Maybe a good secretary of labor is just hard to find. Either your nominee is opposed by most of Washington, or he’s cutting sweetheart deals with a sexual predator. O.K., I’ll admit that’s a cheap crack, but I offer it as a news peg, as they say in the business, the same peg that The Miami Herald used in unveiling a remarkable investigative series led by reporter Julie K. Brown. It showed how, a decade ago, a billionaire pedophile was able to use his wealth and connections to escape any semblance of a just punishment. One of the people who allowed the billionaire to skate was Alexander Acosta, currently secretary of labor, then a U.S. attorney for Southern Florida. But, really, Acosta was just one of many ugly players. Brown lays out in detail how the whole system shielded the billionaire from the gravity of his crimes. That its functionaries felt compelled to do so says a lot about our ruling elites. It’s enough to make you pine for Robespierre. But perhaps there’s more to be said than that.

According to the Herald, the basic story is this: Jeffrey Epstein is a billionaire financier who is said to own the largest residence in Manhattan, plus a Palm Beach mansion, New Mexico ranch, and Caribbean island. He is also a sexual pervert who, until about 12 years ago, preyed serially on teenage children, roughly until they reached the age of consent and became, in his eyes, unattractive. Because of an insatiable appetite for variety, he paid his victims to recruit even newer victims, and on and on in a chain that linked scores and scores of kids. What did authorities do when they found out, back in 2005? They spent a couple of years investigating and drawing up an indictment, then proceeded to quash further investigation, cooperated with Epstein’s lawyers to avoid publicity, violated procedures about plea bargains, made Epstein serve only 13 months in confinement, put him in the county jail rather than state prison, allowed him to leave jail and go to his office for 12 hours a day, raised no objection to him hiring sheriff’s deputies from the jail to guard him outside of the jail, and concealed most of the terms of the settlement from the public and the victims themselves. (On Monday, Epstein settled a related civil lawsuit and agreed to a financial settlement with many of his victims, again avoiding a public trial.)

Now for the bad part. Epstein’s enablers weren’t a handful of Palm Beach rogues. (On the contrary, among the few heroes of the story were Palm Beach police chief Michael Reiter and the late detective Joseph Recarey.) Instead, the higher up the chain you went, the more sympathetic to Epstein the players seem to become. It was U.S. Attorney Alexander Acosta who helped cut short the investigation and his lead prosecutor, A. Marie Villafaña, who e-mailed Epstein’s lawyers, “I can file the charge in district court in Miami which will hopefully cut the press coverage significantly. Do you want to check that out?’’ It was a prosecutor from Cyrus Vance Jr.’s office in Manhattan who pleaded before an incredulous judge to downgrade Epstein’s sex-offender status. Those who came to Epstein’s legal aid included Alan Dershowitz (who says he’s still offering advice to Epstein) and Ken Starr—yes that same Ken Starr. The man who once pursued a president for concealing an affair with a 22-year-old was now helping Epstein outsmart those pursuing him over the sexual abuse of 14-year-olds.

Before the trouble hit, big shots loved Epstein. As a 2003 profile by Vicky Ward in Vanity Fair revealed, he was friendly, and sometimes entwined, with people like Larry Summers, Mort Zuckerman, Lewis Ranieri, Ronald Perelman, Tom Pritzker, Prince Andrew, Bill Clinton, and Florida neighbor Donald Trump. He had perches on the Trilateral Commission, the Council on Foreign Relations, and the Institute of International Education. In 2002, he offered a Boeing 727 on things like humanitarian trips to Africa with Chris Tucker, Kevin Spacey, Bill Clinton, and Ron Burkle. Clinton took at least a dozen flights on Epstein’s plane, perhaps closer to two dozen, and the flight logs of a short 2002 trip in Asia do not list Secret Service agents. (Clinton’s press secretary, Angel Ureña, states that Clinton has never traveled without Secret Service protection.) In 2003, Epstein donated $6.5 million to Harvard, when Summers was still president, in support of a program to be headed up by his friend Martin Nowak, a mathematical biologist. (Nowak told Ward about visiting Epstein’s island lair and the two men having three-hour sunrise conversations about theoretical physics. “Then,” Nowak said, “he’ll go off and do some work, reappear, and we’ll talk some more.” All work and no play?)