They All Knew and Did Nothing
How New Mexico's entire law enforcement hierarchy — from the governor to the sheriff — was compromised, conflicted, or bought off before a single investigation into Jeffrey Epstein ever opened.
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In the past week, I’ve written about how then New Mexico Attorney General Hector Balderas shut down his investigation into Jeffrey Epstein’s activities at Zorro Ranch in 2019 — a decision he was under no legal obligation to make.
Balderas and New Mexico seemed to forget all about Epstein, his co-conspirators and his largest property by far (Zorro Ranch is 97 times the size of Epstein’s island). That is, until the DOJ Epstein file dump of January 2026, when the role New Mexico and Zorro Ranch played in his enormous child sex trafficking ring and alleged intelligence-gathering operation became too clear to ignore. The ranch was finally searched for the first time March 9, 2026, after current Attorney General Raul Torrez reopened the investigation. Whether there’s anything left to find is another matter.
Today I want to focus on what happened before Balderas almost did the right thing. While Florida was able to secure a federal conviction with evidence that also implicated New Mexico, not a single New Mexico official opened a single investigation into what was happening thirty miles south of the state capital.
Why not, you ask?
Put simply, New Mexico did not investigate Epstein or his ranch from 2006 to 2018 because the very people who would have done the investigating were the same people who had the most reason not to.
THE INVESTIGATION THAT TRIGGERED NOTHING
On May 23, 2006, the FBI formally opened a federal investigation into Jeffrey Epstein codenamed Operation Leap Year. Working out of Florida, agents interviewed thirty-four minors whose accounts corroborated one another in detail. By May 2007, federal prosecutors had prepared a draft indictment of sixty counts. The draft described Epstein as “an extremely high flight risk and a continued danger to the community based upon his continued enticement of underage girls.”
The investigation was not limited to Florida — witness statements to the FBI documented abuse sites included Epstein's Manhattan townhouse, his Paris apartment, and his private island in the U.S. Virgin Islands — and his 7600-acre ranch in New Mexico.
Epstein survivor Maria Farmer had reported abuse at Zorro Ranch to law enforcement as early as 1996.
In 2006, she told a Florida-based FBI agent about her trip to New Mexico with Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell a decade earlier. The FBI continued developing witnesses and victims from across the United States, according to an agency memo, including at least one interview with someone associated with Epstein in New Mexico in early 2007 — the ranch manager, Brice Gordon, who confirmed that Epstein regularly brought women to the property and hired local masseuses.
In September 2007, U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of Florida, Alexander Acosta — who would later tell Donald Trump’s transition team that he had been told Epstein “belonged to intelligence” and to “leave it alone” — signed a secret non-prosecution agreement that buried the sixty-count indictment and granted immunity not just to Epstein but to unnamed co-conspirators. Epstein pleaded guilty to two state charges in Florida and served thirteen months in a county jail with generous work-release privileges. Acosta’s deal with Epstein is widely seen as corrupt. And yet, it was a deal. It was something.
Here in New Mexico, nothing at all was done to punish or stop Epstein. No state investigation was opened. No coordination with the federal case was documented. No sex offender registration was even required after Epstein’s 2008 conviction. Epstein literally went to register as a sex offender and New Mexico basically said don’t worry about it, bro, we gotchu. State land surrounding the ranch continued to be leased to his shell companies. The women and girls who had been abused there continued to have no recourse.
To understand why, you have to understand who was in charge, all the way down the line.
THE SALE
The story begins in 1993, and it begins at the top.
That year, Jeffrey Epstein purchased Zorro Ranch from Bruce King — the sitting Governor of New Mexico, a three-term Democrat and one of the most powerful political figures in the state’s modern history. Epstein’s friend Ghislaine Maxwell knew of the place and made the introductions between the men. The sale price was approximately twelve million dollars. King family land surrounds the ranch on multiple sides. Members of the King family appear in Epstein’s personal contact book.
From the first day Epstein owned Zorro Ranch, the transaction was with the governor of New Mexico — the man who at that moment controlled the state police, oversaw the attorney general, and sat at the center of New Mexico’s Democratic political universe. That relationship did not end with the sale. It would shape what happened — and what did not happen — for the next three decades.
