Opportunity Brokers
Opportunity Brokers
In January 2012, Nina Keita emailed Jeffrey Epstein to let him know she’d booked the ministerial suite at the Hôtel Ivoire for his stay in Abidjan. As the name suggests, the suite, with its panoramic views of the Ébrié Lagoon and its tasteful African wood carvings, was intended for high-ranking government visitors like Nelson Mandela, Hillary Clinton, and Keita’s uncle, the president of Cote d’Ivoire. Epstein, apparently, was close enough.
He responded that he hoped “to seee [sic] very pretty girls there.” Keita confirmed, “You will!”
The two had likely met when Keita moved to New York seven years earlier to work as a model. Epstein had invited her to visit his Manhattan townhome and fly on his private jet, fostering a relationship that would prove instrumental when he began traveling regularly to the African continent: Senegal, Mali, and Gabon in 2011; Cote d’Ivoire in 2012; Morocco twice in 2015. Between 2000 and 2016, he made plans to travel to Africa at least fifteen times. Even when he wasn’t there physically, he kept his fingers on its pulse: Searching for “Africa” in the Epstein files yields more than 5,600 results, including regional financial bulletins from the World Bank, foreign policy updates from his buddy the Norwegian diplomat Terje Rød-Larsen, and investment ideas for the continent from Silicon Valley types.
What drew him there? During his 2012 visit to Abidjan, Keita and the interior minister planned for him to join a “private night” at the minister’s penthouse: “He knows what you like,” Keita wrote, four years after Epstein was convicted of procuring a minor for prostitution. But it wasn’t women alone that lured him to the continent. Keita also arranged for Epstein to meet with her uncle, Cote d’Ivoire’s president, at least twice, as well as the country’s minister of mines, petrol, and energy. Later, she helped him broker a security agreement between Israel and Cote d’Ivoire, after which the West African country acquired Israeli-made surveillance technology. Returning the favors, Epstein advised Keita on business ideas, introduced her to a Swiss bank advisor to help realize her “goals,” and connected her with an American philanthropic consultant to fund health and education programs in her motherland.
This was how things worked in Epstein’s world, not just in Africa but across the globe: Young women procured through the same networks in which business deals were struck, lofty political connections cultivated, and philanthropic projects funded. Yet there was something unique about his relations to and within Africa.
When I first searched the Epstein files for mentions of Africa, the emails and texts I found churned with all the desire and revulsion a European settler might have felt in traversing the “dark continent” a century earlier. But by the time I reached the files’ end—if indeed one can ever “finish” sifting through 3.5 million pages of documents, 180,000 images, and 2,000 videos—I suspected my initial conception of Epstein was wrong, or at least incomplete. That his real position might not be as obvious as “imperialist” or “conqueror” but something more geopolitically specific: a role that required history to elucidate, and that explained a man I thought the media had already covered in excruciating, exhaustive detail in a new light.
Like the treaty-hunters and financiers of colonial and post-independence Africa, Epstein fashioned himself as a modern-day power broker. For more than fifteen years, he sought out local and international elites who dreamed of exploiting Africa’s resources, away from public oversight and apathetic to public benefit. There, under the long shadow of colonial rule, Epstein cultivated clout the way he preferred: through proximity rather than through holding office or leading a C-suite; through personal relations rather than institutional affiliation. In Africa, he wouldn’t get rich quick, but he would bring together influential figures who might not have otherwise met, people who might do him a favor in return—people who might, together, bend the continent’s fate to their whims.
Perhaps in the beginning, Epstein dreamed of enriching himself directly off Africa’s resources. He chased a crude oil venture with Equatorial Guinea’s vice president, for instance, and tried to access $80 billion in frozen Libyan assets after the 2011 uprising against Gaddafi. Neither scheme worked out, so he returned to trading in his most reliable investment: the introduction. To that end, Epstein wanted to know: Did Rød-Larsen, the Norwegian diplomat, want to meet the prime minister of Ivory Coast? Could Larry Summers, former U.S. treasury secretary, make “some small time” to meet with Ivory Coast’s finance minister? Did Ehud Barak, former prime minister of Israel, want to meet the heads of state of Senegal, Ivory Coast, or various “Middle East friends”? Did Tom Pritzker, head honcho at Hyatt, want to scout out hotel opportunities at Dakar’s brand-new airport?
Across nationalities, generations, and political systems, what united these brokers was the impunity with which they operated.
Just as he opened doors in Africa when it suited him, he shut them when it didn’t. In June 2011, he heard from Melanie Walker, whom he’d approached twenty years earlier at a hotel lobby in New York because he’d found her attractive. Now a deputy director at the Gates Foundation, she pitched him a project to improve urban sanitation in Dakar. His pals in the Senegalese government weren’t impressed. Her plans reeked of “the colonial masters telling ys [sic] what we need and not really listening,” he relayed. When Walker asked to meet his contacts directly to discuss, Epstein shot her down. “No chance,” he wrote.
