…and a lot of other people, including “Superman” screenwriter Robert Benton.
Previous posts on investment evildoers include this one on Bernie Madoff. Some good links, including a very interesting article at The Skeptic by Stephan Greenspan, Clinical Professor of Psychiatry at the University of Colorado where he teaches about scams, scammers and the scammed. He’s also one of Madoff’s victims.
But back to our latest example of bottom feeder.
Kenneth Starr was a trusted Hollywood and Wall Street insider. He’s believed to have defrauded clients out of $30 million.
According to this article, Uma Thurman raised the alarm:
The Kill Bill actress stormed into the office of accountant Kenneth Starr to confront him over the loss of £700,000 of her money.
Although he paid her back in full, as news spread to his other high-profile clients, Starr’s Ponzi-style scheme collapsed and the FBI was informed.
At the New York Times, it’s Sylvester Stallone who’s credited with the first salvo:
That began to change after a 2002 lawsuit by Sylvester Stallone accused Mr. Starr of mismanaging a failed investment in Planet Hollywood. Mr. Starr’s private life also became more tumultuous — he left his third wife in 2007 for Diane Passage, a pole dancer and former stripper at Scores, the Manhattan club…the marriage alarmed clients. “When your business manager marries a stripper, that’s a tell,”
Funny, the goofball who robbed me some years back had a taste for prostitutes who did things with tootsie rolls. Apparently, guys who like to get nasty shouldn’t be trusted with money. I’ll have to be on the lookout for that.
Starr’s disgruntled client list is, well, awesome. Lauren Bacall, Ron Howard, Diane Sawyer, Mike Nichols, James Wiatt, Al Pacino, Martin Scorcese. Dang.
Voice actress Joan Stanton, AKA Lois Lane, died last year aged 94.
Mrs. Stanton was a dark-haired beauty, model and stage actress before she became a radio star, performing on many shows, including “Perry Mason,” in which she played the loyal secretary Della Street. But it was as Lois Lane, the intrepid but perpetually imperiled reporter for The Daily Planet, where she was a colleague of Superman’s alter ego, Clark Kent, that she became a fixture in pop culture.
And if you are reading this and contemplating sharing your shadenfreude at the expense of the rich, silly creative people, think again:
Creators who strike it rich and enjoy the great privilege of having enough money to do their work don’t incite my envy. People aren’t trying to get rich just because they want to sit on their asses and eat bon bons. They want to have money to pursue their art and they want to have money so that they do not become a burden on others. If you don’t want to end up on the dole in your old age, or you don’t want to end up blegging if you get cancer, or you don’t want to end up in a job you hate never able to do the job you love, all that takes money…
What sick mixed messages this ambivalence about material success sends to creators. They are constantly told they are fools for being artists, doing work for the love. Then they are told they are fools for doing art for money. They are fools for not managing money well. Then they are told that artists are constitutionally incapable of handling money because they are foolish artists.
They are scorned for seeking out people they can trust to help them with that money, especially if they get robbed later. Robbed of money they should never have had in the first place, for if they were real artists, they wouldn’t have money.
Only hacks get rich.
