Leslie "Les" Wexner, the other Mega Group co-founder, also has ties to organized crime. Wexner’s ties to Jeffrey Epstein have come under scrutiny following the latter’s recent arrest, as
Wexner was the only publicly acknowledged client of Epstein's suspicious hedge fund, the source of much of his wealth, and the previous owner of Epstein’s $56 million Manhattan townhouse,
which Wexner transferred to ... an Epstein-controlled entity for free.
The ties between the Mega Group and the National Crime Syndicate don’t stop there.
Another prominent member of the Mega Group with ties to the same criminal network is Max Fisher, who has been described as Wexner's mentor ...
Fisher was a
key adviser to several U.S. presidents, beginning with Dwight D. Eisenhower,
as well as to Henry Kissinger.
[...]
In 1997, when the “Mega” spy scandal broke,
Netanyahu had recently become Prime Minister of Israel after an upset victory, a victory that was largely credited to one well-connected Netanyahu backer in particular,
Ronald Lauder. Beyond being a major donor, Lauder had brought Arthur Finklestein on to work for Netanyahu’s 1996 campaign, whose strategies were credited for Netanyahu’s surprise win. Netanyahu was close enough to Lauder that he personally enlisted Lauder and George Nader to serve as his peace envoys to Syria.
This strong connection between Netanyahu and Lauder during the time of the 1997 “Mega” spy scandal is important considering
Mossad answers directly to Israel's Prime Minister.
Epstein was a long time friend of former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak, who has long-standing and deep ties to Israel’s intelligence community.
Their decades-long friendship has been a source of recent political attacks targeting Barak, who is running in the Israeli elections against current Prime Minister Netanyahu later this year (Sept. 17, 2019).
[...] In 2015, a few years after Epstein’s release from prison following his conviction for soliciting sex from a minor in 2008,
Barak formed a company a company with Epstein with the chief purpose of investing in an Israeli start-up known as Reporty. That company, now called Carbyne, sells its signature software to 911 call centers and emergency service providers and is also available to consumers as an app that provides emergency services with access to a caller’s camera and location and also runs any caller’s identity through any linked government database. It has specifically been marketed by the company itself and the Israeli press as
a solution to
mass shootings in the United States and is already being used by at least two U.S. counties.
Israeli media reported that
Epstein and Barak were among the company's largest investors. Barak poured millions into the company and it was
recently revealed by
Haaretz that a significant amount of Barak’s total investments in Carbyne was funded by Epstein, making him a “
de facto partner” in the company. Barak is now
Carbyne’s chairman.
The company’s executive team are all former members of different branches of Israeli intelligence, including the elite military intelligence unit, Unit 8200, that is often likened to Israel’s equivalent of the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA). Carbyne’s current CEO, Amir Elichai,
served in Unit 8200 and tapped former Unit 8200 commander
Pinchas Buchris to serve as the company’s director and on its board. In addition to Elichai, another Carbyne co-founder,
Lital Leshem, also served in Unit 8200 and later worked for Israeli private spy company Black Cube. Leshem now works for a subsidiary of Erik Prince’s company Frontier Services Group, according to the independent media outlet
Narativ.
The company also includes several tie-ins to the Trump administration, including Palantir founder and Trump ally Peter Thiel —
an investor in Carbyne. In addition, Carbyne’s
board of advisers includes former Palantir employee Trae Stephens, who was a member of the Trump transition team, as well as former Secretary of Homeland Security Michael Chertoff.
Trump donor and New York real-estate developer Eliot Tawill is also on
Carbyne’s board, alongside Ehud Barak and Pinchas Buchris.
Narativ, which wrote the first expose on Carbyne after Epstein’s arrest, noted that the Chinese government uses a smartphone app very similar to Carbyne as part of its mass surveillance apparatus, even though the original purpose of the app was for improved emergency reporting. According to
Narativ, the Chinese Carbyne-equivalent “monitors every aspect of a user’s life, including personal conversations, power usage, and tracks a user’s movement.”
As
MintPress previously reported, Unit 8200-linked outfits like Team8 have recently hired former National Security Agency (NSA) Director Mike Rogers as a senior advisor and gained prominent Silicon Valley figures, including former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, as key investors. Many American technology companies, from Intel to Google to Microsoft,
have merged with several Unit 8200-connected start-ups in recent years and have been moving many key jobs and operations to Israel with
backing from key Republican donors like Paul Singer. Many of those same companies, particularly Google and Microsoft, are also major U.S. government contractors.
Even though Jeffrey Epstein appears to have had ties to the Mossad, this series has revealed that
the networks to which Wpatein was connected were not Mossad-exclusive, as many of the individuals close to Epstein — Lesie Wexner, for instance — were part of a mob-connected class of oligarchs with deep ties to both the U.S. and Israel.