In controlling entry to rarefied rooms, Epstein was occupying a role older than some African nations. In the nineteenth century, “freelance” brokers allowed European metropoles to acquire large swathes of the continent without having to expend their own soldiers or money. Alfred Beit, a German diamond buyer at the Kimberley fields from 1875 onward, helped finance Cecil Rhodes’ chartered company that took what is now Zimbabwe. The German explorer Carl Peters, whose own government refused to back him, sailed for East Africa in 1884 anyway, returning with treaties from chiefs of the interior. Presented with a fait accompli, Bismarck chartered Peters’ private society and German East Africa followed. The freelancer had birthed a colony.
African independence only solidified the broker’s role. More than before, Washington, Paris, and Moscow needed access to the new leaders of economies still built to ship raw commodities to Western ports. And African rulers, their newfound power resting uneasily on administrative systems turned skeletal by the sudden departure of colonial personnel, were eager for allies with military, financial, and moral might.
Maurice Tempelsman, a Belgian-American diamond dealer, proposed in the 1960s that Washington buy Congolese diamonds for its strategic stockpile—with him acting as middleman, of course. He then spent three decades encouraging Western backing of the autocratic Mobutu, who returned the favor by granting Tempelsman the concession to a vast copper and cobalt mine. In the 1970s and 1980s, Saudi businessman Adnan Khashoggi converted the proceeds from his arms sales into an infrastructure of hospitality: a 282-foot yacht, a DC-8 plane outfitted with chamois and silk banquettes for entertaining, and beautiful women hired to “liven up” business functions. He put these spaces and his name behind Sudan’s “breadbasket” scheme, a Gulf-funded plan to turn the country into a granary for the Arab world.
Across nationalities, generations, and political systems, what united these brokers was the impunity with which they operated: none held office, none answered to an electorate, and none could otherwise be held accountable by the Africans whose very destinies they traded in.
Francophone West Africa birthed a class of brokers all its own. Dr. Éric Tsimi, a scholar of Francophone African literature and culture at Northwestern University, believes no other part of the continent remains as tightly bound to its former colonizer. The CFA, which originally stood for Colonies Françaises d’Afrique and still serves as the currency of fourteen African nations, is pegged to the euro, facilitating trade to the advantage of French companies. Since 1960, France has intervened militarily in Africa at least fifty times, both through official deployments and French mercenaries leading uprisings and coups with the tacit approval of Paris. No wonder the region is still known as “Françafrique.”
Even as Epstein publicly wooed some Africans, the continent repulsed him in private.
Within this tangled web, the “indigène évolué” emerges as a key figure: literally translating to “evolved savage” in colonial-era French (Tsimi prefers the translation of “elite magician”), the term referred to an African who’d assimilated to European values through Western education, language, and dress. The businessmen, diplomats, and military officials occupying this role were not mere representatives of colonial authority, extracting local resources and classified intelligence on behalf of the metropole, but people holding great power and ambition themselves. People like Keita. And people like Karim Wade, the son of Senegal’s former president.
Known as Senegal’s “minister of earth and sky” for leading so many governmental departments, Wade often played tour guide on Epstein’s travels to West Africa. He arranged meetings between Epstein and the heads of state of Mali, Gabon, and Senegal. On the road, the pair debated Epstein buying a mansion in Morocco (“Do not forget in the house the harem part,” Wade wrote. “Happy to manage it.”). They discussed turning Senegal into a global banking center and nuclear power hub, and offshore banking contacts for Wade. (Here again, Africa’s colonial history created a dream playing field for brokers and creative money managers: the under-regulated havens of modern offshore finance are overwhelmingly current or former British territories—what historians describe as a “second empire” whereby London continued capturing global financial flows even after losing its colonies.)
In 2013, when Wade was charged by the Senegalese government with siphoning roughly €178 million from state coffers to—you guessed it—offshore bank accounts, Epstein spent at least $600,000 in legal and lobbying fees fighting for his exoneration. In various messages, Epstein called him “the most charismatic and rational of all the africans [sic]” and “a very good guy.” (The terms “good guy” and “great guy” appear in the files 788 times.)
In his efforts to free Wade, Epstein followed in a long line of Western brokers protecting their most valuable assets in Africa. In 1888, agents of Cecil Rhodes obtained exclusive mining rights in the dominion of Lobengula, king of the Ndebele in what is now Zimbabwe. Because the grant was worth only as much as the territory that Lobengula could be said to rule, Rhodes’s chartered company fought to convince both the Portuguese—who claimed the same area by right of prior presence—and London’s Colonial Office that Lobengula’s authority ran across the Shona lands to the northeast. In 1960, when the mineral-rich province of Katanga seceded from the newly independent Congo, the Belgian mining conglomerate that owned its copper financed the breakaway state and bankrolled a lobbyist in New York to support its president, Moïse Tshombe, who stood accused of complicity in the murder of Congo’s first prime minister.
