Al Capone didn't go to prison for murder. Or for running Chicago with a private army. He went down for failing to pay income tax.
In previous attempts to convict Al Capone, witnesses had disappeared or refused to talk. Evidence had vanished. Juries were intimidated or bought.
After years of failed attempts to nail him for his real crimes, tax evasion was their breakthrough.
How do you honestly file a tax return when your income comes from bootlegging and your business expenses include murder?
Picture Capone's ledger:
Income:
Illegal liquor sales: $50,000
Protection racket: $15,000
Gambling operations: $8,000
Business Expenses:
Bribes to police: $2,500
Murder of Nunzio: $500
Ammunition and weapons: $1,200
Comply with tax law and confess to felonies, or don't pay taxes and go to prison for that.
Donald Trump may be heading down a remarkably similar path.
After running his own criminal enterprise—January 6, stolen classified documents, election interference, foreign payments, siding with Russia, canceling aid to allies, the pardons, the lying, the grifting, the norm-breaking—maybe none of that will be what brings him down.
He got away with it all by inventing powerful and addictive false conspiracies. They were drugs that hooked his MAGA base and got him elected in spite of his obvious criminal activities.
There is no real conspiracy and now he's trying to convince his base, after saying there is for so many years and they are not buying it.
His MAGA base are like junkies being told to go cold turkey—furious at their dealer who won't give them a fix. Their addiction level is so high that no amount of information drug will satisfy their craving.
Maybe this Jeffrey Epstein thing is what finally puts him—literally or figuratively—in Alcatraz like Al Capone. Ironic, since he's out there talking about reopening it.
What Really Happened: Three Independent Stories Meet
We can break down this story into 3 separate, independent different ones, which just happened to take place at the same zipcode so to speak, under Jeffrey Epstein.
1. Criminal Behavior: Epstein's Abuse of Underage Girls
This section draws from: "Jeffrey Epstein's Client List for Underage Girls" by Cranky Old Guy
There is only one name on Jeffrey Epstein's client list for underage girls: Jeffrey Epstein.
"Jeffrey Epstein was the pimp and the john. He was his own No. 1 client," says Brad Edwards, victims' rights lawyer representing over 200 Epstein survivors. That collapses the illusion that his sex trafficking of minors was for others. It wasn't. It was for him, about him, run by him, scaled to his money, and built to satisfy his obsession.
The sheer volume of Epstein's crimes can be misleading. When we hear about hundreds of victims, our minds assume a corresponding number of perpetrators. But the exploitation was massive precisely because Epstein had an enormous personal appetite and unlimited wealth to sustain it. This wasn't a business model responding to market demand—it was one man's compulsive behavior scaled to billionaire proportions.
In July 2025, after a five-year exhaustive investigation reviewing over 100,000 documents, the Department of Justice concluded: "No evidence that Epstein kept a 'client list' of people involved in the alleged sex trafficking, or that Epstein blackmailed prominent and powerful associates."
Move along folks. There is nothing more to see.
2. A Legal System That Protects the Wealthy Elite
This section draws from: "Never Attribute to Malice What Can Be Explained by Stupidity — The Jeffrey Epstein Conspiracy," "And Then There Were None: The Alexander Acosta Prosecution of Jeffrey Epstein," "Did the Federalist Society Help Jeffrey Epstein Get Off with a Slap on the Wrist?" and "The Book That Wasn't – How We Got the Sweetheart Deal of a Lifetime for Jeffrey Epstein" by Cranky Old Guy
The second story happening at Epstein's "zip code" was how the legal system bent to protect him. When prosecutor Alexander Acosta had the FBI's 53-page indictment with 36 victims, Epstein faced what any ordinary citizen would: life in prison with no parole. Instead, this legal system gave him 13 months in county jail with work release and immunity for unnamed co-conspirators.
