Money Crimes with Nicole Lapin - Billionaire Boys Club

Episode Date: August 1, 2026

In 1983, a group of young men from wealthy LA families built a social club, a Ponzi scheme, and a homemade philosophy that told them the rules didn't apply, and called it the Billionaire Boys Club. In the first part of our 3-part series, Katie Ring traces the origins of Joe Hunt: the brilliant outsider who faked his entire resume, conned his way into Beverly Hills society, and invented a worldview that would eventually justify murder.Follow America's Most Infamous Crimes to hear the rest of the story: https://pod.link/1882861002If you’re new here, don’t forget to follow Scams, Money, & Murder to never miss a case! To hear episodes ad-free, subscribe to Crime House+. Join at crimehouseplus.com or if you’re listening on Apple Podcasts, tap “Try Free” at the top of this show’s page. Scams, Money, & Murder is a Crime House Original Podcast, powered by PAVE Studios.🎧 Need More to Binge? Listen to other Crime House Originals Clues, Crimes Of…, Crime House 24/7, Serial Killers & Murderous Minds, Murder True Crime Stories, and more wherever you get your podcasts!Follow me on SocialInstagram: @CrimehouseTikTok: @CrimehouseFacebook: @crimehousestudiosX: @crimehousemediaYouTube: @crimehousestudios

Hi listeners, it's Vanessa. Before today's episode, I want to tell you about another show I think you'll love. Crime House and A&E are teaming up on the podcast version of the famous true crime series, The First 48. Each week, Carter Roy takes you inside a landmark homicide case, the interrogations, the dead ends, and the breakthroughs in the critical first 48 hours. Listen to and follow the First 48 every Thursday on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music, or wherever you listen to podcasts. This is Crime House.

In the early 1980s, a group of young men in Los Angeles set out to get rich quick and prove they were smarter than everyone around them. They wore Armani suits, drove BMWs, ate at exclusive restaurants, and partied with models. They called themselves an investment club, and they promised their investors that they'd found a full-proof way to get rich. But it was all a facade. At the center of it was a brilliant.

an awkward young man named Joe Hunt, who'd grown up on the wrong side of town, watching the rich kids and waiting for his turn. He built a culture of exclusion and developed a philosophy that told him and his friends that they could rewrite right and wrong to suit their own ambitions. And his followers were all in right up until two men ended up dead. Every crime tells a story about the people involved, the system that tried to stop it, and the nation that couldn't look away. Some cases are so shocking, deeply woven into who we are that decades later, we're still asking, how did this happen? I'm Katie Ring, and this is America's Most Infamous Crimes. Every Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday,

I'll take you deep into cases that have a lasting imprint on society and still on us today. Crimehouse exists because of listeners like you. Want even more, join Crimehouse Plus, and get all three parts of each week's America's most infamous crime stories dropped out once every Monday and ad-free. You also get the rest of the Crime House lineup ad-free and early and exclusive bonus episodes. To join, go to Crimehouseplus.com or if you listen on Apple Podcasts, tap try free at the top of the America's most

infamous crime show page. This is the first of our three-episode series on Joe Hunt and the billionaire boys club, a social club and investment scheme that conned wealthy Angelinos out of millions of dollars in the early 1980s and ended in the deaths of two men.

Today I'll introduce you to the young man who started it all, the friends who believed in him, and the homemade philosophy that told them the rules didn't apply. Los Angeles has always been a city for Dreamers. For more than a century, people have arrived with a suitcase and hope of making it big. But the young men in this story weren't transplants. They were homegrown.

The children of Beverly Hills and the Hollywood Hills, raised in manicured houses by parents who gave them everything. Two of them were Dean Carney and Ben Dosty. In the spring of 1980, Dean was 20 and Ben was 19, and they were students at UCLA. They'd known each other for years ever since their days at the Harvard School, but not the university. The Harvard School was an elite private prep school for boys tucked at the mouth of Coldwater Canyon. Today, it's known as Harvard Westlake, and it has educated the children of some of the most powerful families in the city. Dean and Ben fit right in with that kind of scene.

