Marcia Clark Investigates The First 48: Billionaire Boys Club (S1, E7) | Full Episode | A&E

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[ominous music] ♪ ♪ [dramatic music] - I'm Marcia Clark, and I'm investigating the controversial cases America can't forget. It's a mission I've been on my whole life: to discover the truth, to bring it to light, and to fight for justice. You haven't investigated a crime scene in 20 years. How could you possibly know what you're talking about? I've spent 12 years as a defense attorney and 14 years as a prosecutor. During my time as a prosecutor, I secured over 1,000 convictions. Most of the time, justice prevailed. Sometimes, it didn't. There has never been a defendant in the history of this state, I warrant, that has had everybody bend over backwards for him the way this one has. And now, as a victim's advocate, I'm investigating the critical first 48 hours of cases that have left us with more questions than answers. ♪ ♪ I want to get to the truth. I want justice for the innocent. ♪ ♪ [ominous music] ♪ ♪ - This is the story of some inexperienced rich kids from Beverly Hills trying their hand at the high-stakes investment game who turn to a conman in a moment of desperation. - What they didn't know is he was scamming them. What he didn't know is they were scamming him. - It's the story of two men obsessed with money, power, and status... - The rest of the BBC kids seemed wimpy to me. Joe Hunt seemed more like a man amongst boys. - Whose lives intersected at the wrong moment. - Ron was brilliant. He was charming. He lived like a king, you know, apparently out of thin air. - One is serving life in prison, the other missing and presumed dead. - "Close blinds, scan for the recorder, tape mouth, handcuff." That looks like something that somebody would do for kidnapping or murder. - A third man is victim to the chaos they created. - It's the perfect body dump. We're talking about two murders in one month... - Yeah, we are. - That Joe Hunt engineered. - Yeah. - Tonight, I'm investigating a case I witnessed in real time as a young prosecutor. This is gonna be a wild ride, so fasten your seatbelts. This is "The Billionaire Boys Club." [haunting music] ♪ ♪ - We the jury find the defendant, Robert Blake, not guilty of the crime of first-degree murder. ♪ ♪ - The duct tape was wrapped around the face. ♪ ♪ That, to me, is evidence of a homicide. ♪ ♪ This is a wild goose chase, and she's lying her ass off. ♪ ♪ - That's pure speculation. - No, it's not. I have pictures. ♪ ♪ - The Billionaire Boys Club. They weren't billionaires, and most not even millionaires. All were in their 20s, so they weren't really boys either, but they aspired to the winner-take-all lifestyle that raged in 1980s Los Angeles and created an exclusive boys club of reckless privilege, led by a charismatic young conman with something to prove, Joe Hunt. So tell us, who is Joe Hunt? - Joe Hunt was a very ambitious guy. He was raised in a family without a lot of money, and he went to one of the most affluent private schools in Los Angeles. - Sue Horton spent 3 1/2 years following the BBC investigation and authored a book on it. What was that school? - It was then the Harvard school. It's now Harvard-Westlake. - He'd he get in? - Joe Hunt was a very bright kid and a very good student, and he got into the Harvard school on scholarship, and when he was there, he was going to school with a lot of people who had a lot more money than he did, and I think at that point, Joe Hunt decided that he wanted to have the kind of money that his classmates had. - What did he do after school? - After Joe Hunt left Harvard-Westlake, he spent a little time at USC, and then he went off to Chicago to try to make it as a commodities trader. It didn't go that well for him, and he ended up getting suspended from trading. - Actually, his real name was Joe Gamsky, but he became Joe Hunt. - How did he become Joe Hunt? - He became Joe Hunt by changing his name, and he wanted people to think he might be associated with the Hunt Brothers, who at that time were the most notorious billionaires in the country. - Randall Sullivan is a journalist who interviewed eight members of the BBC, including Joe Hunt. - And he couldn't help going for the big score. He would leverage his assets, and so market could tip against him even slightly and he'd lose everything, which he did, and he had promised all of these investors what conmen always do. You know, he guaranteed them certain returns, and new investors would put in money, he would put it out. He wasn't doing it just to steal; he was doing it in the belief that he was going to make millions and millions. He believed in his own brilliance that much, but he just couldn't help going further and further out on a limb, spinning stories that were further and further from the truth. - His con was telling clients their money was safe and would soon yield significant profits. He was investigated and disciplined when one of his investors filed a formal complaint that their supposed profits never materialized. - He was suspended permanently, and it appeared he was over. At one point, he was up $14 million, and he came back to L.A. with four dollar bills in his pocket. - Wow. So a bit of a checkered past already, and then he meets up with Dean Karny, his former classmate at Harvard, and so how did the Billionaire Boys Club start? [1980s-style rock music] ♪ ♪ - Joe Hunt reconnected with a lot of his more affluent friends from the Harvard school and got them to bring in their parents and people their parents knew as investors in the Billionaire Boys Club. - So Joe Hunt found the perfect target with these kids. - Right. - Joe came up with the name BBC, inspired by his Chicago hangout, the Bombay Bicycle Club. The newly formed club blurred the lines of business and pleasure, and they started referring to themselves as the Billionaire Boys Club in jest as they burned through other people's money in pursuit of a lavish Beverly Hills lifestyle. ♪ ♪ - It was a group of young men who formed a financial consortium that was really a cult. - Everybody huddled around Joe. Joe seemed to be, like, older, taller, more mature than the rest of them. - Neil Anton ran in the same social circles as Joe and the boys, and they eventually met at a party. - They liked me because they knew that I knew a lot of people who had money and my family was influential in Beverly Hills and Hollywood. - So they wanted to recruit you. - They did. They did want to recruit me. Joe Hunt was telling me that they were looking to expand their business operations. - Joe's sales pitch hid the fact that the BBC had spent $900,000 of investor money without showing any returns and hoped his charm could convince others to cover the loss. - He had that glow and that appeal when people talked to him, 'cause he was a big guy and he sounded really smart. - Very charismatic. - Very charismatic. - Yeah. So what happened? - The BBC was struggling. It looked like a going business concern, but there was no money being made, and there was a lot of money being spent, and finally, Joe Hunt met somebody that he thought could really help him, and it was a guy named Ron Levin. - Ron Levin was a man about town in Beverly Hills who lived large in ways Joe and the BBC could only dream of. He seemed to have unlimited wealth, with access to even more. - Beverly Hills has had many colorful and compelling conmen in its long history, but I don't think there's ever been one to touch Ron Levin. He was a truly amazing character, and utterly without scruples, but with a great sense of humor, and Joe was completely impressed and seduced by him from the beginning. - Joe hopes Ron will be the lifeline he desperately needs. They start developing some deals, and then suddenly Ron Levin simply disappears. [synth music] With this unusual case, we don't have a traditional First 48 to follow, but this is where we believe the investigation begins. On June 7th, 1984, at 6:45 a.m., Ron Levin's friends arrive at his Beverly Hills duplex, but Levin doesn't answer the door. At 7:15 a.m., the housekeeper lets everyone inside. Levin is nowhere to be found. At 9 a.m., friends and family go to the police, only to be told that they have to wait two days before reporting him missing. That policy, which was enforced in 1984, has since been abandoned. At 11 p.m. that night, 2,800 miles away in New York City, a man checks in to The Plaza Hotel under the name Ron Levin. - By 6 a.m. on June 9th... - Levin has run out of hotel credit. The Plaza's management attempts to contact him without success. This brings us to the end of the first 48 hours. The first step in uncovering the truth is walking through the 48-hour timeline following the discovery of Ron Levin's disappearance, and that's where my investigation begins. ♪ ♪ [soft chime music] ♪ ♪ So here we are in Beverly Hills, home to many of the wealthiest, most famous and privileged. You were working at Beverly Hills PD at the time this case was going on, weren't you? - Right. I started with Beverly Hills PD back in 1977. ♪ ♪ - Frank Salcido is a retired captain of the Beverly Hills Police Department, where he served for over 30 years. During his career, he became closely involved in the BBC case. - His father said there was no way on earth that Ron would ever disappear without reaching out to him or having some sort of contact, and it always did trouble me that we had never found the body. Even though there was a conviction, there's still doubt in a lot of people's minds as to whether Ron Levin is still alive or whether he was actually killed. - That's one of the harder cases to have. I had one too. - Great. - Got a first-degree murder conviction on a case with no body, no murder weapon, and they they are hard, because you've got to convince people that the person really is dead... - Mm-hmm. - So isn't it always part of the investigation, particularly in a no-body case, that you ask all the friends and family, everyone who knew the questioned deceased, whether they would have run, and if so, where would they run? What were their habits? And is it like them to just simply drop off the grid? - It's quite remarkable that 30 years later, he hasn't popped up somewhere. - Right. - I mean, that's a pretty elaborate scam to put over on people. - And not tell anyone and disappear forever. [eerie music] ♪ ♪ On June 7th, 1984, at 6:45 a.m., two young friends of Ron Levin arrive at his Beverly Hills duplex. 