The True Story of the Billionaire Boys Club

This article originally appeared in the September 1986 issue of Esquire US. It contains outdated and potentially offensive descriptions of race, gender, and class. You can find every Esquire story ever published at Esquire Classic.

This account is based on hundreds of pages of sworn testimony and police reports taken between December 1983 and June 1985, and on interviews with principals in the story and attorneys working on related cases. Not all the defendants consented to interviews with the author. Descriptions of the murder scenes are largely reconstructed from police reports and from trial testimony of Dean Karny, currently with the California Witness Protection Program.

Before he drove to the airport that morning, Dean Karny recalled, he stopped by the real estate office to rent the house on Beverly Glen. The two of them—Dean and Joe Hunt—had given their Beverly Hills real estate agent the same story they told at Lake Arrowhead and in Palm Springs: Joe was a writer on politics and economics facing a very tight deadline and in need of a quiet place to work for the next six weeks. The first house the woman had shown them, just north of Sunset Boulevard in the southeast corner of Bel Air, looked very good from the outside. It was a big white stucco-and-red-tile hacienda with a tennis court out back, barricaded in front by a ten-foot hedge and screened from the street by a forest of flowering trees. They had agreed in advance that the place they chose would have to be remote, Dean explained, “so that the screams could not be heard.” What convinced them to rent the house, though, was a hidden trapdoor in the hall closet that led directly to the basement.

Dean paid the real estate agent $9,000 cash for six weeks of privacy and caught a noon flight to San Francisco. From the airport there, he took a taxi out to the peninsula, arriving at the Villa Hotel in San Mateo just before 2:00.

The others were all waiting for him in a room Ben Dosti had rented under the name Davis: Joe and Ben had already changed into the brown UPS outfits Dean bought for them a few days earlier. They had considered posing as police officers, and had even rented blue uniforms from a costume shop in Hollywood, Dean recalled, but then Joe had decided that “policemen attract more attention than delivery boys.”

In the center of the room sat two navy-blue trunks, each “big enough for an adult human being,” Dean said. One trunk was filled with their equipment, including the handcuffs Dean had picked up at the International Love Boutique. It was Joe who suggested the sex shop, confiding that it was where he had found the cuffs used during the first murder seven weeks earlier. At the International Love Boutique, Dean also purchased two mouth gags, one a large plastic penis with straps that fastened at the back of the neck.

Among the coils of rope and spools of tape was a brown bottle containing chloroform and a steel bucket filled with cat litter to serve as a portable toilet. Ben, suddenly cautious, had brought along a can of air freshener and “this spray-on Band-Aid” that he thought “would help avoid leaving fingerprints,” Dean remembered. Together they wrapped the empty blue trunk in heavy brown paper, addressed it to HEDAYAT ESLAMINIA, 400 DAVEY GLEN ROAD, #4322, BELMONT, CA, and carried it to the parking lot.

The BMW led the way, followed by the yellow pickup with the black camper shell. Both vehicles parked outside the apartment complex, and Joe and Ben, wearing their brown uniforms, entered through a side gate, carrying what appeared to be a very large package.

Ten minutes later they were back, struggling with the weight of the trunk. Joe told Dean to get out and help load the thing into the camper, because now “it was very heavy.” As they drove back down the hill to El Camino Real Boulevard, he and Joe were alone in the cab of the pickup. Joe did not look pleased. He was bothered that Ben had stopped to wash his hands in the middle of the abduction. “Joe thought that it was a symbolic gesture of guilt,” Dean said.

From the Davey Glen Apartments, they drove directly to a U-Haul dealership, where the blue trunk was transferred from the camper to the back of a twelve-foot truck. As they moved their load into the U-Haul, Dean heard pounding on the lid of the trunk, then a muffled voice: “Please, sir, please let me out.”

Twenty-four-year-old Dean Karny, on summer vacation from law school and still wearing the gray business suit he had put on in Los Angeles that morning, climbed into the back of the truck and sat down. When the doors closed it was dark inside, and there were only the thumps and whimpers of the man in the trunk to keep him company.

The future was terrifying and the past unthinkable. It was time, perhaps, to cease counting the zeros in Hedayat Eslaminia’s $30-million fortune and to consider the prospect of a day when outsiders might look into their little band. What would they see but the children of position and privilege, a frightening cult of Beverly Hills brats who wore Italian suits and drove German automobiles? Joe Hunt had shown them shortcuts to the power and wealth that many considered their birthright, but Joe had never told them what else they might pick up along the way. A few convenient lies told to family and friends had swollen into a saga of alleged stock fraud, grand theft, extortion, and kidnapping. “Ben and I always felt we were doing this for such a good reason that ultimately everyone would understand,” Dean would explain later. It became difficult, though, to describe exactly what that good reason had been, especially after they started killing people.

II

Half joking at first, they called themselves the Billionaire Boys Club. Their leader, Joe Hunt, and his first two disciples, Dean Karny and Ben Dosti, presented it to the others as “this new type of group, an organization where not the structure is important, but the merit of the individuals.” A member would need no more than an idea to create his own company to be financed by Joe’s genius for commodities trading. The beauty of the BBC’s corporate structure was that Joe could endow college students with titles like president, executive vice-president, and chairman of the board. Hunt described himself simply as administrator.

It was a concept of enormous appeal for the young men who began to meet regularly during the spring of 1983, all in their early twenties, the sons of men whose money and influence they could hope to inherit, but never surpass. Among the first twelve recruits were Evan Dicker, whose father was senior partner in the Beverly Hills law firm of Dicker and Dicker, and Alex Gaon, whose father had founded Chemin de Fer, the blue-jeans manufacturer, and whose grandfather serves as president of the World Sephardi Federation.

It was the May brothers, though, who were, in many ways, the making of the BBC. Tom and Dave sported complicated but thoroughly impressive pedigrees. Their mother, a bit player in television during the late 1950s, had given birth to the twins after an affair with actor Ty Hardin, who had his own series at the time, a horse opera called Bronco. The boys had never met their natural father, and knew only that he now owned a chain of laundries in Mexico and hosted what Tom called “a weekly holy-roller show” on cable television. When they were two, their mother had married David May II, who controlled a vast real estate empire accrued from the formerly family-owned May Company department-store chain that made him one of the wealthiest men on the West Coast. Though he had married several times, the elder May was without children of his own; he not only adopted the twins, but made them his heirs, maintaining the paternal relationship even after their mother divorced him and remarried.

Tom and Dave had grown into a pair of lanky lady-killers, outrageously good-looking but regarded as not terribly bright. The boys drove classy cars, drew a large monthly allowance, and kept an apartment in Brentwood where they entertained a harem of girls every summer. As they advanced into their twenties, though, the good times were wearing a little thin, and the boys felt mounting pressure to prove their range of interests extended beyond fast cars and girls in string bikinis.

Recalled one business partner: “Daddy May used to tell them, ‘Why don’t you get a job at Baskin Robbins? That’s all you’re qualified for.’”

Following washouts at USC and Colorado, the Mays had invested in a beach-front nightclub that would be bankrupt within a year. After a meeting at the Hard Rock Cafe, the twins gave Joe Hunt $160,000 they had inherited from their Uncle Wilbur and announced to their adopted father that they had been appointed to the board of directors at a new corporation, BBC Consolidated of North America.

It was a sweet moment for the former “class idiot” and “supreme geek,” who had met most of the young men now gathered around him for the first time back in 1972, when they had been students together at the exclusive Harvard School in North Hollywood. He was thirteen years old then and his name was Joseph Gamsky. Already over six feet tall, Gamsky was a comical figure, a stalk-skinny boy with a pale face, a Prince Valiant hairdo, and a trickle of beauty marks along the right corner of his mouth. He ran for office but was never elected to anything. Other students remembered him as an A student who read the Congressional Record at lunch.

Gamsky had entered the prep school on a scholarship, one of the few poor boys on the twenty-three-acre campus. His classmates were the sons of the wealthiest and most powerful families in southern California, students who had been sent to the Harvard School as much to introduce them to the social network of the ruling class as to take advantage of the college-level curriculum.

For as far back as Los Angeles could claim tradition, the Harvard School had been its bastion. In recent years, though, instruction in the responsibilities of “Christian brotherhood” had given way to an emphasis on personal success. By the mid-1970s Harvard was posting numbers for National Merit Scholars and college-board scores that surpassed any other West Coast high school and rivaled those of the best eastern boarding schools.

Yet the school remained that rare L.A. institution where Hollywood glamour carried little cachet: the son of a studio head might be admitted—a Zanuck, for example—but among performers, only those stars who had ascended to the economic firmament, the Greg Pecks and the Chuck Hestons, got their boys onto the campus.

Power, not fame, was the basic unit of measure, and the students who inspired fascination were the heirs to chief executives of RCA, Teledyne, and Home Savings, boys like young Roy Disney or, in the class just ahead of Gamsky’s, the aspiring ballet dancer whose father in a few short years would be elected President of the United States.

