Crew of the USS Tom Clancy,
Thank you so much for reading.
Hearing the news lately, I went into my files and found the original copy and photos of a story I wrote for the New Republic in 2019 on Epstein’s New Mexico operation; you can read that story here after it went through editorial pasteurization for a major media outlet, or you can read the raw copy I turned in after speeding down the highway from Santa Fe and spending a week chatting people up in the oldest colonial capital in North America.
I think you’ll still find this piece relevant.
In the back of your mind, while you read this article, keep one question: Why call it “Zorro” (Spanish for Fox) and put fox hunting images on the roadside mailbox near the cattle guard? Then please sound off in the comments, because I’m wondering it myself.
Matt
If there's a secret, New Mexico will try to keep it. The Land of Enchantment has gotten a lot of practice over the years, well before Jeffrey Epstein purchased the Zorro Ranch south of Santa Fe. The world's first nuclear weapon, code name Gadget, was detonated in New Mexico on July 16, 1945. Tourists can now visit the Trinity Site on the U.S. Army's White Sands Missile Range to view the epicenter of a highly secret government conspiracy involving top physicists called the Manhattan Project. Trinity is a 111-mile straight line from Zorro Ranch. Consider what lies within the Land of Enchantment this way: Find a map. Make the center the late Jeffrey Epstein’s New Mexico operation. Put the Trinity site at the edge of its radius. Then look: what else is secret and radioactive and inside that circle? Did New Mexico’s other secrets throw off enough chaff to keep Epstein off the radar?
In 2019, I went to New Mexico to see what I could find out about secrets within the circle. Santa Fe, 23 miles away from Zorro as the crow flies, is the oldest colonial capital city in North America, one with a twisted history. The historic center of this small city in the foothills of the Sangre De Cristo mountains is the Plaza, an open-air park with a Haagen-Daas shop at one corner. This was once a drug store, Zooks Pharmacy, that doubled as a base for Russian espionage; in between filling prescriptions and ringing up customers, deep cover Stalinist spies here plotted the death of Leon Trotsky and later coordinated efforts to steal the secrets of the atomic bomb from Los Alamos (distance from Zorro Ranch: 50 miles).
There are also the sites where the Catholic Church hid pedophile priests in local parishes, until a tsunami of lawsuits from victims forced New Mexico’s largest diocese to file for bankruptcy last June. One of those places is in Jemez Springs, an isolated resort town in the middle of a melange of federal jurisdictions, Pueblo Nations, and National Forests. (Distance from Zorro Ranch: 50 miles. Here, the Catholic Church still operates one of two treatment centers in the United States for pedophile priests. They are treated by fellow members of the cloth who belong to an order called the Servants of the Paraclete — the paraclete, of course, being the Holy Ghost. One wonders about the mental health care available for the victims, or whether they will ever really rely on the paraclete again.
We travel inside the circle, from one abusive church to another. A little over 80 miles to the northwest of Zorro Ranch is Trementina Base, a bunker/vault complex owned by the Church of Spiritual Technology — an elite order within Scientology — with hardened rooms storing L. Ron Hubbard's writings. Hubbard's thoughts on Thetans will survive anything, as they’re reportedly inscribed on etched steel plates in titanium containers filled with inert argon gas.
The location is hardly secret, since the CST’s logo, two interlocking circles with diamonds, can be seen in aerial photos, carved into the high desert scrub, ostensibly to help guide Hubbard's spirit back to its new body — whenever that happens.
"Once Hubbard adopts a new body, he’s expected to make his way to one of the CST bases,” a Trementina Base insider told the Village Voice in 2012. “That’s where he’s supposed to be raised and be taken care of.”
There are dozens of other strange things in that circle: there's the Armand Hammer United World College of the American West, a selective international boarding school in Montezuma founded by Armand Hammer and Prince Charles, originally a resort hotel built on a hot springs sacred to the Jicarilla Apache, the previous inhabitants of the Sangre De Cristos. Bill Richardson — who in recently unsealed court records was named by Epstein accuser Virginia Roberts Giuffre as a participant in the illegal sexual abuse ring — claimed to be a lecturer at the United World College in 2001-2002, between his stints as Bill Clinton’s secretary of energy and New Mexico’s governor but only showed up once that the students were aware of. That was to hobnob with Queen Noor of Jordan and Prince Pavlos in front of the cameras in advance of his Gubernatorial run (Full disclosure, I was a student at AHUWC at the time. I recall that Richardson accurately called me a smartass).
Down the street from Zorro is the “Light Institute,” a “center for spiritual healing and multi-incarnational exploration is without equal. Individuals of all ages, from all walks of life, from around the world visit The Light Institute to heal the body, mind, and spirit.”
If you’re rich, powerful, and committed to doing something big, strange and keeping it unseen, New Mexico beckons.
***
On February 22, 1993, as Whitney Houston's "I Will Always Love You" topped the domestic charts, the New Mexico State Land Office granted an agricultural land lease to Zorro Trust. The trust was a shell company for Jeffrey Epstein, whose address of record at that time was 457 Madison Avenue (today it is also the headquarters of Trunk Club). On that same day, the Zorro Trust completed a purchase of lands owned by members of the King family, a powerful New Mexico agricultural and political dynasty. Zorro’s deal included rights to the Kings’ leases on public lands, a total of 1,158.97 acres rented for $872.22 a year. The largest private landowners in New Mexico are either outside billionaires or family dynasties. “Very often we will just be a wealthy landowner’s way of consolidating their holdings,” Stephanie Garcia Richard, the New Mexico Land Commissioner, told me.
