Who is Mark Epstein? Investor Tries to Shed Brother’s Shadow

For Mark Epstein, there’s no escaping the dark shadow cast by his brother Jeffrey. There’s just a chance to keep plugging along with his real estate career while Jeffrey remains a top news story seven years after his death in a Brooklyn jail cell.

Mark began his time as a real estate investor in the early 1990s, but the Brooklyn-raised artist-turned-property maven lived an entrepreneurial life, according to the Wall Street Journal. Businesses included silk-screen T-shirt company Izmo, charter and leasing company Atelier Enterprises, Epstein Acquisitions (dissolved in 2015) and a modeling and talent agency.

Mark’s publicly known holdings are limited, potentially obscured behind untraceable shell companies. He has a 27,000-square-foot office building at 30 Vandam Street in Midtown South and much of a condominium building on the Upper East Side where Jeffrey housed alleged victims. In 1993, the New York Times reported Mark owned four co-op properties in the city, comprising nearly 500 units.

Since he’s kept much of his real estate dealing — and personal life — close to the vest, each of his moves is magnified.

Last week, Mark listed a 60,000-square-foot office building at 515 Greenwich Street in Hudson Square, which is fully occupied and could reportedly reel in $75 million, according to Crain’s.

The property’s primary appeal is its potential, as zoning permits up to 151,000 square feet of development — more than double today’s size — allowing for a possible residential conversion.

The extent of Mark’s active real estate portfolio beyond the office building is unclear. So is the source of Mark’s wealth, just like his brother’s.

In the fall before Jeffrey’s arrest and death, Mark and a co-owner donated a luxury yacht previously valued at $1 million to a nonprofit, the Marine Science and Nautical Training Academy in Charleston, according to the Wall Street Journal.

Prior to that, he donated hundreds of thousands of dollars to Cooper Union, where he’s an alum and served as chair of the board of trustees for more than a half-decade before resigning in 2015.

He also faced a $67,000 tax lien at the time of the yacht donation. Mark declined to discuss his finances with the Journal at the time.

Mark has never been able to shake the ties to his brother. In 2019, Crain’s reported on a Harlem charter school submitting materials to the State University of New York associating Mark Epstein’s Ossa Properties with Jeffrey Epstein’s J. Epstein & Co. Those materials included reference to an Ossa executive who simultaneously worked at the asset management firm.

Defiant, Mark said there was “no business relationship between those entities.”

He’s been more forthcoming about Jeffrey’s use of units at the 301 East 66th Street condominium complex, owned by Ossa. Jeffrey allegedly housed underaged girls at the units; Mark acquired the building in the early 1990s from Victoria’s Secret scion Les Wexner, using a tip from Jeffrey.

“I don’t live in that building, I don’t monitor who uses those apartments,” Mark said in 2019. As of 2024, he still owned at least 150 units at the property, according to Curbed, and his ex-wife still has a photography studio in one of those units.

He ultimately used his Florida home as collateral for Jeffrey’s bail bond following his arrest in July of that year. That condo was valued at only $100,000, according to the Wall Street Journal.

His bail request was denied, though, and Jeffrey was found dead in his jail cell a month later, where he was awaiting trial on charges of sex trafficking.

Before Donald Trump signed a bill to release the Epstein files this fall, Mark pushed back against several of the claims made by the president, according to Realtor.com, including the claim that Trump kicked Jeffrey out of Mar-a-Lago because he was a “sick pervert.”

Mark also claimed Trump had spoken to Jeffrey after the 2016 election, disputing a claim the two had not spoken since 2004.

“They were good friends, everybody around knew that,” Mark said to CNN’s Erin Burnett.