The Oligarch's Broker: How Altpoint Capital Connected Russian Money, Ford Models, and Epstein's Inner Circle

On December 22, 2017, an Italian cybersecurity researcher named Vincenzo Iozzo sent an email to Jeffrey Epstein with a simple question.

"Have you ever heard of this fund http://altpointcapital.com/ or of a guy called Guerman Aliev? Allegedly they are managing russian money?"

Epstein wrote back the same day: "Only yesterday."

Minutes later, Iozzo replied again. He had done some digging. "Found out through some googling that it's Potanin's money," he wrote, linking to the Wikipedia page for Vladimir Potanin, the Russian mining magnate who controls Norilsk Nickel and who would, five years later, be placed on the U.S. Treasury's sanctions list.

That exchange, preserved in EFTA document EFTA01001064 and its companion records EFTA02596238 and EFTA02594699, opens a window into one of the more tangled threads in the Epstein files: a Russian oligarch's money, a storied American modeling agency, Maryland's election systems, and the convicted sex trafficker's network of fixers, hackers, and intermediaries.

Altpoint Capital: From Stone Tower to Potanin's Portfolio

Altpoint Capital Partners began life as Stone Tower, a private equity fund that Russian mining billionaire Vladimir Potanin bankrolled through his holding company Interros. After the 2008 financial crisis, Potanin dispatched Guerman Aliev, a Russian-born financier who had worked for Interros, to the United States to take control of the fund's American investments. Aliev brought on a new team and rebranded the operation as Altpoint Capital Partners, with offices in Greenwich, Connecticut, New York, and Los Angeles.

SEC filings show Altpoint managed more than $287 million in assets. The fund held stakes in more than a dozen companies. Two of those investments would attract federal attention for very different reasons.

The first was Ford Models, the iconic New York agency that had represented Christy Turlington, Naomi Campbell, and a generation of top models since its founding in 1946. Stone Tower had acquired Ford Models in 2007. By January 2011, Altpoint increased its stake to 93 percent.

The second was ByteGrid, a McLean, Virginia-based data center company. Altpoint purchased 3,925 of ByteGrid's 4,000 Class A units, giving the fund the right to appoint four of six board members. ByteGrid hosted the computer servers that ran Maryland's voter registration system, its online ballot delivery platform, and its unofficial election night results.

A private equity fund backed by one of Russia's wealthiest oligarchs had effective control over both a premier American modeling agency and pieces of a U.S. state's election infrastructure. For years, this arrangement attracted no public scrutiny.

Ford Models and the Trafficking Lawsuit

In 2017, a young woman who had been signed by Ford Models as a minor boarded a private jet to London with Guerman Aliev, then serving as Ford's CEO under his American name, Gerald Banks, and a photographer. According to court filings, Banks made a series of sexual requests during the trip. The woman called her agency, was told to leave, and booked a flight back to California.

She sued under California Civil Code Section 52.5, the state's sex trafficking statute. In March 2025, a California appellate court upheld a lower court ruling that the case could proceed, rejecting Banks's attempt to force the claims into arbitration. The court found that the plaintiff had been a minor when she signed her original contract with Ford, and that the arbitration clause did not cover the kind of conduct alleged in the complaint.

The lawsuit remains pending. Neither Aliev nor Altpoint has been found liable.

Ford Models and Epstein's network operated in overlapping territory. Epstein bankrolled MC2 Model Management, the agency run by Jean-Luc Brunel, who recruited young women from Eastern Europe, South America, and elsewhere under the promise of modeling careers. A House Oversight Committee document links modeling agency deregulation to child sex trafficking patterns, citing Brunel's operations specifically. Both Ford and MC2 drew from international talent pools. Both recruited minors. Both had connections to men in Epstein's orbit.

Brunel was found dead in his Paris jail cell in February 2022 while awaiting trial on rape and sex trafficking charges. He had been indicted by French prosecutors in June 2021.

The Maryland Election Systems

In July 2018, the FBI notified Maryland officials that ByteGrid, the company hosting their election infrastructure, was financed by Altpoint Capital, whose lead investor was Vladimir Potanin.

The revelation set off a state investigation. Maryland's voter registration database, its online registration system, its ballot delivery logistics, and its communications with Department of Defense facilities all ran through ByteGrid's servers. The Department of Homeland Security inspected the networks for signs of intrusion consistent with Russian state-backed hacking groups APT28 and APT29. DHS found no evidence of compromise.

