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 thenjust a P.O. Browning nearly laughed out loud when the groups gangly, baby-faced twenty-three-year-old leader introduced himself. With no word from Ben or Reza, money was growing tight. Three weeks, he was told. 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. 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. The firms sixty-eight-year-old president, Bruce Swartout, had invited Hunt to discuss a merger of Cogenco with Microgenesis. A $300-million (minimum) gondola to Dodger Stadium? Entertainment Television, LLC A Division of NBCUniversal. 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. The Mays and Raymond approached Gene Browning, who decided at once he believed the story was true. Hedayat was afraid it might be a bomb, she explained. This article originally appeared in the September 1986 issue of Esquire. That inmate was released last month. Behind bars, Hunt teaches yoga and meditation. Multiple Orgasms. By 1984, despite the Billionaire Boys Clubs trappings of success and dreams of its members becoming more prominent than their wealthy parents, the group had lost nearly $1 million in bad investments. Brian McNamara (b. November 21, 1960) is an American actor, known for his portrayal of Dean Karny in the TV Movie Billionaire Boys Club for which he was nominated for a Golden Globe for Best Performance by an Actor in a supporting role. 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 weekendsplus $480,000 of his own moneyin 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. 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 Hunts lectures on Norminess. Eventually, the twins stopped speaking to each other. The Mays and Jeff Raymond returned to Los Angeles in early September, after more than a month in hiding at Mammoth Lake. . "We have basically an open investigation.". Joseph Hunt made my ministry and work in prison worthwhile, Chaplain Dennis Merino wrote. Actually Jim Pittman asked me once in the lobby if I would be interested in meeting Joe and Dean because he thought that I would fit in with the group. It contains outdated and potentially offensive descriptions of race, gender, and class. From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. During his trial for the murder of Levin, Hunt's defense attorney presented two witnesses, Carmen Canchola and Jesus Lopez, who testified that they saw Levin after his alleged murder, in September 1986 at a gas station in Tucson, Arizona. 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. Dean Karny | Pure Evil Wiki | Fandom Hunt also indulged Pittmans fetish for electronic surveillance equipment and exotic weapons. He told the firm not to execute Hunts orders but said Hunt needed to believe his buys and sells were real decisions. While Joe Hunt remains in prison for the murder of Ron Levin, his appeals and legal battles have continued without pause. In 1993, Pittmanwent onA Current Affair in 1993 and said he shot Levin at the man's Beverly Hills homeand Hunt was there. A credit check revealed that he had registered with an American Express card showing thousands of dollars in past-due charges. While the young men used Rons computer to make a list of all the things that looked wrong, Blanche called the Beverly Hills police to report a missing person. For $5,600 a month, Dosti and Steve Lopez, a new BBC recruit whose main function was the entertainment of wealthy widows and divorces, 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 Joes new nineteen-year-old girlfriend, Brooke Roberts. Hunt defended himself at trial for a second murder case. My reaction was that we should look into the possibility, Dean recalled. Other students remembered him as an A student who read the Congressional Record at lunch. So, he tried it again in Beverly Hillschristening himself Joe Hunt and forming an investment club with some of his former classmates, using his bravado and promises of quick, big returns to get them to put up the capitalfor what eventually became known as the Billionaire Boys Club. On August 16, California Department of Justice agent Oscar Breiling arrived on the scene to take over control of the case. Joes attorneys will argue that Levin arranged his own disappearance and is currently living abroad with a new name and a surgically altered appearance. Usually you weren't the kind of girl for one night stands, but Dean had something about him you couldn't withstand, the alcohol playing part in it too. Reza had told Hunt and Dosti that his father was a former high official in the shah of Irans government, top officer of the Savak. Reza returned with these to Los Angeles in his fathers Cadillac. "He had this quality about him. Dosti's mother is a Los Angeles Times editor; his . The brokerage house sued, calling in the principals for depositions. That same day, in Beverly Hills, Detective Les Zoeller became the first police officer to enter the duplex on Peck Drive since Ron Levins disappearance more than two months earlier. Ben is currently working in a Los Angeles law office. Ron was really amazed and said that Joe had found a real fish, Dean remembered. The convictions of Dosti and Reza Eslaminia were overturned in 2000. One began by freeing oneself of concepts like good and bad, true and false. And so anyone who wasnt prepared to deal with a much greater level of responsibility could leave right then and there, Dean Karny remembered Joe saying. The first rule was, Never feel sorry for anything you do, and the second was, Its all right to lie if you know the truth.. Detectives never found Levin, but they did find what prosecutors called the recipe for murder, a chilling to-do list scrawled on pages from a yellow legal pad. The True Story of the Billionaire Boys Club - Filthy Lucre With just a few thousand in savings, he had earned $35,000 already, Joe said. In the late 1970s, Joe Hunt(then known by his real name, Joseph Henry Gamsky) was a student at the exclusive Harvard Schoolin Los Angeles (then all-boys, now it's the co-ed Harvard Westlake). Brian McNamara's age is 62. Brian McNamara Net Worth 2022: Money, Salary, Bio - CelebsMoney A week later, Steve Taglianetti caught a ride to Gardena with Pittman and noticed a vial of liquid on the dashboard. With the money skimmed from Financial Futures, Joe had raised the pitch of life in the BBC by another octave. When authorities began to investigate the murders, Dean Karny, the club's second-in-command and Hunt's best friend, turned state's evidence on both murders in return for immunity from prosecution on three different felony charges in exchange for testimony. At the time of his disappearance, the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency was investigating an informants tip that the Iranian had imported opium in rugs from Afghanistan. 