Dean especially had a gift for that world. At the Harvard school, he'd driven a white Camero, held court in the senior parking lot and earned himself a nickname that says everything about how he wanted to be seen. The other boys called him Rothschild's cousin, meaning there was an old world heir about him, a sense that he came from something refined and European, and Dean leaned into it. He joined the debate team not because he loved arguing, but because he wanted to be a lawyer and he thought a good attorney needed to know how to speak. Dean believed that clothes and material possessions made the man, but he and Ben's father, didn't have it so easy. Dean's father had immigrated from Israel where he'd fought in the war for

independence, and Ben's dad came from a prominent intellectual family in Albania that lost nearly everything when the country's old order collapsed during World War II. These were men who'd built new lives out of almost nothing. By contrast, their sons had never had to build anything at all, and that was a truth Dean and Ben didn't want to confront. They were standing at the edge of adulthood, about to graduate, and for the first time, it was dawning on them that the good life wasn't guaranteed. Their parents were comfortable, but not rich enough to take care of them forever. Sooner or later, they'd have to provide for themselves, and neither of them had any idea how. But then one day in Westwood Village, the college neighborhood between UCLA and Beverly

Hills, they ran into an old classmate. His name was Joe Gamski. To understand why that chance meeting mattered so much, you have to understand where Joe came from, because it defined everything that would come next. Joe was born on Halloween, 1959, the middle of three children in a Midwestern family that started out comfortably middle class. His dad, Larry Gambsky, was a pharmaceutical salesman with a good income and big ideas that never fully panned out. He bought a franchise to sell stainless steel cookware and made his wife, Kathy, do the actual door-to-door selling. Then he decided the family should move to California, chasing sunshine and even bigger dreams. The grand plan to build a cookware empire out west collapsed almost immediately.

Larry lost his ambition, the savings ran out, and the family was on the precipice of financial ruin. At one point, Larry took a $60 a week job at a place called the American Institute of Hypnosis. And it later came out, he'd quietly spent the last of an inheritance on two days of hypnosis therapy. for himself. Joe grew up watching a charismatic man chase one spectacular, doomed scheme after another, and Larry wasn't exactly the warm and cuddly type. He didn't even let his kids call him dad. Instead, he insisted they call him Larry and once told them to think of him as their teacher, not their father. He spent all of his free time in the garage splurging on turning it into a workshop for his motorcycles, while the kids wore clothes from thrift shops and did their homework at a

he'd banged together out of plywood. When 8-year-old Joe took a paper route, Larry started confiscating his earnings, saying that he needed the money. Thankfully, Joe's mom, Kathy, was a lot more nurturing. She was a devoted woman from a poor Wisconsin farming family who thought of her kids as a house full of future presidents.

When school tests classified them as gifted, she wasn't surprised, and Kathy enrolled them in a special association for advanced kids. And despite everything he'd gone on to do, Joe really was exceptional. He almost never cried, he rarely got angry, and he could entertain himself for hours. By sixth grade, he was so far ahead that his school had him spend part of each day tutoring first graders and helping in the front office, just to keep him from being bored. So Kathy did what desperate, ambitious parents do. When a scholarship became available at the Harvard School for gifted kids who couldn't afford the tuition, she got Joe in.

And while the intentions behind it were good, that decision may not have been the best for him in the long term. The Harvard School was a brutal place to be poor. The students judged each other by their clothes, their parents, their addresses, and their prospects. And Joe failed on every count. While classmates were dropped off in luxury cars, driven by household staff, Joe rode four miles to school on an ordinary bike. In stark contrast to their designer clothes, Joe wore Levi's that he'd outgrown by inches. and his personal appearance was just as messy. Joe's hair was long and unruly,

not because it was fashionable, but because his dad wouldn't pay for haircuts. So even though Joe was bright and handsome, he carried himself with a painful self-consciousness, and his lack of money was the biggest stigma of all. For years, Joe Gamski was the outsider, nose pressed to the glass, watching a world of effortless privilege that was never going to let him in.

