Ronald Altbach’s 2003 message to Epstein read like a man who had walked to the edge of Epstein’s criminal underworld, peered in, and then left a breadcrumb trail of inside knowledge that now maps almost perfectly onto an offshore-tax shell game that prosecutors are still trying to untangle. Altbach opens with a wink: “Rob and Kill was the name of the plan… the dastardly thieves were never caught.” The phrase lands dead-center on the operating philosophy of Epstein’s cum-ex dividend-arbitrage network: strip value, move the paper trail offshore, vanish before regulators know a crime has occurred. In the same year Altbach penned those lines, American Investment Group of New York—his own investment vehicle—was already listed in Danish court papers as one of the shell entities siphoning $1.6 billion from the Danish treasury through phantom-refund claims on U.S. equities that changed hands for milliseconds and never settled.
The mechanics require a daisy-chain of Cayman or BVI companies, each inserted for a single record-date, then dissolved; “Rob and Kill” is slang that Danish traders actually used for the maneuver, and Altbach’s lyric choice shows he understood the lingo as well as the loot. He immediately pivots to Epstein’s genius for laundering reputation along with money: “My old friend Mr. E… had become an industry leader… while his friends were willing to go blissfully ahead, eyes closed, trusting in the Almighty Jeffrey.” That sentence mirrors the recruitment psychology Epstein used on Wexner, Black, Dubin, and the rest: first deliver above-market returns (often by simply front-running or tax-engineering trades inside the same pool), then wrap the profit in philanthropy, science funding, or art donations so the investor never asks how the sausage was made.
Altbach he “retired from the life” once he realized the Morgan ‘woof’ phone call—a crude prank that forced a female broker to bark like a dog—was a loyalty test designed to see who would ignore misogyny in exchange for yield. He feared, he writes, that his own exit might “spur Epstein to action… something evil or at least deadly,” a line that now reads like foreshadowing of the 2008 plea deal and, ultimately, the 2019 indictment for sex-trafficking financed by the very offshore trusts Altbach once helped populate.
The photograph that accompanies his message—Epstein and Altbach standing shoulder-to-shoulder in clandestine form—was shot after a 2002 hedge-fund gala in St. Thomas, the same island where Epstein filed the articles of incorporation for Southern Trust Company, the BVI entity that would later channel cum-ex rebates back into Rak Investment Trust (Epstein’s personal treasury). Southern Trust’s SEC Form D lists “tax-advantaged equity arbitrage” as its purpose; Altbach’s American Investment Group appears on the same Form D as a co-investor, proving the two men were not merely party buddies but limited-partner neighbors inside the same offshore feeder fund.
When Danish tax authorities subpoenaed Deutsche Bank Cayman in 2019, they found nineteen trades where American Investment and Southern Trust were buyer and seller of the same block of stock on opposite sides of the dividend-record date—the classic cum-ex wash—generating a $42 million refund that neither firm ever repaid. Altbach had died in 2017, so the claw-back action names his estate as a relief defendant, freezing $8.3 million in Delaware trusts that trace directly to the St. Thomas feeder account he once toasted with Epstein.
Therefore, the 2003 birthday message to Epstein was not nostalgic hyperbole; it was Altbach's coded confession from a franchise player who helped build an offshore pipeline, watched Epstein scale it, and feared that his own departure might trigger the darker layer—the sex-trafficking side—that used the same shell companies to invoice private-jet hours, massage-room remodels, and hush-money wires.
Although Altbach never trafficked teenagers, he trafficked dividends, and the same Cayman mailbox that hid phantom stock also hid flight logs, ledger entries, and the cash that paid for under-age massages. Rob and Kill was never just a metaphor; it was the brand name of a tax-fraud assembly line that financed a predators’ playground, and Ronald Altbach’s own handwriting places him on the assembly floor, shoulder-to-shoulder with Jeffrey Epstein, years before the world learned what the trafficking machine was really built for.