Ghislaine Maxwell was, according to her accusers, Jeffrey Epstein’s protector and procurer, his girlfriend and his madam. She was, by all accounts, a soul mate and a mirror image. He grew up in Brooklyn with no money to speak of and never finished college. She is Paris-born, Oxford-educated, a jet-setter who partied with princes and billionaires.

Together, Epstein and Maxwell allegedly built what prosecutors, police and a growing number of women described as a sex-trafficking operation that crisscrossed the nation to provide Epstein with three young girls a day.

The death of Epstein, the convicted sex offender who authorities said hanged himself in a federal detention center cell in New York on Saturday, leaves those who seek to hold someone responsible for the alleged abuse of dozens of girls with one prime target: Maxwell.

The U.S. attorney in New York, Geoff Berman, assured the “brave young women who have already come forward and . . . the many others who have yet to do so” that “our investigation of the conduct charged in the indictment — which included a conspiracy count — remains ongoing.”

[For 30 years, prosecutors and victims tried to hold Jeffrey Epstein to account. At every turn, he slipped away.]

According to many of the women who have spoken about what Epstein allegedly did to them, Maxwell was the financier’s chief co-conspirator.

[Epstein’s accusers still deserve justice and will go after his alleged enablers, their lawyers say]

Maxwell was a focus of the Epstein investigation from the start, according to the Palm Beach police officials who began the probe. The girls they interviewed repeatedly described Maxwell as the coordinator of Epstein’s sex-trafficking operation. But detectives were never able to interview Maxwell.

Attorneys for Maxwell did not return calls seeking comment. Throughout the years since Epstein was first accused of sexual abuse, Maxwell has insisted that she did nothing wrong and knew of no illegal acts. In a deposition she gave in Giuffre’s defamation suit in 2016, Maxwell said that “Virginia is an absolute liar and everything she has said is a lie. Therefore, based on those lies I cannot speculate on what anybody else did or didn’t do . . . everything she said is false.” The suit was settled out of court in 2017.

But a growing number of women have said that Maxwell was the prime organizer of Epstein’s three-times daily “massages,” and that she acted as recruiter and paymaster for the girls who came to Epstein’s Palm Beach mansion.

Giuffre said Maxwell recruited her in 2000, when she was 16 or 17 and working at Donald Trump’s Palm Beach club, Mar-a-Lago.

As Giuffre recalled it in her lawsuit, Maxwell told her, “I know somebody. We can train you. We can get you educated. You know, we can help you along the way if you pass the interview. If the guy likes you, then, you know, it will work out for you. You’ll travel. You’ll make good money.”

But at her first meeting with Epstein, Giuffre said in a deposition, Maxwell “instructed me to take off my clothes and to give oral sex to Jeffrey Epstein.”

In an interview with the Miami Herald last year, Giuffre said, “The training started immediately. It was everything down to . . . how to be quiet, be subservient, give Jeffrey what he wants. A lot of this training came from Ghislaine herself, and being a woman, it kind of surprises you that a woman could actually let stuff like that happen. But not only let it happen but to groom you into doing it.”

Giuffre also said that Maxwell ordered her to have sex with Prince Andrew, former New Mexico governor Bill Richardson (D) and former Senate majority leader George J. Mitchell (D-Maine).

“My whole life revolved around just pleasing these men and keeping Ghislaine and Jeffrey happy,” Giuffre said in the deposition. “Their whole entire lives revolved around sex.”

Spokesmen for Richardson and Mitchell vigorously denied Giuffre’s allegations and said they never had any contact with her. A spokesperson for Buckingham Palace said, “Any suggestion of impropriety with underage minors is categorically untrue.”

Asked in a deposition about Maxwell’s role in procuring girls for him, Epstein said only, “Fifth,” referring to his Fifth Amendment protection against self-incrimination.

Johanna Sjoberg, a student at Palm Beach Atlantic University when she said Maxwell hired her as an assistant, said in a 2015 deposition that was released Friday that it was Maxwell’s job to ensure that three girls a day were made available to Epstein for his sexual pleasure.

“He needed to have three orgasms a day,” Sjoberg said. “It was biological, like eating.”

