With the release of the Epstein files seven months behind us, many of the leads into the convicted sex offenders’s connections to the rich and powerful have gone cold — except for those involving Leon Black. The billionaire co-founder of the private-equity giant Apollo Global Management is being hounded by Congress over his suspiciously generous $158 million payment to Jeffrey Epstein for tax purposes. And the 75-year-old is fighting back. Last week, Black ignored a House Oversight subpoena and filed a lawsuit in federal court claiming the subpoena has “no legitimate connection” to the committee’s legislative goals.
This week, banker turned financial journalist William D. Cohan has a new book on Black called Money to Burn, tracing his rise from the ashes of Drexel Burnham Lambert to his fall after Epstein’s death. It is an enormous study of a major figure on Wall Street that goes beyond recent headlines; the Epstein saga is first treated on page 426. Cohan tracks the ways that Black’s career defined the rise of private equity in America and how he was defined by the men in his life ranging from complicated to nefarious: his father, Michael Milken, and Epstein. The day after Black sued the House, I spoke with Cohan about Black’s Epstein ties, his designs to rehab his image thanks to his world-class art collection, and whether or not a billionaire who has never been charged with a crime can ever be held accountable.
