TLDR
Document EFTA02212885 in Data Set 11 contains a four-page email dated April 24, 2017, documenting an American Express Centurion Travel booking for a Russian Federation citizen flying from St. Thomas (STT) to JFK on American Airlines flight 936 (PAPER TRAIL Project, 2026). The email includes Russian-language text and a request to Lesley Groff for a "new ticket back to Moscow" — evidence of international travel coordination during Epstein's registered sex offender period.
The Booking
Among the first sample documents inspected in Data Set 11, EFTA02212885 stood out immediately. Four pages, Bates-stamped (assigned a unique sequential identifier during litigation document processing) EFTA_R1_00936296 through 00936299, the document contains a travel coordination email involving American Express Centurion Travel — the concierge booking service available to holders of the AmEx Centurion card, commonly known as the "Black Card" (PAPER TRAIL Project, 2026).
The booking is for a Russian Federation citizen. The route: STT (Cyril E. King Airport, St. Thomas, U.S. Virgin Islands) to JFK (John F. Kennedy International Airport, New York). The carrier: American Airlines, flight AA 936. The date: April 24, 2017.
The email includes text in both English and Russian. A Cyrillic date stamp reads "pn, 24 apr. 2017 g." — Russian for Monday, April 24, 2017. The recipient of the email asks Lesley Groff for a "new ticket back to Moscow."
What the Document Reveals
Three things emerge from this single email.
First, Epstein's operation used AmEx Centurion Travel for commercial airline bookings for associates, maintaining a parallel travel system alongside the private aircraft fleet. The eight aircraft documented in FAA records served the primary routes between Epstein properties. Commercial airline bookings through AmEx Centurion served the routes that the private fleet did not cover — in this case, a connection from the USVI through New York and onward to Moscow (PAPER TRAIL Project, 2026).
Second, the traveler held Russian Federation citizenship. The booking identifies nationality because international travel on commercial carriers requires passport documentation, and the AmEx booking system records the traveler's citizenship. A Russian citizen departing from Epstein's USVI property — Little St. James Island is accessed primarily through St. Thomas — places a Russian national at one of Epstein's residences.
Third, the request for a "new ticket back to Moscow" implies this was not a one-way trip. The traveler had come from Moscow, visited the USVI, and was now returning. The "new ticket" phrasing suggests the original return booking had been changed or canceled, requiring Groff to arrange a replacement.
Lesley Groff's Role
Lesley Groff was named as a co-conspirator in the 2007 Non-Prosecution Agreement (NPA — a deal where prosecutors agree not to bring charges), received $1,188.72 from DKI PLLC per the TD Bank Suspicious Activity Report (SAR — a report banks must file when they detect potential financial crime), and appears throughout the FedEx records, email corpus, and banking documents as the operational coordinator of Epstein's daily logistics (Non-Prosecution Agreement, SDFL, 2007; TD Bank, 2019). This email confirms her function as the central scheduling gatekeeper — the person through whom all travel arrangements, visitor appointments, and domestic logistics flowed.
The Centurion booking was not placed by the traveler or by Epstein. It was coordinated through Groff. This places her in the role of managing international travel for associates, including arranging commercial airline tickets for foreign nationals visiting Epstein's properties. Whether Groff understood the significance of these arrangements or simply processed them as part of her executive assistant function is a question the email itself cannot answer.
The March 2017 Connection
The April 2017 date of this booking places it one month after a specific compliance event at Deutsche Bank. In March 2017, Deutsche Bank's transaction monitoring system flagged payments from Epstein accounts to a Russian model and publicity agent. The compliance team cleared the alert with the notation "normal for this client" (NYDFS, 2020).
The proximity is striking. In March, Deutsche Bank flags and dismisses payments to a Russian associate. In April, an email in the Epstein corpus documents a Russian citizen traveling from Epstein's USVI property through New York, with a request for onward travel to Moscow. These are not provably connected events — the flagged payments and the AmEx booking may involve different individuals. But they fall within the same timeframe and the same geographic pattern: Russia-connected individuals in the orbit of Epstein's USVI operations, during a period when his bank was actively noting and then ignoring Russian connections.
The Russian Text
The presence of Russian-language text in the email body — specifically the Cyrillic date format "pn, 24 apr. 2017 g." — indicates that at least one participant in the email chain was communicating in Russian. This is significant for entity extraction processing because the English-language text analysis model does not extract entities from Cyrillic text. Russian-language content in the email corpus represents a processing gap: names, locations, and organizations written in Cyrillic will not appear in the entity database without a separate extraction pass using a Russian-language model (PAPER TRAIL Project, 2026).
The scale of this gap is unknown. Only manual sampling has been performed on DS11. Whether the Russian-language content in EFTA02212885 is an isolated instance or representative of a broader pattern of multilingual correspondence cannot be determined without processing the full corpus.
What Remains Unknown
The traveler's name is not visible in the material file — it may be redacted in the source PDF, or it may be present but not extracted. The identity of "Maxim" from the cookies email (EFTA02212883, six days later) is also unresolved. Whether the Russian citizen in the April booking and any other individual referenced in the May email are connected is unknown.
What the document establishes is a data point: on April 24, 2017, a Russian citizen was departing Epstein's USVI territory, traveling through New York, and returning to Moscow, with the travel coordinated by Epstein's personal assistant through his AmEx Centurion concierge service. The document exists. The route exists. The date exists. Everything else requires further investigation.
References
NYDFS. (2020). Consent order: In the matter of Deutsche Bank AG. New York Department of Financial Services. https://www.dfs.ny.gov
Non-Prosecution Agreement, SDFL (2007).
PAPER TRAIL Project. (2026). Observations (OBS-7) [Data set].
TD Bank. (2019). Suspicious Activity Report (BSA-31000155070501). Filed October 1, 2019.
U.S. Department of Justice. (2026). Epstein files: Data Set 11. DOJ Epstein Library.