19-year-old Dean Factor, a great-grandson of Hollywood cosmetics icon Max Factor, along with their mutual friend Michael Brodeur, came to pick up the 42-year-old Levin and catch a flight to New York City for a weekend of partying. They knock on the door several times, but no one answers. [ominous music] Then, the young men notice that the burglar alarm is disarmed, which is strange, because they know Levin always sets the alarm when he goes to bed. ♪ ♪ Hey, Mark. How you doing? - Good to see you. - Hi, I'm Mark Gellar. - Frank Salcido. - How are you? - Very nice to meet you. - Mark Gellar and his wife Laura were also supposed to join Levin for the trip to New York City that weekend. They'd been close friends with Levin for over a decade, since they were in their 20s. So let me take you back to the morning of June 7th, 1984. Tell us what happened that morning. - My wife and I lived in Beverly Hills also, on Oakhurst. We were scheduled to go to New York for the weekend. We showed up here, and we found one of the Factor boys sitting on the steps. [dramatic music] They were very close with Ron also. And Ron was nowhere to be found. ♪ ♪ - Can you show us the door you're talking about? - Sure. So when I came up, the Factor boy was sitting basically over there. His suitcase was nearby. ♪ ♪ I rang the bell, I went around the back, I looked in the windows. I mean, we just saw nothing. I said, "Do you have Blanche's number? Do--you know, call Blanche. Do you know--" - Who's Blanche? - Blanche was his housekeeper. - And what did-- - I said, "Maybe she knows where he is," you know? Because it was definitely unusual. It just wasn't like Ron. I mean, we-- we had planned to go somewhere. It's just--it had never happened before in ten years. - Yeah. ♪ ♪ [suspenseful music] At 7:15 a.m., housekeeper Blanche Sturkey arrives at the duplex and lets the group inside. ♪ ♪ They search the house, but Ron Levin is nowhere to be found. ♪ ♪ His clothing is all there, neatly stored in the spacious closets, and the small black leather bag he always carried when he went out was there too. A white comforter, which Blanche says she put on the bed the previous day, is missing. In its place is a green and yellow floral pattern blanket that she says is reserved for guests. ♪ ♪ - Big, white, fluffy, you know, like a Frette thick, heavy thread count comforter. - And that was the one he always had on his bed? - Always, and, you know, my wife and I have laid on that bed 1,000 times watching TV with Ron in that bed, so--that being gone, it just--if that wasn't in the laundry or Blanche didn't take it to sew it, I don't know where that comforter would have gone. Everything had to match. Everything was always the same. You know, I've watched him give instructions to Blanche 50 times. I mean, it just--when I heard that was missing, I thought, "Oh." [sucks teeth] - Yeah. That was weird. - And the clicker to the TV, the remote control, was missing, which was always on the-- on the bed or nearby on an end table. - You also found two unfinished salads on a table near the kitchen, which made Blanche think someone was with Ron the night before, and I hear you guys called Ron's mother, Carol, 'cause I hear that they had a really close relationship. It was reported that his mother had no idea he was gone. - He talked to his mother every day. He talked to us literally every day. If he didn't talk to me, he talked to my wife, and the fact that he-- no one knew where he was and the fact that the comforter was gone and the clicker was gone, it just--it added up to something not good. - Were you aware of any people that might want to do Ron Levin harm, that might be enemies of his? - No. I wasn't aware of anyone in particular that would have wanted to do him harm. He did tell me--he said, "Oh, I have this new deal, and I'm running stock trades, and it's fantastic, and I'm doing so well," and I go, "Oh, great, Ron." But I--you know, I tried not to talk to Ron about business. He'd tell me some things, and I would want to kind of-- "I don't want to talk about that anymore." You know? I really don't want to know about that. I just didn't want to know about all the little minutiae that was going on with Ron. - Right. - You know, I just felt it was better for me. - So you never heard-- - Better for our relationship. We didn't do business together ever... - Yeah. - You know. - The question to me becomes: did Ron Levin flee because he was afraid the police would come after him for one of his scams, or did he run to escape from an angry person he conned, or was he a victim of foul play? Regardless, his close friends quickly start to suspect that he didn't forget about the flight or sleep at someone else's house or make a last-minute trip to the store. They think Levin's disappearance involves foul play. But because this is 1984, mobile phones weren't widely used, so they couldn't just call him up or text him or use GPS to track him down. [synth music] By 9:00 a.m., Ron Levin's friends have missed the flight they'd planned to take to New York City with Ron Levin. ♪ ♪ Ron's mother, Carol Levin, calls the Beverly Hills Police Department to report her son missing, but the receptionist tells her it's impossible to file a missing persons report for someone who's been missing less than 48 hours. I need Mark and Laura Geller to tell me a lot more about Ron Levin's life, since they knew him so well. - Ron was one of two people at our wedding. - No kidding? - Yes, yes. - We were really close to Ron. - Steadying for us. - Really close. - Wow. - He knew our children. He was-- he was like Uncle Ronnie. - He was there when my son was born. ♪ ♪ - Do you think Ron would have run away? - I wouldn't believe that in a million years. - Yeah. - Ron liked himself. If anything, Ron liked himself, he liked the way he was, and he didn't want to change anything, and that's why I can tell you he didn't go anywhere. - Ron was really close to his mother, and he adored her, and he would have never fled and left her. - And he needed all the creature comforts that he had, by the way. He wasn't--even if he was in a hotel for two or three days, he would get crazy to go home. Ron had a ton of nervous energy. - Yeah. - He talked fast. He worked fast. You know, he was always running to somewhere. - But he was brilliant. You could ask him about anything, and he knew about everything. - That's part of the reason why we liked him so much. I mean, you could talk to him about any subject. You want to talk about art? You could talk about art. You want to talk about fashion? You could talk about fashion. Very few people could do that. He knew an amazing amount of interesting people. We met everybody from Andy Warhol to Bianca Jagger. Ron just knew... - Everybody. - That's amazing. - Hundreds of interesting people. He knew how to get into Studio 54. He was in every club. He held, uh, events at his house where he brought interesting people together. I mean he really was a fascinating guy. - And he was so colorful, and we always would meet the most interesting people, whether famous, infamous-- it was a joy. It was really fun. - So certainly it looked like he had a lot of money, right? - Couldn't not have money the way Ron lived. - Right. - Right. - He had multiple companies. Besides the legal research, he had a company that did camera work at night and then sold it to the TV networks, where they would go out and they would do investigative reporting. - He drove a Rolls-Royce. - He had a--when we met him, he had a 1974 white Rolls-Royce four-door, and had a driver most of the time. - Yeah. - In a white jacket. Always in a white jacket and a black tie. ♪ ♪ Ron was kind of a prankster, by the way. I mean, he--he pulled pranks. Ron was just fun. I mean he was just a lot-- I mean, he--we would do crazy things. I'll give you an example: Ron picked us up once on a Labor Day, and he goes, "We're gonna go tour Forest Lawn, and we're gonna look at their embalming rooms." We had the driver with the thing, and we pull up, and he said, "Now you're you're going to play-- you're an architect, and you're my assistant..." - The nurse. No, I was a nurse. - A nurse. "But here's a pad, "and we're gonna tour the embalming rooms, "and we're gonna tell them "that we're going to build cryogenic factories "where we're gonna freeze people, and we really need to see the embalming rooms." And he had arranged for a full tour... - Everything. - And they had the head guy meet us there. Ron was a prankster. - And he got off on it. He would crack up, and he would use the story over and over again. Everybody would crack up that he could get away with some of those pranks. [melancholy music] - Ron knew how to play on people's... - People's greed. - Greed. He knew what was