THE GREATEST HEIST BOOK 3 | CHAPTER 2 ZORRO RANCH
What happened at Zorro Ranch very rarely escaped Epstein's New Mexico lair, but a recent excavation at the ranch suggests Epstein's secrets are buried below the ground.
In June 2004, in a room she had never seen before, on a property she could not escape, twenty-two-year-old South African Juliette Bryant says she briefly became conscious — and could not move.
“I woke up, and there was a female doctor by my head, and then there were six people in hazmat suits, three down one side, three down the other side. I was naked, strapped to a table, paralyzed, and couldn’t speak. The woman came near me, and she said, ‘Don’t worry, everything’s gonna be okay.’ And then I was out again.”
Bryant remembers nothing about how she arrived, where she had slept the previous night, or how she eventually left. The only evidence that something had happened was a scar above her pelvis.
“Things happened there that scared me so deeply, I still can’t talk about them,” she said.
But she is certain about where it happened: Zorro Ranch, a 7,600-acre estate in Santa Fe County, New Mexico, situated between Los Alamos and Sandia National Laboratories and owned by Jeffrey Epstein.
Bryant is not alone in her memories of Zorro. Chauntae Davies, who was recruited by Ghislaine Maxwell and abused from 2001 to 2005, told 60 Minutes Australia that, of all Epstein’s properties, “Zorro Ranch was probably the most eerie—just giant and quiet and literally in the middle of nowhere.” While Davies herself never saw a laboratory, she heard from other victims about “waking up in a dark room with a female doctor standing over them”—mirroring Bryant’s account.
Bryant remains the only survivor to publicly state there was a laboratory beneath Zorro. It is just one of several signs that the ranch was more than a remote hideaway for a sex offender.
But it’s her singular claim that leads us to ask what was happening beneath the ground at the Zorro Ranch? Earlier this year, the new owners of the ranch began an industrial-scale excavation of a part of the property directly adjacent to the house. The land was previously tough to tow a giant helipad, but was later designated as a Jericho Labyrinth. The sheer scale of the excavation is what caught our attention. With depths exceeding 20 feet and the use of heavy excavation vehicles, the site looks more like an implosion than the removal of a helipad or a spiritual garden. And that’s not all; the extraordinary amount of water well sunk at Zorro and multiple accounts of egg harvesting suggest something was hidden below ground at Zorro.
The high desert stretching between Albuquerque and Santa Fe is the most heavily tunneled region in the United States. The original underground vaults at Los Alamos were carved during the Manhattan Project in the 1940s. By the 1960s, a vast network of tunnels, vaults, and storage facilities had been constructed, extending to Sandia National Laboratories at Kirtland Air Force Base. These secretive, secure facilities—well documented in public reports—form the context surrounding Zorro Ranch, which sits between two of the country’s most secretive labs.
Jeffrey Epstein became a resident of the secretive corridor in 1993, at the suggestion of Ghislaine Maxwell, whose father, Robert, had a biography run through nearby Los Alamos. Epstein bought the 7,600-acre parcel from Bruce King, then a three-term Governor of New Mexico. The sale had never been made public. Managing the transaction was John J. Kelly, a Manhattan attorney who, astonishingly, became the U.S. Attorney for New Mexico the very next year—the top federal prosecutor for the district containing the ranch. Yet, during his time in office, no federal case was ever opened on Zorro Ranch.
Bradbury Stamm Construction, New Mexico’s largest industrial contractor, finished building the Zorro Ranch mansion in 1999. This is a company with deep ties to the region’s secretive science institutions —its founder, Robert Stamm, helped construct the original Manhattan Project labs, and the firm still holds classified contracts at Los Alamos and Sandia. Bradbury Stamm never builds private homes. Epstein’s ranch was the only exception, with work crews holding security clearances and experience on federal projects where secrets are the norm.
Eddy Aragon, an Albuquerque broadcaster who has reported on Zorro longer than anyone, knows Bradbury Stamm from the inside. His own family’s steel company worked as a subcontractor, and as a young man, Aragon spent time on Bradbury Stamm sites—including the underground munitions storage complex at Kirtland Air Force Base, where nuclear material is buried. The same contractor trusted to build bunkers for America’s most dangerous weapons also built Jeffrey Epstein’s private mansion.
Directly adjacent to the palatially sized, oddly designed main house was the property’s most distinct feature, which resembles a helipad. In 2013, Epstein landscaped it into a labyrinth—concentric rings of stone and planting.
We’ve compared the official house plans to available drone footage and other imagery to uncover what appears to be a door from the mansion’s sunken backyard that leads to a vestibule directly beneath the area adjacent to the labyrinth. Drone footage and aerial imagery suggest the labyrinth is supported by giant retaining walls and suggest a covered walkway runs from the main house directly to whatever existed under the labyrinth.
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