JPMorgan, however, was all in. Soon it opened accounts not just for Epstein but also for his companies, including one that handled the affairs of his private island, Little Saint James, off the coast of St. Thomas in the U.S. Virgin Islands. The bank also provided financial backing for Epstein to help Jean-Luc Brunel, a French modeling scout who had been the subject of media reports about drugging and raping women, start a modeling agency called MC2. JPMorgan would ultimately open at least 134 accounts for Epstein, his companies and his associates.

Wittingly or not, the bank was supporting important cogs in Epstein’s sex-trafficking machinery. On the island, Epstein would compel teenage girls and young women to give him nude massages and have sex with him. Some of Epstein’s underage victims said MC2 lured them to the United States with the prospect of paid modeling work. (In 2022, Brunel died by suicide in a French jail cell after being charged with raping teenage girls.)

The millions of dollars in fees that Epstein was paying the bank was only part of his allure. Arguably more important, he was identifying potential new clients and business opportunities. In 2003, for example, he introduced Staley to Brin, the co-founder of Google and one of the world’s richest men. Brin hired JPMorgan to help manage his immense fortune — he would eventually park more than $4 billion in assets at the bank — a decision that Staley credited to Epstein. Staley later said in a deposition that a parade of other Epstein referrals — including to Gates, Elon Musk and Sultan Ahmed bin Sulayem, an Emirati billionaire — followed, though not all became clients.....

Decades of scandals — in which banks facilitated drug smuggling, human trafficking, money laundering, terrorism and even genocide — gave rise to requirements that lenders vet their customers, closely monitor their activities and flag suspicious transactions to the government. Among its many lapses with Epstein, JPMorgan often failed to alert federal watchdogs to transactions that the bank later acknowledged were suspicious. And by opening accounts for young women without meeting them, the bank was missing a well-known hallmark of human traffickers: that they control victims’ interactions with the outside world.

Not until Epstein was arrested and indicted in July 2006 on charges of soliciting prostitution from a teenage girl did JPMorgan start paying more attention. In a deposition in 2023, Staley said that he phoned Dimon to tell him an important client had just been indicted and that the two executives later met in person to discuss the situation. (Dimon has denied this under oath.) “So painful to read,” Mary Erdoes, who had succeeded Staley at the helm of the private bank, emailed her boss, attaching an article about the indictment. Staley responded that he had just met with Epstein the previous night. “I’ve never seen him so shaken,” he typed on his BlackBerry, saying that Epstein “adamantly denies” being involved with girls......

The fallout for JPMorgan has been limited. In 2023, it paid $290 million to settle a lawsuit brought by roughly 200 of Epstein’s victims and an additional $75 million to resolve related litigation brought by the U.S. Virgin Islands, where many of Epstein’s crimes took place. The payments were a rounding error for a company that raked in more than $50 billion in profits that year. (The bank didn’t admit wrongdoing and is trying to force its insurers to cover some of the litigation costs.) No regulator took action against JPMorgan. No executives lost their jobs. Dimon remains one of the most powerful bankers in the world.