Watchman’s Update: 7/26/23 It’s Time to Fight Back, Bud Light, Chase Bank for Shutting Down Dr. Joseph Mercola’s Business Bank Accounts, Including the CEO, CFO, and Their Family Members,No Reason Given—SRH: Reason Chase Is Evil
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HNewsWire:
The Attorney General of the U.S. Virgin Islands, armed with highly effective legal talent from the law firm, MotleyRice – which stakes its reputation on its “boldness” – has filed new documents in its federal lawsuit against the largest bank in the United States, JPMorgan Chase. The new documents are, indeed, breathtakingly bold.
The U.S. Virgin Islands’ attorneys have clarified to the court that they plan to show in a trial scheduled for October that JPMorgan Chase not only facilitated the sex trafficking of underage girls by Jeffrey Epstein but that the bank “actively participated in Epstein’s sex-trafficking venture from 2006 until 2019.”
That is a very explosive assertion. For starters, it throws up a giant red flare as to why the American public has heard nothing from the criminal division of the U.S. Department of Justice about a criminal case against the bank for laundering money for Epstein. The case brought by the U.S. Virgin Islands is a civil case.
The U.S. Virgin Islands filed hundreds of pages of new court documents on Monday and Tuesday. Most of the exhibits have been filed under seal. A Memorandum of Law arguing for partial summary judgment in the case, however, is only lightly redacted and makes the following points:
“Even if participation requires active engagement…there is no genuine dispute that JPMorgan actively participated in Epstein’s sex-trafficking venture from 2006 until 2019. The Court found allegations that the Bank allowed Epstein to use its accounts to send dozens of payments to then-known co-conspirators [redacted] provided excessive and unusual amounts of cash to Epstein; and structured cash withdrawals so that those withdrawals would not appear suspicious ‘went well beyond merely providing their usual [banking] services to Jeffrey Epstein and his affiliated entities’ and were sufficient to allege active engagement.”
The U.S. Virgin Islands has previously alerted the court to the unfathomable sums of hard cash that Epstein was able to take from the accounts he maintained at JPMorgan Chase without the bank filing the legally mandated Suspicious Activity Reports (SARs) to law enforcement. In the new filing, it has tallied up the giant pile of cash, writing as follows:
“Between September 2003 and November 2013, or approximately ten years, JPMorgan handled more than $5 million in outgoing cash transactions for Epstein — ignoring its own policy discouraging large cash withdrawals….”
The U.S. Virgin Islands’ attorneys cite to internal emails at JPMorgan Chase showing that employees at the bank were aware of Epstein’s “[c]ash withdrawals … made in amounts for $40,000 to $80,000 several times a month” while also being aware that Epstein paid his underage sexual assault victims in cash.
JPMorgan Chase’s active participation in the Epstein sex trafficking ring was also alleged in a separate class action lawsuit against JPMorgan Chase brought by lawyers David Boies and Bradley Edwards on behalf of Epstein’s victims. At a March 13 court hearing in the case, Boies argued in open court that JPMorgan Chase had used a private jet owned by the bank’s hedge fund, Highbridge Capital, to transport girls for Epstein’s sex trafficking operation. A January 13, 2023 amended complaint filed by Boies’ law firm provided the following details on that allegation:
“As another example of JP Morgan and [Jes] Staley’s benefit from assisting Epstein, a highly profitable deal for JP Morgan was the Highbridge acquisition.
“In 2004, when Epstein’s sex trafficking and abuse operation was running at full speed, Epstein served up another big financial payday for JP Morgan.
“Epstein was close friends with Glenn Dubin, the billionaire who ran Highbridge Capital Management.
“Through Epstein’s connection, it has been reported that Staley arranged for JP Morgan to buy a majority stake in Dubin’s fund, which resulted in a sizeable profit for JP Morgan. This arrangement was profitable for both Staley and JPMorgan, further incentivizing JP Morgan to ignore the suspicious activity in Epstein’s accounts and to assist in his sex-trafficking venture.
“For example, despite that Epstein was not FINRA-certified, Epstein was paid more than $15 million for his role in the Highbridge/JP Morgan deal.
“Moreover, Highbridge, a wholly-owned subsidiary of JP Morgan, trafficked young women and girls on its own private jet from Florida to Epstein in New York as late as 2012.”
With the criminal division of the U.S. Department of Justice sitting on its hands in this matter, and the Boies/Edwards lawsuit on behalf of victims now settled for $290 million by JPMorgan Chase – with victims’ lawyers getting $87 million in legal fees and $2.5 million in expenses while victims are guaranteed nothing other than a requirement to release their claims – there is no assurance that the American people will ever hear the hard facts about sex trafficking via a corporate jet owned by the largest bank in the United States.
