Vol. 157: Out of my past

How did Jeffrey Epstein get in here?

“Gerry Lefcourt Syndrome” is a phenomenon I first identified 48 years ago (and, as far as I know, still isn’t classified in medical textbooks) in which the subconscious reaches the correct conclusion long before the conscious mind has assembled the necessary logical evidence. Indeed, sometimes the subconscious reaches the right conclusion even though all the rational and logical evidence points in the opposite direction.

This syndrome first manifested itself to me in Switzerland in July 1978 while I waited with my family in the Geneva airport terminal to board a flight to New York. As I looked idly about the terminal building, I noticed, perhaps 100 feet away, the distant contour of a man about my age. Immediately, my subconscious told me, “Gerry Lefcourt.”

Who was Gerry Lefcourt? I will tell you. Twenty years earlier, when I was a high school junior playing basketball for the Fieldston School in New York City, I competed against a school then known as Columbia Grammar (now called Columbia Prep at the high school level). Gerry Lefcourt was one of Columbia Grammar’s best players. I got into the game for no more than ten minutes, which constituted my entire exposure to him.

(If you lived through the Vietnam war protest area, his name may ring a bell for a different reason. Gerald Lefcourt was an activist lawyer who was slated to represent the Black Panther leader Bobby Seale in the Chicago Eight (later Seven) federal conspiracy trial of 1968-69. When Lefcourt withdrew as Seale’s lawyer without advising the court, he was jailed for one night for contempt, thus briefly stealing the spotlight from his celebrated clients— Seale, Abby Hoffman, Jerry Rubin, Tom Hayden, Rennie Davis, and David Dellinger. Gerald Lefcourt the lawyer and Gerry Lefcourt the basketball player were one and the same person. But that’s another story.)

In any case, as soon as my subconscious whispered the words, “Gerry Lefcourt,” my rational conscious took over. “Of course that’s not Gerry Lefcourt,” it told me as I watched the man more closely. “This guy doesn’t look anything like Gerry Lefcourt. And you wouldn’t know what Gerry Lefcourt looked like anyway. Some physiological characteristic in this man has triggered an old, long-buried memory of yours, which is pleasant and intriguing. But clearly, this man and the fellow you remember are two different people.”

‘This may sound off the wall…’

Nevertheless, having thus raised the question in my mind, I confronted a choice: Either I could make a total fool of myself by introducing myself to the man and learning that his name was Ahmed Khatchaturian, a rug salesman from Tehran; or I could forget the whole thing and go to my grave without ever knowing whether my subconscious had been right in the first place.

Having concluded in this case (as I do in most cases, come to think of it) that the benefits of social interaction outweighed the risks, I walked across the airport terminal building and approached the object of my curiosity, who was seated at a bar. Rather than ask him flat-out if his name was Gerry Lefcourt— which would really look dumb if his name was Ahmed Khatchaturian— I decided to tiptoe into the water.

Me: “Excuse me. This may sound really off the wall, but I’m cursed with a photographic memory, and I think I know you from a long time ago. Did you, by any chance, grow up in New York?”

Stranger: “Yes.”

Me: “Are you about 35 or 36 years old?”

Stranger: “Yes.”

Me (growing more confident, beginning to relish this exchange and the stranger’s puzzlement): “You ever play any basketball?”

Stranger (beginnings of a smile): “Yes.”

Me (very confident now, making assertions instead of asking questions): “And you went to Columbia Grammar.”

Stranger: “Yes.”

Me (grinning triumphantly): “And your name’s Gerry Lefcourt.”

Stranger: “Yes.”

Lefcourt’s family and mine were ticketed for the same flight, and our plane made an unscheduled overnight repair stop in London. So, over the next 36 hours or so, our families got to know each other well. It turned out that, as teenagers, Lefcourt and I had both hung out at the same playground basketball courts in Riverside Park on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, even though to this day I retain no conscious memory of ever having seen him there.

“So you see,” he suggested, “your recollection of me wasn’t just limited to ten minutes of a high school basketball game. It was tucked away somewhere in your subconscious.”

A rising New York politician

That encounter occurs to me now because a New York Times article this month about the sexual predator Jeffrey Epstein dredged up a similar memory of a long-ago connection of mine— not with Epstein himself, but maybe six degrees of separation from him.

In 1978, while researching a magazine article about the hippie philanthropist Stewart Mott, I attended a political fund-raising party that Mott co-hosted at the Park Avenue home of Susan Weyerhaeuser, a younger generation member of the timber and paper products family. More than a hundred well-heeled New Yorkers gathered there on a weekday evening to sip cocktails, gobble hors d’oeuvres, mingle with celebrities like Robert Redford and Mayor Ed Koch, and write checks for the re-election campaign of the liberal Congressman Tom Harkin, who presumably had more rich friends in New York City then he did in his own rural Iowa district.

As I left the party that night, I was joined in the elevator by another guest whose face (like Gerry Lefcourt’s) I vaguely recognized.

“Your face is familiar,” I said.

“I’m Andrew Stein, the borough president of Manhattan,” he replied, assuming that answered my question.

