From the movie Billionaire Boys Club (2018)
By Joe Hunt
May 24, 2024
Many people believe that what they saw in the NBC Miniseries, the 2018 movie starring Kevin Spacey and Ansel Elgort, and the documentaries about the Billionaire Boys Club cases was proven in court. However, in the San Mateo case (Hedayat Eslaminia), all murder charges were eventually dropped, and none of my four co-defendants were convicted.
In the Los Angeles Case, the prosecution claimed that Jim Pittman and I went to Ron Levin’s house together and that Jim shot Levin there. Jim’s 1986 trial ended in a mistrial, while I was convicted in 1987. Jim was retried in 1988 and received a 10-2 verdict for acquittal with new evidence showing Levin was alive. Subsequently, the L.A. District Attorney dropped the murder charge against him, and the case was dismissed without a retrial.
I never received a retrial in L.A. and, therefore, did not benefit from the evidence that freed my co-defendant. However, the Chief Detective on the case, Les Zoeller, stated in a 1993 memo to his superiors that, in his opinion, I would likely win a retrial due to the evidence that became available after my conviction.
In short, the key Detective and the prosecutors lost confidence in their case against me and my three co-defendants over 30 years ago. All charges were dropped when Jim, Ben, and Reza were brought back for retrials. In like fashion, the State wouldn’t proceed to trial if my conviction was overturned. The State’s representatives long ago recognized that their case fell apart, even if the media has been slow to recognize that truth. The injustice is thus two-fold: first, it is in the failure to give me a procedural opportunity to present the evidence that freed my co-defendants; and second, it’s in the fact that most of society is wholly unaware that the media version of the case was thoroughly discredited.
I have served time with Joe for years in New Folsom. Once in awhile the justice system gets it really wrong and sends someone to prison that clearly doesn’t belong there. This was the case with Joe. Even so, Joe did and is still doing his time in a way that makes the place better for those who are forced to suffer it. Joe is not the actors on TV and he definitely is not who prosecutors said he was. Almost 40 years later California still has him locked up. And, they are still dead wrong.