Still, the political fallout was immediate. U.S. Senators demanded a broader probe into foreign ownership of election infrastructure companies. Maryland moved its election files to a new data center operated by Intelishift, a Virginia-based firm, and its subsidiary, The Sidus Group. Members of Congress introduced legislation to prevent foreign ownership of U.S. election vendors.

Investigative journalist Seth Hettena, who broke much of the Altpoint story, noted the national security implications of Russian oligarch investments flowing through opaque private equity structures into American critical infrastructure.

Vincenzo Iozzo: The Hacker in Epstein's Inbox

The man who first raised Altpoint to Epstein's attention was not a banker or a deal-maker. Vincenzo Iozzo was, by that point, one of the most accomplished offensive security researchers in the world.

Iozzo had won multiple Pwn2Own competitions, the premier hacking contests where researchers demonstrate zero-day exploits against hardened targets like Apple iOS, Safari, and BlackBerry OS. He was introduced to Epstein in May 2014 by Joichi Ito, then the director of the MIT Media Lab, who described Iozzo in an email as "one of the best network security guys I know." Ito would resign from MIT in 2019 after disclosures revealed he had accepted $1.7 million from Epstein.

The EFTA files contain 918 documents linked to Iozzo, tracing a relationship that ran from October 2014 through at least December 2018. The emails show a pattern far beyond casual acquaintance.

In July 2014, just weeks after the introduction, Iozzo sent Epstein and Ito a link to research on iOS backdoors and surveillance mechanisms, warning them that extracting SMS messages, address books, and app data from iPhones was "way easier and cheaper" than most people realized. "You both use iPhone and iPads, might be a good idea to either install the application this guy wrote or change the usage pattern of your devices," Iozzo wrote, according to EFTA01915918.

By August 2014, the conversations had turned to money. In a series of emails with the subject line "A note on shorting" (EFTA01913382, EFTA01919420), Iozzo and Epstein discussed whether it would be possible to profit from cyberattacks by shorting the stocks of hacked companies. "If you short just a single company that raises a gigantic red flag on you the moment the company is hacked," Iozzo wrote, working through the logistics. Epstein pushed back on the moral hazard question: "no one knows the other side it just looks like a sell and they are buyers?"

In February 2016, Epstein described Iozzo to a contact as someone "very well respected with both black and white hat hackers," offering to arrange a meeting between Iozzo and the contact's associate, who had previously met with Peter Thiel through Epstein's facilitation (EFTA00657903).

In July 2016, Lesley Groff, Epstein's longtime executive assistant, coordinated a meeting between Iozzo and Epstein's staff that Iozzo described as a "safety briefing" on cybersecurity practices (EFTA02047143).

A 2017 FBI informant report, portions of which were released as part of the EFTA collection, describes an individual who was "Epstein's personal hacker," an "Italian citizen born in Calabria who developed zero-day exploits and offensive cyber tools and sold the tools to governments." The informant alleged this individual established a cyber surveillance program for the Saudi government and sold exploits to the U.S. and U.K. governments. Multiple news outlets and cybersecurity researchers have identified the redacted individual as Iozzo, who was born in Calabria. The FBI has not confirmed this identification. It is also unclear whether the agency verified the informant's claims.

Iozzo founded Iperlane, a mobile security company, which CrowdStrike acquired in 2017. He served as senior director at CrowdStrike until 2021 and is currently CEO of SlashID, an identity security firm.

The last documented meeting between Iozzo and Epstein in the files took place on December 1, 2018. In an exchange that morning (EFTA02263645, EFTA02263876), Iozzo asked about media presence: "I have an odd question for you: is there a lot of press around the house given recent news? Trying to decide whether to wear a baseball hat." The reply came from one of Epstein's staff: "I did not see any yesterday but one never knows with what is swirling around. Glasses, hat, scarf. Go for it."

Seven months later, federal agents arrested Epstein on sex trafficking charges.

In February 2026, after these connections became public through the EFTA releases, DEF CON and Black Hat, two of the world's largest cybersecurity conferences, removed Iozzo from their review boards. DEF CON subsequently banned Iozzo, Ito, and Pablos Holman from future attendance.

