also notable in the fixed hierarchy of who comes to whose turf, that everybody, when they went to see Epstein, comes to him. A week in late September, U.N. week as it happened, began, on Sunday, at Epstein’s house with a colloquial for billionaires—Gates, Mort Zuckerman, and Peter Thiel [TK]. Epstein, preternaturally responsive to both the price of oil and to the politics of the middle of east, entertained that evening a delegation from Qatar, including Sheikh Hamad Bin Jassim, the foreign minister. Hamad, indeed, lives across the street in a similarly furnished house—he and Epstein have the same decorator. Epstein, in his relaxed and amused manner, kept prodding: “Why are you financing the bad guys? What do you get out of that?” The Qatarians, in some mild diplomatic discomfort, seemed most worried that their bid for the World Cup might be compromised by bribery allegations. At 9:00 next morning, Epstein is joined for breakfast in the dining room by Reid Weingarten, who’s represented among other fat cats in trouble, Worldcom’s Bernie Ebbers and Goldman Sach’s Lloyd Blankfein and is one of attorney general Eric Holder’s closest friends. Weingarten, horse, with a cold, and dejected, is just back from a failed defense of former Connecticut Governor John Rowland. After a blow by blow of the trial, there’s a discussion of the Qartarian’s visit—Epstein is serving chocolate made from pistachios grown on the Sheikh’s farm—and speculation about who actually controls ISIS. “Why?” I asked Weingarten, when Epstein briefly steps out of the room, “do some many people keep coming back here, everything considered.” “Why we camp out here? I guess because there’s no place like it.” Epstein summons in the next person cooling his heels in the ante-room. It’s a young man named Brock Pierce, a former child actor, and dotcom high flyer—a principle in a gaming company called DEN, a notorious dotcom burnout, with its own sex scandal—who 1s now a leading investor in Bitcoin. He desc