Thread by @TheViewFromLL2

The Steven Jude Hoffenberg rabbit hole is the wildest shit, and I really want to know who Hoffenberg thinks Jeffrey Epstein murdered.

Basically: Hoffenberg was Epstein's mentor and business partner, and the two of them joined forces in the mid-1980s. But then in 1993 everything fell apart when it turned out Hoffenberg's company was actually just a half-billion dollar Ponzi scheme.

Hoffenberg pleaded guilty to securities fraud and spent 20 years in prison, while Epstein pleaded guilty to... conspiring to steal Treasury checks from residential mailboxes and got 5 years probation.

Hoffenberg is something of an unreliable narrator, but a lot of the stuff he says that sounds crazy is, somehow, true. Though, he also has a massive grudge against Epstein, who he believes got away with the crime they committed together, so take anything he says with salt.

Anyway, Hoffenberg claims that he and Epstein ran the Ponzi scheme together, but when they finally got caught, Epstein took a sweetheart plea deal and gave evidence against Hoffenberg, and then stole all of their Ponzi scheme profits to start his billion dollar hedge fund.

As part of his sentence, Hoffenberg was ordered to pay $475M in restitution. While there was little hope of him paying back that amount from prison, Hoffenberg seems convinced that Epstein still has that money somewhere -- and he's still trying to collect it from Epstein today.

Hoffenberg has wilder claims about how Epstein escaped security fraud charges, though they don't seem to have been substantiated.

But the whole Hoffenberg arc does cast a light on @thedailybeast's story from yesterday, on what Acosta told the Trump transition team when he was being vetted. Acosta claimed he'd agreed to the lenient NPA because he'd gotten orders to do so – Epstein was some kind of informant.

So Epstein may be Trump's *second* friend who used to work on Wall Street but got caught committing securities fraud and escaped a lengthy prison sentence by being an informant who did weird intelligence operations for the U.S. government while continuing to commit new crimes.

Oh shit y'all, I almost gave up, but I finally found it! I now know who Hoffenberg thinks Epstein killed: Wexler's attorney, who tried to blackmail Epstein and Wexler in 1997 for child sex trafficking.

No, I have no idea if said attorney actually existed, or if he was murdered.

I'm still looking for the attorney supposedly murdered in 1997, but I found a different attorney who was murdered in 1985 and Les Wexner was linked to his death somehow, and also to the mob. freepress.org/article/shapir…