First Friends: How the First Couple’s Consigliere Went From Modeling Mogul to Special Envoy

The Trump administration’s dramatic reversal with respect to the Jeffrey Epstein case continues to confuse and enthrall, with President Trump still doubling down that the entire “Epstein thing” is a “Democrat hoax.” While Democrats certainly have sought to take advantage of situation for partisan ends, the reversal in rhetoric –– particularly after transparency in the Epstein case was made an important part of Trump’s 2024 campaign –– has seemingly defied explanation. Indeed, the timing of the reversal, which occurred after a protracted delay and then final reneging on releasing files about the case, has been hard for many to swallow.

Amid the fall-out from the administration’s about-face, the Trump administration has sought to mitigate the failure to “release the files” by publishing interviews with Ghislaine Maxwell (who has been desperately seeking a pardon or commuted sentence) and by issuing subpoenas to Bill and Hillary Clinton, a clear effort to divert “transparency” in the case into something more politically favorable to Republicans. 

However, as posited in Unlimited Hangout’s series “First Friends,” Trump’s effort to alter the narrative around the Epstein case may be aimed at shielding, not only potentially himself, but people in his close social circle, including at least one figure currently serving in his administration. That figure, Paolo Zampolli –– the administration’s current Special Envoy for Global Partnerships –– is the subject of this investigation. 

In Part I of this series, we met one of Trump’s closest friends from Italy: Flavio Briatore, a P2 lodge and Italian mafia-linked businessman with ties to prominent Victoria’s Secret Angels, at least one of whom he introduced to Epstein. In this second installment, the connections of Zampolli, another Italian close to both Trump and Briatore, are the focus. Zampolli has been in the news recently, not for the backdoor wheeling-and-dealing of his new, official U.S. government post, but because Trump and his wife Melania claim to have been first introduced by Zampolli amid assertions to the contrary that claim it had been Epstein.

As this investigation will show, Zampolli is deeply corrupt. From his beginnings as a protégé for the controversial modeling mogul John Casablancas, a man known for his appetite for what he called “child women,” Zampolli grew his modeling empire with money from Silvio Berlusconi, the corrupt Italian Prime Minister (and close friend of Flavio Briatore) who was forced to resign for his sexual escapades with minors while in office. Zampolli would later follow Casablanca’s example and marry his wife when she was 19, having met her not long after she had flown as an under-age teen on Epstein’s “Lolita Express.” 

After leaving the world of modeling to work for Donald Trump in the early 2000s, Zampolli would become closely affiliated with the Clintons as well as the United Nations, where he worked on their climate change initiatives and on the development of the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals, or SDGs. In particular, Zampolli was part of the team that developed SDG 14 “Life Under Water” alongside Stuart Beck, a figure closely tied to CIA regime change operations in Palau, as well as none other than Ghislaine Maxwell and her TerraMar project. 

Yet, that is not all Zampolli would accomplish at the UN, as he would figure prominently in a major UN financing scandal and also boasted close ties to suspect citizenship-by-investment schemes that would later see one of his close colleagues arrested and another dead under exceedingly bizarre circumstances. Those colleagues had been taking bribes from an organized crime and CCP-linked Chinese billionaire who was once at the center of the scandal that directly intersects with most of Jeffrey Epstein’s seventeen visits to the Clinton White House.

Once Trump would take office as president, Zampolli attempted to re-brand so he could become a close ally of the president, despite continuing to promote overtly globalist UN policies that ostensibly run counter to Trump’s “populist” campaigns in 2016, 2020 and 2024. Zampolli would see some minor appointments in Trump’s first term, though he would instead mainly play roles in both a major UN scandal and in the Harvey Weinstein scandal during that time. More recently, a less impeded Zampolli was appointed to a special envoy position, one where he –– behind the scenes –– makes the kind of backdoor deals that have marked his entire career in the name of ginning up Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) and forging trade deals, especially in his native country of Italy. As an example of the reach of his behind-the-scenes influence, Zampolli was originally the mind that came up with the idea of “resolving” the Israel-Palestine conflict by turning the Gaza Strip into a “Riviera” resort, years before such a plan was uttered by his current boss Donald Trump or Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner.

The story of Paolo Zampolli is ultimately an indictment of how political corruption, typified by the Epstein case and other scandals, is so often bipartisan despite media attempts to paint only one party as sleaze, depending on a person’s preferred echo chamber. If the American people were to realize that the both public faces of the power structure of their country is corrupt, the Trump administration’s failure to produce files on the Epstein case would quickly make much more sense. 

Zampolli’s Italian Beginnings and Early Connections

Paolo Zampolli was born in Milan to an elite family that had become even wealthier due to the success of the Italian toy company Harbert, which licensed American toys (i.e. Star Wars figures and Easy Bake ovens) in Italy. After his father died in a skiing accident when Zampolli was 18, he left college early to take over the company. However, he quickly decided Milan was “too small” for him and his ambitions. In pursuit of something bigger, he decided to sell his family’s company to the Italian mogul and politician Silvio Berlusconi.  

As noted in Part I of this series, Berlusconi was a member of the notorious freemasonic lodge P2, which was at the heart of the European nexus that united organized crime as well as U.S. and allied intelligence agencies with powerful politicians and business leaders, many of whom were fascist sympathizers. Berlusconi’s own mysterious rise was reportedly enabled directly by P2, as his early trajectory to becoming a billionaire and later Italy’s Prime Minister reportedly began with an infusion of capital from mysterious sources (masked by a maze of holding companies) shortly after he joined the lodge. Berlusconi’s political career would later be marred by scandal after he was convicted of hiring an “underage prostitute” and hosting “bunga bunga” parties where he had orgies with young women and teen girls. The acts that were a focus of that case occurred while Berlusconi was Prime Minister.

Zampolli remained an admirer of Berlusconi from the late 1980s through his death in 2023. Zampolli also cultivated ties to one of the late Prime Minister’s closest pals, Flavio Briatore, which persist to the present. The ties of Briatore to organized crime as well as P2, the Epstein/Maxwell network and Donald Trump were the focus of Part I of this series.

After Berlusconi bought his company, Zampolli became involved in the modeling industry. However, it’s not exactly clear how he first got his start in model management. Zampolli himself has hinted that it began with his childhood fascination with John Casablancas, the controversial founder of Elite Model Management. Zampolli has claimed to have actually spent vacations with Casablancas when he was a child vacationing at his family’s home in Ibiza, Spain. “I had John Casablancas spending the summer [with] me when I was a kid,” Zampolli once told Vanity Fair in 2001. The Vanity Fair article also notes that Zampolli later accompanied Casablancas on scouting trips to Eastern Europe, though the dates aren’t provided. Casablancas corroborated his early ties to Zampolli, as he was once quoted as saying “I’ve known Paolo from before the beginning.”

By 1994, Zampolli had become the lead organizer of the Look of the Year contest in Ibiza. According to Zampolli himself, he was chosen to organize the contest in 1994 because he “brought to the table Club Med and Italian TV!” Club Med, i.e. Club Méditerranée, was acquired in the 1960s by a group led by Baron Edmond de Rothschild after he “visited a Club Med in Israel and liked it. Baron Edmond not only paid Club Med’s debts, but acquired a 34 percent stake in the growing tour operator.” Joining the French Rothschild interests in that group was the Gunzberg family, which – at that point – had intermarried with the organized crime-adjacent Bronfman family of Seagrams fame. The notorious frontman of the Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI) Ghaith Pharaon was also a shareholder in Club Med and used his shares in it to secure lines of credit from BCCI, which was tied to intelligence services, drug cartels and organized crime from its founding up until its collapse in 1991. Jeffrey Epstein, who also entered the world of modeling in the 1990s and was a reported friend of Zampolli’s, was tied to BCCI in the 1980s as were some of Epstein’s 80s-era clients, such as weapons dealer and intelligence asset Adnan Khashoggi. It is unclear how Zampolli became connected with Club Med, but his ties to Italian TV were likely related to Silvio Berlusconi, whose assets included numerous Italian television channels and who has been referred to as “the father of Italian broadcasting.” This would suggest that Zampolli’s ties to Berlusconi persisted after the sale of his family company.

The annual Look of the Year contest that Zampolli organized was put on by Casablanca’s Elite Model Management. However, the top Elite executive that managed the competitions during the late 1980s and 1990s was the then-head of the European branch of Elite Models, Gerald Marie. Marie’s modeling agency Paris Planning had merged with Casablanca’s agency in 1986. Marie has since been accused of a litany of sexual assaults and rapes during the 1980s and 1990s by several well-known and lesser known models, accusations which have been deemed credible by Marie’s wife at the time. Some of Marie’s accusers have alleged that they were “trafficked” by Marie to “wealthy men across Europe for purposes wholly unrelated to modeling.” One of Marie’s accusers, Jill Dodd, has claimed that she and others “were just young, and being taken advantage of, and groomed and sold by our agents.” Dodd said that, after being raped by Marie, the agency set her up and pressured her into a relationship with the aforementioned Adnan Khashoggi. Dodd says she later discovered that Marie’s modeling agency at the time (Paris Planning) had been paid $50,000 by Khashoggi to arrange their meeting. Marie was later reportedly involved with MC2, the modeling agency created by Jean Luc Brunel and funded by Jeffrey Epstein that became a major focus of investigations into Epstein’s sex trafficking.

News coverage of the Zampolli-organized 1994 Look of the Year contest noted that underage girls from around the world were asked to attend and were flown out to the contest without their parents, despite “being so young.” Male “chaperones” were then assigned to the teens, with one such “chaperone” named Pat Lanzillo remarking that he was reminded of how young these “beautiful” teens were when some called their parents crying. The report also notes how the teens were taken to a “wild” nightclub on the island for their “night off.”

Elite’s Look of Year contests, including those hosted alongside Donald Trump at the then Trump-owned Plaza Hotel in 1991 and 1992, have come under scrutiny after former contestants have alleged that they were groomed, assaulted and raped by powerful men in the industry like Gerald Marie. Notably, Elite’s Casablancas met his third wife at a 1993 Elite Model competition, Brazilian model Aline Wermelinger –– then a school-girl –– who married Casablancas at 17. Casablancas was controversial for accusations that he exploited and abused many of his young and often underage models and for frankly expressing his sexual preference for teenagers, whom he referred to as “child women.”

While running the 1994 Elite competition in Ibiza, the New York Times reported that Zampolli was reportedly urged by Casablancas to move to New York to work in the modeling business there. Zampolli moved to New York City not long after, arriving in 1995, and rented an apartment in Union Square. He soon met Donald Trump, “whose grandiosity he admired” and who, like Zampolli, “was a fixture on the city’s nightclub circuit.” In discussing his earliest meeting with Trump, Zampolli once said “We both have a common interest. We both like beautiful things.”  

Though it is unclear exactly how Zampolli first met Trump or who introduced them, it was likely through John Casablancas or another figure at Elite. Casablancas and Trump had been publicly affiliated since the early 1990s. In addition, Casablancas was known to host parties at the notorious nightclub Studio 54, whose co-owner Ian Schrager, was the son of an associate of mobster Meyer Lansky, and whose lawyer was also Trump’s lawyer and mentor Roy Cohn. Cohn was involved in a sex blackmail ring at the Plaza Hotel, which Trump later bought after Cohn’s death. He was also a close associate of New York organized crime interests and served as a lawyer for infamous mob bosses like Tony Salerno. Trump, during the 1980s, was a regular at Elite’s Studio 54 events. During this period, Trump has been alleged to have frequently partied with two men in particular: Tom Barrack, a long-time Trump associate and founder of Colony Capital who now serves as U.S. ambassador to Turkey, and Jeffrey Epstein, the now-notorious sex trafficker with ties to covert arms trafficking networks and financial criminality during this period. Four former Elite models have said that Casablancas’ agency required them to attend private dinners with Trump in the late 1980s and early 1990s, though importantly none of them accused Trump of wrongdoing. It does, however, corroborate that Elite Model Management as a company pushed its models to engage in social activities wholly unrelated to modeling with powerful people.

In 1991, Trump and Casablancas struck a business deal that saw Trump’s Plaza Hotel host the Look of the Year competition. Trump’s daughter Ivanka, would later model for Elite beginning at age 15. Elite has since been criticized for sexualizing a then-teen Ivanka. Trump and Casablancas were reportedly good friends, though Trump, after becoming a politician, has claimed to have hardly known Casablancas, who had — by that point — become infamous. Trump has espoused similar rhetoric about another one-time friend who also later became infamous – Jeffrey Epstein.