civil and what was criminal. Let's say he would go in an art gallery, and he would pull up with his chauffeur and his Rolls-Royce, and he would say, "You know, I really like that painting. I'll take it. I'll send my chauffeur with a check." So the chauffeur would go with a check, and he would pay for it, and then he would call the gallery, and he'd go, "You know that other painting that I looked at? I really liked that." - "I'll take that as well." - "I'll take that as well. Could you send it over?" And then he wouldn't pay for that. They would have to sue him civilly, and Ron was completely judgment-proof. There was nothing in his name. He had nothing in his name. He knew if he had corporations set up, that he--they just couldn't pierce him. - So pranking people sounds like a little bit scamming them. - You can call it what you like. He was a prankster. - That's what he-- - He was like a mischievous... little boy. - Little boy. - That was 40 and had gray hair. - Ron was a little boy. - Yeah. - He never grew up. - He was a little boy. There were times where Ron pissed some people off, and we would say to him, "You know, Ron..." - "You're gonna get in trouble." - "Someday, somebody's going to do something to you, "and not because you pranked them; just because they're gonna want to get back at you." - At 11 p.m. on the same day that Ron Levin is reported missing, records indicate he checked into The Plaza Hotel in New York City, which would seem to indicate that Ron Levin is still alive and well. [mysterious synth music] ♪ ♪ So I arranged to meet with the man who was the hotel's manager at the time to get his recollection of that evening. - In 1984, I worked at The Plaza Hotel. - Richard Lebowitz was the on-duty manager at The Plaza on the night Ron Levin checked in. So take us back through the events of June 7th through June 10th of 1984. A man checked into your hotel. What was this man's name? - This man's name was Ron Levin. - What kind of room did he have? - I believe it was a deluxe room. - Deluxe room? Pretty nice room? - Pretty nice room, great view, beautiful hotel. - Yes. Yeah. - Yes. He was enjoying himself. [eerie music] He had run up a bill over $1,300. - Back in 1984, that's pretty substantial. - Very substantial. - So did that include, like, room service? - Yes, incidentals, uh, the room rate, transportation, dining at the restaurants. Yes. - Around 6:00 a.m. the next morning, hotel staff tries to reduce Levin's large tab by running the credit card he'd left on file. It is declined. Then what happened? - I was informed by the credit manager that we had a guest in the hotel that we were unable to obtain the appropriate amount of credit. - Basically, the credit card he was using for the room-- to pay for the room was maxed out? - Right. Credit manager had tried several times to reach this guest, and the guest had not responded. [energetic music] ♪ ♪ - This brings us to the end of the first 48 hours following Ron Levin's disappearance from Beverly Hills, but at The Plaza Hotel in New York City, the mystery was only getting deeper. So what happened when you heard that he wasn't responding to the managers calls? - So the credit manager put a double lock on the room so that Mr. Levin would be unable to get into the room and would have to come down and deal with us. And before double locking the room, they inventory the room. In the room was a silver metallic attaché case. - So the room was locked up with his suitcase in it with all of his property in it. - Yes, and sure enough, in the evening, this security supervisor was going in a back staircase, and as he's in this back staircase, a gentleman is coming down the staircase carrying a silver metallic attaché case. So the security supervisor says to him, "Sir, I'm hotel security. May I ask you what you're doing on our stairs?" And the gentleman responds, "Your elevators are out of service." And he says, "Sir, are you a guest in the hotel?" He says, "Yes," and this guest says to him, "I can't stop. I have a limousine waiting for me." So the security supervisor radios ahead, walkie-talkies, for backup, for assistance to meet him by the Palm Court, and as you may or may not know, the Palm Court in those days was the violin and the piano and high tea, and-- - Really genteel. - Very genteel. And Mr. Levin is surrounded by security guards in front of the Palm Court, and he drops the attaché case, and he assumes a karate stance. ♪ ♪ He even lets out a karate yell. - [laughs] Ha! - Ha! In front of the Palm Court. - Oh, my God. - And it's like, okay, everybody's probably looking at one another like, "Okay, what's coming next?" He says--Mr. Levin says, "Okay, I don't want any trouble," and the security supervisor says, "Please come with us. We'd like you to talk to the manager." And as they're walking, Mr. Levin runs into the revolving door, and they run after him, and they break the glass revolving door that leads out onto Central Park South. [desolate synth music] So now I go out, and I recognize this is Mr. Levin, and I said, "How did you get your attaché case out of the room?" He said, "I kicked the door down." ♪ ♪ We've never had anything like that before. So he's broken the door to his room, he's broken the revolving door in the lobby, and he's incurred over $1,300 in charges that we don't have a method of payment for. So what do I do? I call the police to have him arrested. - Sounds right to me. - The police did come, and they arrest him. Then I think, "Okay. That's quite a night." I go back to my journal and I make the entry, and I think that's the end of it, but it wasn't. The hotel attorney calls me and asks me if I remember Ron Levin, and I'm like, "Yes, of course I remember Ron Levin." He says, "Well, his name isn't really Ron Levin. His name was actually James Pittman." ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ - So throughout that time that you were dealing with him, and even through the point of his arrest, you never knew that this was not Ron Levin. - I always thought it was Ron Levin. - And so did the New York City Police Department. On the evening of June 10th, 1984, 28-year-old Jim Pittman, who impersonated Ron Levin at The Plaza Hotel, is booked into jail under Levin's name. [ominous pulsing vibration] Beverly Hills police still haven't opened a missing persons case for Levin, so no one, including New York police, has been alerted to his disappearance. ♪ ♪ - On the morning of June 12th, a tall young man approaches a lawyer, Robert Ferraro, standing outside the criminal court, and hires him to bail out Jim Pittman, AKA Ron Levin. [desolate music] The young man claims that his incarcerated friend is an important Hollywood promoter and an agent for Michael Jackson. It's hard to believe that Jim Pittman, a stocky African-American man, could get away with impersonating the slender Caucasian Ron Levin for as long as he did, but back then, photo identification wasn't routinely required. - He hands Ferraro $4,700 in cash-- $2,000 to pay The Plaza Hotel damages, $2,000 for bail, and $700 for the lawyer's fee. - That young man is 24-year-old Joe Hunt. [suspenseful music] - Pittman arrives back in Southern California that same day and goes right back to his job as the Billionaire Boys Club's bodyguard. ♪ ♪ - The whole time I knew Joe, he just seemed like a good guy. I really sincerely doubt that Joe Hunt physically harmed Ron Levin, but you never know. You just never know about people. The rest of the BBC kids seemed wimpy to me. Joe Hunt seemed more like a man amongst boys. - So the other BBC members-- what was their attitude toward Joe? Were they followers, basically? - Reverence. I mean, they looked up to him, absolutely, almost like in the Charles Manson style. - Mm-hm. - I had been hanging out with them a little bit. They had come to my apartment a little bit. I mean they actually, at one point, brought me a car-- a brand new Porsche-- and parked in front of my house in Beverly Hills. Joe Hunt gave me the keys personally and said, "Car's out there for you," and I never drove it. - Why not? - I didn't trust those guys, really. I mean, I didn't know if the car was stolen, I didn't-- I never saw the registration. It had foreign plates on it. I think it came from Germany. And I let it sit in fr-- on Beverly Boulevard and Doheny Drive for probably eight months. - But you didn't want to join? - No. I'm not that kind of a guy--clubs, associations. They asked me if they could meet Ron Levin, and I said, "You don't want to meet Ron Levin." And Joe was like, "Why not?" I'm like, "'Cause you're gonna lose everything you've got. "He's just gonna take whatever you have, and it can only lead to bad things." - When you say "Bad things," what were you thinking? - You know, I just thought that maybe Ron was gonna either rip them off or get them involved in something nefarious that they couldn't get out of, and I just didn't know. My parents knew him. He was a Beverly Hills guy. He was well known amongst Beverly Hills people. - What did you think of Ron? - [laughs] [suspenseful music] He was an interesting guy-- very stylish, great apartment, dressed really well, very smart, but there definitely seemed something a little hinky about him. - Did you ever hear that he conned people for a living? - Yeah, I did. He had a beautiful life. He always dressed white. He drove a white Rolls-Royce. I don't know where the money came from. - What was Jim Pittman's connection to the BBC? - You know, I'm pretty sure that he was, like, a bad guy helping them, you know, resolve debts, collect money... - Muscle? - Yeah, I mean, why else would they hang out