And now, Leon…

Last week, on March 25, I sat down again with Leon Black in his spacious Park Avenue office, at the corner of 57th Street. He was stewing big-time. It was a few days after Ron Wyden, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Finance Committee, had publicly released his latest scathing letter about Black—the details of which found their way onto the front page of The New York Times that very same day. Leon reiterated to me—just as he had during our memorable conversations a couple years ago, which formed the basis of the first two parts in this series—that he didn’t know Jeffrey Epstein was a criminal pedophile. Yes, he was “a bit offbeat and counterculture and eccentric,” Leon once told me. And yes, he had pleaded guilty in 2008 to soliciting a minor, but “he was with a 17-year-old prostitute, got prosecuted for it, and got put away for a year,” he said. “I didn’t think this was the end of the world, frankly.”

When we reconnected last week, Leon insisted that the staggering $158 million he’d paid Epstein over the years—Wyden later pegged the number at $170 million—amounted to a mere 5 percent commission on what Epstein had saved him on taxes and for other business-related advice. According to Leon, Epstein managed to devise a multibillion-dollar estate tax strategy that had eluded his previous lawyers at Weil Gotshal, Paul Weiss, and Sullivan & Cromwell. “All legal, very clever,” he had told me. Alas, Black said the other day, his involvement with Epstein was simply too delicious a target for Senator Wyden, a longtime crusader against esoteric tax loopholes, to leave a billionaire like him alone. And the new Wyden letter was indeed damning. For one, the senator reported that Black had paid Epstein, a non-lawyer, some 30 times more for legal advice than he’d paid Paul Weiss, the principal law firm that worked for both Black and Apollo Global Management, the private equity giant Leon co-founded in 1990. “Leon Black simply doesn’t have a good explanation” for how much he paid Epstein, Wyden told me when I reached out to his office. It was “a preposterous amount of money to pay a notorious sex criminal. If anyone can find me another individual who paid this much for tax planning, without even a formal contract, I will investigate them too.” In his public letter, the senator suggested that Epstein’s “exorbitant compensation” was likely a “pretext for other more nefarious tasks.” Wyden went on to accuse Black of everything from using Epstein as his “fixer” in order to funnel millions of dollars to women “in exchange for their silence,” to arranging with Epstein and Brad Karp, the former senior partner and eventual chairman at Paul Weiss, to surveil Guzel Ganieva, a Russian model with whom Black had an affair. Wyden wrote that the Justice Department’s newly released files removed “any lingering doubt as to whether you were connected to women in Epstein’s network, and the evidence that Epstein and powerful associates in the U.S. and abroad were surveilling and paying off women on your behalf is highly disturbing.” (Black and I previously discussed his yearslong relationship with Ganieva, who ultimately extorted Black for a roughly $21 million settlement in exchange for her silence and broke their nondisclosure agreement in March 2021.) Wyden’s latest allegations against him, Black told me, were, you know, total bullshit. He said he’d never been with an underage girl or abused a woman in his life. Nor, his lawyers told the Times explicitly, was he aware that Epstein had made payments to women on his behalf, as the paper asserted in its latest article. Yes, he has had extramarital affairs, but they were consensual. He conceded that he gave these women gifts, as he has to all sorts of people over the years, including his late sister, he said—and he has paid the required gift taxes on all of them. Black said he would leave speaking on the record about Wyden to his attorney, Susan Estrich, who called the senator’s latest allegations “politically motivated” and “outrageous and false.” (“The financing of sex trafficking isn’t a red or blue issue,” Wyden told me. “I’m going to keep following the money.”) Black also didn’t understand why the Times would make his consensual affairs and his financial support of various women out to be some kind of crime. His lawyers told all this to the Times, too, before it published its latest tome. After all, Black said, Apollo had already commissioned a January 2021 report into his relationship with Epstein—at Black’s request—that seemingly validated his narrative. The so-called Dechert report, compiled by the law firm of the same name, “took more than four months, and they interviewed more than 20 people, including me more than once,” Black told me. “They reviewed more than 60,000 documents. They asked about everything. Nothing was off the table.” (“Shoddy work,” countered Wyden, who claims to have uncovered, without further explanation, an extra $12 million in payments that Dechert had not accounted for.) All the investigation found, per Black, was that he’d paid Epstein for legitimate business purposes. “I understand that some people don’t like these conclusions, and are now saying the investigation was ‘not thorough’ and that the report was a ‘whitewash,’” Black said. “That’s just flat-out wrong.” In any case, a year or so after the Dechert report, Wyden launched his own investigation into Black’s dealings with Epstein, looking into tax fraud and other matters. Since then, of course, the Department of Justice has released millions of pages of Epstein emails, providing Wyden and the media with a practically endless supply of new, highly flammable material.