Thus, it is becoming critically important that the U.S. Virgin Islands actually bring its case to trial in a public courtroom and not fold like another cheap suit by accepting a pile of tainted money from JPMorgan Chase. If the U.S. Virgin Islands wants to make good on its promise to serve the public interest, its hundreds of sealed documents need to get unsealed during the trial instead of serving as an incentive on the court docket for JPMorgan Chase to pay up to keep the documents sealed.
In its latest filings, the U.S. Virgin Islands also note that JPMorgan Chase didn’t just bank Epstein’s accounts but it also banked “all the girls and women publicly alleged in 2006 to be recruiters, accomplices, or victims…” and regularly transferred monies into these accounts from Epstein to buy everyone’s silence. In the case of Epstein’s accomplice-in-chief, Ghislaine Maxwell, who is now serving a 20-year prison sentence for her role in the sex trafficking ring, the new filing notes that JPMorgan Chase “made over $25 million in payments to Maxwell from Epstein….”
What was the bank getting out of all of its sleazy dealings with Epstein? The U.S. Virgin Islands makes a very credible case that the bank was getting lots of profits – both from trading in Epstein’s own accounts as well as his referrals of rich clients to the bank. The Memorandum of Law filed on Monday notes that Epstein “was “bringing in over $8 million in revenues to the Private Bank — the top revenue and nearly double the amount of the next highest client….”
As for the client referrals that Epstein made to the bank, the U.S. Virgin Islands writes as follows:
“In 2003, Epstein was, by double, the top revenue generator in the Private Bank, and the source of Google co-founder Sergey Brin (‘one of the largest [relationships] in the Private Bank, of +$4BN’), Glenn Dubin (billionaire founder of Highbridge), and many other ultra-wealthy clients and connections, which would come to include Bill Gates, Leon Black, Larry Summers, the Sultan of Dubai, Prince Andrew, Ehud Barak, Thomas Pritzker, Lord Peter Mandelson, and Prime Minister Netanyahu.”
Among that client referral list above, Leon Black, the co-founder and former CEO of private equity firm Apollo Global Management, is facing a current lawsuit in federal court over allegations he violently raped one of Epstein’s victims in Epstein’s upper East Side mansion in Manhattan when she was 16. The alleged victim suffers from mosaic Down Syndrome according to the lawsuit. This is only the latest in multiple charges of sexual assault that have been lodged against Black. (But, once again, the silence from the criminal division of the U.S. Department of Justice is deafening.)
Reporter Matt Goldstein broke the story last Friday in the New York Times that Leon Black had quietly settled charges with the U.S. Virgin Islands earlier this year with a payment of $62.5 million.
Another rich, powerful man on Epstein’s client referral list to JPMorgan Chase is Prince Andrew, who settled claims last year of sexually assaulting Epstein’s sex slave, Virginia Giuffre, when she was 17 and loaned out to him by Epstein. The monetary details were not disclosed. In a BBC interview in 2022, Giuffre said she was “passed around like a platter of fruit” for sex with Epstein’s powerful friends.
Wall Street On Parade has been reporting for years on how the systemic culture of JPMorgan Chase is to ignore the law in pursuit of profits. One striking example was investigated by the U.S. Senate’s Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations. The Subcommittee got its hands on internal emails at JPMorgan Chase showing that when a young recent graduate of a law school submitted his resume to the bank, and bragged about finding a loophole that could be gamed by the bank to extract obscene profits from the California electric market, an executive at the bank wrote: “Please get him in ASAP.”
The bank hired the young recruit and deployed the strategy. The bank was eventually fined $410 million in penalties and disgorgements by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC).
It was also revealed during the Senate hearing into the matter that while JPMorgan was being investigated, it continued to engage in other manipulative electricity schemes, a total of 11 in all. The Senate report noted that FERC officials told the Subcommittee “that in the years since Congress gave FERC enhanced anti-manipulation authority in the Energy Policy Act of 2005, the CAISO and MISO regulators had never before witnessed the degree of blatant rule manipulation and gaming strategies that JPMorgan used to win electricity awards and elicit make-whole payments.” (See our report: JPMorgan Rushed to Hire Trader Who Suggested on His Resume That He Knew How to Game Electric Markets.)
Gaming electric markets is, of course, a trivial matter for a bank that has admitted to five criminal felony counts since 2014, which includes laundering money for the largest Ponzi scheme in U.S. history (Bernie Madoff) and rigging the market for U.S. Treasuries – the market that the U.S. government uses to pay its bills.
