The Strange Saga of Jeffrey Epstein’s Link to a Child Star Turned Cryptocurrency Mogul

I also stumbled upon the Bannon-Pierce Brock connection two days ago.

Bannon also seems to have stayed in touch with convicted pedophlile George Nader, who said that he supported Trump's election campaign by paying a Israeli media company. (Probably on behalf of Israel and Qatar).

I've always said that there is a reason why Bannon calls himself 'Darth Vader'.

hollywoodreporter - https://archive.fo/yflVl

What’s unclear is when Collins-Rector stopped being a part of Pierce’s life. In a lawsuit against Pierce, a former partner in IGE claimed that Pierce had told him in 2005 that Collins-Rector — then living overseas and, according to the feds, still consorting with teenage boys — had been blackmailing him, threatening to damage IGE in the eyes of investors. Pierce’s rep says Collins-Rector never threatened blackmail and denies that Pierce ever made such a statement.

Pierce’s rep suggests the split with Collins-Rector happened in stages: “Mr. Pierce separated any business relationship when DEN failed and the internet bubble burst in 2000.” Pierce's personal relationship with Collins-Rector lasted until 2003, the rep says — that’s after Collins-Rector’s indictment in 2000 and after Interpol showed up at the house in Spain in 2002. But Pierce’s rep says at the time of his arrest, Collins-Rector “asserted his innocence." It wasn't until Pierce "received additional information concerning Collins-Rector's improper actions" that he separated entirely.

A couple years after Collins-Rector apparently left Pierce's world, Bannon entered it. IGE had started minting money in part through “gold-farming” operations in China, with low-wage shift workers accumulating in-game currency and virtual goods to sell by playing around the clock. In 2005 Bannon visited the company’s offices in Hong Kong and arranged for private-equity firms — including his former employer, Goldman Sachs — to invest $60 million. Bannon became vice chairman of the business with the idea that he would figure a way to make real-money trading legit.

In 2017, The Washington Post published an exposé of IGE’s dubious practices — such as using the identities of unwitting U.S. residents to create gaming accounts — which were in place before Bannon came on board. It was unclear whether Bannon was aware of such activities when he joined the firm, but they continued after his arrival.

Pierce would later describe Bannon as “my right-hand man for, like, seven years,” but the math on that is hard to figure. Bannon failed in his mission of legitimizing the business, and just a couple of years after he joined the company, IGE was facing declining revenues, growing blowback from online gaming companies, an investigation by Florida authorities and a class-action lawsuit. In 2007 — not even two years after Bannon joined the company — he forced Pierce out as CEO and took the job himself, according to reports. Eventually the company got out of the virtual-goods business and Bannon sold his stake. (Pierce’s rep says he remained chairman of IGE “until 2015 or 2016,” but there’s no mention of that in the press release announcing Bannon’s appointment.)

At some point, Bannon developed his own connection to Epstein, although it’s unknown when or how the relationship began. In August 2018, he was spotted paying an early-morning visit to Epstein’s New York townhouse, and New York Times columnist James B. Stewart reported that Epstein invited him to a dinner with Bannon that month. (Stewart turned down the invitation and Bannon told the Times he did not attend.)

It was not long after Pierce’s ejection from IGE that he emerged as a player in the world of cryptocurrency. (Bannon also became involved in cryptocurrency.) Pierce founded a number of companies including Blockchain Capital, where his bio identified him as “a member of the Clinton Global Initiative.” (Bill Clinton, of course, also had a relationship with Epstein, though he has denied knowledge of Epstein’s wrongdoing.)

Pierce still seems to have been getting his footing in the still-new world of cryptocurrency when he turned up at Epstein’s 2011 conference. Al Seckel, the person who arranged the conference, was a gregarious and litigious poser who had convinced many people that he was a Cornell alum and a cognitive neuroscientist with ties to Cal Tech. (The Mindshift conference featured several scientists from Cal Tech.)

In fact, like Epstein, Seckel never graduated from college, but that hardly held him back. For example, Seckel gave a 2007 TED talk on his particular passion: visual illusions. (His TED bio, since corrected, described him as a cognitive neuroscientist.) He also spoke at the World Economic Forum in Davos. (Session title: “Art and Illusion: Is Seeing Believing?”).

“He was definitely what they called a connector,” says producer Lawrence Bender, who recalls meeting Seckel at the TED talk. “He went out of his way to introduce me to different people.”

Seckel also threw splashy parties in Malibu, bringing together high-level people from various backgrounds. (Though Seckel has many detractors, none has ever suggested that he was involved in any kind of sexual predation.)