Even though Casablancas had been the apparent impetus for Zampolli’s move to New York, Zampolli didn’t work at Elite Models once he was in the U.S. Instead, he became co-president of Metropolitan Models after purchasing the agency soon after making the move. Metropolitan Models’ most famous model was Claudia Schiffer who met and became engaged to the magician David Copperfield while with the agency. Copperfield, a friend of Zampolli’s, was also close to Jeffrey Epstein. Evidence shows the two were in close contact in the early 2000s and Copperfield has also been named by at least two Epstein victims who say they were present for Epstein’s meetings with Copperfield. Copperfield has also, in no relation to the Epstein case, been accused of sexual misconduct by at least a dozen women, three of whom said they were drugged by the well-known magician. Copperfield was later a member of a four-person dinner party that included Donald Trump, Melania Trump and Zampolli during which Trump offered Zampolli a job at the Trump Organization.

That meeting took place at Zampolli’s favorite New York restaurant Cipriani’s, where Zampolli reportedly dines twice a day every day when in the city. Zampolli is a long-time close personal friend of Cipriani’s owner Giuseppe Cipriani. The New York restaurant was opened by Cipriani’s father in 1985 after the success of the family’s restaurant and hotel businesses in Italy. The Cipriani family has been accused of mob affiliations, with Giuseppe allegedly paying organized crime figures a handsome sum to make the family’s issues with labor unions “go away.” Giuseppe denied the charges. 

However, shortly thereafter it was reported that the Vice President of Cipriani, Dennis Pappas, had previously done prison time related to his past role as the “finance man” for the Colombo crime family –– a fact that would have been known to the Cipriani family at the time of his hire. Pappas was indicted in 2006 for fraud while serving as a top Cipriani executive, prompting the company to distance themselves and claim that his title as company Vice President was largely “ceremonial.” That same year, the Cipriani’s became business partners of Steve Witkoff, the New York real estate developer who now serves as Trump’s special envoy to the Middle East. A year later, in 2007, Giuseppe and his father, Arrigo Cipriani, pled guilty to tax evasion as well as filing false tax returns.  

After a temporary exile following his guilty plea and the revelation of Pappas’ mob ties, Giuseppe Cipriani returned to New York with the goal of creating a new “private member’s lounge” away “from the prying eyes of the press.” One report describes this time as follows:

Finally allowed to return to NYC, the Ciprianis insisted on being away from the cameras where possible and Giuseppe’s celebrity friends could not agree more. Leonardo di Caprio was an immediate fan, spending an enormous amount of time at Socialista [the name of the private member’s lounge] and being joined by a famously never-ending rotation of Victoria[’s] Secret Models and fellow actors.

One wonders why Cipriani’s new bar would feature so many models associated with one particular brand. However, one clue may be found in the entry for Cipriani in Jeffrey Epstein’s black book. Epstein, at the time, was closely affiliated with Victoria’s Secret and its models via his extremely close and long-time personal and professional relationship with the brand’s owner, Leslie Wexner. Cipriani is also, notably, a friend of Flavio Briatore, the subject of Part I of this series, who introduced the supermodel Naomi Campbell (then a fixture at Victoria’s Secret fashion shows) to Epstein in the early 2000s. Epstein’s former butler Alfredo Rodriguez had circled Briatore’s name in the black book, fingering him and others as accessories and accomplices to Epstein’s sex crimes.

Cipriani was also good friends with another infamous sex criminal, Harvey Weinstein. Not only did the two friends invest in each other’s businesses, but Weinstein reportedly used Cipriani’s restaurant and his private member’s lounge Socialista as his “hunting grounds,” per reports. Cipriani allegedly facilitated Weinstein’s predatory behavior at these locations. For instance, one accuser claimed that her friend was prevented from going to find her by Cipriani’s security after Weinstein had quickly whisked her off to an upstairs suite. Those suites were reportedly used by Weinstein as his personal “sex pads” with Cipriani’s permission. Cipriani was questioned for his ties to Weinstein but was never charged. Several of the lawsuits against Weinstein for sexual assault and rape claimed that the events in question had occurred at Cipriani’s. 

Zampolli himself also has an unusual tie to the Weinstein scandal. In 2017, Zampolli contacted women he knew had been assaulted by Weinstein, urging them to contact lawyer Benjamin Brafman (and other lawyers at his firm Brafman & Associates) and file a lawsuit against Weinstein. In an audio recording provided by one of the women to the New York Times, Zampolli claims to have had a “falling-out” with Weinstein and that he wanted to “bury” him, urging the woman to file suit against Weinstein. “You gonna be represented by the biggest lawyer that existed in United States history. There are all these girls, and they’re getting together and they’re being represented by Benjamin Brafman,” Zampolli said in the recording. Some of the women then went to Brafman’s firm where they presented evidence and were asked about their traumatic encounters with Weinstein. However, it turned out Brafman had actually been hired as Harvey Weinstein’s defense lawyer, not as a lawyer for victims, a move that was publicly announced just weeks later. Zampolli called the recording of his conversation urging a victim to contact Brafman as “fake news.”

The Modeling Mogul

Zampolli’s time at Metropolitan Models was cut short in 1997 after he sued his partner Thomas Zeumer, alleging that “corporate funds were missing.” Zampolli sued to dissolve his partnership with Zeumer, but the case was later dismissed. Zampolli then bought American Models, which he turned into ID Models.

In the 2011 Italian language book Gli Italiani di New York, Zampolli is quoted as follows about his approach to the modeling business:

The models have to travel the world, they are not sedentary – he says, sipping champagne with his gaze always on his blackberry – we had an office in Brazil where we found them and then moved them continuously from Miami to Berlin, from Paris to Milan, always keeping about seventy of them in New York. For years, the business [i.e. ID models] has produced money and become well known in the world of VIPs – from Bill Clinton to the rulers of the Gulf up to Shimon Peres to Donald Trump […].  

It is unclear how the “continuous” movement of young Brazilian women and girls throughout and between Europe and the U.S. would lead to the business becoming well known to “VIPs,” with those VIPs having little to do with the modeling industry as they are major politicians. However, it seems to align with some of the activities in which the agency of his mentor, John Casablancas, had engaged. It also raises the possibility that shall see, Zampolli’s modeling agency may have been more than just that.

First of all, the VIPs Zampolli names all have ties to the Epstein/Maxwell network. Former U.S. president Bill Clinton has been extensively linked to Epstein and was known to travel alongside teens on Epstein’s jet. Trump, close to Zampolli and friendly with his apparent mentor Casablancas as well as having once been close to Epstein, has also been accused of inappropriate behavior towards women and models. Trump, after divorcing Martha Maples, dated a women that had previously accompanied Jeffrey Epstein to the Clinton White House under dubious circumstances named Celina Midelfart. Trump later left Midelfart for one of Zampolli’s models, Melania Knauss, now Melania Trump (more on that later). 

As noted in Part I of this series, Epstein’s butler Alfredo Rodriguez had circled Trump’s name in the now infamous black book, alleging that he was involved in Epstein’s sex crimes in some capacity. Shimon Peres, the former Prime Minister of Israel, was close to Ghislaine Maxwell’s father, Robert Maxwell, and maintained close ties until his death to her sister, Isabel Maxwell. Peres is also the person who introduced Ehud Barak to Epstein, according to Barak (though other evidence suggests that Barak and Epstein may have met much earlier). Barak, like Flavio Briatore and Trump, is a circled name in Epstein’s black book and other evidence has suggested he was linked to Epstein’s illicit activity.

In addition, Zampolli’s claim that his agency finds its models in Brazil is worth examining. Elsewhere, Zampolli has suggested that many of the models he recruited from Brazil were teens, which is unsurprising given his emulation of John Casablancas. In one article where Zampolli was asked about his most famous former model, current First Lady Melania Trump, he stated that “She was mature, she was 24 years old, not like those 14 year old models from the middle of Brazil.” There is also the fact that Zampolli’s wife Amanda Ungaro –– a Brazilian model who he married when she was 19 –– appears on the Epstein flight logs in the company of Jean Luc Brunel when she was a minor.  

In the late 1990s, Zampolli became friendly with Jean Luc Brunel, who rented an apartment at Trump Tower in Manhattan. According to fashion photographer Clayton Nelson, he recalled an incident at a restaurant where he claims to have seen Brunel, Zampolli and Trump “insistently following a model.” Clayton told French media that he had “asked Brunel: ‘Do we have a fucking problem here?’, says the photographer. ‘Zere is no problem’, replied the Frenchman.” One newspaper article from 1997 notes that Zampolli and Brunel were known to swim in similar circles at the time, having been invited to a showcase for new models by the agency Model Team. The article shows Model Team’s John Merriman posing with Brunel. It also notes that Zampolli had his birthday party that year in Paris at a massive apartment on L’Avenue Foch, the street where Epstein later bought an 8 room apartment in 2002 that would later feature prominently in sex trafficking probes against him and Brunel in France. 

Brunel, another circled name in Epstein’s black book, is a well-known alleged accomplice of Epstein’s trafficking operation who, like Epstein, “committed suicide” while awaiting trial in prison in 2022. Brunel had been arrested in 2020 and was accused of rape, trafficking and “pimping out” aspiring models to Epstein. The same year Brunel died in person, the man who had facilitated Epstein’s visits to the Clinton White House with various women, Mark Middleton, was also found dead, but his death was labeled a suicide despite the fact that the condition in which his body was found made suicide extremely unlikely (more on that later).

According to one lawsuit filed against Epstein in 2018, Brunel and his Epstein-funded modeling agency MC2 was known to “recruit girls as young as 13 from Europe, Ecuador and Brazil.” Brunel, on a flight accompanying Epstein from New York to Paris, brought one underage Brazilian teen with him named Amanda Ungaro. The flight coincided with Epstein’s purchase of his luxurious French apartment later linked to trafficking. Ungaro, who was born in 1986, was underage at the time, either 16 or 17 years old. 

A few years later, Ungaro married Paolo Zampolli, though they claim to have been dating  for some time before their marriage. In 2001, one year before Ungaro flew on Epstein’s plane, Zampolli was quoted by Vanity Fair as courting a “young model” who lived in Brazil, anonymously sending her Easter eggs and teddy bears to Brazil before they had even “gotten together.” It’s unclear if the young Brazilian model alluded to here is Ungaro, who would have been 15 or 16 at the time. Presumably, Zampolli and Ungaro were introduced by Brunel, but this is hard to know as all information about Ungaro’s early life and modeling career prior to her marriage to Zampolli –– e.g. how she met Zampolli, what agencies she first modeled for, etc. –– is incredibly difficult to ascertain from publicly available sources. The earliest online pictures of her modeling and socializing are from 2005, when she was 19 (the age she married Zampolli).

In addition to these connections, there is also the fact that Adriana Ross, one of Epstein’s alleged accomplices who is still protected under the terms of the so-called “sweetheart deal” from Epstein’s 2007 prosecution was formerly a model of both Casablancas’ Elite Models and Zampolli’s ID models before she joined Epstein’s entourage, according to Epstein case documents. Ross stated that her husband, who she met shortly after Elite brought her to the U.S. from Poland, “had the contact” that put her in touch with ID Models. In a deposition, Ross pleaded the fifth when asked about her career history between ID Models and Epstein. Ross was named an unindicted “possible co-conspirator” in Epstein’s 2008 plea deal due to evidence that she procured teens for Epstein, helped destroy and hide evidence prior to a police raid of his Palm Beach home and determined how and when victims would meet with Epstein. Another former model for Elite, Nicole Junkermann, also cultivated close ties to Epstein during the early 2000s, flying on his plane to the UK where he met with two U.S. Senators under mysterious circumstances.

Zampolli himself is also alleged to have had a relationship with Epstein prior to his becoming infamous, albeit according to controversial author Michael Wolff. However, following Epstein’s infamy, Zampolli made it clear to the New York Times that he had long known of Epstein, claiming that “Epstein’s recruiters were so rampant in Manhattan that they became known in the modeling and nightclub world as ‘Jeffrey’s girls.’” The extent of the relationship between Zampolli and Epstein is unknown, though Zampolli clearly swam in similar circles in both the late 1990s and early 2000s.  

