Friend Retells Defendant’s Account of Alleged Slaying

The star prosecution witness in the murder trial of Billionaire Boys Club leader Joe Hunt recounted in grisly detail Wednesday how he helped plan the 1984 slaying of Beverly Hills businessman Ron Levin and how Hunt allegedly carried it out.

Testifying in a monotone punctuated by occasional sighs, former BBC member Dean Karny said Hunt woke him early on June 7, 1984, waving a check for $1.5 million signed by Levin and saying “that he had done it; that Ron was dead.”

It was several days later, said the slight, 26-year-old Karny, his voice choking, that he learned what allegedly happened when Hunt, 27, and his bodyguard, Jim Pittman, 33, went to Levin’s Peck Drive duplex to demand money Levin owed him:

After being forced at gunpoint to sign a check and an option agreement with Microgenesis, a BBC subsidiary, “Ron started to whimper,” Hunt told Karny as the pair strolled through Westwood Village. “Joe felt Ron had given up the possibility that he was going to survive. They took him into Ron’s bedroom, put him face down on the bed and Jim shot him in the back of the head (with a silencer-equipped pistol).

“Joe said he remembered the sound of a man’s last breath leaving his body. He made the sound for me . . . it was like an explosive gasp. Then he said that the blood started seeping out and they quickly wrapped him up in the bedspread and took him out to the car. He said they put him in the trunk . . . and disposed of the body up in Soledad Canyon. . . . He said that he had disfigured the body with a shotgun so it wouldn’t be recognizable if found.

“He said that at one point Ron Levin’s brain jumped out of his skull and fell on his chest. . . . It seemed like Joe thought it was kind of neat in a weird way. . . . He was very casual, matter-of-fact. . . . I recall him laughing when he told me about the brain.”

Karny’s dramatic testimony--delivered to a solemn-faced jury in an overflowing Santa Monica courtroom from which spectators were turned away--is the prosecution’s key evidence, along with a seven-page list found in Levin’s home after he disappeared. His body has never been found.

Karny’s testimony is crucial to proving the case against Hunt. Other BBC members have testified that Hunt told them he had “knocked off” Levin, but none have admitted foreknowledge of the crime and none enjoyed Karny’s special position as Hunt’s best friend and co-founder of the investment and social group, BBC Consolidated Inc. of North America.

Karny, who has been granted immunity from prosecution in the Levin case and in a related murder case in Northern California, was flanked by armed bodyguards, and Superior Court Judge Laurence Rittenband ordered that he not be photographed.

Now living under an assumed name in an undisclosed location, Karny is in the California witness protection program and is being considered for the federal witness protection program under which he would be given a completely new identity. He is the son of a successful Los Angeles real estate developer who, along with friends, invested--and subsequently lost--nearly $500,000 with Hunt.

Karny, who has known Hunt since they were students at the Harvard School in Studio City, said that Hunt supplied “the acceptance and admiration I needed” at a difficult time in his life. The two became fast friends, eventually sharing a luxury condo in Westwood and swank offices in West Hollywood, although the businesses they started together failed to make money.

Hunt became enraged when Levin duped him in an elaborate commodities trading hoax, and began predicting that “Ron Levin was gonna die one day.”

Laying the groundwork for that death, Karny testified, Hunt maintained the appearance of a friendship with Levin, prepared phony letters to suggest business transactions between Levin and the BBC, and made a detailed list of how the murder should be carried out.

Karny said he helped Hunt compile the list at the office late one night, and he identified the seven yellow legal pad pages found in Levin’s home--which are in Hunt’s handwriting and bear both his and Karny’s fingerprints--as the papers he had worked on. The pages include a hand-drawn map of Soledad Canyon, such notations as “Jim digs pit,” and a list of “At Levin’s To Do” that included such items as “tape mouth,” “handcuff,” “put gloves on,” “explain situation,” and “kill dog (emphasis),” a reference, Karny said, to the possibility of killing Levin’s beloved dog, Kosher, if Levin proved uncooperative.

Karny said he did not go to the police to prevent the murder “because I was part of what was going on with Joe at that time . . . was backing him up on what we had decided to do. . . . I went along with it.”

Karny said he took Hunt’s girlfriend and another BBC member to a movie on the night of the alleged murder, intending to say that Hunt went with them should he need an alibi.