Among more than 3 million documents the Department of Justice released last week that were collected during investigations into convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, about 3,400 mention “Massachusetts.”
They include information on Ghislaine Maxwell’s Massachusetts driver’s license, her 2018 tax return and the FBI’s account of a person (whose name was redacted) speaking to them in 2020 about a sexual encounter with Epstein outside Boston.
The documents also detail Epstein’s visit to Westfield in 2017, a moment that provides a snapshot into his life at that time.
A few minutes past 7:30 a.m., Epstein’s jet, a Gulfstream GIV, took off from St. Thomas in the U.S. Virgin Islands. It headed north, traveling for 3 hours and 50 minutes. Its destination: The regional airport in Westfield, Massachusetts.
This Gulfstream jet had visited Westfield-Barnes Regional Airport before, as mechanics at the Gulfstream service center there had worked on it from time to time. A company associated with Epstein also issued checks to the airport totaling hundreds of dollars, possibly for landing fees, according to Daniel Shearer, the airport’s current manager.
Facility performed thousands of dollars of repairs
Over the years, Epstein had at least two jets serviced at the facility, records released last week show.
Gulfstream performed work on the jet in November 2015 after Epstein and his people complained of a fuel leak. A preliminary invoice to address the leak and a slew of other maintenance tasks totaled more than $58,000.
A few months later, the same jet spent almost three weeks in Westfield where mechanics performed almost $160,000 worth of work on the machine, according to a preliminary invoice. Jets of this kind sell for $1.9 million to $4.3 million, depending on their age and model.
Often, the plane would arrive at Westfield empty. But this trip on March 11, 2017, was different. According to the plane’s manifest, it carried a lone passenger — the convicted sex offender himself.
Gulfstream did not return a request for comment. Its service center in Westfield, which is about 130 miles from New York City and almost 100 miles from Boston, sits in the “busiest corridor for Gulfstream business jets,” the company said in a 2013 press release announcing an expansion of the facility.
Shearer, the airport manager, said Gulfstream is a key tenant for the regional airport, which brings in an economic impact of about $100 million a year.
When Epstein landed, he went through customs and presented a passport, according to a Department of Homeland Security document. International flights coming into Westfield have to be coordinated with U.S. Customs and Border Protection, Shearer said, as an officer will come up, meet the flight and screen the plane. It’s a process that happens about one or two times a month, he said.
Typically, the airport does not know who is using the field.
“When they show up, they’re in and out or they’re right into a car,” Shearer said. “And we don’t get manifests as to who’s coming and going.”
A return to ‘his lavish lifestyle’
Epstein’s trip to Westfield came at a time after the sex offender had served out his incarceration in 2009. It was before the Miami Herald newspaper sparked renewed interest in his case in late 2018, when it published an investigation into how the government handled criminal investigations into his actions, according to a Department of Justice report issued November 2020.
Some of his victims sued in civil court during those years, the report said, and Epstein sought to settle many of the claims. “Epstein was otherwise able to resume his lavish lifestyle, largely avoiding the interest of the press,” the department’s report said.
That wealthy lifestyle brought him to Westfield. Epstein was in the process of buying another jet.
The Gulfstream employees in Westfield were inspecting and fixing a Gulfstream G550 that Epstein was looking to purchase from Chevron, which did not return a request for comment. The parties were scheduled to close the sale at the end of March after mechanics finished looking over the plane, according to a letter Chevron sent about the transaction.
A day after his visit to Westfield, Epstein had some thoughts on the plane, expressed in his customary clipped and informal language: “i cant come up the stairs and see a bathroom door. = we have to disguise it and make it look part of one wall,” he wrote in an email.
More than two weeks after his visit to Westfield, 17 days to be exact, Epstein looked into a camera for a photo destined for the New York State Sex Offender Registry.
It was a photo widely circulated two years later. In July 2019, federal prosecutors in New York brought sex trafficking charges against Epstein. A month later, authorities say he killed himself in a federal jail.
The manifest for Epstein’s GIV said he left Westfield that day in March at 11:42 a.m., headed for an airport in Newark, New Jersey, a flight taking a little over 30 minutes.
After an hour and 15 minutes in Westfield, he was gone.
Other Massachusetts mentions in the Epstein Files
The reports of aircraft maintenance are far from the only Massachusetts-related records in the document releases.
- This week, Mike Kennealy and Brian Shortsleeve, two Republican candidates for governor, criticized Gov. Maura Healey after the Epstein documents showed that an election consultant, James McGee, reached out to Epstein seeking a job in 2019 and touting his success working on Healey’s bid for attorney general, the Boston Herald reported. The paper also reported that Healey’s reelection campaign said McGee had misrepresented his relationship to her campaign.
- The Karen Read case, included in some FBI daily news briefs, is mentioned four times in the Epstein files.
- An inventor in New Hampshire, Dean Kamen, was placed on leave by the robotics program he founded, FIRST, after documents showed he regularly communicated with Epstein, according to New Hampshire Public Radio. The organization asked a law firm to investigate.