PUGILIST EXCLUSIVE: Jeffrey Epstein Tried to Turn Zorro Ranch Into a Legal Municipality in 2018
As federal investigators zeroed in on his other properties before his arrest, Epstein tried to make his New Mexico ranch a town with its own police force.
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In April 2018, as Miami Herald investigative reporter Julie K. Brown was quietly closing in on Jeffrey Epstein's Florida operation, the convicted child sex trafficker was frantically trying to make Zorro Ranch — his remote New Mexico compound that was being ignored by investigators and reporters — its own town with its own police force.
His plan was proposed as a legal inquiry, routed through email, directed to a lawyer and real estate developer who had already solved this sort of problem once before for another powerful client. The lawyer was Gerald G. Barton — 86 years old, dying of melanoma, an Oklahoma-born attorney and golf resort developer who had spent the previous decade embedded deep inside Epstein’s operational and financial infrastructure. Barton had executed a nearly identical scheme for Aubrey McClendon, the Oklahoma energy billionaire who died in a single-vehicle crash at 88 miles per hour the morning after his federal indictment in 2016.
According to FBI files released by the Department of Justice and indexed under Bates number EFTA00826214, Epstein was exploring the legal mechanics of incorporating Zorro Ranch — his 7,600-acre compound thirty miles south of Santa Fe, New Mexico — as a private municipality with its own governance structure, legal identity, and potentially its own law enforcement jurisdiction.
The first stumbling block they encountered was the lack of people living on the land. Under New Mexico statute, incorporation of a town requires a petition signed by not less than 200 qualified electors who must swear they have resided within the territory for at least six months prior to signing — and the territory must have a population density of not less than one person per acre. In their email exchange, Barton proposes a solution to Epstein that he appears to have used before: Move a bunch of people onto the land in mobile homes and populate it with residents who, in Barton’s own words, “would have no idea what we intended to do with the property nor would the governmental authority.”
This was happened around the same time Epstein was suddenly demanding his tech guys find a way to build a massive military/industrial grade microwave radio communications network at Zorro Ranch, similar to one he’d been operating until then at his private island near St. Thomas. While I can’t be sure of this, it seems to point to Epstein making a choice while under increasing federal law enforcement scrutiny, to move his base of operations to the one property he owned that he knew no one would investigate: Zorro Ranch in New Mexico, where, the files tell us, at least four top political and law enforcement figures had possibly known about what he was doing and protected him in exchange for campaign donations and other favors.
Barton, after reviewing New Mexico statutes, concluded the plan carried too much risk. Public hearings would be required. The press might investigate the motivation behind the new town’s creation. “I believe in the middle of this undeserved hysteria and the potential of an investigative reporter from the press,” Barton wrote, “there is not a good risk-reward ratio.”
He apologized. He signed the email “Jerry.”
Three months later, Gerald G. Barton was dead. Fourteen months after that, Jeffrey Epstein was arrested on federal sex trafficking charges. He died in a Manhattan federal detention facility in August 2019, 35 days after his arrest, before he could be tried.
Aubrey McClendon, the man for whom Barton had previously executed a private town scheme, was already four years in the ground.
The full operational history of what Gerald Barton built, for whom, and why, died with all three men.
But the paper trail of the secret did not.
THE LAWYER FROM OKLAHOMA
Gerald G. Barton was, the FBI files reveal, one of the most deeply embedded civilian associates in Epstein’s entire network — present across a decade of correspondence, financial schemes, physical visits to Epstein’s properties, and discussions that, by Barton’s own communications behavior, he considered too sensitive to conduct by telephone.
Barton was born in Oklahoma City in 1931, the son of schoolteachers turned theater owners. He earned his law degree from the University of Oklahoma in 1955, alongside his wife Jo Clough, and served in the Judge Advocate General’s corps in Washington before returning to Oklahoma to build a real estate empire. He served on the National Democratic Finance Committee in the mid-1970s and worked directly for Oklahoma Governor David Hall. He continued supporting Democratic Party causes and candidates for the rest of his life — his obituary directed memorial gifts to the Oklahoma Democratic Party.
Through his company Landmark Land, Barton built some of the most prestigious golf resort communities in the United States: Kiawah Island’s Ocean Course, PGA West, La Quinta Resort, Palm Beach Polo and Country Club, Carmel Valley Ranch. His courses hosted the PGA Championship, the 1992 Ryder Cup, the U.S. Amateur. He was, by any measure, a figure of substantial institutional reach across the Democratic Party, the energy industry, the resort development world, and the legal establishment. Something like the democrat version of Donald J. Trump, with whom he was friendly and often crossed paths.
Barton was also, the FBI files show, a man who practiced deliberate operational security in his communications with a convicted sex offender for at least a decade, and tried to help him turn his ranch into a city where Epstein himself was the law.
THE RELATIONSHIP
The earliest Barton-Epstein correspondence in the released files dates to 2009 — the year Epstein completed his work release following his 2008 Florida conviction on prostitution charges involving a minor. On July 22, 2009, Barton emailed Epstein a single line: “July 22nd -- Independence Day?????” Epstein replied from his iPhone with one word: “Home.” He was free. Both men appear jubilant about it.
Over the following decade, Barton made repeated visits to Epstein’s properties. He stayed in Epstein’s Manhattan apartments — multiple units in a building at 301 East 66th Street — with stays coordinated by Lesley Groff, Epstein’s personal assistant, who was later named in civil suits by survivors for her role in facilitating trafficking operations but who, like so many other people associated with Epstein, has never been subpoenaed. Barton visited Epstein’s Palm Beach mansion, where on at least one occasion he left his reading glasses behind, prompting his son Douglas to email Epstein directly to arrange their retrieval.