For instance, in addition to his ties to Trump, Briatore and other Epstein pals of the period, Zampolli was close to figures that took infamous flights on Epstein’s plane, like billionaire Ron Burkle, former president Bill Clinton and long-time Clinton adviser Doug Band. Per Zampolli, he first met Hillary Clinton at Trump’s wedding to Melania after being introduced by her long-time aide Huma Abedin, whom he claimed to know “from events in New York.” He claimed to have met Bill Clinton “many, many, many” times before Trump’s wedding, apparently alluding to his earlier quote of his modeling company becoming well known among “VIPs” including Clinton. However, in 2016 –– when Hillary Clinton and Trump were both running for president –– Zampolli told the New York Times that Clinton “was not coming to parties with me and the models.” Zampolli affectionately calls Doug Band “Dougie.” In a 2009 interview, Zampolli praised Bill Clinton as a “genius” and stated he also had much admiration for Hillary.

Zampolli was also close to Ron Burkle in the early 2000s, the billionaire owner of several U.S. supermarket chains who hired Bill Clinton at his firm Yucaipa Companies shortly after Clinton left office. The pair then flew together with Clinton on Epstein’s plane to Africa, a trip which focused on Clinton jump-starting Africa-focused initiatives of the Clinton Foundation. Burkle was also closely linked to the rapper Diddy and to the late pop singer Michael Jackson. Burkle, who also lent private planes to Bill Clinton, allegedly considered buying Casablancas’ Elite Models in 2002, with reporting on the matter implying that Burkle planned to put Clinton in charge of it. (Notably, two years later, in 2004, Zampolli as well as Jeffrey Epstein unsuccessfully bid to purchase Elite.) Beginning with this 2002 story about an alleged Burkle attempt to purchase Elite, Burkle contacted his friend Zampolli to help manage what he viewed as bad press. Zampolli arranged a meeting between the article’s author and Burkle. The meeting ended “amicably” with an associate of Burkle’s who joined the meeting paying the journalist $5,700 for shirts from his fledgling clothing company. Zampolli offered his services to Burkle more than once, including after a news item was published in 2006 alleging that an unnamed “babe-loving billionaire” was checking the ages of the “young models he invites on his private jet.” Burkle believed the billionaire in question was him.

Meeting Melania

Perhaps Zampolli’s most well-known tie to the modeling world is through his connection to Melania Knauss, now Melania Trump, Donald Trump’s third wife and current First Lady of the United States. Zampolli is known to have been responsible for bringing Melania to the United States to work as a model, later securing her a visa. Zampolli claims to have discovered Melania at a modeling agency in 1995 and Melania has also stated she first met Zampolli that year. She subsequently obtained a H1-B visa for “skilled” workers in October 1996 with Zampolli’s help. However, some reports have cited documents that Melania had done paid modeling work in the U.S. that had been arranged by Zampolli’s agency before she had actually acquired the H1-B visa that allowed her to legally work. At the time, Zampolli was still at Metropolitan Models, as he did not create ID Models until 1997. He has defended her visa application after scrutiny and accusations that the two ran an escort service in the 1990s. That claim prompted Melania to successfully sue the source of that claim, the UK’s Daily Mail, for defamation.

Zampolli is most often cited as the person who introduced Melania to Donald Trump in 1998 at a party he was hosting at the Kit Kat Club (no relation to Ghislaine Maxwell’s UK-based group of the same name), as both the Trumps and Zampolli have publicly made this claim. However, Jeffrey Epstein is also alleged to have claimed that he first introduced the pair.  

It’s hard to know which claim holds more credibility, particularly in an era where powerful people have gone to great lengths to obfuscate their ties to or distance themselves from Epstein. However, it is worth noting that it is highly likely that Epstein introduced Trump to his girlfriend prior to Melania, Celina Midelfart, a Norwegian heiress. Trump is said to have brought Midelfart as his date to the Zampolli-hosted event where he says he met Melania. Prior to dating Trump, Midelfart had accompanied Epstein to the Clinton White House and was also later photographed with Epstein at a 1995 event at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago at age 22. Evidence presented at Ghislaine Maxwell’s trial revealed that Midelfart had been one of Epstein’s girlfriends in the 1990s, with her relationship overlapping with other Epstein girlfriends of that era – Francis Jardine (who Epstein also took to the White House) and Maxwell herself. After dating Epstein, Midelfart began dating Trump. In addition, it seems that Melania may have had more interactions with Epstein than those confirmed by a handful of now well-known photographs. For instance, Melania had her contact information listed in his black book, though it appears under the entry for her now husband Donald Trump. Notably, the circled black book entry for Trump only lists one email address, which was Melania’s then-personal email (melaniakmelania@aol.com). Three numbers for Melania (misspelled Milania) are also listed.

Teaming up with Trump

After failing to obtain the Casablancas-founded Elite Model Management in 2004, Zampolli was hired by his friend of roughly ten years, Donald Trump. However, the possibility of working with Trump had come up a year prior, in November 2003, when Trump and Zampolli flew on a private plane together from Palm Beach to New York. A week later, per The Observer, the possibility of a job was again floated during a dinner at Cipriani’s that was attended by Trump, Melania Trump, Zampolli, and the aforementioned magician, David Copperfield. Zampolli remembered:

“[W]e had dinner together after the Victoria’s Secret show with David Copperfield. And we talked about it over dinner, and I said, ‘Yes, I want to do it.’ Then, three months later, I started to get the classes, the license, the school at NYU where I took the test [to be a realtor].”  

In a separate interview, Zampolli stated that Trump had told him the following at the dinner:  

“If you lose your supermodel, you go out of business. But if I lose my superintendent, I have a thousand looking for that job the next day. Paolo, you are too good for the fashion industry. You should come work with me.”

Zampolli got the official “You’re hired” from the star of the reality TV series The Apprentice in late 2004, following his failed bid for Elite. He began working as Director of International Development for the Trump Organization. In that role, he was tasked with selling luxury condos in United States, chiefly New York City, as well as more “exotic projects” like Villa Trump in Brazil. He focused on “tak[ing] care of the big, big money people” and made a habit of entertaining prospective buyers in his luxury Maybach sports car.  

Trump, when asked about the hire of Zampolli in 2005, stated that: “I’ve known Paolo for a long time. He’s got a great imagination. And in real estate, if you don’t have an imagination, it’s not going to work.” Casablancas, Zampolli’s former mentor, was also interviewed for the same 2005 article in The Observer and argued that Paolo was “going to have to project a more serious image about himself,” moving away from the image he had cultivated as a playboy model mogul in gossip columns to one more befitting a serious, aspiring Manhattan business tycoon.   

Zampolli found working for Trump more difficult than he had anticipated. He told The Observer that “to get a girl from the middle of Brazil that doesn’t speak English [and] put her on the cover of Vogue is very different than building skyscrapers in Manhattan.” Zampolli also stated that he found Trump to bea“tough boss” according to The New York Times.   

Zampolli eventually left the Trump Organization in 2006 to start his own real estate firm, the Paramount Group, which soon made headlines for “using former models as brokers to sell luxury apartments.” He combined this with his past strategies at the Trump Organization, dazzling clients with luxury car, speedboat and helicopter rides around New York City. Zampolli has claimed that his company Paramount is “a division in brokerage” with Prudential Douglas Elliman (now known as Douglas Elliman since 2012). At the time Zampolli teamed up with Douglas Elliman, it was owned by Howard Lorber, who – like Zampolli – is a close friend of Trump. Lorber bought the firm from Andrew Farkas, another Trump friend, in the early 2000s. Douglas Elliman later sued Zampolli for several million dollars in 2015 for “hoarding” profits and refusing to give the firm their share.  

Zampolli explained his approach to real estate in 2007 to CNBC, stating that models are very “driven” and that these “gorgeous ladies, they meet the most rich and powerful people of the world, and some of them, they keep this connection.”

One model turned broker working for Zampolli told the BBC in 2007 that both professions require “incredible networking skills” and that “if you combine the two industries, you’re left with the same rolodex.” Then, she adds, “you just go through your rolodex and sell houses.” The interview also noted that his Paramount Group sits right next door to his ID models agency.

When CNBC asked prospective buyer Raymond Dowd if being shown a property by a former top model made a difference, he stated that: “Absolutely. Involving supermodels in the process really ensures that there is a commitment to the highest quality of clientele and of living.”  The model broker showing Dowd around a property in the interview is Angela Everheart, the former Sports Illustrated model and actress.Everheart had previously been represented by Zampolli’s ID Models in the 1990s and later became known as one of the women who accused Harvey Weinstein of sexual indecency.

In a separate interview with the BBC, Everheart stated: “I know a lot of very wealthy people and I know people all over the world and that people are constantly looking for places to live. If I can network my friends into buildings such as the Cipriani building […] It’s a great way for me to make extra money.” The building to which Everheart referred is the apartment complex that was a joint venture between Giuseppe Cipriani and current envoy to the Middle East, Steve Witkoff.

Other reports and interviews allude to Zampolli having had some notable successes in New York real estate, despite issues caused by the 2008 economic crisis. Zampolli, in one interview, attributed his success in real estate due to his sales “rel[ying] a lot on the clients of the Saudi royal family.” He specifically mentioned descendants of the founder and former king of Saudi Arabia, Ibn Saud, who ruled from 1932 to 1953. As noted previously, Zampolli had stated that his movement of models around the world had gained the attention of notable VIPS – among them Bill Clinton, Shimon Peres and Donald Trump, but also “rulers of the Gulf.” As Zampolli and some of his models sought to fuse their work in the modeling industry with New York real estate, it seems likely that the sharing of rolodexes also extended to some of the most powerful figures in Saudi Arabia and perhaps other Gulf kingdoms. 

This was confirmed by a Brazilian report on Zampolli and his wife Amanda Ungaro, which stated that Zampolli sold a $35 million dollar home to Qatari royals while also serving in a “diplomatic” post at the United Nations. Notably, that purchase was part of the Qatari emir’s “shopping spree” of Manhattan real estate, which also saw him purchase 22 71st Street East –– a property essentially across the street from Jeffrey Epstein’s Manhattan townhouse.

An Unlikely Diplomat

Some time between 2006 and 2007, Zampolli formally left the modeling and real estate industries to work with the United Nations. In a 2009 interview with Diario de Ibiza, Zampolli explained his reasoning as “decid[ing] to change things up and do business with projects that I identify more with.” He added that:

“I have always liked new challenges and I’ve been from the world of supermodels to the world of being a real estate broker and selling luxury homes until three years ago when I started working at the United Nations and I discovered a new world. I was interested in the Kyoto Protocol, energy saving and renewable energy.”

From September 2007 through November 2008, Zampolli worked at the Intergovernmental Renewable Energy Organization (IREO) –– a United Nations intergovernmental organization (IGO) –– which, according to its website, aimed to “foster the collaboration of Governments, NGOs, IGOs, Academia, and the Private Sector” in order to “educate the citizenries of the world on the dire need to change its current patterns of energy production and consumption.” According to Zampolli’s website, while at IREO, which works in association with the UN’s Economic and Social Council, he served as its Executive Director in addition to being a “Special Advisor on Climate Change Issues.” He further described himself as an “Expert” in “Kyoto Protocol / Carbon Credits / Energy Savings.”  

According to reporting from Inner City Press, in 2008, Zampolli sponsored a charity event at the United Nations, with $450 entrance fees benefiting the IREO. The former modeling titan was described at the event as being characteristically “surrounded by models,” and the event itself boasted the presence of the aforementioned Naomi Campbell and Heidi Klum, former fianceés of Flavio Briatore, as attendees. Also attending was the UN’s General Assembly then-President Srgjan Kerim, alongside “fifty to sixty ambassadors,” according to Zampolli. 

Additionally, Grenada’s UN Ambassador, Angus Friday, was in attendance, with the article making note that only a week prior he had personally “squired Naomi Campbell through the [UN] building.” Friday joined the World Bank in 2009 before continuing work as Grenada’s Ambassador to the United States, including being named the Chairman of the Alliance of Small Island States (AOSIS) for the UN, and joined The Waitt Institute as the Blue Economy Director in 2020, run by Ghislaine Maxwell’s former boyfriend Ted Waitt and of relevance to Zampolli’s work with TerraMar, to be discussed in the next section. Friday became Grenada’s ambassador to the United States in 2014, around the same time that Zampolli’s wife Amanda Ungaro became one of Grenada’s UN representatives.