THE ATTORNEY GENERAL
When Operation Leap Year opened in May 2006, the Attorney General of New Mexico was Patricia Madrid, who served from 1999 until January 2007. She was the most active attorney general in the state’s history, and, most notably for this story, started the state’s Internet Crimes Against Children task force to catch sexual predators who use computers to troll for victims. In other words, the kind of person people like Jeffrey Epstein and his co-conspirators least wanted to hang around or communicate with.
I reached Madrid by phone this week, and she told me she had never heard of the Zorro Ranch or Jeffrey Epstein while she was AG, that no one in the FBI or any other organization contacted her in 2006 about him. This seems true, because the FBI did not arrive to start interviewing people at Zorro Ranch until 2007, by which time she was no longer in office.
During the last year of Madrid’s AG post, Epstein and his friends were in close communication with the guy they had decided they wanted to be the next New Mexico Attorney General, however, and they were also donating money to him. Lots of money.
And he won.
On January 1, 2007 — as the FBI was actively building its New Mexico case and interviewing witnesses about New Mexico in Florida — that new Attorney General took office.
His name was Gary King.
He was Bruce King’s son.
And, according to Madrid, “a no-account lawyer who didn’t even know how to try a case.”
King had risen to the top, Madrid says, the same way Balderas and so many other “good old boys” in New Mexico had risen to the top: By being anointed and installed by then-Governor Bill Richardson.
“Bill made Balderas’ career,” says Madrid. “And he made Gary’s. He plucked them out of the crowd and sold them to the public. They were all very close.”
So the “no-account lawyer” whose family had sold Epstein the ranch at the center of a federal sex trafficking investigation was suddenly the state’s chief law enforcement officer. And yet Gary King never declared a conflict of interest. He never recused himself from any Epstein-related matter. And, more importantly, he never opened an investigation.
He did the opposite.
What King did is extensively documented in the recently released Epstein files.
In 2006, while running for AG against Madrid, King accepted fifteen thousand dollars in campaign donations routed through an Epstein company called The Zorro Trust — at a time when Epstein was already under investigation in Florida.
In 2010 — two full years after Epstein’s conviction on child sex crimes — King met privately with Epstein at Jinja Bar and Bistro in Santa Fe. The meeting was arranged via official government email by a staffer in the New Mexico Attorney General’s Office.
In 2014, running for governor, King accepted thirty-five thousand six hundred dollars in donations routed through Epstein shell companies. Epstein’s own attorney, Darren Indyke, advised routing the funds through corporate entities specifically to avoid what he called “additional press coverage” — given that King was campaigning on a platform of protecting children from sexual exploitation. Epstein agreed, instructing his attorney to send the money through “companies or trusts.” King personally thanked Epstein via email for a promised fifty-thousand-dollar personal contribution. He flew on an Epstein-chartered jet during the campaign — a flight arranged through Epstein’s company JEGE LLC from Santa Fe to Washington, D.C. — alongside Deb Haaland, who was then his running mate for lieutenant governor and is currently a candidate for governor of New Mexico. King later claimed he had no idea the plane was Epstein’s, despite emails showing it was King himself who reached out to arrange the flight. Meaning: He lied.
King publicly announced he would return all thirty-five thousand six hundred dollars in Epstein-linked donations from the 2014 campaign. Campaign finance records reviewed by the New Mexico Political Report show no evidence the refunds ever occurred. Meaning: He lied again.
Gary King served as New Mexico’s Attorney General for eight years — the entirety of the window between Operation Leap Year and the Miami Herald investigation that finally triggered Balderas’s inquiry. During those eight years, Jeffrey Epstein was never required to register as a sex offender in the state where he owned a property where abuse had been documented since the mid-1990s.
The conflict of interest extended beyond the AG’s office. Bruce King’s nephew, Jerry King, worked at the New Mexico State Land Office during the critical investigation period. In August 2007 — as federal prosecutors were building their sixty-count case — Zorro Ranch managers documented a conference call with “J. King” about state land lease matters. In February 2008, ranch managers noted that a meeting with Jerry King would be scheduled to discuss delays in processing Epstein’s grazing lease. The same family that sold Epstein the property was simultaneously facilitating his continued access to public land surrounding it — during an active federal investigation.
The State Land Office later acknowledged that a conflict of interest should have been scrutinized. It was not.
Because, New Mexico.