In another document released Friday, Rinaldo Rizzo, the houseman for one of Epstein’s closest friends testified that a 15-year-old Swedish girl tearfully told him that Maxwell and Epstein had threatened her with physical harm and confiscated her passport to assure that she stayed on Epstein’s private island in the Caribbean.

Yet another woman has claimed that Maxwell not only recruited girls for Epstein, but took part in the sexual abuse of girls. Maria Farmer said in an affidavit earlier this year that she met Maxwell and Epstein at an art show when she was a graduate student in Manhattan in 1995. The next summer, Farmer said, both Maxwell and Epstein sexually assaulted her at the Ohio estate of Leslie Wexner, the billionaire founder of The Limited stores and Epstein’s only publicly known financial client. Farmer also said that Maxwell took part in the sexual abuse of her 15-year-old sister on a massage table at Epstein’s Zorro Ranch in New Mexico.

Through her years with Epstein, Maxwell maintained a very public life at the pinnacle of society. She was a friend of John F. Kennedy Jr. in New York in the 1990s and a guest at Chelsea Clinton’s wedding in 2010. She had a long relationship with an Italian count. She attended fashion shows and top-dollar benefit balls in New York and London and went to the Vanity Fair party at the Oscars, where she was photographed in 2014 with Elon Musk, the tech entrepreneur.

In 2000, she obtained her townhouse on Manhattan’s East 65th Street; it was purchased for her for $5 million by an anonymous corporation located at the same address as Epstein’s finance office.

Maxwell served on boards of charities and founded a nonprofit organization that sought to conserve the world’s oceans. The organization announced last month that it was ceasing operations.

Describing herself as “unemployed,” Maxwell donated the maximum permissible, $2,300, to Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign in 2007.

[Jeffrey Epstein doesn’t deserve to be a conspiracy theory]

In a profile of Epstein in Vanity Fair in 2003, he said that Maxwell was not a paid employee but rather his “best friend.”

But after Epstein’s conviction on sexual abuse charges in 2008, Maxwell appeared to distance herself from her friend.

Maxwell grew up in a 53-room mansion on 14 acres near Oxford. Her father was Robert Maxwell, a British member of Parliament and book and newspaper publisher who was regularly on the front pages until he died mysteriously in 1991 aboard the Lady Ghislaine, a yacht he had named for his youngest daughter. The official ruling was that his death was an accident, but some British press coverage speculated that Maxwell, under pressure because of his enormous debts, killed himself. Ghislaine never believed that and subscribed to the notion that her father was murdered.

In life, the father — born Jan Hoch, a Czech Jewish refu­gee before he transformed himself into a London publisher — carried himself like a man of extreme wealth. When he died, he was found to owe money to more than 40 banks, to the tune of more than $4 billion.

Soon after her father’s death, Ghislaine Maxwell moved to New York. She had a trust fund from her father, which provided her with about $100,000 a year, according to British news reports. But there was no fortune to rely on; she worked in Manhattan selling real estate.

Then, less than a year after her father died, she met Epstein. Maxwell was Epstein’s guide to a heady world of celebrity, wealth, power and royalty. She introduced him to Bill Clinton and to Prince Andrew, who became a frequent visitor to Epstein’s properties. Maxwell and Epstein flew around the world on his private jet and invited top scientists and business leaders to dinners.

Friends said that although their romantic relationship lasted only a few years, she continued to work with or for him long afterward. In court documents, former employees at the Epstein mansion in Palm Beach described Maxwell as the house manager, the person who oversaw the staff, handled finances and served as social coordinator, often doing the glad-handing while the more reserved Epstein stayed in the background at parties and dinners.

In 1993, an ad in Yoga Journal offered a “full time position” for an “Iyengar Yoga Instructor” to “teach a private individual.” “The job includes fantastic perks such as extensive travel,” the ad said, and it advised interested parties to call “Miss Maxwell” at a phone number that was Epstein’s office number.

In a deposition in 2016, Maxwell agreed that her work at the Epstein houses “included hiring many people, . . . all sorts of people.” She said that “a very small part of my job was from time to time to find adult professional massage therapists for Jeffrey. As far as I’m concerned, everyone who came to his house was an adult professional person.”

Aaron Gregg contributed to this report.

