When Jeffrey Epstein wanted his favorite Zweigle’s Pop Open hot dogs ferried from his townhouse on the Upper East Side of Manhattan to his sprawling Zorro Ranch in New Mexico, he did what any exceedingly rich person might.
He had his staff reach out to a close friend with a private jet. Stephen Hanson, then head of a Manhattan restaurant empire that at its peak served more than 20,000 people a day at 25 theatrical, high-volume restaurants like Blue Water Grill, Dos Caminos and Ruby Foo’s, was happy to make the delivery himself.
“In the white freezer in downstairs kitchen of 71st street there are packages of frozen hot dogs,” Mr. Epstein’s private chef emailed an assistant. “JE would like to have hot dogs for lunch tmrw and these are the new dogs he likes.”
There was one other favor Mr. Epstein wanted on that August weekend in 2012. He asked Mr. Hanson to make room for a woman who would be bringing a wallet he’d left behind, according to documents the Department of Justice collected as it investigated Mr. Epstein. She was later paid settlements from funds established for Mr. Epstein’s victims.
The Justice Department files attest to Mr. Epstein’s transactional relationships with many powerful men. Billionaires like the Victoria’s Secret magnate Les Wexner and the private equity investor Leon Black helped build his fortune. Boldfaced names like Woody Allen and Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, the former British prince, provided cachet and social access.
What Mr. Hanson offered, a review of the thousands of emails and texts the two men exchanged over a decade shows, was access to the world of food and hospitality — as well as a wingman who enjoyed the company of attractive women, and had the means to help manage and entertain them.
Mr. Hanson got the young women tables in his dining rooms. He arranged cooking classes for them. When Mr. Epstein asked him to help women land visas or find jobs in his restaurants, the answer was almost always yes.
During their long friendship, Mr. Hanson became one of the most powerful people in the restaurant business. In 2003, Bon Appétit magazine named him restaurateur of the year, and he expanded his reach to Las Vegas. By 2007, his company, BR Guest Hospitality, was valued at $300 million.
Mr. Hanson still found time, the files show, to aid his friend in all kinds of ways. He recruited people to manage Mr. Epstein’s private Caribbean island compound and set up tastings to help him hire the perfect private chef. No errand was too small. When the beef jerky that fueled one of Mr. Epstein’s odd dietary binges didn’t taste quite right, Mr. Hanson worked on the recipe. He even had his executive assistant send a sample to a laboratory to test its nutritional value.
Nothing in the files or other public records indicates that Mr. Hanson had sex with minors, as Mr. Epstein did. In a video interview in 2021, a victim of Mr. Epstein’s told the F.B.I. that a decade earlier, when she was in her early 20s, Mr. Epstein had sent the restaurateur to her New York City apartment, where Mr. Hanson paid her for oral sex at least a dozen times.
The woman, who first met Mr. Epstein when she was 17, said she had become dependent on Mr. Epstein and did whatever he requested. Her name was redacted in the files, and her lawyer, Gloria Allred, declined to comment. A Justice Department spokeswoman would not say whether the agency had investigated further, but Mr. Hanson has never been charged with a crime.
In response to questions for this article, Mr. Hanson did not address the woman’s allegations, but issued a brief statement through his lawyer, Gerald B. Lefcourt, a former attorney for Mr. Epstein. “Mr. Epstein knew and relied upon Mr. Hanson for advice on certain matters given Mr. Hanson’s hospitality industry experience,” it read in part. “Mr. Epstein was adept at deception and manipulation. He pulled the wool over the eyes of leading academics, scientists, and titans of business. The suggestion, assumption, or insinuation that there was anything untoward about, in relation to, or concerning, any connection between Mr. Hanson and Mr. Epstein is untrue.”
The files make clear that the two were tight, both before and after Mr. Epstein pleaded guilty in 2008 to soliciting a child for prostitution and spent 13 months in a Palm Beach, Fla., jail. Mr. Hanson, whose hospitality empire is now little more than a single, recently opened restaurant in Palm Beach, was once designated as a backup executor in Mr. Epstein’s will. His name appears on more than 7,000 pages in the Epstein files, about as often as Mr. Allen’s and the former Prince Andrew’s.
Mr. Hanson and Mr. Epstein traded Valentine greetings and presents, including a take-a-number machine that customers in a deli might use. Mr. Epstein placed it in a prominent spot in a room of his Upper East Side townhouse where people waited to see him.
“Don’t take this goofy but I love you as a friend,” Mr. Hanson wrote in one of several affectionate messages. In another, Mr. Epstein told him, “There is still little I wouldn’t do for you.”