Iozzo has said his interactions with Epstein were "limited to business opportunities that never materialized, as well as discussion of the markets and emerging technologies."

The Teodorani Connection

One name that surfaces alongside Iozzo in the EFTA files is Eduardo Teodorani Fabbri, a member of the Agnelli industrial dynasty that controls Fiat, Ferrari, and Stellantis. Teodorani held positions as chairman and vice president of the Italian Chamber of Commerce and Industry for the UK, and he worked at CNH Industrial, an Agnelli-controlled agricultural and commercial vehicle manufacturer.

Teodorani appears in over 1,200 documents in the EFTA collection. The emails suggest a relationship of unusual familiarity. In one April 2012 exchange, Teodorani wrote to Epstein: "Hi master. How are you I am in USA in north dakota looking upon new investment. When are you coming to europe. Let me know I have something interesting to show you" (EFTA02552515). A 2011 scheduling email confirms Teodorani traveling to New York specifically for a lunch at Epstein's townhouse. In 2017, Epstein wrote to Teodorani at his CNH Industrial email asking about plans in Paris.

A January 2012 scheduling email places Teodorani and Peter Mandelson, the former British Cabinet minister, at Epstein's property during the same week (EFTA02176726).

Teodorani's role in the network appears to have been that of a European business intermediary with deep connections to Italian industry. Whether he had any involvement with or knowledge of Altpoint's activities is not established in the documents.

The Potanin Thread

The EFTA files suggest Epstein's awareness of Potanin extended well before Iozzo's 2017 inquiry. In July 2010, Boris Nikolic, the Croatian-American immunologist who served as chief science advisor to Bill Gates, emailed Epstein with a two-word message: "Vladimir Potanin" (EFTA02408449). The subject line read: "do you know."

Epstein replied the same evening: "no, if you need info, you can ask peter" (EFTA01814339).

The identity of "peter" is not specified. Nikolic would later be named as a fallback executor in Epstein's will, signed two days before Epstein's death in August 2019, a designation Nikolic publicly disavowed.

When Iozzo raised Altpoint and Aliev seven years later, Epstein's response ("Only yesterday") suggests recent contact or awareness. Within five weeks of that exchange, on January 29, 2018, Gerald Banks, Aliev's American name, was scheduling an in-person appointment at Epstein's home through Lesley Groff. "Could we please scoot your appt today to 4:45pm with Jeffrey?" Groff wrote. Banks replied: "No problem, I will be there at 4:45 PM" (EFTA02234786).

The internal bank compliance documents in the EFTA collection show that Altpoint-related accounts were flagged for "High Risk Client" annual reviews at Deutsche Bank's private wealth management division, where Epstein also maintained accounts managed by Rosemary Vrablic and her team.

What the Record Shows

In December 2022, the U.S. Treasury sanctioned Potanin, Interros, and Rosbank under Executive Order 14024, targeting Russian elites profiting from the Kremlin's aggression against Ukraine. Norilsk Nickel, which Potanin controls but does not own a 50 percent stake in, was not designated.

Ford Models was sold in 2020 to Ford Models Brasil. ByteGrid's contracts with Maryland were transferred to new operators. Altpoint Capital still lists a Greenwich address in public records.

No charges have been filed connecting Aliev or Altpoint to Epstein's criminal conduct. The civil trafficking lawsuit against Aliev and Ford Models continues in California. Potanin remains on the OFAC sanctions list. Iozzo has not been charged with any crime related to Epstein.

But the documents tell a story of convergence. A Russian oligarch's money, managed through an American private equity fund, flowed into a modeling agency now accused of trafficking and into data centers that processed U.S. election results. That same fund's CEO visited Epstein's home. And the person who flagged the fund to Epstein was a hacker who had spent four years providing cybersecurity intelligence, discussing schemes to profit from breaches, and visiting the townhouse in disguise.

The EFTA collection does not explain why these worlds overlapped. It does confirm that they did.

This article is based on documents from the DOJ's EFTA release (Datasets 9, 10, and 11), public court records, OFAC designations, SEC filings, and news reporting by Seth Hettena, Cybernews, TechCrunch, the Baltimore Sun, and CBS News. All persons mentioned are entitled to the presumption of innocence. Vincenzo Iozzo has stated his interactions with Epstein were limited to business discussions.