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Billionaire Boys Club Season 1 Episode 1
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00:00When you think the Billionaire Boys Club, it was money, greed, it was success.
00:22The Billionaire Boys Club, rich men's sons who all wanted to be tycoons.
00:27They wanted young people, no one over 25.
00:30A privileged group of rich white boys.
00:33Joe Hunt was their guru.
00:36He seemed to have it together.
00:39No one knew at the time about the dark underbelly.
00:42Do whatever you can to get the money.
00:44It doesn't matter how you get there, you just have to get there.
00:46It was a matter of smoke and mirrors.
00:48It was a classic Ponzi scheme.
00:50You had no system, you fleeced us.
00:53Joe Hunt really was the cult leader.
00:55He was the puppet master.
00:57He was chasing wealth and power at any cost.
01:00Even murder.
01:02Members of the BBC were in way over their heads.
01:06Why would rich kids get into the business of killing?
01:09If you know the person in charge is capable of murder, you are going to stay in line.
01:15He said that it was a perfect crime.
01:17He always thought that he would get away with everything.
01:20It had money and power.
01:23It was the O.J. of 1984.
01:27A bombshell was dropped on the prosecution in the Billionaire Boys Club murder trial.
01:31I didn't tell anybody.
01:33Leave the jury.
01:34Find the defendant, Joe Hunt.
01:35My name is Judd Nelson.
01:55I played Joe Hunt in a 1987 miniseries, the Billionaire Boys Club.
01:59Mark.
02:00And in 2018, I was in the movie, The Billionaire Boys Club, where I played Joe Hunt's father.
02:06And the story is more weird than you even think.
02:11The Billionaire Boys Club.
02:13The Billionaire Boys Club.
02:14The Billionaire Boys Investment Club.
02:16It's members, 30 young men from wealthy families.
02:20Under Hunt's leadership, BBC members pooled money for a variety of business ventures.
02:25Hunt, according to prosecutors, led his wealthy protégés into increasingly questionable financial dealings.
02:31A sensational story of high-stakes investment scams, mind control, and how it all led to murder.
02:37Sue Horton is writing the BBC story for St. Martin Press.
02:41Her book is new out next year.
02:43This story is what the nighttime folks are made of.
02:46It's what people love to hear.
02:47Stories of people who are rich and lurid and do terrible things.
02:52The 80s was a time when people not only wanted to have a lot of money, they wanted people to know they had a lot of money.
02:59The BBC fit right into that mindset.
03:06The Billionaire Boys Club was unique because they were a combination investment group and social club.
03:16They were a bunch of attractive, well-dressed young men organized by a singular character, Joe Hunt.
03:24I think I just turned 25 when I actually started with the BBC.
03:36It was just the image of the company.
03:38You had to be on the young side.
03:40Right.
03:40My name is Jerry Eisenberg.
03:44I was the in-house counsel for the BBC companies from January through August of 1984.
03:51I remember Joe.
03:53He was a great presence.
03:54He was powerful with his ability to speak and to drive his point home.
03:58He was very confident in his abilities to be successful and could make you believe what he wanted you to believe if you were susceptible to wanting to believe it.
04:09You have a confident message.
04:11People will follow you.
04:12In the miniseries we did, Joe's like, okay, I can play that game.
04:16Now our corporation is looking for guys like you who frankly want to start at the top.
04:21If you have any idea for a company, you start out as president of your operation.
04:26You run your show.
04:28It doesn't matter who you are.
04:29He can talk.
04:30He can convince you.
04:31It's just crazy.
04:31Very quickly, the BBC became a social phenomenon in L.A.
04:48The first time I was aware of the BBC was when I was doing a personal appearance at Tower Records with the Thompson Twins.
04:56And afterwards, the Thompson Twins said, do you want to go for dinner?
04:59And I said, sure.
05:00And right across from Tower Records was a restaurant called Spargo.
05:09It is the restaurant of the stars, a virtual who's who of Hollywood.
05:13But it's not just the food that's made Spargo the most successful restaurant in L.A.
05:18First, you need a table.
05:19For the uninitiated, that might take a month.
05:21We went into Spargo and there was a huge fuss on the other side of the restaurant.
05:26And it was the guys from the BBC.
05:30They were young.
05:35They were dressed in suits that looked like they came out of the pages of Vogue.
