General Category > Hackensack Discussion

Cubby's: The Hackensack-Pyongyang Connection

(1/5) > >>

Editor:
The Hackensack-Pyongyang Connection

The New Yorker has a truly mind-boggling story in this week’s issue (full article), a story so bizarre we could hardly believe it, even though we're familiar with the subject. Bobby Egan, the owner of an unremarkable Hackensack meatery named Cubby’s, has become an unofficial liaison with the North Korean government. We expected the piece to be pretty lighthearted, the tale of an unwitting dupe doing PR for Kim Jong Il as if he were the Mayor of West New York. The truth is far weirder, and more chilling: In fact, Egan presents himself as an adviser to the North Koreans on high matters of state.

The brilliance of the article is how it changes depth without calling out to the reader what’s going on. Some parts are just laugh-out-loud inappropriate (“[former National Security Adviser Charles] Pritchard can kiss my big fat uneducated ass,’ he said. ‘The North Koreans are just knock-around guys who need a little insight into what we are really about. They need to know what the Bobby Egans are about, not the intellectuals in Washington.’”) Other parts are actually shocking, such as Egan’s description of his advice to Pyongyang about nuclear weapons:

    “I said, ‘Forget all this war rhetoric and all this crap. Don’t blow up a plane, don’t send another submarine to South Korea—don’t do any of that stupid stuff.’ ” Instead, he suggested, the North Koreans should show the Americans exactly what they had. And, in his telling, they listened. “I said, ‘You have them, right? Maybe you should test one. Maybe they have to see it.’ Four or five months later, the Koreans did that nuclear test. I called the Embassy that morning and said, ‘Congratulations, you are in the nuclear club now, boys.’ They were all happy and stuff. I said, ‘Watch the ball start rolling now.’ And it did.”

The article makes you wonder if, in the first Superman movie, Lex Luthor didn’t have the right idea in launching a nuclear missile at Hackensack. At the very least, we are never eating steak at Cubby’s again.

(source for the above summary/opinion)

Our Man in Pyongyang [New Yorker]

Listen to an NPR story about Bobby Egan from 12/2006.

just watching:
That New Yorker article is a pretty comprehensive piece on Egan, although it barely touches on his feud with the Hackensack Police. And how connected people in Hackensack have boycotted his store for over 10 years, and told others not to eat there. And how a Police Captain even opened a competing store up the street called the "Dog House Grill", which went out of business. 

Note also that the New York Times article CORRECTLY mentions that the review of the video-tape proved CONCLUSIVELY that Egan never made the racial slurs. That was a bombshell, and it made big press at the time. Who do you think persuaded the muggers to accuse Egan of launching racial slurs at them while they were ordering? I better not make a suggestion, or it will be edited out of this posting.  It was known around Hackensack at the time that Egan (who lives in a high-rise condo on Overlook Ave) wanted to run for a city council position, which is exactly why people in power were trying to discredit him.

So who's the real menace, Egan or those who have been harassing him.  I vividly recall how he posted a huge POW banner for so many years, and there is not a doubt in my mind that he is a patriotic American.  I am glad he is unofficially representing the interests of the American people, and bonding with the North Koreans.

The New Yorker article drew a comparison between Egan and Robert DeNiro. But I have a better match. Who's Egan? --- he's POW-advocate John Rambo but WITHOUT a machine gun. Just like Rambo, he's fed up with "the system", fed up with being back-stabbed, fed up with being harassed by people in power, and 100% patriotic. That's exactly what he is. I totally see his perspective.

THIS GUY IS A TRUE HERO, AND I AM PROUD TO SAY THAT I EAT AT EGAN'S. And I don't eat there enough, really. I plan to eat there more now that I know what he is doing for the interests of our country.

Editor:
The Axis of Hackensack: Meet Kim Jong-il's Best Friend in Jersey

NJ restaurateur moonlights as unofficial diplomat

just watching:
No mention of Egan during tonite's CNN report on North Korea. 

However, let's look at the results.  The Bush administration recently removed North Korea from the list of countries that sponsor terrorism.  Some of us appreciate what Egan has helped to accomplish behind the scenes.  Keep up the good work, Bobby.  And keep those ribs' coming.

Editor:
(Thanks Homer)

Strutting With Some Barbecue Diplomacy
A new book, Eating With the Enemy: How I Waged Peace With North Korea From My BBQ Shack in Hackensack, is a juicy read.

Posted March 17, 2010 by Erin De Jesus


Bobby Egan, center, with North Korean diplomats at his restaurant in 2006.
Courtesy of Robert Egan.

If it seems unlikely that a delegation of North Korean diplomats once attended a Nets game and received a shout-out from the arena announcer at halftime, well, it was just a warmup in the even more improbable but equally real tale of Bobby Egan, long-time Hackensack restaurateur and self-appointed liaison to the D.P.R.K—the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, they of George W. Bush’s “axis of evil.”

In his funny, eye-opening, and compulsively readable new book (out April 27), Eating With the Enemy: How I Waged Peace With North Korea From My BBQ Shack in Hackensack (St. Martins, $25.99), Egan (and writer Kurt Pitzer) explain how the [censored]y roofer’s son from the toughest streets of Fairfield grew up admiring wiseguys but found out he could never be made on account of being Italian only on his mother’s side. So despite some drug problems and scrapes with the law, he cleaned up his act and went legit. For the last 28 years, Egan has run Cubby’s BBQ, just down River Street from the Bergen County Courthouse.

Egan wanted to fight in the Vietnam War, but it ended when he was just 17. The plight of prisoners of war and the missing-in-action seized his attention. In the early ’80s he got in touch with the Vietnamese mission to the United Nations in New York, and slowly developed a relationship that eventually enabled him to broach the subject of POWs. He befriended Le Quang Khai, a Vietnamese diplomat doing graduate studies at Columbia University, and when Le defected, in 1992, he held his press conference at Cubby’s. Egan that same year testified before the Senate Select Committee on POW/MIA affairs.

The North Koreans evidently were paying attention, because the next year they contacted him—from their diplomatic mission to the U. N.—to set up a meeting. Frozen out from official contacts with Americans, they were looking for friendship, a liaison, in the hopes of eventually normalizing relations. Egan befriended them, inviting them to dinner at Cubby’s, taking them to the Nets game in 1993 and on hunting and fishing trips, eventually making several trips to Pyongyang and arranging the delivery of humanitarian aid. The North Korean people, he says, “are suffering well beyond what even I could have imagined.”

The FBI took an immediate interest in Egan’s relationship with the North Koreans. They buttonholed him early, letting him know they expected him to funnel information to them, which he did (with, he says, the knowledge of the North Koreans).Over the course of thirteen years, Egan became close with U.N. Ambassador Han Song Ryol, until Han returned to Pyongyang in 2006. “I never imagined writing a book,” he says, “until Bush labeled the North Koreans part of the ‘axis of evil,’ and I realized that so few Americans know how far the North Koreans went to normalize relations with us. I want people to understand these are human beings.”

Navigation

[0] Message Index

[#] Next page