This protection wasn't mysterious—it was institutional. Acosta and key members of Epstein's defense team moved through the same elite legal networks, particularly the Federalist Society. Jay Lefkowitz, Epstein's lead negotiator, was Acosta's former colleague at Kirkland & Ellis. The whole "negotiation" was theater: the deal was finalized in September 2007, but Acosta's famous "pressure" meeting happened weeks later in October, followed by nine months of staged back-and-forth to create a paper trail designed to make Acosta look embattled, not complicit.
The system that protected Epstein from real consequences rewarded everyone except the victims. Acosta became law school dean, then Trump's Labor Secretary. The defense lawyers kept their reputations. And tellingly, not one of these ego-driven attorneys has ever written about securing what should have been the legal victory of their careers—because to tell that story honestly would be to confess to orchestrating a fix.
This wasn't Epstein's criminal behavior. This was a separate dysfunction: a legal system where the right connections can make 53-page federal indictments disappear and turn life sentences into slaps on the wrist.
3. Epstein's Real Business - Tax Evasion for the Rich
We don't really know what these 'innocent' get-togethers on the island were about. None of the rich people that were there seem to be able to articulate why they were there. I talk about this in my substack.
This section draws from: "What if weekends at Epstein's island were primarily a tax avoidance retreat for the ultra-rich?" by Cranky Old Guy
This is from a pure thought experiment of what they could have been about. No evidence. Just thinking on my part.
The third story at Epstein's "zip code" might be the most mundane: his actual business. His parties were like something out of The Great Gatsby—a cover for tax evasion instead of bootlegging. Epstein's specialty was helping the ultra-rich avoid taxes through complex trusts and offshore structures, with fees up to $40 million per year. By moving his own business to the Virgin Islands, he cut his federal taxes by 90%.
The silence from visitors is telling. No one has offered innocent explanations like "marine biology conference" or "charitable planning meeting." Instead we get vague non-denials. Why? Because the truth might be just as damning: "I went there to network with fellow tax avoiders and learn sophisticated avoidance strategies."
Face-to-face meetings on a private island left no email trails, no phone logs, no financial records. There's no brochure for "Weekend Tax Seminar at St. James Island"—that defeats the whole purpose. But everyone understood what was really being offered, just like everyone knew what was really happening behind Gatsby's parties.
So we have three separate stories that happened to intersect at Jeffrey Epstein's operation.
Multiple Stories, Same Zip Code
When you try and make a single story out of them you can't. It's like in some of the Sherlock Holmes and Agatha Christie mysteries—it's hard to solve them until you realize it was not a single crime but several that intersected at the same zip code, so to speak.
The Psychology of Conspiracy Addiction
The public wants everything to be a complex conspiracy.
But it's not just about making sense of a vast story - these conspiracies offer excitement. It's recreational to solve a whodunit, especially if we feel we are bringing the guilty to justice and righting the wrongs in society.
Our normal lives are pretty mundane. Go to work, pick up the kids, go shopping, mow the lawn.
Now like John Travolta in Saturday Night Fever, working at a hardware store by day but becoming the disco king at night, conspiracy theories let you be Batman by night, saving Gotham City by hunting down secret pedophile rings.
What Does Donald Say?
And what does Donald say?
He says it's all a hoax.
What does that mean? All those crimes were a hoax?
No, it means the pedophile ring is a hoax.
He would know. He created the hoax along with his henchmen and henchwomen. He did it to get elected and it worked. His accomplices built careers and spawned a cottage industry.
Donald knows for sure there is nothing more to see because he helped plant, water, fertilize and harvest the conspiracy.
Trump's Monster Comes Home
Trump built his political movement on the promise that chasing these conspiracies would fix everything. He created a base that believes the Epstein case is the key to understanding all the inequities of life. Now that base is expecting him to unlock the conspiracy as he promised so many times.
Nothing there? What??????
We don't believe it. Show us the files.
Just like Capone couldn't file honest taxes without confessing to his crimes, Trump can't get his followers to stop pursuing the Epstein story without admitting to the huge lie he created. The conspiracy theory he weaponized for political gain has become his trap.
The silver lining is that, as president, he can oversee the renovation of Alcatraz to make sure that there is one comfy cell that is just the way he likes it.