Peter Mandelson and Jeffrey Epstein: Ex-Labour minister shopping with depraved ...

(fashion) Two middle-aged holidaymakers walk into a fashion boutique in one of those exotic millionaire’s playgrounds where the sun always shines and endless palm trees sway in the afternoon breeze.

One is Jeffrey Epstein, a mysterious financier fond of very young girls, many of whom have for years been systematically exploited and sexually abused in his various luxury homes.

The other is Peter Mandelson, the former British Cabinet minister and long-term friend of Epstein’s closest chum Ghislaine Maxwell, who was staying on the luxury resort island of St Barts.

His journey through public life has already twice been interrupted by scandals involving stupendously wealthy men.

The year is 2005 and Mandelson is taking time off from his work as the European Union’s Trade Commissioner, for which taxpayers are paying him a salary in excess of £200,000 a year.

Epstein (unbeknownst to the world at this point) is under police investigation for numerous ghastly sex offences. Meanwhile, he is doing what he does best: pursuing a Gatsby-esque friendship with a famous and powerful man.

Guests who have spent time on his nearby private island Little St James, a stunning, 72-acre patch of the U.S. Virgin Islands, have included a virtual Who’s Who of celebrities — from Bill Clinton to Naomi Campbell, Stephen Hawking and, perhaps most notoriously, our very own Prince Andrew. On various trips to Chateau Epstein, they’ve spent days or even weeks sunbathing on his private beaches, swimming in his pools or playing tennis on his personal court.

When things start to feel claustrophobic, Epstein’s guests enjoy still more of the high life, taking one of his yachts or helicopters for island-hopping jaunts where they dine in upscale restaurants, or indulge in a bit of retail therapy in a Caribbean tax haven’s smart if somewhat overpriced shopping mall.

All of which brings us back to Mandelson. He’s known the generous host in these pictures for several years, having previously once visited his Caribbean island for a holiday — when neither Epstein nor any of the girls were there — and, on another occasion, dined with various celebrities at his $77 million New York townhouse, filled with erotic art and lurid photographs of young women.

Both men share a love of flashy designer clobber. To this end, Mandelson, sporting a Patek Philippe watch worth £21,000 (almost two months of his post-tax income) can be seen in a Caribbean boutique trying on a swanky white leather belt.

It’s the perfect accessory to complete his nautical Man From Del Monte-style holiday ensemble, which includes a natty white bracelet, white linen shorts, and blue short-sleeved shirt. Epstein looks on with a sort of proprietorial glee. As well he might. For this man has devoted years to building cosy (and, as a financier, potentially very profitable) relationships with the world’s most powerful men.

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Mandelson and Epstein’s hitherto unknown shopping trip took place on December 27, 2005, six months before the now-notorious Epstein was arrested in Florida and charged with a string of child sex offences.

Details have emerged, and can now be reported, thanks to two of the extraordinary photographs that are featured on these pages.

They form part of a remarkable and never-before-seen cache that provide a visual record of daily life in the high-octane (and somewhat seedy) orbit of the morally-bankrupt billionaire, who killed himself in prison this month while facing prosecution on multiple counts of paedophilia and child sex trafficking.

Obtained by the Mail via a source with detailed knowledge of events on Little St James — now nicknamed ‘paedophile island’ and ‘orgy island’ — the photographs raise tricky questions for Mandelson as well as a number of Epstein’s closest associates.

There are multiple images of Ghislaine Maxwell, the British socialite who orchestrated the billionaire’s social life, introduced him to Prince Andrew and has been widely accused (in multiple lawsuits, and in court in New York this week) of recruiting teenage girls to Epstein’s child prostitution ring.

Maxwell, the daughter of crooked newspaper tycoon Robert, who has previously denied any wrongdoing, features in several striking images, including one on these pages which shows her inside Epstein’s main residence on Little St James. It was taken shortly after Christmas 2006.

That date is significant. It was just six months after Epstein had been charged with abusing a large number of teenage girls. He was in the process of assembling a superstar legal team which pulled strings to prevent him serving a substantial prison sentence.

Yet he seems to have barely a care in the world. Indeed, with extraordinary chutzpah, he and Maxwell can be seen larking around with several alleged ‘sex slaves’ who had been flown to the island for the New Year holidays.

Most of the girls, whose pictures cannot be printed (as victims, they must not be identified), appear to be in their late teens. Equally damning for Maxwell is the fact that she can be seen embracing Jean-Luc Brunel, a French model agency boss accused (again in multiple lawsuits, and in a New York court this week) of helping traffic teenage girls.

Brunel, now 72, was alleged in recently unsealed court documents to have used his fashion business to provide the billionaire with a steady supply of impressionable young women who were then sexually assaulted. In return, Epstein is said to have invested in his businesses. Now under investigation, he has also denied wrongdoing.

‘As you can see from the photos, Jean-Luc and Ghislaine were best of friends and worked very closely together with the girls they brought to Jeffrey,’ says the aforementioned source. Any time they were on the island, they managed groups of girls, told them what to do, how to do it, how to please Jeffrey, and instructed them how to behave in front of his guests.’

To this end — while it must again be stressed that Maxwell and Brunel have always denied criminality — they have been accused of committing hair-raising misdemeanours in a series of lawsuits and witness statements filed in the U.S. in recent months.

Most notably, Brunel (who was further accused of sexual assault by three women interviewed by The Guardian last month) appears in recently unsealed court documents, which claim he once flew three 12-year-old girls from France to the U.S. to provide erotic massages for Epstein, by way of a sordid birthday present.

A fourth photo from the cache obtained by the Mail shows Epstein, then in his 50s, touring his island on a quad bike. He regularly used the machine to transport topless teenagers to and from the beach, and to visit an outdoor temple he built near a corner of the island where he’s believed to have committed several sex crimes.

Other images provide further insights into life on Little St James, revealing, for example, that Perspex boxes filled with condoms were kept in guest bedrooms.

‘You hear so many people who were there, or who knew and spent time with Epstein, now saying, “Oh, we never suspected anything bad was happening,” or “We never thought the girls were being exploited,”’ adds the source.

‘The pictures show just how absurd those claims are. Epstein, a man in his 50s, was surrounding himself with teenagers.

‘If you were sitting there, having a glass of champagne at sundown, or eating crab cakes at lunch, and you saw the young girls being made to parade around and asked to give people massages, you’d have to have been blind to think something wasn’t wrong.

‘There’s no way a right-thinking person could have spent time with Epstein on Little St James and thought some of the things going on were remotely OK.’

This island was a place where some of the world’s most famous and powerful men and women have seen fit to accept freebie holidays.

Cathy Alexander, who worked as a housekeeper there, told the Mail On Sunday in a 2011 interview that Andrew turned up on one visit in the early 2000s with a tall, busty, blonde woman who shared his room. Alexander recalled that the prince’s consort ‘was a brain surgeon’.

She further told reporters that Mandelson’s visit saw his partner, Reinaldo, suffer serious sunburn. All of which begs a few questions about character. Among them: what on

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