The Billionaire Boys’ Club

pp. 65 - 67

Ron Levin, one of the men the BBC rubbed out, was an eccentric, lying thief. He boasted of his dishonesties (often answering the question, ‘What do you do?’, by claiming ‘I’m a thief.’) He screamed at waiters in restaurants, was ashamed of his respectable, but not glamorous Jewish roots, and made up stories of different origins, “including one that had him actually a Rothschild and the heir to various fortunes.” He also “relied on props to impress people, spending thousands of dollars a month on clothes, always leasing the right cars, and maintaining a daily housekeeper who stayed on with Levin even after he stung her for nearly twenty-five thousand dollars in a Rolls-Royce deal that went awry. Embarrassed about his lack of education Levin sometimes claimed to have graduated from Harvard University or to have gotten a law degree.” “In the Beverly Hills circles in which Levin liked to run, interesting fictional origins were considered far superior to boring factual ones.” He also sued people all the time for largely imaginary offenses.