The Man Who Bought The Scream: Leon Black’s Reckoning Is Far from Over

Leon Black’s main passion is art, a love that can easily be traced back to his mother, the artist, and to his aunt, the art dealer, and to her husband, his uncle, who was also an artist. His collection, housed in both his Park Avenue town house and his weekend home in Bedford, New York, is considered by many to be one of the world’s finest in private hands. It’s easily worth more than $1 billion, and perhaps several multiples of that number. On the extensive grounds at his Bedford estate, Black has an amazing collection of sculptures, including large works by David Smith, Aristide Maillol (on the side of the indoor pool), George Rickey, Alexander Calder, Henry Moore, Ellsworth Kelly, and Richard Serra. He has a large wooden sculpture, Dottir, in the high-ceilinged pool room by Ursula von Rydingsvard, the German sculptor with a large studio in Brooklyn. With his wife, Debra, Black visited her studio in February 2016, with the intention of buying one of her sculptures for the Bedford house. “Immediately, Black felt to me like a real lover of art,” she later recalled. “All he was interested in was looking at the artwork, and not, necessarily having it spoken about by me or anyone else, but clearly drinking in the visuals and knowing with real clarity what works he liked.” 

Sometimes Black would go up against other leading billionaire collectors at auction, including Ronald Lauder, the heir to the Estée Lauder cosmetics fortune and the former US ambassador to Austria. Lauder, of course, was also the brains and the fortune behind the Neue Galerie, on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan, which contains much of Lauder’s astounding collection of German and Austrian art—one of the few collections in private hands that can rival Black’s. It will soon be part of the Met. Black’s collection, 15 blocks south of the Neue Galerie, is superior to Lauder’s, while not (yet) being for public consumption. In 2025, Black paid $38 million for the Woolworth mansion, on 4 East 80th Street, after it sat on the market for 14 years. Black plans to turn it into his version of the Neue Galerie, in the form of an art “foundation” (tax purposes, you know). Once, in the 2000s, Lauder had spotted a drawing, by a German artist, being auctioned at Sotheby’s. Lauder thought it was “a real find” and was afraid Black might have spotted it, too, and might bid against him for it. He called Black’s office and was told Black was in an all-day board meeting. Lauder figured Black would not be competing for the drawing. On the morning of the auction, Lauder flew to Europe. When the auction began for the drawing, it quickly came down to two bidders: Lauder and a “crazy bidder” on the phone. The price kept going higher and higher, some 30 times the estimate, and finally Lauder decided to let the “crazy bidder” have the drawing, thinking to himself he had found an art collector crazier than Black. When he got back from Europe, he called Black to talk about the “crazy bidder” who had bid against him for the drawing. That’s when Black told him he had bought the drawing and wondered why Lauder had not gotten the message he had left for him earlier in the day. “I was on a plane to Europe,” he told Black.

Black is best known for the two art purchases that made headlines around the world: Edvard Munch’s 1895 drawing of The Scream, for which Black paid nearly $120 million, in July 2012, and a 1931 Picasso sculpture, Bust of a Woman, a plaster depiction of the distinctive face of Marie-Thérèse Walter, his onetime mistress. Black ended up with the sculpture in June 2016, after a legal dispute between Larry Gagosian, one of Black’s art dealers, and the Qatari royal family, which thought it also owned the sculpture. The saga began when one of Picasso’s daughters, Maya Widmaier-Picasso, supposedly sold the Walter bust, for roughly $42 million, to a representative of the Qatari sheikh Jassim bin Abdulaziz al-Thani. Then, in May 2015, Widmaier-Picasso sold the sculpture again to Gagosian, for $106 million, who was acting on behalf of Black. Obviously, there was only one sculpture and it couldn’t be sold twice. In June 2016, after an agreement between the parties, Black ended up with the Walter bust and the Qataris received an undisclosed financial settlement. 

