Medical examiners confirmed Friday that convicted Ponzi schemer and Jeffrey Epstein mentor Steven Hoffenberg was the person found dead in a Connecticut apartment earlier this week.

Steven was believed to have died at least seven days before his body was found Tuesday in Derby by the police, who responded to a request to check on his welfare. He had to be identified through dental records because of the decomposition of his body, police said.

Hoffenberg was born in Brooklyn, New York to a Jewish family on January 12, 1945. He had a twin brother called Martin. In the early 1970s, Hoffenberg founded Towers Financial Corporation, a New York City debt collection agency that was supposed to buy debts that people owed to hospitals, banks, and phone companies. It was later discovered to be a Ponzi scheme.

Hoffenberg, who once tried buying the New York Post, ended up getting busted in one of the country’s largest frauds. He admitted he swindled thousands of investors out of $460 million and was sentenced in 1997 to 20 years in prison. He was released from federal custody in 2013, according to the U.S. Bureau of Prisons.

In 1987, he met Jeffrey Epstein through a reported arms dealer Douglas Leese,[citation needed] who was with Saudi Adnan Khashoggi and Prince Bandar bin Sultan Al Saud, architect of the billion-dollar Al-Yamamah arms deal, Britain’s biggest arms deal ever concluded – earning the prime contractor, BAE Systems, at least GBP 43 billion in revenue between 1985 and 2007.

His cause of death is pending toxicology test results. An autopsy showed no signs of trauma, and there were no indications of a struggle or forced entry at the apartment, officials said.

Source: Ghanafuo.com