Early Monday morning, Rodney P. Hunt’s home was broken into.
This normally would not be considered a noteworthy event outside of Hunt’s family and friends — burglaries happen every day in Arlington and every minute around the country.
Hunt’s house, however, was third-priciest home in the D.C. area as of May 2012. Located on Chain Bridge Road near the border with McLean, the 23,000 square foot home has an indoor basketball court, two-lane bowling alley, 15-car garage and sits on a cliff over the Potomac River. It was featured in 2010 on MTV Teen Cribs with Hunt’s son, Bradley.
Hunt is the former president and CEO of RS Information Systems, which he said he sold for $1.2 billion. He woke up to the sound of shattered glass at 4:45 a.m. — several windows in his entryway were broken — and went downstairs to find a man in his foyer and a woman he recognized sitting in the passenger seat of a black Nissan Altima in his gated driveway.
“It was pretty scary,” Hunt said as he, a police officer, a detective and an ARLnow.com reporter walked through his Mediterranean-style mansion. “I ran after the guy thinking I was a police officer. I wish I had called Arlington police when it happened.”
Hunt would call the police just after noon on Monday. The woman in the car, he said, was an assistant he saw the day before. Her name is Stacy, but she went by “Princess,” and she had asked him for a paycheck two days early — a request he refused to grant. He wasn’t sure what, if anything, was stolen, but said it looked like the burglars got away with some crystal ware.
Wearing a red “Ride or Die” T-shirt, he took ARLnow.com on an impromtu tour of his expansive home — to the basketball court he built for his son, Bradley (who also raps as Kid Named Breezy); the bowling alley he built and named after his father who once bowled a perfect game; the special garage-within-a-garage where he keeps the Nissan Maxima his wife bought him before she was killed by a drunk driver in 1993.
He says the house has fireplaces that were once owned by John F. Kennedy and Winston Churchill.
After it was featured on MTV, the house has gained notoriety for less positive reasons. It was scheduled to be sold at auction in September 2012 when the Washington Post reported Hunt owed Bank of America almost $10 million, but it was taken off the auction block after Hunt convinced the bank he could pay. It was back on the foreclosure market in early 2013, according to Washington Exec, but Hunt is still listed as the property’s owner, according to Arlington County’s property database.
Despite the coverage the home has received, Hunt said it’s the first time it has been broken into since he bought the property in 2003. Asked whether he was more surprised that the house was broken into, or whether it’s the first time it had been broken into, Hunt said it was an easy question.
“That it was broken into at all,” he said, launching into a description of the estate’s extensive security features.
The property has two gates, an elaborate security and alarm system — which Hunt said he forgot to turn on after returning late from watching basketball at a sports bar Sunday night — and has a steep hill entrance to the property.
“That’s just crazy,” he said of the boldness of the break-in.