Epstein was a single man, not a conglomerate, but he marshaled similar resources, including money, lawyers, a lobbying firm, and contacts at the European Court of Human Rights, where he floated filing a suit challenging Wade’s conviction on the theory that Wade’s dual French citizenship might open a European avenue. It’s almost certain he didn’t view any of this as a favor but an investment: Without “indigènes évolués” like Keita and Wade, Epstein had little hope of influencing what unfolded in West Africa—in its earth, skies, or anywhere in between.
Even as Epstein publicly wooed some Africans, the continent repulsed him in private. While traveling in Senegal in 2011, a friend asked what brought him there. “Would you believe great science,” he replied. A rhetorical question with an obvious answer: no. He clarified his real reasons: “primitive thinking , great petrie dishes oflife [sic]” When the Hollywood publicist Peggy Siegal—one of the old-school influencers who lubricated Epstein’s return to elite circles after his first stint in jail—emailed him from East Africa in 2009 to say, “We are going to photograph ourselves with the Masai in the mud hub and say we crashed the winter White house and are posing with Obama’s relatives,” Epstein replied, “You will be amazed by the aroma.”
He fixated on Africa’s “smells” the way nineteenth-century white scientists obsessed over different races’ skull sizes. In a 2012 exchange with Corina Tarnita, a Harvard-educated evolutionary biologist working in Kenya, Epstein said he’d always wanted to go to the country. But “what about the smells?” he asked. “What smells?” Tarnita replied. “Kenya” he answered.
The next year, he made plans to travel there. For even as he denigrated Africa as a disgusting, desolate place, he couldn’t stay away. “It’s not a paradox,” Tsimi told me in an interview. Africa “is precisely the kind of terrain that racial hierarchy historically renders exploitable.” Nor was Epstein an aberration in holding such seemingly contradictory attitudes: Vincent Bolloré, the French billionaire whose fortune was built largely in Africa, owns a news channel that regularly faces sanctions and fines for inciting hatred and discrimination.
The frenzy of media attention devoted to Epstein and his misdeeds belies how his actions were, in many ways, unexceptional.
Desire and revulsion combined to create a good mercenary: Epstein switched loyalties without hesitation, advising Africans and Westerners alike on how to exploit the other. In a 2015 email with the subject line “fertile land for exploration,” Epstein suggested to a former director of the MIT Media Lab that they approach President Mugabe to create a new Zimbabwean currency after the collapse of the local dollar, describing the southern African country as another “great petri dish” for experimentation. A few years later, he advised Nigerian-born investor Jide Zeitlin on how to pressure the American government into giving him control of mines under litigation in Congo.
How drastically did Epstein change the course of ordinary Africans’ lives? It’s a hard question to answer, in part because brokers exist to preserve plausible deniability; the role had endured all these years to obfuscate attribution. The archive shows Epstein opening and closing doors. It does not establish to what extent he influenced Wade’s theft, the 2014 Ivorian-Israeli defense agreement, or Dakar’s sanitation failures.
Ultimately, the greatest harm that Epstein inflicted on Africa may be in proving the old colonial tradition—of public questions settled in private rooms—still worked. Opportunists paying attention will be pleased: Apparently, outsiders can still divine the fates of the continent, if only they know the right people.
The frenzy of media attention devoted to Epstein and his misdeeds belies how his actions were, in many ways, unexceptional: from America to Africa, sexual predation and opportunistic glad-handing are the axes on which contemporary power turns. Even now, with Epstein gone, his network in Africa remains alive and well. Keita is second-in-command at Gestoci, the public company managing Côte d’Ivoire’s oil infrastructure. She’s also married to the Minister of Employment and Social Protection, elevating her to the highest ranks of the country’s elite. Wade was released after three years in prison and immediately fled to Qatar, thus avoiding paying a €150 million fine. Zeitlin, who resigned from his role as a Fortune 500 CEO after being accused by a woman of posing as a photographer to lure her into a relationship, now runs a private investment company. On LinkedIn, he describes himself as a “globally active business executive [with a] personal commitment to social justice and educational access.”
As Western institutions retreat from the so-called “developing world”—USAID dismantled, bilateral aid in tatters, foreign news bureaus shuttered—the personal network economy that Epstein embodied represents not only the past but also the future of Western engagement with these countries. To decipher the inner and outer workings of Western philanthropists, intellectuals, and billionaires—especially those claiming to save humanity—following the money is no longer enough. We need to trace the introductions, obligations, and relationships that determine where the money moves and why.
Somewhere, an email is going out right now, vouching for a very good guy.
No comments:
Post a Comment