The Price of Experience

“Sullivan has done what every aspiring true crime writer hopes to do: He has crossed the line from titillation into cultural history.”—Los Angeles Times

The shocking story of Joe Hunt and the downfall of the Billionaire Boys Club — from social investing group to Ponzi scheme to murderers — told in a propulsive narrative by Randall Sullivan, now updated with a new afterword and soon to be a CNN miniseries

When it first came to the public’s attention in the fall of 1986, the story of the Billionaire Boys Club and its leader, Joe Hunt, a young man labeled a “yuppie Charles Manson” by the prosecutor was splashed across headlines and TV screens throughout the nation.

The story of rich kids, flagrant excess, and multiple murders fascinated the American public, but deeper truths lay buried beneath. The saga was so complex that neither its scope nor its implications could be clearly discerned—that is, until The Price of Experience was published in 1996.

A scholarship student with a strange father and a mysterious background, Joe was socially shunned at the ultra-elite Harvard School in Los Angeles. By age twenty, however, Joe had made and lost $14 million on Chicago’s commodities exchange. Back in L.A., he dazzled former classmates with his power and confidence, assembling them into the BBC Consolidated of North America, Inc. – part corporate empire and part private social club. Joe convinced the children of L.A.’s most powerful families that all the wealth, status, and power in the world was theirs for the taking. They gave him their trust funds and a loyalty he transformed into cultish devotion. Hunt and the BBC became the talk of L.A. – not only for the meteoric rise that brought them control of more than $100 million in assets, but for the grisly murders connected to the group. As the group’s deadly momentum increased and its business dealings spun out of control, BBC members began to talk, and eventually Hunt and four others were arrested on two counts of murder.

In this utterly gripping narrative, award-winning journalist Randall Sullivan finally revealed the whole story. Now, in the new afterword, he returns to Joe Hunt—who has now been in prison for almost forty years—and recounts the fates of his accomplices. This is a landmark true-crime book with a diabolical, but almost irresistibly seductive, genius at its center.