THE GOVERNOR
While Gary King was serving as Attorney General, the governor of New Mexico was Bill Richardson — a former congressman, former U.S. Energy Secretary under President Bill Clinton, former U.N. Ambassador, and two-term governor who served from 2003 to 2011. Richardson was one of the most prominent Democratic politicians of his generation. He ran for president in 2008, which might have been the urgent reason he had for burying the Epstein-Zorro investigation on his home turf, because Richardson did not just accept money from Epstein, he partook of the underaged trafficked girls Epstein offered him, according to survivors.
According to a sworn deposition, New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson sexually abused Virginia Giuffre. At Zorro Ranch. More than once.
Giuffre — one of Epstein’s most prominent survivors, whose posthumous memoir was published after her death in 2023 — stated in a sworn federal deposition that Epstein directed her to have sex with Richardson at the ranch. Richardson, who mysteriously died in his sleep in August 2023 at the age of 75, denied the allegation categorically. His spokesperson called it “completely false.” Giuffre’s account has never been tested in court. It is, however, testimony given under oath in federal litigation. It is a legal document. And I believe her. She had no reason to lie about it, whereas Richardson had many.
What the released Epstein files document beyond the allegation is a relationship between Richardson and Epstein that continued long after Epstein became a convicted sex offender. Richardson arranged to meet with Epstein at least nine times between 2010 and 2018, according to DOJ-released emails. Most meetings were scheduled at Epstein’s Manhattan townhouse. In late 2010, Richardson planned to visit Zorro Ranch. In 2019, Richardson’s spokesperson stated that, to the best of his recollection, Richardson had visited the ranch only once, while campaigning in 2002. That was not accurate. Emails and records show the visits continued. Richardson also visited Epstein’s private island, Little St. James, in 2010 — a visit he publicly denied until flight logs made the denial impossible. In a JPMorgan Chase lawsuit, a bank executive testified that Epstein had referred Richardson to the bank as a client.
“Bill was always making a spectacle of himself, everywhere he was,” says Madrid. “He was always showing up to events surrounded by a bunch of men and all these very young women or girls. He didn’t try to hide it. It was blatant. And all I could think was, his poor wife. He never brought her. Always this big group of young girls. And he and Gary and Hector were all very, very close.”
Richardson, as governor, controlled the entire law enforcement hierarchy of New Mexico. He appointed Carlos Maldonado as Chief of the New Mexico State Police. He appointed John Denko — a former Santa Fe Police Chief and former State Police Chief — as Cabinet Secretary of the Department of Public Safety, the man who oversaw Maldonado and the entire state law enforcement apparatus. Both men served at Richardson’s pleasure.
The New Mexico State Police has statewide jurisdiction. It could have investigated Zorro Ranch independently of the county sheriff, independently of the attorney general. There is no documented record of it taking any action during the 2006-2008 period.
A former official who served in a senior position in the Richardson administration — and who asked not to be identified even though Richardson has been dead since 2023 — told this reporter that Richardson “kept a short leash on everyone in his orbit.” The source’s reluctance to be named years after the governor’s death speaks precisely to New Mexico’s ongoing punitive “loyalty” culture that reluctance describes.
THE SHERIFF
Zorro Ranch sits in Santa Fe County. The first call on any crime committed on that property goes not to the FBI, not to the state police, not to the attorney general — but to the Santa Fe County Sheriff.
From 2003 to 2010, that sheriff was Greg Solano.
In August 2005, Solano accepted a two-thousand-dollar campaign donation from Jeffrey Epstein. When Epstein was criminally charged in Florida the following year, Solano publicly refused to return the money, explaining that he had already spent it and that he was broke.
Solano was re-elected as sheriff in June 2006 with sixty-four percent of the vote. He began his second four-year term on January 1, 2007 — the same day Gary King took office as Attorney General. Together they were the two most directly relevant law enforcement officials for any investigation of Zorro Ranch. Both had taken Epstein’s money. Neither investigated Epstein.
What the public did not know at the time was that Solano was simultaneously running a years-long personal theft operation, stealing county property — protective body armor, police equipment, office supplies — and selling it on eBay for gambling money. He was eventually arrested on two hundred fifty-one counts of embezzlement and fraud, resigned before the end of his term in November 2010, and pleaded guilty. He served six weeks in the county jail he had once run.
The Santa Fe County Sheriff’s Office has confirmed it conducted no investigations into alleged sex crimes at Zorro Ranch during Solano’s tenure.
A NOTE ON THIS PLACE
People who have not lived in New Mexico struggle to understand how any of this was possible. How could so many officials, across so many institutions, willingly fail to protect child sex trafficking and rape victims so completely and for so long?
