So in jail, I was in a place called the special housing unit, which is for the roughest, toughest, meanest people.

They had put me there, they said, for my own protection.

So I was in a 8 by 10 cell with a little slit in the door, where they would serve my food on a tray about nine inches by four inches.

And then as soon as I finished the evening, they'd take the tray and close it down.

And one of the guards said,

do you understand there's Wall Street's crashing?

I'm worried about my pension fund. What should I do? And I said, sorry,

Wall Street's crashing? What's happened? And he said, there's some crisis and some companies

are going bankrupt. I said, are you sure? And he said, yeah, it's all over the papers.

Everybody's, we're all terrified. We're going to lose our life savings because we have either a 401k or our pension funds. We don't know anything about money. Mr. Epstein, can you tell us, like, what's going on? Am I going to be able to afford my children's education? Am I going to be bankrupted, like this company called Lehman Brothers?

And there's another company in the front page today called Bear Stearns.

Oh, no, I said. Why? Because that's the company I was a partner in. And in fact, that was a company I had a very large investment in. So, as a great story, I didn't have my Wall Street Journal,

but in the early mornings you're allowed to make two phone calls, collect.

And when you pick up the phone, you can dial a number,

and when the person picks up, they say,

you're getting a call from the Palm Beach County Jail.

Will you accept reverse charges?

And the person either says yes,

and the call goes through, or the person says, no.

The person I called was Jimmy Kane, the president of Bear Stearns.

And I said, tell me what's going on.

And so my knowledge of the financial crisis happened with Jimmy, who was at the center of the storm, telling me about

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