with a guy like that? It was just so literally night and day, you know? I had met Jim Pittman one time, and that was more than enough. - Tell us. - Very scary looking guy, and he looked like a very, very dangerous guy. - Joe Hunt wasn't rich, and he didn't come from money, but he managed to wield a certain kind of power over the wealthy members of the company by sheer force of personality. I need to learn more about what went on inside the BBC. - Joe Hunt realized that he needed a little money to make a little money. The idea was a sort of loosely connected group of young people who would bring in their parents and people their parents knew as investors in the Billionaire Boys Club. Some of the first initial investors were two of the BBC members themselves, Tom and Dave May, whose father was a department store heir. - The May Company. - The May Company, yes. - The May Brothers' initial investment was $160,000. [rapid synth music] - The Billionaire Boys Club rented offices in sort of the West Hollywood area. They went out to dinner a lot, they dressed in designer clothes. They were spending a lot of money. ♪ ♪ As one of them described it to me, "We dressed up and daddy's business suit and went in and played office." - Did they really invest the money in any ventures? - They did invest some money. They put together businesses, they'd trade commodities. - So what happened? - None of the investments had paid off. They were spending a lot of money, and they were spending the money that they'd taken in as investments, so the investors were starting to get restless and starting to want to see the returns on their investments or to pull them out, so Joe desperately needed money. - By early 1984, the BBC has lost $900,000 of investor money through unbridled spending on their lavish lifestyle and failed business deals. The BBC is now essentially running a Ponzi scheme. Hunt is using new investor money to cover the club's investment losses, so he has to keep finding new investors as those losses continue to mount, which means he needs more cash and quick. [desolate music] In March of 1983, BBC member Simmie Cooper arranges a private dinner to introduce Joe Hunt and Ron Levin. After the meeting, Hunt said that Levin was one of the most compelling characters he had ever encountered --truly brilliant. They soon develop a friendship, albeit one in which both have hidden agendas. According to BBC member Dean Karny, Hunt looks at Levin as a potential target, but Levin sees Hunt as a sort of plaything. [dramatic music] ♪ ♪ - Joe Hunt really felt like Ron Levin had money, and so he was really urging Ron Levin to invest with the BBC. Levin kept them on the string. You know, he talked about his Swiss bank account, he talked about money, and finally, he agreed to invest $5 million. ♪ ♪ The $5 million that Ron Levin was going to put in was the biggest haul Joe Hunt had ever made. He really felt like this was his huge break. So Ron Levin said to Joe Hunt, "I'm gonna put $5 million "into an account at a trading company, "and you will be the manager of that money. "You can invest it however you see fit, "and we'll split the profits. Whatever you make, I'll split with you 50/50." Joe began trading this money in Ron Levin's commodities account, and in a few months, Joe Hunt had made a profit of $9 million. He turned the $5 million into $14 million. - And that actually shows Joe Hunt really did know how to trade. - Yes, or at least was lucky then. But it turned out that none of it was real. [dramatic music] ♪ ♪ - Ron Levin turned out to have pulled a massive scam on Joe Hunt, and what he did--Ron Levin went to this trading company and said, "I'm a documentary filmmaker. "I'm making a film about commodities trading, "and we're gonna have different traders "do different things. One we're gonna have "do it by a real system. "Another we're gonna have, you know, "just kind of throw darts at a dartboard. "Joe Hunt, he's going to trade this account "that we're going to say has $5 million in it, "and Joe can't know "that there's really not $5 million in there. ♪ ♪ "If he knew the money "wasn't real, he wouldn't be as motivated." And the trading company went along with it. - This is all an elaborate game to Ron Levin, but to Joe Hunt, this is a major business opportunity-- the biggest he's ever had. Hunt plans to pay BBC investors the $900,000 he owes them with profits from the Ron Levin trades. This has to work, or he could lose his reputation, get sued by his investors, and possibly face criminal charges. - This $5 million was run up to almost $14 million over 2 1/2 months, and I was elated. - Reveling in their first major success, the BBC members believe their leader, Joe Hunt, has delivered on what he promised. His trading strategy is extraordinary, and his vision for BBC greatness has been realized. Now they just needed to cash out. - Ron Levin says, "Okay, we're going to liquidate the account now. Stop trading." Joe just kept bugging Levin for his share of the money, you know, and Levin kept putting him off, saying, "Yeah, yeah, it's coming, it's coming." - I was running around thinking I had $4 million coming to me, making business decisions on it that ultimately affected 80 investors. - And then one day, Joe Hunt happened to be at the trading company, and one of the traders there said to him, "So when did you know the money wasn't real?" - Oh. - That was the moment that Joe knew it was fake. Ron Levin was a better conman than Joe Hunt. That's the long and short of it. - The cruelty of Ron Levin's hoax deals Joe Hunt's ego, not to mention his finances, a crippling blow. Humiliated, he tells the BBC members about Levin's game. [somber synth music] But in this game, there is one winner: Ron Levin. Levin tells Joe Hunt that he took the fake profit statement generated during the hoax to another broker, and he used it as leverage to secure himself a $1 million line of credit. He promises to split the credit with Hunt, but he never does. So, did Joe Hunt's fury at Levin and his desperation to regain the faith of the BBC lead to Ron Levin's disappearance? - It's actually my, uh, most memorable case. - Les Zoeller was the lead detective on this case. In my mind, the Billionaire Boys Club case was probably be most intriguing SoCal case in all history that I'm aware of, especially since my time in the office. This is the one that always got to me. - It was a hard case. It's a no-body case, so it was a hard case to prove. - Yeah. - And I knew Ron Levin. He was so well-known within the Beverly Hills Police Department. I mean, he was-- he was a con artist, and people complained about him, and he complained about people. I mean, we just knew him. - A missing persons report is finally filed on June 22nd, 16 days after Ron Levin was discovered missing. The next day, Zoeller begins his investigation. - So we contacted the parents, and the parents said, "Well, let me contact his attorney to see whether he could authorize us to go in and search his house." The attorney said no. So the case sat until I got a call from an attorney for the May Brothers. He said, "I represent Tom and Dave May, "and they have information about the disappearance of Ron Levin." And my partner and I went to the attorney's office on Sunset and sat down and had this two- or three-hour discussion. - What'd they say? - They told us this elaborate story. They started off with describing Joe Hunt and how they were trading commodities within this business that they had, and then they told me that they had had a meeting at the Wilshire Manning in West Los Angeles that was called by Joe, and he told the group that "Jim and I knocked off Ron Levin." [dramatic music] - Jim was the same Jim Pittman who was the BBC's head of security and had impersonated Ron Levin at The Plaza Hotel in New York the day he had gone missing. [desolate music] - And that's what the May Brothers said, "Everybody's starting to get worried." Joe told him that on the 6th of June, Joe knew that Ron Levin was going to New York the following day, so he wanted to do it on the night before. It was prearranged. He talked to Ron. Ron said, "Come on over." So at 9:00, he went over and took a salad there and, you know, was just chatting with Ron Levin, and then at about 9:30, 9:45, there was a knock on the door, which is not unusual at Ron Levin's house. He always has people coming and going. And it was Jim Pittman. ♪ ♪ And Joe said, "Oh, that's fine. "That's Jim. He's a friend of mine." The plan was for Jim to come in and make believe that he was an enforcer from the mafia and that he was there to collect money that Joe Hunt owed to the mafia. So the plan was, is that he was going to muscle Joe Hunt, and Joe Hunt would basically point the finger at Ron Levin, saying, "Well, he owes us money," so then they were pointing the gun at Ron Levin. They were forcing Ron to sign papers, which he was doing willingly-- he's willingly doing everything that they wanted him to do, including signing a check for $1.5 million out of the Swiss bank account, the one that Ron Levin always bragged about. It got to a point where Ron Levin had done everything, he'd signed the check over, and they had placed Ron Levin on the bed, in the bedroom, facedown, with Jim Pittman holding a gun to him, and there was some phrase that was used that meant "kill him," and with that... [suspenseful music] Jim put the gun to the back of Ron's head and pulled the trigger. ♪ ♪ It bled quite a bit, so they wrapped Ron Levin up in this comforter and took him out the back door, and they had this BMW out back, and they put Ron Levin in the trunk