Jeffrey Epstein was born in Brooklyn, New York, on January 20, 1953 (per Biography). Raised in a middle-class family, his mother was a school aide, and his father worked as a groundskeeper for the city. He graduated from high school at age 16 and went on to college at New York University, although he never graduated with a degree. Despite this, he worked as a math teacher at a prep school in 1974, but this stint was brief as he was fired two years later due to poor performance in his duties. But before his dismissal, he made a connection with Bear Stearns CEO Alan Greenberg, who was the parent of one of his students. Because of his gift for numbers, Epstein worked his way up from an assistant job at Bear Stearns and was able to start his own finance company.
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In the 1980s, he developed connections with powerful people who were linked to many foreign governments. He claimed to some of his friends that he was working as an intelligence agent, and while this seemed far-fetched, his travels and connections at the time lent some credence to this claim. In the decades leading up to his first sex trafficking charge, Epstein was involved in finance companies like Tower Financial Corporation (which was revealed as a Ponzi scheme) and Financial Trust Company. Despite his success and escape from some dubious financial activities, accusations of sex trafficking led to his undoing, per CNN.