I shook my head. “No, no,” I said. “I live in Philadelphia. That’s not how I know you.”

At this, he looked at me. “Did you go to Fieldston?” he asked. Of course I had— but Stein hadn’t. He had attended Fieldston’s traditional rival, the Barnard School for Boys. The two schools were just a few blocks apart in the Riverdale section of the Bronx. Presumably he and I had seen each other at sports events or on the subway.

But now that I think of it, we had a more specific connection.

In the fall of 1959, when Fieldston played Barnard in our traditional Election Day football game, I was the kicker on the Fieldston team as well as Fieldston’s sports publicist. Stein was a lowly sophomore reserve halfback on the Barnard team. Except that his name in those days wasn’t Stein. His father, Jerry Finkelstein, was a wheeler-dealer who made a fortune in a variety of businesses, among them politically influential newspapers, like The New York Law Journal and The Hill. In his various capacities, he advised presidents, governors, mayors, members of Congress, city and state officials, and a host of judges, lawyers and lesser luminaries. More to the point, he heavily financed his son’s subsequent foray into politics. At that point, Andy Finkelstein shortened his name to Stein.

Great promise, great downfall

In 1968, at the age of 23, Stein ran for the state assembly from the East Side of Manhattan, even though his only employment at that point had been as a teenage water boy for the Baltimore Colts. His father put up $250,000 for this campaign— then the largest sum ever spent on a local campaign— and inundated the district with posters, mailings, and campaign workers. His father also extracted endorsements from Vice President Hubert H. Humphrey, the 1968 Democratic presidential nominee; Senator Edmund Muskie, the vice-presidential nominee; and Senator Edward M. Kennedy. (As Don Vito Corleone put it, “I do you this favor, you do me a favor.”) Do I need to tell you that young Stein won handily?

At first Stein’s political career followed a promising arc. He was elected to the state assembly four times, then twice elected borough president of Manhattan (both times, incidentally, defeating David Dinkins, who later became mayor). He was subsequently elected City Council president.

Then things went downhill. Stein ran unsuccessfully for mayor of New York. He was indicted for lying about his involvement during the investigation of a multi-million-dollar Ponzi scheme involving a financial advisor to various Hollywood celebrities. (Stein pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor tax evasion charge and was sentenced to 500 hours of community service). And just last year, when I thought he couldn’t sink any lower, Stein cast his lot briefly with a similarly daddy-dependent politician— Donald Trump— in the mistaken belief that Trump supporters would help prevent Zohran Mamdani from winning the New York mayoral election.

But I digress. In an effort to confuse us Fieldston football players on that November day in 1959, Finkelstein the lowly reserve switched football jerseys with Barnard’s starting halfback, Ian Hershaft. (Whose idea this was, I know not.) So when Hershaft scored a touchdown in the second quarter, it was erroneously credited to Finkelstein. That’s how I reported it when, after the game, I phoned the results to the New York newspapers. And today I can’t help wondering: Was I responsible for Andrew Stein’s first mention (albeit erroneously, and albeit under his birth surname) in The New York Times?

Enter Jeffrey Epstein

But what did Stein have to do with the swindling scumbag Jeffrey Epstein? Not much, granted. Stein seems to have been merely one of dozens of bold-face celebrities whom Epstein attempted to latch onto in order to enhance his fictitious financial reputation.

The secret to Epstein’s long survival as a con man, it seems, was his keen sense of which benefactors he could quickly suck dry, and which were worth nurturing for the long run as sources of connections and prestige. Sometime in the ’80s, Epstein wormed his way into a friendship with George Mitchell, then the U.S. Senate Majority Leader. At a reception for Senator Mitchell, Epstein met Lynn Forester, a successful telecommunications executive who had risen to greater prominence through her marriage to… Andrew Stein. Forester’s profile was further enhanced in the early ’90s when Bill Clinton appointed her to a White House advisory commission. (“I do you this favor….”)

But the end of Andrew Stein’s unsuccessful mayoral campaign in 1993 coincided with the end of his ten-year marriage to Lynn Forester. According to the New York Times, Forester and Stein were feuding over how to divvy up their millions, and Epstein apparently convinced Forester that he could protect her from getting ripped off (a version of a tactic that Epstein had used earlier to win the good graces of the billionaire retailer Leslie Wexner). Epstein apparently phoned one of Stein’s lawyers, falsely claiming that Forester had empowered him to negotiate on her behalf and demanding that Forester, as the couple’s primary breadwinner, walk away with a greater share of the assets.

(For all the wretched details, see “The Art of the Con” in the Jan. 4 New York Times Magazine.)

I know what you’re thinking. If only, back in 1959, I had conducted professional due diligence and fact-checked Ian Hershaft’s touchdown instead of crediting it to Andy Finkelstein, thereby launching Stein’s public career, this whole sorry train of events would have died in its tracks then and there. I should’ve listened to my subconscious. Right?

Enjoy Dan Rottenberg’s new memoir, The Education of a Journalist: My Seventy Years on the Frontiers of Free Speech. You can also visit his website at www.danrottenberg.com