of his BMW, and they took the body up to Soledad Canyon, and I have a picture of it. They went to Soledad Canyon, and he said that, uh, you know, "We buried him up there, way up on the top." - Way up on the top, which would be somewhere, like, up here? - Yes. - Okay. - When they took Ron Levin up, Jim and Joe shot the body up with shotgun shells to make him unidentifiable, and Joe even laughed and said, "At one point when we shot him, "his brain popped out of his head and landed on his chest." - He laughed about that? - He laughed about that. Got to the point where the May Brothers were beginning to fear more of Joe Hunt than ever. They were becoming more and more concerned about what he may do. So I called Ron Levin's father, and I told him we had more information, and we're looking for evidence to back up the story that we had heard. And he agreed--I think he contacted the attorney, and he agreed, because now it's been two months since Ron Levin's been missing. And we went to the apartment, and my partner and I, and we had Identification Bureau photographing. We started looking for things. Ron Levin's father's name is Martin Levin. He said, "I found this in this little secretariat office area." It was the seven pages of notes. - Handwritten... - Handwritten. - Looks like. - It says, "At Levin's to do: "Close blinds, scan for the recorder, "tape mouth, handcuff, put gloves on, explain situation," gets down to "kill dog," "emphasis" in parentheses. [suspenseful music] And to me, that looks like something that somebody would do for kidnapping or murder. ♪ ♪ - "Get alarm access code." "Jim digs pit"? - Yes. In the margin, it has... - "Joe Hunt." - "Joe Hunt." ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ - It's such a detailed list. - Yes. - "Put answering service on 668 first ring," meaning it would go immediately to the answering service. - Yes. - "Get alarm access code." Have you ever, ever recovered a piece of evidence like this in your life? - No. I mean, this is the smoking gun in this case. If you go further in this, in the margin, it has... - "Joe Hunt." - "Joe Hunt." - And it's a signature. - And it's a signature! I mean, it looks like somebody's signature. ♪ ♪ And then there's a page that shows the road, a squiggly line... ♪ ♪ And to me, it was going up to the mountains, and it shows east towards the ranger station. ♪ ♪ - Course we don't know exactly what ranger station he meant, but still... - No, no, and at that point, I had no idea. - In my opinion, this to-do list is clear evidence of premeditated murder, but Hunt claims the list was written for an entirely different reason. - The first thing is, you're thinking of this as a list for action. What I was trying to do was pretend I had had this meeting where these things were discussed by these very heavy players, and that I took notes as the meeting progressed, and that's why I didn't try and have anything that looked like it was some sort of official master plan type thing. "This is what we gonna do to Ron Levin." It was supposed to look--and if you see, I even left doodles and stuff on it on purpose. I wrote my name on it. It was supposed to be taken seriously by Ron Levin. Unfortunately, it wasn't. After I went through my entire spiel about this with him, he said, "Don't con the conman, Joe. This is ridiculous." ♪ ♪ - Did anything happen to Ron Levin's dog? - No. No, the dog was fine. - And in the duplex, did you find any evidence that Ron Levin had been there after June 6th? - No. Blanche Sturkey, who knew everything about Ron Levin-- I forget how many years she had worked for him, but at least a couple of years-- and she knew all his quirks, and she said that, "When I saw him last, which was on the 6th, "in the middle of the day, when I was him last, he was wearing a gray jogging suit and a gray robe," and she said that, "When I went through the house, "I noticed that the gray jogging suit "and robe was missing, as well as a comforter and a remote for the television." - Two days after Ron Levin's disappearance on June 6th, Joe Hunt deposits the $1.5 million check he forced Levin to sign, believing he now has the money to pay his BBC investors. [dramatic music] But the check bounces. In fact, there's only $40 in that Swiss bank account, and Levin signed the check in the wrong place. ♪ ♪ Ron Levin has pulled off his final scam on Joe Hunt. ♪ ♪ I need to know just how far the increasingly desperate Joe Hunt would go to save his disintegrating assets. ♪ ♪ - He needed to keep the money coming in from the investors. He needed to keep the companies going. He needed to have "the boys," you know, confident that things were going to work out. The BBC needed real money, and as it happened, this young man named Reza Eslaminia showed up at just that moment. [synth music] - On July 7th, just 31 days after Ron Levin's disappearance, BBC member Ben Dosti brings a new friend, Reza Eslaminia, to a BBC party. ♪ ♪ There, the 23-year-old Eslaminia meets Joe Hunt, and he brags to Hunt about his father's wealth. ♪ ♪ His father, 56-year-old Hedayat Eslaminia, had allegedly amassed a $30 million fortune as a high-ranking official under the Shah of Iran. He'd been living in exile in the San Francisco Bay Area since the 1979 Iranian Revolution, when the Shah was overthrown and the Ayatollah Khomeini became the supreme leader of Iran. Eslaminia reportedly worked from within the United States to overthrow the Ayatollah Khomeini, and he often flew to Washington, D.C., at the expense of the U.S. State Department. His son, Reza Eslaminia, reportedly was estranged from his father, whom he hated. - What Reza told the BBC was that his own father was not doing anything for him. ♪ ♪ And Reza told them that he was tremendously wealthy, he was hiding all this money, and he was furious at him, and he wanted to get it somehow, and within days of meeting Joe and Ben, they were coming up with a plan to kidnap Hedayat, torture him into signing over his assets, and then, of course... - What did they do? - W--ah, well, what they did--I mean, they implemented that plan. [disquieting music] - Joe, Ben, Dean, Reza, and Jim Pittman all gathered in Northern California and planned this abduction. Hedayat Eslaminia was worried about Khomeini people killing him, so if he disappeared, it would probably be assumed that the Ayatollah's people had--had done away with him. [ominous drone] What they were supposed to do, according to the plan, they were gonna transport him to Bel-Air house, torture him into signing everything over, and then kill him. And that was agreed among all of them, you know, including Reza, and Reza was the one who told them, "He'll never do--I mean, he's a really tough man. He'll never do it unless you really make him suffer." And Joe said, "Don't worry. I'll make him really suffer." ♪ ♪ - On July 30th, 1984, just 54 days after Ron Levin's disappearance, Joe Hunt and his followers put their plan for Hedayat Eslaminia into motion. [ominous music] - To get into this condominium that he kept very secure, Joe and Ben, dressed as UPS men, lugged a large trunk to the front door, knocked on the door. Eslaminia let them in, and then they immediately jumped him, and then Jim, who was supposed to do the dirty work, got overwhelmed by the situation-- or the chloroform they were going to use, or whatever it was-- and couldn't do it, so Joe ended up slapping the chloroform over Eslaminia's face and knocking him out. They put him in the trunk, carried him back outside, still dressed as UPS drivers, and load-- - Was Dean Karny there? - Dean Karny was sitting outside in the truck that they loaded the trunk into, and-- - And where was Reza? - Reza was parked in a Mercedes right across the street. - So they load the trunk... - They load the trunk in the back of this truck... - So what happened? - Well, boys will be boys, and so what Dean and Ben were supposed to do, according to the plan, was once they were on the road, open the trunk, give him some more chloroform, and put him in handcuffs, but Dean and Ben were both so frightened, 'cause they heard this man in the trunk begging to be let out, screaming to be let out. It was a 39 by 13-inch box that this man was stuffed into on a hot day, so he was slowly suffocating, and neither of them could work up the courage to let him out, but Dean used a Phillips screwdriver to punch holes in the trunk, and Eslaminia revived. But when he revived, he began to scream again, and Dean, you know, in--in the extreme state he was in, imagined that it was so loud it could be heard through the back of a truck by people in passing vehicles, and so he put tape over the holes. Eslaminia suffocated, and by the time they actually got him to the Bel-Air house, he was long since dead. - So there goes that plan. - Well... - What happened? - Joe, just like that, said, "Well, you know, not all is lost, "because his firstborn son is among our ranks. "We can get a conservatorship for Reza and transfer all the assets that way." While that was happening, Hedayat Eslaminia's girlfriend reported him missing, and immediately that was picked up by the San Francisco newspapers that had headlines the next day. ♪ ♪ So then Reza went to see Hedayat's girlfriend, and during the course of the conversation, he said, "I know my father loved you," and she said, "Loved? Is he dead?" And that immediately started her thinking, "Um, maybe it wasn't the Ayatollah," and then she told the cops, who told the FBI, and so the FBI began to look at the possibility. They still thought it was probably... - Khomeini? - Khomeini, but, you know, these boys seemed awfully anxious