New details revealed about Jeffrey Epstein’s friendship with his final cellmate

Stephen Rex Brown, New York Daily News
Updated

NEW YORK — Jeffrey Epstein’s final cellmate hesitated to leave a hellish lower Manhattan jail because he’d befriended the alleged sex trafficker, new court transcripts reveal.

Efrain “Stone” Reyes was the last inmate to share a cell with Epstein prior to Epstein's suicide. Reyes, a cooperating witness in a Bronx narcotics case, was transferred from the Metropolitan Correctional Center to a private Queens jail commonly referred to by the name of its operator, GEO Group, on Aug. 9, 2019. Less than 24 hours later, Epstein was found hanging in his cell.

The suicide shook Reyes, according to his attorney Marlon Kirton.

“Mr. Epstein had trouble adjusting to being in jail and the population at the MCC. ... He was finally placed with Mr. Reyes ... They got along very well and they both helped each other.

“Obviously (Reyes) wanted to move out of the MCC to GEO, but probably the only reason he didn’t want to be transferred out of the MCC was the relationship that he built up with Mr. Epstein,” Kirton said last year at Reyes’ sentencing.

“I think my client’s presence stabilized Mr. Epstein, to a certain extent, and I think it was very hard on my client when Mr. Epstein committed suicide. It was very, very difficult.”

Transcripts of Reyes’ guilty plea and sentencing were unsealed last week in redacted form following a request by the New York Daily News. The unlikely friendship between the recovering drug addict with an array of health problems and the multimillionaire sex offender was revealed by the Daily News in December.

Epstein bought Reyes, 51, contraband drugs to help him go to sleep, according to a source close to Reyes. Their friendship was a departure from Epstein’s earlier experiences at MCC, where sources said he was threatened and extorted by inmates.

After the shocking suicide, Reyes told inmates at GEO that he’d been questioned by then-Attorney General William Barr, according to a source. A former Barr spokesman denied that account.

Reyes was released from GEO — officially known as the Queens Detention Facility — in April after catching coronavirus. Inmates previously told the Daily News the jail was overwhelmed by a COVID-19 outbreak.

“You know, the beds are close to each other. There is no way you can really quarantine yourself ... when the guys is, like, 2 feet apart, 1 foot apart. You know, everybody is around you. We share the bathroom, we share the shower,” Reyes said, adding that he was recovering from coronavirus but still “a little labored on breathing.”

The father of two said he hoped to get his life together.

“When I got arrested in 2018, I was a man with eyes but was blind. I had a brain, but I was thinking insane. And throughout this time, I got ... a second chance in life. Nobody wants to go to jail, but getting arrested really saved my life,” Reyes said.

Judge Katherine Polk Failla said Reyes was less culpable than others arrested in the takedown of a crack and heroin ring operating around the Lambert Houses near the Bronx Zoo. She sentenced him to time served.

“Mr. Reyes, sir, my sincerest hope is that you do not get any sicker, that your symptoms resolve themselves quickly, that you join your niece and her sons or her children in the near term, and that you finally make it out to Pennsylvania to begin a new life,” Failla said.

Reyes died Nov. 27 at a Bronx apartment belonging to his mother and niece. A source said he never fully recovered from COVID-19 and suffered breathing problems.

Reyes and his family were not interested in publicity relating to Epstein. They preferred that his cooperation, the extent of which is not public, be kept under wraps, Kirton said during a hearing last month on the Daily News’ unsealing request.

“Mr. Reyes is not a celebrity. His contact with Mr. Epstein was basically coincidental,” Kirton said.

“He happened for a brief time to be a cellmate with who I call the most notorious defendant in the Southern District since the terrorism cases of the 1990s.”

———

Originally published

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