Among such a student body, Joe’s parents were interesting only as anomalies. His father, Lawrence Gamsky, was a storefront psychologist who rode a motorcycle and insisted that his son address him by first name only. “I’m not your father,” he would tell Joe, “I’m your teacher,” and it was rumored that Lawrence Gamsky had used devices ranging from Wilhelm Reich’s orgone box to posthypnotic suggestion as a means of heightening the boy’s mental powers. Joe’s mother had disappeared when he was in high school. One story he told about her involved the time she had taken him to a spiritual medium who stood up shrieking in the middle of a séance, announced that the boy was the antichrist, and fled the room.

Karny knew Gamsky from Joe’s only extracurricular activity, the debate team. At the Harvard School, debate was the most popular and competitive sport on campus. Gamsky was so avid he even spent his lunch periods in the debate room, arranging and rearranging the plastic name tags on the “tab board” where the squad’s rankings were displayed. While Joe Gamsky’s name always appeared at the top of the tab board, he could not conceal his envy of the boys whose names hung near the bottom, boys like Dean Karny, a bony and bug-eyed little blond who had weighed only eighty-nine pounds when he was cut from the freshman football team, but who knew everyone’s nickname and seemed always to have a beautiful girl on his arm. Or Ben Dosti, swarthy and athletic, whose mother, Rose, food writer at the Los Angeles Times, had taught him to appreciate the finer things: by the time he was thirteen, Ben had his own tailored tuxedo and could read a wine list or The Wall Street Journal with equal facility.

After school, when more popular and fortunate classmates like the Mays and their buddy Steve Taglianetti drove convertibles home to Beverly Hills, Gamsky rode a bus out to the smoggy, sunburnt rim of the San Fernando Valley, within walking distance of the tiny tract house where he spent three hours at night reading the dictionary.

“Joe was always out to prove himself better and smarter than the rich kids,” remembered one classmate. “And he was.”

During his junior year, though, Joe lost even his status as a star debater, dismissed from the team by coach Ted Woods for falsifying evidence during a tournament. His response was an unsuccessful drive to impeach the speech-squad captain.

At graduation, each member of the senior class was given one full page in the Harvard School yearbook. While the boys who in a few years would become his disciples filled their space with images of themselves driving sports cars or racing speedboats, Joseph Gamsky’s own page was quite different. There was only a photo of Joe pouring a card file onto another debater’s head and a poem that read:

My favorite place is a place that is always there.

For all my life it is my paradise.

It is the favorite place of mine.

Which can be created at a moments thought.

No one can disturb you.

Not for your life, if you please.

The eternal silence, which would be great for anyone to have, is there.

You just have to concentrate.

There are endless galaxies which are yours.

You can journey to infinity.

Through the endless passages of the cosmos.

Even better, this all belongs to you.

This is your mind.

After graduation in 1977, Karny heard nothing of Joe Gamsky until the April night in 1980 when he and Ben Dosti—now students at UCLA—literally ran into Joe on the sidewalk in Westwood. Joe had grown to six feet four inches and sounded like a young man who had taken some long strides since Harvard. He had passed the C.P.A. exam the spring after high school—the youngest person in the country ever to do so—and by challenging finals, he said, had finished at USC in a year and a half. Two months before his twentieth birthday, he went to work full-time as a junior accountant in the Arco Tower downtown, but had discovered almost immediately that the corporate world stifled capable people. His superiors actually resented talent and initiative, stooping to all sorts of petty intrigues against him. He lasted only six months before resigning to trade on the commodities market. With just a few thousand in savings, he had earned $35,000 already, Joe said. “He kind of made an example out of himself as he explained the way he thought things worked out in real life for exceptionally bright people,” Dean remembered.

Joe treated Dean and Ben to a movie that night and met them again the next afternoon. “He began taking us out to lunch,” Dean recalled, “buying us games at the video arcade.” During Dean’s summer vacation, Joe began spending the night at the Karny estate in the Hollywood Hills. “My parents . . . thought he was a good influence on me,” Dean said. Shalom Karny was a Holocaust survivor who had made a fortune as a real estate developer in Los Angeles, and he appreciated the spirit of enterprise that young Joe Gamsky was cultivating in his Dean. Danielle Karny’s maternal instincts were aroused by her son’s new friend; she began referring to the bunk in Dean’s room as “Joe’s bed.”

That fall Joe announced that he had been offered an opportunity to lease a seat on the floor of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange. Bond trading was a very special field of endeavor, Joe explained: “There are no crop periods or seasonality. You don’t have blights. You are not interested in weather. . . . You have a pure, smooth, psychological phenomenon.”

The Karnys put up $150,000 to stake Joe’s trading account, and persuaded friends to add another $250,000. Even Dean and Ben contributed, putting in their combined savings of $12,000, and by the time Joe set up shop in Chicago, he had a trading fund in the neighborhood of half a million dollars. Eighteen months later he had lost it all—a fortune Joe claimed had grown to $14 million.

“He explained that on the floor when you make a lot of money, others lose,” Dean remembered. “And so a lot of people became very hostile toward him, and one of the big brokerage houses had decided to squeeze him out.”

That was not how Tom Utrata, director of the Merc’s Compliance Department, remembered it. “One of our landmark cases,” said Utrata, who had supervised a series of hearings that resulted in a record ten-year suspension of Gamsky’s trading privileges. “After meeting him, it gave a whole new idea to the idea of a pathological liar. I am convinced that he cannot distinguish truth from fiction. He seems so believable and exerts such charm that until you start to take the thing apart, he gets a lot of people sympathetic to him.”

Haggard and homeless, Joe continued to talk in ten figures, but came back to L.A. with four dollars in his pocket. Dean had started classes at the Whittier School of Law and was living rent-free in an Encino condominium owned by his father. “I let Joe move in with me, ” he said. “Basically, I supported him.”

Joe was already planning to regain a trading position. Before he left Chicago, he changed his last name. In Los Angeles, he persuaded Lawrence Gamsky to become “Ryan Hunt,” and later, when asked under oath, “Why did you change your name?” Joe would answer, “I wanted to have the same last name as my father.” Dean and Ben were “kind of wavering in our faith,” Karny said, but Joe would win Dean over once and for all on a ski trip just before Christmas 1982. Dean had just been dumped by a girl he wanted to marry and was experiencing “some self-esteem problems.” While the others in their party were off skiing that weekend, Joe stayed behind with Dean at the lodge.

Dean would find happiness, Joe explained, only if he achieved “purity of action.” The starting point was an understanding that the impediments between what you had and what you wanted were external, not internal. One began by freeing oneself of concepts like good and bad, true and false. Joe had found his own Way—“paradox philosophy,” he called it—only when he realized that it was possible to approach the same situation from an infinite number of angles. Reality was “circumstantial,” Joe explained, and through a “reorientation of perspective” you could always see things in the way that best suited your needs. It was like the ability to debate an issue from either side. “Black is white and white is black”—that was the paradox, Joe said. Those who dwelled in the gray areas Joe called Shadings.

Much of Dean’s problem could be traced back to his parents, Joe suggested. Shalom and Danielle were “Normies,” a term Joe coined to describe those who lacked the intellectual daring to see beyond “old values.” If he did not break from his parents soon, Dean was warned, “they would sacrifice me to their society.” Dean joined Joe and Ben in a holiday recruiting drive. The three of them went calling on friends—“mostly Ben’s and my friends,” Dean recalled. “Joe didn’t really know any of our friends.” Joe had come back from Chicago with his hair too long, wearing suits that were too small for him, Dean said, “but Ben and I knew all about style and social graces,” and groomed their leader for his new role. They hit the party circuit and club scene with Joe out front “and tried to project this image of the BBC as being a cool group of people who really had our heads screwed on straight,” Dean said, “who were making money and had pretty girlfriends.”

III

Within weeks of the BBC’s first meeting, Joe led a caravan of Porsches, Mercedeses, a Rolls-Royce, and a BMW—“We all borrowed our parents’ cars,” Dean remembered—to a demonstration at Gene Browning’s desert plant in Hesperia. Browning nearly laughed out loud when the group’s gangly, baby-faced twenty-three-year-old leader introduced himself. Within the hour, however, Browning decided that “Joe Hunt was the most articulate person I had ever met.” A biochemist, Browning had invested eighteen years of evenings and weekends—plus $480,000 of his own money—in the development of a machine he called the Attrition Mill, an enormous metal cylinder capable of reducing ore to ultrafine powder to separate precious metals. During the course of their first meeting, Hunt began outlining the machine’s industrial applications and was already shaping a sales pitch. His corporation wanted a stock position, Joe said—“I believe the figure mentioned was $5 million,” Browning recalled.