Ungaro was not the only member of the Zampolli family with a lengthy relationship with governments of Caribbean nations –– including Grenada specifically. Zampolli, for instance, was named Minister-Counsellor to the Permanent Mission of the Commonwealth of Dominica in 2011, appointed as Ambassador under the Tourism Ministry of Grenada in 2012, and appointed the United Nation Ambassador and Ambassador For Oceans and Seas for the Commonwealth of Dominica in October 2013. As recently noted, Amanda Ungaro was later appointed as a UN Ambassador to Grenada in 2014. Zampolli and Ungaro later created several projects aimed at lobbying the UN on “sustainable development” and other issues, such as UN Kids and the World Empowerment Retirement International Organization.

Around the time of the 2008 IREO fundraiser mentioned above, Zampolli launched Green Inc. in order to “[Build] a Greener World Through Alternative Energy & Solutions.” The website also claimed that Green Inc. is a “strategic partner” of the United Nations Association in Brazil. Zampolli additionally acted as a special advisory to Brazil’s UN organization, Anubra. Zampolli’s Haute Living author profile claims Green Inc. was founded in 2009 in order to sell “green products to heads of states and municipalities.” Despite the posturing of altruistic motives, Zampolli later explained in an interview with Diario de Ibiza that Green Inc. is “not a charity business,” and that “it’s good business.” The same interview describes the company’s customers as “heads of state, governors, and mayors,” and that Green Inc. had “entered into an agreement with [the multinational electronics conglomerate] Phillips to supply the company.” 

Zampolli also stated he was working closely with Barack Obama on renewables, but claimed his administration had not gone far enough in pushing certain products that could offset climate change, such as hybrid cars and ethanol. Alongside Obama and Trump, Zampolli also boasted close ties to the “genius” Clintons. His close contacts with former and future U.S. presidents is perhaps best summed up by his own admission that “the natural path [of success] is to follow the trail of power.” He furthered, that “the secret to advancing your career and your business is to meet increasingly important people.”  

In 2012, Zampolli was pictured and noted as being a delegation member of the Clinton Climate Change Initiative, which is directly affiliated with The Clinton Foundation, according to the foundation’s website. Also among this delegation sat attorney Jan Hartke, who eventually became the Global Director for Clean Energy at the Clinton Climate Initiative. Previously, between 1975 through 1990, Hartke acted as the Chief Public Defender, State Treasurer, and Director of the Governor’s Washington, DC Office for New Mexico. Much of Hartke’s service for New Mexico overlapped with the multiple gubernatorial stints of Governor Bruce King, with the Sante Fe New Mexican noting in April 1980 that the two shared a “special kind of relationship.” In 1993, King sold Epstein the land for the now-infamous Zorro Ranch, with the vast majority of the land surrounding the ranch still owned by members of the King family, aside from a plot of land that was bought by fashion icon and one of Epstein’s Black Book contacts, Tom Ford, in 2001.  

In 1992, Harkte had also founded and acted as President for the Earth Council Alliance (ECA), alongside Dr. David Jhirad –– a Vice President and Special Adviser on Energy and Climate Change to The Rockefeller Foundation; a Vice President for Science and Research at the World Resources Institute; and an advisor to the alleged CIA-cut out USAID. Jhirad was replaced as ECA Chairman by 2025 Nobel Prize nominee Lelei Lelaulu, who among other UN stints, was part of “the small group hand-picked to reform the United Nations in the 1990s” as acting Secretary of the Task Force to Re-orient UN Public Information Activities. Lelaulu additionally served on the Board of Directors of the Peter Thiel-founded Seasteading Institute, and notably was a founding Team Member of Blue Guardians ––  a partnership “with DigitalGlobe, SIDS DOCK, Clinton Climate Initiative, the World Bank, The Nature Conservancy,” in addition to Waitt Foundation and Google Ocean, among others.  

The Waitt Foundation was founded by Ted Waitt, who dated Ghislaine Maxwell for nearly 7 years between 2003 and 2010, and was reportedly responsible for connecting Maxwell with ex-Google CEO Eric Schmidt at an event held by the Clintons –– likely a Clinton Global Initiative (CGI) event. As described by the CGI, Blue Guardians was formed in 2015 as a response to “the lack of affordable, high-quality geospatial and climate data” needed by SIDS [Small Island Developing States] to “plan, finance, and manage urgently needed mitigation and adaptation programs.” In the context of the need for “geospatial and climate data,” Maxwell’s subsequent romantic partner after Waitt, Scott Borgerson (whom she would later marry), was the founder and CEO of the Eric Schmidt-funded, maritime data specialist company CargoMetrics (For more information about CargoMetrics and its relevance, see Unlimited Hangout’s investigation “The Chain of Issuance”). Blue Guardians is notable in the context of Zampolli’s Sustainable Oceans Alliance (SOA) in that it served as a near-identical blueprint for one of his founding SOA partners –– the now-infamous TerraMar Project, started by Epstein’s accomplice Ghislaine Maxwell (to be explained in detail below). Other Blue Guardian organizations, such as the Clinton philanthropies and Google Ocean, also boasted ties to TerraMar.

It is also important to remind readers that Epstein himself had numerous connections to The Clinton Foundation, including a statement from his lawyers claiming “Mr. Epstein was part of the original group that conceived The Clinton Global Initiative” in a July 2007 letter, according to reporting from Fox News. Maxwell has since claimed that she was also “very central” to the “startup” of the CGI. It was also reported that Epstein donated $25,000 directly to the foundation, as revealed by a whistle-blower via The International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, within the “documented $81 million” routed from “HSBC Swiss accounts to The Clinton Foundation,” including “various accounts totaling $3.5 million” held personally by Epstein. 

As noted in Part I of this series, the “HSBC Swiss accounts” were born out of the scandal-ridden banking interests of Edmond Safra, who appears in Epstein’s black book and was a close friend of Ghislaine Maxwell’s father Robert Maxwell. Part I also noted that Flavio Briatore, a close friend of Zampolli’s and Trump’s who also boasted important ties to Epstein, held accounts at the same bank, overlapping with the time of his involvement in Formula1 race-fixing. When HSBC took over Safra’s banking institutions, it also inherited some of Safra’s “wealthy international clients,” which appears to have included Epstein.

There has been surprisingly little interest in pursuing HSBC for its Epstein ties, with J.P. Morgan and Deutsche Bank having been more publicly linked to Epstein via court cases that were later settled out of court. However, HSBC has a history of being shielded from prosecution, particularly after it took over Safra’s banking institutions. For instance, HSBC’s direct involvement in money laundering for drug cartels was not prosecuted by then-head of the Bank of England Mark Carney, who later became a leading architect of UN “green” finance and is now Prime Minister of Canada (and who also was known to have socialized with Ghislaine Maxwell while he was leading the Bank of England). 

In addition to Epstein’s funding of the Clinton Foundation and his alleged role in helping create CGI, Clinton has admitted to flying on Epstein’s private jet four times in 2002 and 2003 while doing work for The Clinton Foundation. His wife Hillary twice hired Ghislaine Maxwell’s nephew, Alexander Djerassi –– first during her 2008 campaign, and secondly at the State Department during her tenure as Secretary of State in the Obama administration. Djerassi, according to his bio from his stint as an associate at the Carnegie Endowment, served as a “U.S. representative to the Friends of Libya conferences, Friends of the Syrian People conferences, U.S.-GCC Strategic Coordination Forum, and several UN General Assemblies.” Notably, Djerassi joined Carnegie shortly after Bill Burns, who later served as Biden’s CIA Director, became the organization’s president. Burns, who was involved with the UN while at Carnegie, had met with Epstein shortly before he joined the organization. Carnegie’s chair at the time was Penny Pritzker, a member of the Chicago-based family with historic ties to organized crime and the CIA-linked Castle bank. Some of its members were very close to Epstein (this is discussed more in detail in the next section of this piece).

It is worth noting that Epstein himself appeared to have had some important intersections with the United Nations. For instance, the Wall Street Journal reported that, during the week of the United Nations General Assembly, “a steady stream of dignitaries could be seen arriving at Mr. Epstein’s townhouse” in New York. It is unclear why so many officials sought to meet with Epstein, though one possibility lies in Epstein’s claims to have managed sovereign wealth funds for oil-rich nations in the Middle East. 

In addition, Epstein cultivated close ties to the International Peace Institute (IPI), which collaborates closely with the United Nations and was created in 1970 with direct UN-backing and funding from the Forbes family, particularly Ruth Forbes Young. Young was the mother of Michael Paine, who — along with his wife Ruth — are major persons of interest in the conspiracy to assassinate John F. Kennedy in 1963. Epstein funded the IPI to the tune of $650,000 from 2011 to 2019 and also gave the IPI’s then-chairman, Terje Rød-Larsen, a personal loan of $130,000 in 2013. Rød-Larsen later stepped down when Epstein’s donations to IPI and to Rød-Larsen were made public.

Furthermore, Leon Black, a close associate of Epstein both financially and personally, and his private equity firm Apollo Global Management were involved with managing the UN Joint Staff Pension Fund. However, the Fund later put Apollo on a “blacklist” after the extent of Black’s ties to Epstein were reported in 2021. Apollo remained on the list even after an internal report at Apollo sought to exonerate Black of wrong-doing tied to Epstein. That internal Apollo report was notably authored by three Apollo board members, including Alvin “Buzzy” Krongard, a former executive director of the CIA who is also, incidentally, a key suspect in the now memory-holed 9/11 insider trading scandal.

Epstein’s brother Mark Epstein also served as vice-chairman of the board of another non-profit with close ties to the UN, the Humpty Dumpty Institute. Also on the board of Humpty Dumpty, still today, is Amir Dossal, who — as we shall see — worked closely with both Zampolli and Ghislaine Maxwell on efforts intimately involving Maxwell’s TerraMar project.

Citizenship for Sale

In addition to the ties detailed above that show Zampolli’s work at the UN intersected with the Clinton philanthropies, there is more to discuss regarding Zampolli and other aspects of the Epstein-Clinton relationship. As mentioned in the previous section, Paolo Zampolli was appointed Minister-Counsellor to the Permanent Mission of the Commonwealth of Dominica in 2011. Zampolli first became connected to Dominica’s government via his ties to real estate. He did so by securing the construction of a luxury resort in the island nation, which boasted an economic passport program whereby foreigners could obtain citizenship in the country by purchasing properties at the complex.

That resort was built by Range Developments, who have also built luxury hotels in Grenada and St. Kitts –– island nations to which Zampolli and his wife Amanda Ungaro, as previously noted, have significant connections. As stated previously, Ungaro worked for Grenada’s permanent mission to the UN while Zampolli has claimed to have represented St. Kitts in addition to Dominica and Grenada. 

Range has also built luxury hotels with similar economic passport schemes for the Hyatt Hotel Group, which is run by Tom Pritzker, a long-time and close friend of Jeffrey Epstein who was subpoenaed as part of the USVI-J.P. Morgan case, is in the black book, and has been accused of sexual misconduct by prominent victims. As noted in One Nation Under Blackmail, the Pritzker family have longstanding ties to organized crime and were also closely associated with the mob-linked offshore Caribbean bank, Castle Bank, the management of which was dominated by two figures in particular: Burton Kanter, a lawyer for the Pritzkers, and CIA-OSS veteran Paul Helliwell.

Zampolli later sued Range Developments claiming he had not been provided his promised 5% of the profits of the “800 family passports” affiliated with the Dominica resort whose construction he helped facilitate. Range Developments claimed that Zampolli could not be paid until after the project was fully completed and accounts closed. Notably, in the lawsuit, Zampolli claimed that top figures at Range Developments “are known to sell passports to Iran, Yemen, and Sudan to circumvent U.S. Treasury sanctions and United Nations Security Council sanctions.” One wonders if Zampolli would have been so concerned about this aspect of the passport sales if he had been paid.

Zampolli seemed to squeal on a poorly kept secret –– something was shady about Dominica’s economic passport scheme in general. Indeed, several suspect figures aside from Zampolli were given diplomatic positions by Dominican Prime Minister Skerrit Roosevelt either before or after buying citizenship in the country. The outlet PassBlue noted that this “passport plan [had first] started with a Dominica ambassador to China, David King Hsiu, according to Wikileaks.” Other sources note that Hsiu is a Chinese national who was apparently given the post of being ambassador to China after pitching the government of Dominica on using luxury real estate projects to sell passports to Chinese citizens specifically. As noted above, this same model would also later lead to Zampolli being given a post by Dominica. PassBlue added that: 

The plan [as devised by Hsiu] was ostensibly devised to bring investments into tourism for Dominica. But the dealings, in which Chinese families could buy a passport for $100,000 each, reportedly benefited only top players in the arrangements. 

