Even in the months leading up to the death of Jeffrey Epstein, messages from a Bank of America Corp. wealth adviser were still hitting his inbox.
Paul V. Morris, a banker who did business with Epstein at both JPMorgan Chase & Co. and Deutsche Bank AG, called on the convicted sex offender for years after joining Bank of America’s Merrill Lynch division a decade ago, documents released by the US Department of Justice show. In 2017, less than a year into his tenure at Bank of America, he reached out to Epstein to see if anyone in his network needed to borrow money for yachts or artworks.
“Hi hope all well, is JE around this month?” Morris wrote in a message to Epstein’s assistant in an email dated July 18, 2018. Days earlier, she had coordinated a call for Morris with Tommy Mottola, the former chief executive officer of Sony Music Entertainment.
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The emails released by the Justice Department, which include years of correspondence between Morris and Epstein, reveal that even after Bank of America agreed to pay $72.5 million earlier this year to settle a lawsuit brought on behalf of victims of the disgraced financier in an attempt to sever the company’s last ties to his orbit, at least one connection remains.
Morris was a member of the financial-concierge team that shepherded Epstein’s wealth at two of the world’s largest banks. His continued relationship with Epstein showed how lucrative the financier’s network appeared to his industry contacts — and how, even after lenders dropped the sex offender as a client, this individual banker chose to maintain his own professional ties to Epstein.
While Morris never held a senior executive position with expansive corporate sway the way former Barclays Plc Chief Executive Officer Jes Staley did, his relationship with Epstein spanned almost a decade and offers a window into how two large banks handled red flags on his accounts. In 2008 Epstein pleaded guilty in Florida to procurement of minors for prostitution, and in 2019 he was arrested on federal sex-trafficking charges, dying by apparent suicide while in custody.
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Bank of America was accused by Epstein’s victims of aiding in his sex-trafficking by providing financial accounts for his associates, leading to the settlement reached in March. The bank, which did not admit wrongdoing, said in a statement at the time that it “did not facilitate sex trafficking crimes.” Morris wasn’t named as a defendant in complaints against Bank of America, JPMorgan or Deutsche Bank, and hasn’t been accused of a crime. He was deposed about his relationship to Epstein in 2023, Bloomberg News reported at the time.
The Justice Department documents offer insight into the demands on bankers such as Morris in the normally secretive world of high-net-worth finance, where he’s worked for more than a decade. Major clients, especially those with wide networks who can provide word-of-mouth recommendations, are prized assets.
Epstein offered plenty of those coveted relationships, including with private equity billionaire Leon Black. Morris weighed the risks of working with Epstein against the business he could potentially bring in, the files show. Over the years, Morris opted to keep the relationship alive, offering gifts to Epstein and his staff, and volleying investment banter and friendly messages. The only clear end point to the correspondence came in 2019, the year Epstein was arrested in New York.
Representatives for Bank of America and JPMorgan declined to comment. Morris didn’t respond to a request for comment.
“We acknowledge our error of onboarding Epstein in 2013 and the weaknesses in our processes, and have learnt from our mistakes and shortcomings,” Dylan Riddle, a spokesperson for Deutsche Bank, said in an emailed statement, adding that the company has cooperated with law enforcement and reworked internal controls. “We have repeatedly stated that we deeply regret our association with Epstein.”
Epstein seemed circumspect when Morris was first assigned to work on his account at JPMorgan. “paul morris seems nice , but not very experienced,. is he really the person you want to cover me,” Epstein wrote in an April 2010 email to Staley, then CEO of JPMorgan’s investment bank.
Morris was relatively new at the time, having joined JPMorgan the prior year. He set about handling Epstein’s affairs there, offering the kind of white-glove service typically afforded to the very wealthiest customers at the nation’s biggest banks. Soon he was swapping messages with Epstein about investments regularly.
When Epstein appeared interested in a company in Norway, he reached out to Morris, asking for details and adding, “I might want to make a run at it.” In 2012, Morris told Epstein that he’d discussed vehicles for art purchases with colleagues and wanted to debrief him.
Epstein was flagged as a high-risk client, and JPMorgan eventually dropped him in 2013. From his time at JPMorgan, Morris knew about Epstein's sex-trafficking, according to a subsequent class-action lawsuit brought by Epstein victims against Deutsche Bank.
That was around the time of Morris’s own departure from JPMorgan, and meant he had the opportunity to offer Epstein — newly spurned by the nation’s biggest lender — access at his new employer, Deutsche Bank. Morris joined the German bank’s New York office in late 2012, in the middle of its big push to win over wealthy customers. A junior relationship coordinator prepared a memo about bringing Epstein aboard for Morris to send to Charles Packard and Patrick Harris, both senior officials in the bank’s wealth-management division at the time, according to the complaint.