Three months later, Joe was marketing options on the machine—renamed Cyclotron—to investors in six western states through a BBC subsidiary called Microgenesis of North America Inc., one of four new companies under the BBC umbrella. The most promising had been inspired by Joe’s reacquaintance with the Mays’ friend Steve Taglianetti. Through his father, Taglianetti had access to “gray market” luxury cars imported from Europe at less than half the price they could be sold for in California. Within weeks, Joe not only set up West Cars of North America, but provided the company with more than a quarter-million dollars in assets by persuading other BBC members to sign over their own cars as collateral.

The young executives were ensconced in a suite of offices in West Hollywood, taking an entire floor of an office building on Third Street. They spent nearly $100,000 on advanced software for the conference room, another $30,000 to stock the BBC’s law library.

The boys could afford to travel first class now, because the money was pouring into Joe Hunt’s new commodities-trading fund, Financial Futures. Behind the cover of his new name, he had begun trading at the Beverly Hills brokerage house of Cantor, Fitzgerald & Company in accounts that had been set up under the names Tom May, Dean Karny, and Alex Gaon.

“Capital formation,” Joe would say later, “is always a problem,” but he had solved it neatly with the help of one of the BBC’s first female members, Allison Weiss. Allison convinced her father, film editor Steve Weiss, to invest $20,000 in the trading fund during June 1983. When Weiss received a “profit disbursement” of $4,000 one month later, he added $30,000 to his portfolio, and passed the good news to friends. Weiss would bring in many of Financial Futures’ first scores of investors, among them Hunt’s single largest trading partner, Woodland Hills businessman Chester Brown, who deposited $250,000. Brown was fascinated by the young man’s facility with figures, recalled his wife Mary, and watched him add, subtract, multiply, and divide whole columns of five- and six-digit numbers in his head. The Browns brought in more investors. “From the minute you started telling them about it, everybody wanted to believe,” Mary Brown said.

Hunt and Alex Gaon were at their Quotron in Cantor, Fitzgerald’s trading room every morning at 6:00, but Joe would never put more than half the money he collected into the commodities market. He could cover himself in the short run, Hunt explained, by paying off early trading partners with the money being brought in by newer investors. The BBC had deals in the works that would make a half-million dollars look like small change: Gene Browning’s machine was generating international interest, and Joe was already involved in negotiations with Denver “tax-shelter king” William Kilpatrick, discussing a merger of Microgenesis with Kilpatrick’s United Financial Operations Inc. that could result in a lucrative multimillion-dollar payoff.

As Hunt drew the others in, the BBC began to assume the shape of concentric circles, or “layers of understanding, ” as Joe called them. “You noticed that systematically, one by one, people would break up with their old girlfriends, tell their dad to go fly a kite, and become more and more integrated into the fabric of the BBC and more isolated from society and Normies,” Dean said. “And the bonds were very strong as long as Joe appeared to have the answers to things, both in terms of philosophies and in terms of coming up with money to keep people happy and activities to keep them busy.”

In October 1983, the BBC’s core members took up residence at the Wilshire-Manning, a high-rise of luxury condominiums above Wilshire Boulevard in Westwood, where their neighbors included Blake Edwards and Julie Andrews, Mr. T, and a young Saudi prince who sent the bellboys scurrying every time he opened his front door, hoping to catch one of the hundred-dollar tips he handed out. For $5,600 a month, Dosti and Steve Lopez, a new BBC recruit whose main function was the entertainment of wealthy widows and divorcées, moved into a two-bedroom suite on the twelfth floor, while Hunt and Karny took a huge three bedroom place on the fifteenth floor, sharing it with Joe’s new nineteen-year-old girlfriend, Brooke Roberts.

Young and blond, Brooke styled herself as a sort of pastel punker. Her story was that she despised her father, movie producer Bobby Roberts—cofounder of Dunhill Records and former personal manager for Richard Pryor and Ann-Margret—who was president of Lorimar Records at the time. She wanted to be an actress, Brooke said, but Bobby Roberts had forbidden his daughter any involvement in show business. On her own, Brooke claimed, she won a part on the TV series Diff’rent Strokes, but when her father found out, he made a single phone call, and the next day the job was no longer hers.

Bobby Roberts disapproved vehemently of his daughter’s relationship with Joe Hunt, but at the Manning, Brooke went to almost any length to capture her young man’s affection. Most memorable, according to a BBC member, was the time she painted her entire body with watercolors, spread a huge sheet of art paper on the floor, pressed herself against it in a series of postures that looked as if they had been lifted from the Kama Sutra, and wrote I LOVE YOU, JOE in one corner. “She thought he would fall head over heels,” the BBC member recalled, “and Joe acted like, ‘No big deal.’”

Gene Browning asked Joe if he was going to marry Brooke: “He said, ‘She’s just a cover,’” the inventor recalled.

With the money skimmed from Financial Futures, Joe had raised the pitch of life in the BBC by another octave. Joe, Brooke, and the boys became the shock troops of L.A. night life, traveling fifteen and twenty at a time to the China Club, Le Dome, La Scala, and the Hard Rock Cafe, running up tabs of $3,000 in a night, letting Ben run amok with the wine list, leaving $500 tips, making an impression. Dosti and Lopez took the others shopping for clothes on Rodeo Drive, and it became part of the BBC code that no member should appear in public unless he wore a suit and tie. The European autos imported for West Cars became their private fleet: twenty-two-year-old Ben got a Mercedes 350, Dean and Steve took big BMWs, and Joe gave himself a Porsche 911.

“Joe was using any name, any innuendo that he could to convince the world the BBC had power and big money behind it,” Dean said. “Everything wound up being used as some sort of prop for the image that he was trying to project.”

Shortly after the move to Manning, Joe added a new dimension to the BBC’s image by recruiting the group’s first minority member, a man who brought an entirely new set of skills into the fold. Jim Pittman was a black bodyguard who carried 210 pounds on a five-foot-eight-inch frame, with muscles that shifted like a nest of pythons under his starched white shirts. He had grown up in a Pentecostal congregation, married young, and started a successful cleaning service back in Hampton Beach, Virginia, where he yearned for a more glamorous line of work. He had come to California early in 1983 with a fifty-two-inch chest and the idea that there would be people out west who would appreciate his special talents.

Karny met Jim first, working security at a party in the Manning. After Pittman boasted that he had survived eighty-seven consecutive karate tournaments without a loss, Dean introduced him to Joe. “A guy like that might be good for the BBC, ” Hunt said, and hired Pittman as a martial-arts instructor. Within weeks Hunt had fabricated a gangster mystique for Pittman, reinventing him as a Penn State all-American who had run back kicks for the Baltimore Colts, then gone to work for the mob as an enforcer. “Joe’s the kind of person who can pick up very quickly the person who is dissatisfied with his lot in life,” Dean explained. By the first of the year Hunt had Pittman on salary as the BBC’s director of security and had given him a black BMW.

Joe got Ben Dosti to take Jim shopping for clothes, promised to send him to UCLA to improve his vocabulary, even bought him a tuxedo for the BBC’s black-tie New Year’s Eve party. Hunt also indulged Pittman’s fetish for electronic surveillance equipment and exotic weapons. When the BBC gathered now for meetings at the Manning, Jim sat off to one side, fondling automatic pistols with screw-on silencers, voice-activated microphones, heat-sensitive alarms—and his favorite toy, a single-shot pistol built into a ball-point pen.

Amid high-tech displays, $200-per-session polo lessons, shotgun shooting safaris in Soledad Canyon, and weekends at the blackjack tables in Vegas, Joe staged some serious demonstrations of power. Perhaps the most stunning came on Halloween Day, 1983, when he went to San Juan Capistrano to address the stockholders of an energy company called Cogenco Systems. The firm’s sixty-eight-year-old president, Bruce Swartout, had invited Hunt to discuss a merger of Cogenco with Microgenesis. Joe spoke to the stockholders for forty-five minutes, describing the company as a future General Motors, and “sold them 100 percent,” Swartout recalled. “They were never so influenced by a young man in their life. They actually cheered.” Three days later the board of directors unanimously gave Hunt, who had turned twenty-four two weeks earlier, complete control of a company claiming $12 million in assets, naming him both president and chairman of the board. “He put all his BBC guys in control, passed forty resolutions, and took all the power away from us immediately,” Swartout recalled.

The money became a river now. Parking beside a fire hydrant one afternoon, Joe remarked that it was cheaper to pay a ticket than to waste his valuable time looking for a legal space. Deciding to take the BBC bowling one Saturday, Hunt was informed by the attendant that there would be a wait of at least one hour; he laid $500 out on the counter and had two open lanes a minute later.