Perhaps the most jarring part of the PassBlue article reads as follows:

In 2015, in a much-publicized case that is still reverberating, a Chinese billionaire, Ng Lap Seng, was arrested by the FBI in relation to a UN bribery investigation involving payoffs to John Ashe, who was a former president of the UN General Assembly as well as the UN ambassador for Antigua and Barbuda. Ashe was accused of using his Assembly post to buy influence in the UN to enable a real estate development in Macau by Ng Lap Seng. [Prime Minister Roosevelt] Skerrit of Dominica was photographed with Ng shortly before his arrest. [Reminder: Skerrit’s government had appointed Zampolli to represent Dominica at the UN in 2011 and again in 2013]

Ashe died a pauper in 2016 in a freak accident at home, after being indicted by the US government and living under house arrest in Westchester County, New York. Ng Lap Seng is to face trial this month, as will an adviser to him, who is in plea talks. Francis Lorenzo, a Dominican Republic ambassador to the UN accused in the fraud case, pleaded guilty last year.

Lorenzo, despite being one of the UN officials that Seng had bribed and who carried out favors for him while representing Dominica, ended up serving no prison time due to his testimony at Seng’s trial. As documented tirelessly by Inner City Press (apparently the only news outlet willing to tackle the story at the time), the verdict for Lorenzo was just the tip of the iceberg for what amounted to a massive cover-up of UN corruption that shielded the corrupt UN officials involved, allegedly including UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, while instead only going after the bribers (see here, here, here and here).

Lorenzo and Zampolli were very close, serving together as UN representatives for Dominica, and also on a personal level, with Lorenzo leading the singing of “Happy Birthday” to Zampolli at his birthday party in 2012. At that event, Zampolli was pictured posing with Lorenzo and the other figure Seng had bribed, John Ashe. However, as noted above, Ashe, unlike Lorenzo, suffered an unfortunate fate due to a “freak accident.” The official cause of death for Ashe was that he had died due to “a weightlifting accident when a barbell he was lifting from a bench dropped on his neck.” To further quote from an Associated Press report: 

“Dr. Kunjlata Ashar, Westchester County’s medical examiner, said the cause of death — traumatic asphyxia — was determined during an autopsy, though she did not perform the procedure herself and did not have additional details. It was deemed an accident based on a combination of information from the autopsy and an investigation by the Dobbs Ferry Police Department, officials said. The police department said in a statement that the death appears accidental, but provided little information otherwise.”

Ashe’s unfortunate “accident” and association with Ng Lap Seng are particularly relevant to this story as Ng Lap Seng was also closely affiliated with Mark Middleton, who also died under exceedingly odd circumstances. Both Seng and Middleton were key figures in the broader “Chinagate” scandal that was intimately related to Jeffrey Epstein’s 17 visits to the Clinton White House in the 1990s.

Ng Lap Seng is a real estate developer from Macau whose improbable rag-to-riches story was later explained by U.S. Congressional investigators as the result of his becoming a “front for municipal and provincial authorities in the People’s Republic of China.” He eventually became a member of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference, an advisory board for the Chinese Communist Party, or CCP. His real estate holdings in Macau, like the Fortuna hotel, were known as “massage-table dance-karaoke” spots where important Chinese officials, Chinese military figures and Triad gangsters mingled. As noted in One Nation Under Blackmail, Fortuna in particular appears to have had trafficked women work their “massage tables” and may have blackmailed prominent politicians who frequented it.

Seng later teamed up with a businessman based in Little Rock, Arkansas named Charlie Trie in a failed venture that saw them team up with Rose Law firm’s C. Joseph Giroir. Rose, incidentally, was the law firm where Hillary Clinton and figures close to her and husband, like Vince Foster and Webster Hubbell, also worked. Trie, during the Clinton administration, would establish a presence in Washington that he and Seng later used to court Clinton White House figures like Mark Middleton. The evidence shows that Trie acted as a front for Seng in these operations. 

Middleton, who was then serving as a special assistant to President Clinton, would later emerge as a central figure in the scandal that involved Seng, Trie and others that is now remembered as “Chinagate.” While that scandal is best known for the corrupt dealings between Trie and his associates and the Democratic National Committee, the reality is that it was part of a much larger scandal involving the covert trafficking of Chinese arms into the U.S. in exchange for the illicit transfer of sensitive U.S. military technology to the Chinese military. 

While Middleton was embroiled with figures like Trie and Seng and the broader nexus of Chinagate, he was also regularly meeting with Jeffrey Epstein at the White House. Middleton accounts for the vast majority of Epstein’s 17 visits to the Clinton White House, which began in 1993 and continued through January 1995. Middleton left his post at the White House in February 1995. Middleton also flew on Epstein’s private jet in May 1994. During this time, Epstein had complete control over Leslie Wexner’s affairs via power of attorney and had helped Wexner’s business interests take de facto control of the CIA-linked airline Southern Air Transport, which began making regular flights between Columbus, OH and Hong Kong. Southern Air Transport had a history of transporting drugs and weapons for the CIA and Iran-Contra network and Epstein had previously been closely affiliated with both prominent weapons dealers (i.e. Douglas Leese and Adnan Khashoggi) and the Iran-Contra network.

A few months after UK media reported on the extent of Epstein’s meetings with Middleton at the Clinton White house, Middleton was found dead of an alleged “suicide.” Police claimed that he had both hung himself with an extension cord and shot himself in the chest. An Arkansas judge rapidly sealed images and other evidence from the crime scene to prevent the spread of “conspiracy theories.”

Ultimately, the ties of Dominica’s economic passport scheme to figures like Ng Lap Seng and the broader network behind “Chinagate”, as well as the fact that two figures caught up in scandals with Seng (Ashe and Middleton) died under very suspicious circumstances, suggest that the scheme was used by irreputable figures for the purpose of purchasing citizenship that would enable them to engage in offshore, criminal activity. 

Zampolli, TerraMar and the SDGs

Aside from his ties to Dominica, the former model mogul would go on to hold numerous positions in association with the UN, including affiliate organizations. For instance, as noted earlier, Zampolli was a special advisor to Brazil’s Anubra and also had ties to the UN Foundation, which is heavily funded by CNN founder and billionaire Ted Turner as well as the Gates Foundation. Zampolli authored a 2010 piece for Haute Living describing a private ceremony he attended that was hosted by the United Nations Foundation to “congratulate Amir Dossal on his ‘graduation’ from the United Nations as executive director at the UN Office for Partnerships.” Dossal had first joined the UN in 1985. Billionaire Ted Turner –– controversial for his views on population control and globalism –– presented Dossal with a check at the ceremony and took time to take a selfie with Zampolli. Other notable guests at the party included Max and Stefania Girombelli of the Cipriani Group, Christiana Falcone of the World Economic Forum, president of the UN Foundation Senator Tim Wirth, and Anne Marie Miller of Zampolli’s Green Inc. Also present was supermodel Petra Nemcova, a former Victoria’s Secret model who started her modeling career with Next Models, an agency co-founded by Jean Luc Brunel in 1989 and which Brunel was intimately involved with until 1996.

The event’s honoree, Amir Dossal, has other connections and ties to Zampolli that are worth noting. Just before leaving the UN, Dossal had formed the Global Partnerships Forum, described by Zampolli as a “non-profit platform to build innovative public-private partnerships to address various global challenges.” Dossal’s Global Partnerships Forum was a founding member of the Sustainable Oceans Alliance (SOA), a partnership created in 2013 between Paolo Zampolli, listed as the “Special Representative for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and International Business of Grenada,” Dossal’s Global Partnerships Forum, the UN Ambassador of Palau Stuart Beck, and Ghislaine Maxwell’s TerraMar Project. Dossal, Beck and the aforementioned Scott Borgerson, were all board members of TerraMar. Dossal and Zampolli appeared to be quite close in this era, as Dossal was chosen to give a speech to party-goers praising Zampolli at his birthday party in 2014.

The TerraMar Project was officially launched a year before the SOA in September 2012 at the Blue Ocean Film Festival & Conservation Conference in Monterey, CA. It was the culmination of two years of planning by Maxwell. Notably, during these “two years,” Ghislaine’s sister, Isabel Maxwell, was listed as the President of the Blue World Alliance –– an organization co-founded by Isabel’s then-husband, Al Seckel, and described as “a non-profit organization seeking tractable solutions to environmental problems concerning oceans.” Seckel was a co-founder of the Mindshift conference with Epstein –– the host of conferences which featured Zampolli’s good friend Brock Pierce, among others –– before his suspicious death after falling off a cliff in France in 2015. While not much is known about Blue World Alliance, it is highly possible the concept first started with Isabel Maxwell before it was reborn as her younger “socialite” sister’s TerraMar Project.  

Ghislaine’s non-profit organization offered digital citizenship for the oceans in order to uphold and protect the high seas. Its website stated that its “number one goal is to change attitudes and governance as it relates to the world’s largest ecosystem.” The organization made note of the UN’s Law of the Sea Convention, which “declares that the international seabed and its mineral resources are the common heritage of mankind and requires activities in the international seabed to be carried out ‘for the benefit of mankind’.” While not much is ultimately known about the success of the project, the triangulation of the UN’s influence on ocean governance, the rights of use for the resources of the seas, and the implications of issuing passports and citizenry for international waters all culminated in an organization that was run by UN stalwarts, political influencers, a convicted human trafficker, and technologic data brokers. Under this context, Zampolli’s close ties to such a project through the Sustainable Oceans Alliance makes sense given his previous lines of work at the UN, the modeling industry, his ties to heads of state, and his overlaps with the extended Epstein network.  

On that note, TerraMar boasted connections to Epstein that went beyond Maxwell herself. For instance, Dana Burns –– an assistant to Maxwell in New York who was a founding member of the Board of Directors for the TerraMar Project –– appeared on the logs for two Epstein flights when 19 years old. According to testimony from Epstein’s butler, Janusz Banasiak –– whose wife and stepdaughter worked for Ivana Trump –– Burns also worked briefly for Epstein’s Florida Science Foundation, and The Daily Beast further connected her to “a Manhattan building where Epstein was known to house models.”

Stuart Beck, a TerraMar board member, co-chair of the Sustainable Oceans Alliance, and UN Ambassador of Palau, was a close colleague of Zampolli’s at the UN. Beck was the former President of Granite Broadcasting –– a New York television company founded by 17-year Goldman Sachs veteran W. Don Cornwell, who acted as Director of Blue Meridian Partners and later served on the boards of Pfizer, AIG and Big Brothers Big Sisters NYC, among others. Beck accompanied Maxwell to the UN on at least two occasions, including a very telling discussion in June 2013 on behalf of TerraMar and the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs):

“There are going to be 193 votes at the General Assembly in 2015 to decide what are the Sustainable Development Goals. So our ultimate objective has got to be those 193. This is not a ‘slam dunk’, there are a lot of countries, it seems, who are not in favour of an Oceans SDG, they have their own priorities, they’re landlocked, they’re more concerned with MDG type issues for example. So those are the ultimate objects of our campaign. We need those votes.” – Stuart Beck June 25, 2013 at the United Nations  

The quest for more votes on world-changing regulation as it relates to the UN’s power over the high seas had been the initial impetus for Beck’s role at the UN on behalf of Palau. An article by the Tampa Bay Times published in July 2005 quotes Beck articulating his push for the country to take their seat at the United Nations: 

“I said to them, ‘Look, you don’t produce anything, you don’t manufacture anything, nobody’s after your labor pool, you don’t have anything that anyone wants, the U.S. already has defense and basing rights, so the only thing of value you have is your U.N. Vote’.”  

Historically, the relationship between the UN, the U.S. and Palau is intertwined, starting in 1947 with the UN “assign[ing] the United States administering authority over the Trust Territory of the Pacific Islands (Trust Territory), which included what is now the Republic of Palau (Palau).” Notably, Palau has a rather unique immigration deal with the United States, having signed a Compact of Free Association (COFA) in 1982. The agreement went into effect in October 1994 and allows Palauan citizens easy entrance to the United States, an indefinite length of stay, the right to live, study and work, and even access to a social security number. Part of this COFA included an agreement that “the United States has full authority and responsibility for defense and security matters in and relating to Palau.” 

According to the CIA’s world factbook, this defense arrangement led to an amendment to the Palau constitution, originally signed in 1981, which “stated that Palau was a nuclear-free country.” Following “a constitutional amendment and eighth referendum in 1993,” the COFA was formally ratified in 1994. In December 1994, only two months after this Compact went into effect, Palau became a member state of the United Nations. Beck, a lawyer, had helped Palau draft the COFA, and was granted honorary citizenship for his contributions. 

