HOUSE OVERSIGHT 018932 EPSTEIN from .1A asking questions and teenage girls started talking, a wave of legal resistance followed. If Palm Beach police didn't know quite who Jeffrey Epstein was, they found out soon enough. Epstein, now 53, was a quintes- sential man of mystery. He amassed his fortune and friends quietly, always in the background as he navigated New York high society. When he first attracted notice in the early 1990s, it was on account of the woman he was dating: Ghislaine Maxwell, daughter of the late British media tycoon Robert Maxwell. In a lengthy article, headlined 'The Mystery of Ghislaine Max- well's Secret Love," the British Mail on Sunday tabloid laid, out specula- tive stories that the socialite's beau was a CIA spook, a math teacher, a concert pianist or a corporate head- hunter. "But what is the truth about him?" the newspaper wondered. "Like Maxwell, Epstein is both flamboyant and intensely private." The media frenzy did not begin in full until a decade later. In Sep- tember 2002, Epstein was flung into the limelight when he flew Clinton and actors Kevin Spacey and Chris Tucker to Africa on his private jet Suddenly everyone wanted to know who Epstein was. New York magazine and Vanity Fair published lengthy profiles. The New York Post listed him as one of the city's most eligible bachelors and began describing him in its gossip columns with adjectives such as "mysterious" and "reclusive." Although Epstein gave no inter- views, the broad strokes of his past started to come into focus. Building a life of extravagance He was born blue-collar in 1953, the son of a New York City parks department employee, and raised in Brooklyn's Coney Island neighbor- hood. He left college without a bachelor's degree but became a math teacher at the prestigious Dalton School in Manhattan. The story goes that the father of one of Epstein's students was so impressed with the man that he put him in touch with a