As one of his new duties, Pittman went to the bank with Hunt several times a week, riding shotgun in the black Jeep Joe drove when he wished to remain inconspicuous. Jim remembered watching Hunt hand a teller five and six deposit slips at a time: “He would tell her, ‘I want to put $400,000 in this account here, BBC Management. I want to put $300,000 in BBC Consolidated.’” Ten minutes later, Joe would be back at another window, drawing out a cashier’s check for $800,000. Pittman recalled: “He’d, put it in, but he’d take it back out. I don’t know the purpose of all that. He knew.”

IV

Through his membership, Joe was sending out feelers to the city’s most exclusive neighborhoods, announcing that the BBC was looking for people who understood that it took money to make money. It was probably inevitable that someone would bring his attention to Ronald G. Levin of Beverly Hills.

Warned in advance that Levin was “a scammer,” Joe had come away from their first meeting impressed in a way that the other BBC members had never seen. Levin was a truly incredible character, Joe said, a professed graduate of Harvard College, number one in his class, with a 186 IQ, who’d taken a $200,000 inheritance and run it up to $25 million, and knew everything about everyone in town. Yet it seemed to those who watched them together that it was the scoundrel in Levin that truly intrigued Joe. Ron regarded the swindle as an art form and loved to boast of his accomplishments. His duplex on Peck Drive was worth at least a million dollars, Ron said, but he’d gotten it for a fraction of that, negotiating a lease option with the old woman who inherited the building, convincing her that $100,000—twice what her dead husband had paid for the place thirty years earlier—was a fair price.

Levin, forty-two, liked to introduce his black maid Blanche Sturkey and her husband Christopher as devoted family retainers whom he had inherited from his grandmother. In truth, he had met the couple for the first time two years earlier, shortly after the Sturkeys moved to Los Angeles from Detroit. Blanche, a retired schoolteacher, had been introduced to Ron at a private party where her husband was working as a bartender. Within weeks, Levin had inveigled the couple into an “investment opportunity.” She and Christopher had put up all of their life savings to purchase Ron’s Rolls-Royce. The problem, however, was that after taking the money, Ron decided he loved his car and couldn’t sell it. Blanche had to go crying to his stepfather, Marvin Levin, to get back even part of the money, $20,000, and Ron arranged to cover the rest of his debt by paying the Sturkeys $900 a month to work as his servants.

Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., an attorney who represented Levin in “one of his many civil actions,” described him as “the most fantastic, complicated character I’ve ever encountered.” Levin described some amazing stunts over the years: he once sold a new BMW to a computer salesman only weeks after he had begun leasing the car. When his secretary asked him for a temporary loan, Levin said he didn’t have the money, but offered to have her car rear-ended. An attorney who worked for his company, Legal Research Associates, described Levin as “fundamentally honest” and experienced “an almost religious feeling” for him: “There was this wayward charm, something ineffable,” she recalls. “How do you describe lovability?”

Tall and slender and always expensively dressed, Levin had fine silver hair, an immaculate white beard, a smile that was an affront to some, irresistible to others. His eyes were “piercing,” one acquaintance thought, “shifty,” according to another, but no one who met Levin forgot the high and nasal voice that poured forth ideas, observations, promises, and propositions at a rate that left his listeners either dazzled or dumbfounded.

Levin loved to entertain and had dozens of close companions. A homosexual, he traveled with a retinue of young men, but his longtime friends included Muhammad Ali, who often visited the house on Peck Drive with his wife, Veronica, and flew Ron to several of his fights. When Levin threw parties, his guests included Warren Beatty, Jack Nicholson, and Andy Warhol. He liked to be around celebrities and cultivated them assiduously. Recalled lawyer Holmes: “He got them deals.”

For young Joe Hunt, Levin would remain a figure who not only fascinated, but also frustrated him. “Joe hadn’t gotten Ron to invest any money, and he was kind of wondering whether Ron took him seriously as a businessman,” Dean remembered.

Yet Levin seemed “affectionately oriented toward Joe,” Dean thought, and both “relished the adversary relationship.” The two of them argued constantly “about little factual questions,” and would run to reference books to prove their point. They had “almost the same kind of personality,” Dean said. They shared a disdain for drugs, though Joe carried his brand of puritanism several steps further, refusing alcohol, sugar, and caffeine as well, insisting he would never touch anything that might diminish his intellectual abilities.

Joe continued to solicit Ron’s respect. When Microgenesis made its first significant sale, collecting $150,000 from bank president Michael Dow as an option on a total purchase of $4 million, Joe brought the check directly to Levin’s door. “Ron was really amazed and said that Joe had found a real fish,” Dean remembered. “He wanted Michael Dow’s phone number so he could get a million dollars out of him. ”

In June, Ron finally called Joe to say he was ready to talk business.

It may have been Levin’s masterpiece. He began by contracting with independent L.A. television stations to provide camera coverage of fires, murders, and other catastrophes between midnight and 8:00 A.M., when the union crews demanded overtime pay. Levin was making $10,000 a month from this arrangement, he told Holmes, but he couldn’t stop there. Ron’s reverse spin was to prepare a three-page treatment as the pilot for a proposed TV series he titled The Reporter. He was soon circulating the pages around town, only not at the networks, but at RCA and Panasonic, from which he obtained a loan of some $280,000 in camera equipment after telling the companies the pilot was going into production that month and promising “promotional consideration.” He had his own production company by then—just a P.O. box and a phone-answering service, actually—but Ron called it Network News and with business card in hand paid a visit to a man named Jack Friedman at the Clayton Brokerage office in Beverly Hills, where he identified himself as assignment editor.

“He said he was doing a four- or five-part series on commodities trading,” Friedman recalled. Network News already had arrangements with Merrill Lynch and PaineWebber, Levin said, but needed one other brokerage house for a segment that would be focused on an outside trading adviser, a young man named Joe Hunt. The plan was to set up a dummy account in the amount of—say, $5,225,187.80. He wanted to film the trading process as it happened, Levin explained, and the documentary should have a dramatic feel. It was important that the subject, Mr. Hunt, behave as if he were trading real money. So they would have to employ a little harmless deception.

For Joe Hunt, it was the opportunity to prove his trading theories on the sort of scale he had always dreamed of. And Joe did, running the $5.2 million up to more than $13.5 million within six weeks. By late August, Joe was able to tell the BBC that their share of the earnings came to more than $4 million.

“There was a big hoopla about it,” Dean remembered, “because we had just lost a great deal of money in our own commodity accounts at almost the same time.” It was a virtual replay of Chicago. Joe played the commodities market the same way he played the pinball machines in his favorite dark corner at the Hard Rock Cafe, occasionally reaching a new record total, but more often bashing the machines into tilt. At Cantor, Fitzgerald, Joe took $230,000 of the Mays’ money, they would learn later, and gambled long shots into temporary control of nearly $40 million in assets. The junior brokers clustered around Hunt, dazzled by his daring, until the day a senior executive named Finebaum told Joe that his margins had been tripled, giving him twenty-four hours to come up with another $1.5 million to cover his bets. Two days later, Cantor, Fitzgerald liquidated the accounts, leaving the trading funds of Tom May and Dean Karny some $60,000 overdrawn.

The brokerage house sued, calling in the principals for depositions. Cantor, Fitzgerald even subpoenaed Levin. Ron identified himself as a reporter for Network News and brought an attorney who objected to virtually every question his client was asked, “on the following grounds: first of all, privacy; second of all, relevancy; third of all, we’re dealing with freedom of the press here—reporter’s privilege.”

At the BBC office in West Hollywood, they didn’t let it worry them much: the profit Joe had made with the Levin account would more than cover their escalating overhead until the Microgenesis contracts were signed.

Ron, of course, was a little slow about producing the money, stalling for nearly two months before telling Joe that he had invested the $13 million in a suburban shopping center near Chicago, where the BBC had an equity position that was worth maybe twice the $4 million he owed them. “Then we, of course, went and told our parents, ‘Hey Mom and Dad, we got a shopping center,’” Dean recalled, “and our parents said, ‘Well, do you have a title?’ And we said, ‘No, but that doesn’t matter, because Joe’s going to take care of it.’”

As the end of the year approached, Hunt pressed Levin to deliver title to the shopping center as collateral for a loan. Finally, Joe called Jack Friedman at Clayton Brokerage, hoping to gain information that would help him trace the $13.5 million. It was Friedman, though, who asked the first question: “I said, ‘Did you ever do that story?’” When Hunt did not answer, Friedman asked another question: “Were you aware that the money wasn’t real?”

After a very long pause, Joe told him, “Yes, I was aware.”

Joe cornered Levin that night, but now Ron had a new story: “He said . . . he had used the statements from that account in order to get credit in other brokerage houses fraudulently, and that he had actually scammed up about a million and a half dollars,” Dean remembered, “and he agreed to give Joe about two or three hundred thousand of it.”

Joe spent nearly two months chasing Ron Levin’s last promise to him, Dean recalled, then let it go: “He said that . . . since two or three hundred thousand dollars wasn’t going to solve his problems, he wasn’t going to waste too much time trying to get that money, but he said that he was going to get around to killing Levin one of these days.”