to get in there and get the records and to establish Reza as a conservator, and then Jim Pittman, for whatever reason, told the BBC lawyer, "We knocked off Eslaminia." [desolate music] - So what did the lawyer do? - Called the FBI. ♪ ♪ - It gave me pause when I heard that the BBC lawyer reported Pittman's confession to the FBI. Normally, statements like that would be covered by the attorney-client privilege, but there's no indication the lawyer was ever cited for an ethical violation, so I can only conclude that for some reason, the statement wasn't covered by the privilege. While the FBI investigates the lawyer's allegation, Reza Eslaminia continues to try to gain conservatorship over his father's estate and is denied. ♪ ♪ But it wouldn't have mattered if he succeeded, because, as happened with Ron Levin, his wealth didn't exist. [dramatic music] Hedayat Eslaminia had lost his money and property after fleeing Iran five years earlier. He was no longer worth $30 million; in fact, he was close to penniless. ♪ ♪ It's unclear why Reza said his father was worth millions. He might have just been misinformed, or maybe he lied, either to impress the other club members or to get the BBC to help him take revenge on the father he openly deplored. Regardless, Joe Hunt loses again. ♪ ♪ [police chatter over radio] On September 28th, 1984, Beverly Hills police arrest BBC members Joe Hunt, Jim Pittman, and Dean Karny for conspiracy, robbery, and first-degree murder of Ron Levin, and for conspiracy, kidnapping, and murder of Hedayat Eslaminia. Ben Dosti and Reza Eslaminia were later arrested and charged with the conspiracy, kidnapping, and second-degree murder of the elder Eslaminia. Facing the death penalty if convicted, Dean Karny strikes a deal-- a very generous deal that's rarely given for crimes this serious. [dramatic music] Karny is given full immunity in prosecution in exchange for his testimony, and he enters the Witness Protection Program. ♪ ♪ - Dean Karny told us everything that he knew, including where he and Joe Hunt had disposed of Hedayat Eslaminia's body. [somber music] - And now here we are in Soledad Canyon. - Here we are, going on Soledad Canyon in the same direction that Dean Karny took us that morning, where he showed us the remains of Hedayat Eslaminia. ♪ ♪ We turned off on Soledad Canyon to a fire road called Indian Canyon. ♪ ♪ - Wow, it is isolated up here. That's amazing. ♪ ♪ And it's not very paved, either. - No, it's paved just for the parking lot here, and then from there, it's... dirt road, just as it was then. - You think we can walk up there and get a little closer to it? - We can certainly try. ♪ ♪ - Nothing for miles. - No. Absolutely not. - So how did Joe know about this place? - He and his father used to come up here and plink when Joe was just a young boy, so he knew the area very well. It's 50 square miles up here of nothing. - Yeah. ♪ ♪ - When they were driving with Eslaminia in the back of Joe's father's truck, it was just Dean and Joe. There was this gigantic bonfire, and Joe stopped, and he was worried that there would be people there, probably drunk, and he didn't want the chance of... ♪ ♪ Them stopping them and finding Eslaminia in the back... - And a bunch of... - So that's when they turned around and came back. - And that's why they wound up dumping the body a lot lower? - Yes. Exactly. ♪ ♪ - That to-do list that you found in Ron Levin's duplex... - Yes. - One of the pages had kind of a map. - Yes. - Does that seem to match up to this location? - The hand-drawn map from Joe, it showed the road, which was Soledad Canyon, it showed going up the hill, kind of a squiggly, I'll say, and then it goes all the way to the top, and it shows the top of the mountains... ♪ ♪ And then along the top of the ridge, and it actually shows a ranger station, and there is a ranger station up there. [foreboding music] This looks pretty close to the area where Dean Karny pointed it out, and--'cause what he said is that they stopped the truck... ♪ ♪ Pulled the steamer trunk out, put it here, opened the top, rolled it, and Eslaminia rolled down the hill. ♪ ♪ On the right-hand side is where we found the remains of Hedayat Eslaminia. ♪ ♪ - What was actually remaining of Eslaminia at that point? - It was nothing but bones at that point. There was some articles of clothes, small pieces, but it had obviously had been taken by coyotes or some other animal and taken under bushes. ♪ ♪ And it wasn't all together, either. It was probably within a ten-feet area. ♪ ♪ - So scattered a little bit. - Scattered around, yes. - But you were able to identify the remains as that of Hedayat Eslaminia? - Yes, because of dental records. - Hedayat had bridges? - Yes. - That'd be another great way to identify him, I guess. - Yes, exactly. - Yeah. - Can you imagine you ever would have found those remains in a place like this if Karny hadn't said, "This is where..." - Absolutely not. - I mean, it's the perfect body dump. - Yes. - Yeah. ♪ ♪ So Dean Karny wasn't there when Joe Hunt dumped Ron Levin's body. - No. That was just Jim Pittman and Joe Hunt. He said that when Joe and he were taking Eslaminia's body up to the Angeles National Forest, when they turned off of Soledad Canyon going on this fire road, this dirt road, he said that Joe made a comment: "This is where we buried Ron Levin, way up on the top." [melancholy synth music] - Did you try to find Ron Levin's body at that time? - Oh, we tried many times going up there, taking teams of 10, 15 people at times, looking for graves, is what we were looking for, and found nothing. - With Dean Karny's testimony and the recovery of Hedayat Eslaminia's remains, Joe Hunt will eventually face trial for Eslaminia's murder. [ominous music] ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ - On February 3rd, 1987, Hunt stands trial in Santa Monica for the murder of Ron Levin, even though Ron Levin's body still hasn't been found. Hunt's once-loyal BBC members testify against him. - He says that it was a perfect crime, that there's no way in which... ♪ ♪ He--we could be caught. ♪ ♪ - What did he say about it? - Well, he mentioned that the body would never be found. - Ron started to whimper, and they--they took him into Ron's bedroom, and Jim shot him in the back of the head. ♪ ♪ And he said that, uh, the blood started seeping out, and they, uh, quickly wrapped him up in the bedspread and took him out to the car. - Incredible. "Hunt told me." "Hunt said this, Hunt said that." - But Joe Hunt's defense attorney, Arthur Barens, highlights the fact that no one has found the dead body of Ron Levin, and argues that he must still be alive. He claims Levin performed his last hoax on Joe Hunt by framing him for his murder. - His sole reason for being was to con and cheat and work as an illusionist. We will put on a further witness who will say that she saw Ron Levin in the recent past. - He was about 6'1", real slender. Um, he had very nice clothes on, very expensive-looking clothes. - After hearing the testimony of 62 witnesses, the eleven-woman, one-man jury begins deliberations. Four days later on April 23rd, they return with the verdict. - [inaudible], would you please hand the verdicts to the bailiff? - We the jury in the above entitled action find the defendant, Joe Hunt, guilty of murder in violation of penal code section 187. A felony is charged in the information in count one. - He was guilty as hell, and I'm glad they got him. - What do you think for the penalty phase? - [inaudible]. - What do I think of it? - Mm-hmm. What would you like to see him get? - I'd like to see him die. That's what I'd like to see. [desolate music] - ...If you can look at someone and tell from their face and their gestures whether they're telling the truth, but this is not a science, and it's something that's escaped human beings. I believe in the American judicial system. I am astonished that I was convicted, given the state of the evidence. - The jury votes to sentence Joe Hunt to life in prison without the possibility of parole. ♪ ♪ Jim Pittman is also tried for Ron Levin's murder. - It never happened. Um... It's never happened. That's all I can say. - Jim was a very, very sweet guy. He was a big man, very muscular, and they were looking for somebody big and strong and athletic, and he fit the bill. - Attorney Jeff Brodey, my former boss back when I was in private practice before I joined the DA's office, was Jim Pittman's defense attorney. So Joe Hunt was off in his case. You represented Jim Pittman. The prosecution's theory was that Jim Pittman helped Joe kill Ron Levin, helped him dispose of the body, was in on all of it. - Yes. - That was the prosecution's theory. - That was their theory. - And what was the defense strategy? - Uh, the defense was that Jim was being used, taken advantage of, and that Joe is so smart that he made it look like Jim was involved where Jim wasn't really involved. - Tell us about that trial. - The trial was very, very difficult at first, but during the course of the trial, we began to tell that the jury was turning around. Ron Levin had so many things that were against him. [uneasy music] He had a lot of people that were suing him. He just was a very... unlikable human being. I don't think anybody felt sorry for him, and... ♪ ♪ People went broke because of him. I don't think they had-- cared about him. - Mm-hm. - You have to have somebody that you care about. - Yeah. - If you have somebody that you don't care about, hard to get over that, isn't it? - Very hard. You know, at the end of the day, I think a trial is always a popularity contest. - I do too. - Yeah. - I