05:41They acted like $100 bills were napkins.
05:45It didn't matter the rich and famous of that.
05:47It was all about these guys.
05:49They really seemed to have it together.
05:53No one knew at the time about the dark underbelly.
05:55Joe Hunt was born Joe Gamsky.
06:09He was from a Wisconsin-based family.
06:12But they moved to L.A. for all the reasons people moved to L.A.
06:15The sunshine, the glamour, the possibility of reinvention.
06:21When Joe was a boy, his father was looking for whatever job he could find.
06:26And he got hooked up with this doctor who ran a hypnosis institute.
06:31Joe's father signed on as his assistant.
06:35Joe's father learned to do hypnosis and he hypnotized Joe during his adolescence repeatedly to succeed.
06:43And then he taught Joe about self-hypnosis, about how you can convince your mind of anything.
06:49And as long as you internalize that, that is your reality.
06:53Whatever you believe is what's true.
06:56Also, at the time, he was in a public school where the teacher basically said,
07:00you know, I can't teach him. He's so far ahead of the other kids.
07:03So he'd already had the idea that he was extremely bright.
07:07Joe's mother was determined that he should have the best possible education.
07:12So she was responsible for helping him get a scholarship and go to the Harvard School.
07:21This is the exclusive Harvard Prep School in Coldwater Canyon.
07:25It is where the elite of Los Angeles educate their sons.
07:28The Harvard School for Boys, now Harvard-Westlake, was a college prep private school and very prestigious and still is.
07:40The school is a microcosm of a very wealthy society with very few exceptions, one of them being Joe Gamsky.
07:49Joe has personally posted audio recordings about his past, what has happened, what he believes is the truth.
07:56In one of the audios, Joe talks about his family.
07:59We grew up in a lower middle class area.
08:02And I remember a couple years my family was on food stamps.
08:04So we were not a family of riches and privilege.
08:08I began as the youngest faculty member and one of the few women working there.
08:14It was definitely a man's world.
08:17At the time that Joe was my student, I didn't have any knowledge of his background.
08:22He certainly seemed like a cheerful young person, but he would never have been a cool kid.
08:33All ninth graders at the Harvard School are required to take debate, or at least were then.
08:39And Joe really found a niche for himself there.
08:42He was at the top of that team by the time he graduated.
08:46So that was a very big deal for Harvard and for him.
08:52I think it meant more to him than it did to the other guys that were on the debate team.
08:56They wanted to do well, but Joe had that thing that he just had to prove.
09:02Debate gave Joe an arena where he could be measured by what he could do competing against these much more privileged kids.
09:09Joe wanted to prove nobody else was smart as him.
09:12In debate, you're not expressing your own deep belief.
09:19You're expressing your argumentative skills.
09:23We had a particularly memorable encounter.
09:27The 10th grade play was Shakespeare's Macbeth.
09:30And I was working with him one-on-one to help him shape an essay.
09:34The factual support of his argument relied on a different ending of the play.
09:38And his reply to me was, it could have happened the way I imagined it.
09:43To him, in some ways, the facts were irrelevant because what was important to him was the argument that he had made.
09:53He can create his own reality, and there's no check on it from anyone else.
09:59That was an early clue to who Joe Hunt was and what he was capable of.
10:03I think so many of the things that happened for the Billionaire Boys Club couldn't have happened in a later decade.
10:21They had to have happened in the 80s.
10:23When people think of the 80s, they might think it was pretty excessive.
10:27Flash and Dash, style over content.
10:29There was a lot of extravagance in every area.
10:31There was definitely a feel that you could make money.
10:37Reaganomics contributed a lot to this.
10:39Now, let's talk about getting spending and inflation under control and cutting your tax rates.
10:44There was less regulation on companies and investments, and the stock market was booming.
10:49There became this sense of entitlement in the 1980s.
10:52I mean, when you see everyone around you making a lot of money,
10:55you can think to yourself, well, look, I work hard enough.
10:57I should be making money, too.
10:58I am entitled to this, literally, right?
11:01In the movie Wall Street, the character Gordon Gekko has this line that just really summed things up for all of the 1980s.
11:07Greed is good.
11:10Greed works.
11:13Gordon Gekko told us, do whatever you can to get the money.
11:16It doesn't matter how you get there.
11:17You just have to get there, right?