Mr. Hanson was one of the last people Mr. Epstein texted on July 6, 2019, before he boarded his Gulfstream jet in Paris and flew to Teterboro Airport in New Jersey. It was his final day of freedom. Federal agents were waiting, and a shocked Mr. Epstein was arrested on federal charges of trafficking minors.
Mr. Hanson had reached out to wish him a happy Fourth of July. “Ive been careful as my press has been toxic,” Mr. Epstein texted back, explaining in his typo-laden style why he was in Paris. “No need to put you at risk. Hopefully changing soosn.”
“No different then before,” Mr. Hanson replied. “Nyc understand a bitch. But palm is easy. Enjoy paris.”
A Restaurateur’s Skills
Mr. Hanson, 76, made his name by democratizing fine dining in Manhattan. He knew that for every customer seeking a three-Michelin-star experience, there were a thousand who just wanted a solid piece of grilled tuna and a cold martini.
Born in New Rochelle, N.Y., to parents who built a sportswear line around his mother’s designs, Mr. Hanson got hooked on Manhattan hospitality in the early 1970s, when he managed the first TGI Friday’s, which helped start the era’s singles-bar craze. In the golden age of disco, he opened and managed nightclubs, then tried his hand at trading commodities. His first restaurant — the Coconut Grill, on the Upper East Side — debuted in 1987.
Michael White, the executive chef who along with Mr. Hanson owned Fiamma Osteria when it won three stars from The New York Times in 2002, considers his former partner a pioneer. “The detail and the execution and knowing who is in your dining room, that’s all the stuff I learned from Stephen,” he said.
Ivy Stark, who was head chef at Mr. Hanson’s Dos Caminos restaurants in the early 2000s, said his systems for managing inventory and personnel were innovative, and his attention to detail unmatched. “He could walk into one of the restaurants and see a lightbulb out from 50 feet away,” she said.
He had a reputation for barking at employees, she said, but also a sweet side that was on full display when he would bring his two young daughters into the kitchen. (Mr. Hanson, a bachelor into his 50s, married Deana Dibello, a former host at his Upper West Side restaurant Isabella’s, in 2003.)
It’s unclear how Mr. Hanson met Mr. Epstein, but by the late 1990s, their friendship had blossomed. Both had climbed high enough in their respective fields to play in a world of wealth where being surrounded by models, or aspiring models, provided social currency and potential dates.
The recently released files, which include photographs, show that they shared pedicures, holiday dinners and movies, and spent time together in Palm Beach, where both owned homes. Starting at least as early as 2012, Mr. Hanson visited Little Saint James, Mr. Epstein’s private island in the Caribbean. Several of Mr. Epstein’s victims have testified, in court and in depositions, that they were held captive and sexually abused on the island, some as minors, though there is no indication that Mr. Hanson was on the island then.
There were vacations, too. In 2013, Mr. Hanson was part of a group Mr. Epstein hoped would join him for a weekend in Las Vegas. When Mr. Epstein asked if he was indeed coming, Mr. Hanson texted back. “Do u like women. Silly question for both. HELL YES… I want to share a suite with you. Bunk mates like the old days.”
Also on the trip was Jean-Luc Brunel, the French modeling agency owner who hanged himself in his Paris prison cell in 2022, while facing charges, related to the Epstein case, that included the rape and trafficking of minors.
Like Mr. White and others who worked with Mr. Hanson in restaurants over the years, Ms. Stark said she was surprised to learn that he had been a close friend of Mr. Epstein’s.
“I don’t think he could have known about any of that stuff and continue to be friends with him,” she said. “I think it was more like ‘I’m a big dog. You’re a big dog. Let’s be flying around in the private plane’ kind of thing. It’s all glamorous.”
Models and Management
Young women were a constant in their friendship. Mr. Epstein, who told some victims he needed sex three times a day, used his money and contacts to assure a steady supply of women to satisfy him. Many were from Russia and Eastern Europe, and had come to the United States hoping to find modeling work.
Mr. Hanson was no stranger to the world of modeling. He and Mr. Epstein shared a long-term friendship with Faith Kates, who started the powerhouse Next Management modeling and talent agency in the 1980s, when businessmen like Donald J. Trump began to regularly mix with models at clubs and parties. (Mr. Trump has said he knew nothing about Mr. Epstein’s abuse of girls.)
Mr. Hanson had hired models for work events, and invited them to his restaurants. He dated several of them, too, former business associates and a longtime family friend said.
With his logistical acumen and hospitality expertise, Mr. Hanson was often dispatched to tend to the needs of women connected to Mr. Epstein. Hundreds of messages between the two involve plans for “the girls,” a term they often used for whichever group of women then happened to be in Mr. Epstein’s orbit, whether as assistants or sexual prospects.
