He searched the Epstein files for the initials HWL - Now Simon Andriesz is dead

Simon Andriesz knew where to look. From his years at the financial firm BGC, whose CEO at the time was Howard Lutnick, he knew the habit of senior people at Cantor Fitzgerald of hiding behind their initials in emails. So he searched the millions of pages the U.S. Justice Department had released from Jeffrey Epstein's files for one abbreviation: HWL. What he found contradicted what the current U.S. Commerce Secretary had claimed for years about his relationship with Epstein. This September, Andriesz died at the age of 57, according to our current research by his own hand. At the time, he was in the middle of a two-month stay at a trauma crisis center.

The Brit had spent decades in the securities business and had run a futures and options trading desk at BGC in London from November 2014 to January 2017. The company then fired him after he raised concerns internally about irregularities in the books. What followed, he later described himself. Heart problems and treatment for psychological trauma. On top of that, a ruined career and a shattered family life. The U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission listed him as a foreign whistleblower whose information had played a significant role in an enforcement case. He carried the price for that alone. A whistleblower rarely wins. He loses in installments while the company he reported keeps running.

The document that caught up with the secretary was a 2018 email exchange. In it, Lutnick and Epstein discussed AdFin, a digital advertising company in which both had invested. Andriesz gave the find to members of the House Oversight Committee before the secretary testified there behind closed doors in May. In February, we had already independently exposed the business connection. In July, Andriesz himself spoke about his search in a British radio report. He invented nothing. The contracts and emails had long been sitting in government files; his achievement was finding them and recognizing their significance where others had read right past them.

Lutnick's account sounded like a clean break. He said he had met Epstein in 2005, when he and his wife moved next door to Epstein's Manhattan mansion, and that during a tour of the house something had so disgusted him that he decided never to be in the same room with the man again. The files tell a different story. In 2012, the Lutnick family had lunch with Epstein on his private island; before the Senate Appropriations Committee in February, he acknowledged the trip, said he could not remember why he went, and called it insignificant. In December of that same year, companies controlled by the two men signed an agreement involving shares in AdFin. The correspondence continued until 2014. In 2018, Lutnick urged his old acquaintance to oppose the expansion of a neighborhood museum, 10 years after Epstein had pleaded guilty in 2008 to soliciting prostitution from a minor and 1 year before he died in custody while awaiting trial on sex trafficking charges.

From our reporting at the time: The document shows two signature pages from a "Series A Preferred Stock Purchase Agreement." On the left side, Howard W. Lutnick signed as president for CVFHI, LLC. On the right side, Jeffrey Epstein signed as president of Southern Trust Company, Inc. Both signatures relate to an agreement connected to a preferred-stock investment in AdFin Solutions, Inc.

While Andriesz followed the initials HWL, we investigated AdFin directly. Both trails led to the same man, each independently, without either side knowing about the other at the time. Our own reporting had already uncovered more. Epstein gave $50,000 in 2017 for a charity dinner honoring Lutnick. For at least 6 years, the current secretary was financially connected to Epstein through AdFin, gradually took control, and eventually sat on the board. There was no sign of the small minority investor his circle had claimed he was. In 2019, the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission itself fined BGC $3 million over failures in supervision and recordkeeping.

What Andriesz accomplished remains to his credit. Andriesz went public with his story on July 14, 2026. Finding the decisive page in a mountain of millions of pages takes persistence and a sharp eye. He had both, and this second independent investigation from a different direction was a major gain.

An archived version of the AdFin website from July 2015 lists Howard Lutnick as one of five “board members and investors” of the company. Jeffrey Epstein does not appear in this public listing, although he continued to hold shares in the firm.

Read our February 24, 2026 article on this as well: Investigation shows: US Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick Lied - Six Years of Business With Epstein

US Commerce Secretary: Subpoena Almost Certain - Lutnick Moves to the Center of Congress in the Epstein Case

Lutnick Hearing on Epstein: The Island, the Memory Lapses and the 250 Documents

Before the committee, Lutnick acknowledged 3 encounters with Epstein in May. The house tour in 2005 and a conversation about scaffolding in 2011. The lunch on the island in 2012 was added as well. He said he only learned through the release of the files that Epstein had been involved in AdFin. He walked back his earlier description of Epstein as a major blackmailer, saying the words had been exaggerated and he had no evidence. Emails under his name, he said, had sometimes been sent by employees. Republican chairman James Comer said Lutnick had cooperated; Democrats said the later contacts were incompatible with everything he had previously told the public. Lutnick has not been charged. He denied having a close friendship with Epstein and described the later contacts as limited. A congressional committee is not a criminal court, and so it ended with a transcript that was released a week later.

