"Most Americans have never heard of the Mega Group. And that’s exactly what the members of the Mega Group want.

In 1991 — the same year Ghislaine Maxwell’s father, Israeli asset Robert Maxwell, fell from his yacht into the Atlantic and was buried in Jerusalem with six heads of Israeli intelligence in attendance — two North American billionaires quietly founded what they called the Study Group. These men were Leslie Wexner, who would become Jeffrey Epstein’s sole known financial patron, and Charles Bronfman, heir to the Seagram liquor empire. Their “Study Group” was a by-invitation-only consortium of roughly twenty of the wealthiest Jewish businessmen in North America. They met twice yearly, behind closed doors, with membership dues starting at $30,000 a year — equal to about $72,000 in 2026.

The public didn’t learn The Study Group existed for seven years. And even then, barely. This was by design. It would later morph into calling itself the Mega Group instead.

A 1998 Wall Street Journal investigation first brought the Mega Group to public attention. The Journal described what it found in terms that were almost deliberately anodyne: a loosely organized club of Zionist billionaires whose philanthropy exclusively served a political project. The story ran and then disappeared. There was no follow-up. There were no hearings. There were no names released in primetime.

That is worth noting, because the names of the members were extraordinary. They included: Edgar Bronfman, chairman of the World Jewish Congress; Charles Schusterman of Samson Investment; Harvey “Bud” Meyerhoff, Baltimore real estate magnate; Laurence Tisch, chairman of Loews Corporation (who, like Donald Barr — the man who gave Epstein his first job — served in the OSS, the wartime precursor to the CIA); Max Fisher, Detroit oil magnate and Republican Party powerhouse; Steven Spielberg, the film director; and Les Wexner — who by then had already handed an unknown college dropout named Jeffrey Epstein the keys to a Manhattan townhouse reportedly rigged with hidden surveillance cameras in every room and said to be the largest private residence in Manhattan, and given him power of attorney over his personal finances.

A college dropout. One known client. Billions of dollars. No one asked where the money came from. Everyone accepted the story of Jeffrey Epstein, genius financier, at face value, despite zero real evidence to back up the claim. Almost every reference you still see today will refer to him in those same terms. He was a wealthy financier.

I believe, as many others do, that Jeffrey Epstein was presented as a wealthy financier, when in fact he was simply the public face of a secret Zionist boys’ club that was quietly providing him with everything he needed to do the dirtiest of the dirty work they wanted doing, to make sure Israel could grow in power and remain powerful. And to do that kind of dirty work, they knew they needed a narcissistic sociopath they could both reward and control, in equal measure.

They found him in a surface-level charming, objectively handsome, conscience-free, arrogant loser from Coney Island, who had already proven himself happy to lie about anything and everything if it got him ahead, but whose secret insatiable desire to rape several children per day provided the Mega Group with the ideal tool to inspire, reward, threaten and control Epstein, all at the same time. Do what we ask of you, and we’ll give you everything you could ever dream of. Including intelligence ties that will provide impunity for your crimes.

Investigative journalist Whitney Webb, whose 2019 MintPress News series and subsequent two-volume book One Nation Under Blackmail remains the most thoroughly documented accounting of this network, established that several of the most prominent Mega Group members had documented ties to organized crime stretching back generations. Michael Steinhardt’s father was a mob associate of Meyer Lansky, one of the most powerful figures in twentieth-century American organized crime. The Bronfman empire built its early fortune through Prohibition-era liquor distribution networks heavily intertwined with bootlegging. These weren’t distant ancestral embarrassments. They were the same networks, evolved and laundered through philanthropy and political access.

