Rasputin. Roy Cohn. Jeffrey Epstein. Every Elite Has a ‘Dark Connector....

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Guest Essay

Rasputin. Roy Cohn. Jeffrey Epstein. Every Elite Has a ‘Dark Connector.’

It’s tempting to think of Jeffrey Epstein as an isolated aberration — a depraved man who was protected for too long by his wealth and privilege. In fact, he represents a recurring type. You might call this type the dark connector.

The dark connector is not necessarily a criminal, though he (or occasionally she) is inevitably a kind of predator. Sitting outside ordinary morality is part of what makes him valuable. The dark connector’s role is to make it easier for people of standing to move between their public obligations and their private desires without too much friction.

The dark connector is useful because he offers solutions that do not officially exist, ways of arranging things that institutions cannot sanction but that rich and successful people still want. The power he acquires by providing assistance is informal. It depends on personal trust, mutual compromise and the unspoken understanding that everyone involved has something to hide as well as something to gain.

The best way

to understand how Mr. Epstein

functioned as a dark connector is through

Jmail,

a simulation of his email inbox that lets users experience his slimy, typo-filled workflow.

This searchable database — created by Riley Walz, a software engineer, and Luke Igel, an A.I. developer — performs the civic service of turning the Justice Department’s abridged and chaotic release of its investigatory files into a navigable archive. It’s illuminating and unsettling to contemplate the world from the dead creep’s perspective.

For those looking for proof that Mr. Epstein was a blackmailer or a financial crook or the operator of a pedophile ring, the emails are disappointing. They don’t quite prove him to have been any of those things. He was a sexual abuser who used his wealth to victimize women and girls on an industrial scale.

But the more subtle picture that emerges after some time trawling through his inbox — and once you start dipping in, it’s hard to stop — is that of a social broker. A college dropout with a gift for bullshiting on many topics, he made himself into a gateway between important people and the many kinds of better-kept-quiet help they wanted — with their tax bills, their sleazy romantic adventures, jobs for their kids and their social ambitions.

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