Bronx-born accountant Kenneth Starr, 66 — in jail awaiting trial on charges he stole $59 million — started resenting his famous clients and bilking them long before he fell for and married a 34-year-old Scores stripper, an article in the new Vanity Fair claims.
Novelist Jane Stanton Hitchcock — whose investigations on behalf of her late mother led to Starr’s arrest — believes Starr “started plundering the $70 million estate of her mother, radio star Jane Stanton, in 1994, suggesting Starr was a master con man at work long before Diane Passage ever shimmied up a pole,” the magazine says.
Starr’s clients included Uma Thurman, Al Pacino, Warren Beatty, Liam Neeson, Tom Brokaw, Matt Lauer, Mike Nichols and Diane Sawyer; directors Martin Scorsese, Jonathan Demme, Sam Mendes, Doug Liman and Michael Moore; blueblood Bunny Mellon, Sony chairman Howard Stringer, NBC chief Jeff Zucker, fashion designer Isaac Mizrahi and diplomat Richard Holbrooke.
Starr used to tell a story about attending the 2000 wedding in Florence of Courtney Sale Ross, the widow of Time Warner billionaire Steve Ross.
“Someone wanted to take a picture of [a] group, who just happened to be all Ken’s clients,” a former colleague of Starr tells VF’s Michael Shnayerson. “And he said, ‘Sure I’ll be in the picture.’ And one of these people said, ‘Why do you want him in the picture? He’s just the accountant.’ ”
But others believe Starr’s alleged Ponzi-scheming was the result of a midlife crisis. Blackstone Group founder Pete Peterson, who was partners with Starr in the Millenium Technology Ventures fund, wonders, “Has he always been kind of pathological? . . . Or did something in the way of a profound midlife crisis trigger this behavior?”
One client observed, “When your business manager marries a stripper, that’s a tell.”