The Prep-School Ponzi Scheme That Ended in Murder

When trust fund babies pay for an "investment club" only to end up with murder charges

Joe Hunt was 13 years old and, by his own account, the “class idiot” when he arrived at the Harvard School in North Hollywood on a scholarship in 1972.

He was one of a handful of boys on a 23-acre campus whose own family couldn’t have covered the tuition his wealthier classmates paid as a matter of course.

By spring of 1983, those same classmates were signing over inheritance checks to him, now in their early twenties.

Clandestine meetings were held in Encino condominiums and Bel Air rentals describing a ‘commodities system’ that couldn’t lose.

Within a year, one man was missing and presumed dead, his body never recovered, and a second man had suffocated inside a locked steamer trunk during a kidnapping that prosecutors said Hunt organized with the missing man’s own son.

Hunt’s conviction for the first killing has never moved. No murder conviction from the second has survived.