Leon Black is a poet-laureate of predation, a financier who turned the trafficking of teenage girls into lyrical entertainment long before the world knew of Jeffrey Epstein's crimes. Leon Black’s 2003 birthday ode to Epstein does not read like an innocent toast — it reads like a charter membership card, inked in cadence and rhyme, celebrating the very machinery that dragged Virginia Giuffre and countless others across oceans and time zones to be fed into Epstein’s “net of fish.”
Black’s metaphor maps blondes, brunettes and red-heads “spread out geographically,” each hair color a pin in a trafficking boardroom map from “Moscow to Alhambra East”. When he crows that Epstein has become “The Old Man and the Sea,” he is not literary—he is literal, casting under-age girls as prey and Epstein as the angler who never misses a catch. The poem is therefore a confession disguised as a compliment, a shareholder report on the supply of human bait.
Black itemizes “birds (female assistants), bucks (studs), C’s (children), M’s (minors)”—the same taxonomy prosecutors later found in Epstein’s black book and flight logs. He boasts of Moscow, Paris, Santa Fe, Alhambra East, every villa a node in a distribution network he praises as a “Maxwellian delight.” That is not hyperbole; it is bookkeeping and Ghislaine Maxwell was the logistics chief. Leon Black, with a single stanza, acknowledges her role the way a CFO acknowledges a division head. The poem’s closing couplet—“Best of all, a Dear Friend, Jeffrey / Love and kisses, Leon”—is not affection; it is audit language, confirming receipt of services rendered. He signs off the way one initials a ledger after a banner quarter.
After the cuffs clicked and the plea papers were signed in 2008, Black did not run from the blood on his pen; he simply changed the font. He told shareholders, senators, and museum boards that he had hired Epstein only for “tax and estate consulting,” yet he continued to wire sums that dwarfed Apollo’s annual outside-counsel budget—$10 million, then $20 million, then $30 million—until the total reached at least $158 million. Those transfers are not consulting fees; they are hush-money by installment, priced at a slice of every dollar Epstein saved him. Black’s public defense—“I knew nothing of sexual misconduct”—is the same defense every banker uses when the offshore account surfaces: I saw only the spreadsheet, never the cargo. But the spreadsheet is the cargo; the billion dollars he kept is the liquid form of every plane ticket, every hotel suite, every tear that fell on massage-table vinyl.
Virginia Giuffre was one of those tears. She is the blonde in Black’s geography, the fish that got away long enough to tell the world what the net felt like. Black’s poem anticipates her; it inventories her before she is even caught. When he writes of “green eyeshades” and “schemes and plans,” he is describing the same calculators that later justified her dispatch to Paris, to New Mexico, to the island, to wherever the next investor needed proof of Epstein’s magic. Black simply underwrote the system that transported her — trafficking by spreadsheet, by stanza, by wire transfer.
The museums that accepted Black’s donations, the senators that accepted his testimony, the analysts that accepted his “I was merely a client” are all accessories after the fact, because they allow the ledger to remain balanced. But poetry is evidence, and poetry is permanent. Black’s iambic endorsement still circulates, time-stamped, signed, and sealed, a promissory note that the market in human beings was good business for those who knew how to rhyme it. Every couplet is a receipt; every metaphor is a fingerprint.
Leon Black is not a regretful client; he is an investor who bought the product, profited from the product, and then paid the vendor in verse. The tax he saved is the echo of Virginia’s scream, amortized over decades, compounded in offshore trusts, and laundered through couplets no audit will ever touch.