really do, and in our case, Jim was the most popular guy in the courtroom. We dressed him up in very bright clothes-- yellow sweaters. We dressed him up so that he would look like a warm, fuzzy human being, and he came out that way. I think the jury felt sympathy for him, and they didn't care about Ron Levin one bit. - What was the verdict? - It was a hung jury. [eerie music] - How did it hang? Do you remember? - I think it hung nine to three or ten to two. It was very, very strong towards acquittal. - Oh, ten to two for acquittal? - For acquittal. - Oh, wow. In October of 1987, Jim Pittman is retried for the murder of Ron Levin, and the jury deadlocks again. [suspenseful music] The prosecution decides to offer him a deal: plead guilty to the lesser charges of accessory to murder after the fact and possession of a concealed weapon and be sentenced to time served. Pittman had already been incarcerated for 3 1/2 years, and he decides not to risk a possible conviction after a third trial, so he reluctantly takes the deal. - They offered us a deal we couldn't turn down. They offered Jim to plead, uh, to an accomplice, and so he plead to that. He got time served, and he was released. - But Pittman, just like Joe Hunt, still has to face trial for the murder of Hedayat Eslaminia. ♪ ♪ [hubbub] This time, Joe Hunt decides to represent himself. [spacey music] Nearly five years passed before his trial begins on April 14th, 1992. ♪ ♪ After almost eight months and more than 120 witnesses, the jury deadlocks eight to four in favor of Joe Hunt's acquittal. Not bad for a beginner. ♪ ♪ Aware that Joe Hunt has already been sentenced to life without the possibility of parole in Los Angeles, the prosecution decides to dismiss the charges against Joe Hunt. This major victory for Hunt is also a victory for Jim Pittman. - Joe put on a great case, and when they couldn't convict Joe, they dismiss it against Joe and Jim. ♪ ♪ - So Jim never had to go to trial up north. - No. Jim got married, got a job. ♪ ♪ - On May 20th, 1993, after all of his charges have been resolved, Jim Pittman gives a television interview about the Billionaire Boys Club case. - And then he went on television, and I'm watching television. I knew he was going, but I didn't know that he was gonna be so forthcoming, bragging about what he had done. [disquieting music] - You must have been pulling your hair out. - It was over. - Yeah. - It was over, and if you ask me, I never believed that he was totally innocent. - Knowing that he couldn't be retried for the murder of Ron Levin, Jim Pittman confesses in a national television interview and says that on Joe Hunt's orders, he shot Ron Levin in the back of the head and buried his body in Soledad Canyon. [desolate music] Pittman says that Hunt wanted Levin dead because he'd scammed Hunt and made him look like a fool to the BBC. - He always sort of admitted that to me on the sly-- never--never directly-- and then he went on television... - After all your hard work. [laughs] After the interview was aired, Pittman takes police to Soledad Canyon to recover Levin's body, but they never find it. I would have liked to sit down with Jim Pittman and explore the matter further, if only to assure myself that he was telling the truth about Ron Levin's murder, but unfortunately, in 1997, four years after his television interview, Jim Pittman died of kidney failure in Los Angeles at the age of 44. [ethereal music] Regardless of Pittman's statement, there still is no body in this murder case, so I need to explore the theory that master con artist Ron Levin was not murdered, but instead went into hiding and is living a life under a different identity now. But what reason could Levin have have had that would be compelling enough for him to cut ties from his mother and stage his own death? [ominous music] - Beverly Hills police had been trying to capture him for 20 years and just couldn't make anything stick. - Marc Curtis knew Ron Levin well from the news-gathering business. - In the '80s, I owned a company called Southern California News Service, and we would be the overnight news for all the stations in Los Angeles. Suddenly, Ron Levin comes on the scene to be my competition. [desolate music] He was a... interesting guy-- ♪ ♪ Tall, intelligent, crafty conman. - How did you know that? - You know, if you had a few dealings with him, things just didn't ring true. His idea was to do a movie about stringers-- overnight news gatherers-- so what he did was convince a lot of companies like Panasonic and ENG Corporation and others to lend him some equipment so that he could produce this film. But he wasn't doing the film, and he never returned the equipment, even after they kept asking him to. This stuff cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. He had the equipment for at least six months. When those--those manufacturers were starting to get a little antsy. They had no progress reports, no film to look at, and they were starting to wonder if they were being scammed, which they were, so they contacted the Beverly Hills police and said, "Hey, we want our equipment back, and he won't give it to us." [laughs] You know? So anyway, Beverly Hills police called me, said, "Look, we need to know if that equipment is in his house. Would you be interested in helping us?" I said, "Sure." [synth music] So I go to his house, December 23rd of 1983, and I pretended to have a customer who needed to do some editing on the type of equipment that he scammed. I see that the equipment is there, I arrange an editing session for the next day, called Beverly Hills police back and said, "Okay, it's there. Do you want me to come tomorrow to, uh, pretend that I'm there to do the editing?" and they said, "No, we'll take it from here." Got a call from them in the late afternoon of December 24th. ♪ ♪ Ron Levin was incarcerated. [dramatic music] He couldn't make bail, because the courts were closed for a few days for Christmas. - Oh, my God. - He was out after three days in jail at Christmas. - Mm-hmm. Right. - So the manufacturers got their equipment back, and that made them very happy. He then was not to be seen out on the streets anymore, which made me very happy. Yeah. - Do you know whether they filed charges against him? - Yes, they did. They filed, uh, grand theft, and his court date was going to be about six months later. Not quite six months later that-- suddenly he turns up missing. - Did you have a hard time believing it? - No. No, only because I knew that Ron was a conman, so the story really fit very well, and they've never found the body. [eerie music] - Ron Levin was charged with allegedly stealing close to $100,000 in video equipment, and he was facing trial for grand theft and possible prison time. ♪ ♪ So I guess he did have a reason to flee, but is there any evidence that he actually did? - Part of the defense was that there were many people that testified that people were looking for Ron Levin. - Arthur Barens represented Joe Hunt at his trial for the murder of Ron Levin. - They were serious people looking for him, that he'd done a lot of people in financially, and that he had motive to leave. - And that was the defense theory, right? - It was the defense theory, and we had support for that. That was not made out of whole cloth. That was there. - Wasn't Ron Levin, um, about to be arrested on a 12-count fraud case? - Yes. Yes. - Criminal case. - There was criminal charges, civil complaints. I mean, there was a lot of stuff going bad for him, because people figured him out after a while. We had an alibi witness. These people from Phoenix had contacted us. They said--a man and a woman-- that they had seen Ron Levin in a gas station in Phoenix. [ominous music] They saw Ron Levin there for quite a period of time. - After the point he supposedly... - Disappeared. - Disappeared. ♪ ♪ - They claim they were in the gas station, and they saw Ron Levin there for quite a period of time in the gas station. ♪ ♪ The lighting was good. ♪ ♪ Levin--they described his clothes, his mannerism, this and that. ♪ ♪ I believe they had seen his picture in a magazine at one time. That was what caught his attention to him. These people had a high credibility factor. They didn't know him, they had no prior contact with him, their description of him, his mannerisms, his affect, etc., was unbelievably accurate. ♪ ♪ Now I, to this moment, don't know how that was quite so possible. I believe them. I prepped them for trial. I spent hours with them, and I to be frank with you, for my own conscience, I tried to impeach their story, and they were unimpeachable. They were straight-up unimpeachable. To this day, I believe they were telling the truth. Uh, could have been mistaken? Yes. - Of course. - But were they telling the truth about their perception and the empiric knowledge they had about the situation? No question in my mind. [dramatic music] - I wanted to get more information on the witnesses who claimed they'd spotted Ron Levin, so I wrote to Joe Hunt himself at Pleasant Valley State Prison. [percussive music] Though he refused a personal interview with me, he did send a document with the names of all the witnesses who claimed to have seen Ron Levin alive after his disappearance. Now, I need to find out where those witnesses are today. - I guess there was eight people altogether. Two testified, and the other six were after the fact. - Vito Colucci is a long-time private investigator who began his career working undercover in organized crime. Since 1990, his work has included high-profile missing persons cases. I asked him to see what information he