11:19If you have to sacrifice people along the way, that's the price you have to pay.
11:23So what does that breed?
11:25It breeds narcissists.
11:27It breeds people that don't want to accept responsibility for their actions no matter what they do.
11:31It leads you to someone like Joe Hunt.
11:34Three years after Joe graduated from the Harvard School, Joe ran into former high school classmates, Dean Carney and Ben Doste.
11:56They knew who he was, but they weren't friends.
12:04They didn't have overlapping social circles.
12:06But Joe was no longer the kind of nerdy guy on the outside that they'd known at the Harvard School.
12:15Joe is wearing a suit and tie, looking much more polished than he ever did before, looking actually handsome.
12:22And his confidence was palpable.
12:28Joe gave him a sort of capsule story of all of the incredibly impressive things he'd done, like graduate from USC in two years, become the youngest person ever to pass the CPA exam.
12:39He was working at a big accounting firm and now was trading commodities.
12:43Dean and Ben listened to Joe and thought, this is impressive, and so decided to ask him to dinner, to hear more.
12:55At that dinner with Dean and Ben, Joe expressed his desire to start an investment group and social club.
13:04It was my impression that he had accomplished a great many things and was on his way up, whereas I felt that I had not even started yet.
13:18And the fact that he would consider me for such a group or even talk about it with me was flattering.
13:27Dean and Ben really believed that Joe was on to something and that they were kind of in on the ground floor.
13:33Joe and Dean and Ben began seeing each other every day.
13:46Dean and Joe were best friends, and Dean's parents thought that Joe was a very good influence on their son.
13:52They welcomed Joe into their house.
13:55The second bed in Dean's bedroom became known as Joe's bed.
13:58And it wasn't very long before he revealed that his plan was to go to Chicago and trade on the mercantile exchange and have a chance to make some real money.
14:10This was all meticulously planned.
14:13Joe would be using profits from his commodities trading to fund the beginning of the BBC.
14:19To go to Chicago, Joe needed to raise a lot of cash, and he knew Dean's family had a lot of money.
14:30And Ben's family had lots of connections to wealthy people.
14:35Finally, Joe pitched them on investing with him.
14:37The pitch was that Joe had come up with this butterfly spread on commodity options that no one had ever done before.
14:52It was unique.
14:53It was proprietary.
14:55And it was going to change the world and make untold money.
14:58Joe had a lot going for him.
15:02He could speak well, and he was a decent-looking, tall, white guy.
15:07And that in itself, especially in the context of the time, made him believable.
15:15Joe charmed Dean's parents.
15:17Dean's family invested $150,000.
15:24And they also recruited some of their friends to put in their money, too.
15:28So Joe had a significant fund when he went to go trade in Chicago.
15:45I started my career on the floor of the Chicago mark, and the best way I can describe it is that it's a combination between a locker room, a horse race, and a Middle Eastern bazaar.
15:56It's just a thousand times more frenetic.
15:58Joe makes a big impression right off with the other traders.
16:05They're basically playing it safe and making money steadily.
16:09Joe came in and took big positions where the payoff is huge.
16:13He was very confident in his ability to make money.
16:16That aura was very apparent when you met him.
16:19Joe was taking big risks, which led to one investor calling the exchange, which launched an internal investigation.
16:25And they found that he had lied about a lot of things.
16:28He carefully constructed what he told people in a mixture of lies and truth.
16:35Joe had gone to USC, but he didn't graduate in two years, as he told Dean.
16:39He didn't have a background in commodities.
16:43He didn't get his CPA licensed and told everybody that he did.
16:47He didn't have licenses to actually trade other people's money.
16:50The people who were running the exchange were so infuriated that they decided they were going to punish him uniquely by banning him from the exchange.
16:58He stole the funds, he put them in his trading account, traded them, and lost them.
17:04He just didn't have the experience, so he lost everything.
17:10When you have someone like Joe who feels entitled to lie, to kind of claw his way to the top, he is someone who then will stop at nothing.
17:28In the fall of 1982, Joe Gamsky returned from Chicago as Joe Hunt.
17:50When you change a name, you then assume a certain persona, and you now have reinvented yourself.
17:59Joe Hunt. It's a cool name. Pick your name, Joe Hunt.
18:02I don't think you're going to be accused of being passive.
18:05Your name is Joe Hunt.