To escape his shame, he found a couple of outlets. The first one was diving. An Olympic diver took pity on the only kid who'd signed up for the class and coached him one-on-one. The other and the one that shaped him was debate. The Harvard school treated competitive debate almost like a religion, and Joe threw himself into it completely. It rewarded exactly what he was best at, compiling evidence, thinking on his feet, and taking apart an opponent's argument while making his own sound.

airtight. It also gave him a place to belong. Like when he was younger, Joe helped coach the younger debaters. One of them was a popular, good-looking classmate named Tom May. After high school, Joe went to USC thinking he'd become an accountant, and he seemed genuinely good at it. As a teenager, he took California's notoriously difficult CPA exam and passed it. The exam prep company he used was so impressed with it that they ran a newspaper ad with Joe's photo, calling him the youngest student they'd ever coached who'd passed. Joe took that story and ran with it. Over the years, he'd start saying he was actually the youngest person in California history to pass the exam, period. At USC, Joe also tasted something he'd never had, social success. He pledged a fraternity,

Kai Phi, which happened to be the least prestigious house on the row and had been gutted down to just nine members after a crackdown. But they needed leaders and Joe, who was serious, articulate, so and called himself Joseph Henry Gamski the third looked like exactly that. He told him he came from a wealthy family but that his strict father wanted him to make it on his own. The brothers bought it and in 1978 they made him present. And almost as soon as Joe had that power, he changed. He tried to rule that frat with an iron fist and freaked out at anyone who he didn't think took it seriously enough, which obviously didn't make him popular and it wasn't long before he got

pushed out. Joe Gamsky had shown his true colors, a gifted, wounded, ambitious young man who'd inherited his dad's talent for big visions and his instinct for control. But the Joe who turned up in Westwood that spring of 1980 was almost unrecognizable. He'd filled out, he was dressed in a nice suit, and he had a story. Hey, Ontario, come on down to BetmGM Casino and see what our newest exclusive, the Price's Right Fortune Pick has to offer. Don't miss out. Play exciting casino games based on the iconic game show only at

Betmgm. Check out how we've reimagined three of the show's iconic games like Plinko, Clifhanger, and the Big Wheel into fun casino game features. Don't forget to download the Benmgm Casino app for exclusive access and excitement on the Price's Right Fortune Pick. Pull up a seat and experience the Price's Right Fortune Pick only available at Betmgmgm Casino. BetMGM and GameSense remind you to play responsibly. 19 plus to wager. Ontario only. Please play responsibly.

If you have questions or concerns about your gambling or someone close to you, please contact Connects Ontario at 1866-531-2600 to speak to an advisor, free of charge. BetMGM operates pursuant to an operating agreement with Eye Gaming Ontario. The moment a body is found, the clock starts ticking. 48 hours. That's how long detectives have before the trail begins to go cold. From A&E and Crime House, this is the official podcast from the famous true crime series, The First 48.

Step inside the critical window, the interrogations, the dead ends, and the breakthroughs that crack a case wide open. I'm Carter Roy. Each week, I revisit a landmark homicide investigation. with the depth you know and immersive long-form storytelling built for your ears. Real detectives, real cases, real stakes. This is the first 48. New episodes every Thursday.

Listen to and follow the first 48 on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Joe Gamski told Dean and Ben that after high school, he'd gone to USC and graduated. early with distinction. He'd passed the CPA exam as the youngest person in state history, then tried corporate life, but it wasn't for him. So he'd struck out on his own trading commodities, raw economic materials like grain and metals and treasury bills that are bought and sold in fast, high-risk markets.