The son is interesting, too. Douglas G. Barton — identified in the files as a senior Landmark Land officer and Vice President of Community Development — was integrated into the relationship across multiple contexts. He accompanied his father to meetings. He handled logistics. He communicated directly with Epstein and his staff. The Barton relationship with Epstein was multigenerational.
Gerald Barton communicated through layers of deliberate distance. His assistant, identified in the files as “Gi Feather,” sent emails on his behalf. Physical packages were routed not to Barton personally but through FSF, LLC — one of the approximately 56 shell entities in Epstein’s Virgin Islands corporate structure, documented by KPMG in estate litigation. When Epstein offered in October 2012 to call Barton immediately to discuss an upcoming New York meeting, Barton declined. He preferred to wait weeks for an in-person conversation rather than speak by phone.
THE TAX SCHEME AND THE APARTMENT
The financial dimension of the relationship centered, at least in part, on a $166 million tax loss Barton had accumulated through Landmark Land’s savings and loan collapse in the early 1990s — a collapse that resulted in the government seizure of Barton’s entire empire, the freezing of his personal assets, and a formal finding by the Office of Thrift Supervision that Barton had demonstrated “personal dishonesty.”
Barton spent years fighting the government. He won a partial recovery in federal court in 2002. But the $166 million tax loss remained, and Barton believed it could be monetized.
Epstein had a knack for locating powerful men in trouble, and rescuing them at the moment they most needed help. Zorro Ranch itself has hints of that strategy, as he bought it from then sitting governor of New Mexico Bruce King, at a time, according to the Albuquerque Journal, that he was in serious financial trouble with his businesses, owing tens of millions of dollars to creditors. In walked Epstein, with an offer he couldn’t refuse. What this strategy might have done is make otherwise reticent men feel indebted to Epstein in some way, and as such, would be more inclined to cover for him or do him favors.
In a separate email to Epstein — referencing their prior discussions and thanking Epstein for the “periodic availability” of his New York apartment — Barton requested a meeting to explore using the tax loss. He noted casually that Donald Trump had recently purchased Doonbeg Golf Club in Ireland — a project Landmark Land had originally developed rights to in the 1990s before losing it to another developer. Barton refers to Trump as “your friend” to Epstein.
Epstein tried to help Barton with his tax problems. In April 2010, he wrote to Barton: “tax loss virtually impossible to monetize.”
Barton’s response: “Thank you for trying, but most of all, thank you for caring.”
The financial scheme had failed. The relationship did not
THE McCLENDON PRECEDENT
When Barton wrote to Epstein in April 2018 about the private town scheme, he was explicit about his prior experience. “In the project I worked on for Aubrey McClendon,” he wrote, “we were moving several people to the site to live in mobile homes. They would have no idea what we intended to do with the property nor would the governmental authority.”
Aubrey McClendon was the co-founder of Chesapeake Energy, one of the largest natural gas producers in the United States, and one of the country’s largest private landowners during his peak years. He was also, from 2008 to 2013, the subject of multiple state and federal investigations into bid-rigging, antitrust violations, and land lease manipulation.
On March 1, 2016, a federal grand jury indicted McClendon on charges of conspiring to rig bids for oil and gas leases in northwest Oklahoma. He drove his SUV at 88 miles per hour into a concrete overpass embankment the following morning. Police said he drove straight into the wall with no attempt to correct course. There were no skid marks. The Department of Justice dismissed his indictment less than 48 hours after his death. A co-conspirator who had testified against him before the grand jury was never charged.
The property on which Barton executed his private town scheme for McClendon has not been publicly identified. It exists somewhere in Oklahoma public records. It has not been reported that I could find.
Barton brought that same scheme — refined, tested, legally vetted — to Epstein two years after McClendon’s death. At 86 years old and dying, he made the trip anyway.
TERRAMAR ON LAND
The private town scheme was not an isolated idea. It was the land-based expression of a sovereign territory strategy that ran across multiple Epstein properties and extended to Ghislaine Maxwell’s parallel efforts at sea.
Maxwell’s TerraMar Project, founded in 2012, was built around the legal concept of international waters as jurisdiction-free space. Its stated mission involved ocean citizenship and environmental protection. Its operational logic was the same as Barton’s private town proposal: find or create a jurisdictional gap, and operate inside it. In simplest terms, Epstein and Maxwell were both looking for places on the planet Earth where they could commit act that would be crimes anywhere else, and get away with it, legally.
The Barton email is the missing land link that makes this pattern in their child sex trafficking blackmail operation (and other operations) documentable rather than theoretical.
THE DEAD END
Gerald G. Barton died on July 26, 2018, in Annapolis, Maryland — three months after writing his final known communication to Jeffrey Epstein. He was 86. The melanoma he had carried for twelve years had finally won.
Jeffrey Epstein was arrested on July 6, 2019. He died on August 10, 2019.
Aubrey McClendon died on March 2, 2016.
These three men took to their graves the full operational history of a scheme — tested in Oklahoma, proposed for New Mexico, abandoned only because New Mexico’s laws and Brown’s investigations made it too visible — to place powerful men beyond the reach of government authority on American soil.
I offer these posts freely, but your support is appreciated and necessary. Please like, comment on and share my work if it moves you. Subscribe, paid if you’re able. Tips are also great. Just four $25 tips a day keep me writing full time.
“A knack for locating powerful men in trouble.” I suspect this would be an endless source. Once again, you are connecting dots and strategies that need to be brought to light. No matter which political party. Thank you!
Interesting. The whole town thing looks like the "freedom cities" the tech bros are trying to build (see Gil Duran's work on substack).