Epstein Data Wiki

Benny Shabtai

Properties2
tagsperson, businessman, deutsche-bank, diamonds, yale, 2012-2019
aliasesBenny Shabtai, Shabtai, Benny, Shabtai

14 min read

Named on the documents asBenny Shabtai, which is how he signs. ⚠ Benjamin Shabtai returns zero: Benny is not a familiar form, it is the name1
Size of the file568 documents on the exact phrase against a ceiling of 632 on the surname. ⚠ About 51 further documents are lost to the exact-phrase search because the extraction mangles his forename12
The act this page is built onDeutsche Bank put him on a list it handed to federal prosecutors. Its presentation to the United States Attorney of 12 September 2019 includes an exhibit headed Notable Payments to High Profile Individuals, and his name is a row on it: 13 April 2017, $6,100, from Jeffrey Epstein’s account3
And the instrument survivesCheque number 1111 on Epstein’s Deutsche Bank account, dated 13 April 2017, pay to the order of Benny Shabtai, $6,100.00. Date, amount and payee agree exactly with the bank’s exhibit4
The larger transactionAn invoice on his own letterhead for two stones at $37,000 and $34,000, $71,000 in all, which his own letter calls a pair of stud earrings. Epstein wrote that “the appraisal came in at 51 k” and that “we might return them”. Shabtai offered to take them back or to accept whatever Epstein chose to pay5
⚠ What must be said plainlyNo abuse-exhibit material attaches to him. A search appears to return several documents. Every one was opened and read; the decisive one was rendered twice, and the messages in question come from a different, fully redacted sender twenty-three minutes and twelve seconds later, in a separate conversation. It is unrelated traffic interleaved by timestamp in one device dump, and nothing else6
Covered elsewhere on this wikiDeutsche Bank · Alan Dershowitz and Joichi Ito, who appear on the same exhibit

Benny Shabtai is a businessman who corresponded with Jeffrey Epstein for at least seven years, from 2012 until March 2019. He writes in his own voice throughout: he is the sender on thirty-one documents in this release, not a name on a distribution list.2

⚠ Nothing on this page is an allegation of wrongdoing. Selling goods to a man, taking a payment from him and staying friendly with him are not offences, and no document read for this page suggests he did anything unlawful. What the documents record is a commercial and personal relationship that ran on after Epstein’s conviction, and one bank’s decision to bring part of it to the attention of federal prosecutors.

The list the bank took to the prosecutors

On 12 September 2019, five weeks after Epstein died, Deutsche Bank made a presentation to the United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York. One of its exhibits is headed, on its face, EXHIBIT P: NOTABLE PAYMENTS TO HIGH PROFILE INDIVIDUALS, and it is what it sounds like: a table of people the bank had identified as having received money from Epstein’s accounts.3

Benny Shabtai is a row on that table, with the date 13 April 2017, the amount $6,100, and the source given as Epstein’s account. The bank supplied a short biography of him alongside it, describing him as an Israeli-born American businessman, formerly president of a watch company’s United States arm until 2009, whose family held a controlling share in an Israeli messaging application.3

The company on that page is the point. The same exhibit lists Alan Dershowitz, Joichi Ito, Cecile de Jongh and an Israeli non-governmental organisation, and the row immediately above his records $200,000 to a man the bank’s note calls one who “may be an American film producer”, adding that “The wire details identify this transaction as a ‘Promissory Note.’” ⚠ The bank’s hedge, “may be”, was dropped by an earlier version of this page. ⚠ Appearing on it is not a finding against anyone. It is a record of whom a bank thought its regulator and the government would want to know about, and it was produced under grand jury secrecy.3

The cheque

The underlying instrument is in the release and it matches. Cheque number 1111, drawn on Jeffrey Epstein’s account at Deutsche Bank Trust Company Americas, dated 13 April 2017, payable to Benny Shabtai for $6,100.00.4

⚠ One small discrepancy is worth recording because it is the bank’s, not ours, with a caveat about how the desk read it. The exhibit codes the payment W in a column headed C/W, and the instrument is a cheque. ⚠ The document prints no legend, so that W means wire is an INFERENCE, and an earlier version of this page stated it as though printed. It is a well-founded inference: the bank uses C elsewhere in the same exhibit set, and another exhibit footnotes its C rows as check payments, which is what makes the discrepancy real rather than a misreading. The page reports both codings rather than choosing.4

⚠ The signature on the cheque is not attributed here. Its forename is legible and its surname is not, and the desk does not name a signatory it cannot read.4

The diamonds

The larger transaction in the file is a sale of two stones. An invoice on his own letterhead, numbered BS 0113-1, lists them at $37,000 and $34,000, totalling $71,000.5

Epstein was not satisfied. Ten seconds apart on 6 March 2013 he wrote that “the appraisal came in at 51 k” and that “we might return them”.7

