Epstein Files | Patel: Trust us

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finesse said:
How much of the organized crime thing was Castro closing off Cuba. Havana was getting pretty big in the 50s in that regard, wasn't it?
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That's part of it but not anywhere close to the most important part. Miami-Dade became the port of entry for a huge amount of drugs from South America, a safer port of entry than the southern border. Organized crime flocks to the illicit trades. But at the time, Broward and Palm Beach were "posher" places to live than Miami-Dade, so when the New York "mafia" cartels started moving down to merge with the south Florida cartels, that's where they mostly settled. When the DEA increased resources to combat drug trafficking, the cartels added human trafficking to keep their profits up.

Cubans have traditionally resisted the influx of both culture and criminality from South America. That, along with the GOP's historical opposition to communism, is a large part of the reason the Cuban community in south Florida has trended Republican over the years. The GOP's extraordinarily effective campaign to take over Spanish-language media in south Florida has thrown gas on that fire in recent years, to the point that south Florida Cubans are so conditioned to vote GOP they can't imagine any other option.

I had been spending a lot of time in south Florida for several years before 2015. That's one of the many reasons it seemed impossible to me that Trump could ever be taken seriously as a political candidate. He's the archetype of everything evil and criminal about that area. And I say that as someone who loves the area generally. It's the most exciting and interesting part of the country, in my opinion. But there's a dark, dark underbelly to all of it, and that's where Trump has always lived.
 
lawtig02 said:
The most underreported crime story of our times is the shift of the organized crime nerve center from New York, Kings and Queens Counties from the 1960s through the mid-1990s to Broward and Palm Beach Counties from the mid-1990s through the present.
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I'd say the bigger story is the diversification of organized crime. The old mafia were organized into "families," which was of course largely a euphemism but it reflected a) the concentration of organized crime among Italians and the occasional Italian patron (e.g. Bugsy); and b) the idea that there was something there that wasn't entirely transactional. Goodfellas, after all, was based on a true story, as was Donnie Brasco. They were surely exaggerated for the movies, but I think the "families" were more than soulless organizations.

Now, of course, we have cartels. And the cartels, generally speaking, are purely transactional. And they have hugely diversified. Russian Mafia. Ukranian mafia. We know about the Latin American cartels. Singapore cartels. So on and so forth. This is in part because of the focus on drugs. The old rackets -- i.e. numbers racket, union rackets, construction rackets, etc. -- have been largely replaced by the much more lucrative and harder to stop drug business.

I'm not sure that there was a "nerve center" for organized crime. There was more mafia in NYC, but there was fair geographic diversity. Las Vegas was built by the mob; Detroit was a mob town; Chicago too. Whitey Bulger among others in Boston. As for today, Google tells me that La Cosa Nostra is still more active in the NE than anywhere else. Cartels are everywhere.
 
1. I am with the posters who say there isn't and never was a "client list." I mean, who knows. I have no real info and I'm not expert in the social mores of that particular jet set. I'm going with instinct here.

2. For one thing, Epstein had to be an extraordinary person in some way. Suppose that there are only 1000 people in the country who want to have that kind of life (1000 seems an underestimate, probably a huge one). That makes him at least 99.9th percentile. It's probably more like 99.99th or 99.999th.

So what does it take to be extraordinary in that business? I imagine a substantial part of it was gifts in networking. He could probably keep all his "clients" in his head and remember the details of their personal connection. Most accomplished politicians have this gift, or at least did before smart phones and mass media. I'll bet Epstein knew everyone who went to his island; he knew what they liked (in terms of girls and other things); and he didn't need a damn list to keep track.

3. The other reason is that I doubt Epstein was running a cash business. I'm not sure exactly the basis for this opinion. It's probably some mix of a) cash business is too easily busted; b) money laundering on that scale would not be easy IMO; and c) the vibes I get from the operation seem different than that. After all, he invited plenty of people to the island for non-sex purposes. I mean, he held scientific conferences there. I have no idea whether he was genuinely interested, or if it was cover for all the famous people headed there for sex, but either way it seems inconsistent with a pay-to-play idea.

My guess -- and note, I have paid very little attention to this over the years -- was that "payment" came in the form of information, tips, opportunities. It would shock me if he wasn't doing insider trading, and probably quite a lot of it. He probably also played middleman, in the vein of his investment banking work. Client tells him on the plane, "boy would I love to get distribution for XYZ but I don't know who would be interested"; another client who is in distribution says he's looking for more lucrative products. He tells each one about the other; they set up a partnership in some sort of LLC or LLP and they throw Epstein some equity.

4. Do kill switches even exist? I mean, they are only effective if they are known but not used. But how do you make them known, without the people setting up the kill switch getting nervous. I don't know, it just seems to me that a "client list" would offer Epstein little protection and would therefore not be worthwhile.
 
MAGA turning on Trump for not revealing the clients is awesome. They actually think a bunch of Dems are on the list. Of course if that was the case then Trump would have revealed them already.
 
Carolina Fever said:
MAGA turning on Trump for not revealing the clients is awesome. They actually think a bunch of Dems are on the list. Of course if that was the case then Trump would have revealed them already.
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Just wait 'til they find out Trump is on that list, and Biden is not. MAGAts will be twisting themselves into pretzels to pretend it's not real.
 
Carolina Fever said:
MAGA turning on Trump for not revealing the clients is awesome. They actually think a bunch of Dems are on the list. Of course if that was the case then Trump would have revealed them already.
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MAGA will never turn on Trump for anything. This is just the latest in a long line of QAnon-adjacent BS that Trump has winked at then ignored without ever suffering any consequences. This is a much bigger issue for people like Dan Bongino, Kash Patel, and the other right-wing podcaster types who have spent years making this into a bogeyman issue - some or all of them may end of losing audience, influence, or their jobs over this. But Trump will remain untouched by it, as he always does. Just like he could come out tomorrow and say "no more tariffs, I never said anything about tariffs, why are you still talking about then?" and MAGA will just move on like the subject never existed. The unifying principle behind MAGA is and always has been that Trump is the man and Trump is infallible, so MAGA will simply recoil from any suggestion that Trump screwed up and block the whole thing out of their minds.
 
BlueSteel said:
Just wait 'til they find out Trump is on that list, and Biden is not. MAGAts will be twisting themselves into pretzels to pretend it's not real.
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No doubt. Trump already set up that talking point for them by saying that the nonexistent Epstein list was created by the ObamaLibDemKillaries.
 
BlueSteel said:
Just wait 'til they find out Trump is on that list, and Biden is not. MAGAts will be twisting themselves into pretzels to pretend it's not real.
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Is it at all possible that the biden administration had the files before the trump administration?
 
lawtig02 said:
Hope Bondi enjoyed being in the box at MetLife yesterday. Because she's about to be thrown all the way under the M15 bus.
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She brought it on herself. I still like her but she f'ed this up and all the files need to be released and the carnage is what it is.
 
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