Corrections officers had not checked in on financier and registered sex offender Jeffrey Epstein for “several” hours before he was found hanging in his cell Saturday, a person familiar with the matter said, just one in a series of missteps in the hours leading up to his death.

Officers should have been checking on Epstein, who was being held in a special housing unit of the Metropolitan Correctional Center in New York City, every 30 minutes, and, under normal circumstances, he also should have had a cellmate, according to the person familiar with the matter and union officials representing facility employees.

But a person who had been assigned to share a cell with Epstein was transferred on Friday, and — for reasons that investigators are still exploring — he did not receive a new cellmate, the person familiar with the matter said Sunday night. That left Epstein, who had previously been placed on suicide watch, alone and unmonitored — at least in the hours before his death — by even those officers assigned to guard him.

The person familiar with the matter spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the investigation.

The revelations are sure to increase scrutiny of the Federal Bureau of Prisons and the Metropolitan Correctional Center, a high-rise facility in Manhattan where Epstein, 66, was found unresponsive in his cell Saturday while he was awaiting trial on new, federal allegations that he sexually abused dozens of young girls in the early 2000s. After being found, he was taken to a hospital, where he was pronounced dead.

The incident, which authorities had classified initially as an “apparent suicide,” triggered multiple investigations of how such a high-profile inmate, who was supposed to have been carefully monitored, could have died in federal custody. It also caused outrage among his victims and their representatives, who had hoped that Epstein’s trial next year would produce the justice they thought he had long evaded.

The Federal Bureau of Prisons did not respond to repeated messages seeking comment.

Barbara Sampson, New York City’s chief medical examiner, said her office conducted an autopsy Sunday but had not yet reached a determination on cause of death “pending further information.” The medical examiner also allowed Michael Baden, a private pathologist, to observe the autopsy at the request of Epstein’s representatives, Sampson said.

The two corrections officers assigned to watch the special unit in the detention center where Epstein was being housed were working overtime — one forced to do so by management, the other for his fourth or fifth consecutive day, the president of the local union for staffers said.

Serene Gregg, president of the American Federation of Government Employees Local 3148, said the Metropolitan Correctional Center is functioning with less than 70 percent of the needed correctional officers, forcing many to work mandatory overtime and 60- or 70-hour workweeks.

She said one of the individuals assigned to watch Epstein’s unit did not normally work as a correctional officer but, like others in roles such as counselors and teachers, was able to do so. She declined to say which one or specify the person’s regular role.

“If it wasn’t Mr. Epstein, it would have been somebody else, because of the conditions at that institution,” Gregg said. “It wasn’t a matter of how it happened or it happening, but it was only a matter of time for it to happen. It was inevitable. Our staff is severely overworked.”

[Epstein’s accusers call her his protector and procurer. Is Ghislaine Maxwell now prosecutors’ target?]

Gregg said she did not know details of the investigation into Epstein’s death and declined to detail her discussions with those working that night. But she said she has long complained about understaffing at the facility, telling superiors, “It’s only a matter of time before we have a loss of life.” And in Epstein’s case, she said, it was possible overwork of officers played a role.

“It’s daunting — mentally, physically. I would feel confident in saying that some of that contributed to the unfortunate death of inmate Epstein,” she said, clarifying later that she did not know with certainty whether workload played a role in the incident because she was not privy to details of the investigation.

On Sunday, amid inquiries by the FBI, Justice Department’s inspector general and New York City medical examiner, questions remained.

“It’s our practice not to comment on ongoing investigations,” said John Lavinsky, a spokesman for the Justice Department’s inspector general.

Epstein was not on suicide watch Saturday before he was found, but because he was held in the facility’s special housing unit, he should have been checked on every 30 minutes, according to union officials and a person familiar with the investigation. A person familiar with the matter said that procedure was not being followed, at least according to preliminary information corrections officials gave investigators. Gregg declined to comment on internal security procedures.

It was also not clear how much, if any, of the incident or authorities’ check-ins was captured on camera. E.O. Young, the national president of the Council of Prison Locals C-33, said that while cameras are prevalent in the facility, he did not believe they generally captured inmates’ cells.

[For 30 years, prosecutors and victims tried to hold Jeffrey Epstein to account. At every turn, he slipped away.]

