whose turf, that, when they want to see Epstein, they tend to come to him. He’s created a world and you enter it. His conversations are less meeting-like—focused and agenda-driven—then narrative. In effect: the outside world comes to Epstein’s and he eagerly solicits reports. It’s a real time newspaper, or the news you don’t read in a newspaper, market movements before they occur, the health and eccentricities of world leaders, high level government appointments soon to be announced. It’s Sunday lunch—in his schedule from a week last fall—with Gates, Mort Zuckerman, the real estate billionaire and owner of the Daily News, and Peter Thiel, the PayPal co-founder and early Facebook investor. That evening its Sheikh Hamad Bin Jassim, the foreign minister of Qatar. Hamad lives across the street in a similarly furnished house—he and Epstein have the same decorator. (Epstein, in his relaxed and amused manner, keeps prodding: “Why are you financing the bad guys? What do you get out of that?”’) Next morning, Epstein is joined for breakfast in the dining room by the lawyer Reid Weingarten, who’s represented, among other fat cats in trouble, Worldcom’s Bernie Ebbers and Goldman Sachs’s Lloyd Blankfein. Weingarten, hoarse with a cold, is still lamenting his failed defense of former Connecticut Governor John Rowland. After a blow-by-blow of the trial, they discuss the Qatarian’s visit—Epstein served HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_024236