Black’s collection is vast and varied, with everything from a Michelangelo drawing and an original Shakespeare manuscript to ancient Chinese vases and a Jasper Johns painting he shares ownership of with Ken Griffin, the hedge fund manager. There are drawings by Vincent van Gogh and watercolors by J. M. W. Turner and two Raphael drawings for which Black paid nearly $50 million each. As a youth, Black was also “an addicted collector,” he told me, of baseball cards, stamps, and coins. Local restaurants in Manhattan would let the young Black rifle through the cash registers looking for pennies, nickels, and dimes that might be rare or unique. Near the Blacks’ apartment, there “was a little old man,” a philatelist, whom Black would visit on his way home from school. He learned about stamps and stamp-collecting from the man. “I won the international award for my presentation on aviation and stamps,” he said. “You learn a lot. Part of collecting is researching and learning.” Yes, he conceded, his collecting bordered on the obsessive, but at least it was a healthy obsession. “I’ve always believed one of the things to really be celebrated—and it’s what separates us from animals—is man’s creative spirit,” he told me. That’s one of the main reasons Black said he collects art, as well as the first editions of great literature, poetry, and the original renderings of scientific discoveries. “It’s almost an obsessive-compulsive sickness,” he said.

He used to wreak havoc in museums across Europe that he visited as a teenager because he would stand too close to the artworks. “I like to actually touch the art,” he said. “In Italy, I set off a number of alarms.” He said he enjoys studying and researching an artist in context while deciding to make a purchase. “I love what you learn,” he said. “All the research I do about the artist, about his whole career, where this piece fits in it, what else is going on in that time, who else is doing interesting things, what the differences are between them? And you just keep learning.” He also enjoyed the negotiations required to buy a piece of art, “having been the head of M&A for years [at the now defunct Drexel Burnham],” he said. But, he continued, “You can only negotiate so far if you’re going to collect quality . . . you can’t think you’re going to be able to get bargains.” He enjoyed being surrounded by his collection. “I love living with the stuff, and am lucky enough to have it in my hands for a number of years,” he continued. “When I’m gone, it’ll be passed on to others, whether I create a museum is a possibility for some of it, or it just goes on to others that appreciate it. . . . Each piece gives me a different satisfaction. I never tire of spending time with it. Beauty is special. Creativity is special. And I’m lucky enough to have a great eye.”

I was curious how he went from collecting coins and stamps and baseball cards to paying $120 million for an Edvard Munch pastel. “I’ve always liked Edvard Munch,” he said, “and I’ve always felt he is the father of modernism in art. I know a bunch of people have always felt it was Picasso’s Les Demoiselles, which is at MoMA, but I actually think it’s The Scream.” I asked him to elaborate. He gave me a brief explanation of the various isms in art, prior to modernism. “Romanticism is all about nature, actually the terror of nature,” he said. “Frankenstein is actually a romantic novel from the Romantic period, but so are the color and the earthquakes or avalanches of Turner. That’s Romanticism. It’s about nature. Impressionism is about other things. But what modernism is all about—what’s called solipsism, which you’ve probably heard of—it’s turning inward into your own psyche, into ‘God is Dead.’ Nietzsche declares ‘God is Dead.’ It’s not religious. It’s not about nature. It’s about men turning inward, becoming more [taken] with existentialism, dependent on himself, and that’s a lot of what modernism is. You see it in Surrealism. You see it in Freud’s dreams. So Munch comes out with The Scream. That’s the first really iconic image of man turning into himself. Of grappling with being a human and not being a slave to God, who is dead, or to a lot of other isms.” He mentioned two Munch artworks from 1894, Anxiety and Puberty, which depicted a young girl, naked, sitting on the edge of her bed, seemingly in despair, with a large black cloud depicted on the wall behind her. “No art had been done like it before,” Black said.

