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Hollywood financial adviser and accountant Kenneth Starr, who among others cheated Al Pacino, Uma Thurman, and former William Morris CEO Jim Wiatt, pleaded guilty to fraud charges this morning. He admitted to a Ponzi-type scheme in which he lost between $20 million and $50 million of his clients’ money over the past 5 years. “I used a portion of the money for my own purposes,” Starr told an U.S. District Court in Manhattan, according to the AP. Starr has been jailed since his May arrest because he couldn’t pay his $10 million bail. Starr’s fall from grace defrauded some of Hollywood’s biggest names. Not only did he help himself to his clients’ money, but he then moved money from other client accounts to cover shortfalls when questions were asked. The indictment allegeed that Starr used the funds to finance such purchases as a five bedroom condo on the Upper East Side that cost at least $7.5 million with a 32-foot lap pool and a 1,500 square foot garden.
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Sylvester Stallone was the only one who had the balls to blow the whistle on this guy a long time ago. Soon after, Stallone’s name was smeared in a whisper campaign around town as being crazy and litigious.
Ken Starr was repped by Bert Fields and so, naturally, Anthony Pellicano worked the case. Hence, Stallone was painted as “crazy.”
Had the truth been allowed to come out then, a lot of people would have kept their money away from Ken Starr.
See the ongoing damage these guys did to good people in Hollywood?
No matter how hard people try to bury it, the truth always comes out. And the truth about Ken Starr is out today.
Bert Fields, shame on you.
Yeah um, I wouldn’t call Sly “good people”, but I guess we get your point.
So your point was just to take a stab at Sly, huh. Sounds like you cannot judge who is good or bad … I mean, think of it … what ‘good people’ YOU must be to hide behind anonymity just to stab someone else.
And, the truth about the rest of these vermin is not far behind!
Anyone who is willing to rip-off his own friends and clients and US citizens is a domestic terrorist and should be treated to solitary confinement for the rest of their life and forced to do hard labor.
Oh my – Kenneth is going to be busy for yom kippur. I hope there is enough time to get it all in….
Shame on the lemmings for following Ken.
Thank you.
can’t he just sell the house and pay off the debts?
You’re right about Stallone. He’s the only guy who had the balls to stand up, and say what was going on. He didn’t let personal embarrassment get in the way.
And people put him down, because they didn’t like what he had to say.
Whether you like his films or not, Sly really is a good decent honest guy.
Anita Busch – all grotesque roads in Hollywood lead to Bert Fields do they not? Surely Stallone and Garry Shandling feel this way. Don’t forget that, in many important ways, Fields, with his ad in the trades, paved the way for siccing “top” client Tom Cruise’s Scientology on the rest of the country.
Fields’ “legal” camouflage and smoke and mirrors are now, in retrospect, absurdly formulaic. OF COURSE – he’ll work on something with David Boies (Shandling’s lawyer) – this is supposed to project and telegraph “innocence” thereby distancing himself from the Pellicano mess which he could not and never did because he was guilty as sin. OF COURSE he’ll put together a press-worthy winner for Uma Thurman – as P.R. this distances him from Starr. OF COURSE he’ll go “on the record” at the New York Observer about the Starr scandal. This is supposed to exhibit, as was famously declared by him during the Pellicano trial, that he has “nothing to hide,” in that case, while the worm eluded testimony through a lot of role and game playing that cost the city of Los Angeles a lot of money. (Read between the lines of his quotes to the Observer: The conclusion that you’re supposed to come to is it was all the stripper whore wife’s fault.)
anhonestanswer – lemmings yes but the problem is systemic (and systematic) extortion operating in the “what’s the password?” closed community business model defined by however many zeroes are attached to a “mark,” i.e. the seven, eight, nine figure media rich and famous. Smaller potatoes but Dana Giacchetto – same types of behavioral model things happened.
Fields functioned no differently than Starr. It’s a power club. If you’re not a lemming swimming TOWARDS the club you may find yourself screwed out of a deal, a job, out of a client. “Membership,” it is implied, is a self-fulfilling prophesy.
To Starr’s credit, and I realize this is little consolation, at least he didn’t insult everybody and the court the way that Madoff; Fields; Ovitz; and Pellicano did.
Here’s hoping he flips on Fields and Ovitz big time.
Starr was a wannabe macher who developed a late in life thing for the art of pole dancing after his wife developed M.S., far from classy obviously, but evidently he wasn’t just ensnared in the systemic systematic system starting then.
I knew, liked, and admired Peter Stone who, it has been reported, was the person who introduced Starr to the entertainment community. If Peter were alive today perhaps Starr would not have been pulled into the loco locus.
Here’s a perhaps not irrelevant anecdote that illustrates how funny he could be, but also how Hollywood’s “do as I say, not as I do” privately held hand of cards, in a like-minded game of power poker, trickles down to the common man if not the current national stage.
After seeing “The Color Purple,” Peter, who was jewish, pronounced it “a jewish boy’s tribute to his maid.”
He was hilarious. Old school – when a screen writer could write a “Charade,” (A. Hepburn : “Do you know what’s wrong with you?” Cary Grant : “No, What?” Hepburn : “Nothing;”) follow up for Grant with an Oscar winning “Father Goose;” turn around and do an adaptation like “The Taking of Pelham 123;” or write the book for a musical like “1776;” and consider such diverse applications of talent a point of pride (as well he should have.)
Isn’t it interesting how Jim Wiatt destroyed so many William Morris employees he gets ripped off for one million.
What comes around goes around.
Happy New Year Jim
Dealt with him on several business deals a decade ago. A petty, arrogant, mean-spirited p.o.s. if there ever was one. Old habits die hard — good luck in the joint, asshole!
So depressing. This keeps happening again and again, makes me wonder about all the other Ken Starr’s who haven’t been caught yet. Creepy.
Ken Starr is just the tip of the iceberg. When he starts spilling his guts – and he will – they’ll be a ton of lawyering-up in Chinatown and the Big Apple…
Just amazing how that crook could get away with such lenient sentencing.