Leon Black Sold His Art to Himself to Pay Off an Epstein Model — at the Taxpayer’s Expense
This is the scheme that made Anastasiya Siroochenko wealthy. It bought her mother a mansion in Lviv. In the end, the American taxpayer paid for all of it.
Last week, we told you how Leon Black sold two masterpiece paintings to himself. Not because he loved the artwork, but as a tax dodge. To cheat the IRS of a sizable capital gains tax, Black, Jeffrey Epstein, and Darren Indyke concocted a scheme to sell the paintings to a trust Black had set up under Epstein’s name — but the intermediary and buyer were also connected to Black.
The point of selling a painting to yourself is the tax you do not pay. If you dress the deal as a like-kind exchange under Section 1031, the capital-gains bill is deferred. If you route it through a St. Thomas trust, New York’s sales tax never lands. Because you are the buyer, you never actually lose the art. Six months later, one painting — the Giacometti — went under the hammer at Christie’s for $8.8 million. The trust booked a $2.725 million gain on a sculpture it had owned for fewer than two hundred days. Three dodges in one night. The only loser was the United States Treasury.
Epstein, of course, took his share — but so did a young Ukrainian art adviser who advised Black’s foundation.
Anastasiya Siroochenko entered the Epstein orbit as a face on a casting sheet posted on a fashion message board: a twenty-one-year-old from Lviv, 178 cm tall, and the men who collect girls for a living were already rating her. “She is divine,” one wrote.
In 2010, at twenty-two, she signed with MC2 Model Management in Miami, the agency run by Jean-Luc Brunel, the front man in charge of Epstein’s modeling pipeline. The year she walked through that door, Anastasiya met Jeffrey Epstein.
What followed was not a fall but a positioning. Columbia gave her an MA in art history. Harvard gave her an MBA. She founded Sublime Art LLC. She took board seats at the SculptureCenter and Robert Wilson’s Watermill Center. She became the principal of a London dealership. And she would always be beholden to Epstein.
The Epstein modeling pipeline worked differently for different women. Some came from the former Soviet background and found their way into the lives of leaders in physics, economics, and business. Others were underage girls recruited, like Virginia Giuffre, so they could be planted to compromise. Most were high-priced escorts dressed up as models.
Over the four-year period from 2011 to 2015, Leon Black moved at least $2.5 million from his personal accounts, his family partnership, and a corporate account into Anastasiya’s accounts. Her accountants wrote it down as gifts. Shareholder records list Black Family Partners and Anastasiya as co-owners of the same entity. In the same years, Black was Sublime Art’s biggest client — gifts out of one pocket, invoices into the other, the same name on both sides of the ledger.
Epstein managed the entire financial operation. He had complete control over Anastasiya’s accounts — including her tax records — and he controlled the Black family assets and the trust. This gave the principals a cloak of invisibility, or so they thought. Now we can see how Epstein’s operation really worked. Narativ has been working with a forensic accounting expert in the financial money-laundering space, and what they are uncovering is extraordinary.
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