And according to Joe, he had cracked the code. He claimed he'd developed a method that let him limit his risk almost to zero while still pulling in huge profits. Now, anyone who knows markets will tell you that's impossible. But Dean and Ben weren't market experts. They were two young men looking for a shortcut, and here was a living proof that one existed, a guy, their own age, in an expensive suit,

talking about money like it was easy. Over the next few months, the three of them became inseparable. Anytime they went out, Joe footed the bill. He spent so much time at Dean's family home that the spare bed in Dean's room got a nickname Joe's bed. Dean's mom, Danny, adored him. She had Joe over for dinner two to three times a week and decided he was a great influence on her son. Dean started introducing Joe around campus as a genius, a phenom who was running his own brokerage, and Joe had a vision he loved to talk about, a brotherhood of brilliant young men who

didn't need the slow ladders of corporate America. It would be half social club, half investment fun. With Joe's gift for trading and Dean and Ben's connections to the city's richest families, it was easy to believe it would work. There was only one thing standing in the way. To get a venture like that off the ground, they needed money. And there was an easy place to find it, their parents. To raise serious capital, Joe decided he needed to be where the action was. So in the fall of 1980, he moved to Chicago, home of one of the world's biggest commodities exchanges, the Chicago Mercantile Exchange. He passed the licensing test that October and started trading in November. Within his first week, he was telling Dean and Ben his profits were already in the five figures.

When Joe came back to L.A. for the holidays, the three of them decided it was time to ask the Carnies and the Dosties for money. Ben's parents weren't ready to commit yet, but Dean's parents were happy to hear Joe out. Joe told the carnies he'd designed a virtually fail-safe investment, a system that wove together several positions at once to push risk almost to the point of non-existence. If that sounds complicated, that's the point. When someone you respect explains an intricate plan and asks if it makes sense, people don't want to admit they're lost. So they nod, and that's what the carnies did.

Dean's mom handed Joe $150,000 of her own money on the spot. And she didn't stop there. She brought in her wealthy friends who brought in their friends. who brought in their friends. A retired doctor from Toronto invested 100,000 and recruited two more Canadians for another 150. By the time Joe headed back to Chicago, he was carrying a trading account of somewhere around $700,000.

But those investors would never see that money again. Back in Chicago, Joe got a reputation as a bold, even reckless trader, someone who took huge risks on long-shot positions, and he decided it was time for a money. a new name. From now on, he wasn't Joe Gamski, he was Joe Hunt, which he didn't pull out of thin air. By then, Joe's dad, Larry, had started calling himself Ryan Hunt and pretended he was a doctor, and Joe was fully committed to his role as a trading prodigy. But the trades were going badly. The high-risk style that was supposed to make his investors rich was bleeding the account

dry. But instead of admitting it, Joe papered over the losses with confidence and kept insisting the big win was just around the corner. Meanwhile, he was still generous to a fault. He took Dean and Ben to dinner at the Beverly Hills Hilton when he was in L.A. and paid for a holiday trip to New York. When Dean and Ben asked him in early 1981 to help cover the lease on a Beverly Hills apartment, Joe said no problem. He'd send the money in March. But March came and went and the money never came. Dean and Ben kept calling, but eventually Joe's answering machine went silent. Then his phone was disconnected altogether. They were starting to panic, but in April, Joe finally surfaced with bad news.

He couldn't help after all. The money was gone. According to Joe, his account had ballooned to $14 million before a rival trader squeezed him out of his positions and wiped him out. Whether or not that story was true, and there was good reasons to doubt most of it, The bottom line was real. The money was gone. But Joe promised everyone it was just a temporary setback.

He'd make it all back and more. That was all his investors wanted to hear. Joe had never let them down before, but the compliance officials at the Chicago Mercantile Exchange weren't so trusting. At least one investor wanted to know where the money had gone, and that triggered an internal investigation. What it turned up was devastating.