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. The petition also describes Hunt's in-custody record of conduct as "exceptional" and details his founding and facilitation of a men's spiritual group at the California State Prison in Sacramento where Hunt was imprisoned until 2012. 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. 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. From a high of about thirty, BBC membership collapsed to a core of sixteen. He was thirteen years old then and his name was Joseph Gamsky. 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. Editors Note: The drama and intrigue did not stop there. 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. From the minute you started telling them about it, everybody wanted to believe, Mary Brown said. 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.. The Browns brought in more investors. 166K followers. Less than five minutes after the twins pulled into their driveway in Brentwood, Tom May recalled, Joe Hunt was at their front door. The question is whether this is the sincere act of a changed man or just another con job by a master manipulator, which is what prosecutors and law enforcement officials believe. He had passed the C.P.A. "There is one voice that will never be stifledand that's the voice of an innocent man talking about his innocence," Hunt said in court. 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. He said he was doing a four- or five-part series on commodities trading, Friedman recalled. Dean graduated from the Whittier School of Law in 1985 and has applied for admission to the California Bar. Things got weird fast, Opinion: California wants more psychiatric detentions. Dean Karny, Hunt's closest confidant in the Billionaire Boys Club, testified that Hunt told him they handcuffed Levin and shoved him face down on the bed, where the bodyguard put a bullet in. 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. The man apparently needed to write a how-to for his own crime and needed to bring it with him - he probably should have put "take evidence with you" on that list. Karny knew Gamsky from Joes only extracurricular activity, the debate team. 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. Hunt will face the death penalty when he is brought to trial in Santa Monica for the murder of Ron Levin. Joe called that one correctly: through Bens 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 mans house. We would like to show you a description here but the site won't allow us. Much of Deans problem could be traced back to his parents, Joe suggested. Joe said it looked like Tom was going to be a Shading, and so Tom was all happy for a few 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.. Ten BBC members gathered on the afternoon of June 24 in Joes condo at the Manning. . Four BBC membersJoe, Dean, Ben, Jimand Reza attended the first formal discussion of the subject. (Needless to say, an ill-timed film starring Kevin Spacey that made less than $200 at the box office in 2018 did nothing to move the needle. He is a borderline sociopath in my opinion.. Dean Kearney. Both ended in hung juries. Former Billionaire Boys Club Buddies Face Off in Court | AP News 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. 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.. He was one of Billionaire Boys Club (also known as BBC) founders, Joe Hunt's former best friend turned archenemy and main witness in Joe Hunt's trial. Ben Dosti and Reza Eslaminia continued their unsuccessful search for Hedayat Eslaminias European assets. That afternoon, Karny led Zoeller and a Los Angeles County coroners team into the Angeles National Forest, to a turnout on a dirt road in Soledad Canyon. Dean Karny is the main antagonist of Billionaire Boys Club. Gene Browning asked Joe if he was going to marry Brooke: He said, Shes just a cover, the inventor 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. 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. Defense attorneys also pointed out that Levin had restructured his already-made bail arrangements to release his parents from liability, and asked one witness for information about Brazilian extradition treaties. Gamsky had entered the prep school on a scholarship, one of the few poor boys on the twenty-three-acre campus. Within the week, however, Joe was back at the Manning, released after the district attorneys office refused to file charges until more of the young men who had witnessed Hunts alleged confession were interviewed. 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 doesnt matter, because Joes 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. Karny provided the only direct testimony linking Reza Eslaminia and Arben "Ben" Dosti to the 1984 kidnap-murder of Eslaminia's. Tom and Dave had grown into a pair of lanky lady-killers, outrageously good-looking but regarded as not terribly bright. 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. You have a pure, smooth, psychological phenomenon.. Several observers in court remarked upon Hunts physical resemblance to a young Andy Griffith. [17], In January 2018, Hunt filed an application for commutation of his sentence, which would change it from life without possibility of parole to an indeterminate life term, which would give Hunt the opportunity to prove his rehabilitation before a parole board.[18]. The Karnys put up $150,000 to stake Joes trading account, and persuaded friends to add another $250,000. Steve Cooley said that Hunt killed for greed and that his case was one of the highest-profile murder cases handled by the office in the 1980s. Dean Karny | Villains Wiki | Fandom At the duplex on Peck Drive, Blanche Sturkey was just arriving for work. And when we had to make excuses to our own comrades . 