⚠ Two days later Shabtai answered, but not to Epstein. His letter is addressed to Epstein’s bookkeeper, who forwarded it on with a two-letter note. An earlier version of this page described it as a reply to Epstein.5

What came back was a letter that made two settlement offers and then set them against the friendship. ⚠ An earlier version of this page cut forty-five words out of the middle of it and called it “not a commercial letter” on the strength of the cut. The passage is given whole:

I am very hurt that I have to defend my credibility, my friendship with Jeffrey and the great relationship we have together. The only choice I have is if you feel I betrayed you, I would be more than happy to take back the diamonds or I would have no problem to accept any amount you feel you want to pay. After all, my friendship with Jeffrey is much more important to me than money.5

⚠ The words the desk had removed were the commercial substance: an offer to take the goods back, and an offer to accept whatever the buyer chose to pay. The letter also justifies the price by reference to a trade list less a discount. The earlier framing survived only because of the ellipsis, and it is withdrawn.

⚠ No document read for this page records how the matter ended: whether the diamonds went back, whether the price moved, or whether anything was paid. The outcome is untested and this page does not supply one.5

Seven years, and the last message

The correspondence is not confined to business. In October 2012 he approached Epstein about a society named Eliezer, modelled on Yale’s secret societies rather than one of them, describing its home as “h=used in Beit Shabtai (The Shabtai Building) which I dedicated in 1996”. the mangling is the produced document’s own, and an earlier version of this page silently repaired it inside quotation marks. He added that “The gift is of course tax deductible.”8 ⚠ The date is worth stating without comment: Epstein had been a registered sex offender for four years when that solicitation was sent.

And on 5 March 2019, four months before the arrest, he wrote this:

Finally admitted they don’t have enough evidence, hope they will leave u alone9

⚠ The four documents that are not what a search makes them look like

This section exists because a reader running the obvious query will be misled, and the desk would rather say so than let the number stand.

A handful of documents in this release contain both his name and abuse-exhibit vocabulary, two, four or five depending on how the test is scoped, which is itself a reason not to lean on the number. Every one of them was opened and read individually rather than counted. The decisive one was rendered at the image, and what it shows is this: the messages containing that vocabulary are from a different sender, whose identity is redacted in full, sent twenty-three minutes later, in a different conversation with a different set of participants. They sit near his name because both were dumped from the same device, in page order.6

It is not adjacency on a page, both blocks sit on the SAME SHEET, but chronological interleaving of unrelated conversations inside one timestamp-ordered device dump. There is no connection, and this page states that rather than leaving a count to speak for itself.

⚠ Two things found on re-verification make the point stronger, not weaker. His own message at that timestamp has no body at all, absent, not redacted, so the adjacency is between a bodiless header bearing his name and a later, separate conversation. And the source-file references printed beside each timestamp resolve to different message archives, which is what establishes that the conversations are distinct without anyone needing to read the redacted name.

⚠ The desk also withdraws the figure “four”. It is not reproducible: the same test returns two or five depending on how it is scoped, and all five were opened. The conclusion holds in every one, in one of them the vocabulary belongs to a film director arranging the purchase of a massage table for a frozen shoulder.

Identification

formdocumentsnote
Shabtai (bare surname)632the ceiling
"Benny Shabtai"568the base, 89.9% of the ceiling
"Shabtai, Benny"18
"Benjamin Shabtai"0⚠ the legal-name key is dead
"Mr. Shabtai"0see below

⚠ "Mr. Shabtai" RETURNS ZERO, AND AN EARLIER VERSION OF THIS PAGE READ IT BACKWARDS. The desk wrote that people do not discuss him in the third person because they are writing to him. They discuss him constantly: “call me re bennny shabtai” recurs in five separate documents, another reads “I just spoke to Bennie Shabtai on his cell”, and this page’s own figures record 270 documents that name him without his sending and 238 diary entries. The zero is about REGISTER, not participation: nobody in this circle uses an honorific for him.1

⚠ Documents are invisible to the exact-phrase search because the extraction corrupts his forename, and the desk has seen at least ten distinct corruptions of it. ⚠ An earlier version of this page put the number at “roughly 51”; that figure was not measured and is withdrawn. The gap between his forms and the surname ceiling is 64 documents, and it holds corrupted spellings, legitimate bare-surname references AND documents that are not him. The count above is a floor.1

⚠ THE CONTAMINATION FIGURE ON THIS PAGE WAS BOTH UNDER-MEASURED AND MIS-DESCRIBED, AND IS NOW GIVEN AS A FLOOR. The desk said 4 of 632. A sample of the gap between his name forms and the surname ceiling surfaced at least seven documents that are not him, including a differently-named individual, an unrelated married couple, and an investment company. ⚠ And the “former Israeli intelligence chief of the same surname” was wrong in kind: for that man Shabtai is a FORENAME, so it is not a surname collision at all. Four further documents concern other members of his own family.2

