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In October 2017, a yoga instructor emailed Jeffrey Epstein with a delicate question: When might she receive the tens of thousands of dollars she’d been promised by the billionaire Leon Black?
She and Mr. Black had been in a sexual relationship, and since at least 2009, hundreds of thousands of dollars had flowed to her from Mr. Black’s bank accounts. But in 2017, the setup changed. Now Mr. Epstein would wire the money — in this case, $100,000.
“He said that now he does it through you,” the woman wrote to Mr. Epstein in an email that the Justice Department released this year. Mr. Epstein wrote back, confirming the arrangement.
In the later years of Mr. Epstein’s life, after he was incarcerated and registered as a sex offender, no one did more to bankroll his opulent lifestyle than Mr. Black, 74, a towering figure on Wall Street and a fixture of the global art scene.
Mr. Black paid Mr. Epstein $170 million over six years for what Mr. Black has said were tax and estate-planning services. The sum dwarfed what elite law or accounting firms would have charged for similar work, baffling both his Wall Street peers and investigators on Capitol Hill.
The millions of pages of Epstein-related emails and other documents that the Justice Department released this year offer a potential explanation for the size of the payments: Mr. Epstein essentially served as a fixer whose services went beyond modernizing Mr. Black’s finances or reducing his taxes, according to a New York Times review of those records.