After Joe admitted that he had been taken, Levin became public enemy number one among the BBC. The May brothers “referred to many people in terms of insects,” Karny recalled; Tom began to say he “really would like to step on that cockroach, or splat that fly.” Only Joe refrained from any public condemnation, and though he did not tell the others, he continued to see Ron socially. “He just decided to hang in there, foster whatever relationship he could, and eventually see if there was something that he could get out of Ron,” Dean explained.

By the end of April 1984, Joe saw his situation coming to a head. Financial Futures’ quarterly disbursement was due in June, and he had close to 150 investors to pay off now. The BBC’s overhead was up to more than a quarter million dollars a month, and Joe was promising delivery on a Cyclotron Gene Browning had yet to complete. Without money for new materials, work was brought to a virtual standstill at the Microgenesis plant in Gardena. To top it all off, the deal with Kilpatrick and UFOI was coming unglued. Bruce Swartout was working to void the merger of Microgenesis with Cogenco, and had gone to Denver himself in an effort to make a back-door deal with Kilpatrick.

Hunt handled the pressure from without by closing the ranks from within, drawing the committed nearer, pushing recalcitrants to the periphery. The new divisions came between the Mays, as Tom, anxious to be declared a Shading, moved closer to Joe, while Dave, always skeptical, increasingly became the object of Hunt’s lectures on “Norminess.” Eventually, the twins stopped speaking to each other.

From a high of about thirty, BBC membership collapsed to a core of sixteen. Those who left did so, Dean said, “either because their parents had a very strong pull and yanked them out, or because they got scared—scared of Joe.”

Joe had begun referring to the BBC as his family and to the other members as his children. His aphorisms were delivered now as public proclamations, codes of conduct for true believers. “The first rule was, Never feel sorry for anything you do, and the second was, It’s all right to lie if you know the truth.”

As his crisis deepened, Joe reacted not by lowering expectations but by raising them, describing his plan to expand the BBC into “a national organization of kids close to their inheritances.” Joe worked relentlessly, formalizing the BBC’s structure in a nine-page document provided to all members, envisioning an organization of “2,187 individuals” divided into cells, sections, and divisions, with a hierarchy of nexuses, axes, and thraxes. “A thrax is a fantastic beast with nine heads and an eye in the center of each,” Joe wrote.

Hunt ordered a fourteen-foot map of the world for the Third Street conference room and covered it with colored pins marking the spots where he thought the BBC should start companies: Hong Kong, Hamburg, Rio. He even prepared a prospectus for world domination, describing the inevitable collapse of the global economy as Third World countries defaulted on loans and pulled First World banks under with them. It would then be a world where only hard assets counted, Joe explained. There would be no countries, only corporate empires.

For the first time, though, the others saw signs of stress in Hunt. He was gaunt, often in a distracted state, borrowing money in amounts he would have scoffed at three months earlier—$10,000 from Tom May, $5,000 from Evan Dicker. As the group began to fray at the edges, Hunt and Pittman grew tighter, the others noticed. Jim was spending hours at a time in Joe’s office. The two began to refer to a place they called the Ice House, an armed retreat where the BBC was to rendezvous when things “got hot,” Joe was building a personal library for Jim, a set of “how to” books with titles like Hit Man: Technical Manual for Independent Contractors and Black Bag Owner’s Manual II, which began, “This pertains to the personalized killing that in peacetime is called murder.”

The first indication that Joe was serious about the direction things appeared to be taking came during a dispute with a Santa Ana company called FCI Laboratories. Joe grew incensed when the company, which was testing the BMWs and Porsches that West Cars had converted to meet federal emission standards, not only refused to pass most of the autos, but also refused his demand for a discount. After disappearing one night in March, Joe returned to report that he and Jim had shot up the FCI lab with machine guns.

The next target would be human. Enraged that Bruce Swartout’s negotiations in Denver had stalled the BBC’s deal with UFOI, Joe began talking about taking out a contract on the Orange County man, Dean recalled.

On the morning of April 13, 1984, Swartout arrived at his office in Irvine and parked in his regular space, where he saw a muscular black man in khaki work clothes leaning against the wall, holding a Carl’s Jr. cup. As he reached into the back seat for his briefcase, Swartout said, the black man threw the contents of the cup on his back. “I thought I was stabbed at first,” he recalled. His back began to burn a few moments later, and fearing he had been attacked with acid, Swartout undressed in his office and rinsed himself with water.

A week later, Steve Taglianetti caught a ride to Gardena with Pittman and noticed a vial of liquid on the dashboard. Jim advised him not to touch the stuff, Steve recalled, warning that it was DMSO spiked with strychnine and would cause a heart attack.

V

It was the first week in June when Dean began to realize that Joe had meant what he said about settling his account with Ron Levin. On the morning of June 4, Dean came into the office early and saw Joe making notes on a yellow legal pad. At the top of the page was a title: “At Levins, TO DO.” Below was a list of fifteen numbered items: “Close Blinds; Scan for Tape Recorder; Tape Mouth; Handcuff . . .”

Two days later, on June 6, Joe asked Dean to take Brooke to the movies that night. Karny did not see Hunt again until 8:30 the next morning, when Joe walked into Dean’s bedroom with his hair still wet from the shower, wearing a clean suit and carrying a briefcase that he opened to reveal a $1.5-million check drawn on a Swiss bank account in the name of Ron Levin.

At the duplex on Peck Drive, Blanche Sturkey was just arriving for work. She found two of Ron’s young friends sitting outside on the porch with their luggage. They had been waiting since 7:00 A.M.: Ron had promised to take them with him on a trip to New York that morning, but there had been no answer when they rang the buzzer. Blanche used her own key to open the front door. In the kitchen she found two partially eaten take-out dinners on the dining table, and in the living room discovered that Ron’s poodle Kosher had urinated on the Persian carpet. In the bedroom, Blanche saw that the down comforter and the top sheet were missing. Levin’s luggage was lined up in front of his closet, but the suitcases were all empty. While the young men used Ron’s computer to make a list of all the things that looked wrong, Blanche called the Beverly Hills police to report a missing person.

Karny and Hunt rode together to the office that morning, where Joe “paraded the check all around and showed all the boys,” Dean recalled. During the celebration, Joe called the Bank of America to ask how long it would take to cash a Swiss check. Three weeks, he was told. A BBC attorney volunteered that he had a friend at the World Trade Bank, which maintained excellent contacts with the Swiss. Joe and Dean drove to Beverly Hills, opened a corporate account, and paid a fee of $5,000 to have the check cashed within five days.

Dean avoided Hunt for the next couple of days, until the afternoon of June 10, when Joe took him for a walk around the block in Westwood, Karny recalled, and “proceeded, kind of against my wishes, to tell me in fairly great detail what he and Jim had done.”

While Dean and Brooke were at the movies on the night of June 6, Joe said, he had shown up at Levin’s with two take-out dinners from La Scala. As they sat down to eat, Hunt mentioned that he had invited a friend for dessert. Jim Pittman, whom Ron had never met, rang the buzzer at about 9:30 and introduced himself over the barrel of a silenced .25 Berretta. “Joe was concerned that Ron would think, once they pulled a gun on him . . . that he was going to die and so he wouldn’t cooperate,” Dean recalled, so it was time for item five on Joe’s list: “Explain Situation.” Back in Chicago, Joe said he told Ron, he had gone into debt to some “heavy characters,” and when they came to collect the money, he naturally told them about the $4 million Ron Levin owed him. His credit had been extended to the point where either the debt would be paid that night, Joe said, or they would both be dead men by morning.

Ron “willingly” signed the Microgenesis contract and wrote a $1.5-million draft on his Swiss account, Joe told Dean. Things had happened fast after that. When they put the handcuffs on him, Ron “lost all his energy.” Pittman forced Levin to lie facedown on the bed, and Ron began to whimper. They listened for only a few moments, Joe said, before Jim silenced Ron with a single shot to the back of the head.

At the crosswalk in Westwood, Joe described Levin’s last breath leaving his body: It was a kind of gurgling gasp—Joe “made the sound for me,” Dean remembered.

As Hunt and Pittman watched Levin die, the blood began to flow, seeping onto the bedcovers. The two of them wrapped the body in the comforter before carrying it outside, where the most difficult part of the evening was loading the stiffening corpse into the trunk of Joe’s car. From Beverly Hills, they drove north on the San Diego Freeway, following fire roads into Soledad Canyon, to a spot where Jim had dug a pit earlier that day.

Before covering it, he and Jim had disfigured the body with shotgun blasts, Joe said. Later that night he threw Ron’s gold Bulgari watch down a storm drain in Westwood. Joe thought “it was a shame to throw away a $12,000 watch,” Dean remembered, “but he wasn’t going to mess around with a clue like that.”