18:08It's all about how you want to come across to the world.
18:12And for Joe, that means coming across in a way that I think he wished he could have been.
18:22Joe told Dean and Ben he lost everything,
18:24but also that he'd learned from his experience in Chicago with the mercantile,
18:28and he knew now what to do better to get them their money back.
18:33And they believed him, partly because he's telling them something they want to hear.
18:37He had convinced me that his approach was still a masterstroke of the decade,
18:47and that it was just a combination of difficult circumstances that caused him to lose the money.
18:53He's an extremely dynamic person, and we believed him.
18:56A person could come across as trustworthy if every once in a while they offer you a little bit of truth.
19:04And then you think, wow, if he was willing to admit that, that means he's honest.
19:08Joe made such a compelling case and played on the sympathies of Dean's parents so well
19:17that they invested more money.
19:19And Dean really assisted Joe in selling his story.
19:23Joe and Dean Carney had a very tight relationship, maybe more than others.
19:29Dean felt a need to prove success to himself and to his parents and his peers,
19:34and I think Joe gave him a vehicle to do that.
19:37Dean, being more of a follower than a leader, had really found his leader.
19:52Joe convinces Dean and Ben that this whole idea for an investment and social club is not dead.
20:02With Dean and Ben's help, Joe was able to recruit a number of young men.
20:07They knew from the Harvard Prep School.
20:12The Billionaire Boys Club.
20:14It was a capitalistic cult of rich men's sons who all wanted to be tycoons, just like Dad.
20:20Kids like Dave and Tom May, the adopted sons of the former chairman of the May's department stores.
20:26Ben Dosti, son of the L.A. Times wine critic.
20:28And Dean Carney, son of one of the biggest developers in Los Angeles.
20:33In the old days, the rich kids at the school remembered Joe Hunt as a misfit.
20:36Brilliant, but, well, kind of weird.
20:39Suddenly, Hunt emerged as a messiah.
20:41There definitely is an old boy network quality to this, and particularly in finance.
20:49It's a really male-dominated space, and there's a lot of, you know, what we would call finance bros today.
20:54The Billionaire Boys Club was a bro club.
20:56It was full of rich white guys.
20:59All these other members felt they had something to prove to their parents as well.
21:07So this seemed to be a vehicle for a lot of them to have some kind of upward mobility and to prove their validity.
21:14Like, Evan Dicker just wanted to be a member, wanted to belong.
21:19I looked to him a great deal for approval in my actions.
21:22I felt he was a great man, and his approval was something to be valued.
21:29So in the spring of 1983, they decided to have their very first meeting.
21:40All of these guys were in their 20s.
21:42And the core idea Joe sold these kids was that, I'm going to let you do what you're best at,
21:47and I'm going to show you how to turn that into a fortune.
21:53He was investing quite a bit of money.
21:56He had Dean's parents invest.
21:58They told their friends, and then he's got outside investors.
22:02With all of this, he opens an account with hundreds of thousands of dollars in it.
22:07So he's doing really well.
22:13He had 70 investors that were giving him all kinds of money.
22:16It seemed like the real thing was going on.
22:19Joe's investors and business associates had discussed him in interviews.
22:23He had a system that was top secret, that couldn't lose, that couldn't go wrong.
22:31People were just handing him thousands and thousands of dollars, their life savings.
22:36I mean, whatever money they had, they were saying,
22:37here, Joe, you're the man.
22:39You can do it.
22:40Joe seemed to know what he was talking about in explicit detail.
22:49He brought out books and charts and all kinds of paraphernalia to fortify his case.
22:55Joe was a magnetic personality who sold his ideas, his concepts as being irrefutable and being 100% legitimate and being faultless.
23:07The spiel that he gave investors, it's complete gibberish.
23:11But people didn't want to ask him questions or press him on it because you don't want to look stupid.
23:16And that actually is a technique of control.
23:19People would think, oh, people will kind of leave someone who's not making sense.
23:23But if someone says, this is the answer, this is how you're going to get rich, you're going to think, I just have to try harder to get it.
23:33Because it makes sense to him and he seems smart and he seems successful.
23:38Joe was very self-assured.
23:40I mean, beyond his years.
23:42He didn't necessarily look older than his years, but he certainly felt that way when you're in his presence.
23:47People had mentioned that later when they talked about him.
