By Bryan Pietsch
A pair of private islands owned by Jeffrey Epstein, the disgraced financier and registered sex offender who died in a Manhattan federal prison in 2019, were sold to a billionaire investor who plans to build a luxury resort on the land where Epstein allegedly trafficked children.
The islands – named Great St James and Little St James but dubbed “Paedophile Island” and “Orgy Island” by locals – were sold to billionaire Stephen Deckoff via an investment vehicle, SD Investments, the firm said.
Deckoff “plans to develop a state-of-the-art, five-star, world-class luxury 25-room resort” on the land in the US Virgin Islands, it said, adding that the resort was expected to open in 2025.
The pair of islands sold for a combined total of $60 million (R1 billion), according to Bespoke Real Estate, which had listed the 90 hectares of land.
The sale nearly amounted to a buy-one-get-one-free deal: the islands had previously been listed for $55m each, which was a decrease from the reported original listing price of $125m for the pair. Despite the steep discount, the sale was the “highest-priced trade in the history of the US Virgin Islands”, Bespoke Real Estate said.
Acknowledging the land’s unsavoury past, the firm noted the islands were previously owned by Epstein, adding that “a significant portion of the sale proceeds” were to be paid to the government of the Virgin Islands per a settlement between the government and Epstein’s estate.
Deckoff, who has a net worth of about $3bn, according to Forbes, which first reported the sale, founded the investment firm Black Diamond Capital Management in 1995, according to the firm’s website.
Under the settlement, which was announced by the Virgin Islands Department of Justice in December, half the proceeds from the sale of Little St James, “the island on which Epstein resided and on which many of his crimes occurred”, are to be paid to the government of the Virgin Islands.
The proceeds are in addition to a $105m payment and another $450 000 payment “to remediate environmental damage around Great St James”, where Epstein “razed the remains of centuries’-old historical structures of enslaved workers to make room for his development”.
The proceeds from the sale of the island will be used by the government to fund projects and counselling programmes that “help Virgin Islands residents or inhabitants who are victims of sexual assault, human trafficking, sexual misconduct, and child sexual abuse”, the Virgin Islands Justice Department said.
Epstein, who also faced allegations of sex trafficking in New York and Florida, used private planes, helicopters and boats to bring underage girls and women to his islands, according to a lawsuit against his estate filed by Virgin Islands Attorney General Denise George in 2020.
Though Little St James was secluded - nearly 3km from St Thomas, a popular holiday destination, and accessible only by boat or helicopter – Epstein sought further privacy, buying Great St James in an effort to stop visitors to that island from witnessing what was transpiring on the adjacent one, the lawsuit alleged.
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