Pittman, the former doorman, was sentenced to three years and six months in prison after pleading guilty to an accessory to murder charge. He admitted on the TV show A Current Affair, “Yeah, I did kill Ron Levin, but I can’t be tried for it twice.” Pittman died of kidney failure in 1997. Levin’s body has never been found.
Hunt was tried and sentenced to life in prison. Ever the showman and slick marketer, Hunt co-authored a book with his prison cellmate. It’s a fictional tale described on a website as an “epic encounter between good and evil” that takes place in a distant part of the universe. An online bio for Hunt states: “Hunt maintains his innocence. He occupies himself now with his ongoing challenge in federal court to his conviction…the stock market, handball, and Kriya Yoga.”
A prosecutor once described Joe Hunt as having a “Charles Manson-like” personality.
James Pittman
A detailed to-do list was left behind after Hunt and bodyguard Jim Pittman visited financier Ronald Levin.
Pittman had drawn a map for police indicating where Levin’s body was buried.
Pittman and Detective Les Zoeller search unsuccessfully for Ron Levin’s body.
1986
The Deadly Van Cleef and Arpels Robbery • Hostages Killed
June 23, 1986 was a lovely summer day, a Monday morning. President Ronald Reagan’s wife Nancy was in town for a visit, the national news media in tow. A few streets over, on Rodeo Drive, the exclusive Van Cleef and Arpels jewelry store just opened up as usual at 10 a.m. The high-end gem shop was like a fortress: bulletproof windows, closed-circuit security cameras, an on-site security guard. No jewel thief had ever penetrated the perimeter—until that day.
A young man dressed in a dark gray suit, carrying a briefcase, walked up and rang the bell. An employee mistook him for a salesman and buzzed him in. But instead of jewelry samples, twenty-two-year-old Steven Livaditis took out a gun, a nickel-plated .357 Magnum. With a sweeping gesture he showed employees he meant a different kind of business. “Everyone on the floor,” he yelled. “This is a robbery!”
Chaos ensued. Employees scattered. One hit the panic button. Upstairs, staff in the factory area looked over at monitors and saw the gunman. They activated a silent alarm and quickly slipped down the backstairs; several employees escaped. Within minutes, dozens of police cars and officers arrived at the scene. Rodeo Drive was shut down; the First Lady’s entourage diverted.
Livaditis, unaware the alarm had been tripped, grabbed jewelry and gems by the handful and was about to leave when he spotted an officer. Cornered, he hustled five employees into an interior showroom and locked everyone in: the store manager Hugh Skinner, security guard William Smith, and three salespeople, including Ann Heilperin. News helicopters thundered above; reporters on the ground began what would be the first live, all-day broadcast of an unfolding news story in Beverly Hills. They could only report what they saw going on outside. Now, for the first time, details from police files reveal what was going on inside.
The thief had come prepared. His hostages watched as he pulled out of his briefcase some tape, twine, ammo, a survival knife, and a switchblade. Livaditis was irritated. Smith, the guard, was talking smack to him.
“He called me some names,” Livaditis would later tell a probation officer, “I had a lot of anger. I felt I had to take control of the situation.” Livaditis duct-taped the guard’s hands and feet, took a knife and plunged it into the fifty-three-year-old’s back, leaving the blade in the body. Ann Heilperin began crying quietly.
SWAT members arrived; the building was completely surrounded now. Negotiators made phone contact with Livaditis. They asked if he’d killed anyone. At first he said yes, then he said no. Then he yelled into the phone, “You better back off!”
One of the hostages needed to use the bathroom. Livaditis made him (and eventually all the others) use the room’s trashcan in front of everyone. Heilperin was trying not to cry. Livaditis was annoyed, “I couldn’t take it,” he explained. “I told her to be quiet; she was whimpering too much.” Livaditis duct taped the forty-year-old’s hands and legs, covered her mouth, then pulled up her hair and shot her in the back of the head. Now there were two dead bodies in the room.
