THE GREATEST HEIST BOOK 2 | Chapter 3 The Quiet

In 2006, Palm Beach police referred the Epstein case to the FBI. The feds weren't ready for what they uncovered.

I. MIAMI — NOVEMBER 2006

By the time the file landed on Marie Villafaña’s desk, every meteorologist in Miami had spent months pointing at red swirls.

All summer, the National Hurricane Center had warned that 2006 could be another brutal season—fifteen named storms, eight hurricanes, four major. Local news ran constantly updated graphics: warm sea-surface maps, spaghetti models, close-ups of Cape Verde waves rolling off Africa. People taped their windows in June and never took the tape down.

And then: almost nothing. A tropical storm here. A system that sheared apart there. By November, the ocean looked flat and harmless on TV.

“Quiet season,” the anchors said. “We got lucky.”

In South Florida, anyone who’d spent more than one season knew that “lucky” was another word for “waiting.”

The file didn’t look like much at first. A banker’s box stamped PALM BEACH POLICE DEPARTMENT. Marie pulled the lid off and the stale-paper smell hit her—detectives’ sweat, copier toner, time.

She lifted the top binder and photographs slid out across her desk.

Jeffrey Epstein by a pool. Ghislaine Maxwell in sunglasses. Very young girls. The Manhattan townhouse. The Palm Beach mansion. A Gulfstream on a runway. Another shot: Maxwell with her arm around a girl who looked maybe fifteen, smiling in the stiff way people do when they know something is wrong and don’t have words for it.

The phone rang.

“Villafaña.”

“Marie, it’s Jeff Sloman.”

She straightened. First Assistant U.S. Attorney. He didn’t call about routine cases.

“Morning, Jeff.”

“Did you get the Epstein file?”

She looked at the spread of photos. “Just opened it.”

“I want you on this one. FBI West Palm is lead—Agent Nesbitt Kuyrkendall. Call her today. Call me after you’ve gone through it.”

He hung up.

Marie picked up the probable cause affidavit. One count: solicitation of prostitution. She flipped to the victim statements.

Fourteen. Fifteen. Sixteen.

The word prostitute repeated where child belonged.

Trash pulls from the Palm Beach house: appointment book pages with names and phone numbers; Detective Joe Recarey’s notes in the margins. Can’t come at 7—soccer practice. Another line: Victim says: “He told her she was too old”—about a 23-year-old.

The pattern was obvious. Recruiters paid $200 for every girl they brought. Girls paid $200 per “massage.” Pool house, massage table, cash.

But that wasn’t the pattern that caught Marie’s attention.

It was the scale. The infrastructure. The way everything had been built to run whether Epstein was there or not—schedulers, recruiters, handlers, each with clear roles and compensation structures. This wasn’t a wealthy man with a problem. This was a system designed for production.

Then she hit the financial section.

International wire transfers. Large, repeated cash withdrawals. Clusters of payments to women overseas. Palm Beach detectives had flagged them, but their notes trailed off—possible laundering? no resources to follow up.

Marie understood why. Local cops don’t have subpoena power over offshore accounts. They don’t have the jurisdiction to follow money that crosses state lines, let alone oceans. What they’d found was the edge of something much larger—a glimpse of plumbing that ran somewhere they couldn’t see.

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Beyond the paywall: Meet the other women who drove this case. The FBI Agent and the first person to report Jeffrey Epstein to authorities.