Aliases Used by Alleged Victim Recited at Club Leader’s Trial

Ron Levin, the alleged murder victim in the Billionaire Boys Club case, was a grand impostor who posed at various times as “Dr. Levin,” an attorney named R. Michael Wetherby, and “Ron Rothschild,” a member of the famous banking family, friends testified Tuesday in the murder trial of club leader Joe Hunt.

On one occasion, the con artist--who kept a skeleton, doctor’s bag and medical books in one room of his Beverly Hills duplex and legal tomes in another--talked his way into the cadaver room at UCLA Medical Center and dissected a body, testified Dean Factor, 22, a longtime friend who said he had planned to go to New York with Levin on the June, 1984, morning he disappeared.

Factor testified that Levin, 42, also counterfeited bank passbooks, printed fake business cards for his multiple identities, bragged that he had been able to make money while doing time in jail and once talked his way free of an angry creditor who put a gun to his head.

Other Identities

“Most of the time he was a lawyer,” Factor said, “but a few years straight he was running ‘Rothschild.’ ”

Factor, who is related to the Max Factor cosmetic family, was one of several handsome young men befriended by Levin and called by the prosecution in the Santa Monica Superior Court trial to show the life style of a man they say would never have just skipped town.

However, the defense contends that Tuesday’s testimony shows just the opposite--that Levin was a survivor who always managed to squeeze out of tight spots and that he could have “arranged” his own disappearance to avoid creditors and a possible jail term. His body has never been found.

During the second day of testimony in the trial of Hunt, 27, prosecutors also called James Foulk, 26, who is believed to be the last person to have seen Levin alive.

Foulk, a model and actor, said a chance meeting with Levin at Spago’s, a trendy restaurant, led to a job in one of Levin’s many businesses, Network News. He said he left Levin’s home at about 7 p.m. on the evening of June 6, having declined Levin’s invitation to accompany him to New York the next morning “with three of his kids.”

‘A Lonely Person’

Foulk described Levin as “a lonely person who always liked to have people around.” He said Levin, who never married, had told him that he had five children and was divorced and often referred to fights with his wife.

He said Levin seemed excited about the Eastern vacation.

But Factor testified that, in retrospect, Levin seemed “unusual” when they spoke by telephone later that night. Factor said he had called to see if everything was on schedule for the next day’s trip. Levin assured him it was, but said he was sleeping and had to get off the phone.

When Factor and others who had planned the trip arrived in the morning, they found Levin gone and several items in his bedroom rearranged or missing.

Deputy Dist. Atty. Fred Wapner said he plans to first focus on who Levin was, then turn to Hunt and his exclusive social and business club and show how the two came together and ended in murder. If convicted, Hunt could receive the death penalty. Wapner contends that Hunt and his bodyguard shot Levin to get even for Levin’s having duped Hunt in an elaborate commodities trading hoax and to raise money for the foundering investment group known as BBC Consolidated, whose initials gave rise to the label “Billionaire Boys Club.”

The bodyguard and co-defendant James Pittman, 33, whose earlier trial ended in a hung jury, will be retried separately.