New Mexico is only slightly smaller than Germany in land area. Its population is barely over two million — roughly the size of a mid-sized American city, spread across an ocean of high desert and mountain range. Everyone in power knows everyone else in power. The families are intermarried across generations. The political dynasties run three terms and hand off to their children. The man who sells you the ranch is the father of the man who doesn’t investigate it. The cabinet secretary used to be the city police chief. The AG’s cousin works at the State Land Office.
In New York or Miami, corruption operates through anonymity and scale. There are enough people, enough institutions, enough parallel power structures that a determined person can find somewhere to turn, someone who isn’t compromised, some exit from the web.
In New Mexico there is no such exit. People with power here learn early — and learn completely — never to rock the boat. It’s a survival strategy in a place where every level of government, law enforcement, and in many cases media, is interlocked. Where speaking up means speaking up to people who are loyal to a fault, vindictive and proud, people who know your family, who control your livelihood, who can close every door in a state where the doors are few. People who know where you live, worship, play. Who know your child’s teacher.
This is why a former Richardson administration official will not put her name on the observation that he kept a short leash on everyone in his orbit — even two years after his death.
This is why residents of Stanley and the surrounding area apparently knew for years that something was wrong at what they called locally “the playboy ranch” — and said nothing, or said it quietly, or said it to people who had every reason not to hear it.
And this is why Jeffrey Epstein — or should we say Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell — chose this place. A vast geography and a tiny, tightly controlled population long accustomed to corruption as a way of life is not an accident of ranch selection. They searched in other western states first. But they settled here. Because here, because New Mexico, is, in operational terms, the ideal location for an intelligence-linked child-sex trafficking operation that needed to stay buried. The women and girls who were brought there — flown in on private planes that landed on the ranch’s private airstrip, from Texas, from New York, from foreign countries, from all over the world — had no idea they were entering a jurisdiction that had been engineered, through decades of political architecture, to have no exits.
WHAT THIS MEANT FOR THE SURVIVORS
At least ten people have alleged that Epstein groomed or abused them as children at Zorro Ranch beginning in the mid-1990s, according to an NBC News review of court testimony, lawsuits, and other records. Half were underaged teenagers when the abuse occurred.
In 2019, a woman identified in court records as Jane Doe described being molested at the ranch in 2004, when she was fifteen. She recalled Epstein laying her on the floor, where she was confronted by framed photographs on his dresser — images of him smiling with wealthy celebrities and politicians.
Another victim, after a crash on an ATV the day after Epstein abused her, was told by another young guest: “Don’t worry. No one gets in trouble for anything here.”
She was right. For nearly thirty years, no one did.
New Mexico did not make human trafficking a felony until 2008. Epstein was never required to register as a sex offender in the state after his Florida conviction. State land continued to be leased to his shell companies. The governor who allegedly abused a victim at the ranch controlled the state police. The attorney general whose family sold Epstein the ranch never opened an investigation. The sheriff who took his money never investigated. The FBI agents who conducted the 2007 ranch interviews were based in Florida, and whatever they found went nowhere when Acosta signed the non-prosecution agreement.
The released Epstein files contain a partially redacted 2019 email referencing an allegation that the bodies of two foreign girls may be buried on the property. The New Mexico Department of Justice has requested the unredacted version. State Representative Andrea Romero called the allegation “horrifying.”
No one had ever searched the property.
Until now.
WHERE THINGS STAND
New Mexico Attorney General Raúl Torrez reopened the investigation earlier this year and ordered a search of the property. People in the area report seeing K-9 officers enter the ranch last week. The legislative truth commission, established with subpoena power and a two-and-a-half-million-dollar budget, held its first meeting in February 2026 and is expected to produce interim findings by July.
This investigation is ongoing. If you have information about activities at Zorro Ranch or the conduct of New Mexico officials in relation to Jeffrey Epstein, you can contact the New Mexico Department of Justice tip line at nmdoj.gov/get-help/epstein-zorro-tips/ — or contact me directly at newstipsalisa@proton.me. I offer these posts freely, but your support is necessary and appreciated! A.
one would think that nationally and in the state of NM, this article could garner some very serious attention.
seems a lot of nm officials folks are ‘playing possum’ on the epstein topic.
Si now that every body knows, how come DT is still in office?