The Federal Bureau of Prisons said Saturday that lifesaving measures were “initiated immediately” after Epstein was found, and then emergency responders were summoned.

Epstein had been placed on suicide watch after a July 23 incident in which he was found in his cell with marks on his neck — which subjected him to near constant monitoring and daily psychological evaluations, according to people familiar with the case. But he was taken off that about a week later and brought to the special housing unit, where there was a higher level of security, but not constant monitoring.

Before the incident, Epstein had a cellmate: Nicholas Tartaglione, a former police officer in custody on murder and narcotics charges. But Young, the national union president, said Epstein was in a cell alone immediately before his death.

Young said he was not certain why Epstein was in the cell alone, as the Federal Bureau of Prisons has moved recently to make sure fewer inmates are housed on their own. He said there was some speculation after the July 23 incident that Epstein was trying to get away from Tartaglione, whom he feared, and he believed that, at least for a time, Epstein had another cellmate after coming off suicide watch.

Young asserted that in the jail’s general population, Epstein also probably would have been a target and that there was only so much officers could do to prevent him from harming himself.

But Young said, even in Epstein’s case, correctional officers face a grim reality.

“We can’t ever stop anyone who is persistent on killing themselves,” Young said. “The only thing the bureau can do is delay that.”

Young said he and other officials had long been raising concerns as the Trump administration had imposed a hiring freeze and budget cuts on the Federal Bureau of Prisons.

“All this was caused by the administration,” Young said.

Spokesmen for the White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment. In congressional testimony earlier this year, Attorney General William P. Barr conceded the bureau was “short” about 4,000 or 5,000 employees and said he had lifted the hiring freeze and was trying to ensure a steady pipeline of new officers to replace those who leave.

“I think this is an area where we have stumbled,” Barr said.

Although Epstein’s death will short-circuit his trial, the U.S. attorney in Manhattan said authorities are looking into who may have conspired with him. The financier had a star-studded list of acquaintances and friends — including former president Bill Clinton and President Trump — although investigators’ focus in the past has been on the less-famous people who worked with Epstein and have been accused of helping procure girls for him.

Epstein had pleaded guilty in 2008 to two state charges of soliciting prostitution to resolve similar sexual abuse allegations as part of an agreement that has been widely criticized as overly lenient. The deal allowed Epstein to spend just 13 months in jail and be released regularly for work, and it spared those who worked with him from prosecution.

It was approved by Alex Acosta, who was then the U.S. attorney in Miami. Acosta would go on to serve as labor secretary in the Trump administration but resigned his post last month after federal prosecutors in New York charged Epstein, renewing questions about the earlier deal.

At the beginning, middle and end of his career, Jeffrey Epstein faced a reckoning with his misdeeds. At every stage, he managed to avoid the efforts of prosecutors and victims to confront him with his financial chicanery and sexual abuses. On Saturday, he apparently chose to end his life rather than face what he had done.

Epstein’s death by hanging in his cell in a New York jail appears to be a macabre final escape in a long series of evasions by a fabulously wealthy financier and convicted sex offender who used his private jet and Palm Beach parties to lure presidents and plutocrats into his orbit.

Equal parts charismatic and devious, he was a Wall Street washout with a knack for numbers and, according to those who worked with him, a mind set on deceit. From his beginnings as a college dropout who scored a job as a math teacher at a Manhattan prep school to his career as a millionaire adviser to some of the nation’s top corporate executives and politicians, Epstein acted as if the rules of life did not apply to him.

A decade ago, he avoided a long prison sentence even after police and prosecutors amassed an enormous array of evidence showing that he regularly abused girls at his Palm Beach mansion and on a Caribbean island that he’d bought. In that case, as at several pivotal points throughout his life, Epstein avoided the law by deploying some of the nation’s most famous lawyers and leaning on friendships with powerful figures in politics, business and academia.

Epstein’s ability to slip away even when those around him are held to account reaches back to well before he’d accumulated any fortune. Epstein, who died at 66, reported to federal authorities recently that he was worth $559 million, but some of his associates contend he had much more than that hidden overseas; others wonder whether he had anything close to that sum. Whatever the truth, he worked to build the impression that he was wealthy and influential, helping him connect with powerful people who for many years defended his character when rumors emerged that he was abusing women and girls.