He resolved to buy The Scream, if andwhen one of the versions of Munch’s most famous work became available for the first time. Munch made four different versions of The Scream. Two of the versions were painted in 1893, the first of which has on it an inscription, in Norwegian, “could only have been painted by a madman.” That picture is in the National Museum of Norway, in Oslo. “Small, dark, and conceptual,” Black told me. A pastel version, also made in 1893, is in the Munch Museum, in Oslo. Two years later, in 1895, Munch painted another, similar version of The Scream, pastel on cardboard, as a paid commission for the Olsen family. “It’s the brightest one,” Black said. “He writes at the bottom, in Norwegian, that he’s crossing a bridge with some friends, and then he finds himself alone. He’s gripped by anxiety, and he hears Der Schrei der Natur—the scream of nature.” Munch painted one more version 15 years later, in 1910, which is also in the Munch Museum, “kind of cartoonish,” Black said.

In May 2012, Petter Olsen, a Norwegian shipping magnate, hired Sotheby’s, in London, to sell the 1895 version of The Scream. That’s when Black pounced. Sotheby’s allowed him to take the painting home with him for three or four days. “I spent a lot of time with it late at night,” he said. How did he get Sotheby’s to allow that? “They know I’m a major collector,” he said. “They know I’m good for it. They know that the chances of me buying something will be enhanced if I can spend some time with it.” He decided it was great and he wanted to have it. “Well, if I decide I have to have something,” he said. “It doesn’t mean I will pay any price.” The auction took place at night. Black was at home, on the phone with Sotheby’s. He was bidding against Joe Lewis, the British financier—later indicted on charges of passing inside information to his friends as a way to compensate them. The prices kept escalating through $80 million, $90 million, and then $100 million. Black won. He had to pay Sotheby’s commission and then New York State taxes on the entire purchase price. In the end, that came to nearly $120 million, one of the highest prices paid for an artwork to that time. He had no regrets, no buyer’s remorse. “The only remorse I’ve usually had is when I stopped bidding,” he said. He also said he had regrets when he sold artworks—something he’d done rarely over the years, around 12 times or so. “An artist like Picasso was great in six or seven different genres,” he continued. “Not only might you buy a few in the same genre, but then you also want the variety of some of the different genres, unless there’s a genre you don’t like. I think Picasso was great from the Blue, Rose, Cubist periods [to] Dora Maar. But I don’t particularly like the late Picasso.”

Picasso’s Bust of a Woman sculpture, for which he paid about double what the Qataris apparently paid for the same thing, seems to cause him a little more agita. “I overpaid for that,” he said, “but they’re so rare, and that one is such a famous one . . .” He had no idea the sculpture had previously been sold to the Qataris, or how much they had paid. “I didn’t find out until months later,” he said. In fact, his friend Ronald Lauder told him he could have, maybe should have, paid more, given the prices being paid for Brâncuși and Giacometti sculptures. “This is a much greater piece than the Giacomettis and it’s rarer than the Brâncușis,” he said.

George Goldner, the Met’s longtime chairman of the Department of Drawings and Prints, recalled how “for years” Black would urge the Met to buy an Albrecht Dürer drawing. Goldner explained there were hardly any “good ones left” and they were unlikely to be sold. He urged Black to think about Dürer prints, only to hear Black respond that he was not a “print collector.” Over time, though, Black warmed to the idea of prints, and became a “works on paper” enthusiast. “Why works on paper?” he asked. “Because, to me, again, it’s what gets you closer to the artist and to the originality of the concept of what he wants to do. Sometimes it’s for work on paper, which is the end product, and sometimes it’s a study for a painting that shows him working things out. So, it’s all about the creative process, and it’s more intimate.” At one point, the Met was offered a collection of more than a hundred Old Master prints. “He bought them all,” Goldner recalled. “Leon became not merely a print collector, but perhaps the print collector of our time.” (When Goldner retired from the Met, he went to work for Black, full-time. Coincidentally, he lived near Black, in Bedford, making things even easier.)

