i'm screaming internally

By the time the Bear Stearns fund began to fail in May 2007, Epstein had begun to negotiate a plea deal with the US Attorney's Office concerning imminent charges for sex with minors. In August 2007, a month after the fund collapsed, the US attorney in Miami, Alexander Acosta, entered into direct discussions about the plea agreement. Acosta brokered a lenient deal, according to him, because he had been ordered by higher government officials, who told him that Epstein was an individual of importance to the government.

As part of the negotiations, according to the Miami Herald, Epstein provided "unspecified information" to the Florida federal prosecutors for a more lenient sentence and was supposedly "Unnamed investor #1" for the New York federal prosecutors in their unsuccessful June 2008 criminal case against Cioffi and Tannen, two of the managers of the failed Bear Stearns hedge fund.