When Jeffrey Epstein was about 6 years old, he moved with his family to Sea Gate, in Coney Island. He would spend his formative years there, in a gated neighborhood several blocks from the beach, making friends who stayed close to him for most of his life.
Like many families in Sea Gate, a mostly working- and middle-class Jewish refuge, the Epsteins had little…
On the other side of the tall fence encircling Sea Gate, the west end of Coney Island — including the site of the Epsteins’ previous apartment — was a demolition zone, whole blocks slated for the bulldozer or burned and vandalized during urban renewal. White families fled if they could afford to, and among those who stayed, racial tensions simmered and boiled.
To its residents, Sea Gate signified safety from people and places they viewed as threats. A private police force patrolled its cabanas and community basketball courts. Kids had the run of the place, crowding the paths and the beaches, at home in one another’s houses. They attended one another’s bar mitzvahs; an accordion teacher made the rounds several days a week. “It was like day camp all year round,” recalls Susan Danzig, who lived near Epstein on Maple Avenue. Adults seemed beside the point…
The children in Sea Gate were not spared the convulsions of the 1960s. Heavy drugs were used there. Pals went to Vietnam and never came back. But the kids were aware, at the time and from a distance of five decades or more, that compared with those living outside the gate, they had it good.
By junior high school, Epstein was part of a tight friend group: four smart, ambitious boys who preferred music to sports and cracked one another up…
Epstein’s father, Seymour, was the son of immigrants from Eastern Europe. His father owned a wrecking company in Brooklyn, and his mother suffered a “nervous breakdown” and underwent shock therapy. Seymour quit high school “because I never liked school,” he wrote in an autobiographical essay before his death in 1991 that Maxwell included in the birthday book.
Before landing his job at the Parks Department in 1956, Seymour seems to have drifted, selling cutlery at Macy’s and working as a conductor on the subway. He was a “very, very basic guy” who enjoyed television and especially Tarzan movies, Gary Grossberg, an Epstein family friend, said in an interview.
In their emails the Epstein brothers regularly mocked their father…
Now an elite public middle school with a competitive entrance exam, Mark Twain Junior High School in 1964 was tense with racial conflict in an increasingly impoverished neighborhood. “We had police escorts from the public bus to the school at certain times,” recalled Scott Ehrlich, who attended with Epstein. Epstein once said he did not like wearing a tie because it gave kids on the street something to grab when they dragged you from one place to another.
The solution, at Mark Twain, was to sequester the high-achieving white kids, who tended to be Jewish, and collect them in classes labeled Special Progress, or S.P. Some of these S.P. students, including Epstein, skipped eighth grade. “We were a special class, kind of an island, isolated from the others,” Durham recalled. “And people resented us.” Because of their insularity, the Sea Gate kids were regarded as especially privileged.
For the rest of his life, Epstein displayed a keen determination to enforce the boundaries between those on the outside and those who were “in.” Even the network of “girls” functioned to exclude others. When an unnamed person in 2011 asked Epstein to explain how having “400 women” at his disposal could be as satisfying as “a deep relationship with one woman,” he responded that he liked the security. “The Harem,” he wrote, has traditionally “meant protection for those inside from those outside.”
Sea Gate sits behind a fence at the western end of Coney Island. A private police force patrols the cabanas and the basketball courts. On the other side of the fence, in the years when Jeffrey Epstein (1953-2019) is a boy, the blocks burn and empty under urban renewal, and the families who can afford to leave do. Inside the fence the children have the run of the place. They cross into one another’s houses. They go to one another’s bar mitzvahs. An accordion teacher makes the rounds. A neighbor remembers it as day camp all year round, and remembers that the adults seem beside the point.
The Epsteins have the second floor. The house on Maple Avenue stands three stories, a Dutch colonial with a broad front porch, and the family rents a small apartment in it. Seymour Epstein works for the Parks Department as a laborer and brings home less than eight thousand dollars a year. Paula works as a school aide at P.S. 188. The neighbors find Paula simple, and sometimes silly. Years later the sons mock the father in their emails, the stained boxer shorts, the wife-beaters with gravy on them, and Mark asks whether Seymour might have been part ape. This is the home the boy escapes. The terror under the whole story starts here, in the second-floor rental behind the fence, and the terror has a name the boy hears every day on the other side of the gate. The name is nobody.
Ernest Becker held that a man builds his life as a defense against the knowledge that he is small and that he will die and that he might amount to nothing. The defense is a hero system, an arrangement of meaning that lets a man feel he counts. Cultures hand these systems down. A man does not invent his from scratch. He receives it young, before he can reason, and it tells him what a life worth having looks like and what the worst fate is. For the boy in the second-floor rental the worst fate stands in plain sight beyond the fence, and the hero system that answers it forms early, among four boys who decide together that they are not nobody. They are special.
The word special runs through every hero system on earth and means a different thing in each.
For a Carthusian monk in his cell, special means set apart for God and hidden from men. The monk gives up the rise. He gives up the witness. His significance has an audience of one and that audience needs no proof. The worst fate for the monk is to be seen, to be praised, to have the world know his name, because the knowing would steal the thing back from God and return it to the self. Special means invisible.
For a Marine, special means the few, and the few earn it through shared ordeal, and no man earns it alone. The significance lives in the unit. A Marine carries his worth in the regard of men who suffered the same thing he suffered, and the cardinal sin, the one that damns him, is to leave a brother behind. Special means I did not break, and I did not let my brothers break.
For a founder in a glass building south of Market Street, special means the exception who breaks the rule and makes the world bend to him. He reads the rules as the cage built for ordinary men. He proves his worth by disruption, and the proof arrives as a number, a valuation, the bend of the world measured in capital. Special means I was right and everyone who doubted me was wrong, and here is the money to settle it.
