The Butler Who Knew Too Much: The Story of Alfredo Rodriguez and Epstein’s Black Book

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Among the millions of documents released by the United States Department of Justice on January 30, 2026, there is a 46-minute video that did not go unnoticed. The setting is a hotel room in Boca Raton, Florida. The date is November 3, 2009. Sitting across from an undercover FBI agent, a stocky man with a Cuban accent pulls a 97-page bound notebook from an envelope and calls it “the real McCoy,” the original.

That man is Alfredo Rodriguez, former butler and house manager for Jeffrey Epstein at his Palm Beach mansion. And that notebook — which Rodriguez referred to as “the Holy Grail” — contained 1,571 names, approximately 5,000 phone numbers, and thousands of addresses: a map of Epstein’s entire network, including the names of underage girls exploited for so-called “massages.” Rodriguez wanted $50,000 for that book. He would never see that money, but the document itself would prove to be a major breakthrough in the investigation into Jeffrey Epstein.

This issue is written by Sacha and edited by Luigi.

46 Minutes in a Hotel Room in Boca Raton

The video — which the Department of Justice initially released without blurring the face of the undercover FBI agent (forcing CNN to correct its broadcast and the DOJ to remove the footage from its website) — offers a rare window into what was really happening inside Epstein’s home, as described by someone who lived and worked there every day.

The scene unfolds like this: after about two minutes, the agent shows Rodriguez a duffel bag filled with cash. At minute 6:18, Rodriguez pulls the notebook out of the envelope and begins flipping through it, pointing with his finger to the names and phone numbers of the girls who came to give the “massages.” “You will see a lot of important people here,” Rodriguez tells the agent, adding that the book includes phone numbers of underage girls.

But the most explosive revelation concerns Ghislaine Maxwell. Rodriguez states in the video that Maxwell maintained a full-fledged database of girls, which also included nude images. “The teenagers, they had braces,” Rodriguez says in the secretly recorded footage — the girls had braces on their teeth. Rodriguez provides no material proof of the existence of that database, but his statement, recorded by the FBI, preceded by more than a decade Maxwell’s 2021 conviction for sex trafficking of minors.

Rodriguez also recounts that the magician David Copperfield would come to Epstein’s house to perform his magic tricks. He specifies that the girls were not nude during those visits, but suggests that Copperfield could be an important witness to what was happening inside the mansion. The detail is not insignificant: according to Palm Beach police reports, several victims had stated that they were given tickets to Copperfield’s shows as gifts from Epstein.

At minute 46, the agent hands Rodriguez the duffel bag of money and tells him to count it. At that point, the video cuts off. Rodriguez is arrested immediately afterward.

The Butler Who Cleaned the Sex Toys

Before that hotel room, Alfredo Rodriguez had for years been one of the most valuable — and most ignored — witnesses in the Epstein case. He worked as a butler at the Palm Beach mansion between 2004 and 2005, and during that time he saw things that could have changed the course of the entire investigation, had anyone listened to him in time.

According to Palm Beach police reports and FBI records, Rodriguez stated that he regularly saw underage girls nude by the pool. He recounted that after the so-called “massage” sessions, it was his job to clean Epstein’s sex toys.

He also said he had seen pornographic images of minors on his employer’s personal computer. And then there was a detail that conveyed the girls’ real age better than any document could: Rodriguez told police that the visitors “ate tons of cereal and drank milk all the time.” They looked — and behaved — exactly like high school girls. Because they were.

On one occasion, Rodriguez personally delivered a dozen roses to one of Epstein’s victims directly at Royal Palm Beach High School. Although he was interviewed by the FBI in 2007, Rodriguez did not hand over the black book to investigators. Instead, he attempted to sell it for $50,000 to an attorney representing Epstein’s victims.

That attorney reported him to the FBI, which then organized the sting operation in the Boca Raton hotel room. Arrested and charged with obstruction of justice, Rodriguez pleaded guilty in 2011 and was sentenced to 18 months in federal prison — five months longer than the 13 months Epstein served for soliciting a minor.

At sentencing, federal judge Kenneth Marra made an observation worth revisiting today: had that book been obtained earlier, Epstein’s 2008 sentence “could have been significantly different.” In other words, the man who cleaned a billionaire pedophile’s sex toys ended up serving a harsher sentence than the pedophile himself. Rodriguez told the court that the book was his “insurance policy”: he feared that Epstein would make him “disappear.”

Dead in Silence: The End of Rodriguez and the Growing List

Alfredo Rodriguez died on December 28, 2014, at the age of 60, from mesothelioma — a rare cancer typically associated with asbestos exposure. He had just been released from prison after serving 13 months of his sentence.

His widow, Patricia Dunn, stated that her husband “knew everything about Prince Andrew” and that the black book contained information that could have definitively closed the case. But that information, at least in part, died with him. The exact whereabouts of the original black book have never been established, although more or less complete copies have circulated over the years, the first published by Gawker, a well-known New York blog, in 2015.

Rodriguez’s death, however natural, fits into a list of deaths connected to the Epstein case that has few parallels in recent judicial history. At least 22 people within Epstein’s orbit have died suddenly.

There is, of course, Jeffrey Epstein himself, found dead by suicide, hanged in his cell at the Metropolitan Correctional Center in Manhattan in August 2019, while surveillance cameras were not functioning and the two guards assigned to monitor him had fallen asleep. His brother Mark has consistently maintained that Epstein was killed.

Jean-Luc Brunel, the head of the French modeling agency accused of supplying underage girls to Epstein, was found hanged in his cell at La Santé prison in Paris in February 2022 while awaiting trial.

Steven Hoffenberg, Epstein’s former associate and founder of Towers Financial, was found dead in his Connecticut apartment in August 2022, his body in an advanced state of decomposition. Hoffenberg had been speaking with the FBI and had publicly claimed that Epstein worked for the Mossad.

Mark Middleton, an adviser to Bill Clinton and the man who had invited Epstein (and in some instances Maxwell) to the White House at least 17 times, was found hanging from a tree with a shotgun wound to the chest in Arkansas in May 2022. Police classified the case as a suicide.

Virginia Giuffre, Epstein’s most prominent accuser — the woman who brought Prince Andrew to court and publicly denounced the entire trafficking network — died by suicide in April 2025 in Australia at the age of 41.

Thomas Bowers, the Deutsche Bank executive responsible for the wealth management division that handled Epstein’s accounts, was found hanged in his home in California in November 2019.

Efrain “Stone” Reyes, Epstein’s final cellmate before his death — transferred out of the cell the day before the financier’s alleged suicide — died of COVID in November 2020, just weeks after speaking with federal investigators.

Then there are the victims: Carolyn Andriano, who died of an overdose at 36 in May 2023, and Leigh Skye Patrick, who died of an overdose at 29 in 2017. Two individuals who had investigated Epstein also died suddenly: biographer Wendy Leigh, found below her London balcony in 2016, and former NYPD detective John Connolly, author of a book on Epstein, who died in 2022.

While in prison, the butler Alfredo Rodriguez told his lawyers that keeping the book would protect him. “Epstein wanted to make me disappear,” he said. The black book ultimately did not protect him. And with his death, a direct witness to what happened inside the Palm Beach mansion — a man who could have closed this case in the blink of an eye, because he had seen the girls with braces on their teeth, had cleaned the sex toys, had handwritten the names in the book — took to the grave everything he did not have time to reveal.

Until the next Debrief,

Sacha and Luigi

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