Epstein Data Wiki

Merwin Dela Cruz

Properties2
tagsperson, staff, house-manager, 9-east-71st-street, correspondence, 2014, 2019
aliasesMerwin Dela Cruz, Merwin Dela cruz, Mervin Dela Cruz, Dela Cruz, Merwin, Merwin

9 min read

⚠ what this page is about, and what it is not

The man who ran Jeffrey Epstein’s New York townhouse, and by volume one of the largest correspondents in the entire release. He is household staff, hired in 2014, still writing four days before the arrest. No allegation against him was found anywhere in the release, and none is made here. ⚠ This page is about running a building.

WhoMerwin Dela Cruz, house manager at 9 East 71st Street, hired February 20141
In the release8,474 documents under the full name, 8,999 pages, 1.06 pages per document. ⚠ This is the largest single-person gap the desk has closed2
His own messages4,245 sender rows across 3,231 documents, 1 September 2011 to 2 July 20192
⭐ The actOn 24 February 2014 he accepted the post in writing, asked whether $90,000 “would be a consideration”, and asked to continue his predecessor’s practice of monitoring the house from home at weekends when Epstein was in residence. Epstein approved the hire the same afternoon: “ok to hire merwyn”1

Merwin Dela Cruz managed Jeffrey Epstein’s Manhattan house. He is not a marginal figure in the files: he writes in more than three thousand documents, more than most of the financiers, lawyers and politicians who have pages on this wiki, and what he writes about is deliveries, keys, rugs, prescriptions, contractors and a dining table.

The hire, 24 February 2014

The whole exchange sits on one sheet, read at the image.1

At 12:49 PM he wrote to Epstein’s accountant Richard Kahn:

Hi Rich,

It is with great pleasure that I accept your offer. In response to your compensation question, I would like to know if 90,000.00 would be a consideration.

If it’s alright, i would like to continue the practice that Rich B had on the weekends where he would monitor the house from home when Mr. Epstein is in residence.

At 2:16 PM Kahn forwarded it to Epstein:

I asked Merwyn his current compensation package. It appears he avoided my question with his attached response. Rich Barnett compensation is 125,000 plus approx 35,000 for union healthcare and pension. Please advise.

Epstein’s reply, in full: “ok to hire merwyn”.

⚠ Three things the sheet establishes and the page states no further. He asked for $90,000 against a predecessor’s $125,000 plus about $35,000 in union healthcare and pension. Kahn read his answer as an evasion. And the weekend practice he asked to continue was his predecessor’s, described as monitoring the house from home when Epstein was in residence; ⚠⚠ the sheet does not say what monitoring consisted of, and this page does not guess.

What he did, in his own subject lines

The work is domestic and logistical. A message of 13 November 2016, to Epstein and copied to Karyna Shuliak, is the whole job in five lines:

Hi sir, The front is now functioning again. It looks like it’s been repaired couple o= times in the past so I suggest that we change the door knob. But it should=work for a while.

Thanks

Merwin Dela Cruz

⚠ The o= and should=work are a transfer-encoding fault in the produced document and are printed as they stand.3 “Hi sir” is how he addresses his employer, and the subject lines are the most economical description of the rest: “Package for JE”, “Key for 8A ASAP”, “Rugs”, “Prescription”, “New dining table”, “DHL package Coming Wed March 8th”, “Please confirm you rec’d these items from Amazon”. He corresponds with Lesley Groff about measurements and weights, and with Kahn about a cooling tower and chiller replacement for the townhouse.4

The volume, and why it is the point

A count this size has been an artefact three times on this wiki, so it was measured first.2

  • 8,999 pages across 8,474 documents, 1.06 pages per document. Not a running head.
  • He is the SENDER in 3,231 documents. ⚠ That is the finding. Most subjects of this wiki appear because others wrote about them; he appears because he wrote.
  • ⚠⚠ THE 478 plist DOCUMENTS ARE NOT A SEPARATE CLASS OF RECORD. An earlier version of this page recorded them as unopened. Opened and measured: 475 of the 478, 99%, carry an ordinary e-mail Subject: line. They are the same household correspondence with Apple property-list metadata appended. The gap is closed and the answer is a null result.3
  • His traffic rises steadily and does not taper: 2014 495 · 2015 276 · 2016 606 · 2017 1,030 · 2018 1,026 · 2019 388.
  • ⚠ The last message the store carries from him is dated 2 July 2019, four days before Epstein was arrested. The subject is a contractor’s name.2

What this page does not say

No allegation against him was found anywhere in the release.5

⚠⚠ NOTHING HERE SUGGESTS HE KNEW OF, PARTICIPATED IN, OR WITNESSED ANY OFFENCE. He managed a building. The documents read for this page are about packages, keys, plumbing and furniture, and a reader should draw nothing from the mere fact that a house manager’s correspondence is voluminous. ⚠ The 478 plist documents WERE opened and are not a distinct class; see above.