Unfortunately for the citizens of Palau, the story for how this amendment came to be is hardly as innocent as the CIA’s website makes it out to be. For starters, the reason for apprehension regarding nuclear arms on the tiny island comes downstream from the U.S. Department of Defense having used the neighboring Marshall Islands as a nuclear test site from 1946 through 1958, leading to concerns about fallout and irradiation. A super-majority of Palauans thus passed a nuclear-free constitution, directly contradicting the DoD’s “plans to relocate US forward bases from the Philippines to Micronesia” and the Pentagon’s policies to “neither confirm nor deny that its crafts are nuclear-powered or armed.” A rather telling excerpt from an article on Pacific.Scoop, based on work by Ed Rampell, outlines how the White House and the CIA directly created the environment for regime change in order to secure Palau as a military outpost:

“The conflict came to a head while George Herbert Walker Bush, veteran of WWII’s Palau campaign, was CIA Director and in the Executive Branch. According to Bob Woodward in The Washington Post, CIA chief George Herbert Walker Bush presided over illegal bugging of Micronesian political status negotiations in the 1970s, ordered by Henry Kissinger, carried out by Bush ally Brent Scowcroft, and aimed at ‘exerting covert influence on key elements of the Micronesian independence movement.’ 

While Vice-President George Herbert Walker Bush had his longtime crony Fred Zeder, an ex-Pacific fighter pilot and Texas businessman, appointed the President’s personal representative for Micronesian status negotiations in 1982. Zeder had been admitted to the Young Presidents’ Organisation in 1960 at the University of Michigan, where his roommate was Prescott S. Bush Jr., the brother of George Bush Senior…

Zeder allegedly played a role in bankrupting tiny Palau by supporting IPSECO – an apparent covert action disguised as a power plant, with generators and a fuel farm far too big for Palau’s 15,000 people (but large enough to provide power/fuel for future possible US military bases). The only way the emerging nation could pay off its enormous power debt was by approving a treaty called the Compact of Free Association. The accord would nullify Palau’s anti-nuclear constitution – in exchange for US aid…

On June 30, 1985, [Palauan] President Haruo Remeliik was assassinated, which reopened the then-deadlocked treaty negotiations. Shortly after the liquidation, then-Vice-President Bush personally flew to Saipan[, Palau], where the Trust Territory administration was headquartered, to reopen stalled negotiations, and struck a new deal.”

On this trip, in October 1985, then-VP Bush traveled to Palau to brief a delegation of Micronesian officials on the COFA:

“We stand on the threshold of a new era. Soon, very soon we hope, the United States Congress will have completed its mandated program of review of the Compact of Free Association and will pass it with all of the commitments and essential elements intact. As soon as that is accomplished, we will go to the United Nations to secure termination of the trusteeship. When the Trust Territory is dissolved, our mission of replacing trusteeship with self-government will have been accomplished.”

Despite Bush’s speech, antinuclear activists were able to strike down the treaty in court, keeping Palau’s status as the world’s first nuclear-free nation. Shortly after, in 1987, terrorists “firebombed and shot Pacific pacifists,” and “besieged Palau’s congress.” A U.S. Congressional General Accounting Office investigation “found a $2 million US-derived slush fund” had “financed political violence” in Palau during this period. In August 1988, Palau’s second president Lazarus Salii was found dead in his home after failing to pass the COFA –– allegedly only a day before he was to announce his bid for reelection. Eventually, with two presidents killed and two million dollars spent to stir violence, the Palauan constitution was amended, the COFA went into effect, and the U.S. was free to place its nuclear arms on the tiny island. 

The assassination of Palau’s first President, Haruo Remeliik, initially led to the successful guilty prosecution of three men: Melwert Tmetuchl, Anghenio Sabino, and Leslie Tewid. The latter, Leslie Tewid, had just returned from the United States, having recently graduated from New York University. While Tewid was pursuing his undergraduate degree, he had lived with Stuart Beck in Manhattan. Tewid’s alibi during his defense was that while he had “spent much of the night at a bar about an eight-minute drive from the President’s home” where he was assassinated, “around midnight” he and two friends had driven “to a water tank, where the friends used heroin before returning to the bar.” While one of his accompanying friend’s had verified the trip to prosecutors, “the other died in an accident before the trial.” Tewid had taken a polygraph test during the trial and was “found deceptive about the assassination.”

Despite all of this, Beck and fellow Manhattan lawyer David Richenthal, on behalf of the ACLU, called for an appeal and, in July 1987, an “appeals court ordered acquittals for three young men.” A year and a month later, in August 1988, the aforementioned Palauan President Salii was shot and killed in his home. Despite police initially believing that “a gunman entered the home and killed him,” his death was eventually ruled a suicide. The same evening Salii was found dead, Vice President Thomas Remengesau Sr. was sworn in as Acting President. Remengesau Sr.’s son, Thomas Remengesau Jr., was later elected president of Palau four times –– first in 2000, and again in 2004, before two more elections in 2012 and 2016. At the start of his second term, Remengesau Jr. first appointed Beck the Ambassador and Permanent Representative for Palau at the UN.

Ambassador Beck and Remengesau Jr. took a diplomatic trip to Israel in June 2006, in which Remengesau was quoted entering Israeli President Moshe Katsav’s office stating: “There are two Jewish ambassadors to the United Nations, yours and ours.” An article by The Jerusalem Post covered the trip, making note that “the country that most consistently votes with and for Israel is Palau,” with Beck reiterating that “Palau had the best and most consistent record of any country in voting for Israel.” The article furthered that members of Remengesau’s delegation had “been trying to get Micronesia, the Solomon Islands, Nauru and other Pacific island states to join a pro-Israel coalition,” dubbed the “Great Powers of the Pacific in Support of Israel.”  

Palau and Ambassador Beck’s affinity for Israel as it relates to the UN may offer further clarity on their relationship with TerraMar’s founder, Maxwell, due to her family’s ties to the state of Israel, including her father Robert Maxwell’s and sister Isabel Maxwell’s longstanding relationship with Israeli intelligence and government officials, respectively. 

In addition to the aforementioned visit in 2013, Beck again accompanied Ghislaine Maxwell to the UN in February 2014 at an event hosted by the Zampolli co-founded Sustainable Oceans Alliance, and the governments of Italy and Palau. Amir Dossal, who sat on the board at the Humpty Dumpty Institute alongside Jeffrey Epstein’s brother Mark, brought Maxwell to the stage on behalf of TerraMar with a telling introduction:

“I am now going to invite the person who has been the inspiration behind the Sustainable Oceans Alliance who really has something called TerraMar Project. She controls the oceans around the world. If you look up the website, you have the option to buy a part of the ocean through her… And therefore I invite my dear friend Ghislaine Maxwell to tell us how we can own the oceans.” [emphasis added] – Amir Dossal at the UN, February 4, 2014

While TerraMar hardly had the rights to actually sell parcels of the ocean, her project did seem to operate a primordial NFT-esque purchasing program. This makes sense given how TerraMar board member Steve Haft, who helped bring together the Sustainable Ocean Alliance, has an intimate relationship with ConsenSys –– an Ethereum development company founded by Ethereum co-founder Joe Lubin. Haft was also an advising member of Amir Dossal’s Global Partnerships Forum, and has worked alongside the UN on climate and blockchain-related projects. Importantly, Dossal had founded the Blockchain Commission for Sustainable Development at the UN. Zampolli’s connections to the blockchain community are to be discussed later on in this article. 

As for the citizenship angle, there are unusual overlaps with SOA’s other members and citizenship by investment schemes with dubious reputations, such as those involving Zampolli and Dominica. This may warrant a re-examination of Maxwell’s statements in a 2016 deposition where, when asked if she was “a citizen of any other land [besides the US]?”, she responded “TerraMar,” instead of mentioning her British and French citizenships. In the same deposition, Maxwell also confirmed that Epstein had given “some money to TerraMar,” estimating it to be around $50,000. The pay-to-play aspects of TerraMar citizenships are in line with Palau’s unique immigration relationship to the United States, in addition to Palauan experiments with their Digital Residency Program –– a blockchain-based residency and ID system which allows cryptocurrency holders to purchase residency.  

Interestingly, Jeffrey Beattie –– who appears to be the father of a former Trump speech writer and current Under Secretary for Public Diplomacy at the State Department who grew up in Palau, Darren Jeffrey Beattie –– was an Attorney General of Palau who was accused of abusing his position to “solicit a U.S. visa for a personal acquaintance of his” in 2009. According to reporting from Marianas Variety, Special Prosecutor Michael P. Copeland received a complaint that Beattie “did use a letter head from the AG’s Office to make a request to the United States government” to grant a U.S. visa to a female Chinese national whom Beattie noted “had been helpful in a few of the republic’s investigations into human trafficking in Palau.” Beattie alleged that if she was “required to go back to her country, her life would be in danger.” A second allegation against Beattie held that “he and the [Chinese] lady used his power as AG to extort and blackmail businesses in Palau,” including “threats to close down karaoke bars and massage parlors if they did not pay her ‘protection money’.” The behavior of this Chinese national is reminiscent to that of the aforementioned Macau real-estate developer Ng Lap Seng. Ultimately, no charges or actions were made against Beattie, apparently because Palau’s AG at the time didn’t want to spend money sending “an investigator to China to find witnesses.” 

As for how Beattie’s AG position relates to TerraMar’s ocean citizenship play, a 2004 profile from Colorado College –– Beattie’s alma matter –– stated that “a delegation came to Palau claiming to be from a new nation called the United Kingdom of Atlantis. They wanted to meet with the president to discuss establishing diplomatic relations. I agreed to meet with them, but when I checked the longitude and latitude of their country, it was just ocean.” While easy to dismiss as a throw-away quip, within the context of human trafficking, passport laundering, and the country’s unique immigration compact with the U.S., Palau could easily have been used as a gateway for foreign nationals to cover their own citizenry and enter the U.S. with ease –– the first iteration of today’s cryptocurrency for “citizenry” via Palau’s Digital Residency Program. 

After Epstein’s death in 2019, Zampolli claimed to be unaware of Maxwell’s connections to the Sustainable Oceans Alliance, but that he did recall Ambassador Beck bringing her to the UN “twice to discuss her oceans advocacy.” In an interview with The Daily Beast, Zampolli elaborated: 

“She came to the United Nations twice to meet with me. She had a very creative idea about the oceans. She wanted to create awareness and give free passports to the ocean. Oceans are so big. Her idea wasn’t aligned with the charter of the U.N… She was very active and knowledgeable about the oceans. I learnt after the meetings the Clinton foundation was funding her. She did not give us money. It was not a United Nations idea. It was a virtual passport. It’s like getting a piece of ice from an eskimo. It would be like getting a passport for an ice cube.”

While Zampolli sought to distance himself from TerraMar and Ghislaine after she and Epstein became infamous, interviews given elsewhere by Zampolli reveal that he worked closely on the team, with “fantastic, terrific colleagues” that created Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 14. However, the public faces of the very team that developed SDG 14 were Stuart Beck and Ghislaine Maxwell herself, both of whom were members of the Sustainable Ocean Alliance with Zampolli. Zampolli acknowledged working closely with Beck to develop SDG 14 in a 2020 interview, but left out Ghislaine, even though he had long-running associations with figures who had been close to Ghislaine and Epstein.

WATO Scandal at the UN

Zampolli’s deep involvement with SDG14 would bring him to the forefront of a major UN scandal. Remarkably, Zampolli managed to avoid any repercussions at all for his involvement, despite the fact that the available evidence directly contradicts his claims about the case. 

The scandal first broke in 2022, when a UN official then at the UN Office of Project Services (UNOPS) was revealed to have suspiciously steered $58 million of UNOPS funds to a British businessman merely after meeting him at a party. Who brokered the introduction between the two men? Paolo Zampolli.

Zampolli first introduced the UNOPS officials central to the scandal, Grete Faremo of Norway and Vitaly Vanshelboim of Ukraine, to the British businessman, David Kendrick, and his daughter Daisy in 2015. At the time of the party, Zampolli “was making introductions for Mr. Kendrick, the British businessman, who was selling a system for building fast, cheap, sturdy homes in the developing world.” “Could that bring me money? Yes, of course. That’s called real estate,” Zampolli later told the New York Times about his apparent motives in making the introduction between UNOPS officials and the Kendricks. After the party, Zampolli said that “David came to me and said, ‘Paolo, these UNOPS people are very interested. They can invest.”

