. 6(e) DB-SDNY-0050775 CONFIDENTIAL SDNY_GM_00196959 EFTA01361573