Joe hadn't graduated early from USC. In fact, he hadn't graduated at all. He dropped out after the first semester of his sophomore year. Yes, he'd passed the CPA exam young, but he wasn't the youngest in state history, and he was never actually licensed. As for the trading statements, he'd been mailing to his investors, they were fakes.

Official-looking documents he'd produced on his computer to show profits that didn't exist. On top of all of that, he wasn't even registered to trade other people's money. When the exchange held a hearing, the verdict was unanimous. Guilty. They expelled Joe Hunt and barred him from ever reapplying, and one official made sure the decision was circulated to every commodities exchange in the country. Joe tried to work around having Ben Dosty physically stand in the trading pit

while he called in with instructions, but it didn't last. By October of 1982, Joe was back in L.A. He was around half a million dollars in debt with no license, a ruined trading career, and almost no prospects. By almost any measure, he'd failed completely. But that's not how Joe saw it. He told the Carnies his failure was actually a kind of affirmation. He said the lesson wasn't that his system didn't work. It was that a young man of his ability had to learn to win quietly, to disguise his size his

success rather than flaunt it. That way, they established powers couldn't gang up to destroy him. In other words, he'd been punished for being too good, and he told Dean and Ben he was finally ready to build the club they dreamed about. Joe even had a first real venture lined up, something legitimate or at least legitimate sounding. Through a friend of his father's, Joe had gotten connected to an inventor out in the desert who'd built a machine Joe described as maybe the most important new technology of the decade. Now, they just needed the money to invest in it. The pieces were in place.

Joe had the vision. Dean and Ben had the connections. All they needed now was a name and a way to make their friends believe. While Joe was living in Chicago, he and Ben had spent their evenings at the singles bars on Rush Street. One night, calling Dean from a place called the Bomb Bay Bicycle Club, they decided that's what they called their group, the BBC after the bar. Eventually, because the members were young men from wealthy families chasing easy fortunes, outsiders started calling it something else, the billionaire boys club. The nickname stuck. They held their first official meeting on March 18, 1983, at the condo

Joe and Dean shared. Around 30 young men showed up, old classmates from the Harvard school or from college. Joe and Dean had worked for days to get it right, because these were sophisticated guys and the worst thing would be for them to think that the BBC wasn't legit. Joe dressed in clothes Dean had helped him pick out. And then, drawing on every bit of the rhetorical skill he'd honed in debate club, he started talking. By one member's account, he went on for three hours. He opened cool, almost distant, telling the room the BBC might not be for all of them,

that the club could only use the very best, that it would rise or fall on the dedication of its members. It was the oldest trick in the book, Make Them One In. And this is where the billionaire boys club became something far stranger than a money scam. Because Joe wasn't just selling an investment. He was selling a worldview. He called it paradox philosophy. He and Dean had built it together over long talks on ski trips, on the beach, in the condo, and now Joe laid it out for the group. The heart of it was this. There are no absolute rules. Joe, argued that right and wrong aren't fixed. They're situational. He even pointed out that thou shall not kill gets suspended in self-defense or war. So the truly free person was the one who could

strip away guilt, taboo, and conscience, what he called internal impediments and simply do whatever best served his goal in the moment. He said the first step was streamlining consciousness, clearing out the inherited fears that hold people back. His motto for at all was a single line. Black is white, white is black, and all is shades of gray between. Joe had names for the two kinds of people in the world. First, there were Normies, ordinary people, the ones who sacrificed themselves to society's rules. The enlightened ones who'd freed themselves to act without conscience, he called shadings. There was a word Joe used over and over for the mindset he wanted, reconciled. A real shading was reconciled to his purpose.

He said people who weren't would never succeed at anything. Joe taught that normies were actually dangerous because they tried to infect everyone around them with their fears, even their own children. He told Dean that his own parents, Shalom and Danny, the same woman who'd fed Joe dinner three nights a week and had given him $150,000 were Normies. They meant well, but they were bad for Dean.

