Federal prosecutors in Manhattan have subpoenaed Jeffrey Epstein’s longtime personal pilots, according to people familiar with the matter, as investigators seek to question the financier’s employees in the wake of his indictment on sex-trafficking charges.
The grand jury subpoenas were served on the pilots earlier this month after Mr. Epstein’s arrest on July 6, some of the people said. Mr. Epstein was arrested at Teterboro Airport in New Jersey after he had returned from Paris on a private jet.
A lawyer for one of the pilots confirmed the subpoena, but declined to provide further details.
It couldn’t be determined what information the subpoenas sought, how many pilots were subpoenaed or whether the pilots have agreed to cooperate with prosecutors.
Testimony from the pilots could be used by federal investigators in their efforts to corroborate accounts from Mr. Epstein’s accusers. They could also provide detail on Mr. Epstein’s travels and his associates. Some of the pilots were responsible for keeping flight logs of passengers who flew on Mr. Epstein’s private jet, according to court filings.
Mr. Epstein, who was denied bail and will remain in federal custody pending trial, has pleaded not guilty to sex-trafficking charges stemming from what prosecutors allege was a yearslong scheme from 2002 to 2005 to recruit and sexually abuse dozens of girls.
Mr. Epstein’s lawyers didn’t respond to a request for comment. A spokesman for the Manhattan U.S. attorney’s office declined to comment.
In a recent court filing, prosecutors said that entities controlled by Mr. Epstein own at least two private jets in active service, and that at least one of them is capable of traveling internationally. He frequently traveled by private jet between his homes in New York and Palm Beach, Fla., according to the indictment against him. Mr. Epstein’s lawyers said he owns one private jet and sold the other one last month.
Women in civil lawsuits have accused Mr. Epstein of conspiring with his pilots and other associates from at least 1998 to 2002 to facilitate sex abuse and avoid law-enforcement detection. One woman has said in court filings that when she was a minor in 2000, Mr. Epstein transported her regularly on his private jet to be sexually exploited by his associates and friends.
A lawyer for Mr. Epstein said recently in court that Mr. Epstein didn’t engage in sex trafficking, arguing there was no violence or coercion in his interactions with the alleged victims. Mr. Epstein and his associates have settled many of the civil suits. The women haven’t sued the pilots.
Mr. Epstein’s flight itineraries came under scrutiny in 2005, during an investigation by Palm Beach police and federal prosecutors in Miami into similar allegations against Mr. Epstein, according to police reports.
The investigation ended in 2007 with a nonprosecution deal that protected Mr. Epstein and his alleged co-conspirators from federal charges in the Florida investigation. In exchange, he pleaded guilty to two state counts related to prostitution, registered as a sex offender and served a 13-month sentence. A series of Miami Herald articles late last year drew renewed attention to the deal.
Soon after the deal was finalized, women who said they were sexually abused by Mr. Epstein began filing lawsuits against him, a legal process that allowed their lawyers to depose Mr. Epstein’s associates and obtain dozens of pages of his private jet flight logs.
Mr. Epstein employed David Rodgers, Larry Visoski, Larry Morrison and Bill Hammond as pilots and flight engineers, according to court filings. Mr. Rodgers, Mr. Visoski and Mr. Morrison have previously testified in civil depositions. The four men didn’t respond to requests for comment.
Flight logs signed by Mr. Rodgers, which became public through civil lawsuits, showed dozens of passengers on Mr. Epstein’s jet from 1997 to 2005. Some women have said in civil lawsuits that their names appear in the flight logs, which they said would corroborate their allegations of being trafficked by Mr. Epstein’s associates when they were underage.
Lawyers for the women also alleged in a 2015 court filing that the flight logs provided by Mr. Rodgers were incomplete. “It would not be surprising to find that some of these flight logs…were likely designed to hide evidence of criminal activity—or perhaps later cleansed of such evidence,” the lawyers wrote.
Investigators may be interested in asking Mr. Epstein’s pilots whether they witnessed any efforts by Mr. Epstein to interfere with law enforcement, according to legal experts. In recent court filings, prosecutors have accused Mr. Epstein of tampering with witnesses, an allegation that Mr. Epstein’s lawyers denied in court.
Federal prosecutors in Miami and Mr. Epstein’s lawyers in 2007 negotiated over the possibility of Mr. Epstein pleading guilty to obstruction of justice, including for an incident involving one of his pilots, according to emails that became public in civil lawsuits.