None of this was new. As early as 2020 and 2021, Andriesz had told the FBI that Lutnick maintained undisclosed business ties with Epstein. Reporting at the time had already backed that up. The agency did not pursue it. Years passed before a congressional committee took a look. Until then, no government body had followed the trail, only a fired banker with a search box. He lost his legal battle with his former employer in April 2025, when a federal judge rejected his challenge to an arbitration award. Some of his information, people around him said, was later confirmed by regulators or tax authorities.

Here you can access our public Epstein archive

Andriesz most recently lived in Cornwall. His death was made public by Andy Agathangelou, founder of the Transparency Task Force, who had invited him to speak at whistleblower meetings. With great sadness, he said, they were sharing the news that a valued member of the community had died the previous week, without giving a reason. A report that called it suicide relied on a single financial publication; an official cause of death remained open. The Commerce Department and the FBI stayed silent. No evidence connected his death to Lutnick or Epstein, including anything he had uncovered. Agathangelou did not speak of a crime. He spoke about what a whistleblower has to endure until career and health begin to fall apart. His experience, he said, showed what can happen to people who report wrongdoing.

The internet needed less than an hour to place the dead man on a long list. Matthew Wingell, who is running for governor of New Jersey, wrote: "This is not a game, people." Representative Thomas Massie, who has long demanded the release of the Epstein papers, helped draw attention to it. Neither of them offered evidence that anyone had harmed Andriesz. Epstein's own death in custody in 2019, officially ruled a suicide, continues to fuel suspicions like these. Turning Epstein's death into a rule that every other death must fit is convenient and proves nothing.

A closer look makes this list fall apart in your hands. Epstein died in New York custody in 2019, the main perpetrator. Jean-Luc Brunel, his close associate, who built the MC2 agency with Epstein's money and was prosecuted over the rape of minors and human trafficking, took his own life in a Paris cell in 2022. The suspicion holds that far. Then it starts to break down. Daniel Amar Siad, described in the files as a recruiter of young women and girls for Epstein, to whom he sent photos and profiles over the years and from whom he is said to have received money, including a $25,000 loan, died near Paris in July 2026. The autopsy found no fresh signs of violence. It found poor health and evidence of an earlier heart attack. In France, serious allegations against him included rape and human trafficking in a separate case. Steve Bing, a businessman and film producer, died in Los Angeles in 2020; he knew Epstein through the circle around his late girlfriend Allexanne Mitchum, whose aunt Carrie Mitchum later said he had been urged to speak through lawyers about what he knew. Nothing beyond knowledge is established. Mark Middleton, once a White House staffer under Clinton, where Epstein visited several times in the 1990s, had met him there; documents establish the contact, not involvement in the crimes. Thomas Bowers, finally, a former bank executive, is turned online into Epstein's banker even though his documented role involved Trump's loans and had no demonstrable connection to Epstein's business dealings.

The appetite for the grand conspiracy has a quiet beneficiary: power. Every unprovable murder story drags the provable lie down into uncertainty with it, until the secretary can dismiss everything with a wave of the hand as internet noise. No one has to deny the facts to protect Lutnick. It is enough to let them disappear in the noise of speculation. Andriesz had tried the opposite, paper against rumor, a contract and a set of initials in an email.

The search for a secret killer misses the point. Andriesz did not have to be eliminated for an injustice to be done to him. It was enough that an agency let these warnings sit as well and that a secretary reshaped his story before Congress and remained in office anyway. The man who delivered the truth lost his health and his family and, in the end, no longer knew what to do. Howard Lutnick is still U.S. Commerce Secretary. Simon Andriesz is dead, and the internet turns him into a story instead of having listened to him while he was still here. We already found that disturbing back then.