Nardello & Co.:
the chain that launders responsibility

This archive documents an unregulated reputation trade and, on the Paul Weiss page, the same work performed inside a licensed profession. Nardello is the third version: a firm whose entire business is doing this properly.

Its founder was a federal prosecutor in the Southern District of New York. Its recent hires include a former CIA analyst who supervised counterterrorism work at the NYPD, two former DEA special agents, and two more former SDNY prosecutors. Its clients are Fortune 500 companies, governments and NGOs. It was engaged to help recover assets after the FTX bankruptcy.

And two of its marketed service lines are the ones that matter here. Its Chambers profile describes a partner leading “multi-state mobile surveillance operations” and “the coordination of witness interviews around the world.” The firm also markets “activist defense.”

The praise for that partner, published in a legal directory, reads: “our go-to person any time we need to approach a witness… has great human touch. He makes the witnesses comfortable.” That is a professional commendation, and in almost every engagement it describes something entirely benign.

In 2015 the firm was retained through Paul Weiss, acting for Leon Black, and surveilled a woman for a week. Her movements were relayed onward to Jeffrey Epstein, and transcripts of secret recordings were produced.

The firm says it did not know. And the archive has no basis to doubt it — the denial is specific, it names what the firm did and did not know, and no evidence contradicts it.

Which is precisely why this page exists. The most disturbing version of this story is not one where a firm behaved badly. It is one where every participant behaved correctly on the information available to them, and the aggregate was still a week of surveillance on a private woman, reported to a convicted sex offender.

This page previously said the contents had not been reported. That was written from a 300-character index snippet, and it was wrong. The document is readable.

EFTA01190807 is a 24-page draft transcript of a covertly recorded conversation, dated 24 August 2015, addressed to Brad S. Karp and Lorin L. Reisner at Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison. It records a two-hour lunch on 19 August 2015 at The Modern restaurant, 9 W 53rd Street, New York.

The header states the arrangement in one line: “The recording was made with the consent of JD.” One party consented. The woman across the table did not know she was being recorded, and did not know a transcript would be produced for a law firm. New York is a one-party-consent state. This was lawful.

The conversation is a settlement negotiation, conducted in person, with one side wired.

The man, anonymised throughout as “John Doe (JD)”, describes payments already made — “I’m going to give you a million dollars to get settled… I gave you half a million when you left and then there were three payments after that” — and discusses an investor’s visa, then a passport, then a trust, and an ongoing figure of “a million dollars a year after tax.”

Three passages are worth reading exactly.

He explains Mutually Assured Destruction to her, walking through the Soviet–American nuclear analogy, as a frame for their situation.

She says: “I think it’s dangerous for me to meet with you. It could be seen as a blackmail case.”

And he advises her against retaining a lawyer — “the danger of having one too early is they try to grab on to a significant piece” — when she asks him directly, “You think I should get lawyer?” The man discouraging her had two of them receiving the transcript.

Her side of it: her visa, her son’s schooling, a year moving between hotels, “my reputation, my emotional well being” — and the question “were you aware that this is happening? That my son and me were getting attacked?”