His name surfaced in the Justice Department’s 2026 release of Jeffrey Epstein’s emails. What the records show about the casino executive and his link to Epstein.
Nicholas Ribis ran Donald Trump’s Atlantic City casinos through the 1990s. On March 22, 2011, years after he had stopped working for Trump, Jeffrey Epstein emailed him with a problem he wanted handled quietly. A woman had told a newspaper she had worked at Mar-a-Lago as a teenager. Epstein wanted to know how to check her account, and how Trump might react if the questions reached him. He then forwarded the exchange to Ghislaine Maxwell, who replied that she thought he had agreed to keep Trump out of it.
The Justice Department released that email in late January 2026, among a large batch of records from Epstein’s estate. It brought a casino executive who had spent years out of the news back into public view. To understand why Epstein took that question to him, you have to go back to the casino business, and to the years Ribis spent as one of the central figures in Trump’s casino empire.
| Detail | Info |
|---|---|
| Full name | Nicholas Louis Ribis |
| Born | July 26, 1944 |
| Profession | Lawyer and casino executive |
| Known for | Leading Trump’s Atlantic City casino operation |
| Top role | President and CEO, Trump Hotels and Casino Resorts (1995 to 2000) |
| In the news | Named in Jeffrey Epstein emails released by the Justice Department in 2026 |
Table of Contents
From Trump’s lawyer to his casino chief
Ribis trained as a lawyer and made his name in gaming law in New Jersey before Trump hired him as his casino attorney. By his own account in 1991, he had already worked with Trump for more than ten years. That January, Trump handed him the top job across the whole Atlantic City operation, naming him chief executive of his three casinos and a hotel and pushing out the previous boss, Ed Tracy.
A 1993 Nevada Supreme Court decision describes his role without any ambiguity, identifying him as the chief executive of the Trump Taj Mahal and of every Trump gaming property in Atlantic City. He also did the hiring, bringing in the executives who ran the individual casino floors.
His worth to Trump showed during the cash crisis of 1990 and 1991, when the casinos were sliding toward collapse under their debt. Ribis worked with the finance executive Stephen Bollenbach on the rescue that talked Trump’s banks into easing their terms, trading real estate and cash for relief on the casino loans. At one Casino Control Commission hearing, with two commissioners pressing hard, Ribis asked for a recess. When the session resumed, the deal went through.
Running the casinos as a public company
In June 1995, Trump took his casino business public as Trump Hotels and Casino Resorts. The share sale raised about $140 million at $14 a share, and the stock traded under the ticker DJT. Ribis ran the company as president and chief executive.
The money was good. For 1996 he drew a base salary close to $2 million and a bonus of around $2.5 million, and his base climbed to roughly $4.5 million the next year.
The share price was another matter. In October 1996, the public company paid about $491 million to buy the Trump Castle from a partnership Trump controlled, a price many investors saw as far too high for a casino that was losing money. The stock fell from around $35 to single digits, and eventually to pennies. The company later lost more than a billion dollars and filed for bankruptcy in 2004, four years after Ribis had left.
There was a regulatory episode too. In 2002 the Securities and Exchange Commission settled a case over a 1999 press release in which the company used a gain from ending a restaurant lease at the Trump Taj Mahal to dress up a weak quarter in which revenue had fallen. The SEC named Ribis and two other executives. The company paid no fine.
The years after Trump
Ribis stepped down in 2000, and Trump took the chief executive title himself. Ribis turned to private investment. Working with the firm Colony Capital, he helped buy Resorts Atlantic City for about $140 million in 2001. The property lost money for years, and by the end of the decade its lenders took it back under a mortgage of around $360 million, with Ribis still running it.
He kept working in Atlantic City. He led the casino formerly known as the Atlantic City Hilton, which was renamed the Atlantic Club in 2012. Two years later, Churchill Downs sued him, claiming his company had taken a $2.5 million deposit and then failed to close a deal to buy the Showboat casino.
Why Ribis appears in the Epstein files
His casino career is what connected him to Epstein in the first place. By the 2000s, Ribis was an executive at Colony Capital, a major investor in casinos, the kind of wealthy operator Epstein worked to stay close to. The released records show contact between the two men over many years.
- Around 2007, Epstein referred Ribis to JPMorgan as a possible client worth in the region of $200 million, according to court records from later litigation against the bank.
- In March 2011, Epstein sent the email about the Mar-a-Lago accuser and forwarded it to Ghislaine Maxwell.
- In December 2018, Epstein emailed Ribis again, this time mentioning Trump and Mick Mulvaney.
Several news organizations have reported that Ribis sent Epstein about $158,000 in 2018, though the released files do not say what the money was for. Jack O’Donnell, who once ran the Trump Plaza casino, told CNN the two men were close, describing them as “pretty good buddies.”
What stands out about the 2011 email is its recipient. By then Ribis had spent close to twenty years inside Trump’s casino business, first as his gaming lawyer and then as the chief executive of his casinos. The documents show Epstein bringing a Trump problem to exactly that man, and they do not explain why.
One point belongs here without any hedging. Ribis has not been charged with any crime connected to Epstein, and nothing in the files suggests he played any part in Epstein’s abuse. Trump has not been credibly accused of wrongdoing in connection with those crimes either.
Is he still alive?
It is one of the most common questions about him, and the truthful answer is that it has not been confirmed. No obituary has been published, and his name appears in news coverage as recently as 2026, which points to him most likely still being alive. Born in 1944, he would now be in his early eighties. Little about his private life has ever reached the public record, and no reliable source confirms where he lives today.
The man who was always nearby
For forty years, Ribis has had a talent for standing near a disaster without being caught in it. He ran casinos that went bankrupt or back to their lenders. He led a public company whose collapse wiped out small shareholders, and when the SEC came after its accounting, the case ended with no penalty against him. Now the released emails show that Jeffrey Epstein trusted him with a sensitive question about a young accuser, and once again his name sits next to the trouble rather than inside it.
He has answered for none of it, and he has stayed quiet since the files came out. Epstein made his choice in 2011. The public is only seeing it now.