For a prizefighter, special means proven on the body and proven alone. No coach confers it. No crowd confers it. The other man in the ring tries to take it and fails, and that failure is the only proof the fighter trusts. Special means I stood and he did not.
The monk and the Marine and the founder and the fighter use one word and live four lives, and not one of them would recognize what special means inside the fence at Sea Gate. There it means selected out of the precarious mass and witnessed by the boys who were selected with you. It is relational. It is comparative. Special at Sea Gate means special compared to the children burning out of their homes beyond the gate, and the comparison is not the shadow of the value. The comparison is the value.
The school makes this plain and never means to. Mark Twain Junior High in 1964 runs tense with racial conflict, and children take police escorts from the bus to the door. The school’s answer is to gather the high-achieving kids, who tend to be Jewish, into classes labeled Special Progress, S.P. Epstein lands there. He skips a grade out of it. A classmate, Lisa Durham, remembers the arrangement with a clarity that holds the whole hero system in a sentence. They were a special class, she says, an island, isolated from the others. And people resented us.
An island. The word the boy will spend his fortune on, fifty years on, the boy who will buy Little St. James and run his life from it, learns the structure of the island in a tracked classroom at thirteen. The island confers worth, and the worth depends on the water, and the water depends on the people kept off the island. The resentment Durham names is not a cost of the system. It is the proof the system works. You cannot be special unless someone outside the fence is not.
The boys carry the system out of the school and into the rest of their lives, and they speak it to each other for half a century in a private liturgy. We came from nothing, Kafka writes. He says it more than once because it is the creed. Coming from nothing is the terror, and the rise is the redemption, and the cohort is the church that keeps the record of who rose how far. You didn’t learn life’s lessons in your house, Kafka tells Epstein. You learned them from us. We didn’t look to our families really for anything. The family is the nothing. The boys are the something. The hero system replaces the home that shamed them with a brotherhood that crowns them, and the crowning never stops, because Kafka is still measuring the rise in 2015, still writing it down, still keeping the books. He did well. Epstein did better.
The boys prove the system the way Sea Gate taught them, by sorting. They share rare things to mark rank, the recordings of the French pianist who made Bach into jazz, the calculus book the boy reads on his bed with Beethoven going. They travel Europe on two dollars a day and sleep on night trains to save the price of a room, and the thrift is not poverty, the thrift is mastery, the boy working the schedules so the world gives him its rooms for free. Pure happiness, Kafka writes, is sneaking into the five-dollar seats at the Fillmore with an orange soda and a lobster roll, the ultimate luxury. The luxury is small and the theft is the point. Special means the rules are the cage built for the children beyond the fence, and we slip them, and slipping them is how we know we are not those children.
At Interlochen, the summer he is fourteen, the boy enters a higher island, talented youth from everywhere marked as special, and a cabin-mate remembers him skirting the rules and barely complying, sockless under a regulation that requires socks. The detail is small and it is the whole man. The rule binds the others. The boy proves he is special by the margin of his noncompliance, and he proves it again on the Bear Stearns application in 1976, where he invents a degree from Cooper Union and a master’s from New York University he never earned. The lie is not only fraud. The lie is the hero system stated in a job application. The credential is the cage. The man who writes his own credential has declared he stands outside it, on the island, where the rules are for the people in the water.
Then the rise goes vertical, past anything Sea Gate could have scripted, and the cohort watches with awe and keeps faith. Here the hero system does the thing that every other reader of this story has called a puzzle and that Becker lets us read as fidelity. The friends do not stay loyal to Epstein despite his crimes. They stay loyal because Epstein is the proof. He is the boy from the second-floor rental who rose highest, who turned coming from nothing into an island a man could stand on, and to break with him is to concede that the rise can end in a cell and a corpse on Little St. James, and that concession unmakes the meaning of every life in the cohort. The men cannot afford it. So the oncologist Buchholtz and the optometrist Eisenstein and the billboard man Kafka keep the friendship warm across the guilty plea, banter about the girls in the house, track the release date, wire the money. JEE, Kafka writes in 2009. Are you released yet. Good job on getting thru the sentence.
When Eisenstein dies in 2014, Kafka writes the obituary, and in it he names Jeffrey Epstein a soul mate. The man has pleaded guilty by then. Kafka knows what the house holds. He writes the words anyway, because the alternative is to say that the boy who proved the creed proved nothing, and a man does not, at the end of his life, burn the scripture that told him his life had weight.
This is the new thing the Sea Gate story offers a reader who has watched the rise a hundred times in the obituaries and the indictments and never seen the spine of it. The sacred value of the cohort, special, the value that saved four boys from the terror of the second-floor rental, was the same value that built the architecture of the harem. When the unnamed correspondent asks Epstein in 2011 how four hundred women can satisfy a man more than one deep bond, he answers in the language of the island. The harem, he writes, has traditionally meant protection for those inside from those outside. The reader is meant to find the line monstrous and alien. It is neither. It is Special Progress grown rich. It is the SP island with a private plane. The boy learned at thirteen that worth comes from being inside and depends on someone being outside, and he never learned anything else, and at the end he ran the lesson to its floor.
The monk and the Marine and the founder and the fighter would each reach a different floor, because each holds special to mean a different thing, and the thing it means decides where a life can go. The monk’s special ends in silence. The Marine’s ends in the regard of men who held the line with him. The Sea Gate boy’s special ended where its logic always pointed, on an island, with the world sorted into the few who counted and the supply that did not, and a cohort on the shore who could not call it monstrous because they had spent their lives calling it special.
