Coney Island, Zelig-like silver haired financier. In 1994, just at the moment when Prince Charles was on television acknowledging his love for Camilla Parker Bowles, Jeffrey Epstein was sitting with his arm around Princess Diana at a dinner at the Serpentine Galley in London (Diana wearing her “revenge” dress that evening). Graydon Carter, in his second year as editor of Vanity Fair, was also at the dinner. Epstein’s rise and Carter’s rise are not, with a little critical interpretation, that different. Both are a function of the age of new money, both are helped by strategic relationships with the exceptionally wealthy, both have made themselves up. To say that Epstein, in the company of the Princess, stuck in Carter’s craw would be an understatement. Epstein became one of the “what do you know about him” figures in Carter’s gossip trail—a story waiting to happen. Carter once advised me not to go to Epstein’s house or accept a ride in his car least I risk being put under his spell, . (“For what?” I asked Carter. “You can’t even begin to imagine,” said Carter.) He joined the board of Rockefeller University. And then he was suddenly on the Trilateral commission, that cabal of business people who are fancied by some conspiracy buffs, as the group running the world. He bought, from his client Limited Founder Les Wexner, the largest private house in Manhattan. He bought an airplane. Then another. He expanded his holdings in New Mexico. He began a Xanadu-like refurbishment of his Caribbean Island and then bought the neighboring island for guests. He befriended Bill Clinton in his new after-office life—and that would prove to be quite the fatal pairing. The post-Monica Clinton, now having pardoned the on-the-lam financier Marc Rich—at this point, before his own rehabilitation, Clinton was considered the world’s ultimate sleaze ball—was suddenly being ferried around in the jet of...who exactly? The New York Post was the first to take formal media note of the Clinton- Ep