The group also funded causes that are harder to dismiss as mere charity. Mega Group members Charles Bronfman and Michael Steinhardt co-founded Birthright Taglit with the backing of Benjamin Netanyahu. Steinhardt, an atheist by his own admission, stated his motivation plainly: advancing devotion to the state of Israel as an ideological project. The group poured money into Hillel International and Jewish day school networks, building an infrastructure that promoted a strongly Zionist worldview across generations of American students. Multiple members also sat on the board of WINEP — the Washington Institute for Near East Policy — which shapes U.S. foreign policy thinking on the Middle East to this day.

None of this is illegal. But it is a map.

Former NSA counterintelligence officer John Schindler has argued that Epstein operated within a broader Israeli covert action framework, stressing the link to Wexner and suggesting that Congress or serious investigative reporters should use the Mega Group as a starting point — not an ending point.

Former CIA officer John Kiriakou — who blew the whistle on the agency’s post-9/11 torture program and went to federal prison for it, which is to say a man who has already demonstrated he will tell the truth at serious personal cost — goes further. In a recent interview, Kiriakou described Epstein as an “access agent,” almost certainly for Mossad, and explained the operational logic with precision: foreign intelligence services cannot recruit sitting presidents, prime ministers, or billionaires directly. Those people are not recruitable. But someone who could place them in compromising situations, document those situations, and hold the evidence — that person is invaluable. That was Epstein’s function.

Kiriakou also described Epstein’s Wexner relationship not as philanthropy or friendship but as a long-term intelligence operation. His assessment: Mossad directed Epstein to target Wexner, who then connected Epstein to some of the most powerful financial networks on earth, including the Rothschild family. “The guy was a seventh-grade substitute math teacher with no college degree,” Kiriakou said, “and he’s managing the Rothschild family’s billions. It doesn’t make any sense.” Unless, of course, it makes perfect sense — just not as a financial story.

Epstein survivor Maria Farmer has been more direct than almost anyone. In her testimony, she described the network as a blackmail operation intended to gain leverage over global elites for the benefit of Israel, and identified Wexner as its backbone and primary enabler. She went silent after accepting a payout from the Epstein survivors fund, and much of the internet has been scrubbed of her most damning statements about Epstein and Wexner and their connection to Israel.

Former Israeli intelligence officer Ari Ben-Menashe told multiple outlets that he encountered Epstein in Robert Maxwell’s office in the 1980s — meaning Epstein knew Robert before he knew Ghislaine, contradicting her sworn statements to the FBI that her father never met Epstein and that she herself met him through a friend who was dating him at the time. Robert Maxwell’s funeral drew multiple Israeli prime ministers, with Shimon Peres delivering the eulogy. At the graveside, then-Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir said Maxwell “has done more for Israel than can today be said.”

Consider what that sentence means. Consider what it conceals.

The last known meeting of the Mega Group occurred at the Manhattan mansion of Edgar Bronfman on May 3–4, 2001. After that, the trail goes quiet. No public record. No confirmed disbanding. Just silence — which is its own kind of data.

What I know is this: Epstein’s unsearched 7,600-acre Zorro Ranch here in New Mexico didn’t exist in a vacuum. Epstein didn’t accumulate his access, his properties, his protection from prosecution, in a vacuum. The surveillance infrastructure, the communications systems, the political cover that seemingly continues to this day despite him being dead since 2019 — these have all required motive, money, relationships, and people who understood how to keep secrets at scale.

The Mega Group was, at minimum, the social and financial substrate in which Epstein’s world grew. At maximum — and I want to be precise here, because precision is what separates journalism from speculation — it appears to have been the funding and influence architecture for a coordinated operation that stretched from New York to Tel Aviv to a ranch in the New Mexico desert, and which, by many estimations, might still be in quiet operation as it allows its perverse frontman to take the fall.

In a future installment of this series, we will examine the connections between the Mega Group, Israeli intelligence, and two facilities in our own backyard: Sandia National Laboratories and Los Alamos. The through-line, as always, runs through Robert Maxwell, a backdoored software program called PROMIS, and money that was never supposed to be followed."

- Alisa Valdes-Rodriguez Substack