could dig up on these defense witnesses. So who else did you look into? - Well, it's like a laundry list, Marcia. - Vito's research has brought to light many of the alleged Ron Levin sightings-- one in Phoenix, Arizona, two in Los Angeles, California, and there was even one alleged sighting all the way across the pond in Mykonos, Greece. - Christmas Day 1987, you have a family, Mr. and Mrs. Gerrard. The Gerrards were in Greece vacationing when they saw Levin. [eerie music] They said when Levin walked in with his friend, he spotted the Gerrards, who he had met on a couple of occasions. Ron abruptly turned around with his companion and walked right back out of the restaurant. - And they did not speak to him? - No. He took off right away. [suspenseful music] Ivan Werner. He's a funeral home director. He said to them that he had seen Levin in '85 at a funeral service at the home he does own. Everybody that has seen him that don't know each other have all said that Levin was the sharpest dresser they ever seen, always to the nines with the finest clothes all the time, 6'2", charming. This fella calls Levin a diplomat. Ivan Werner stated that one thing he remembered about Levin was that he had all gold teeth in his mouth-- something I guess that only a funeral parlor owner would remember to say. An FBI agent testified at trial that Levin had 20 gold fillings in his mouth. ♪ ♪ Jonathan Milberg-- highly respected attorney who practices law in L.A. He was working on behalf of Ron Levin, and at Levin's residence, he states, "I heard part of a telephone conversation "that Ron Levin was having, "and during the course of that conversation, "I heard Mr. Levin state that if things got too hot for him, "he would disappear, "that everyone would think he is dead, "and that he would be sitting somewhere laughing at everybody. [dramatic music] You have a lady by the name of Nadia Ghaleb. She was a maître d' at a celebrated restaurant in Los Angeles. Nadia says that she had extensive contact with Levin over a period of 11 years. - I knew Ron Levin from the late '70s into the '80s. - I'm back in New York City to speak with defense witness Nadia Ghaleb. - I kind of ran the front of the house for Mr. Chow Restaurant in Beverly Hills, and he was an almost nightly customer. He'd just kind of pop in at all hours, and, uh, usually by himself. So I was at the front, and the bar was at the front, so I spent a lot of time dealing with him, because he would, you know, be alone. - And sit at the bar? - Yeah, he'd sit at the bar, I'd give him his seat in the restaurant, but, you know, he was always-- he'd come in without reservations and things, so I'd always have to... - Make room for him? - Yes. - Yeah. [laughs] - Yes. - Can you describe him? - Well, first of all, he had a very incredibly unique long face. You know, just the composition of his face was very distinctive, and, you know, I think almost everybody that ever met him thought he was a little bit dicey. I mean, he had something about him that was not very trustworthy. - Huh. - You always kind of felt that vibe. So... what first happened to me was that I was driving to work, and I went from Santa Monica up San Vicente, and as I was looking over to the right, right across from Toscana --you know where Toscana is? - Mm-hmm. I do. - Um, I noticed Ron Levin getting into a car. This was in March of 1987. - That was three years after Levin disappeared. [dramatic music] - I said to myself, "That's so weird. I haven't seen Ron Levin for years." And I got totally preoccupied, never thought another thing about it until, strangely enough, I, um, went to a baby shower in April. I was seated next to a girl, and I asked her what she was doing, and she said that she was an attorney and she was working on the Billionaire Boys Club murder. I said, "Wait a second. Billionaire Boys Club. I have a strange story to tell you." So I told her the story, and she said, "Oh, my God. "Do you mind if I tell the attorneys that I'm working with?" And I said, "No, I guess not. "I mean, I don't think he's dead. "So, of course, I would be happy to substantiate the fact that I think he's alive." So that was the beginning of a long road that I've been on with this story. - What happened? - Well, the detectives came and interviewed me a million times. Nothing happened at that stage. Joe got convicted and got sent to prison, but then he decided to take over his own case, and he went through all the transcripts of the trial and all the notes from the lawyers, and he decided that I could maybe help him, so he got in contact with me and got the finances to send me up and brought me up and put me in a hotel. You know, he was actually quite a tall, handsome young man, quite well educated, certainly seem to believe in his own innocence. I mean, he was presenting a person to me that he, you know--he was fine. I mean, he was kind of a normal guy. He certainly didn't look like a murderer to me. - Right. And you talked to him about seeing Ron Levin, I take it, right? - Yes. Oh, yeah. He asked a million questions, because he was wanting me to be, like, a star witness that was gonna get him off, you know, so he really was trying to make a big investment in my sighting. - Right. - And he explained to me that not only had I seen him, but he'd been sighted by at least three other people in different places in the world, which I thought made sense. [ominous music] - Did Nadia Ghaleb and the others actually spot the real Ron Levin and not someone who just looked like him? Well, here's the way I see it: if Ron Levin has gone into hiding, it would have made very little sense for him to hang around in Los Angeles where people like Nadia, who knew him, would be likely to recognize him. To me, that eliminates the witnesses who claim they spotted Levin in Los Angeles, and I find the funeral director's story, in which he claimed to have identified Ron Levin at a funeral service by his gold teeth, highly questionable. Ron Levin didn't have gold teeth; he had gold fillings. So how could the funeral director have seen them from across the room? And none of these witnesses, either in Los Angeles or in more remote locations, ever spoke to the man they thought was Ron Levin. [warbling synth music] What also occurred to me was the timing of many of these sightings. For the most part, they seemed to have happened shortly after a story about the case was publicized, when the question about Ron Levin was top-of-mind. That too could have caused people to believe they saw Ron Levins everywhere. It's kind of like having someone tell you a story about a blue convertible. Suddenly, you start seeing blue convertibles all over the place. And lastly, what's the likelihood that a career con artist like Ron Levin suddenly figured out how to earn an honest living and stay off the police radar? It just makes no sense. So, no, I think if Ron Levin were alive, he surely would have been busted for some kind of fraud or scam long ago. So, bottom line, although I do think the witnesses were honest, decent citizens who sincerely believe what they said, I just don't think the man they saw was Ron Levin. ♪ ♪ In the end, Joe Hunt was convicted for killing Ron Levin and is currently serving a sentence of life in prison without the possibility of parole. His charges for the murder of Hedayat Eslaminia were dropped. ♪ ♪ Jim Pittman pled to lesser charges in the murder of Ron Levin and was sentenced to time served after 3 1/2 years in prison and released. ♪ ♪ His charges for the murder of Eslaminia were also dropped. Ben Dosti and Reza Eslaminia were both convicted of the kidnapping and murder of Hedayat Eslaminia and sentenced to life without the possibility of parole... ♪ ♪ But after serving ten years, their convictions were overturned when it was discovered that the jury accidentally heard a prejudicial tape recording that had never been admitted into evidence. They could not be retried, because Dean Karny, the key witness, was still in Witness Protection and refused to reveal the new identity he had been living under for many years. ♪ ♪ Also, he has reportedly become a licensed attorney and a member of the California State Bar. ♪ ♪ [energetic music] This is a wild tale. The price of envy and ambition was two murders-- one of a conman and the other of a millionaire immigrant. Joe Hunt seemed to have incredible promise as a trader, and there was a moment when his trading ideas actually worked. He would have earned $9 million in the Ron Levin trades, had they been real, and although he had no formal training as a lawyer, he successfully defended himself in a murder case that should have been a slam dunk for the prosecution. ♪ ♪ Joe Hunt's fatal flaw was his desire to find a shortcut to a lifestyle of wealth and glamour by any means necessary, and in his pursuit of that goal, he lost everything, including his freedom. [desolate music] ♪ ♪

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Channel: A&E

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Keywords: billionaire boys club, marcia clark, investigates, a&e, aetv, a&e tv, ae, a&e television, a and e, a+e, the first 48, marica clark, marsha clark, marcia clark investigates, entertainment, The Spreckels Mansion Mystery, Marcia Clark Investigates The First 48, Marcia Clark Investigates The First 48 season 1 episode 7, Marcia Clark Investigates The First 48 se1 e7, Marcia Clark Investigates The First 48 1X7, Marcia Clark Investigates The First 48 s1 e7, Marcia, Boys Club, First 48

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Length: 85min 17sec (5117 seconds)

Published: Wed Jan 08 2020