Black had a symbiotic relationship with the curators at both the Met and MoMA—especially at the Met—where they would keep each other informed about desirable pieces that would be good to have in the Met’s collection or in Black’s. Sometimes, Black would buy the desired artwork and pledge it to the Met. For instance, Black became interested in the work, particularly the drawings, of a German artist, Caspar David Friedrich, who lived mostly in Dresden, from 1774 to 1840. Before Friedrich started painting, in 1807, he created “some of the most fascinating landscape drawings of his time,” according to the Met’s description of him on its website. One of those drawings, completed in 1806, was of a solitary figure on the island of Rügen, in the Baltic Sea, not far from where Friedrich was born. “The austere island inspired some of Friedrich’s greatest works, in which he combined a close observation of nature with a pervasive romanticism,” according to the Met’s online description of the artist. “A solitary human figure contemplating the expanse of nature would be a recurring theme in his oeuvre.” No wonder his work appealed to Black. In 2002, Black bought the 1806 Friedrich drawing, Eastern Coast of Rügen with Shepherd, and promised to make a gift of it to the Met. In his book about Friedrich, The Magic of Silence: Caspar David Friedrich’s Journey Through Time, the German art historian Florian Illies tells the story about a Hessian collector who was passing by a French antiques shop and purchased, for a few francs, several landscape drawings that were stacked outside the door of the shop. His mother liked one of the drawings so much she hung it for years in her home. Years later, the son was thumbing through a book about the collection of a Dresden art gallery and saw a picture—Friedrich’s, The Great Enclosure, from 1832—that looked an awful lot like the drawing that he had bought for a few francs at the French antiques store. He took the drawing from his mother’s house to Dresden to compare it with the one in the gallery. “Both the curators and the collector were aflame with excitement,” Illies wrote. With his mother’s blessing, the Hessian collector resolved to sell the Friedrich drawing to a dealer in London. With the proceeds of the sale he built himself a house in Seligenstadt, and attached to it a plaque, noting that a Friedrich artwork had made it possible. The London art dealer later sold the Friedrich to “a buyer in New York”—Black—“for millions,” Illies wrote. Later, Black agreed to lend the artwork to an exhibition but suddenly could not find it in his home. Illies wrote, “When a snowstorm hit New York and he searched for a winter coat, he discovered the Great Enclosure [study] in the back of the wardrobe. His housekeeper had found it while cleaning the kitchen.” 

Ann Temkin, the chief curator of painting and sculpture at MoMA, described Black as a special kind of collector. “I love Leon for his love for works of art,” she explained in Black’s 65th-birthday book, in 2016. “And not just any works of art, or even excellent ones, but rather the most absolutely outstanding works of art. Leon is a brutal perfectionist.” She loved engaging him in discussions about art. “Leon’s innate curatorial sensibility is abundantly clear on the astonishing walls of his homes,” she continued. “Rumor has it that Leon wanders the rooms reinstalling the art in the middle of the night.” He once spent four hours with Chuck Schumer, the US senator from New York, “lovingly describing the pictures that hung in his house,” Schumer recalled, also in the birthday book. In November 2000, Black was named a trustee of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, one of those marquee appointments that announces to New York society that you’ve arrived, via both your vast wealth and your exquisite taste. In February 2003, the Met named Black a “Fellow for Life.”

His Dartmouth art history professor, the late John Wilmerding, told me he was utterly amazed by Black’s art collection. Wilmerding said he thought it was one of the finest in private hands in New York. “It’s really, really impressive,” he said. “What amazes me is not all collectors have this kind of breadth and capacity—Alice Walton is one—but the fact that Leon has collected in such diverse areas, with such a high sense of quality, is staggering. To buy old-master Renaissance drawings, and then Chinese ceramics, Pop Art, standard European masters. It really is breathtaking.” In 2018, MoMA named Black the chairman of its board of trustees. Over the years, he had lent the museum The Scream and the Picasso sculpture of Dora Maar. “I believe, unless the work is too fragile, that it should be shared with the public,” he said. “I lend a lot to museums all over the world.” That same year, he donated $40 million to MoMA. It was highly unusual for one person to be on both the Met’s board and the chairman of MoMA, so Black decided to step off the Met board and turned his seat there over to his wife.

