Jeffrey Epstein, convicted of soliciting underage girls for sex in his Florida pleasure palace, started his 18 month jail sentence this week. A look at what brought down one of the country's richest men, who owns Manhattan's largest town house, and who, until Monday, was holed up at a tropical paradise known as Xanadu.

It is a stunning downfall for Mr. Epstein, who grew up in Coney Island and went on to live the life of a billionaire, only to become a tabloid monument to an age of hyperwealth. Mr. Epstein owns a Boeing 727 and the largest town house in Manhattan. He has paid for college educations for personal employees and students from Rwanda, and spent millions on a project to develop a thinking and feeling computer and on music intended to alleviate depression.

His crime? This friend of President Clinton's liked massages with happy endings. The happy endings were, of course, provided by teenage girls. (He paid the fourteen-year-old who ended up turning him in a sum of $200 for her services.)

Using his big connections (Ken Starr and Alan Dershowitz were both on his team), Epstein at first seemed to avoid jail time. But an attorney for the government's office in Miami wasn't having it, insisting that Epstein not buy his way out of jail like so many of the rich can do.

Now, Epstein's e-mail autoresponse says he's "on vacation." The future registered sex offender will, in a year and a half, return to Xanadu, where a new estate is being built for him.

The villa will occupy the island’s promontory, which offers views of the Atlantic on one side and the Caribbean on the other. It will have a separate library to house Mr. Epstein’s 90,000 volumes, a Japanese bathhouse and what he calls a “Ziegfeld” movie theater.

For now, however, those visions of a private paradise have been replaced by the cold reality of a jail cell.

Via the New York Times.