The Greatest Heist Book 2 | Chapter 1 The Gathering

Ohio, 1995. Four men came together to rescue a failing real estate dream. 13 years later, the same four men were central to the worst financial crash in a century.

Every empire begins as a private geometry — a few men, a clean sheet of land, and the belief that rules are for someone else.

The fog clung to Ohio’s rolling hills in the spring of 1995.

From the unfinished steps of his estate, Les Wexner stared into it. Fifty-seven years old. The undisputed king of Ohio—Victoria’s Secret, The Limited, Bath & Body Works. An empire built on understanding what American women wanted to buy and what American men wanted to see.

His latest project was nearing collapse.

New Albany—ten thousand acres carved from cornfields. A gated enclave for the rich, white, and powerful—where people like him wouldn’t have to live among people who weren’t. Where democracy stayed outside the gates.

But the financing had fallen apart. His previous lawyer—the one who’d handled difficult problems—had met an untimely end in what newspapers called a mob hit. The police chief had misplaced the case files.

Wexner needed someone with a knack for making money appear. Someone who understood that certain problems required solutions that left no regulatory trace.

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Jeffrey Epstein entered Wexner’s life in 1986, at a party in New York. Five years later, Wexner granted him power of attorney over his personal fortune.

Some whispered boyfriend. Others said protégé. Heir apparent.

Nobody quite knew where he came from. Nobody understood what he did. But everyone knew he could make problems disappear.

Epstein had already run up against regulators and investigators. He’d left Bear Stearns after violating regulations for his client Edgar Bronfman—a Wexner friend. He’d pulled off a Ponzi scheme at Towers Financial that sent Steve Hoffenberg to prison for eighteen years and disappeared $450 million.

If anyone knew how to game the system, it was Jeffrey Epstein. And he was gathering the people who could fix New Albany.

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Jack Kessler was one of them—Wexner’s partner in the New Albany Company and one of Ohio’s most connected lawyers. When Wexner stepped down from the Banc One (later renamed Bank One) board in 1991, he handpicked Kessler as his successor.

Bank One—the McCoy family’s empire—had backed New Albany from the start. The financing had become what lawyers delicately called “a total mess.”

Whatever happened next left no paper trail. No minutes. No record of what was said.

But over three years, something changed. The mess got cleaned up. Debt restructured. Development accelerated. Money flowed through channels that attracted no regulatory attention.

And Jeffrey Epstein’s power grew.

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In 1996, he moved into an office at The Limited’s headquarters—Three Limited Parkway in Columbus. Not a visitor’s office. A permanent position inside Ohio’s corporate crown jewel.

Sometime in the mid-nineties, a JPMorgan banker named Jes Staley came to Columbus to handle capital-markets work for Wexner’s accounts. During one of those visits, he encountered Epstein.

Four years later, Staley had moved to JPMorgan’s private-banking division. Chairman Sandy Warner formally introduced him to Epstein as a client—making official what Ohio geography had already created.

It would become a thirty-year friendship.

State filings in 1998 listed Jeffrey Epstein and Les Wexner as co-presidents of the New Albany Company. Kessler was chairman. The case file from the lawyer’s death stayed lost.

As the millennium turned, Kessler was tasked with finding a new CEO for Bank One.

Behind the paywall: Meet the 4th man—and the lie at the center of the conspiracy.