Throughout this unprecedented crime spree and non-prosecution agreements and deferred-prosecution agreements generously lavished on JPMorgan Chase by the bizarrely forgiving U.S. Department of “Justice,” the Board of Directors of the bank has kept Jamie Dimon in place as both Chairman and CEO. For the conflicts of interest between the bank and its Board that might explain that lack of action, see our report here.
Now Dimon and specific members of the Board of Directors also find themselves being sued directly for their role in facilitating Jeffrey Epstein’s crimes. The lawsuit has been brought by two pension funds on behalf of shareholders. The lawsuit’s theory of the case is that specific members of the Board of JPMorgan Chase “put their heads in the sand” and ignored that the bank had become a cash conduit for Jeffrey Epstein’s child sex trafficking ring because they were hoping that their own business ties to Epstein “would go unnoticed.”
The pension fund case, the Epstein victims’ case that was settled last month for $290 million, and the U.S. Virgin Islands’ case, are all before the same judge, Jed Rakoff, in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York – a District Court where Big Law is known for getting sweet deals for Wall Street’s recidivist miscreants.
Representing the Board Members who have been named in the latest lawsuit brought by the pension funds is Big Law firm, Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison. For background on how Paul Weiss services Wall Street, see our report: Meet the Lawyer Who Gets Citigroup Out of Fraud Charges and The Untold Story of the Paul Weiss Internal Investigation that Didn’t Catch a Massive Stock Fraud and Judge Issues Scathing Rebuke of DOJ and Law Firm, Paul Weiss.
HNewsWire: People must simply flee from these evil corporations. Anyone who wishes to continue speaking their mind must participate in the alternative economy that is already developing. It would have an effect if everyone who followed Mercola tomorrow deleted their accounts.
HnewsWire:
Jeffrey Epstein withdrew up to $80,000 in cash 'several times a month' while he paid girls for 'massages,' court filings say
By Jacob Shamsian,
15 hours ago
US Attorney's Office for the Southern District of New York
- Jeffrey Epstein frequently withdrew tens of thousands of dollars in cash from his JPMorgan accounts.
- At the time, there were reports that he paid cash to girls for "massages" — a code word for sex.
- When asked about the large withdrawals, Epstein said he needed to pay for jet fuel.
Jeffrey Epstein needed an excuse.
He was withdrawing a lot of cash from his bank accounts with JPMorgan Chase.
Starting from August 2006, he withdrew tens of thousands of dollars at a time, usually multiple times per month.
He usually withdrew the money in $40,000 increments. In one November 2013 transaction, tied to an account related to his private jet, Epstein withdrew $97,152. Between September 2003 through the end of 2013, Epstein withdrew more than $5 million in cash from his JP Morgan accounts overall.
The trouble was, Epstein banked with JPMorgan's Private Bank division, reserved for ultrawealthy clients.
JPMorgan's private bank has a policy to "discourage" large cash deposits and spending. Bankers, according to an excerpt of the guidelines filed in court Tuesday morning, are responsible for getting clients to explain their large cash withdrawals.
"It is the primary responsibility of the Banker to obtain explanations on the source of the cash and acceptability of the intended use of the case, and to assess the plausibility of these explanations for large cash transactions," the guidelines say.
The other problem was, Epstein was known for using cash to pay off the teenage girls he raped.
Epstein's large cash withdrawals raised red flags
Epstein, whose estate was valued at $630 million after he died in 2019, kept tens of millions of dollars of his assets parked with JPMorgan between 1998 and 2013 . A chunk of those funds was used to pay over 100 women who he sexually abused before his death .
In an ongoing lawsuit, the government of the US Virgin Islands accuses JPMorgan of being aware of Epstein's sex-trafficking operation and did nothing to stop it, ignoring numerous red flags for years.
The US Virgin Islands government offered more insight into Epstein's relationship with JPMorgan in a series of court filings Tuesday morning.
It filed a 45-page summary judgment motion , a 148-page "statement of fact" that was agreed upon by the government and the bank , and more than 300 exhibits — most of which were filed under seal or remain highly redacted.
The documents illustrate how JPMorgan employees joked about how Epstein surrounded himself with young women , had due diligence reports that noted criminal investigations related to his abuse of girls, and internally expressed concern about his enormous frequent cash withdrawals — but kept him as a client for years anyway.
