Richard Perry/The New York TimesRobert Egan, in front of his barbecue restaurant in Hackensack, N.J., says he has played an unlikely role in diplomatic relations between the United States and North Korea.
In this 2010 photo, North Korea’s leader, Kim Jong-il, who died last weekend, applauds following a massive military parade celebrating the 65th anniversary of the communist nation’s ruling Workers’ Party in Pyongyang, North Korea.
HACKENSACK, N.J. – Diners were chewing on pulled pork and baby back ribs here at Cubby’s barbecue restaurant on Sunday night when the owner, Robert Egan, learned that the North Korean leader Kim Jong-il, had died on Saturday of a heart attack.
“I got 50 calls from the press, and I was in consultation with the North Koreans all night,” Mr. Egan said, sitting in a booth on Monday in the no-frills rib restaurant he has owned since 1982.
The ripple effects of Kim’s death extended from Russia to China to Washington and, most improbably, to this restaurant, whose regular clientele is working-class locals – not Koreans.
Mr. Egan, a plain-spoken man of Irish-Italian extraction, has traveled several times since 1994 to North Korea, an isolated dictatorship that rarely welcomes foreign visitors. On one trip, he was honored with a pin with the image of Kim’s father, Kim Il-sung, who died in 1994.
At the ceremony, Kim Jong-il was on the platform. Mr. Egan said this was the closest he ever came to meeting him. But he credited Kim Jong-il with personally approving his visits to North Korea. Overall, he gave the leader a mixed review.
He said American officials should seize upon the death as a diplomatic opportunity. Embassies should be opened. Trading partnerships should be explored.
“Now is the time, right now, to develop relations,” he said.
Mr. Egan ridiculed profiles of Kim Jong-il in the Western news media that rarely neglected to note the dictator’s taste for luxury.
The walls of his restaurant are covered with dozens of pictures of Mr. Egan posing with North Korean diplomats.
He explained how he made his North Korean connections after spending the 1980s trying to find American soldiers who went missing in the Vietnam and Korean Wars. He said he got to know Vietnamese diplomats, who eventually introduced him to North Korean diplomats at the United Nations.
The North Koreans were isolated and lonely in New York, and they warmed to Mr. Egan’s knockaround-guy affability. They accepted his invitations to go on hunting and fishing trips and to New York Giants games – and, of course, to eat ribs at Cubby’s, which sits on a nondescript stretch of South River Road, near the Bergen County Jail.
Mr. Egan became especially good friends with Han Song Ryol, who once served as a senior North Korean diplomat. Intelligence officials in Washington learned that a man who owned a barbecue restaurant in New Jersey was close to North Korean government officials, and Mr. Egan said he became a diplomatic intermediary between the United States and North Korea.
When the Central Intelligence Agency began asking for information on the North Koreans, Mr. Egan said he obliged. This was not high-level spy work, he said. “I flip burgers for a living; I don’t have the codes to the nuclear bomb,” he said.
Mr. Egan said he developed his hustler’s mentality and street savvy by growing up around mobsters.
“From my upbringing with the mob, I grew up knowing it’s all about, ‘What have you done for me lately?’” he said.
“I told them, ‘When a guy who flips burgers for a living is your main man in North Korea, something’s wrong,'” he said.
Mr. Egan’s book, “Eating With the Enemy: How I Waged Peace With North Korea From My BBQ Shack in Hackensack,’’ was published last year. It thanks “the Dear Leader Kim Jong-il.” An HBO movie based on the book is set to star James Gandolfini as Mr. Egan.