The police would undoubtedly suspect that Levin had attempted to create the impression of an abduction before skipping the country, Joe predicted. Ron had good reasons of his own for disappearing: under criminal indictment for illegally purchasing $300,000 worth of computer goods and photography equipment, Levin faced almost certain conviction and a state-prison sentence of up to seven years.

Joe called that one correctly: through Ben’s mother, Dean said, they learned from a reporter at the Los Angeles Times that the Beverly Hills Police Department had not even bothered to send a detective to the missing man’s house.

Three thousand miles away, however, at the Plaza Hotel in New York City, new complications were developing. Joe Vega, the Plaza’s security supervisor, reported for work on June 10 and was immediately asked to accompany the hotel’s credit manager to room 1071. The guest staying in that room, Mr. Levin, had run up a $2,000 bill in just three days, largely by his use of the hotel’s limousine service. A credit check revealed that he had registered with an American Express card showing thousands of dollars in past-due charges.

“We decided to double-lock the door, so that the guest would not be able to get in without checking with the front office,” Vega explained.

Just before 8:00 that evening, Vega recalled, he observed a gentleman carrying two suitcases down the number 7 stairway. The suitcases looked very much like the ones he had seen in room 1071 four hours earlier. “Sir, are you a guest at the hotel?” Vega asked. The gentleman flashed a key and kept walking. Vega asked the gentleman to stop, but the gentleman answered, “Look, I have a limousine waiting,” and began to run.

Via walkie-talkie, Vega ordered an intercept in the hotel lobby. When the gentleman reached the French doors at the Fifth Avenue entrance, Vega recalled, “four of my units were waiting for him.” The gentleman then did something that no one had ever done in the lobby of the Plaza Hotel: he dropped his suitcases, let out a yell, and assumed a karate stance. “All of us were just amazed that this was happening,” Vega recalled, “but we just closed a circle on him, and then he put his hands up.”

Vega’s units escorted the gentleman through a crowd of gawking guests, but when they reached the center of the lobby, the gentleman broke loose and bolted toward the Fifty-ninth Street exit. Vega’s units caught the gentleman in front of the Palm Court, Vega said, but it had taken all five of them to subdue him. Within hours, Jim Pittman was in a holding cell at Manhattan’s Midtown North precinct, where he was printed, photographed, and booked under the name Ronald Levin.

Hunt flew to New York the next afternoon, “to get Jim out of jail.” When Joe arrived back in Los Angeles on the evening of June 16, Dean and Ben had to tell him it appeared as if Ron Levin had taken him for one last ride, because the World Trade Bank was unable to cash the Swiss check. “It looked like Ron had been killed for nothing,” Dean said.

After Karny, the only other person with whom Joe discussed the murder was the third Shading, Ben Dosti. A few days later, however, at a meeting with Hunt, Pittman, and Dosti in Ben’s office, Dean suggested telling the others. It was a matter of principle, he explained: “I felt very strongly about the reasons why we had started the BBC . . . and I felt very strongly about the group of boys we had gathered around ourselves. And when we had to make excuses to our own comrades . . . it really didn’t sit right with me at all, because I felt somehow that the ideology I had come into the situation with was being compromised.”

Jim was the only one who had a definite opinion on the subject, Dean recalled: “He said that he didn’t know of anyone that could be trusted with information like that, and that there is always someone who talks.”

Joe decided to test the waters. Evan Dicker was asked to prepare the minutes of a nonexistent June 7 meeting of the Microgenesis board and to fabricate a discussion of the Levin deal. Tom May came by the condo one afternoon while they were practicing Levin’s signature, and Joe got him to give it a try: when Joe told Tom that Ron had been murdered, Tom received the news “with dignity and responsibility,” Dean recalled. “Joe said it looked like Tom was going to be a Shading, and so Tom was all happy for a few days.”

One week later, the Shadings held a second meeting on the subject of disclosure. This time, Tom was included. Dean again argued that they should tell the others. The four of them discussed who “would be able to handle this kind of information,” he recalled, and Joe decided to schedule a meeting for the following weekend.

Ten BBC members gathered on the afternoon of June 24 in Joe’s condo at the Manning. Eight young men and Brooke Roberts pulled the pieces of a playpen sofa into a semicircle. Hunt sat on an ottoman in the center.

“Joe said that there were going to be some very sensitive things discussed at this meeting,” Dean remembered, “which would bring some of the members there to a higher level of information. He said with that higher level of information came a very great responsibility.”

“The BBC was going to take some bold steps and achieve greatness, and for those people who wanted to go along with the BBC to achieve these levels of greatness, they must know things and do things,” Evan Dicker remembered Joe saying.

“There is basically a point in everybody’s life where either you are going to continue on with the company, or just leave,” Steve Taglianetti remembered Joe saying.

“And so anyone who wasn’t prepared to deal with a much greater level of responsibility could leave right then and there,” Dean Karny remembered Joe saying.

No one left. “Jim and I knocked off Ron Levin,” Joe announced.

VI

Pittman was right; somebody always talks. The first to break the circle was Jeff Raymond. Tall, good-looking, a surfer from Newport Beach, Raymond had been brought to the BBC by the Mays. He had invested just $20,000—“the poor little fellow on the block,” Gene Browning called him—but had proved valuable because his father, Lewis Raymond, a well-known metallurgist, had agreed to do the stress tests for Browning’s Attrition Mill.

Raymond remained best friends, however, with Dave May, one of the six BBC members excluded as “untrustworthy” from the June 24 meeting. On June 25, Jeff told Dave what he had missed: “You’re not going to believe this. . . .”

Dave took the story to his father. Two weeks later, Tom May drove to the office on Third Street and removed every piece of paper with his name on it from the company files.

The Mays and Raymond approached Gene Browning, who decided at once he believed the story was true. Three days after the June 24 meeting, Browning said, he had met Hunt for breakfast in Westwood. As the two of them walked back to their cars, Browning told the Mays, he had mentioned some problems he was having with a former business partner. “Joe said, ‘Do you want me to have [him] killed?’” Browning recalled. “And I said, ‘You’ve been watching too many movies.’ And he said, ‘Now that I have Pittman, I can have anybody killed in the world that I want. All it’s going to cost me is a suit of clothes and another car.’”

Browning joined the Mays and Raymond at a meeting set up in the office of the Mays’ private counsel. Within minutes, two detectives from the Beverly Hills Police Department walked through the door.

While they waited out the police investigation, the Mays decided to remain with the BBC as members in good standing. During the third week in July, Hunt announced he had leased one of Browning’s machines to a commercial gold miner who operated an extraction plant near the Nevada state line. The Mays volunteered to transport the Cyclotron, and Joe accepted. The night before they were to depart, however, Hunt asked the twins to meet him at Evan Dicker’s house. When they arrived, Joe was sitting on the floor in the study, Tom recalled; Dean was in a chair beside him, with Evan standing in the library. Joe mentioned in a casual voice that some documents were missing from the office and asked if they knew anything about it. When the Mays pleaded ignorance, Joe said that “if he found out who had taken the documents, he would have their hands broken,” Tom remembered.

A few days later, Hunt and Dicker broke into the Mays’ empty condo, where, by the latters’ account, they searched in vain for the missing documents. Before they left, Evan remembered, Joe stopped to play back the messages on the twins’ answering machine. One was from the Beverly Hills Police Department.

Joe convened a meeting of the Shadings the next day, including Evan among the inner circle for the first time. The Mays “posed a threat to us,” and the five of them discussed “the elimination of that threat,” Evan remembered. Joe thought the best idea was to have “a large, weighted truck smash into them” on the open highway.

Hunt and Pittman pursued the Mays into the Mojave Desert the next afternoon, hunting them without success by truck, motorcycle, and twin-engine plane.

The BBC had exhausted its remaining cash reserve during the June disbursement to Financial Futures’ investors, and by July, Dean said, they were reduced to supporting themselves by the piecemeal sale of West Cars’ inventory. The situation was critical—even Joe admitted it, Dean said—but Hunt never showed any sign that his resolve was weakening. He continued to insist there were always new contingencies, further possibilities.

VII

It was on a street corner outside the BBC office in West Hollywood that Joe and Ben first described for Dean the fabulous wealth of a man named Hedayat Eslaminia. Karny had met Eslaminia’s twenty-four-year-old son Reza at a BBC party several weeks earlier. Reza had told Hunt and Dosti that his father was a former high official in the shah of Iran’s government, top officer of the Savak. Hedayat Eslaminia had fled the country during the Ayatollah Khomeini’s revolution with more than $30 million plundered from the national economy, his eldest son said, and had enlarged upon his fortune in the United States by smuggling opium. Reza hated his father, Ben told Dean, and guaranteed that if they could arrange to kidnap the man and force him to sign over his assets, they would split the money equally.

“My reaction was that we should look into the possibility,” Dean recalled.

