Courtesy of Todd Michael Glaser
It’s no surprise that the ultraelite in Palm Beach, FL, would want to forget that notorious sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein once lived among them—but the developer who bought the land and razed the mansion took it one step further, changing the address.
The disgraced financier had a waterfront mansion at 358 El Brillo Way. The address has since been changed to 360 El Brillo Way.
The “El” streets (El Brillo Way, El Bravo Way, and El Vedado Road) “are three of the nicest streets in Palm Beach,” local agent Dana Koch of Corcoran tells Realtor.com®.
(Realtor.com)
(Courtesy of Todd Michael Glaser)
But not even one of the nicest streets in one of the world’s nicest neighborhoods can overcome the shadow cast by the property’s last resident.
The home was built in 1952 and designed in a West Indies style by Palm Beach architect John L. Volk. Epstein purchased the home in 1990 for $2.5 million.
After Epstein died by suicide in prison on Aug. 10, 2019, his estate sold the home in 2021 for $18.5 million to local developer Todd Michael Glaser.
One of the first things Glaser did was apply to the Town of Palm Beach to have the address changed. The request was approved, and the property became 360 El Brillo Way.
The 1-acre property, about 2 miles north of President Donald Trump‘s Mar-a-Lago Club, is at the end of a private cul-de-sac overlooking Lake Worth Lagoon and Tarpon Island (also owned by Glaser). But crime aficionados apparently had no trouble finding the place.
“You can’t imagine how many people drove down that dead-end street,” Glaser tells Realtor.com. “It was absolutely crazy—15 to 30 people a day going down that private street, doing U-turns, running over people’s grass.”
He says razing the house didn’t stop the curiosity seekers.
“The vacant lot was even more alluring,” he says. “It became even busier. The neighbors were going crazy.”
So Glaser applied to change the address through the Planning, Zoning & Building Department, and it was approved within two weeks.
Despite owning another infamous house—the Al Capone house in Miami Beach (which was also torn down)—Glaser says this is the first time he’s changed an address. And it worked. With Epstein’s address no longer able to be plugged into search engines, word quickly spread that the house was no more.
“Word got out like wildfire. The drive-bys stopped within a week,” he says. “I became like a movie star in Palm Beach. Whenever the neighbors saw me, they were like, ‘Thank God you made it stop.'”
(Google Maps)
Koch says an address change can be about more than thwarting looky-loos. It’s also about purging the property of bad vibes.
“It’s bad karma, bad juju,” he explains of a tainted address. “If it’s a house where serious crimes took place, then there are people who don’t want to be associated with it. People are either superstitious or they just don’t feel a comfort level being associated with an address that had bad things go down at it.
“They didn’t change Bernie Madoff‘s address (410 North Lake Way, Palm Beach),” he notes. “But those were white-collar crimes—a little different.”
A clean house slate
At first, Glaser says he tried to sell the Epstein home as is.
“It was a beautiful modern house, completely renovated, but nobody would buy it. The husband would love it, but the wife would say, ‘I’m never living here.'”
The Palm Beach Architectural Review Board rejected Glaser’s proposed design to replace the home with a midcentury modern mansion with art deco influences.
Town officials said it would not fit in with the surrounding homes, calling it “too commercial” and “alien in Palm Beach,” according to local law firm Rabideau Klein. Glaser decided to part with the empty lot.
In September 2021, it was sold for $25,845,000, a 13% discount off its May price but still with over a $7 million profit.
The buyers are Boston venture capitalist David Skok of Matrix Partners and his interior designer wife, Mally, who has a store on Worth Avenue. The couple, who are seasonal residents, bought the property through a limited liability company, 360 El Brillo Way, LLC.
Then they presented a different design—a Cape Dutch–style building—which was more in line with the other homes in the area, and it was approved. The new home is almost completed, and it’s safe to say no one misses the old.
“When we purchased 360 El Brillo Way, one of our goals was to take something that, I think, had a very bad reputation and was a blight on the community,” Skok told the Palm Beach Architectural Commission, “and do everything we could to bring that to a state of beauty and grace that really added to the town.”
Other notorious change-of-address homes
While the Epstein property was sold fast, not even an address change and a razing are helping to move the megamansion sitting near where director Roman Polanski‘s wife, actress Sharon Tate, and four others were murdered by the Manson cult in 1969.
The original farmhouse, which was owned by music producer Terry Melcher, was razed in the mid-1990s by a developer. Around this time, the address was switched from 10050 Cielo Drive to 10066 Cielo Drive.
The new mansion, called Villa Andalusia, is a sprawling nine-bedroom, 18-bath estate on 3.6 acres in Benedict Canyon. Featuring spectacular views, it is currently listed for just a smidge below $50 million.
Whether due to “bad juju” or an inflated price, the property, designed by celebrity architect Richard Landry and owned by “Full House” creator Jeff Franklin, still sits after several major price cuts since it first hit the market in January 2022 for $85 million.
(Realtor.com)
Another murder house that used the change-of-address sleight of hand is the Brentwood home where Nicole Brown Simpson and her friend Ronald Goldman were murdered in June 1994.
This L.A. property sat on the market for two years before it was sold for $525,000, a drop from its previous sales price of $100,000. After an extensive remodel and an address change from 875 S. Bundy Drive to 879 S. Bundy Drive in 2006, it changed hands again, this time selling for $1.7 million.
A more recent address switcheroo is that of the infamous pink house where Gypsy Rose Blanchard helped orchestrate her mother’s murder.
Located in Springfield, MO, the house has had its share of looky-loos. The crime scene where Blanchard persuaded her online boyfriend to kill her mother, Clauddine “Dee Dee” Blanchard, in 2015 has become a destination of sorts, much to the dismay of neighbors who complain of people with out-of-state license plates parking in the middle of the road to take pictures.
Property records show that the 1,080-square-foot ranch, built by Habitat for Humanity and gifted to the elder Blanchard, was sold in August 2021 for $97,090.
The house has a brand-new address (which we are not listing out of respect for the privacy of the new inhabitants).