Thanks to the January 2026 release of documents in the so-called Epstein files, the world now has an unfiltered understanding of the extent of Black’s extraordinary art collection—at least as of March 2017 (the date of the document)—and of its extraordinary value, estimated to be worth more than $5 billion these days. Among the most valuable artworks in Black’s collection, according to the 2017 appraisal, were Paul Cézanne’s Le Château Noir (appraised at $50 million in 2016), Piet Mondrian’s Composition C with Grey and Red ($40 million), Constantin Brâncuși’s sculpture La Muse ($40 million), Claude Monet’s Nympheas ($45 million), and Vincent van Gogh’s Carrière près de Saint-Rémy ($60 million). There’s a Cezanne, appraised at $60 million; a Constable, appraised at nearly $19 million; and a Fragonard, at $30 million. In all, the inventory runs to more than 50 pages.

Black’s balance sheet also revealed that he had pledged six artworks to MoMA as gifts, including two Richard Serras and a Jasper Johns, and had pledge another dozen artworks to the Met, including a Gauguin and an Ingres. Black had also pledged $52 million to charitable organizations, such as Dartmouth, Rockefeller University, and MoMA, and more than $13 million for his sister’s memorial garden. The Black Family Foundation had made another $9.5 million in charitable donations. By early 2024, he had given $25 million to the Met. He’s given about $100 million to MoMA in the forms of both cash and art.

The Epstein files also revealed that Jeffrey Epstein, the disgraced financier, helped Black obtain loans from a variety of banks, using his valuable artwork as collateral. According to Black’s December 2015 personal balance sheet, he had borrowed $565 million from Bank of America. His personal borrowings, which he guaranteed, totaled $627 million. He also had more than $100 million in cash, most of which was at U.S. Trust. There were also the toys: the 2002 Gulfstream V jet; the 178-foot 1997 Benetti Starfire yacht; the 36-foot 1995 Hinckley Picnic Boat; and a variety of automobiles, still worth more than $400,000. And, of course, there was his real estate at the time. The cache also revealed that during the first two months of 2015, Black and his family spent $75,499 on art; $35,052 on clothing (including $13,000 at Bergdorf Goodman); $27,196 on dining out (including one meal at Joe’s Stone Crab for $7,688); $67,333 on alcohol, including nearly $20,000 spent at z alone; $105,880 on professional services; nearly $72,000 on landscaping; $52,225 on utilities; $25,000 on his private jet; $13,440
on “clubs and hobbies” and nearly $900 on car washes.

Leon Black first met Jeffrey Epstein in 1996. When I asked Black if Epstein was charming or just a name-dropper, and whether there were things about him he didn’t like, he replied, “C’mon. This was 30 years ago. He was one of the one thousand people I met every year. Over time, we got friendlier because I did find him interesting.” Over a longer period of time, Black said he engaged Epstein to do some “trust and taxation and estate planning work” because “I thought he was pretty smart.” 

A year later, Black appointed Epstein a trustee to his family foundation, which struck me as a rather intimate act for someone he barely knew. Why had he done that, I wondered? First, Black replied, he wanted me to know that the foundation board “didn’t do anything. I don’t think we ever had one meeting.” Having said that, he continued, Epstein “really understood tax very well” and had told Black he worked with many other prominent families on tax and estate matters, although that was a boast Black told me he couldn’t confirm directly because of “privacy and confidentiality” issues. In any event, it was an un-paid, honorary position, so why not invite a guy who was an expert in tax and estate planning onto the board of his family foundation?

Epstein-controlled trusts would eventually be involved in Black’s art deals. The New York Times reported that, in 2016, Black used a 1031 exchange, a provision that allows real-estate investors to swap one investment property for another without incurring a capital gains tax, to sell an Alberto Giacometti sculpture, Figure Moyenne II, for $25 million to a trust—the Haze Trust, controlled by Epstein—and then the same day used the proceeds to buy a Paul Cézanne painting, Portrait de Vallier de Profil, for $30 million. He avoided capital-gains taxes on the sale of the sculpture. The Haze Trust had also bought a Georges Braque painting from Black for $5 million, in another 1031 exchange. Black used the money to buy another Cézanne painting. Whit Clay, a spokesman for Black, told the Times the transactions “were completely legal and appropriate,” and “Mr. Black paid Epstein for legitimate financial advisory services.”