Four BBC members—Joe, Dean, Ben, Jim—and Reza attended the first formal discussion of the subject. Joe asked most of the questions, nearly all of them about money, Dean recalled, and led the group to the conclusion that the idea was plausible: they could force Eslaminia to surrender property titles and bankbooks, coerce his signature onto loan documents and contracts with BBC companies.

His father maintained as many as three residences, Reza said, but seemed to spend most of his time at the Belmont condominium he shared with his girlfriend, Olga Vasquez. Jim and Ben went north with Reza to perform surveillance on the condo in San Mateo County.

As the plan grew more definite, each of them was assigned a list of duties. Joe kept the master list and told the others he would personally conduct the interrogation. “He said that he was going to the library to look up some books on how to torture people, ” Dean recalled. “He said that you could find out anything in a library.”

At the point of the choice between the police disguises and the delivery-boy outfits, Reza came by the condo to announce that his father was leaving for Europe within a few days. This would provide good cover for the man’s disappearance, Joe suggested, and he told them to be ready on short notice.

After looking at remote mountain cabins and desert hideaways, Dean said, they settled for the house in Bel Air, which had a large basement where they could set up a combined office/torture chamber. The four others drove north on the night of July 29 in one of West Cars’ BMWs, followed by a pickup and camper that belonged to Joe’s father. Dean signed a six-week lease on the house the next morning and flew north for a rendezvous at the Villa Hotel.

An hour later, Joe, Ben, and Jim entered the condominium complex wearing their brown outfits, Dean said; within ten minutes, the three returned with the loaded truck, and the plan proceeded on schedule through the transfer at the U-Haul agency.

Dean rode alone with the trunk for forty minutes, listening to the pleading and pounding of the man inside. At a rest area south of San Jose, Ben Dosti joined him in the back of the U-Haul. Ben said it had been more difficult than anyone expected, Dean recalled: Pittman had been unable to subdue the fifty-six-year-old man unassisted, and they had all beaten Eslaminia for a while, until the chloroform knocked him out.

At dusk they stopped again, less than fifty miles from Los Angeles, where Joe ordered the cargo transferred to the back of the pickup. They traveled only a short distance together, Dean remembered, before Joe noticed that the sounds from the trunk had ceased. He told Dean to crawl in the back, open the trunk, and check for vital signs. “There was a strong odor of urine” as he lifted the lid, Dean remembered, and he opened and shut the trunk five times, assembling a mosaic of glimpses that arranged themselves into the picture of a stocky, gray-haired man wearing handcuffs and lying motionless in a fetal position. The man’s eyes were closed and there was drool on his chin. Mr. Eslaminia was dead, Dean told Joe and Ben.

“There was sort of a lull in the conversation at that point, ” he recalled.

VIII

Hedayat Eslaminia had enemies, Olga Vasquez advised the Belmont Police Department when she reported him missing at 5:00 A.M. on July 31. In Tehran, Eslaminia’s name had been written on walls with blood. At the Davey Glen Apartments in Belmont, he rented their condo under a friend’s name, using only his initials on the registry outside and paying his bills with checks drawn on an account that belonged to his sister. After a recent trip to Europe, he had warned Vasquez not to open a package that came to the condo from Germany. “Hedayat was afraid it might be a bomb,” she explained.

Olga, a doll-faced, soft-bodied woman with long legs and a breathy voice, gave interviews to local TV stations, and the San Francisco papers picked up the story, leading with the suspicion that Eslaminia’s disappearance had been the work of a “Khomeini hit squad.” Vasquez did not mention to the media a second possibility, one already under consideration among law-enforcement officials—that Eslaminia had been abducted during a drug deal. At the time of his disappearance, the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency was investigating an informant’s tip that the Iranian had imported opium in rugs from Afghanistan.

She did not begin to suspect that Eslaminia’s disappearance might have something to do with the bad blood between Hedayat and his eldest son until three days later, Vasquez said, when Reza showed up at the condo with a young man, whom he introduced as “my associate, Joe Hunt.” Before admitting Reza and his friend to the condo, Olga called the building’s security officer and asked him to stand guard. Vasquez had seen Reza just twice during the year she spent with his father, the second time early that summer, when she spotted Reza sitting in a gold Porsche outside the condo. After she told Hedayat that Reza was outside, Olga recalled, “he became very upset and told me never to allow him in the apartment.”

Reza and his “associates” were seen in Belmont often during the following week. BBC attorneys had prepared conservatorship and power-of-attorney papers for Reza upon which Hedayat Eslaminia’s signature had been forged by Joe Hunt and notarized by Evan Dicker. With these in hand, seven BBC members visited every bank in San Mateo County to search for accounts bearing Eslaminia’s name. They found just one, containing only a few hundred dollars. After the BBC attorneys failed to obtain a search warrant, Dean recalled, Reza and Steve Lopez broke into the Belmont condo. Olga Vasquez had moved out; all that remained was a pile of documents in one corner. Reza returned with these to Los Angeles in his father’s Cadillac.

At the Manning, Joe determined that Eslaminia had bank accounts in Germany and Switzerland. During August, Dean said, Hunt dispatched Ben and Reza to Europe with copies of the conservatorship and instructions to withdraw whatever money they could find.

Back in Belmont, the city’s tiny police department was bringing both the FBI and the DEA into its investigation of the Eslaminia disappearance. On August 16, California Department of Justice agent Oscar Breiling arrived on the scene to take over control of the case. He began by interviewing Olga Vasquez.

That same day, in Beverly Hills, Detective Les Zoeller became the first police officer to enter the duplex on Peck Drive since Ron Levin’s disappearance more than two months earlier. With him was Martin Levin. As Zoeller sorted through Ron’s files, Martin Levin searched the office. On the floor, behind the typewriter, the older man discovered seven pages torn from a yellow legal pad, covered with notes that had not been written by his son. “Look at these,” he said to Zoeller. “So I held them, opened them, and read the front page,” the detective recalled. “[It] was labeled ‘At Levins, TO DO.’ Below were fifteen numbered items, a crude map of mountain roads, and the words ‘Jim Digs Pit,’” all composed, Zoeller would learn within the next few weeks, by a young guru who taught his disciples that internal guilt was what caused criminals to fail.

With no word from Ben or Reza, money was growing tight. Joe was now driving the Jeep exclusively and Dean had gone back to his old Fiat convertible. The BBC’s ranks were thinning. Jerry Eisenberg, the young attorney who had introduced Reza to Joe and Ben, was now telling the FBI he had reason to believe that Joe Hunt was involved not only in the death of Ron Levin, but also in the kidnapping and murder of an Iranian from northern California.

The next evening, August 21, two trucks rented with credit cards issued to Dean Karny and Ben Dosti hauled away loads of electronic equipment and machinery from the office on Third Street and the warehouse in Gardena. The records of Financial Futures and several other BBC companies disappeared at the same time. Four days later, Evan Dicker reported that the BBC office had been burglarized and filed an insurance claim in excess of $100,000.

The Mays and Jeff Raymond returned to Los Angeles in early September, after more than a month in hiding at Mammoth Lake. Less than five minutes after the twins pulled into their driveway in Brentwood, Tom May recalled, Joe Hunt was at their front door. Certain that Hunt knew they had gone to the police, Tom May began carrying a pistol in his own home. In a meeting at the Hard Rock Cafe, Jerry Eisenberg told police, Joe had threatened his life. And in Costa Mesa, uniformed officers twice evacuated Gene Browning and his family from their home after warnings that Hunt had purchased a contract on the inventor’s life.

Investigators were closing in on the BBC from both the north and the south now. By the end of August, Oscar Breiling had met a state narcotics agent who reported he had been using Reza Eslaminia as an informant for nearly two years. He had known for some time that the younger Eslaminia hated his father, the agent said, adding that before he flew to Europe, Reza had suggested knowledge of his father’s disappearance, claiming “he knew two individuals whose principal activity involved kidnapping, torture, and subsequent killing of wealthy individuals, after the individuals had been forced to turn over their assets.”

By the second week of September, the Securities and Exchange Commission had alerted Financial Futures’ trading partners to its investigation into the activities of Joe Hunt. On September 22, Joe convened a meeting of Financial Futures’ investors in an office building on Beverly Boulevard. More than two hundred people attended, taking chairs in rows that faced the table where Hunt sat flanked by the BBC. “I had met very few investors, ” Mary Brown said, “and I was astounded by the caliber of people who had been taken in. There were attorneys and doctors, writers from the studios, producers and directors.” Financial Futures’ assets were frozen, pending the SEC investigation, Joe announced, but he offered his personal promise that every trading partner would receive his or her money before the end of the year.

Three prominent investors challenged Hunt, pounding on the table, demanding the truth. Joe “never flinched,” Mary Brown remembered, not even when an elderly woman who said she had invested her life savings broke into hysterics. “He just had this calm. I can’t believe the calm.” Hunt “was in total control of that room,” his secretary Lorie Leis remembered. “I was sitting by his side and it was like he was not shaken by anything.”