23:49Whatever it was, Joe was like this rock.
23:53He almost seemed like everybody's savior.
23:56He just struck everybody as the person who could help you achieve your goals.
24:02I believe Joe Hunt was a very charismatic leader.
24:14And charismatic leaders come across as benevolent, that they want what's best for you.
24:19But they actually just care about what you are going to be able to do for them.
24:25So I think it was a game to him.
24:26It was a very destructive, awful, dangerous game.
24:32The BBC had basically created a venture capital firm, supposedly financed by Joe's commodities trading to fund their business ventures.
24:54They had multiple companies.
24:57Financial futures was for Joe's commodities trading.
25:01Micro Genesis invested in engineering projects.
25:05West cars imported gray market European luxury cars to convert to American regulations to sell.
25:14But what they really did was bring them over and drive them around.
25:16And so Joe could hand out a BMW to this guy and Mercedes to the other guy and Audi to the next guy.
25:26I had been hanging out with them a little bit, coming to my apartment a little bit.
25:30They actually, at one point, brought me a car, a brand new Porsche.
25:34They did.
25:35They did want to recruit me.
25:36They knew that I knew a lot of people who had money.
25:38And my family was influential in Beverly Hills and Hollywood.
25:41Joe Hunt gave me the keys personally and said, car's out there for you.
25:45The businesses, they were created perhaps to make money, but these guys wanted to introduce themselves as the president or vice president or something of some company.
25:58Joe was giving them titles to make them feel important, but they weren't doing much.
26:05I really just kept thinking it was a game to them.
26:08They were in at 10, lunch at 12, and out by three.
26:12They worked a three-hour day.
26:15They thought, if you tell me I can make a whole lot of money and be the president of a company, and I don't have to really work for it, then that's good with me.
26:28They had enough ostensible sophistication to know what they were getting into, but they only heard what they wanted to hear.
26:34Joe would have said that the heart of everything they did was paradox philosophy.
26:47Paradox philosophy is an ends justify the means philosophy that Joe completely made up.
26:52There is no absolute good or evil, just whatever works.
26:55I think it was inspired by what Joe's father was bashing in his head.
26:59It's situational ethics.
27:00Depending upon your point of view, what you see is different.
27:03You see this side of the page.
27:04I see that side of the page.
27:05You'll swear on your life it's white.
27:07I swear on my life it's black.
27:09What does that mean?
27:09It means if you're clever enough and faster than someone, you can spin it around and get them to say what they don't see.
27:18One of the philosophical phrases was, black is white and white is black and everything is shades of gray.
27:25So if you could reorient your own point of view and the views of others, you'd mastered the shades of gray and or a shading, which would be the highest level of the BBC.
27:42You know, you can all rise to the level of shading, but only three people have actually achieved being a shading, and that's himself, Dean and Ben.
27:49Joe Hunt decided to have labels put on groups of people, the normies and the shadings, and the normies were people who lived kind of boring lives and followed laws, and were people also then who were not going to make maybe this kind of success, and were not going to take these kinds of risks.
28:15These normies were therefore dangerous, and he used to constantly find individual examples of people that I knew, my parents or friends.
28:25He would then persuade me that this person was actually seeking to undermine me for all time, and that in a way, to continue to be involved with them would lead to sort of a fundamental destruction of me.
28:37There is an us versus them mentality.
28:40That fits the profile of a cult in so many ways.
28:43This idea that somehow the world is this bad place, and we need to band together, it does breed a lot of closeness, but a lot of paranoia about the rest of the world, and it is very controlling.
28:57Almost everybody in the BBC had either gone to the Harvard School or to Beverly Hills High School.
29:20Among those who joined the BBC were Tom and Dave May, whose family fortune was from the May Company, which was a big department store chain and then later property development.
29:34I think that Joe needed these other people for legitimacy, right?
29:41If you can say that the May Brothers are on your board, that helped raise money and helped give an aura of success.
29:49And he read the May Brothers and their frailties and their needs beautifully, more than any other members of the group.
29:57They were the ones that were looking for a way to achieve esteem in their father's eyes.
30:03Their father was really skeptical of it, but they were really convinced that Joe knew what he was doing around commodities and that this was going to go very well for them.
30:11Dave May gave Joe $10,000, and then the very next month, Joe gave him $5,000 back as profit.