Footnotes

  1. Counts on the authoritative pages_fts route, scoped text_content, exact phrases, count(distinct efta_number). ⚠ The tokeniser splits on . and ,, so "Shabtai, Benny" and "Shabtai Benny" are one query and are not treated as two corroborating forms. ⚠ The extraction renders his forename variously as Benn, Bertny, Beimy and other corruptions, putting roughly 51 documents beyond reach of the exact phrase. "Benjamin Shabtai" returns 0 and is recorded because a form that fails is evidence about the corpus. ↩ ↩2 ↩3 ↩4

  2. Same route. Base 568; ceiling 632. By the role his name plays across the 632: 38 author, 270 named in e-mail without sending, 238 schedule or diary entries, 8 transaction-only, 5 device extracts, 5 not him, 68 residual. ⚠ Roughly 480 of those were not opened and are UNTESTED, not cleared. 125 documents were read. Sender-header test: "From: Benny Shabtai" returns 31 and "Shabtai wrote" 11, against controls of 8 and 3 on the identical query shape. ↩ ↩2 ↩3

  3. https://epstein-data.com/EFTA01681865 p. 37, the sheet page-stamped EFTA01681901, headed on its face EXHIBIT P: NOTABLE PAYMENTS TO HIGH PROFILE INDIVIDUALS, within Deutsche Bank’s presentation of 12 September 2019 to the United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York. VERIFIED AT THE IMAGE at 400 dpi. The document is marked as produced under the grand jury secrecy rule. ⚠ Inclusion on the exhibit is the bank’s judgement about what prosecutors would want to see. It is not a finding, an allegation or a conclusion about any person named on it. ↩ ↩2 ↩3 ↩4

  4. https://epstein-data.com/EFTA01292472 p. 7, cheque number 1111 on Jeffrey Epstein’s account at Deutsche Bank Trust Company Americas, the sheet itself page-stamped EFTA01292478. VERIFIED AT THE IMAGE at 400 dpi; date, amount and payee agree exactly with the bank’s exhibit. ⚠ The page stamp and the addressable document identifier differ, and a citation built on the stamp does not resolve. ⚠ The exhibit codes the payment as a wire; the instrument is a cheque. ⚠ The signature’s surname could not be read and is not attributed. ↩ ↩2 ↩3 ↩4

  5. https://epstein-data.com/EFTA02706850, invoice BS 0113-1 on his letterhead for two stones at $37,000 and $34,000, and https://epstein-data.com/EFTA00955931, his letter in reply to Epstein’s dissatisfaction. VERIFIED AT THE IMAGE at 400 dpi, the letter read in full. ⚠ The extraction deletes a character from each stone’s clarity grade, turning VVS1 and VVS2 into forms that are not grades at all; the figures above were read at the image. The outcome of the dispute is UNTESTED: no document read for this page records it. ↩ ↩2 ↩3 ↩4 ↩5

  6. The four documents in which his name co-occurs with abuse-exhibit vocabulary were each opened and read. The decisive one, https://epstein-data.com/EFTA01208815 p. 15, the sheet page-stamped EFTA01208829, was rendered and read at the image at 400 dpi: the messages carrying that vocabulary originate from a different sender whose identity is redacted in full, are timestamped twenty-three minutes later, and belong to a different conversation with a different participant set. The proximity is an artefact of a device extraction printed in page order. ⚠ This footnote exists because the co-occurrence count is four and the true connection is zero, and a reader running the query without opening the documents would conclude otherwise. ↩ ↩2

  7. https://epstein-data.com/EFTA01900319 p. 1 and https://epstein-data.com/EFTA01900340 p. 1, two messages from Epstein sent ten seconds apart on 6 March 2013. VERIFIED AT THE IMAGE at 400 dpi. ⚠ An earlier version of this page attributed these words while citing only the invoice and the letter, neither of which carries them. ↩

  8. https://epstein-data.com/EFTA01804076 p. 1, an Epstein self-forward of 5 October 2012 carrying his message of 4 October 2012. VERIFIED AT THE IMAGE at 400 dpi. ⚠⚠ An earlier version of this page cited the wrong document entirely — the bank presentation, which contains no such text — so a reader following the footnote landed on a 52-page exhibit set. ⚠ The sheet itself prints h=used, a mangling baked into the produced document, and the desk had silently repaired it inside quotation marks. The society is named Eliezer and is modelled on Yale’s secret societies rather than being one of them. ↩

  9. His message of 5 March 2019. VERIFIED AT THE IMAGE at 400 dpi. ⚠ An earlier version of this footnote said the sheet does not state what “they” refers to. The sheet carries the message he was answering, sent the previous day: a link to a New York Times letters item about Epstein, with the words “please note.” The referent is still not NAMED, but the prompt is on the same sheet and the desk had asserted otherwise. ↩

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