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, were dealing with freedom of the press herereporters privilege.. He lasted only six months before resigning to trade on the commodities market. Brown in recent months has commuted 18 life sentences, giving the inmates a chance at freedom. On the morning of June 4, Dean came into the office early and saw Joe making notes on a yellow legal pad. But he also has repeatedly rejected parole requests for high-profile killers, including members of the Manson family.. Contents 1 Biography 2 Personality 3 Gallery 4 Trivia Biography Others are highly skeptical Hunt is a candidate for this reappraisal. There was reported speculation that the disappearance ofHedayat Eslaminia, who was a wealthy businessmanback in his native Iran, had something to do with the Ayatollah, whom he had criticized. And he said he killed Ron Levin, and therefore Ron Levin must be dead. If that is the case, there is no physical evidence., The irony of the situation isnt lost on me, said Hunt, who admits he was the consummate liar, drawing an analogy to the fable of the boy who cried wolf. Simpson, before Erik and Lyle Menendez, there was Joe Hunt. His duplex on Peck Drive was worth at least a million dollars, Ron said, but hed gotten it for a fraction of that, negotiating a lease option with the old woman who inherited the building, convincing her that $100,000twice what her dead husband had paid for the place thirty years earlierwas a fair price. . 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 Im here., Six days later, Hunt and Pittman were arrested in Westwood, each charged with murder, special circumstances, in the death of Ron Levin. 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. Blanche, a retired schoolteacher, had been introduced to Ron at a private party where her husband was working as a bartender. 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. Levin's body was never found, and Hunt maintains that Levin, who was under criminal investigation and out on bail at the time of his disappearance, instead fled the country to escape prosecution. 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 Gamskys own page was quite different. 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. Levin loved to entertain and had dozens of close companions. When police searched Levin's condo, they found what appeared to be a to-do list in Hunt's handwriting that said things like "close blinds" and "tape mouth.". "Absolutely 100 Percent Not Guilty": 25 Bizarre Things You Forgot About the O.J. Joe mentioned in a casual voice that some documents were missing from the office and asked if they knew anything about it. As the plan grew more definite, each of them was assigned a list of duties. He worked closely with the prisons clergy, acting as a chapel clerk. The next morning he was back in Beverly Hills, describing what he knew of Ron Levins disappearance. According to the governments star witness at trial, Hunt and his bodyguard forced Levin to sign a check for $1.5 million at his Peck Drive home in Beverly Hills. How Palm Springs ran out Black and Latino families to build a fantasy for rich, white people, 17 SoCal hiking trails that are blooming with wildflowers (but probably not for long! 2,448 posts. On the seat next to him was a maroon briefcase. Then they met Joe Hunt, who offered them the one thing they didnt have: belief in themselves. 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. Look, I am innocent. 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. Jerry Brown to commute his sentence of life without the possibility of parole. Yet it seemed to those who watched them together that it was the scoundrel in Levin that truly intrigued Joe. That, Hunt says, was the trial at which jurors got to hear the truth about his activities. It's a way to get away from the real crazy [out in the world] and we can just kind of go to the other crazy, and be entertained and horrified.". Authorities found bones in the spot Karny led them to, and the remains were identified via dental records. At graduation, each member of the senior class was given one full page in the Harvard School yearbook. In fact, he lived in the middle-class city of Van Nuys, only about a 21-minute drive from the school in Holmby Hills, but what must have felt like a world away to the teenager. Having lost money, he started his own investment fundandwas promptly kicked out of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange. Club members, clad in Armani suits and driving high-end BMWs, dined at Spago and partied with supermodels. He just had this calm. To top it all off, the deal with Kilpatrick and UFOI was coming unglued. Before he left Chicago, he changed his last name. 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 inventors life. On Wednesday, Hunt questioned Dean Karny, his former prep school chum and fellow club member who has been granted immunity and is in the federal witness protection program. 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, however, conned the brokerage into believing he was a TV producer doing a documentary on commodities trading. He is also responsible as the club's second-in-command. Ron regarded the swindle as an art form and loved to boast of his accomplishments. After Hunt's conviction, eight witnesses came forward stating that they had seen Ron Levin alive in various locations in 1986 and 1987, including Greece and Los Angeles. Hunt acted as his own attorney during this trial and contended that star witness Karny had killed Eslaminia. Back in Belmont, the citys tiny police department was bringing both the FBI and the DEA into its investigation of the Eslaminia disappearance. At dusk they stopped again, less than fifty miles from Los Angeles, where Joe ordered the cargo transferred to the back of the pickup. 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. 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.. With the testimony of accomplice Karny, both Dosti and Reza Eslaminia were convicted and sentenced to life imprisonment without parole. 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. ", Andshe's excited toexpand on that "wow"because, though it's been the subject of books and an Emmy-nominated miniseries, as well as inspired plenty of TV and film plots, it has been one of thoseinsanely juicy stories that somehow slipped through the cracks of the true crime canonthat always seems to be in rotation decades after the events in question occurred. Jim Pittman was tried for the murder of Ron Levin (whose body has never been found) during May and June of 1985. Dean rode alone with the trunk for forty minutes, listening to the pleading and pounding of the man inside. 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. 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 hotels limousine service. Dean Karny, Hunt's best friend who had previously stuck by him when other investors started to drop out, agreed to testify in exchange for full immunityand he also said that Hunt was behind the .