Trail Of The Grifters

By STEVE LOPEZ

Sure, it might be a little strange growing up with a wealthy mother who's a world-class grifter and uses a couple dozen aliases, but it's not as if there's no upside. You can torch a neighbor's house, terrorize a girlfriend, become a bona fide problem child, and your mother's in no position to pass judgment. And should you choose "criminal" as your grownup occupation, it's the ultimate flattery.

Especially if your partner is Dear Old Mom.

Murder suspects Sante Kimes, 64, and son Kenneth, 23, can't be real. The FBI must have got together with cops from New York City and L.A. to do a treatment for a road movie starring Kathy Bates and Sean Penn.

Troubled young man drops out of college after beloved Dad expires. Dragon Lady Mom, who did federal time on a slavery rap, swoops in to stoke love-hate relationship with Junior. Three busy years hence, Bonnie and the Son of Clyde are Public Enemies Nos. 1 and 2, suspected of murder, mayhem, arson and fraud in a spooky, dark-hearted, cross-country jag stretching from Hawaii to the Bahamas.

In the chill of their wake was a body in a Dumpster (Los Angeles), a vanished banker (Bahamas) and a disappeared millionaire landlady and former Radio City Music Hall dancer (New York City).

And that may be just for starters.

New York City Police Commissioner Howard Safir says hundreds of leads and inquiries have come in from across the country and beyond since the Kimeses were nabbed July 5 in New York on a fraud warrant after a Lincoln Town Car they allegedly purchased with a rubber check was found with a loaded gun, a box of .22-cal. cartridges, wigs, $30,000 in cash, blood splatters and documents that may link them to the dead man and the missing banker.

FBI agents and police detectives have fanned out across the country to investigate possible links to other disappearances and yet more scams. Safir said eight cases were of particular interest. He refused to elaborate, but in reference to the missing former dancer, he made a point of law. "You do not need a body to charge someone with murder." No, but you do need forensic evidence, argues Sante Kimes' lawyer Jose Muniz, "and there is nothing." Still, charges of credit-card fraud were added to the Kimeses' resume on Friday, and Safir predicts additional charges this Thursday.

In a perfectly appropriate twist last week, defense attorneys for the Kimeses introduced Les Levine, a private investigator who has worked for both infamous sportscaster Marv Albert and one of the New York City cops accused in the toilet-plunger sodomy scandal. Levine said his mission is to find out what really happened to Irene Silverman, 82, the missing ex-dancer. "Oftentimes," he said of police, "they get so blinded by what they think are the facts that the true perpetrator happens to get away."

It will be interesting to see whether this true perpetrator, once located, also happens to have been in the company of the Cayman Islands banker who disappeared after a 1996 meeting with Sante Kimes in the Bahamas--or of David Kazdin, 63, a Southern California businessman who turned up dead two weeks after telling a friend he was in a jam involving Sante Kimes.

"David was clearly fearful of her," says Phil Eaton, a Southern California attorney and former cop. Eaton says Kazdin, who'd known Kimes for more than 20 years, had often told him of "crazy and bizarre" things she was involved in. It surprised Eaton that Kazdin would get caught up in one of them.

According to Eaton, Kazdin got a call a few years ago from Sante's husband Kenneth Sr., who asked a strange favor. He wanted to temporarily transfer ownership of the Kimeses' Las Vegas house to Kazdin. Kazdin didn't understand the fishy explanation, but he liked Kenneth, an easygoing man who owned a chain of motels, and so he foolishly said go ahead. But he later suspected the Kimeses were making bogus insurance claims and demanded that his name be removed from the title.

Then, last December, a Florida bank asked Kazdin why he hadn't made payments on a $280,000 loan taken out on the property. Kazdin began calling Eaton in January for legal advice. In February, after an apparent conversation with Sante Kimes, Kazdin told Eaton, "This woman is crazy, and she'll do anything."