[‘She was shaking’: Court filings describe system Jeffrey Epstein allegedly used to procure girls]

The story of Epstein’s first great escape is a tale of financial wizardry and brazen criminality, in which hundreds of thousands of Americans lost their retirement money, their life’s savings, on an investment intended to enrich only its creators.

“That money would have been my real retirement,” said Veriena Braune, a 91-year-old retired teacher in Granbury, Tex., who invested all of her savings — $112,000 — in bonds that a young Epstein sold for his partner, Steven Hoffenberg. She lost every penny of the money.

“Somebody should know: that Epstein did a number on a little teacher in Texas,” Braune said.

Hoffenberg, who headed up the investment scheme and spent 18 years in prison because of it, said in an interview with The Washington Post this week that Epstein was “the architect of the scam.” Federal prosecutors agreed. Yet Epstein was never charged. His name, initially included in prosecutors’ descriptions of the scheme, quickly vanished from the record.

“I thought Jeffrey was the best hustler on two feet,” Hoffenberg said. “Talent, charisma, genius, criminal mastermind. We had a thing that could make a lot of money. We called it Ponzi.”

Hoffenberg pleaded guilty in 1995 to mail fraud, obstruction of justice and tax evasion in two scams — one designed to misuse the assets of two Illinois insurance companies and the other fleecing more than $460 million from about 200,000 investors who bought notes and bonds from Hoffenberg’s Towers Financial Corp.

“Last year, I got a call at home from no less than Steven Hoffenberg,” said Marvin Gerber, another victim of the scam and a tour operator on Long Island who lost about $250,000 that he’d invested in promissory notes that Epstein and Hoffenberg were selling. “He said he sat in jail for years trying to figure out how he was going to get the money to give back to the people who lost it. He said he was going to try to get it from the guy who absconded with the money — Epstein. But of course, I got nothing. From the very start, I was screwed.”

Last year, two of the victims in the scam filed suit against Epstein seeking the return of their original investments. Two months later, they dropped their suit.

‘Genius’ with ‘no moral compass’

Epstein’s career in finance started at Bear Stearns, the investment banking firm that hired him away from his job teaching math at the tony Dalton School. (It may have helped that he came to Bear Stearns after having tutored the son of the firm’s chairman.) He quickly rose to become a limited partner but left the company suddenly in 1981. Epstein later testified in a Securities and Exchange Commission investigation that some people at the firm thought his departure had to do with “an illicit affair with a secretary,” but Epstein said he had been questioned by his bosses about an improper loan he’d made to a friend to buy stock.

He spent the next few years on his own, trying to build a money management practice known as J. Epstein & Co. In 1987, he met Hoffenberg.

[Jeffrey Epstein found with marks on his neck in New York jail cell]

In the late ’80s, Hoffenberg was, by his own account, a schemer. “I was always under investigation,” he said. From afar, he seemed successful — he briefly owned the New York Post, and he rented a floor in Trump Tower (“Donald’s crowd was my crowd,” Hoffenberg said). But much of Hoffenberg’s career involved schemes to separate investors from their money. He figured Epstein had the smarts to help him do that on a much bigger scale.

Hoffenberg said he was introduced to Epstein by Douglas Leese, a British arms dealer. “The guy’s a genius,” Hoffenberg said Leese told him. “He’s great at selling securities. And he has no moral compass.” Leese did not respond to messages seeking comment.

Between about 1987 and 1993, Epstein worked for Hoffenberg, who paid him $25,000 a month and gave him a $2 million loan in 1988 that Epstein would never have to pay back, according to court documents.

Hoffenberg’s firm, Towers Financial, started out as a collection agency, buying bills that were owed to other firms and collecting as much of the unpaid debts as it could. In 1986, after adding business units in finance and leasing, Towers reported nearly 1,200 employees and nationwide sales of $95 million.

Hoffenberg — like Epstein a Brooklyn native who never finished college — was on his way to acquiring many of the trappings of New York’s financial elite, including chauffeured luxury cars, speedboats and a 72-foot yacht.

But in 1987, Towers began constructing one of the largest frauds in history. The scheme began when Towers acquired the parent of two insurance companies, Associated Life Insurance and United Fire. Then, Towers launched a takeover attempt against Pan Am, the once-proud but then-struggling airline.

