Ehud Barak crashed at Epstein’s apt. regularly, neighbors say - report
The building in question is located at 301 East 66th St. in New York's Upper East Side.
By JERUSALEM POST STAFFEhud Barak and Jeffrey Epstein(photo credit: CORINNA KERN/REUTERS)
New reports by residents of a building owned by Jeffrey Epstein's younger brother indicate that former prime minister Ehud Barak crashed regularly at the building, which is located at 301 East 66th St. in the Upper East Side of New York.Despite attempts to downplay his ties to the billionaire following Epstein’s indictment on child sex trafficking charges, claiming he only met the financier "on occasion," Barak’s involvement in the controversy grew as Israeli sources reported that he had received more than $3 million from Epstein-related institutions beginning in 2004.Five current and former residents of the New York apartment told the Daily Beast that they’ve encountered Barak’s security detail, saying they “would hang out in the lobby as if it was their own living room." They also said that the security detail would "sprawl out, they’d put all their s*** on the couches, and sometimes they ate on the table there.”It has been claimed that Jeffrey Epstein had some ownership in the building. But, Mark Epstein, Jeffrey's brother, the owner of the real estate company Ossa Properties that holds the majority of the building’s units, denied those claims. However, he admitted that he had rented out apartments to Jeffrey for "personal use."In 2010, a former bookkeeper for the modeling agency owned by Epstein associate Jean-Luc Brunel, told the FBI that the apartments were being used to house underage girls from Europe, the former USSR and South America. The bookkeeper had told the Miami Herald that Brunel was sending the girls to Epstein’s parties or loaning them to wealthy clients to be molested.Many of the same allegations were also raised by Brad Edwards, an attorney for several of Epstein’s victims.Nadia Marcinkova, who was accused of participating in the financier’s sexual encounters with underage girls, registered an aviation business to the 66th St. building in 2011.Sarah Kellen, an assistant to Epstein accused of helping schedule the billionaire’s “massages,” ran an interior design firm out of the building as recently as 2015.Following an Israeli journalist’s report revealing that Barak received $2.4 million from the Wexner Foundation in 2004, Epstein – who was a trustee and a major donor in the foundation – also reportedly invested $1 million in Barak’s technology startup Cabryne in 2015. The latter investment happened after the 2008 conviction of Epstein in a Florida state court for soliciting a prostitute and procuring an under-18-year-old girl for prostitution.Barak refused to expand on his work for the Wexner Foundation, saying he “did what I committed to do.” He has said that he is looking into disentangling Epstein from Cabryne’s finances.“It is up to them if they want to discuss it,” the former prime minister said, referring to "interested parties" for which he performs research and geopolitical consulting.
