77-year-old businessman, Steven Hoffenberg, who became close friends with Jeffrey Epstein and who pled guilty in one of the largest Ponzi schemes in U.S. history, has been found dead at his Connecticut apartment.
“Police in Derby, Connecticut said officers responded to Hoffenberg’s apartment at 8 p.m. on Tuesday for a requested welfare check. When they arrived, they found a body ‘in a state where a visual identification could not be made’.
The body was taken to the office of the chief medical examiner, where an autopsy was performed on Wednesday. The initial examination revealed no trauma on his body but the cause of death remains unknown pending further toxicology study, police said.
The body is believed to be Hoffenberg, though formal identification has not yet taken place.
‘A subsequent dental record comparison is underway to make a positive identification and subsequent notifications to appropriate next of kin’, police said in Thursday’s statement, which provided no further details.
It’s unclear when Hoffenberg died, but Derby Police Lt. Justin Stanko said it had been ‘approximately one week’ since someone had spoken to him. Hoffenberg had recently tested positive for COVID-19 and his frequent use of Twitter came to an abrupt end on July 26.
Epstein accuser Maria Farmer, who was friends with Hoffenberg, said she had been trying to reach him for well over a week when she called police, but an initial request for a welfare check on Saturday was unsuccessful because the address she provided was out of date. The body was found after a second request on Tuesday night.
Hoffenberg, who was born on January 12, 1945, was the founder of New York debt collection agency Towers Financial Corporation, which in 1993 was revealed to be one of the biggest Ponzi schemes in U.S. history, bilking investors out of nearly half a billion dollars.
Hoffenberg met Jeffrey Epstein in the late 1980s and hired him to help at Towers Financial Corporation. ‘He was my best friend for years. My closest friend for years … He was my guy, my wingman’, Hoffenberg told CBS News in an interview in 2019.
Epstein, who was charged with sex trafficking of minors in July 2019, was found hanged in his cell in New York a few weeks later. Epstein’s death was officially ruled a suicide, though the incident has been the subject of numerous conspiracy theories”. -BNO News
He was decomposed when they found him. He had previously claimed back in 2019 that the Epstein and Maxwell sex trafficking operation was funded with stolen money from the Ponzi scheme.
“From his prison cell at Fort Dix, convicted fraudster Steven Hoffenberg began a campaign to expose his former assistant, Presidential friend and accused sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein, of keeping stolen millions. Epstein's lawyers deny it all.
In a string of lawsuits filed by Hoffenberg, and most recently by a pair of Towers investors citing Hoffenberg’s claims, Epstein is described as the ‘unindicted co-conspirator’ that federal criminal prosecutors referenced but never filed charges against in the Towers case. That was how 200,000 Americans lost that half-billion buying Towers’ uninsured high-interest-rate securities, most of which was never recovered.
Epstein’s lawyers say that Hoffenberg’s claims are untrue, that the alleged fraud occurred too long ago for a civil lawsuit, and that Hoffenberg has no standing to sue to get investors’ money back. Hoffenberg was sent to prison in 2002 and released in 2013 from the lock-up at Fort Dix in Burlington County for orchestrating the Towers fraud”. -Joseph N. DiStefano, Philadelphia Inquirer
He pleaded guilty in 1995 and admitted he defrauded investors of $460 million.
Apparently, Maria Farmer, the first woman to accuse Epstein of misconduct to police, called the police asking them to check on Hoffenberg. She revealed that she and Hoffenberg had become close friends in his final years.
Although Epstein, who died in August 2019 in jail, was never charged with the financial crime, Hoffenberg told The Washington Post that it was Epstein who masterminded the scheme that he spent years in prison for.
Hoffenberg told Farmer that he felt shame for trusting Epstein and taking him under his wing in the late eighties, after the financier left Bear Stearns.
Hoffenberg divulged that Epstein had a term for the perfect execution of the grift. He called it “playing the box”, which meant that he ensured that even if his crime was uncovered, the victim would be unable to do anything about it, either because of social embarrassment or because the money was tucked away in a place where they couldn’t either find it or get it.
What Hoffenberg didn’t know at the time was that Epstein would go on to con him too.