The afternoon dragged into night. Livaditis looked over at the two bodies; rigor mortis had set in. Around 11:30 p.m., Livaditis decided to make a run for it. He told the store manager to trade pants with him. The manager was now wearing the thief’s dark suit pants.
Livaditis loosely tied the remaining hostages to himself and threw a blanket over everyone as they exited out a back door. The area was illuminated by streetlights. The sudden movement of people leaving the building took authorities by surprise; they trained their night scopes on the group of four, looking for the suspect. (They had a description from the employees who’d escaped earlier that day; the gunman, they said, was wearing dark suit pants.)
Officers lobbed a flash-bang concussion grenade to stop the escapees. The manager was separated from the others. He fell to the ground, rose up to a sitting position, and extended his arm to the others now huddled under the blanket. On top of a nearby parking garage, a deputy spotter who’d been told the suspect was wearing dark pants saw the extended arm and told the sharpshooter next to him, “He has a gun, he’s going to shoot.” A single, precise shot was fired. The man in the dark pants collapsed to the ground. The deputy unknowingly had just shot and killed the store manager, sixty-four-year-old Hugh Skinner.
Livaditis tried to escape; officers were on him instantly, taking him down and into custody. His briefcase contained over two million dollars worth of jewelry, watches, and loose gems.
During the trial, which took place in a heavily guarded courtroom, Livaditis explained why he pulled the heist. “I was running out of money.”
The shooting death of the store manager was ruled accidental. By all accounts, the deputy who fired that lethal bullet acted according to protocol, but he was so upset by what he had inadvertently done, that he quit and left a career he loved.
Livaditis sits on Death Row at San Quentin. He recorded an audio interview for a group called “Greeks for Christ,” in which he spoke about a newfound connection with the Lord. The once cold-blooded killer says he’s hoping to get his sentence commuted. “Ever since I accepted Jesus, I have a clear conscience,” he notes.
The police were confused about who the perpetrator was because he had forced a victim to switch pants with him.
Livaditis was arrested for reckless driving a month before the tragic heist.
The standoff lasted thirteen and a half hours, Livaditis phoned police requesting a meal, but he never retrieved the brown-bag lunch they delivered.
Investigators found this survival knife lodged in security guard William Smith’s back.
Detectives from the Beverly Hills Police Department and the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department enter the jewelry store after the siege.
Authorities conducted hostage negotiations with Livaditis via telephone throughout the day.
Police retrieved custom-made jewelry that Livaditis had stashed into his pockets.
Livaditis, who had robbed jewelry stores before, stuffed jewelry worth over two million dollars into a briefcase.
1988
Pawn Shop Double Murder • Female Killer on the Run for Decades
“The Rolls-Royce of Pawn Shops”—that’s what customers called the Beverly Loan Company, a high-end pawn shop owned for almost five decades by seventy-nine-year-old Julius Zimmelman and his brother, Louis, eighty-one. No guitars or records were pawned here, just pricey and valuable items, like the diamonds a Saudi Arabian princess brought in for a loan while waiting for the monthly check from her oil-rich father.
For forty-seven years, the Zimmelman brothers had carefully built a solid reputation. The loan company was tucked away in an office on the third floor of the Wells Fargo Building at 9350 Wilshire. Julius’s son, Harry, thirty-eight, had been working with his father an
d uncle for years, and would be taking over the business soon. At least that was the plan, until the day a short and stout Filipino woman walked into their shop.
Around 4:30 p.m. on April 6, 1988, Asunción Espina had a discussion with Julius. Perhaps it was a dispute over a loan, maybe an argument about a pawned item; whatever it was, it triggered a profound rage-filled reaction. Espina pulled a gun from her purse and began firing at Julius. His son heard the shots and ran over. She began shooting at him. Once the bullets ran out, she dropped the gun and raced out of the store. In her haste, she left behind her purse, which held her driver’s license and other identification. Both father and son were able to tell police who shot them before they passed out. Julius died on the operating table. His son Harry was put on life support, never regaining consciousness. He died almost three months later.
