Even more surprisingly, Egan claims that last year, when relations between the U.S. and North Korea appeared to have reached yet another impasse, he counselled the North Koreans to be more demonstrative. “I said, ‘I think you have to bring it up to another level,’ ” he told me. “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.”

Over the years, Egan claims to have suggested some even more outlandish gambits. At some point in the mid-nineties, he says, he proposed that North Korea release American P.O.W.s to Iraq in exchange for oil; Iraq, which was at the time under the rule of Saddam Hussein, would then gain favor with the United States by releasing the Americans. In the interest of establishing a relationship with Iraq, Egan took the Iraqi Ambassador Nizar Hamdoun and his wife to a Giants game. A photograph on the wall of Cubby’s shows the couple in the back seat of a limo, next to a grinning Egan. The prisoner-release plan never came to anything, but Egan, in his office at Cubby’s, keeps a letter written in Arabic on official-looking stationery. “This is a letter from Saddam Hussein to me, thanking me for my help and my ideas,” Egan, who never had the letter translated, told me. In fact, the letter is from a lesser official, thanking Egan for his hospitality at the Giants game. Egan also claims that he once proposed a plan whereby the Koreans would sell their nuclear weapons to the U.S., achieving denuclearization and economic recovery in the same stroke. The Americans, he says, rejected the idea. (Last year, an article in Newsweek described such a proposal, citing Egan.)

Although the name Bobby Egan is largely unfamiliar to those in higher diplomatic circles—Christopher Hill, through a spokesperson, said that he had “never heard of Mr. Egan”—there is one senior official who does have some knowledge of him: Charles L. (Jack) Pritchard, who was the director of Asian affairs for the National Security Council under Bill Clinton and, between 2001 and 2003, served as a special envoy for negotiations with North Korea. While Pritchard was in the Clinton Administration, he went to Cubby’s to meet with Egan, but he has nothing good to say about him. “Ten years ago, I did go to his restaurant, based upon information that he said he had,” Pritchard told me, adding that the information concerned the possibility of P.O.W.s being held in North Korea. “I checked it out, and I decided it probably was not as advertised.” Pritchard dismissed Egan’s claims of having influence in security matters: “He has made no contributions, no positive suggestions, as far as I can tell.” He added that he stopped taking calls from Egan after he discovered that Egan was taping their conversations. “I disassociated myself with him, and I haven’t missed him a single day,” Pritchard said. Egan said that he made the tapes for his own protection. “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.”

Minister Kim, whom I called after observing the barbecue summit at Cubby’s, confirmed that Egan has a relationship with North Korea. “He has been interested in improving the relations between the two countries in the past, and he would like to help with the provision of humanitarian assistance, like medicines, for the D.P.R.K.,” Kim said. “He’s a friend of the D.P.R.K., especially those people who receive the humanitarian assistance from those organizations.” In a follow-up call, however, Minister Kim said that Egan had never proposed an oil-for-prisoners deal with Iraq or a nukes-for-cash deal with the U.S. He also said that the idea for North Korea’s recent nuclear test did not originate in Hackensack.

When I passed Kim’s comments on to Egan, he seemed momentarily deflated, then resigned. “That’s going to be their line, and that’s O.K.,” he said. “That’s their right to say what they want, and I can understand their position. Maybe it’s because, right now, the Koreans are in a position to move forward with our government. It is difficult, I guess, for a country to admit to something like this. They can discount it if they like, but I know different.”

It has been a few years since Egan was last in North Korea, he says, and he is eager to go back. “Why do I do this?” he asked me one day. “Why did Mozart compose music? This is what I do best, and it’s what I enjoy. I mean, I run a great restaurant, but this is what I do. And I have an overwhelming desire to get involved.” He also has personal reasons for wanting to get back into action: he has been going through a tough time emotionally since separating from Lilia Mani, he says, and he wants something to take his mind off things. He also misses Han. “The only characteristic I have that the Koreans don’t have is that I get emotionally attached to people,” he said. “I can take aim, I can break a bone, a nose, a jaw. I can take burning. I can take getting cut. Drop me on my head. I can take any of it. But emotional pain is something that would disqualify me from being a North Korean commander. It is something that is very, very difficult for me. I have a difficult time saying goodbye to people I really care about.”

There’s a lot about North Korean society that Egan admires, he said that afternoon as he drove me into Manhattan. (He pays the toll on the George Washington Bridge in cash rather than using an E-Z Pass; he says he doesn’t want anyone to know how many trips he has made back and forth, should the American authorities ever decide that he is too much of a liability and try to build a case against him for conspiring with the enemy.) “This is what I like—the North Koreans are very disciplined, and I like discipline,” he said. “I think that is what is lacking in this country. They are a very hardworking people, and they are very family-oriented. And they have a better take on a man’s role and a woman’s role than we do. I think a lot of women in this country are trying to be men, and I think that could be the downfall of the family structure of this society. But, in North Korea, the man goes to work and the woman raises the family. Now, I wouldn’t want that for my own daughters—I want them to be career girls, not dependent on any man but me—but in my own life I like the fact that a guy’s a guy and a girl’s a girl. You feel like a man when you are in North Korea. And, security-wise, it is a safer nation to live in. You are not going to have anybody break into your house, unless it comes from the top. And if it comes from the top you’re in trouble.”

In any case, Egan says, he prefers the American way of life, even if his way of life has been unlike that of any other American. “Certainly, I like where I am, or else I’d move there,” he told me as we drove along the turnpike, past warehouses and swamplands of bulrushes, his radar detector chirping like a demented sparrow. “I’d be somebody in North Korea. Maybe I’d be in a little position of power. I wouldn’t take all the power in the world—not to say that I would have much—but I would have more than I have here.

“But I wouldn’t give this up,” Egan went on. “I like it where I am. I am an American. I love my country. That is why I am doing all this. There are certain freedoms that I want, and choices I want to be able to make, that I wouldn’t be able to make there.” ♦