⚠ His personal e-mail address prints in the clear on documents in this population and is not reproduced here. He is a private individual and household staff; the address carries no investigative value, and this is an editorial choice rather than a rule, recorded so it is not mistaken for a redaction.

Footnotes

Footnotes

  1. The hire, 24 February 2014. EFTA00983814 p.1, read at the image at 700 dpi, carrying all three messages in one chain: his acceptance at February 24, 2014 at 12:49:38 PM EST, Kahn’s forward at Mon, Feb 24, 2014 at 2:16 PM, and Epstein’s reply headed Mon, 24 Feb 2014 19:28:06 +0000. ⚠ Epstein and Kahn both spell it “Merwyn”; he signs “Merwin”. ⚠ The lower-case “i” in “i would like” is as printed. ⚠ Sender and recipient addresses are covered on the forwarded message and are not supplied, and Epstein’s own address prints and is not reproduced. ⚠ The predecessor, Rich Barnett, is named in the clear on the sheet, and his compensation figures are Kahn’s statement of them rather than a payroll record. ⚠ No document read for this page says what salary was finally agreed. ↩ ↩2 ↩3

  2. The measurement. ⚠⚠ The candidate list carried this subject as the surname fragment “Dela Cruz” at 9,177 documents and could not be commissioned until the form was resolved. It resolves to Merwin Dela Cruz: of the forenames standing before “Dela Cruz” in a 400-page sample, Merwin accounts for 237 and its OCR variants Mcrwin, Mervin, Mermn and Menvin for a further 23, with no other person present. "Merwin Dela Cruz" returns 8,474 documents across 8,999 pages, 1.06 pages per document; the bare surname returns 9,607. ⚠ The hinge is page scope: pages_fts indexes pages and a document counts when any one page carries the phrase. Corpus documents.doc_type splits the population as email.header 7,377 · plist 478 · calendar 51 · email.chain 25 · memo 19, with 407 untyped. In the e-mail metadata store he is the sender of 4,245 rows across 3,231 documents, 1 September 2011 to 2 July 2019, by year 2011 3 · 2012 2 · 2014 495 · 2015 276 · 2016 606 · 2017 1,030 · 2018 1,026 · 2019 388, with no rows in 2013. Sender strings include Merwin Dela cruz (2,651), Merwin (339), Merwin Dela Cruz (272), Mervin Dela cruz (210) and Merwin Dela crux (50). ⚠ No deduplicated message total is stated, because the desk has twice printed one that did not reproduce. ↩ ↩2 ↩3 ↩4

  3. The plist class, and the 13 November 2016 message. EFTA01784863 p.1, read at the image at 700 dpi: From: Merwin Dela cruz, Sent: Sunday, November 13, 2016 1:59 PM, To: jeffrey E., Cc: Karyna Shuliak, Subject: Front door. Beneath the signature the sheet carries an Apple property list (<!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC "-//Apple//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN">) with keys including date-received, gmail-label-ids and remote-id. ⚠ That appended metadata is why the corpus types these documents plist, and it is the only thing distinguishing them from the rest of his e-mail: of the 478 so typed, 475 carry an ordinary Subject: line. ⚠ No e-mail address from this sheet is reproduced here, and a short block beneath his signature is withheld on the sheet. ⚠ The transfer-encoding faults o= and should=work are printed unrepaired, as this desk was caught silently repairing one on a sister page. ↩ ↩2

  4. The work. Subject lines are taken from the e-mail metadata store’s own subject column across his sender rows and are quoted as it holds them. The cooling tower and chiller exchange with Richard Kahn, 15 August 2012, is EFTA00628366 p.1, text layer; its attachment is named for the townhouse address, which is how this page establishes which property he managed. The exchange with Lesley Groff of 10 April 2014 about a box’s measurements and weight is EFTA00364491 p.1, text layer. ⚠ Neither was read at the image, and neither carries a quotation on this page beyond the subject lines. ↩

  5. Absences, each scoped. No allegation against him was found anywhere in the release. No deposition of him, no interview report and no filing naming him as a party or a subject was found. ⚠ Each of these says what was not found, not what does not exist. ⚠⚠ This is a shallow absence check against a very large population and the page says so plainly: with 8,474 documents, the six derived stores were NOT searched and no systematic read of the population was attempted. ⚠ The 478 plist documents, recorded here as unopened when this page was published, have since been opened and measured; they are e-mail with Apple property-list metadata appended and add no new class of record. A subject this size deserves a deeper pass than this page has had, and the gap is recorded rather than dressed as a finding. ↩

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