In a Sept. 19, 2007, email, a lawyer for Mr. Epstein offered a statement to the government that said Mr. Epstein changed his flight plan to land in the U.S. Virgin Islands instead of New Jersey after he learned that one of his associates was contacted by the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Mr. Epstein was never charged with obstruction of justice.
Write to Nicole Hong at nicole.hong@wsj.com and Rebecca Davis O’Brien at Rebecca.OBrien@wsj.com
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John McDonnell has accused Sajid Javid of profiting from the greed that fuelled the financial crisis, in a stinging attack on the chancellor’s former City career before his move into politics.
In an explosive letter to Boris Johnson, the shadow chancellor questioned whether Javid was suitable for high public office given his time at Deutsche Bank. Javid held several senior executive positions at the German investment bank, including a role selling collateralised debt obligations (CDOs), a type of complex and risky financial product responsible for turbocharging the financial crisis.
McDonnell said the new chancellor must also answer questions over any connection he may have had with a tax avoidance scheme known as “dark blue” during his time at Deutsche.
The shadow chancellor demanded that the prime minister launches an investigation, adding there was evidence that would raise alarm bells over Javid’s suitability to look after the nation’s finances.
In the letter sent on Monday, seen by the Guardian, he said: “It will not be lost on those that have suffered the consequences of the last nine years of austerity following the 2008 financial crisis that the newly appointed chancellor profited from the greed that contributed to it.”
Before his election as the Conservative MP for Bromsgrove in 2010, Javid had an 18-year career in the City, and latterly with Deutsche Bank in Asia. As global head of credit trading for the region, excluding Japan, he sold risky bonds and complex derivative products, including CDOs.
CDOs are complex financial products that gained a toxic reputation during the financial crisis for fuelling the collapse of the global banking system. They have been labelled by the US investor Warren Buffett as “financial weapons of mass destruction”.
Deutsche Bank, which was among the biggest sellers of CDOs, was described by US senator Carl Levin as a “financial snake pit rife with greed, conflicts of interest and wrongdoing” ahead of the 2008 crash.
The bank has faced repeated scandals, including for internally referring to some of its CDOs as “crap” that “blows”. Deutsche Bank has spent more than $18bn (£15bn) on fines and to settle legal disputes in the past decade, according to Bloomberg.
McDonnell said Javid was a senior office holder at the German bank around the time that a US Senate committee concluded it had inflicted “material damage to ordinary people and the wider global economy”.
He referred to a report by the financial magazine Euromoney, that said: “[Javid] was responsible for structuring an emerging-market synthetic CDOs that incurred millions of dollars worth of losses for investors.”
According to the magazine, Javid worked at Deutsche Bank when it sold $500m (£411m) of collateralised loan obligations (CLOs) – similar to CDOs but using loans rather than bonds – to investors who later sued the German bank for losses of as much as $37m (£30m). The case was dismissed because it came after the expiration of a five-year statute of limitations on legal disputes.
Javid had also previously told the magazine that CDOs were “very appropriate” for buyers as long as they understood the risks associated with them.
Warning that the comments should call into question whether the new chancellor should be trusted with the nation’s finances, McDonnell said Javid was implicated in “some of the worst excesses of the casino economy”.
He also called for the prime minister to investigate Javid’s personal tax affairs. The new chancellor, who was reportedly paid about £3m per year, is said to have taken a 98% pay cut to become an MP.
Demanding that Javid publish his tax returns, McDonnell questioned whether the chancellor benefited from a tax avoidance scheme while at Deutsche Bank. The Mail on Sunday reported in 2014 that Javid opted into a scheme known as “dark blue” that channelled bankers’ bonus payments through the Cayman Islands.
McDonnell said: “It critically undermines this government’s response to the scourge of tax avoidance for the chancellor to stand accused of this practise.
“Every penny avoided in tax by wealthy large corporations is a penny taken from our desperately underfunded public service.”
A Conservative spokesman said: “Frankly, Labour might want to use the time better thinking about their own credentials for governing. Not content with antisemitism being rife in their party and their totally incoherent Brexit policy, the only threat to the UK economy is them.
“Their reckless plans would see debt soaring as they spend one thousand billion pounds, tax raids on hard working families and upheaval of our economic system by replacing key posts such as the governor of the Bank of England with their hard left choices. Utter disaster. If any party knows about failure and bogus investigations, it’s them.”
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