How Kenneth Starr got nabbed

Not the Clinton prosecutor - the New York money manager who is alleged to have scammed dozens of celebrities out of tens of millions of dollars. Starr, 66, is in a cell at the Metropolitan Correction Center, charged with fraud and money-laundering and facing up to 45 years. He's made headlines not only because of his famous former clients - Bunny Mellon, Barbara Walters, Al Pacino, Caroline Kennedy, Martha Stewart, and Matt Lauer, among many others - but because of a wild and crazy lifestyle that included being married to a former stripper. In this early passage from a lengthy profile in Vanity Fair, the feds are closing in on him at the $7.5-million NY apartment he shared with his wife, 34-year-old Diane Passage.

The doorman rang Apartment 1-C, the triplex with the pool and l,500-square-foot garden. Diane says she awoke to hear her husband saying into the phone to the doorman, "Tell them I'm not home, but my wife is." The agents went away. Diane went downstairs to get breakfast for her 12-year-old son, Jordan. While he ate, she went back up to the bedroom to hear Starr start muttering about legal problems. Diane had never heard him talk like that before. He was always so upbeat. An hour later there was a banging on the apartment door. Starr looked sick. "Say I'm not home," Diane says he told her. She opened the door to six federal agents. "Ken's not home," she said dutifully. The agents showed her a warrant and came in anyway.

After the agents asked her a second time if Starr was home, the largest of them, a giant, leaned over and said in a low, serious voice, "I'm going to ask you one more time." Diane recalled how in the movies people got arrested for lying to the F.B.I. That was when she whispered, "He's in the bedroom closet," and the agents went up to find a telltale pair of shoes protruding from beneath the hanging clothes. When the agents left with her husband sandwiched between them, Diane called a friend. What should she do? "Keep your son home from school and don't talk to anyone until you have a lawyer."

Even before he was charged, Starr had been losing many of his clients because the word was out that his investments were becoming highly questionable. At the end, he was down to between 30 and 40 clients, from a high of around 200.

Photo: Diane and Ken Starr