The Beverly Hills Police Department took more than twenty years to apprehend Espina. Immediately after the shooting, she fled to the Philippines where she was protected by many high-level government friends. (Her father reportedly had been a general in the Marcos regime). Stymied by a lack of help from Philippine authorities, the case was cold until the two countries signed an extradition treaty in 1996. Espina continued to fight extradition until 2009 when Beverly Hills police officers, working through State Department channels, were finally able to bring her back to the scene of her crime, some twenty years later. Asunción Espina is spending the rest of her life in prison at the Central California Women’s Facility.
The Beverly Loan Company lost two good men that fateful day. No doubt they would have been thrilled to know their family business has not only survived, but is thriving at a new location, with a new owner: a Zimmelman grandson.
The murder weapon Espina left behind was registered in her name.
Espina’s license describes a five-foot two-inch, 135-pound female with black hair and brown eyes.
1989
The Menendez Murders • Scheming Sons Execute Parents
It is the most gruesome crime in the history of Beverly Hills. Two privileged rich kids, eighteen-year-old Erik and twenty-one-year-old Lyle Menendez, slaughtered their parents in the living room of the family home at 722 North Elm Drive on August 20, 1989. The coroner’s report describes “gaping lacerations” five inches wide in Jose Menendez’s skull. He was shot six times, his slumped-over body still in a macabre seated position on the couch in the family living room. His wife Kitty had fallen between the couch and the coffee table; she’d been shot ten times, half her face torn off by the bullets.
But perhaps nothing drives home the gruesome nature of the attack more than this fact that never made news: as a group of investigators prepared to bag up Mr. Menendez’s bullet-riddled body, his brain detached from his skull and slid across the marble floor. Even the most hardened professionals had to leave the room.
While the public wouldn’t know who killed the video executive and his wife for many months, police had their suspicions immediately. Clark Fogg was called to the family home. He was one of the first on the scene, videotaping and collecting key evidence.
An odd question was one of the first clues that the sons may have been involved. While Fogg was escorting Lyle Menendez to his father’s office to get elimination fingerprints (taken to rule out potential suspects), the oldest son nodded his head in the direction of the den, where his parents’ dead bodies lay. “Is that the room it happened in?” he asked. As Fogg points out, Lyle knew the answer to that question; he and his brother had already “discovered” the bodies and called police. “It’s a red flag when someone asks a question they already know the answer to.”
Beverly Hills detective Les Zoeller began watching the boys’ every move. Despite putting on a good show (when Lyle called 911, he blubbered convincingly into the phone, “They shot and killed my parents!”), the brothers were not very slick at covering up their crime. Barely a week after the murders, the sons went on a wild spending spree: new clothes, Rolex watches, new cars. Lyle got himself a Porsche 911 and Erik bought a Jeep Wrangler. They rented ocean-view apartments, one for each of them. Within a few months, they’d burned through almost a million dollars of their inheritance. But police needed some evidence they’d committed the crime.
About two months after the murders, Zoeller interviewed Erik at the mansion, making the boy so uneasy that Erik panicked and called his therapist, Jerome Ozeil. During his next therapy session, the young man fell apart and made the shocking confession, “We did it; we killed our parents.”
Ozeil was stunned, and he taped the following sessions where not only Erik, but also Lyle talked about how much they had hated their Dad. The sons had worried their dad was going to disinherit them because they weren’t as smart and successful as he wanted them to be. They also spoke of having seen the Billionaire Boys Club television movie, and how it had inspired them when one of the boys was willing to kill his dad for money.
Lyle bragged on the tapes that he and Erik had “shown great courage by killing their mother.” Lyle also said he “missed having these people around. I miss not having my dog around.” But neither brother ever expressed real remorse. The tapes became key evidence in court. (Doctor/patient confidentially guidelines are negated if threats are made—the brothers had told Ozeil they’d harm him if he told anyone about the confessions.)
