U.S. Attorney General William Barr is said to have personally questioned Jeffrey Epstein’s final cellmate at Manhattan’s Metropolitan Correctional Center following the deceased moneyman’s suicide.
The New York Daily News reported Monday that Barr questioned Efrain “Stone” Reyes, 51, who was moved out of Epstein’s cell just one day prior to Epstein taking his own life on August 10, 2019.
“Barr wanted to know about what was going on in there. Barr told him, ‘I owe you a favor, thank you for telling us the truth,’” an unnamed source told the Daily News.
“He said [Barr] was a good guy. Barr was nice about it. He just wanted to know if [inmates] were being mistreated. What [Reyes] believed happened. Just basically that. He told them everything. He cooperated with Barr,” the source added.
The news comes after Reyes was revealed to have died of coronavirus last month. Reyes was found dead on November 27 at his mother’s house, a NYPD source told the Daily News.
Reyes’s niece, Angelique Lopez, claimed Epstein had issues with both inmates and prison guards before his death.
“They knew how much money he had. They said let’s push him around and extort him for money. They thought they could get his money,” Lopez said. “(Staff) were treating him like crap. They were making him sleep on the floor. They wouldn’t let him sleep on a cot.”
The report regarding Reyes followed a federal judge denying bail for Ghislaine Maxwell, the alleged madame of Epstein, for a second time this year.
Judge Alison Nathan said Maxwell poses a serious flight risk due to her wealth and multiple citizenships.
Maxwell, 58, is in a federal lockup in Brooklyn awaiting a July trial on charges she recruited three teenage girls in the 1990s for Epstein to sexually abuse.
She has pleaded not guilty. Epstein killed himself in a Manhattan federal jail in August 2019 as he awaited trial on sex trafficking charges.
The AP contributed to this report.