To make it concrete, Joe built an entire, entire mock corporate structure around the philosophy. Written in a manual, the members came to call the Blackbook. There was an elaborate cell system with ranks Joe gave invented names. A nexus led a cell, an axis led a group of cells, and so on and up the pyramid. The club's businesses were called shapes. At the very top, there was a governing council Joe called the Corps, where he said no decision could pass without overwhelming agreement,

and where every seat had to be filled by a shading. There was even a group called Paradox Court to settle internal disputes open only to shadings, who were told they could monitor each other freely because a true shading would never see scrutiny as a burden. And wouldn't you know it, there were exactly three shadings, Joe Hunt, Dean Carney, and Ben Dosty.

Joe insisted they present themselves to the membership as equals, three partners, no single box. Dean later explained that Joe knew people wouldn't want to join a club that was obviously run by one man. But behind the curtain, there was never any doubt who was in charge. When a member once challenged Joe on whether one of the club's corporate maneuvers was even legal and reminded him that the rule said that the Corps had to decide together, Joe snapped that as the chair of the Corps, he could decide for himself. That was the moment that member realized the truth.

The talk of three equals was a story, and Joe was the boss. To an outsider, it may have seemed pretty harmless. Just a bunch of privileged 20-somethings playing make-believe with edgy philosophy and org charts. But with Joe Hunt at the controls, it was much more dangerous than that. In the meantime, though, the club needed cash and the boys went fishing for investors. Two of their biggest early catches were Dave May and his identical twin Tom, who Joe had coached in Debate Club. On paper, the Mays were exactly the kind of name Joe craved.

They were the adopted heirs to the May Company department store fortune, but their solid pedigree hid a shakier reality. Their mother and adopted father had divorce, and the boy's futures weren't guaranteed. Tom had studied business at USC, but neither twin had excelled, and they'd recently sunk money into a struggling nightclub down in Dana Point. But when Joe came to tour that failing club,

he heaped praise on it and told a twin, they had exactly the kind of drive he wanted in the BBC. Dave May would later describe the appeal in his own words, that he didn't want to start at the bottom, that he wanted to impress his family, and that Joe had such a dramatic way of presenting things that he made you feel idiotic for not wanting to get involved. So the twins got involved.

Dave May put in $10,000 first, and then Joe did the thing that makes a scheme like this run. Less than a month later, sent Dave a check for $5,000 and called it profit. The thing is, that kind of growth isn't really possible in just a couple of weeks. In reality, Joe was running a classic Ponzi scheme. He took money from one pool of investors and paid it back to others as fake profits, which convinced everyone he was a genius and brought even more money in the door.

It worked like a charm. Dave May wrote a new check for $70,000. His brother Tom matched it with eight. money poured in. With it, the billionaire boys club built an image. They moved into an elegant high rise on Wilshire Boulevard called the Manning, which came with dormen, valet parking, and around-the-clock security guards. They signed a two-year lease worth more than $70,000 for a corner unit with ocean views. The boys also leased a suite of offices in the bank building on West 3rd Street presenting themselves as executives of a company called Eye Contact Advertising.

They drove a fleet of BMWs and a Jeep with a club's monogram on it. They threw rowdy black tie parties where the champagne got poured on people as often as it got drunk. And the lifestyle wasn't just for show. It was the key to the whole operation. A prospective investor didn't need to study a balance sheet. He just needed to see how the boys lived. The cars, the parties, the Ocean View condo all served as living proof that Joe's system worked. Membership came with the intoxicating feeling of being on the inside of something special,

and that feeling sold better than any numbers could. It was a closed loop. New money paid for the image, and the image brought in new money. There was just one catch. Almost none of it was backed by real returns. The whole operation relied on new investors' deposits, and to keep it going, Joe needed a much bigger fish. And in the spring of 1983, he found one.

