It's emerged that the aunt of the reclusive, sabre-rattling North Korean leader Kim Jong-Un runs a dry cleaning business in New York.

Ko Yong-Suk lives under an assumed name, having defected in 1998, and has spoken about her new life with the Washington Post.

Kim's aunt says the Supreme Leader's main interest was basketball, and that when his mother tried to tell him off for not studying, he would go a hunger strike.

Ko Yung Suk, helped raise the future dictator, her sister’s child in Korea and Switzerland before heading to America in 1998 when he was in his early teens.

She and her husband, Ri Kang, shared memories of the reclusive Korean tyrant with the Washington Post, including his trips to Disneyland and how he used to go to sleep with a basketball under his arm.

The couple then gave up a life of luxury in her homeland to eventually settle several hours from New York City.

The couple says their departure 18 years ago came as Kim Jong Un’s mother was sick with breast cancer and they feared what her husband, the bespectacled former leader Kim Jong Il, would do to their family once “the link to the royal family” died.

The Kim family has ruled North Korea for 70 years, through a repressive system which cuts its citizens from all contact from the outside world.

Ko and Ri now watch as the man they once saw in nappies, who took over after his father’s death in 2011, cements his control on the Stalinist state, testing nuclear weapons to stave off influence from South Korea and the US.

After opening up a dry cleaning business, the defectors say they are content with their American lives they have built for themselves and their three adult children.