Though he had become one of the most talented lawmen in the country, Jim Hunt Sr. always remembered a valuable lesson he’d learned from his father: to not bring his work home to his wife and three kids in Cambria Heights, Queens. James was a family man, and he kept his home life and his work life as separate as possible. Still, he did let his children know about the perils of drugs. He did let them know the difference between right and wrong. He was not overly strict, but he kept a close eye on his two sons, Jim Jr. and Brian. The Hunts also had a daughter, Colleen. She had strawberry-blond hair, was attractive, and people readily warmed to her. She would later become a very popular on-air reporter in the New York metropolitan area. She was tenacious and always seemed to ask the right questions.
There was one time, Jim Hunt Jr. remembers, when he and some friends had gotten very drunk on cheap wine called Boone’s Farm. When Jim stumbled in that evening, his father was there. All he did was make sure his son got to bed and stayed put. The following day, however, Jim Sr. bought a whole case of Boone’s Farm and put it in the basement. He told his sixteen-year-old son he could go in the basement with his friends and drink all the wine he wanted to, drink until his heart’s content. He said, “If you’ve gotta drink like that, do it at home. I don’t want you drinking and getting drunk on the street like some forgotten bum. You get your friends and you drink here.” He learned a good lesson about drinking excessively.
Like his father, Jim Hunt Jr. excelled at sports. He was a natural-born athlete, particularly well coordinated, had a thin, muscular physique that responded well to all types of sports, including boxing. James Sr. had taught his son the rudiments of fighting early on. He told him where to place his feet, how to throw a left, and how to throw a right with maximum effect. He also, perhaps more importantly, taught him how to avoid a punch by moving his head.
Several times, at a local nightclub Jim hung out at—Dizzy Duncan’s in New Jersey—there were fights and brawls. Inevitably, Jim got involved in these altercations and broke them up, pulled combatants apart. Before he knew it, he was offered a job as a bouncer. The money was good, his friends were there, and he had access to girls…lots of girls. What made Jim stand out was that he was always cool under pressure, that his head seemed to rise above the fray. He was particularly good at talking guys out of fighting one another, though if need be, he was just as adept at knocking out people who wouldn’t listen to reason. Jim Hunt was about reasoning—not brawling.
As weeks and months went by, still living at home, Jim began to think seriously about a career other than as a bouncer; he couldn’t help but think of law enforcement. After all, his grandfather and father, as well as uncles and cousins, were all cops who were highly respected and honored by their friends and colleagues. The more Jim thought about law enforcement, his getting between the bad guys and the innocents, the more the job appealed to him. He thought about what branch of law enforcement he would join, and like his grandfather, cousins, brother, and uncles, he decided on the NYPD. He knew, too, in the NYPD, he would have good health benefits and an excellent pension plan. It was no secret that Jim was particularly bright and knew the ways of the street well. He felt that in due time he’d be giving orders instead of taking them, that he’d make sergeant, lieutenant, and captain. At that juncture in his life, Jim had no desire to get married or have a family. He saw married life as something that was not, at that point, for him.
Jim Hunt went and spoke to his father and his dad thought Jim’s turning to law enforcement was an excellent idea. Jim applied to the New York Police Department, took the physical, and began the six-month course at the New York Police Academy on East Twentieth Street, looking forward to the prospect of serious police work in the great city of New York. To Jim, New York was the heart and soul of the world and he looked forward to protecting society from its degenerates, miscreants, and criminals. On his way to the Academy, as Jim read about different crimes in the newspapers, he was appalled at how women and children were put upon, beaten and battered and raped. This was during the height of the drug epidemic plaguing the United States and street crimes were off the charts.
Jim excelled at the firing range. He became a crack shot. He knew the .38 revolver the police department issued was a tool of his trade, a tool that could save his life, his partner’s life…an innocent’s life. Every week, he spent extra hours at the pistol range, perfecting his shooting prowess. When, toward the end of the course, Jim was asked where he’d like to be placed, he purposely picked one of the toughest known precincts in all of New York City—the Thirty-fourth Precinct in Washington Heights. Jim was not about to go through the motions. He wanted to be in the epicenter of where crime was happening on a large scale, to be in the action. When he started at the Thirty-fourth Precinct, he was assigned to walk a beat, precisely what he had wanted.
With his fair skin and red hair, Jim Hunt stuck out in Harlem like a carrot in a cabbage patch. He had a pleasant baby face, a warm, beguiling smile, and he quickly made acquaintances and friends with shop owners and residents on his beat. Jim knew good police work was, to a large degree, about having your ear to the ground, both eyes wide open, having informants. He let the word be passed all along his beat that he would welcome information about crimes and keep the source a secret. Like this, little by little, Jim heard about robberies, assaults, drug deals, murders, and unspeakable sex crimes. He began to shine. As well as being clever, easy to talk to, easy to warm to, Jim Hunt was fearless. Often, he’d make an arrest by himself without a second thought. He had a gun. He knew how to use it well. And he was very good with his hands. Yet if he needed backup, he’d call for it. He knew a good partner was worth his weight in gold.
As much as Jim liked police work at the NYPD, he came to realize that his opportunities for promotion were inherently limited at the NYPD. Jim began thinking of leaving the force for federal law enforcement. He heard through family that there were positions open in the Secret Service. He went to their offices at One World Trade Center, took the exams, and passed with flying colors. Next he had to be interviewed by a senior Secret Service agent. These interviews were to establish if any given individual was adequately qualified to be in the Secret Service; that is, capable of protecting the president and other political luminaries of the United States. A senior agent named Jack Sullivan interviewed him and said, “Jim, I like everything about you. You did great on the test. You’re the kind of guy we’re looking for, but I don’t know if you’ll like the job. I don’t know if we are what you’re looking for.”