And Black’s passion for art would come to figure, metaphorically, in at least one of their interactions. In the trove of 20,000 Epstein-related documents that Republicans in the House of Representatives released in November 2025, there were about 75 emails, dating from 2015 to 2016, from Epstein to Black. In May 2016, Epstein wrote, “Leon, you hired me to produce a work of art,” he wrote. “[I]t was not inexpensive[.] [T]he value far exceeds any other piece in your collection—by FAR.” Black, of course, has a nearly priceless art collection. “It took me 30 years to be able to craft such a work,” Epstein continued, with the rather forced analogy, and then referencing people who worked for Black in his family office, added, “I understand your desire to modify my work, in doing so you have [B]rad telling me, [‘]just
a bit more red here, let me show you[.’] [Y]ou yourself pick up a brush a[nd] add some strokes. [Y]ou have [J]oslin spray water on it to maintain it. I vigorously complain that [J]oslin i[s] ruining my work … you describe me as [Z]eus, [I] describe it as [being an] artist and a reaction to his work being ruined. [H]owever [I’]m aware that you own the work and you have the right to paint over it[,] tear it up, put it in the closet in the basement. It[’]s yours.” Epstein wrote Black that his goal was “clear” to “end, not extend,” his financial interactions with Black so that he “will have a machine that works” and “will not be complex to oversee.” But, he continued, “to create it, is something else.” He then laid out the cost for Black of his artistry. “Unfortunately for us both, the price for my works has not changed since day one,” he wrote. “[$]40m per year. I’m willing to discount it to [$]35 [million] as I did give you a bad number when asked[,] and should pay an embarrassment fine. I’m also aware, as you made perfectly clear that you have already paid what you consider a great deal of money, for my work. [B]ut again its value exceeds anything else by far in your collection at a cost less than agreed upon.”

I asked Black what he was thinking when this guy he knew for 10 years or so, and who was on the board of his family foundation, and with whom he had discussed the nuances of his children’s personalities, was suddenly being investigated by state and federal prosecutors for pedophilia, essentially, and ended up in jail. “I took it seriously,” he said. “But I didn’t take it that seriously. I mean, he was with a 17-year-old prostitute, got prosecuted for it, and got put away for a year. And, you know, according to him, even that person had shown an ID [to him] that she wasn’t underage. My feeling is there are serious things and there are things that are less serious. I didn’t think this was the end of the world, frankly. I mean, I’ve stayed incredibly close with Mike Milken. Mike Milken went to jail for two years. I stayed close with Alfred Taubman. I stayed close with Martha Stewart. We’re still friends. They all went to jail.” Referring back to a list of famous people who interacted with Epstein, he said, “But most of this list I met after [Epstein’s conviction in June 2008, in a Florida state court]. And he was dealing with big institutions. I mean, J.P. Morgan, Deutsche Bank. It wasn’t like—again he brought Bill Gates up to my office. All of that was after. Not only did I not think it was that serious or heinous, but most of the world didn’t.” Now, though, he conceded the world had changed considerably.

It’s safe to say that prior to Epstein’s arrest on July 6, 2019, few people had any idea that Leon Black and Jeffrey Epstein were as extensively involved with each other as they turned out to be. Few people knew the extent of the rich and powerful people who had ties to the convicted pedophile. That would change quickly, of course, and few were affected quite as extensively and devastatingly as Leon Black, the founder and CEO of Apollo Global Management, the scion of ten generations of Orthodox rabbis.

