A HUNT FOR CLUES ABOUT BBC BOSS.

Byline: Mark Barnhill Daily News Staff Writer

Title: ``The Price of Experience: Power, Money, Image and Murder in Los Angeles''

Author: Randall Sullivan

Data: 705 pages, Atlantic Monthly Press; $27.50

Our rating: Four Stars

In the moments after Joe Hunt was convicted of murdering Ron Levin, the Santa Monica courtroom roiled with emotion.

On one side, Hunt's girlfriend mouthed the words ``Oh my God'' and began sobbing. On the other, Levin's family kissed and embraced, openly sneering at Hunt.

With the word ``guilty'' still echoing, all eyes turned to Hunt. What was he thinking? How would he react?

He sat still for a moment, then shook his head once. He turned blankly toward his girlfriend, rolled his palms upward and shrugged. He slowly, methodically, removed his necktie and wallet.

Then he turned to reporters and said, in a flat voice, ``This is a tragedy because Ron Levin is alive.''

The myth of Joe Hunt had completely collapsed. The dazzling boy genius from the San Fernando Valley, the leader of the Billionaire Boys Club, had been redefined as a con man and a killer.

But there was no way Joe Hunt was going to let anyone inside his head.

I remember watching him that day in 1987 and thinking, ``Jeez, this guy is one cold SOB. What's going on in there?''

In the nine years since, Joe still hasn't let anybody in.

But in a riveting new book, ``The Price of Experience: Money, Power, Image and Murder in Los Angeles,'' author Randall Sullivan has given us a complex and compelling sense of what it is that makes Hunt tick.

It is a sprawling and ambitious work that not only tells Hunt's story, but uses it as a central subtext in a larger parable about avarice and greed in 1980s Los Angeles.

In it, Sullivan succeeds as the first and only person to do justice to the story of the Billionaire Boys Club, and of Hunt himself.

They've been the subject of a clownish television movie, a tepid true-crime book and countless newspaper and magazine stories. But nobody before Sullivan has put it together so completely or so artfully.

Exhaustively researched and exceptionally well written, the book traces the glittering rise and breathtaking fall of the Billionaire Boys Club.

The BBC included the sons of some of the most powerful and wealthy families in Los Angeles. Prep school classmates from the exclusive Harvard-Westlake School in Coldwater Canyon, they were heirs to business fortunes and high station.

Yet they were feckless boys desperate for easy money and social status that didn't derive from their parents.

And they proved easy prey for a preternaturally self-possessed young classmate, driven by forces none of them understood, who conned them out of their inheritances and led them to murder.

A poor kid from Van Nuys at Harvard-Westlake on a scholarship, Joe Gamsky convinced these boys that an investment club combining their money with his brains could make them all millions of dollars.

Changing his name to Hunt - perhaps because it sounded like the Texas billionaire Hunt brothers - Joe espoused a ``Paradox Philosophy'' that allowed the boys to rationalize any action if it served their interest.

They lived the high life for a time, until their inheritances - and their luck - ran out.

Duped in an investment scam by a con man named Ron Levin, Hunt announced to the other BBC members that he and his bodyguard, Jim Pittman, had killed Levin.

Levin's body was never been found, though Pittman later admitted the killing and said they had dumped the body in Soledad Canyon.

Hunt, who was convicted and sentenced to life without parole, has insisted from the beginning that Levin still is alive. He has petitioned for a new trial, and a hearing is set Monday in Los Angeles.

(Charges against Hunt in another slaying, of Hedayat Eslaminia, were dropped after the jury in his second trial deadlocked 8-4 for acquittal. Two other BBC members, Arben Dosti and Reza Eslaminia, the dead man's son, were convicted.)

Sullivan's book recounts details of both cases, and of Hunt's animosity toward the palpably fearful Dean Karny and other former BBC members who testified. (Karny, one of the boys who co-founded the BBC with Hunt, wound up with a new identity in the witness protection program.)

But the real power of ``The Price of Experience'' is not in the true-crime or courtroom passages, but in the development of Hunt's life story, and of the events and family relationships that molded his personality.

And the genius of the book is in replicating on the printed page the charisma that Hunt so clearly carried in person.

One of the drawbacks of the BBC story, for those who have never met Hunt, is the difficulty in understanding how people could have been so completely swept up in Joe's thrall.

He's been described as rivetingly charismatic, captivating, Svengali-like - but the descriptions have never been enough to capture Hunt's magnetism.

Yet in Sullivan's book, it comes through. A third of the way in, you find yourself captivated by Hunt, liking him, even admiring him.

As the narrative builds and deepens, however, it turns deftly into a portrait of a remorseless sociopath whose soaring intellect and charm are tragically compromised by a chilling lack of emotion or remorse.

In the end, the only thing missing from ``The Price of Experience'' is an in-depth interview with Hunt. (Sullivan uses testimony and statements from him to good effect, but Hunt declined to be interviewed.)

Of course, what purpose would it have served? Joe Hunt still is not letting anyone into his head. There's room for only one in there, and Joe has always liked his own company best.

CAPTION(S):

2 Photos

Photo: (1) no caption (Book cover - The Price of Experie nce: Power, Money, Image and Murder in Los Angeles)

(2) Randall Sullivan

A dogged reporter