Jeffrey Epstein Was Basically Marty Supreme
A number of rich Jewish guys found the Outer Boroughs working class hustler a nostalgic reminder of the good old days.
Josh Safdie’s drama Marty Supreme with Timothy Chalamet as a sociopathic Jewish ping-pong hustler from the Lower East Side in 1952 is one of the Oscar frontrunners. It’s been popular with audiences, critics, and, especially, Jewish critics, for whom it tends to remind them of their more rough-hewn uncles.
But the grandsons of the late table tennis promoter Marty Reisman, the real life inspiration, are massively offended by their beloved grandpa’s portrayal as a criminal and even perhaps a mass murderer (when menaced by a blond gang like the Jets in West Side Story, Marty douses them with gasoline and skids off making sparks; a fireball is seen in the background, but the fate of Marty’s victims is never mentioned again).
Who knows?
As I’ve been pointing out for awhile, Jeffrey Epstein didn’t seem to be a financial genius relentlessly coming up with brilliant get-rich ideas. Instead, he seems like kind of a charming ruthless doofus who made something like three big scores in his life.
The first appears to have been with the Towers Financial Ponzi scheme of 1988-1993, one of the biggest Ponzi schemes before Bernie Madoff. Towers was a low rent debt collection agency, for whom Epstein’s blue collar background (his dad was a groundskeeper for public parks) perhaps could help him imply that maybe he knew a guy who knew some guys who would break some thumbs if the debt wasn’t repaid. During Epstein’s tenure, Towers got into more ambitious schemes like trying (but failing) to buy TWA airlines.
The feds arrested most of the Towers higher-ups in 1993 and sent them to prison for their Ponzi scheme. Epstein, who had left Towers earlier, got away scot-free, however.
Why? The founder of the company, Steven Jude Hoffenberg, alleged a quarter of a century later, after Epstein’s death, that Epstein was working for Mossad and was protected by CIA or FBI.
Maybe. Maybe not.
Epstein’s other two big scores seem to have been …
Paywall here.