A year later, in 2016, Zampolli and UNOPS co-hosted an event that bore the branding of “We Are The Oceans” or WATO, Zampolli’s UN-backed “conservation group” that Zampolli once described as “the NATO of the Oceans.” Photos show Faremo and Vanshelboim –– then the top two figures at UNOPS –– along with Zampolli, who addressed guests. Among them was Petra Nemcova, the super-model who started off her career at Jean Luc Brunel’s modeling agency and who seemed to be a fixture at Zampolli-hosted UN events. Another guest was Daisy Kendrick. According to photos from the party, the purpose of the event was to formally announce UNOPS’ new “seed capital facility.”

That seed capital facility was described in a 2016 UNOPS document as “aimed at utilizing a portion of UNOPS operational reserves to make targeted contributions to early-stage investment projects in UNOPS mandated areas, with a view to leveraging high-impact transformational initiatives in countries with a United Nations field presence, in collaboration with like-minded donors and investors and fully in line with the strategic priorities of the respective Governments and the United Nations coherence agenda.” The New York Times claimed that the idea for this facility had been developed by Faremo prior to the 2015 meeting where Zampolli brokered her introduction to the Kendricks, and that the purpose of that meeting had been to “find someone to lend to.”

A year after the joint WATO-UNOPS event, in 2017, UNOPS announced a formal alliance with a WATO now led by Daisy Kendrick. The branding of Kendrick’s WATO, founded in 2016, was exactly the same as Zampolli’s WATO. Furthermore, the announcement of the UNOPS-WATO partnership involving Kendrick was made at an event hosted by the aforementioned Sustainable Oceans Alliance (SOA), whose members were Palau’s Stuart Beck, Ghislaine Maxwell’s TerraMar, Amir Dossal’s Global Partnership Forum and Paolo Zampolli. 

Kendrick’s WATO received $3 million from UNOPS as part of this 2017 partnership, producing a song called “We are the Oceans” and a video game. Similar to TerraMar in some ways, the goal of Kendrick’s WATO was to target youth and “create awareness [about SDG14] through music”, resulting in partnerships with singer Joss Stone and Vans Warped Tour, followed by another effort to “create awareness” through a mobile game called “The Big Catch.” UNOPS’ Grete Faremo also performed the song to a largely empty UN conference hall that same year.

Notably, the mission statement of Zampolli’s WATO appears to align with exactly what Kendrick’s WATO was doing. His WATO’s website states it exists “to leverage the art [sic] and unlock humanity to accelerate the drive to implement the SDG’s. We are connecting different artists globally and harness their collective power for humanity to save the oceans.” Shortly after the Stone partnership, for reasons unknown, it appears that Kendrick began rebranding her WATO under the name Ocean Generation, perhaps to distance it from Zampolli’s group.

A year later, in 2018, the UNOPS seed capital facility –– first announced 2 years prior at a Zampolli-hosted event –– began making its first loans. Over the next two years, it made three loans valued at a total of $58.8 million for projects in different countries. However, all of the beneficiaries were companies controlled by or deeply connected to David Kendrick. The projects, which included building homes and wind farms in impoverished communities, never happened and it appears that Kendrick had used the funds his companies received to pay off other loans. All of the $58.8 million were lost. It later emerged that the agency’s second-in-command, Vitaly Vanshelboim, began receiving secret payments and expensive gifts from Kendrick in 2017, a year before the loans were made and the same year that UNOPS decided to give Daisy Kendrick’s WATO $3 million.

Zampolli has denied any role in the scandal beyond merely brokering the introduction between Faremo, Vanshelboim and the Kendricks in 2015. He claimed to have been “used” by the Kendricks when it came to the WATO name and there was never any connection between the two WATOs. This is despite the fact that the branding and goals of Kendrick’s WATO were the same as his WATO group and that another Zampolli-linked group had presided over the announcement of the partnership between UNOPS and Kendrick’s WATO. 

Zampolli also claims to have not been paid a “finder’s fee” for the introduction of the Kendricks to UNOPS officials, even though he claimed that his goal in brokering the introduction was money and that David Kendrick had excitedly told him the introduction was due to result in UNOPS investments in his companies. In other cases, which were already discussed in this article, Zampolli is known to sue when he doesn’t get his cut and he does not spend his time making introductions for wealthy businessmen just for fun. Thus, the denials of being paid to introduce David Kendrick to UN officials seems aimed at warding off scrutiny from the media only after the scandal began to surface.

There is also the fact that, a year after Zampolli made the introduction, Zampolli’s WATO co-hosted the event where UNOPS announced its seed capital facility, which would later only expressly benefit the Kendricks and at which Daisy Kendrick was present (an event conveniently left out of the New York Times reporting that also published Zampolli’s denials without pushback). It further appears that Zampolli’s wife, Amanda Ungaro, may have had something to do with connecting the Kendricks and Zampolli as well as motivating Daisy Kendrick to create her WATO non-profit. Kendrick has said that her decision to create WATO was made in 2015, after “an internship at the United Nations in New York working for the Permanent Mission of Grenada.” At the time, Amanda Ungaro was one of the representatives for the Permanent Mission of Grenada at the UN. Overall, it seems quite clear that Zampolli was a key part of the Kendrick’s efforts and did much more than merely broker their introduction to the UNOPS officials they would later corrupt.

Zampolli Goes to Washington

When Trump launched his 2016 presidential campaign, Zampolli had a chance to gain access to a whole new tier of power players outside of the UN. After Trump’s defeat of Hillary Clinton (also a friend of Zampolli’s), Zampolli was one of the most high-profile Italians invited to the ritziest of inaugural parties and balls. Zampolli even co-organized an inauguration party for Trump with the magazine Forbes, utilizing his “diplomatic capacity” to do so, per reports. The guest of honor was Sylvester Stallone, who was previously engaged to one of Zampolli’s former models and model brokers, Angela Everheart. The subject of Part I of this series, Flavio Briatore, who was described by Italian media as “the Italian friend closest to Donald Trump,” was also heavily involved in the inaugural festivities, telling Corriere Della Sera that “the most interesting meetings take place before the start of the big celebrations.”   

After the inauguration, Zampolli spent multiple New Year’s Eves with the president and his wife while also frequently visiting the White House and Mar-a-Lago. During this time, Zampolli began re-branding as a “counter-terror” expert and an expert in Artificial Intelligence, creating an organization called World Artificial Intelligence Organization (WAIO). According to its website, WAIO is dedicated to “ensur[ing] that AI is deployed for SDGs implementation.” His forays into “counter-terror” and defense tech may have been aided by the U.S. government. In 2019, Zampolli told Serbian media outlet Telegraf that “I met briefly [Serbian Interior] Minister Stefanovic when he came to visit the CIA, the FBI, and the New York Police Department for counter-terrorism, and I promised him that I would come and visit Serbia to have an official meeting on these topics.” Zampolli’s statement suggests that someone at one of those organizations sent the Serbian government minister to Zampolli to discuss counter-terrorism and defense tech. This would foreshadow Zampolli’s later focus when appointed Special Envoy for Global Partnerships under the second Trump administration.

In October 2020, Zampolli decided to move from New York City to D.C. to ostensibly be closer to his former boss. However, Zampolli blended in poorly with D.C. elites, who found his tastes “garish” and the guests he would entertain “questionable.” Politico noted that these “questionable” figures were “lobbyists for disreputable industries and diplomats for countries with lackluster human rights records.” It was also reported that his artwork was deemed offensive, including: “a photograph of Tony Blair scribbling on the Chilcot Report, a painting of Barack Obama smoking, a photograph of George W. Bush struggling with a Rubik’s Cube and multiple massive images of Trump.”

The following year, in 2021, Zampolli saw himself appointed to the President’s Council on Sports, Fitness & Nutrition as well as to the board of trustees of the Kennedy Center. That same year, he also hosted a “We are the Oceans” event at the Kennedy Center, which was attended by diplomats as well as Brock Pierce, the co-founder of Tether, Jeffrey Epstein’s former cryptocurrency guru and affiliate of the DEN pedophile network. Pierce and Zampolli met prior to the event and have been closely associated ever since.

Pierce initially found fame as a Disney child star before he joined Marc Collins-Rector and Chad Shackley in co-founding the Digital Entertainment Network, or DEN. The focus of a previous investigation by Unlimited Hangout, The Chain of Issuance, Pierce left the failed DEN to form his own company, the Internet Gaming Entertainment (IGE), which kick-started the virtual goods economy, eventually culminating in the founding of the world’s largest stablecoin issuer, Tether. DEN, an early pioneer in digital video streaming which acted as a front for an extensive pedophilia ring in southern California, failed famously after Collins-Rector was “indicted for transporting minors across state lines for sex,” forcing the founders to flee to Spain. In May 2002, Interpol arrested Collins-Rector, Shackley and Pierce after “finding weapons and thousands of child-porn images in their house,” with Spanish law enforcement furthering that “enormous amounts of child porn” were found in the house and that “the FBI has been investigating the trio since late 1999.” It was during this time in Spain, before the arrest, that Pierce founded IGE.

“I started a company called IGE and so I built a supply chain of 400,000 people in China that were playing video games professionally to mine digital currency in games like World of Warcraft and so I was the main market maker for all of the virtual worlds globally, rolled up Korea and most of the major territories, and in that process I raised a bunch of money from Goldman Sachs. My right hand was a guy by the name of Steve Bannon who then became CEO.” – Brock Pierce at BlockShow Asia 2017

Pierce was eventually forced out as CEO of IGE by Steve Bannon, who has considerable ties to both Epstein and Trump. Bannon filmed Epstein for an estimated 15 hours for a supposed documentary film that has never materialized and is said to have coached Epstein on how to respond to his reputational and legal woes. Bannon viewed Epstein as an intelligence asset as he was “intrigued by Epstein’s role as middleman for intelligence services in the United States and abroad.” Bannon was a key figure in Trump’s rise to the presidency, and held the position of Chief Strategist during the first 7 months of his first administration. 

Pierce is most famous today for founding Tether, but he was also instrumental in the success of Blockchain Capital, Block.one’s EOS, Roundtable Media –– the media company associated with BTC Inc and the Bitcoin Conference  –– in addition to his prudent roles as a United Nations OIJ Senior Advisor and a member of the Clinton Global Initiative. In 2011, Pierce appeared at Al Seckel’s and Epstein’s Mindshift Conference held on Epstein’s Little St. James Island, with a representative of Pierce claiming that “the few communications that Mr. Pierce had with Epstein related to cryptocurrency.” Pierce had previously ran a gaming firm for Clearstone Ventures, a spin off of Idealab Capital Partners –– the first institutional investor in PayPal –– which was managed by Bill Elkus. In the 1990s, Elkus was listed as a trustee of the J. Epstein Foundation alongside Jeffrey Epstein’s brother Mark, and was also business manager to the Epstein-affiliated Deepak Chopra. 

In April 2021, Zampolli threw a party for Pierce at his mansion in Washington, D.C. in which Pierce infamously taught the party-goers how NFTs work by setting fire to an expensive painting hanging on Zampolli’s wall. According to reporting from Page Six, a guest described Pierce talking about recently acquiring an NFT made by The Rolling Stone’s front-man Mick Jagger. The guest stated that “Paolo [had] said he was an old school art collector and still didn’t understand the concept of NFT’s,” leading Pierce to say, “Let me show you how its done.” Pierce scanned the walls of Zampolli’s mansion before landing on a  painting made by Domingo Zapata, a friend of Zampolli, whom agreed to allow the pair of friends to destroy his painting to create an NFT. Zampollo and Pierce placed the painting in a champagne bucket and set it on fire. Pierce took the video of the pyrotechnics and turned it into an NFT in order to auction it off at the aforementioned June 2021 fundraiser for “We are the Oceans” held at the Kennedy Center, where Zampolli is a board member. Zampolli and Pierce would continue to work on cryptocurrency events and projects relating to Trump’s presidency, as described further below.