This caught Jim off guard. “Why is that?” he asked.
“Jim, what we do is not hands-on. I’m telling you this as a friend, as though you were family—what we do is all about waiting, watching. What I think you’re used to, what I think you want, is to be in the action, to be out there making arrests, chasing down bad guys, running over rooftops.”
Jim Hunt smiled. “Well,” he said, “you’re right.”
“Well, Jim, that’s not what we do,” Jack repeated. Jim Hunt thanked him and the two men soon parted. As Jim made his way down the elevators, his mind went toward the DEA, his father’s home turf.
Jim Hunt Jr. was soon enrolled in the four-month course given by the Drug Enforcement Administration at Quantico, Virginia. His class trained alongside the new class of the FBI. The DEA and the FBI were sister agencies. Though they were supposed to be working harmoniously, hand in hand, they were often at odds with one another, competing to see who could piss the farthest.
Though Jim was only twenty-six years old, he was serious beyond his years. Jim knew the job was about life and death, but that did not distract or dismay him in the least. He concerned himself with doing the job well. At the DEA Academy at Quantico, there were plaques to commemorate agents killed in the line of duty. These men were thought of as heroes, but to Jim they were heroes and more—they were good, decent family men who had been struck down and killed before their time, for all the wrong reasons. Jim was a natural loner. He had come to rely on himself, his own resources—he was brought up that way. His father had taught him to deal with life’s twists and turns with his own two hands; he taught him to think on his feet.
Jim was anxious to get out of the Academy and hit the streets. He had no idea where he’d be assigned, for the DEA had offices in pretty much every major city in the world, but he hoped to be assigned to New York. He still viewed the Big Apple as the heartbeat of the world—its tarnished soul.
After Jim had finished his classwork, his wish was granted when he was assigned to New York. He immediately began working out of the DEA’s office at 555 West Fifty-seventh Street, just off Eleventh Avenue. It was a large white office building with a car dealership on the ground floor, innocuous. The DEA occupied just three floors in the mostly commercial office building, but from these three floors, they were fighting a multitude of battles in the war on drugs. Here, strategies were put together; here, groups were assigned to fight on different fronts.
Jim Hunt took to the DEA like a duck to water. When he first arrived, he was assigned to Group 33. Composed of handpicked, serious, seasoned DEA agents, Group 33 had seen and done it all—it was the place to be. They were on the front lines, in the trenches, in the war on drugs, the best of the best that the DEA had. These were dedicated, highly motivated men and women who believed in their hearts that drugs were the undoing of society—an evil tantamount to the plague. Of all the different groups in all the different DEA offices in all the world, Group 33 was by far the most successful. They moved at two hundred miles an hour. Ran on octane fuel. They had a single purpose in mind, and they had become particularly good at carrying it out.
It was no secret who Jim’s father was and Jim was greeted warmly. At this juncture, his father was literally a hero in the DEA, a legend within the agency. Jim had some big shoes to fill, but that never entered his mind. He was not the kind of man who would compete with his own father. He would do his best and let the chips fall where they may. Jim Hunt was particularly suited, however, to be in the DEA. He was street-smart, quick-witted, personable, and genuinely tough. He was also a consummate actor.
One of Jim Hunt’s first cases was an outgrowth of the infamous Pizza Connection case. The original case involved hundreds of players, all of whom were mafiosi, the majority of them hailing from Sicily. From the years 1975 to 1984, the Sicilians cleverly, diabolically, brought some $1.6 billion worth of heroin into the United States. Always shrewd, always audacious and deadly, taking advantage of whatever situation presented itself, they began selling heroin across the length and breadth of the United States. Many of the players, coincidentally, owned pizza places; thus the operation became known as the Pizza Connection case. One of the busiest locations was Al Dentes Pizza in Forest Hills, Queens. Here you could get a slice or a Sicilian piece of pizza, veal parmigiana and meatball heroes, calzones and zeppolis, and amazingly pure Turkish heroin.
Through the ingenious, clever use of wiretaps, surveillance, infiltration, and informants, the DEA, with the help of local police jurisdictions and the FBI, put together a monumental, airtight case that would end up with eighteen out of the twenty-two defendants convicted. These were no small, would-be mafiosi. There were major players involved, cunning Mafia superstars, including family heads Gaetano Badalamenti and Domenico Lo Galbo. One of the reasons the prosecutors managed to get so many convictions was that they turned the boss of bosses, the Caruso of the Mafia—Tommaso Buscetta. He was, by far, the most important mafioso to ever become an informer. He knew more about the intimate workings of the Mafia than most five bosses put together. Having someone of his stature and importance, with the amount of knowledge regarding the inner workings of the Mafia, was a groundbreaking event; it would teach prosecutors a very good lesson. They came to know that if they could manage to get the heads and bosses of any given family to talk, they (the prosecutors) could bring down the whole house of cards.
The case that grew from this, the Pizza II case, opened Jim’s eyes to the workings of the Mafia and how dedicated and diabolical his adversaries were. He came away from it with a sense of satisfaction; that he had accomplished something important. Had the heroin the DEA intercepted made it to the street, thousands of lives would have been marginalized, squandered, lost. Little did Jim Hunt know that he would soon be up against an adversary, a monster of the night, far more evil than any of the mafiosi associated with the Pizza Connection case. There were dark skies, thunder, and lightning just over the horizon swiftly moving toward Jim Hunt.