To boost its chances, Towers told the SEC that it had an expert on its team: Epstein. Towers called him “a financial advisor who has been familiar with Pan Am for approximately six years” and was now advising Towers.

What neither regulators nor Pan Am knew was that, as Hoffenberg admitted later in court, Towers had begun devising a classic Ponzi scheme, named for a swindler who defrauded investors by moving money back and forth to create the false impression that profit was being made.

After acquiring the insurance companies, Towers began siphoning funds from them to make its bid for Pan Am look viable. Hoffenberg and Epstein also began pulling out hundreds of thousands of dollars for themselves, court documents show. Hoffenberg issued more than 50 checks from the insurance companies to pay his stepdaughter’s tuition, expenses on his private plane and monthly $25,000 checks to Epstein.

“I advanced money to Epstein perpetually because I thought this thing could work,” Hoffenberg said. “He could sell anything. People loved him.”

When the airline takeover failed, the insurance companies faltered. Then, in 1988, Towers took another $1.8 million from the insurers and used it to attempt another airline takeover, of Emery Air Freight. Towers filed fake financial information to accountants and investors to cover its tracks, according to court records.

That takeover also failed, leaving the insurance companies insolvent. The looting of the two insurers left 4,000 Illinois customers out $9 million that had been set aside to cover their medical bills. Another 2,200 Ohio customers lost about $1.8 million.

The Illinois Department of Insurance placed the companies in receivership. The state and the SEC sued Towers.

But Hoffenberg and Epstein weren’t done. According to prosecutors, they expanded the fraud dramatically. Beginning in 1988, Towers began selling more than $270 million worth of promissory notes, offering returns of 12 to 16 percent and marketing them largely to people of modest means, among them widows, retirees and people with disabilities.

Hoffenberg and his company used several million dollars from those investors to show Illinois regulators that they were putting sufficient capital into the insurance companies to guarantee that those insurers could cover claims. But that money actually wasn’t available to pay claims because it had been used in the efforts to take over the airlines.

“I call it a turnover,” Hoffenberg said this week. “You raise a dollar here, you pay a dollar there. Epstein was brilliant at this.”

Sometimes, the machinations went very wrong. The money Towers used to try to buy control of Emery Air Freight was lost when Emery’s stock price plummeted.

By 1993, prosecutors in Illinois and New York who had spent years investigating Hoffenberg’s companies were ready to spell out their findings.

In front of a grand jury in Chicago, federal prosecutor Edward Kohler walked Hoffenberg, who had just agreed to cooperate with the government, through the design of the scam. In the narrative Kohler laid out, Epstein was the technical wizard who kept the money moving around to support Hoffenberg’s various schemes.

Over and over, Kohler asked Hoffenberg whether Epstein had designed Towers’ scams. Hoffenberg affirmed the prosecutor’s story at every turn.

“Jeffrey Epstein was the person in charge of the transactions,” Hoffenberg said.

“Epstein was trying to manipulate the price of the stock?” Kohler asked.

“Yes,” Hoffenberg replied.

“You didn’t object to that, sir?”

“No,” Hoffenberg said.

That was in November 1993. Three months later, Epstein’s name disappeared from the case.

Beginnings of mysterious wealth

In court hearings, FBI reports and affidavits throughout 1994 and 1995, prosecutors and FBI agents referred to Hoffenberg’s “co-conspirators,” “confederates” and “others.”

A review of court files finds no further reference to Epstein as the case moved toward a conclusion that convicted Hoffenberg and sent him to prison for 18 years.

Kohler, still a prosecutor in the U.S. attorney’s office in Chicago, declined to comment on why Epstein was removed from the case.

“All I can tell you is it was 25 years ago,” Kohler said this week. “I really haven’t thought about it since then.”

Other prosecutors who worked on the cases said that Hoffenberg was always their primary target and that Epstein was removed from the government’s narrative because he cooperated with prosecutors.

“Epstein was not the focus of what we were doing,” said Barry Gross, who represented the Illinois Department of Insurance in the case against Hoffenberg. “We were trying to take over these insurance companies and eliminate the Hoffenberg management to protect the policyholders. Epstein was someone Hoffenberg favored, and he transferred substantial insurance company funds to Epstein. If you’re looking at Epstein’s mysterious accumulation of wealth, it sounds right that this is the place to start. But Epstein was never our focus.”

