How JPMorgan Enabled the Crimes of Jeffrey Epstein

America’s leading bank profited from America’s most notorious sex offender for years. Not because he was good at hiding his crimes—because it just didn’t care enough about those crimes to stop doing business with him. Three New York Times reporters combed through thousands of pages of bank records and court filings to tell the story of JP Morgan and Jeffrey Epstein’s mutually beneficial relationship:

In March 2005, the parents of a 14-year-old girl filed a complaint with the police in Palm Beach, Fla., alleging that Epstein had molested her. The police opened an investigation, and soon other teenage girls shared similar stories of abuse. (Women have subsequently accused Epstein of raping them as teenagers as far back as 1985.)

Even before the investigation became public, warning lights should have been flashing inside JPMorgan. Epstein’s huge cash withdrawals continued—a total of more than $1.7 million in 2004 and 2005, according to records we reviewed—much of which was used to procure girls and young women. Some of the withdrawals took place at the bank branch in JPMorgan’s Park Avenue headquarters, where Epstein’s accountant regularly arrived to cash huge checks written from Epstein’s various accounts.

At Epstein’s request, the private bank also agreed to open accounts for two young women without actually speaking to either of them. Instead, one of Epstein’s minions provided bare-bones information, and JPMorgan couldn’t confirm one woman’s Social Security number. A banker was supposed to meet with the woman to verify her details but never did, according to a report prepared for the U.S. Virgin Islands, which later sued JPMorgan. (Evangelisti, the bank spokesman, said the accounts “were properly verified and documented.”)

Decades of scandals—in which banks facilitated drug smuggling, human trafficking, money laundering, terrorism and even genocide—gave rise to requirements that lenders vet their customers, closely monitor their activities and flag suspicious transactions to the government. Among its many lapses with Epstein, JPMorgan often failed to alert federal watchdogs to transactions that the bank later acknowledged were suspicious. And by opening accounts for young women without meeting them, the bank was missing a well-known hallmark of human traffickers: that they control victims’ interactions with the outside world.