BUSTING THE BILLIONAIRES : NEWS HOUND NEVER VEERED OFF THE TRAIL.

Byline: Anne Burke Daily News Staff Writer

In the summer of 1994, in an attorney interview room at the Los Angeles County Jail, Joe Hunt ran into public defender Brady Sullivan, whose brother, Randall, was writing a book on the Billionaire Boys Club.

Hunt, the brilliant and charismatic BBC leader, told the lawyer, ``Your brother is using my story to exorcize his own demons.''

Hunt's observation ``is not entirely untrue,'' said Randall Sullivan, whose book, ``The Price of Experience: Power, Money, Image and Murder in Los Angeles,'' was just published by the Atlantic Monthly Press.

Like Hunt, a scholarship student at what is now the prestigious Harvard-Westlake School on Coldwater Canyon Avenue, Sullivan came from humble beginnings - a small town on the Oregon coast where his father was a longshoreman, his mother a housewife.

Hunt went on to USC and the Mercantile Exchange in Chicago, Sullivan to a post-graduate writing program at the Ivy League Columbia University, ``a place and world full of people who came from a background that was more appropriate to it,'' he said.

``I reacted to their sense of entitlement and presumption with a kind of reactionary arrogance,'' Sullivan said.

``I felt this kind of contempt, as Joe did, for the social contract that would permit these people to have so much more than others, without doing anything to deserve it,'' he said.

From there, Hunt's and Sullivan's parallel lives diverged radically. Hunt, along with two ex-classmates, formed the BBC - a social and investment club of rich kids looking for easy money.

Sullivan became a successful journalist. He was a front-page columnist for the Los Angeles Herald Examiner while still in his 20s, and has become a contributing editor to Rolling Stone.

In the 10 years since beginning work on the 705-page ``Price,'' Sullivan said he has spent considerable time thinking about why his life and Hunt's, which started out with so much in common, ended up at such polar extremes.

Hunt was convicted in the murder of businessman Ron Levin, whose body was never found. Sentenced to life in prison without parole, he's now in the Los Angeles County Jail awaiting a hearing Monday in an effort to seek a new trial.

Sullivan, 44, has moved back to his hometown of Portland, Ore., where he lives with his wife.

``Where Joe and I separate is that I respect my emotions,'' he said. ``I consider my emotions the essence of what makes me human. Joe considers his emotions merely an obstacle to what needs to be done.

``When it comes right down to it, a fundamental difference between Joe and me is that he thinks the human intellect is the greatest creative force in life. I don't.''

That ``The Price of Experience'' was even published is due as much to Sullivan's perseverance as his intellect.

In the late 1980s, he abandoned the project for two years because of litigation over rights to portions of the story, which has since been settled.

Then in 1991, the editor working with him on the book ``got in a cab, lit a cigarette and dropped dead of a heart attack,'' he said.

At that point, said Grove Atlantic Publisher Morgan Entrekin, ``Ninety-nine out of a hundred writers would have given up.''

Then there was the fact that Hunt refused to be interviewed by Sullivan, although the two had several cordial conversations. (Hunt even sent Sullivan a gift copy of his favorite book, Paramahansa Yogananda's epic ``Autobiography of a Yogi.'')

Sullivan's failure to get Hunt was not the drawback that it might seem, and the author is blase about it.

``To sit down and hear a litany of lies with a few grains of truth, I didn't know what use it would have been. Anyway, I had enough public statements from Joe from when he was on the witness stand in Redwood City in San Mateo County (in the separate Hedayat Eslaminia murder case, for which charges were dropped against Hunt when a jury deadlocked).

Though he didn't interview Hunt, Sullivan writes as if he knows him well. He claims he should: Among hundreds of sources for his book, many of them intimate with Hunt, were eight former BBC members.

He also had access to 30 letters Hunt authored from jail.

Armed with that insight, Sullivan on Hunt is as damning as anyone could be about another human being: ``The most fascinating and disturbing evil I've encountered in fiction or nonfiction,'' he says. ``A truly brilliant but profoundly alienated outsider.''

Sometimes, he is wickedly funny: ``Hunt's like a shark. He can only go forward.''

There is, too, the consideration that for Sullivan, the book is as much about Los Angeles in the Reagan '80s as it is about Hunt.

``It's about invisible corruption, which to me is the story of Los Angeles,'' he said.

``It's the conundrum of L.A.: How can a place so sunlit be so dark at the same time?''

``The Price of Experience'' is Sullivan's first book, and has received several favorable reviews in advance of publication.

Still, Sullivan seems a little nervous about the public reaction - and whether readers will conclude the book lives up to its high aspirations.

``I'm a little agitated right now because John Gregory Dunne is supposed to do a review for The New York Times or the New York Review of Books, and the fact that they've assigned it to him is a bit scary.

``I'm having a sense that the book might be as good as it was supposed to be.''

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Photo

Photo: Billionaire Boys Club leader Joe Hunt, foreground, a nd attorney Richard Chier react after the reading of Hunt's guilty verdict in 1987.