How exactly billionaire pedophile Jeffrey Epstein was able to kill himself (or not kill himself, depending on what conspiracy theories you subscribe to) while in federal custody remains a mystery, but we have some new insight into his final days, thanks to an excerpt from the new book The Spider: Inside the Criminal Web of Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell published by The Daily Beast.
Author Barry Levine describes how Epstein was unpopular with his fellow inmates due to the nature of his crimes. “Rather than harming Epstein physically, several young prisoners in the unit initially sought to intimidate and extort him, according to inmate Michael ‘Miles’ Tisdale, who ran the Inmate Companion Program that had been established to assist at-risk prisoners,” he writes.
“He was ‘run out,’” Tisdale told Levine. “[Other inmates] tried to extort him … they tried to control him by selling him commissary items [like snacks, sodas, and certain meals] for way above what they’re supposed to be sold for.”
In addition to being frustrated by being mistreated by his fellow inmates, Epstein also reportedly expressed some racist fears.
“In conversations with another one of his counselors, inmate William ‘Dollar Bill’ Mersey, Epstein expressed the fear that he would be targeted by Black inmates (Epstein did not raise these specific fears with Tisdale, who is Black),” Levine writes. “As Mersey understood it, Epstein’s worries about his safety were related to his experiences and feelings about race. ‘He mentioned he’d been bullied at school in Coney Island by Black kids—not by Italians, not by the Irish, but by Black kids,’ Mersey recalled.”
You can read the complete excerpt here.
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