Bobby Egan
You can't open a paper or visit an internet site without reading the curious tale of Robert Egan. This story is so amazing, how a high school drop out who owns a barbecue in Hackensack becomes a go to guy in international diplomatic relations between the United States and North Korea. Stranger than fiction. But you listen to the guy and you can understand how he has been able to accomplish what he has in establishing a conduit to a secret and dictatorial regime. I think that he is an impressive guy.
Bobby Egan was a one time roofer, a guy with a little drug problem, a guy who knew his way around mobsters, who decided to help some Vietnam vet friends out in the 1980's with the POW/MIA issue. He took it upon himself to fly to communist vietnam and parley with the regime. Guy opens a barbecue joint in Hackensack and befriends some North Koreans and becomes a respected intermediary, going on junkets courtesy of the Clinton White House, presumably with Bill Richardson.
I first heard Egan interviewed the day after the late autocrat's death on Monday. He was not an apologist for the regime whatsoever but offered some unique perspective on the roots of their paranoia. A 5000 year old country split apart by the United States in the last hundred years, how do you think that they would react, he asks? But he is quick to point out that it is an awful place where people are struggling.
He wrote a book last year, “Eating With the Enemy: How I Waged Peace With North Korea From My BBQ Shack in Hackensack." HBO optioned it, Gandolfini and DeNiro are involved. Read this link and this link, both with the same curious title, Barbecue Diplomacy. God bless the brisketmakers...
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