Former house manager (butler) at Epstein's Palm Beach estate from approximately 1999 to 2004, working alongside head house manager Juan Alessi. Rodriguez secretly removed a copy of Epstein's black book - a spiral-bound contact directory containing names, phone numbers, and addresses of hundreds of prominent individuals - and kept it hidden for years. In 2009, he attempted to sell the black book to attorneys representing Epstein's victims for $50,000.
The FBI intercepted the sale, and Rodriguez was arrested. He pleaded guilty to obstruction of justice in 2011 and was sentenced to 18 months in federal prison. The black book Rodriguez took became one of the most significant pieces of evidence in the Epstein case, as it was the same book later published by Gawker in 2015.
Rodriguez also circled 50 names of individuals he described as being of particular interest to investigators. In a 2009 sworn deposition before his arrest, Rodriguez described witnessing dozens of young women coming to the Palm Beach estate for ‘massages,’ described seeing sex toys in Epstein's bathroom, and stated he was instructed by Epstein to always be ‘blind, deaf, and dumb.’ Rodriguez died of mesothelioma on January 1, 2015, at age 60, before the full scope of the Epstein case unfolded.