Emily Michot/Miami Herald/Tribune News Service via Getty Images
Much of Epstein's sex trafficking, the US Virgin Islands said, consisted of paying cash to teenage girls for "massages" — a code word for sex. Victims who testified in the trial of Ghislaine Maxwell , who was convicted in 2021 for trafficking girls to Epstein for sex, said they were paid between $200 and $300 for giving "massages" to Epstein.
Details of Epstein's payments for massages were also reported in a 2006 Palm Beach Post article, which turned up in JPMorgan's internal due diligence reports. The article cited an affidavit from Palm Beach County police, which described how a girl recruited six other girls to Epstein for sexualized massages, each of whom was paid $200 per session. One 14-year-old girl was given $300 after giving Epstein a massage where he told her to strip naked.
In another memo dated that year, JPMorgan employees raised their eyebrows at Epstein's enormous cash withdrawals.
"Cash withdrawals are routinely made in amounts for $40,000 to $80,000 several times a month, which total over $750,000 year to date," employees wrote in a 2006 memo discussing how to handle him as a client .
While these withdrawals rang alarm bells, Epstein was one of the Private Bank's most important clients.
Partly because of his connections to other powerful and wealthy people, JPMorgan's private banking executives used him as a recruiter.
In 2003, according to Tuesday's motion , Epstein was "by double, the top revenue generator in the Private Bank." He brought in clients like billionaire hedge fund manager Glenn Dubin and Google cofounder Sergey Brin, and made connections with potential clients like Bill Gates, Leon Black, Larry Summers, the Sultan of Dubai, Prince Andrew, Ehud Barak, Thomas Pritzker, and Benjamin Netanyahu, the filing says.
Epstein died in jail in 2019 while awaiting trial on sex-trafficking charges.
In a statement to Insider, a JPMorgan representative said the bank had no knowledge of his sex-trafficking operation.
"Any association with Epstein was a mistake and in hindsight we regret it, but we did not help him commit his heinous crimes," a representative for JPMorgan Chase told Insider in a statement. "We would never have continued to do business with him if we believed he was engaged in an ongoing sex trafficking operation."
JPMorgan finally asked Epstein about the cash in 2011
In 2007, Epstein arrived at a plea deal with prosecutors in Florida. Law enforcement identified about 40 women and girls who said he sexually abused them. Alexander Acosta, a US Attorney at the time, came to an agreement with Epstein that allowed him to plead guilty to a couple of charges related to soliciting sex work in exchange for a quick stint in jail, where he'd mostly be on work release.
JPMorgan's employees remained uneasy about the bank's relationship with Epstein, documents obtained by the US Virgin Islands show. But Epstein kept withdrawing enormous amounts of cash, despite the private banking division's guidelines. He continued to take out hundreds of thousands of dollars in cash each year from his JPMorgan accounts, records show.
In a 2011 memo cited in the 148-page "statement of fact" document, JPMorgan employees wrote that a banker had another conversation with Epstein "with regard to large cash withdrawals."
Epstein had an excuse ready. He told them he needed the money to pay for fuel when he traveled. JPMorgan made an internal note to reflect that.
"Mr. Epstein withdraws anywhere from $20K to $40K in cash to pay for fuel expenses when he travels to foreign countries," the memo said.
The next page of the "statement of fact" document is entirely redacted.
US Attorney's Office for the Southern District of New York
By July 18, 2013, the continued cash withdrawals rang bells at JPMorgan's internal anti-money laundering department, which the US Virgin Islands described as "JPMorgan's in-house human trafficking experts."
One compliance officer wrote in an email that Jeffrey Epstein had kept up massive cash withdrawals, simply switching from his personal account to a different account linked to his private jet.
"Issue is he really never stopped the large cash withdrawals," a compliance officer wrote then.
The next day, John Duffy, who was then the CEO of JPMorgan's private banking division, emailed Mary Erdoes , the CEO of the wealth management division, about cutting ties with Epstein. Erdoes had been in frequent communication with Epstein over the years, and he wanted her advice.
Duffy raised a few talking points with her about what to tell Epstein.
"1. The repetitive nature of your cash transactions is a problem for us and our relationship with you[;] 2. The regulatory standards in the banking industry continue to evolve with a very low tolerance for cash activity when combined with your personal history[;] 3. So, given the intersection of these circumstances we are in a uniquely challenged situation," Duffy wrote. "Remediation is required and we need to ask you - in an orderly manner - to find another bank for your needs."
"I think that is fine," Erdoes responded, about the proposed language of the bank's anticipated break-up with their billionaire client.
JPMorgan officially dropped Epstein as a client later that year.
Last month, the bank agreed to pay $290 million to settle a class-action lawsuit brought by Epstein's victims over his sexual abuse.
Read the original article on Business Insider
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