A month later in July 2021, Zampolli forwarded a series of text messages to “a dozen lobbyists, business owners and other power players in D.C” that included “screengrabs of exchanges between himself and a woman, in which he described his sexual encounters with her in graphic detail.” Zampolli described the woman as a “working girl,” i.e. prostitute. However, Zampolli later said that he did not pay her for sex and several sources claimed that the woman was not, in fact, a prostitute.  “Please stay away from my family, you are a pro, all [sic] city knows you are a working girl, since day one you said I had to pay you,” Zampolli had written in one of the messages. The woman later stated that the relationship had been consensual, but that Zampolli had “dishonest about the nature of his relationship with the mother of his son and no longer wanted to be involved or associated with him.” She claims that Zampolli threatened her and then proceeded to slander her in the texts he forwarded around D.C. Zampolli described the situation very differently, stating that he felt “blackmailed” and that the woman “wanted to hurt my family.” Shortly after sending the messages around town, Zampolli moved back to New York.

Zampolli’s New Role

However, Zampolli would again make a political comeback with Trump’s return to the White House after winning the 2024 presidential election. He again participated in several prominent inaugural events (discussed later) and apparently reuniting with another close friend of Trump, Flavio Briatore. Soon after returning to the White House, Trump appointed Zampolli to be U.S. special envoy to Italy in February. “The other day, the president, in front of ten people, suddenly pointed at me and asked me to be a special envoy,” Zampolli told the Italian newspaper Il Gironale. He later added that Trump “is always very busy and quick. He says a few words and solves problems.”

Once in that role, Zampolli began meeting with top politicians in Italy like Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni and her deputy Prime Minster Matteo Salvini. Salvini and Meloni are long-time political associates of Silvio Berlusconi, the Italian billionaire and former Prime Minister who was caught up in the “bunga bunga party” scandal involving teen girls. As noted earlier, Berlusconi, the P2 lodge member with alleged mafia links, had long-standing ties to Zampolli beginning with Zampolli selling his family toy company to Berlusconi to finance his entry into the world of model management. Meloni had previously served under Berlusconi as his Minister for Youth Policies from 2008 to 2011.  

In his meetings with Italy, Zampolli and top Italian officials like Salvini publicly claimed in English to focus on “reinforc[ing] the economic and commercial ties between the two countries.” However, In an interview on Italian TV, Zampolli made it clear his main focus was on “defense industry ties between Italy and the United States.” One of his proposed policies, pitched to top Italian officials without Trump’s approval at the time, was to have the U.S. enter the Global Combat Air Programme (GCAP), whose current members are the UK, Italy and Japan. The main contractors for that program are currently BAE Systems (UK), Leonardo (Italy) and Mitsubishi Heavy Industries (Japan).  

Zampolli was one of the earliest figures in the new administration to push Italy’s Meloni to advocate 5% of Italian GDP to defense spending. The push came before the NATO-wide agreement to have member countries contribute 5% to defense spending, to which Meloni – among others – agreed. That agreement came after a push from Trump and some of his top officials. Zampolli also called for Italian company Leonardo (part of the GCAP) to become “a European leader in supplies for the American Iron Dome,” i.e. the Golden Dome, stating that such systems are necessary “to counter the risk of attacks with much more advanced launchers than those launched by Iran against the Jewish State.”

By this point, however, Zampolli was no longer just special envoy to Italy. On March 11, he was promoted to the post of Special Envoy for Global Partnerships. Since then, he’s been an important yet quiet fixture at major events, like the GCC-USA Summit in Saudi Arabia, which was attended by top Trump officials as well as major figures from Wall Street and Silicon Valley. That summit resulted in a major, $600 billion investment commitment. As noted previously, Zampolli has long boasted of his ties to members of the Saudi royal family. Furthermore, other GCC nation ruling families have ties to Zampolli, such as those of Qatar, as Zampolli has represented them in New York real estate deals in the past. Oddly, American media avoided naming Zampolli at all as being part of Trump’s entourage, despite him supposedly being a member of Trump’s “inner circle.” However, images from the forum show Zampolli in the front row of the summit with top U.S. officials and Gulf officials and other media reports from outside of the U.S. described Zampolli as being “at the forefront” of the forum.

In an interview with Corriere Della Sella, Zampolli claimed that the GCC countries had become “the main interlocutors of the United States” and that the Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, also known as MbS, was a “true friend” and “role model” due to his “determination to transform Saudi Arabia based on the 2030 agenda,” i.e. the sustainable development goals that Zampolli helped influence. Zampolli also stated that he had met MbS when he was 24 years old, long before he was Crown Prince, “at the home of his cousin Nawaf bin Sultan al Saud, my old friend, who lived in one of the Trump Towers in New York.” MbS, after coming to power in 2017, developed close ties to other figures in Trump’s circle, such as Jared Kushner, as well as former close friends of Trump’s, like Jeffrey Epstein.

Since the summit, Zampolli has quietly continued to meet, both officially and unofficially, with other top officials from several other governments such as the Prime Minster of Montenegro, the President of the Dominican Republic, and Keir Starmer, the Prime Minister of the UK, as well as the UN-Secretary General Antonio Guterres, and former heads of NATO.

In addition to behind-the-scenes business deals and efforts to gin up foreign investment in the U.S., Zampolli is also aiding Trump by “reshaping the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts,” better known as the Kennedy Center. Zampolli has served on the board since Trump’s first term but was one of the few to remain during Trump’s second term, when the president fired all Biden appointees of the “historically bipartisan” institution. Zampolli has pitched to open Kennedy Center franchises in Gulf nations like Saudi Arabia, to “launch art into space with the help of Elon Musk” and to “open a marina on the Potomac and a Cipriani restaurant.”

Furthermore, it seems that some of Trump’s most controversial foreign policy ideas may have first originated with his long-time friend. In 2016, Zampolli had told journalist Mattia Ferraresi of his idea of converting Gaza “into a “Mediterrean Riviera” with high-rises and shopping malls.” “Let’s make it like Dubai, but with no golden faucets,” Zampolli was quoted as saying. More recently, in February, Trump (and before him his son-in-law Jared Kushner) promoted the very controversial policy of forcibly relocating the 2.3 million Palestinians in the war-torn Gaza strip to other states, demolishing buildings in the strip that haven’t already been destroyed by the Israeli military and building a US-backed “Riviera” in their place. When Ferraresi contacted Zampolli after Trump’s “Riviera” plan, he said “You see, maybe I am no completely dumb after all” and was “obviously delighted about the Mar-a-Gaza project,” per Ferraresi. Zampolli denied, however, being directly involved in the new policy. Yet, given Zampolli’s history of distancing himself from things only after they become highly controversial (such as the UN-WATO incident mentioned earlier in this piece), it is difficult to take his denial at face value.

While Zampolli’s official role in the government is focused on foreign policy and foreign investment, he also appears to have played some sort of role in the administration’s effort to court the crypto community. These efforts, unsurprisingly, have all occurred alongside Zampolli’s associate of several years, Brock Pierce. For instance, Zampolli, Pierce and Pierce’s DNA Holdings were the hosts of the inaugural “Blockchain Ball” event at the Kennedy Center. The ball was sponsored by Charles Hoskinson’s IOHK (Hoskinson is a co-founder of both Ethereum and Cardano) and the Near Foundation, which is chaired by Diogo Mónica. Mónica also co-founded Anchorage Digital, the only crypto bank to be chartered by the OCC, which occurred during Trump’s first administration. Since the recent passage of crypto regulation, others have applied for charters, but Anchorage was able to entrench itself due to its early regulatory advantage. 

In addition, both Zampolli and Pierce were simultaneously involved with the $PATRIOT token project, an apparent crypto grift. That token was the brainchild of Dustin Stockton, now referred to as the “godfather of political finance” for his role in popularizing political meme coins. Stockton was previously the “lead organizer” for January 6th who, despite his leading role, decided not to show up to the Capitol that day and was not charged in relation to the event. Instead, he subsequently denounced Trump and the “riot,” promising to “name names.” Stockton also helped the create the ill-fated “We Build the Wall” non-profit, which later led to criminal charges with others intimately involved in the project, including Steve Bannon who has been closely affiliated with Stockton for years. Again, Stockton was not charged (his RV, however, was raided by law enforcement). Bannon is likely how Stockton first met Brock Pierce, as the two are former business partners. Bannon and Pierce also share mutual ties to Jeffrey Epstein, whose ties to Pierce in particular were built around his interest in cryptocurrency.

The ostensible goal of the $PATRIOT token was to build a two-story-high monument to Donald Trump’s now iconic reaction after the Butler, PA assassination attempt. That statue was due to be paraded around the country before being installed in Miami at the Trump Doral. Despite being completed in January, the token’s website claims it has yet to be “unveiled,” despite being completed several months ago. However, Stockton has since claimed that the group paid a 6-figure sum as part of “a purchase agreement for the Intellectual property that governs the merchandising and reproduction of the $PATRIOT Statue.” The website claims it worked through “liaisons to the President” as part of the project, with one of those liaisons being Paolo Zampolli, who posted images of him presenting Trump with a replica of the $PATRIOT statue. Another is the pastor Mark Burns who, in a recent clip posted to the token’s Twitter page on August 8th, mentioned Brock Pierce’s early and continuing presence in the project. he also mentioned the involvement of Yaakov Flitchkin, a “partner” of Brock Pierce whose organization, the Alliance for Global Cooperation, has closely linked itself to the United Nations and acts as a de facto UN lobbying group for the Chabad Lubavitch movement. Burns, Pierce and Flitchkin sat together during the inauguration and attended other inaugural events together aside from the $PATRIOT token’s award ceremony. At the inauguration, the trio were joined by Mayor of New York Eric Adams, who previously courted controversy for riding on Pierce’s private jet. 

In January, during inauguration festivities, Stockton hosted the Patriot Awards that were directly affiliated with the token project. Stockton credited Brock Pierce for much of the project, claiming that Pierce “helped put all of this together” and has “done so much behind the scenes that I couldn’t even begin to describe.” The $PATRIOT token Twitter page also credited Paolo Zampolli as having been a “huge help” in putting together the event, which was hosted at the National Press Club. Awardees included Pierce, who gave a shout-out to Zampolli in his speech, as well as Steve Bannon and a top journalist at Breitbart, which Bannon once ran and which also previously employed Stockton.

Stockton promoted the token as being “America’s token” and its success as being “inevitable.” He continued to do so as its value tanked, promising those who had purchased the tokens that it would soon be “making moves” in several tweets. At the height of its popularity in January, the token had a market cap of $77.7 million that has since collapsed to $3.4 million.

$PATRIOT was just one of several political meme coins that Stockton was involved with that targeted Trump’s base during and right after the election. For instance, Stockton also created the $MAHA token that Stockton promoted as being related to the Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) movement. Stockton promoted the $MAHA token throughout 2024 and implied that the imminent “domination” of “top influencers” in MAHA would pump the token’s value. Not long after, Stockton began co-hosting a Club MAHA podcast with Kyle Kemper, Justin Trudeau’s half-brother, and social media personality turned streamer Ian Carroll. (Note: Carroll does not appear to have ever been affiliated with the token, but Stockton appears to have used the access to a larger MAHA audience to promote this failed token).

Consigliere Zampolli

Paolo Zampolli’s appointment to a new government position seemingly made just for him should be the subject of increased scrutiny, not just due to Zampolli’s affiliations to the broader network of Epstein, Brunel and Maxwell, but also due to the decades of covert and corrupt wheeling-and-dealing that has marked his career in real estate, in “diplomacy” and now in U.S. foreign and trade policy. It is truly remarkable that, despite all that this investigation has documented, Zampolli has never been investigated or charged for criminal activity. He appears oddly protected from scrutiny. 

This is true also for the press, especially considering so many outlets would presumably jump at the chance to un-earth the deep corruption of the man that Trump and Melania say introduced them, especially when confronted with the assertion that it had been Jeffrey Epstein.

Paolo Zampolli is truly an ambassador for one thing — brazen corruption in the global power structure. The fact that he would be given a special role involving foreign trade and partnerships in the current administration by Trump is mind-boggling — at least if you take Trump’s political rhetoric at face value. This is especially true considering that, among other things, Zampolli was given this role after servicing corrupt, predatory and globalist ambitions targeting the world’s oceans, facilitating fraud, and aiding citizenship-by-investment scams used by corrupt Chinese, Iranian and others to, as Zampolli himself said, circumvent U.S. sanctions. It is also a testament to the protection and cronyism enjoyed by some of the “First Friends” that enjoy not only close ties to the current U.S. president, but the broader Epstein/Maxwell network.

As we will see in the final, and arguably most damning, installment of this series, another figure close to Trump that has also become quietly yet intimately intertwined with New York mayoral politics appears to similarly enjoy protection from legal scrutiny when it comes to his extensive dealings with Jeffrey Epstein.