Mr. Hanson lent the women one of his two houses in East Hampton, N.Y., for getaways, and extended invitations to parties.
There were more complicated projects, like recruiting a general manager to run the island estate. Mr. Hanson was so involved that the government of the U.S. Virgin Islands issued him a subpoena in 2021, asking for decades’ worth of information about people he may have helped hire for Mr. Epstein.
In the summer of 2013, Mr. Hanson helped coordinate renovations to several apartments that Mr. Epstein’s brother, Mark, owned in a building on East 66th Street in New York, which the files show were used by Mr. Brunel and various women who were visiting the city.
When women in Mr. Epstein’s entourage needed a visa or a job, Mr. Hanson sometimes employed them as hosts, servers or, in one case, a chef. It didn’t always go well.
In 2009, shortly after Mr. Epstein had finished his jail sentence in Florida, a woman who would become part of a group who were paid settlements after his death wrote to him, saying she was broke and needed money. Mr. Epstein replied: “my friend steve hanson, owns a buch of restaruants ,, he will be helpful,, call him directly.”
Mr. Hanson got her a job as a host at Isabella’s, which for 30 years was a mainstay of Upper West Side dining before closing in 2017. Within three months, she was fired. Mr. Epstein asked what had happened. “Between us,” Mr. Hanson wrote, “the girl was a nervous wreck and just couldn’t handle it.”
He offered to try to find her secretarial work. “No problem,” Mr. Epstein replied. “We tried.”
‘No One Else I Would Trust’
What did Mr. Hanson get in return besides friendship?
Mr. Epstein gave advice and lent him money. In 2017, Mr. Epstein helped broker a deal between Mr. Hanson and the developer David Mitchell to turn the Midtown Manhattan building that once housed Life magazine into a hotel and a restaurant, and guaranteed $1 million toward the project. The two partners fell out, and Mr. Hanson walked away from the restaurant. But Mr. Epstein continued to use the hotel to put up women.
Mr. Epstein’s strategic talents came in particularly handy when Mr. Hanson was negotiating a way to cash out of his restaurant group.
Mr. Hanson had sold half of BR Guest Hospitality to Barry Sternlicht’s Starwood Capital Group for an estimated $150 million in 2007. Mr. Hanson stayed on as president, aiming to grow the 16-restaurant company to as many as 80 around the country. But by 2013, the group had added only nine new spots. Mr. Sternlicht called the partnership with Mr. Hanson “among the two worst investments of my career,” and was looking to end it.
Behind the scenes, the files show, Mr. Epstein helped Mr. Hanson navigate the breakup, reviewing Mr. Sternlicht’s offers and writing the responses that Mr. Hanson used to walk away with more than double the initial offer on the table.
“Dam are u good,” Mr. Hanson emailed Mr. Epstein after the deal was done. “Learned a lot from you.”
Mr. Epstein granted personal favors, too. In 2016, Mr. Hanson invited him to his teenage daughter’s birthday party, and asked if he could work with her on themes for a high school term paper. Mr. Epstein’s suggestions: “transgender? life on mars. self driving cars” and “gentic engieering. . living to 120 years old”.
That same year, according to the Justice Department files, Mr. Hanson turned to Mr. Epstein for help in untangling himself from a woman he had met in Scottsdale, Ariz., where years earlier he had partnered with the Equinox Fitness co-founder Danny Errico to open the James Hotel.
The woman, Mr. Hanson wrote, was “a total psychopath” who called him almost every day. The two had made some joint investments in horses and real estate. He had also lent her money and bought a ring she had promised to sell.
“It’s not that I want to be with her — but it’s that she won’t stop,” he wrote Mr. Epstein. The situation had gotten so bad, he said, that he had to dodge her when she visited friends in New York.
“I can’t have it ruin my life or my children’s I love them so much as I have told you often my family means everything to me,” he wrote, begging Mr. Epstein to help find a way out. “There is no one else I would trust wit this nightmare.”
Mr. Epstein offered a suggestion. “its a shame you cant send her to another country where they deal with blackmailers more effectively. in china there are cos that are set up to only do that. get rid of female blackmailers. they move them to other cities countries and try to find them real work”.
Mr. Epstein was found hanged in his New York City prison cell in 2019. In December, Mr. Hanson teamed up with Ignacio Figueras, the celebrity Argentine polo player nicknamed Nacho, to open the Polo Room in Palm Beach.
The restaurant is a raging success, said Mr. White, his former chef at Fiamma Osteria. “You can’t get into it.”
Nicholas Confessore contributed reporting, and Sheelagh McNeill, Juliana Castro Varon and Jenny Vrentas contributed research.