Joe insisted the BBC would come through this, Dean recalled: Ben and Reza had already found an account in Geneva containing $127,000 and would have the money within two weeks. Joe was still predicting ultimate success when he was arrested on September 28.

IX

Les Zoeller and his partner Dennis Decuir were en route to the Manning that afternoon when they spotted Hunt driving his Jeep in the opposite direction, eastbound on Wilshire. After a series of lane changes, the detectives caught the Jeep at Santa Monica Boulevard. Joe was taken into custody wearing an Armani business suit and a Rolex watch from Tiffany’s—a birthday present from Ron Levin, he said. On the seat next to him was a maroon briefcase.

Inside were file folders labeled REZA: ASSETS RE CONSERVATORSHIP, SWARTOUT, and one stamped THE MAYS, in which Zoeller found a two-page contract between Microgenesis and Ron Levin.

Within the week, however, Joe was back at the Manning, released after the district attorney’s office refused to file charges until more of the young men who had witnessed Hunt’s alleged confession were interviewed. “Joe said he had made Detective Zoeller look like a real idiot,” Dean remembered, “and I was sitting there sort of believing that ‘Oh, yeah, we can just tough this out.’”

What Joe didn’t mention was the moment during his interrogation when Zoeller had laid out seven pages torn from a yellow legal pad on the table in front of him. “The suspect started to look at them and became visibly shaken (blank look on face, nervously going from page to page, over and over again),” the detective wrote in his report. For the first time since his arrest, Zoeller noted, “the suspect was at a loss for words.”

After his release, Joe’s preoccupation was the $127,000 Ben and Reza were to send from Switzerland, Dean remembered, but the money never came. On October 16, Breiling cabled the Trade Development Bank in Geneva to request a freeze on the Eslaminia account. He was told later that the bank had received his message at the very moment the $127,000 was being counted out for Ben and Reza. “They pulled the money right off the table in front of their eyes,” Breiling said.

That same day, Joe was appearing on his own behalf at the Los Angeles County Court in Santa Monica, where he requested the return of “personal property” that included the contents of his briefcase, engaging the presiding judge in a discussion of case law that grew so involved the assistant district attorney on the case interrupted “just to remind you I’m here.”

Six days later, Hunt and Pittman were arrested in Westwood, each charged with murder, special circumstances, in the death of Ron Levin. “I had every attorney in town come to see me,” Pittman remembered. “One wanted $40,000, one wanted $100,000, one wanted $200,000. Everybody thought I was rich.”

Within hours of his second arrest, Hunt was calling from a pay phone at County Jail, Dean recalled. “He started to put words in my mouth and he told me, ‘You know, Dean, I think that your recollections on this occurrence are going to be very important some day, and it is very important that you remember exactly what was happening around the sixth. Like, didn’t we go to a movie that night?’”

During the next two weeks, Dean moved out of the Manning and refused to answer Hunt’s calls. “The time I spent by myself is when I really realized how wrong he was about so many things,” Dean explained, “and how I had just been twisted around his finger like all the other nice boys.”

Brooke Roberts, Joe’s last loyal follower, traced Dean to his parents’ home in the hills. “She told me that things were getting worse for Joe, because more and more people were coming out against him,” Karny recalled. “She said it was important for me to make a statement that contradicted other statements, or Joe might not get bail set.” He would discuss the matter with his attorney, Dean told Brooke.

One by one, the BBC members who had attended the June 24 meeting were being served with subpoenas. On November 26, Les Zoeller visited the Karny home on Outpost Drive. Dean’s mother answered the door. When it was clear Zoeller wanted only to question him, Dean stepped into the hallway and said he was interested in testifying as a witness for the prosecution if he could get immunity. Two days later, Dean was in San Francisco talking to Oscar Breiling. The next morning he was back in Beverly Hills, describing what he knew of Ron Levin’s disappearance. That afternoon, Karny led Zoeller and a Los Angeles County coroner’s team into the Angeles National Forest, to a turnout on a dirt road in Soledad Canyon. “This is the spot,” he said.

Seventy-five feet down the slope, searchers found most of a human rib cage with several attached vertebrae. Fifteen feet farther down they discovered radius and humerus bones. The tibia and fibula and a pair of black slacks were nearby, with the femur, skull, and jawbone of Hedayat Eslaminia and a piece of light-colored cloth in a cluster twelve feet away. Near the bottom of the hill, the coyotes had left a scrap of white cloth with a label that read JOCKEY CLASSIC BRIEF, SIZE 36.

Epilogue

Ben Dosti and Reza Eslaminia continued their unsuccessful search for Hedayat Eslaminia’s European assets. The two remained fugitives from the law until July 1985, when a U.S. passport agent named Mullen sent the FBI an advisory on a suspicious application filed by a Minnesota man named Christopher Potter at the post office in Monterey, California. A fraud officer at the U.S. Passport Agency contacted the Registrar of Vital Statistics in Minnesota and was referred to the state of Kentucky, where Christopher Potter died with his brother Lansing Lee and their parents in an airplane crash on January 3, 1965. Within the week, Reza was arrested in San Francisco as he attempted to pick up a passport issued to Christopher Potter. Ben Dosti, aka Lansing Lee Potter, was apprehended by the FBI the same day in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Reza is an inmate at the San Mateo County Jail, where he will be held until he comes to trial for the murder of his father. The state attorney general’s office has asked for a sentence of life in prison without possibility of parole. His codefendant, Ben Dosti, was released on $500,000 bail posted by a bond on his parents’ home. The Dostis hired top criminal attorney Richard Hirsch to handle their son’s defense. Ben is currently working in a Los Angeles law office.

Jeff Raymond, Steve Taglianetti, and Evan Dicker have agreed to testify against Joe Hunt. No criminal charges have been filed against them—or against Alex Gaon, Gene Browning, Jerry Eisenberg, or others whose dealings with the BBC were minimal in the eyes of prosecutors.

Tom and Dave May are also prosecution witnesses. The twins have spent much of the last year trying to break into the movie business with their version of the BBC story.

Jim Pittman was tried for the murder of Ron Levin (whose body has never been found) during May and June of 1985. The proceedings ended with the jury hung ten to two for conviction. Prosecutor Fred Wapner has been granted a retrial. Pittman remains at the main County Jail in downtown Los Angeles, where he is currently the only BBC member behind bars.

Joe Hunt was released in September 1985 on a $2-million property bond, the amount secured by a man who earlier had been outspoken in his hatred of Hunt, Bobby Roberts. Brooke’s father not only posted his Bel Air mansion as a bond on Hunt’s behalf, but put him up in a private suite there. Roberts also hired one of Los Angeles’s most expensive trial lawyers, Arthur Barens, in whose office Joe is working as a research assistant on his own defense.

At Hunt’s arraignment, the spectator benches were filled with former investors in Financial Futures, their interest piqued by the news that Joe had accounted for only $428,028 of the $1,584,730 his trading partnership officially took in. Wearing an Armani suit and his mask of indifference, Joe claimed to have made maximum use of his time in jail, achieving fluency in French and Japanese. Several observers in court remarked upon Hunt’s physical resemblance to a young Andy Griffith. One other comparison, however, was made with even greater frequency: “A Manson for the Eighties,” Gene Browning called Joe.

Several former disciples testified that they believed Hunt was still attempting to have them killed. Fred Wapner, who adamantly opposed Hunt’s release on bail and was visibly upset when Judge Laurence Rittenband granted it, said afterward, “This is the one person I’ve ever prosecuted who actually scares me.”

Hunt will face the death penalty when he is brought to trial in Santa Monica for the murder of Ron Levin. Joe’s attorneys will argue that Levin arranged his own disappearance and is currently living abroad with a new name and a surgically altered appearance. In northern California, defense attorneys have subpoenaed several federal agencies, including the CIA, for evidence supporting the theory that Hedayat Eslaminia was killed either by Iranian terrorists or by drug dealers. In both trials, north and south, Hunt will take the stand as the chief witness for the defense.

Dean Karny will be the state’s star witness. During a hearing in San Mateo County, a police informant testified he had overheard Reza Eslaminia boast that his codefendant, Joe Hunt, was purchasing a contract on Karny’s life. Dean was subsequently removed from his parents’ home and placed under the California Witness Protection Program, which provides him with a $650-per-month living stipend. At his next appearance in court, Karny wore a bulletproof vest. Dean graduated from the Whittier School of Law in 1985 and has applied for admission to the California Bar.

Editor’s Note: The drama and intrigue did not stop there. While Joe Hunt remains in prison for the murder of Ron Levin, his appeals and legal battles have continued without pause. Hunt was first portrayed by Judd Nelson in the 1987 NBC miniseries on the Billionaire Boys Club, later by Ansel Elgort in a 2018 film adaptation.

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