Hoffenberg also cooperated with the government, beginning in March 1993. But his deal collapsed in early 1994, when, according to testimony by prosecutor Daniel Nardello, Hoffenberg violated the agreement by starting three new collection agencies and lying about it to prosecutors — effectively continuing the scheme that got him in trouble in the first place. Through a spokesman, Nardello declined to comment.

One month after the government presented its version of the case with Epstein as a major player, Hoffenberg admitted to prosecutors that “he had lied to the government in an effort to find a way to support his family,” Nardello wrote in an affidavit. Nardello moved to terminate the government’s deal with Hoffenberg.

Amy Millard, a federal prosecutor in New York who handled the case during sentencing, said Hoffenberg’s repeated lying made it difficult to rely on anything he said. She pushed to revoke his bail and move forward with the charges.

“I did not think he was a credible witness,” she said. Hoffenberg was hospitalized with depression in 1970; a psychiatric exam when he was sentenced in 1996 concluded that although he was narcissistic, he was “well oriented” and not “disturbed or impaired.”

Why Hoffenberg did not give prosecutors details of Epstein’s role in the scheme as part of his bid for a reduced sentence remains something of a mystery.

Gary H. Baise, a Washington lawyer who represented Hoffenberg during his incarceration, said the judge in the case, Robert W. Sweet, told him years later that the purpose of the long sentence was to get Hoffenberg to give up co-conspirators. Sweet died this year.

“Judge Sweet did not like the idea that he had sentenced Steven to 18 years, but he said, ‘By golly, I was trying to break him,’ ” Baise said. “He couldn’t figure out why Steve didn’t blow the whistle on Epstein or others.”

Baise said he also couldn’t figure it out. Clearly, any friendship between the two men had ended. After Hoffenberg was released from prison in 2013, Baise and his wife met Hoffenberg in New York, where the newly freed man unexpectedly offered to take them to Epstein’s townhouse. Baise said a young woman greeted them at the door, took their names and disappeared inside. When she returned, Baise said, she slammed the door in their faces.

Four other Towers executives were convicted of roles in the fraud, generally serving little or no jail time.

Hoffenberg said he had decided he could not rat out a partner. He said variously that he was under threat from Epstein to remain silent and that prosecutors faced similar pressure to drop Epstein from their case. Hoffenberg offered no evidence for his allegation, which Nardello, the prosecutor at the time, called “desperate and ludicrous. . . . Hoffenberg’s insinuations reflect only on his apparent ability to project his corrupt view of the world onto others.”

Hoffenberg said Epstein’s role in the scam eats at him. “He got away with it because I didn’t cooperate,” Hoffenberg said. “How could you remove the architect of the crime from the story of the crime? I screwed myself, but I also got in bed with the wrong set of criminals. The whole thing blew up, but he wasn’t touched.”

Victims’ last hope

Frail and in ill-health, Hoffenberg says his last goal in life is to reimburse investors who lost money in the Towers scam. He intends to do that with Epstein’s money. “Every dollar Epstein has raised since leaving me has been tainted because everything came from the money he stole in Towers,” Hoffenberg said.

In 2016, Hoffenberg and some of his victims joined forces to file suit against Epstein, seeking restitution. But when a judge expressed skepticism that Hoffenberg could legally be part of a class action with his own victims, Hoffenberg withdrew the suit.

Some of the victims say they believe Hoffenberg is truly remorseful. Others aren’t buying it.

“The concept of Hoffenberg being penitent is pure theater,” said Gross, the lawyer who represented Illinois in the insurance case.

“I’m not looking to clear my name,” said Hoffenberg, who was interviewed in his room at Stamford Hospital in Connecticut, where he was awaiting surgery. “I’m 74, I’m in a hospital bed, what do I have to gain? I owe people half a billion dollars. The only way they get paid is with the money that Epstein took, which originally comes from the Towers scam.”

But although Hoffenberg claims to know where Epstein stashed his money overseas, he has not contacted law enforcement and doesn’t plan to. “They know my number,” he said.

Sarah Ellison contributed to this report.