Jeffrey Epstein’s web of influence stretched from European palaces to Ivy League universities and Wall Street banks, but there was apparently at least one little corner of the establishment that seems to have been beyond his reach: Augusta National. In July 2019, Epstein sent an iMessage to Steve Bannon asking for his help with a particularly difficult problem. “Need to work magic to get brad Karp admitted to augusta golf club,” Epstein wrote. “The head of Paul Weiss Brad Karp?” Bannon replied. “Yes.”

Karp, the former chair of the legal firm Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison, stepped down from his position in February because of his ties with Epstein.

Bannon and Epstein talked it over for an hour. Bannon suggested that Karp’s “best shot” was to “take a strong interest in amateur golf”, Epstein complained that some of the existing Augusta members who might help, like Bill Gates, “have no sway”, and asked “Who s their senator” as if they might. Bannon explained that he thinks the club is run by “7 Atlanta and Augusta families”, who he calls “crackers” from the “Old south” who are prejudiced against “lawyers and investment bankers”. The heart bleeds.

It’s a pungently obnoxious conversation, racist and misogynistic, and at the end of it, Bannon and Epstein are absolutely no closer to figuring out how to go about getting in.

Which is one of the great lessons of Augusta National. Money only goes so far. It is, even now, just about the only sports event in the USA where you don’t need to worry that Donald Trump is going to decide to put in an appearance.

If Brad Karp and his ilk are busy worrying about how to get a club membership, most of the rest of us would settle for just making it inside the gates during Masters week. But admittance, like everything else around here, is done according to its own peculiar set of rules. Most of the tickets go to lifetime patrons from the local community, who own badges passed down through the generations along with grandad’s pocket watch. That route in was shut back in the 1970s. The other is the annual lottery, and your odds of winning it make Tiger’s chances of a sixth Green Jacket look good this year.

Officially that’s it. Unofficially, anyone who’s willing to spend enough was usually able to pick one up from one of the touts who camp out on the easements down by the interstate, just beyond the reach of the 2,700ft boundary that makes scalping near the property a criminal offence under Georgia law. Reselling tickets is against the terms and conditions, but the loophole was that anyone who bought one could always insist they had received it as a gift. In recent years, though, resale has become an industrial business, and second-hand tickets have been appearing on the internet where they sell for as much as 50 times their face value.

Until, that was, Augusta’s members decided they had had enough of other companies making the profit the club have chosen to forgo by keeping the actual admission prices so low. The Sunday of last year’s Masters was described as a “bloodbath” by an executive working for one of the hospitality companies in the area, as hundreds of paying customers found they were detained, and even refused entry, at the club gates because they had come on someone else’s ticket. According to industry reports, as many as 200 ticket holders were turned away on the day.

Some said they were taken into a room and asked to hand over their identity documents before being grilled about how they got their tickets, and where they were staying during the tournament. One person said it was like being pulled over by the police. Some were let in anyway, others say they were turned away. As is the way at Augusta, it’s almost impossible to get a straight answer from anyone at the club about exactly what’s going on and, in the absence of any information, there are an awful lot of rumours about the club’s crackdown on the market.

They say the four-day tickets have radio-frequency identification chips in them, and that the club were able to trace all the ones that were being returned back to a single geographical location each evening before being used again by someone else the next day. They say the information contained in the barcodes includes the buyer’s address. They say the club are employing undercover agents to idly ask patrons where they picked up their tickets while they are walking around the grounds.

The other theory is the club are buying up a lot of the resale tickets themselves just so they can find out the names of the people who put them up for sale. The letter they send out is a masterpiece of Masters manners, thanking the recipient for their support and patronage over the years before informing them that they are now permanently banned from the grounds.

What’s absolutely true is that the resale platform StubHub has rolled out an onerous new contract specifically for anyone offering Masters tickets. From now on anyone selling a Masters ticket on the site is solely liable for all charges, costs and fees if the buyer gets turned away. SeatGeek has stopped offering tournament tickets this year. And while you feel for anyone who spent their hard-earned on a second-hand ticket, anyone who’s had much experience with these companies, who have cornered so much of the sports market, might think that’s a sign they’re doing things right.