Steven Hoffenberg, who was found dead in his Connecticut apartment aged 77, was once one of New York’s wealthiest men before being outed as a Ponzi fraudster and sent to prison for nearly two decades.
Through his company Towers Financial, Hoffenberg stole $460m from 200,000 investors to fund a lavish lifestyle of private jets, expensive cares, and luxury homes in New York and Florida.
In his heyday, Hoffenberg briefly owned the New York Post in 1993, was close friends with Donald Trump and once rented an entire floor of Trump Tower.
The scheme came crashing down when he was arrested in 1994 and charged with "one of the largest Ponzi schemes in history", a decade before Bernie Madoff’s crimes were revealed.
The disgraced businessman later claimed it was his protege Jeffrey Epstein who had masterminded the scam.
Hoffenberg served 18 years in federal prison, while Epstein was never charged for his role.
After leaving prison, he launched a lawsuit against Epstein in 2016 in which he claimed the late paedophile was the “architect” of the scheme.
He had been living alone in Derby, Connecticut, and was found dead in his home after police were asked to perform a welfare check.
An initial autopsy found no signs of trauma, and a cause of death has not yet been released. It’s unclear when Hoffenberg died, but his body was in an advanced state of decay and police were awaiting dental records to make a formal identification.
Who was Steven Hoffenberg?
Born in Brooklyn in 1945 to Jewish parents, Hoffenberg founded the Towers Financial Corporation in the early 1970s after dropping out of college.
The company started out as a debt collection agency, buying outstanding medical bills and forcing debtors to pay out what they could.
Towers Financial grew quickly, acquiring several insurance companies that Hoffenberg would use to siphon finds from.
Hoffenberg was introduced to Epstein in 1987 the British arms dealer Douglas Heubert Leese.
The pair were constant companions between 1987 and 1993, which is when prosecutors would later reveal that Towers began defrauding investors.
Court documents showed that he paid Epstein $25,000 a month during that period and gave him a $2m loan in 1988 that was never paid back.
Hoffenberg later said that this loan was how Epstein began accumulating the wealth that he used to shield himself from public and legal scrutiny during his decades of sexually abusing and trafficking young girls.
In an interview with the Washington Post in 2019, the elder businessman later said that Epstein was the “architect of the scam”.
“I thought Jeffrey was the best hustler on two feet,” Hoffenberg told the Post.
“Talent, charisma, genius, criminal mastermind. We had a thing that could make a lot of money. We called it Ponzi.”
The pair made an ill-fated attempt to take over the struggling Pan Am airlines.
When the deal floundered, Towers came to the attention of financial regulators and was sued by the Security and Exchange Commission.
Unperturbed, the pair continued to acquire insurance companies and plunder money from investors, many of whom were widows, retirees and living with disabilities.
When prosecutors in Illinois and New York eventually charged Hoffenberg in 1993, he agreed to turn government’s witness and implicated Epstein in the schemes.
However, despite pointing the finger at Epstein, his name mysteriously disappeared from the case later that year.
Reporting on his conviction and sentencing in 1995, the New York Times described Hoffenberg as “one of the brashest figures on the New York business scene”.
“From the start, Mr Hoffenberg’s boasts of wealth seemed dubious,” the Times noted.
Hoffenberg is best known for briefly owning the New York Post during a turbulent period for the paper in the early 1990s.
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.
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 amid a staff revolt.
Mr Murdoch bought back the paper that year, and has owned it ever since.
Hoffenberg once rented an entire floor of Trump Tower, and later said of the former president that “Donald’s crowd was my crowd”.
How did he die?
Dailymail.com reported that one of Epstein’s abuse victims Maria Farmer had contacted police after becoming concerned about Mr Hoffenberg.
The Derby Police Department said they found a man deceased at an address on Mount Pleasant St 8pm on Tuesday, in a statement posted to Facebook that did not identify Hoffenberg.
It’s unclear how long he had been deceased in the apartment, but police were unable to positively identify Hoffenberg visually.
Hoffenberg was a prolific social media user, tweeting more than 35,000 times about Epstein, Ghislaine Maxwell, Prince Andrew and politics.
His Twitter account shows he posted eight times on 27 July, before going silent.
Ms Farmer told Dailymail.com that she became concerned as Hoffenberg had been in poor health after being diagnosed with Covid-19.
“Hoff was one of my dearest friends on earth, more like a father than my own father ever was to me,” Ms Farmer told Dailymail.com.
“He lived in kindness, always giving what little he had, never asking for anything.
“This man was beyond incredible and a dear friend to survivors of Epstein... as he was also.”
Maria Farmer was one of the first of Epstein’s victims to go public with sexual abuse allegations.
Her sister Annie Farmer was one of four women to testify at Ghislaine Maxwell’s child sex trafficking trial in December last year.
