Steven Hoffenberg, who went to prison for a Ponzi scheme he said he built with Jeffrey Epstein, was reportedly found dead on Tuesday at his home in Derby, Connecticut. The cause and manner of death are yet unknown, as the body was seemingly in a state of advanced decomposition. According to a statement from the Derby Police Department, officers went to Hoffenberg’s apartment around 8 p.m. Tuesday evening in response to a request for a welfare check. There, the statement said, officers found “the body of a white male…in a state where a visual identification could not be made.” A public information officer was not available to speak with Rolling Stone on Thursday afternoon, but a spokesperson for the department told the New York Post, “Every indication is that it is Mr. Hoffenberg.” The police statement further indicated that an initial autopsy revealed no trauma.
Maria Farmer, an artist who survived sex abuse at the hands of Epstein, tells Rolling Stone she was in daily contact with Hoffenberg and it was she who contacted Derby police to do a wellfare check when her calls to him went unanswered. “I want people to know how kind this gentleman was to survivors, while asking for nothing,” Farmer tells Rolling Stone.
In the 1980s, Hoffenberg, who founded the debt-collection agency Towers Financial, was looking for ways to make money faster when he met Epstein. He hired Epstein as a consultant, paying him $25,000 a month to use Epstein’s business connections to lure in investors. In one of the largest financial frauds in American history, Towers Financial acquired the parent company of two insurance companies and used those funds to attempt a takeover of Pan Am airline. (The attempt failed.) Hoffenberg later admitted they were moving money back and forth to simulate profit-making.
Hoffenberg told prosecutors Epstein was involved in the scheme, and while Epstein’s name initially appeared in court records describing the fraud, references to him soon disappeared from the record. In 1995, Hoffenberg pleaded guilty to mail fraud, tax evasion, and obstruction of justice. He was sentenced to 20 years in prison. Epstein was never charged in the scheme. During the time Hoffenberg was in prison, he was allegedly grooming and abusing young girls and women, assisted by Ghislaine Maxwell who was herself sentenced to 20 years in prison in June for sex-trafficking and other charges.
After Hoffenberg got out of prison, having served 18 years, he strongly disavowed his relationship with Epstein, and urged victim-investors of his company to sue Epstein to try to get some of their money back. “I’m the first one in the line to assist the victims,” he told NPR in 2019, shortly after Epstein was found dead in a Manhattan jail cell, where he’d been awaiting trial for sex crimes. “At 74, I’d like to go to the pearly gates assisting the victims.”
Hoffenberg was also the court-appointed manager of the New York Post for a few months in 1993, and at one point rented a floor in Trump Tower.