In October 2020, at a regularly scheduled Apollo board meeting, Black requested that the board’s conflicts committee hire independent, outside counsel to conduct a “thorough and independent” review of his relationship with Epstein. The committee interviewed three firms, Black told me, and then selected Andrew Levander, at Dechert, to undertake the investigation. He told me he was the only person prominently associated with Jeffrey Epstein who ever asked to be investigated by an independent, outside law firm. None of the others, he said, including Leslie Wexner, Glenn Dubin, Jes Staley, Bill Clinton, Donald Trump, Sergey Brin, Alan Dershowitz, Larry Summers, Ehud Barak, or Bill Gates, has asked for—and received—an independent scouring of their relationship with Epstein. “I asked for the damn investigation,” Black told me. “I asked for it because I knew I had done nothing wrong.”

On January 22, 2021, came the public release of Andrew Levander’s much anticipated, 22-page report detailing Black’s relationship with Epstein. Black likes to say the Dechert report was “totally exonerating” of him and his relationship with Epstein. And that’s true, it did clear him of wrongdoing. But whether the report revealed the extent of their relationship or not will probably never be known publicly. (Levander declined to be interviewed about the report.)

Two months later, on March 26, MoMA announced that Black would not run for reelection as chairman MoMA board of trustees when his term ended on June 30. Artists such as Nan Goldin and Ai Weiwei criticized MoMA for continuing to have a relationship with Black, after the Dechert report’s revelations. “How can MoMA stand by Leon Black, a man aligned with Jeffrey Epstein who was responsible for the sex trafficking of teenage girls?” Goldin told Josh Kosman, at the New York Post. According to Kosman, a “number of MoMA trustees have approached” Black about stepping down as chairman of the board of MoMA when his term ended. “Complicating matters,” he continued, was whether Black would remain on the MoMA board. “Remember, if MoMA kicks out Black,” a source told Kosman, “they lose a chance at his personal art collection.” (Black remains on the MoMA board but is no longer its chairman.)

Like nearly everyone else who read the Dechert report, I was incredulous, too. In our conversations, Black said he understood my reaction and was not critical of it. Incredibly, he told me that he had never added up how much he had paid Epstein until he had no choice but to do so as part of Dechert’s investigation. “The paying [of Epstein] was seriatim. I never had tallied it. And frankly that number that came out was much bigger than I had thought.” He continued, “And you can say that’s implausible. . . . How is this possible that this financial genius could throw away these amounts of money? There must be something more there. Yeah, I get it. But there isn’t.” His attorneys at Paul Weiss told me they agreed with Black’s assessment of the Epstein fees. “Again, we’re his lawyers so you can take it for what it’s worth, which maybe is nothing,” one of them said. “But I’ve sat with him and discussed it. I actually credit that. I don’t think that he was really focused on the accumulation of payments over the course of those five years.” 

Black wasn’t finished trying to explain the bizarre juxtaposition of the man whom Businessweek labeled “Ruthless” in a cover story with a man who could somehow fail to keep track of paying Jeffrey Epstein, a convicted pedophile, $158 million for financial advice and only financial advice. It sounded like a justification he had rehearsed, was comfortable with, and thought helped to explain how two diametrically opposed ideas could be true at the same time. “I’m going to tell you something,” he said, “because it is complicated, and it does get into people and personalities. So, I’m known to be a ruthless negotiator. A penny pincher. Sharp elbows. All of the above. I’m also known to pay $50 million for a Raphael. Twice. Not once. Twice. Two Raphaels, $50 [million] each, this big”—and here, he made a small square with his fingers, indicating an eleven-inch drawing—“on paper.” He added, “Why is it implausible? Is it implausible that I would buy two works on paper for $50 million and be the high bidder in an auction, [when] I’m a value investor and never paid the high bid? That wasn’t the way I did things at Apollo.” That was not even the most he had paid for a single artwork. “The Scream was $130 million,” he said, referring to the Munch pastel masterpiece that hangs above the fireplace in his East Side mansion. 

From the book MONEY TO BURN: The Unvarnished Truth About Leon Black, Apollo, and the Rise of a New Wall Street. Published by Portfolio, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House, LLC. © 2026 William D. Cohan.