Morris noted to his colleagues that adding Epstein as a customer could be lucrative for Deutsche Bank, possibly bringing in “flows of $100-300 million” over time, or more, meaning potential “revenue of $2-4 million annually over time,” according to the lawsuit. The memo contained information about Epstein’s plea deal and prison sentence for procuring minors for prostitution.
When Epstein started the process of migrating funds in September 2013, Morris got the credit. Packard wrote, copying colleagues on the email: “Great news! Congrats Paul.”
Deutsche Bank managers were amping up their efforts to win over wealthy customers through a “key client partners” push. In a December 2013 email touting his success landing a big account, Morris described a client matching Epstein's profile and listed his strengths as a Deutsche Bank customer: “Billionaire entrepreneur; family office, philanthropist,” as well as being a “Highly sophisticated private investor and trader across asset classes and derivatives” and “One of largest brokerage clients at JP Morgan” with “Multiple relationships across the street.”
A former employee who worked in Morris’s division recalled that a document was sent to all banking teams, showcasing who closed the most business, according to one Federal Bureau of Investigation interview published in the cache of Justice Department documents, the details of which weren’t confirmed. The employee recalled that, at the time, Epstein was Morris’s “only client,” but that he was looking for an introduction to Leon Black.
Epstein’s network earned him an unusual designation within Deutsche Bank, correspondence shows. It’s typical for a bank to label a high-profile politician or government official as a “politically exposed person,” or PEP for short. Epstein — whose network included Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, Prince Andrew at the time, and former President Bill Clinton — was designated within Deutsche Bank as an “honorary PEP” and “high-risk” client, according to the lawsuit. The two designations meant he should have been subject to enhanced transaction monitoring of activity within his accounts.
By 2015, concerns about continuing to bank Epstein were boiling over. Bank compliance officials were worried about his big cash withdrawals and payments to Russian accounts, which sent up red flags for sex trafficking and coercive commercial sex acts, the files show. Two men were sent to talk over these issues with Epstein in person, according to the complaint against Deutsche Bank. One was Packard, and the other was Morris.
The two men met Epstein at his Manhattan mansion, at a bar adjacent to his indoor swimming pool, and the financier offered explanations, but Morris and Packard “suspiciously, or tellingly,” didn’t make any contemporaneous recording of the meeting, according to the lawsuit.
At Deutsche Bank, Epstein’s friends and contacts continued to prove valuable. A few months after the meeting at Epstein’s home, there was an exchange about Black’s family office setting up and funding an account, and confirming Epstein would have the authority to transact on Black’s behalf, an internal Deutsche Bank email thread shows.
“We need to generate more ideas and flow please,” Morris wrote to colleagues in April 2015. It wasn’t until more than three years later that Deutsche Bank decided to cut Epstein off as a client.
In 2023, Deutsche Bank would go on to pay $75 million to settle the suit with Epstein’s victims, who accused the lender of facilitating his sex-trafficking operation by maintaining his accounts. The same year, JPMorgan settled with Epstein victims for $290 million, on a set of similar allegations.
Morris departed Deutsche Bank for Bank of America in 2016. Epstein never became a client at Merrill Lynch, according to a person with knowledge of the matter who asked not to be identified discussing information that isn't public. But Morris, who continues to run his practice as The Morris Group within Merrill Lynch in New York, kept reaching out to Epstein.
“Hope you’re well. Please let me know if you have any relationships that are looking for aircraft, yacht, art, hedge fund portfolio etc. thanks,” Morris wrote to Epstein in 2017.
In January of the following year, Morris wrote to Lesley Groff, Epstein’s assistant, wishing her a happy new year and arranging time to drop off gifts for her and Epstein. Subsequent messages suggest the gifts were delivered, with Groff thanking Morris for the “very nice gift of Kiehls products! So nice of you to think of me. :)”
Days after the planned gift dropoff, Morris asked Groff if Epstein was in town. He followed up again to see if Epstein might have a few minutes for a phone call.
Other opportunities appeared to emerge as he kept up a rapport of his own to Epstein, such as the call arranged for Mottola and Morris. (Attorneys for Mottola have said he knew nothing about Epstein’s crimes.)
Morris also continued to seek Epstein’s input on investment topics. In one case, Morris sent him a story about opportunity zones, which awarded tax breaks to investors for developing real estate or funding businesses in low-income areas.
“Hope all well, are you doing anything around these or clients?” Morris wrote to Epstein in January 2019.
By July of that year, a “Capital Market Outlook” from Morris’s account — a roundup of market news sent out regularly now that he was a private-wealth manager at Merrill Lynch — landed in Epstein’s inbox. It’s not clear if Epstein ever opened it. Days later, he was arrested.
