When FBI agents raided Jeffrey Epstein’s Manhattan mansion upon his July 2019 arrest, they used a chainsaw to open a metal safe.
Inside, they found a pile of loose diamonds, cash, passports with the disgraced financier’s photo under different names, and several hard drives and CDs.
Because the agents didn’t have a warrant to seize the safe’s contents, they left them in the middle of the floor with the hard drives and binders piled on top, agent Kelly Maguire testified at the criminal trial of Epstein’s co-conspirator Ghislaine Maxwell.
Five days later, when the FBI returned to the mansion with a new warrant in hand, the safe’s contents were gone.
Later that day, the items were handed over to the FBI in the form of two suitcases by Richard Kahn, Epstein’s longtime accountant.
The episode has fueled speculation among watchers of the Epstein story amid broader concerns about cover-ups and undue influence in the case.
Why Kahn took the safe’s contents, and what he did with them, has been a mystery — until now.
In his March 11 testimony before the House Oversight Committee, Kahn said that the safe’s contents passed through three different people before coming into the FBI’s possession.
In a deposition made public Tuesday, Kahn said he was informed of the raid by Merwin Dela Cruz, the manager of Epstein’s Upper East Side mansion, who said he packed the safe’s contents into two suitcases and left them with Kahn’s doorman in Manhattan.
“When the FBI broke into Epstein’s home, they broke down his door, so his door could not lock and the alarm could not set properly,” Kahn told the committee. “When Merwin, the house manager, was at the house, he realized that these items were not safe to be left alone.”
Kahn, who wasn’t in New York City at the time of the raid, said he took possession of the items “three or four days later.” He testified that he brought the two bags into his apartment and didn’t look inside them.
“I never touched them. I never opened them,” Kahn said. “I left them in my dining room.”
A day or two later, Dela Cruz called Kahn again to say the FBI was looking for the stuff they had left behind, Kahn told the committee.
That’s when he grabbed the bags from his home and brought them to the FBI agents at Epstein’s house, Kahn said.
Reached by Business Insider, Dela Cruz declined to comment. Daniel Ruzumna, an attorney representing Kahn, declined to comment beyond Kahn’s testimony.
At Maxwell’s trial, Maguire testified that the contents of the suitcases “appeared to be all of the items that had been previously located in the safe.” In a court filing, prosecutors said the safe’s stash included 48 loose diamonds, which is the same number of diamonds Epstein bequeathed to his fiancée, Karyna Shuliak, while awaiting trial on sex-trafficking charges before his jailhouse suicide.
The missing Palm Beach hard drives
The testimony released by the committee on Tuesday also shed light on the fate of computers removed from Epstein’s Palm Beach, Florida, house shortly before police officers executed a search warrant there in 2005, during a local investigation into his interactions with underage girls.
Florida law enforcement officials never found the computers. Their investigation culminated in a plea deal that required Epstein to serve a year in jail — after which he resumed his business and social lives, interacting with many rich, famous, and powerful figures.
In a March 19 deposition with the House Oversight Committee, Darren Indyke, Epstein’s longtime personal attorney, said he learned after Epstein’s 2008 conviction that the hard drives were in the possession of Riley Kiraly, a private investigations firm.
In an October 2005 memo released by the Justice Department as part of the Epstein files, firm co-owner William Riley told one of Epstein’s lawyers that an employee had retrieved computers from Epstein’s home, among other items of “potential evidentiary value.”
After Epstein’s Florida criminal case concluded, Riley asked Epstein and his lawyers what he should do with items belonging to Epstein, the DOJ’s files show. He said they included computer hard drives, which were cloned “by a forensic specialist” and “locked in storage.”
Riley declined to comment to Business Insider. Indyke said in the deposition that he didn’t know anything about the storage units. The Epstein files show that Kahn was in charge of paying the fees for the storage site, but he wasn’t asked about them in his deposition.
On Friday, Democrats on the House Oversight Committee sent letters to Riley and two other private investigators who worked for Epstein, asking about the computers.
“The Committee requests that you make yourself available for a transcribed interview to provide insight into the contents, removal, storage, and location of materials removed from Mr. Epstein’s Palm Beach home,” the letter to Riley says.
Read the full article here
