Former Epstein mentor and New York Post owner Steven Hoffenberg found dead

The 77 year old spent 18 years in prison after being convicted of running a $500m Ponzi scheme

Steven Hoffenberg, a former mentor to Jeffrey Epstein and one-time owner of the New York Post, has been found dead, according to reports.

Mr Hoffenberg’s body was discovered by police as they performed a welfare check on him at his home in Derby, Connecticut.

The 77-year-old spent 18 years in prison after being convicted of running a $500m Ponzi scheme in the early 1990s.

The Derby Police Department said they were called to the home in Mount Pleasant St to perform a welfare check at 8pm on Tuesday, in a statement posted to Facebook that did not identify Mr Hoffenberg.

An initial autopsy found no signs of trauma, and a cause of death has not yet been released. It’s unclear when Mr Hoffenberg died, and police are checking dental records to confirm his identity.

The police department said his body was “not in a state where a visual identification could not be made”.

Dailymail.com, which broke news of Mr Hoffenberg’s death, reported that one of Epstein’s abuse victims Maria Farmer had contacted police after becoming concerned about Mr Hoffenberg.

Jeffrey Epstein, pictured with Ghislaine Maxwell, was ‘the best hustler on two feet’, Mr Hoffenberg said in 2019 (Channel 4)

Ms Farmer told Dailymail.com that “Hoff” was one of her dearest friends, and was “more like a father than my own father ever was to me”.

She said she became concerned as Mr Hoffenberg had been in poor health after being diagnosed with Covid-19.

Ms Farmer’s sister Annie was one of four women to testify against Ghislaine Maxwell during her child sex trafficking trial last year.

In 1995, Mr Hoffenberg pleaded guilty to running one of the largest Ponzi schemes in US history through the debt collection company Towers Financial Corporation he ran with Epstein.

Mr Hoffenberg and Epstein lived the high life for years before the company collapsed, using invester’s funds to purchase homes in Manhattan, Florida and a mansion in Long Island while flying everywhere by private jet.

He later sued Epstein, claiming that he had, in fact, been the mastermind of the enterprise, claiming that this was the mysterious source of the late paedophile’s wealth.

After Epstein died in prison while awaiting trial for child sex trafficking in 2019, Mr Hoffenberg told the Washington Post that Epstein had been the “architect of the scam”.

“I thought Jeffrey was the best hustler on two feet,” Mr Hoffenberg told the Post.

“Talent, charisma, genius, criminal mastermind. We had a thing that could make a lot of money. We called it Ponzi.”

Mr Hoffenberg is best known for briefly owning the New York Post during a turbulent period for the paper in the early 1990s.

Writing for The Independent in 1993, Michael Leapman said his ownership came about after Rupert Murdoch was forced to sell the tabloid paper when he purchased the Fox television network due to media cross-ownership laws.

New owner Peter Kalikow’s attempts to turn a profit by changing the Post from an afternoon to a morning paper failed spectacularly, leading to missed publications and mass resignations.

Mr Hoffenberg stepped in to purchase the paper as it teetered on the edge of bankruptcy in late 1992.

His brief tenure as owner came to an end three months later, when he was forced out.

Mr Hoffenberg once rented an entire floor of Trump Tower, and later said of the former president that “Donald’s crowd was my crowd”.

His company Towers Financial started out as a debt collection firm, buying unpaid medical bills and collecting as much of the outstanding debt as it could.

As the company grew, Mr Hoffenberg launched a hostile takeover of now defunct airline Pan Am in 1987.

By that time, he had begun siphoning hundreds of thousands of dollars in investor funds from insurance companies he acquired in the scheme that eventually landed him in prison for nearly two decades.