The multimillionaire, politically connected Florida financier and convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein was arrested on Saturday France on sex trafficking charges, according to the sources. The arrest was the result of a joint operation which was held by the FBI as well as the New York Police Department. Epstein was flying from Paris to New York on Saturday and then he was arrested at Teterboro Airport and was then taken into federal custody, a law enforcement source said.
The several other media outlets report more precisely states that Epstein was arrested and is charged with sex trafficking relating to cases from the early 2000s.
66 year old Epstein is reportedly expected to appear in federal court on Monday in New York, two of the law enforcement officials said on a condition of anonymity.
A lawyer for Epstein did not immediately responded to any of the request for comment.
The charges against Epstein is going to remain under seal up till a hearing in federal court in Manhattan planned for Monday, the sources say.
The sex trafficking crimes speciously occurred at his homes which is located on the Upper East Side and in Palm Beach, Florida.
The first investigation against Epstein was started in 2005 for alleged sex crimes against minor girls by local along with federal authorities in Florida. The main allegations turned around an alleged scheme that gave employment to young girls to the Epstein’s Palm Beach mansion for massages which then further ran to sexual contact in most of the cases, according to the court records as well as law enforcement documents.
But because of the once-secret non-prosecution contract with Epstein in the year 2007 that ended the federal investigation along with freeing him from a possibly long prison sentence.
Last year, the Miami Herald published an investigation of the reported collaboration among federal prosecutors and Epstein’s lawyers.
Epstein “essentially came up with this sex operation where he would recruit girls — underage girls in Palm Beach, have them come to his home for a massage,” Miami Herald reporter Julie Brown told a news agency in the month of February.
“Ostensibly that’s what they were being asked to do, but he molested them. And authorities suspect that he molested hundreds of girls over a five- or six-year period in Palm Beach alone and possibly operated an international sex-trafficking organization around the world.”
Now, at the present, the U.S. District Judge Kenneth Marra in the Southern District of Florida is going to decide whether that nonprosecution agreement should still stand or not.
The new charges are in a sealed accusation, as per to the CBS Miami. They “involve alleged sex trafficking crimes committed between 2002 and 2005, according to law enforcement sources. The indictment alleged that the crimes occurred in both New York and Palm Beach, Florida.”
