NEW YORK — Steven Hoffenberg, a former business partner of Jeffrey Epstein, has been presumed dead after a decomposing body was found in his Connecticut home.
Police in Derby arrived at his home on Mount Pleasant Street on Tuesday for a wellness check and said “the body of a white male was found deceased and in a state where a visual identification could not be made.”
“Every piece of evidence and information points to the fact it’s Mr. Hoffenberg,” Derby police Officer Justin Stanko told the Valley Independent Sentinel.
An autopsy was performed, but the results are still pending, the Derby Police Department wrote on Facebook.
Hoffenberg’s cause of death has not been determined, but there were no signs of trauma, police said. Investigators were waiting on a toxicology report and dental records to confirm Hoffenberg’s identity.
Epstein worked with Hoffenberg at Towers Financial, a debt collection agency that was later exposed as a Ponzi scheme. Hoffenberg spent 18 years in prison for running the scandal, which federal authorities described as one of the biggest in history prior to Bernie Madoff’s scheme.
Epstein got off scot free and became a notorious sex trafficker of teenage girls. He was eventually charged with several sex crimes and died by suicide in Manhattan federal jail in August 2019. Many people theorized that Epstein acquired some of his expansive wealth in the Towers Financial scandal.
In 2016, Hoffenberg sued Epstein and claimed that he was a “co-conspirator” in the Ponzi scheme. In 2019, he said in an interview that the two worked side by side every day.
Hoffenberg also briefly owned the New York Post in 1993, but his reign lasted only three months before the house of cards collapsed.
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