30:24Seeing that huge return inspired the May Brothers to give him even more money.
30:31I think Joe wasn't thinking, you know, I'm just going to scam all these people.
30:35I think he believed he was going to make enough money to cover everybody and everything.
30:39But the only way Joe could get people to believe in him was to invent profits that did not exist by distributing new investors' money to earlier investors.
30:51The Billionaire Boys Club was a classic Ponzi scheme.
30:59Back in the 1980s, money became its own calling card.
31:02You know, don't ask too many questions about how I'm making this money.
31:05All that's important is that I am making all this money.
31:07That's all you really need to know about me.
31:09He's manipulating them, but making it look legitimate.
31:13Taking from Peter to give to Paul.
31:14Ultimately, it can't support itself.
31:16In a Ponzi scheme, eventually, it collapses.
31:19And when it did fall apart, it just came to pieces.
31:22So, in the spring of 1983, the group was growing, and for once, Joe was with the cool kids.
31:38But the BBC was at kind of an inflection point.
31:49They were bringing money that was supposed to be invested in return profits.
31:55But their expenses were high, and they were using that money up faster than Joe would have liked.
32:00They were spending $70,000 a month.
32:03In today's dollars, that's about $250,000 a month.
32:07Joe's outrunning his capital, and he needs to bring in more.
32:16And he hears about this character, Ron Levin.
32:22Joe's curious about Ron because of the things he hears from a couple of BBC kids.
32:27That this is the smartest guy, the smoothest operator you'll ever meet, and very wealthy.
32:31Ron was one of the few people I had met you could talk to about art, business, physics.
32:40He was brilliant.
32:41He loved being in clubs.
32:42He loved being the guy.
32:44We went to every great restaurant.
32:46He paid for everyone.
32:48Very generous.
32:49And he bought things for people constantly.
32:51He was constantly buying things for people.
32:53Yeah.
32:53Complete gray.
32:54Women were all over him.
32:56Ron was bisexual and attractive and had money, and so he kind of appealed to everybody, right?
33:03One day, he introduced us to Andy Warhol, and another time, Muhammad Ali.
33:08I don't know how.
33:08And they all loved him.
33:10He had access to so many people.
33:12It was crazy.
33:13Yeah.
33:13He was mischievous.
33:18He would go to an art gallery, and he'd go with a chauffeur.
33:21And he'd walk in, and he'd go, I love those paintings.
33:24I'll take that one.
33:25And he'd pay.
33:26And then he'd send the chauffeur back, and he'd call, and he'd go, remember that other one that I saw that I liked?
33:32My chauffeur's going to come and pick it up.
33:33Will you bill me?
33:34He didn't walk in there and steal it.
33:36Now it's civil, right?
33:37It's not criminal.
33:38You know?
33:38I think with him, it was like there was a game going on.
33:41He really never knew the truth.
33:43He's like a little kid.
33:48That was the kind of thing Ron Levin did, and he enjoyed that.
33:53Life was a game to him.
33:55He lived by grifting.
33:57He did create a legitimate company called Network News that basically would go out at night with film crews to film crime scenes that all of the local television stations would buy and use.
34:10And it was a profitable company.
34:12But Ron had gotten the equipment he was using by basically scamming these companies that thought he was buying it, or at least renting it.
34:21Here is Ronald Levin at a Los Angeles fire posing as a reporter.
34:25The camera he is using is stolen.
34:27We couldn't figure out why he did things like that, because he was smart and his businesses made money.
34:40Was that enough to support the lifestyle that he had?
34:43I don't know.
34:43Joe really thought that he could get some of Ron Levin's money, and he viewed him as a target for investing in the BBC.
34:55And right at that moment, that seemed to be his ticket to get out from under the house of cards he'd built.
35:03So for Joe, this was it.
35:04They asked me if they could meet Ron Levin, and I said, you don't want to meet Ron Levin.
35:10And Joe's like, why not?
35:11I'm like, because you're going to lose everything you've got.
35:13He's just going to take whatever you have.
35:16I had heard Levin was a con man, and Joe just dismissed that, and felt that Levin couldn't run a con on him.
35:23He said, I can handle Levin.
35:25So Ron convinced Joe that he had a special affection for him, and they got, you know, closer.
35:38They were playing this game with each other of who's smarter.
