Alan “Ace” Greenberg, then a partner at Bear Stearns, hired Jeffrey Epstein — who was working as a math teacher at Manhattan’s prestigious Dalton School — to the firm in 1976.
“A parent at Dalton called my husband and said, ‘This kid is brilliant,'” Greenberg’s widow, Kathryn Olson Greenberg, told Business Insider. “My husband had the mindset to try someone out.”
Two years after hiring Epstein, Greenberg became the investment bank’s CEO.
In the birthday letter, Greenberg wrote that Epstein had been hired to trade stock options on the American Stock Exchange floor. Stock options, which give investors the ability to buy a stock at a fixed price, were becoming more common, but they were typically traded “over the counter,” or informally over the phone, instead of on a stock exchange.
When Epstein was hired, the plan was for him to trade options more formally on the exchange floor, but he said, “no,” according to the letter. It’s unclear what transpired, but Greenberg’s missive noted that it was the last time the two disagreed.
Olson Greenberg told Business Insider that “there was no relationship” between the two men after Epstein left the firm. She explained Greenberg’s message to Epstein by saying her husband, who died in 2014, “never would have said no” to someone asking him for a birthday letter.
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