Presumably Seckel met Epstein through his sort-of wife, Isabel Maxwell — the sister of alleged Epstein enabler Ghislaine Maxwell — whom he had married in 2007, while apparently still married to someone else. Whether Epstein was convinced by Seckel’s phony credentials is not known, but sources say he did turn to Seckel to set up the Mindshift conference.

Pierce’s rep says he had met Seckel through “a networking gathering in Los Angeles” and saw him at a few other events after that, which led to the Mindshift invitation. Among the star talent there was physicist and Nobel-laureate Murray Gell-Mann and MIT professor Gerald Sussman. An online announcement of the event was vague about its purpose: "To try to push the frontiers of substantive topics.”

By the time of the conference, Seckel and Isabel Maxwell had relocated to France. Bender, who after meeting Seckel at the TED Talk had gotten to know him well enough to be invited to his wedding party and to visit him and his wife at their new home, says he had also started hearing rumors about Seckel's sketchy business dealings. "It started to make me feel like, am I hanging out with the wrong person?” he says. “Then he disappeared. I thought, 'That's weird.'"

Indeed, in July 2015 Seckel’s body supposedly was found at the bottom of a cliff in France. He was 56. (The echoes of the fate of Isabel Maxwell’s father Robert, found floating in the sea near his yacht in 1991, are hard to miss.) Seckel died, it seems, just as Tablet magazine was preparing an article that alleged a litany of dubious business dealings as well as exposed Seckel’s phony academic credentials and double marriage.

Though the article appeared shortly after Seckel’s supposed death, it was never updated to reflect Seckel’s passing. Asked why, author Mark Oppenheimer told THR in an email: "I was never able to establish to my satisfaction that Seckel had died.” Though he didn’t devote a lot of time to the question, he continued, “I always had my suspicions that maybe he faked his own death; it would have been in character.” Others who knew Seckel also have their doubts that he's dead and, in fact, it's difficult to verify; authorities in France did not respond to inquiries. And, after all, the man had a passion for illusions.

By February 2018, Pierce was listed ninth on Forbes’ first list of cryptocurrency’s richest with a net worth estimated at $1 billion. Neil Strauss, the reporter who spent 10 days with him for the Rolling Stone profile, described the then-married 37-year-old as a person who rarely ate a full meal or slept in a bed: “He crashed on random couches, in the back seats of cars, on tables at bars.” The article also noted that Pierce carried a satchel “filled with small containers of various plant medicines, such as the Peruvian psychedelic San Pedro and the Amazonian tobacco rapé, which he often snorts midmeeting.” Pierce was operating from and extolling the virtues of Puerto Rico, and pledging that he would use his wealth to “rebuild” the island.

But escaping the shadow of Collins-Rector and his notorious past still proved challenging. In March 2018, HBO’s Last Week Tonight With John Oliver aired a segment about the “speculative mania” around the cryptocurrency market and focused on a startup called Block.One. Oliver played tape of Pierce in a straw hat and jeans in what appears to be a promotional video, extolling a company that had already raised $1.5 billion. “Everything that exists is no longer going to exist in the way that it does today,” Pierce says in the video. “Everything in this world is about to be better.”

Calling Pierce “a sleepy, creepy cowboy from the future,” Oliver noted that Pierce had been “involved with some very unsavory figures” and urged viewers to google “Brock Pierce scandal.” Then he played another clip in which Pierce rambled about “intentionality” before showing photos of his “entirely unicorn wedding” at Burning Man the previous year. (The bridesmaids and groomsmen “wore the colors of the rainbow plus pink” while the best man “was a woman dressed in black, cracking a whip,” he said.)

In the immediate aftermath of Oliver’s takedown, Pierce was ejected from Block.One. “Anything I accomplish in my life,” Pierce told Rolling Stone, “ends up being discredited because of this [old] narrative.”

But Pierce is still mixing and mingling with the rich and powerful. In July, he attended a gala for the South Fork Natural History Museum in Bridgehampton, New York, that also attracted high-profile Trump world denizens including Kimberly Guilfoyle and hedge-fund billionaire John Paulsen. More recently he was on the guestlist for Equinox and SoulCycle owner Stephen Ross’ recent, controversial Trump fundraiser, also held in the Hamptons.

Despite their less than idyllic history at IGE, Bannon told The New York Times last year that he would have gotten involved with Pierce and cryptocurrencies in 2016 if the Trump campaign hadn’t intervened.

Asked about the mockery that John Oliver had heaped on Pierce, Bannon shrugged, saying he had seen others triumph despite low expectations. “These guys," he said, "are visionaries.”