The Commissioner then produced a thick binder that looked like a briefing book; it was a record of every interaction Epstein had with the land commission which involved only a small portion of Epstein's New Mexico playground; the 50,000 square foot mansion was situated on private land. A few details stood out about the land. For all the care he took purchasing it through shell companies and lawyers, the little things were often neglected. That November, the state sent Epstein a letter for not paying his grazing fees, bringing his annual costs for leasing land from New Mexico to $889.50, plus a 2% interest fee.
The next year, Epstein sought approval to construct a "grass strip runway for a private plane" on New Mexico state land within his lease — but when the state wanted to send inspectors out to the site of the proposed runway, the request for a permit was withdrawn, and Epstein built another runway on land he owned outright. In 2004, a variance from the NM land commissioner allowed Epstein to build a section of raised railroad track where he wanted to put an antique Santa Fe Railroad caboose in sight of the Creston Petroglyphs, nearly 5000 catalogued pictograms left behind by the original inhabitants of the Galisteo Basin. (http://galisteo.nmarchaeology.org/sites/creston.html) (https://www.archaeologysouthwest.org/pdf/arch-sw-v19-no4.pdf)
Zorro wasn’t Epstein’s only New Mexico investment. While raping teenagers three times a day and trafficking them to blackmail powerful friends must have occupied a substantial portion of his time, he had other interests: eugenics, cryogenics, and theoretical physics among them. New Mexico filled those needs nicely: groundbreaking work in all three has been done in New Mexico since the Manhattan Project; after World War 2 the United States imported Nazi war criminals to help run the fledgling space program, where their prior skills in rocketry and ghastly human experiments could help the United States retain the edge over the communists. It seems Epstein, a canny investor, saw value in both the physical and human terrain of New Mexico.
He pumped more than a quarter of a million dollars into the Santa Fe Institute, a think tank for theoretical researchers, where he befriended co-founder and quark-theory pioneer Murray Gell-Mann. When I called a well-connected Santa Fe lawyer, they told me to look at the Institute, and asked what I knew of Gell-Mann's reputation around town. Not much, I admitted, and went to find out.
“When these men describe Epstein,” Vanity Fair wrote, “they talk about ‘energy’ and ‘curiosity,’ as well as a love for theoretical physics that they don’t ordinarily find in laymen. Gell-Mann rather sweetly mentions that ‘there are always pretty ladies around’ when he goes to dinner chez Epstein.”
When I drove out to the Institute to ask about its connections, no one bothered me as I wandered around. SFI is up in the hills above the rest of the city, with beautiful views and a campus that seems like a graduate school building at an expensive university; open spaces and industrial lighting, whiteboards and hardwood furniture. Eventually,a spokeswoman provided me a statement that, “Contrary to certain statements in Epstein’s bios, he was not actively involved at SFI other than as an infrequent donor,” and the Institute had rejected any funding from Epstein after 2010. Gell-Mann could not be reached for comment; he preceded Epstein in death last May, at the age of 89.
Driving out of the Santa Fe Insitute, nestled in the hills above the rest of the city, I stop to take a photo of the welcoming artwork, before the Parking lot; an old, but operable, Chevy truck with an erect rocketship as its unloaded cargo. The fin of the rocketship reads 9EX, but at first I think it reads SEX. “Cowboy artist” Bob Davis built it for SFI’s first Interplanetary Festival. “our facilities crew drives it back and forth on the Chevy truck (part of the exhibit) which has a hydraulic system under the hood for changing the rocket’s angle of inclination," Jenna Marshall, Santa Fe Institute's flack explains on email. Cormac McCarthy is one trustee of the Santa Fe Institute. Pierre Omidyar is another. Perhaps the hydraulic lift will lower the 9EX rocketship 45 degrees to half-mast.
Gene Peach, a Santa Fe photographer, has “had an eye on ‘Zorro’ since the late ’90s," he tells me. After the news of Epstein's arrest broke, Peach spoke with several Stanley area ranchers, none of whom ever saw Epstein or had any idea what went on at his ranch. Locals say that they know when "the Epstein crowd is at the ranch, because the mansion lights drown out the stars” Peach explains later in an email — no mean feat in that part of New Mexico. Some thought Epstein owned Victoria's Secret, because of the "caravans of glamorous women" who would show up at the Ranch's double gate off Highway 41. Peach reports that the locals always had mixed feelings about their furtive big-city neighbor — Epstein's property taxes were "a blessing to the community" and won't soon be replaced, he said: "There are many big ranches, but no other 50,000 square foot mansions." Well, there’s Tom Ford's nearby seven figure ranch, but that has yet to find a new buyer.
***
State Land Commissioner Stephanie Garcia Richard has been among the most proactive public servants in her response to the revelations about Epstein’s illegal activities; even before Epstein's arrest in New York, as soon as she heard about Virginia Roberts Giuffre’s accusations — complete with pictures of Giuffre posing in snow in front of Zorro Ranch — Richard instructed her staff to pull every relevant document, deed and scrap of Epstein correspondence from the files, assemble it into a briefing book, and deliver it to New Mexico Attorney General Hector Balderas, one of only a few New Mexico government officials to do something about the state’s reputation for graft other than embracing it.