In all of their therapy sessions, the young men never mentioned any abuse, physical or sexual, by their parents, but that’s the excuse defense attorneys would use in court. The boys cried crocodile tears as they testified. Lyle said his mother Kitty sexually abused him when he was eleven. Lyle also said he himself molested Erik when Erik was five. Erik claimed his dad had forced him to perform sex acts on him, and that as a child he would put cinnamon in his father’s coffee and tea because he heard it made semen taste better. The prosecution elicited testimony that the boys were blatant liars and sociopaths driven by hate and greed, spoiled brats who couldn’t wait for Daddy’s money.
The brothers’ first trial ended in a hung jury. Both were found guilty in the second trial. During the sentencing phase, the jury spared them the death penalty. Erik and Lyle are in separate prisons for the rest of their lives. According to an aunt, “In prison, they’re perceived as a couple of rich guys and people hate them.”
Clark Fogg’s Analysis:
We actually had our suspicions that Erik and Lyle were involved shortly after we arrived at the scene. Here’s why: the boys came in and told us they thought the mob was behind the murders. That seemed odd to us because so many shots had been fired; a hit doesn’t require that many shotgun blasts. The two also made several trips in and out of the house that night to gather personal items. Usually grieving family members don’t want to go into the scene of the crime right away. They seemed very cold and calculating.
Kitty and Jose Menendez met in a debate class in college. He was nineteen when he asked her to marry him.
Lyle (left) and Eric (right) spent three years in jail waiting for their trial to begin. Lyle lost most of his hair when he was in his teens and wore a hairpiece in court.
1993
Heidi Fleiss’ Hooker Ring Busted • Madam with Morals?
When Heidi Fleiss was just twelve years old, she was already showing signs of being quite the entrepreneur—she started a mini babysitting empire and recruited her girlfriends as employees. As an adult, she recruited girls again; only this time, as high-end hookers who serviced the rich and powerful.
Heidi had learned all about the call girl business from the best: Elizabeth Adams, better known as “Madam Alex.” Madam was looking for someone to take over her enterprise. After Fleiss turned a few tricks herself (Adams said Fleiss rated only about a 4 on a scale of 1 to 10), Heidi became the madam’s assistant, increasing profits by bringing prettier and younger girls into the stable.
Eventually Fleiss wanted a bigger share of the profits, and the twenty-five-year-old struck out on her own. She became a rival in what Adams called “The Whore Wa
rs.” The elder madam would bristle at the mere mention of Fleiss’s name, complaining, “She stole my business, my books, my girls, my guys.”
But Fleiss prevailed. Her stable had better-looking, younger women who were in demand, and she paid them more money: a sixty/forty split. (The typical rate was fifteen hundred dollars a night, sometimes ten thousand dollars for special girls, weekends, and overseas travel.) Heidi made millions, telling an interviewer once, “On my best day, I think it was ninety-four thousand dollars in cash. And that’s [for] me, just forty percent.”
There was one important trick Heidi failed to learn from her mentor: how to play nice with law enforcement. Madam Alex was an informant, passing along key client pillow talk to authorities. She lasted twenty-five years in the vice business before getting a slight slap on the wrist: probation. Fleiss only lasted a few years. She was cocky, telling an undercover police officer once, “In the history of this business, in one year, no one has ever been able to do what I do.” Fleiss boasted that her call girl ring catered to the top one percent of men in the entertainment, corporate, and political worlds.
Police couldn’t ignore her booming business any longer, and they set up a sting. Beverly Hills police detective Sammy Lee posed as a wealthy Japanese textile businessman who wanted to book some girls. He called Fleiss, who asked him what he wanted. “Basically nothing bizarre,” he said. “I don’t want to see a llama coming through the house.” They agreed on six thousand dollars, and Heidi sent over four hookers and some cocaine. The ladies arrived at Lee’s Beverly Hilton hotel room and got some surprise welcome gifts: bracelets—as in handcuffs. Fleiss was arrested the next day at her hillside home.
Beverly Hills Confidential : A Century of Stars, Scandals and Murders Page 12