by Pam Martens and Russ Martens, Wall St On Parade:
On Friday, February 16, ahead of a three-day weekend, JPMorgan Chase quietly filed its 10-K (annual report) with the Securities and Exchange Commission. The document carried the bombshell that the bank had paid an astonishing $1.4 billon in legal expenses in 2023 – a 426 percent increase over the prior year’s legal expenses.
While the bank didn’t break down the names of the law firms that received the lion’s share of those legal expenses, public records can fill in most of the blanks.
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Throughout 2023, JPMorgan Chase was paying the expensive lawyers at WilmerHale to defend it against a federal lawsuit brought by the David Boies law firm, Boies, Schiller & Flexner LLP, on behalf of the raped, assaulted, and sex trafficked underage victims of Jeffrey Epstein. JPMorgan was also paying WilmerHale lawyers throughout 2023 to defend it against Epstein-related charges brought by the Attorney General of the U.S. Virgin Islands. In both cases, the plaintiffs credibly alleged that the bank was actively-engaged in facilitating Epstein’s criminal sex-trafficking enterprise by providing the financial services and hard cash necessary to keep it going while willfully violating its duty to report the cash transactions to the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN).
Both cases were settled by JPMorgan last year, thus preventing the mountain of heavily redacted and sealed documents from seeing the light of day in a jury trial. The Epstein victims’ case was settled for $290 million while the U.S. Virgin Islands case was settled for $75 million.
Throughout last year’s scandalous headlines, the Chairman and CEO of JPMorgan Chase, Jamie Dimon, preposterously stuck to the story that he didn’t know the notorious Epstein was a client at the bank, from at least 1998 to 2013, and likely much longer.
The Boies law firm and another law firm involved in the Epstein victims’ case, Edwards Henderson Lehrman, received $87 million in legal fees from the $290 million settlement, plus more than $1 million in legal expenses.
Now we’re learning new details about what else WilmerHale and Dimon extracted from David Boies (in addition to a ton of documents remaining sealed or redacted) in exchange for that $87 million payday.
Earlier this month, David Boies filed a federal lawsuit against Darren Indyke and Richard Kahn, Epstein’s personal lawyer and accountant, respectively. There are two named plaintiffs who seek to become the class representatives in a class action against Indyke and Kahn: Danielle Bensky and Jane Doe 3.
Bensky’s allegations originate during the time-period in which JPMorgan Chase was funneling $40,000 to $80,000 a month in hard cash to Epstein so he could pay hush money to his victims and incentive cash to his recruiters of underage girls. But instead of Boies including what would be the very critical information against JPMorgan Chase that was obtained in discovery in last year’s cases, the bank’s name is not mentioned once in the 85-page court filing.
The heart of the case against Indyke and Kahn is that they were “personally essential to the Epstein Enterprise’s success—among other things, they helped structure Epstein’s bank accounts and cash withdrawals to give Epstein and his associates access to large amounts of cash in furtherance of sex trafficking.”
How a lawyer can prove this case without naming the bank that played a central role in the scheme from at least 1998 through 2013 is beyond our comprehension. Unless, of course, the strategy is to just grab another settlement.
Below is a sampling of the gut-wrenching charges that Boies made against JPMorgan Chase just last year in the victims’ case against the bank:
“To access the large amount of cash needed to maintain his active sexual abuse of young women, it was essential that the financial institution where he banked be complicit in his operation, and more specifically that Epstein bank at a financial institution that would allow him to constantly withdraw cash from his accounts without following anti-money laundering and reporting laws. To put it plainly, Epstein needed a bank that knew he was engaging in illegal activity and did not care, which Epstein had in JP Morgan.”
“Epstein’s aptitude as a sex-trafficker and appetite as a sexual abuser did not suffer because of his Florida incarceration in 2008. Even while he was in jail in Florida, Epstein brazenly continued to sexually abuse young girls and women from his work-release office.”
“At all relevant times, Epstein maintained numerous apartment units at 301 East 66th Street in New York City, where Epstein’s co-conspirators often stayed and which operated as stash houses where numerous victims were kept over the years.”
“JP Morgan knew of the 301 East 66th Street Epstein properties and knew that these units operated as victim stash houses.”
“In 2006, Jeffrey Epstein was arrested in Florida after state and federal law enforcement discovered that he had sexually abused more than 30 children in his Palm Beach, Florida mansion…As a consequence of the Florida investigation, Epstein pled guilty to two felonies, was permanently labeled a ‘Registered Sex Offender,’ and was jailed in 2008. Epstein also entered into a non-prosecution agreement with the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of Florida barring his prosecution (and prosecution of his known and unknown co-conspirators) for violations of the TVPA [Trafficking Victim Protection Act] and other sex offenses in Florida. When the U.S. Attorney’s Office entered into that non-prosecution agreement with Epstein, it had not received reports from JP Morgan about vast sums of cash that it was providing Epstein. Nor did JP Morgan provide any other assistance in the investigation.”
“JP Morgan chose not to cooperate with law enforcement and other investigations into Epstein’s sex trafficking, because it knew it would be exposed as assisting in Epstein’s scheme.”
“As Epstein’s criminal sex trafficking venture expanded, he needed more protection and support from JP Morgan. Through [Jes] Staley and others, Epstein became more deeply involved with JP Morgan, providing JP Morgan with more financial benefits. And, as a quid pro quo, JP Morgan allowed Epstein to transfer massive amounts of hush money to his victims and recruiters. JP Morgan allowed Epstein to withdraw hundreds of thousands of dollars in cash so that all the payments were not traceable (the most obvious red flag for any criminal enterprise).”
“…JP Morgan failed to file with the federal government the required SARs that financial institutions must file with the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (‘FinCEN’) whenever there is a suspected case of money laundering or fraud. Timely filing of these reports is required by the Bank Secrecy Act and related laws and regulations. These reports are tools that the federal government uses to detect and prosecute, among other illegal activities, sex trafficking in violation of the TVPA. While JP Morgan was providing Epstein vast sums of cash each year, it was required to timely file SARs about Epstein’s suspicious and unusual cash transactions. JP Morgan’s failure to timely file SARs about Epstein’s sex-trafficking venture, in spite of numerous red flags, was wrongful and purposeful.”
This is what passes for “justice” in the United States of America, circa 2024.
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