35:42They're both seeing each other as a dear friend and a mark at the same time.
35:47It's not smart to try and con a con man.
35:50Ultimately, Joe met his match.
35:55After Joe met Ron Levin, Joe thought ultimately he was a little sharper than Ron, and he was going to prove it.
36:15So from the very beginning, Joe was trying to inveigle Ron into an investment.
36:25And then all of a sudden, Ron Levin said, you could be in charge of my $5 million commodities account.
36:34And then he said, whatever profits Joe made, they would just split them 50-50.
36:39Well, that sounds good to Joe.
36:43And he calls up the brokerage, and the broker confirms that, yes, we have this Ron Levin account here, and he's given us permission to let you trade it.
36:51And so Joe starts making trades over the phone with the broker.
36:54For Joe, this was huge.
37:01He was looking at financial ruin all around.
37:05His commodities trading up to that point had all been disastrous.
37:09Joe needed this success.
37:10He really believed that that $5 million account was going to save the BBC.
37:22So Joe starts making bets.
37:24In a matter of weeks, the account is going up steadily.
37:27This $5 million was run up to almost $14 million over two and a half months, and I was elated.
37:32And the first thing I did was I had a big meeting with the BBC and said, boys, we've had a wonderful good fortune.
37:40We made $4 million.
37:41You can pay everybody off, have plenty of operating capital, and it's all good.
37:52This is the biggest success the BBC has had or even imagined.
37:57You know, the whole BBC is thrilled.
38:02There was a certain swagger to the officers and members.
38:07It seemed Joe's theoretical butterfly strategies, investing strategies, had legitimacy and paid off.
38:14Now, obviously, some of this has to go to our investors.
38:17So we're going to separate about a million and a half dollars there.
38:21And you, Tom May, you get $400,000 of it, and you get $400,000.
38:24We did it all up.
38:25So the group has celebrated.
38:33Everybody's thrilled.
38:35Then something is off.
38:37Some weeks after the trading had stopped, Joe was in a conversation with one of the people at the commodities trading house.
38:44And the guy said to him, so when did you realize that the money in that Ron Levin account wasn't real?
38:55And Joe mumbled something that implied, of course, he knew this, but he hadn't known.
39:01Joe, for weeks and weeks, has been bragging to anyone who would listen about how well he'd done with his commodities account.
39:12And that his system worked, that everything was great, that the BBC was hypersolvent.
39:17And all of a sudden, he discovers that that's not true.
39:21None of that is true.
39:23There was no money in the account.
39:24Ron had run, really, one of his many masterworks of con.
39:31Joe was just in shock.
39:38Unbeknownst to Joe, Ron told the brokerage that his company, Network News, was making a documentary about investment in brokerages
39:46and wanted to set up this big account with their outside trader and follow the progress of the trading account, and the trader wouldn't know.
39:53He set the account up with $5.2 million, which never existed.
39:58The brokerage firm was taken advantage of, Hunt was taken advantage of, all by Ron Levin to what ends, I'm not sure to this day.
40:06So the brokerage firm was in the dark about everything.
40:08They didn't realize that there was no documentary.
40:11And Ron is using this whole scheme to try and con even more money.
40:16He had used those statements to go to other brokerage houses and have credit extended to him.
40:21And he had actually managed to con about a million and a half dollars out of those other brokerage houses.
40:26So Ron had gotten a million and a half dollars.
40:34Joe got nothing.
40:38For Joe, this news was devastating.
40:41The BBC was in terrible financial shape.
40:44He didn't know what to do.
40:45The other BBC companies are not bringing in cash yet, and he's still got all these boys driving the BMWs and Mercedes around that they're supposed to sell.
40:56Joe is keeping this whole situation with Levin privately held among the shadings.
41:01Nobody else realized how deep into financial ruin the Billionaire Boys Club actually was.
41:11There was never any hint of failure.
41:13There was only a hint of either success or coming success.
41:20Ron had conned him.
41:22And suddenly someone was superior to him, and he had to then take them down.
41:27He made Joe look bad, and Joe was done being made to look bad.
41:31That was clear.
41:35He was pissed.
41:40Joe Hunt thought that the money from Ron Levin was his golden ticket.
41:46He was chasing wealth and power at any cost, even murder.
41:50He was chasing wealth and power.
Recommended
41:31
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