Inside Top Palm Beach Broker Lawrence Moens’ Epstein Connection

Top broker Lawrence Moens has gone to great lengths to embody the discretion his clients expect of him.

Little is known publicly about the low-profile broker to Palm Beach’s billionaires, but the federal government’s latest release of files in late January concerning disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein provided insight into Moens, a real estate agent to some of the most powerful businessmen who have homes on the island.

Epstein and his associates spoke frankly about their dealings with Moens across dozens of emails between 2007 and 2016, primarily concerning the flip of a home at 124 Parc Monceau in Palm Beach.

“There is some blowback from other brokers about working with Moens (who certainly seems focused on higher hanging fruit) which is just part of Moens’ baggage,” Epstein’s friend, business partner and convicted fraudster Paul Prosperi wrote in an email in June 2015.

None of the files show direct communication between Moens and Epstein, both of whom made a practice of communicating through lieutenants. A representative for Moens said Moens did not know Epstein was involved in the property, and that he only ever dealt with Prosperi, who he believed to be the true owner of the home. Prosperi died in 2016.

In a February 2016 message, Epstein’s accountant Richard Kahn wrote that he didn’t trust Moens and worried that he would sabotage a deal to protect his commission. Moens’ representative refuted that, saying Moens would never undermine a deal.

In an October 2014 exchange, Prosperi indicated that working with Moens required appeasing his ego.

“What do you think of asking all but Moens to make listing presentations,” Prosperi wrote. “Moens I doubt will do this … he will find it offensive.. So we will figure something else out for him, maybe just a phone call.”

A May 2007 email from one of Epstein’s employees includes a list of Epstein’s “close friends” in Palm Beach, listing Moens among them. But Moens’ representative denied they ever had a personal relationship.

The records do not allege any wrongdoing on Moens’ behalf, and there is nothing connecting him to Epstein’s criminal activity.

It’s not surprising that he and Epstein would have crossed paths through Palm Beach real estate activity. The island is a very small luxury market controlled by a handful of brokers.

Epstein bought his notorious Palm Beach home for $2.5 million in 1990 and was friends with now President Donald Trump, a client of Moens.

Moens also played a key role in the fate of Epstein’s Palm Beach estate. He represented Todd Glaser in the spec developer’s $18.5 million purchase of the property in 2021, after Epstein’s death. Glaser demolished the house and flipped the property for $28.9 million nine months later.

The files offer a look behind the curtain at Moens, an elusive figure who has skirted the public eye throughout a decades-long career involving some of the most significant residential sales in the country, with a career deal volume in the billions of dollars.

His competitors in Palm Beach generally refuse to comment on Moens publicly, but behind closed doors they say he is a difficult personality to work with, which Prosperi referred to when he referenced Moens’ alleged “baggage.” Moens’ representative pushed back on this characterization.

As the head of his namesake brokerage, Lawrence A. Moens Associates, his client roster includes some of the world’s richest and most powerful men, including Ken Griffin, Steve Wynn and Larry Ellison.

While Moens has steadfastly eschewed the spotlight, it found him in 2023 when he was called to testify at Donald Trump’s civil fraud trial in New York regarding the valuation of Mar-a-Lago. The trial produced the one and only photo of Moens that lives online, showing him with a grey shock of hair wearing a black wool coat and sunglasses.

Moens took the opportunity during his testimony in the trial to market himself as the best person to sell Mar-a-Lago, which he estimated was worth $1 billion.

“I could dream up anyone from Elon Musk to Bill Gates and everyone in between. Kings, emperors, heads of state. But with net worths in the multiple billions,” he said, comparing Mar-a-Lago to the Taj Mahal. “If I could get it on the open market, if he’d let me sell it.”