His name was Ron Levin, a man who talked about a million dollars like it was loose change. Joe became convinced that Ron was the answer to all the club's problems, the investor who could keep the dream alive. What Joe didn't understand yet was that he had finally met someone who could out con the con man. At the end of each episode, I like to take a moment to answer any questions you may have about the case and share my thoughts, so make sure to comment below. A lot of people hear rich kids running an investment scam and just roll their eyes. But how does a group of intelligent young men actually end up believing in something like paradox philosophy?

The lengths people will go to feel a sense of belonging and superiority to others really blows my mind. This case is really so much more than a financial scam. What Joe built was basically a cult personality, and it followed the playbook almost exactly. You start with charisma and a sense of secret knowledge. Joe was the genius who'd cracked the code and being close to him made you special. Then you create an in-group and an out-group, the shadings versus the normies. So members feel like they're the enlightened few and everyone else is just sheep.

And then, crucially, you give people permission to ignore their own conscience and dress it up as freedom. That line, black is white, white is black, and all is shades of gray. that's not philosophy. That's a tool for switching off a part of your brain that says this is wrong. And these weren't stupid people. They were Ivy Track kids from good families. But intelligence doesn't protect you from manipulation or your own ego. Sometimes it makes you even more vulnerable because you're confident you'd never fall for anything like this. It's interesting that so many of them came from money, but we're panicking about not having enough. I think this is actually twofold. I feel like many kids who grow up with money can go two ways. Some just ride on what they are given. Others feel

a sense of insecurity and that they have to prove that they can make it on their own. In reality, I think it's a mix of both, and I think Joe really understood this. He told them that they were better than everyone else because they have money. Then he challenged them. You can take the easy route, or you can show your parents you can do this on your own. I do also think that they did have a fear that it might all slip away because they hadn't earned it themselves. And although their parents did, well, there were people around them who were much wealthier and could really live off their parents' money. But these are all destabilizing feelings, and Joe spoke to them directly.

He told them that they didn't have to grind their way up like their parents did. They were special, and they could leapfrog the whole system. For somebody terrified of falling out of the lifestyle they grew up in, that's an incredibly seductive promise. It wasn't really about greed for most of them, I think. It was about status and the fear of losing it. Joe lied about basically his entire resume. USC, the CPA license, the trading profits.

How did nobody check? I went to UC Santa Barbara. And if you are familiar with the school, you may know that has a reputation for being a party school. But I had a professor that said something that has stuck with me all these years. He said UCSB is one of the best universities because not only do you get a top-tier education, You also learn invaluable social skills. And he was right because business is almost all about who you know.

Joe was selling the people closest to him. He went through Dean, through Ben, through their families. When your own son brings home a friend and swears he's a genius, you don't treat him like a stranger off the street. That trust was already built in. That's a pattern you see again and again with con artists. They almost never cold call you. They come in through someone you already love and believe.

And once Danny Carney invested and started telling her friends, every new person figured the vetting had already been done by someone they trusted. And that's how $150,000 becomes $700,000 without anyone asking a single hard question. That and the fact that in the early 80s, you couldn't just pull up someone's records on your phone or computer in seconds. Verifying a story meant phone calls and paperwork that most people never bothered with. Thanks so much for joining me for this episode. To enhance your listening experience, join Crimehouse Plus and get all three parts of each week's America's most infamous crime stories dropped at once every Monday and ad-free. You also get the rest of the crimehouse lineup ad-free and early and exclusive bonus episodes.

To join, go to crimehouseplus.com or if you listen on Apple Podcasts, tap try free at the top of the America's Most Infamous Crime Show page. Come back tomorrow for our next episode on the billionaire boys club. Hi, listeners, it's Vanessa. Before today's episode, I want to tell you about another show I think you'll love. Crime House and A&E are teaming up on the podcast version of the famous true crime series, The First 48. Each week, Carter Roy takes you inside a landmark homicide case, the interrogations, the dead ends, and the breakthroughs in the critical first 48 hours. Listen to and follow the First 48 every Thursday on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music, or Word. wherever you listen to podcasts.