Even as Kazdin was fighting off the loan obligation, according to published reports, Sante Kimes changed the name on the title, took out fire insurance and then tried to cash in after a suspicious January fire destroyed part of the Las Vegas house. Eaton advised Kazdin to put everything in writing, which he did on Feb. 13. On March 14, police fished him out of a Dumpster with a bullet in his head.

Eaton remembers just what he told police when they asked if he knew what might have happened. "I have some information here on who should be your No. 1 suspect."

It was that combination of events--along with an emerging history of similar creative finance, suspicious fires, insurance claims and constant movement, plus a Sante Kimes rap sheet that reaches back to the Kennedy Administration--that put police on the trail of the amazing Kimeses. But even if they can connect all the dots and take care of the legal business, there's still the anthropology to work out.

Who are these people?

Not everyone can be a PTA mom. But this woman, who once escaped from federal custody while at a hospital and was later recaptured in disguise in a bar, could grow black flowers.

"She's what used to be called a sociopath and is now called antisocial personality disorder," says Susan King, who should know. In 1985, as a Justice Department attorney, King laid the groundwork for a slavery conviction against Kimes. Maids recruited from Mexico and Latin America, some of whom ran screaming from her homes, claimed Kimes had held them captive, worked them like mules and scorched one of them with a hot iron.

It couldn't have been to save money; the Kimeses had big bucks and nice houses in several states. Kenny was often picked up at school in a limousine, until Sante Kimes decided the other kids were a bad influence and had him tutored at home.

"I've actually thought about this," says King, who has a master's in clinical psychology. "In nontechnical dialogue, she's the consummate con artist with what I'd call a hysterical personality disorder. She's like a drama queen. Everything's overdone and flamboyant." Like the time she and her husband crashed a 1974 White House soiree thrown by President Gerald Ford and wife Betty, with Kenneth posing as an ambassador to a Bicentennial commission and Sante, in white fur hat and Zsa Zsa-like jewels, as an Indian socialite named Singhrs. Benito Raho, a Las Vegas neighbor, says she loved to dress "all in white, all the time, with the hair, the makeup. She looked like Elizabeth Taylor, to tell you the truth."

A chilly and scary Elizabeth Taylor, who once told Raho to keep his son Vittorio, a close friend of Kenny's, away from her darling boy. Raho, who saw a maid running from the Kimes house crying for help, recalls, "She told me her son was a genius and mine wasn't, so she didn't want them together." The problem was that Raho liked Kenny, as did many others, and took pity on him. "He was a sweet kid, very shy," says Raho, who used to call Kenny over to play soccer in the street with the rest of the kids.

Most of the people who knew Kenny are shocked, shocked, at the possibility that he could be wrapped up in anything this twisted. But from a distance, you wonder how they missed it. The boy grew up in Vegas, for one thing, close enough to the Strip to hear the jingle of the daily grift. For another thing, Kenny was entering adolescence just as Mom was heading off to prison on a slavery rap, which is something Opie Taylor never dealt with. Kenny's father, convicted of knowing about the situation and doing nothing about it, served no prison time.

"Kenny loved his mom like any son does, but at the same time he was ashamed of her," says Neil H. Huffey, 23, a former schoolmate who wants to be a lawyer and wants that middle initial in there now. All Kenny's friends say he flourished when his mother went away and drew even closer to a father who showered him with affection.

The party ended with Mom's parole.

"Kenny would pretty much say that when his dad died, he felt like he was going to be in trouble," says Nader Helmi, 22, a graduate student. "She was lying to Kenny's father about things. It was pretty obvious she was doing things to people. Kenny knew about it, and his dad didn't."

Kenny went away to college in 1993, where in 1995 a female classmate filed a petition for a restraining order against him. His father's death in 1994 hit him hard, and most of his friends haven't heard from Kenny since. Helmi learned from Vittorio that summer that Kenny had become much closer to his mom. "I said, 'That's weird,' and Torry said, 'Yeah, it's weird, but maybe it was a good thing.'"

Well, no. Not with Mommy Dearest.

Part of the mystery still baffling investigators seeking a murder rap is this: What exactly might have happened to turn as slick a grifter as they come into a bungling hit woman? Kenny and Sante were Hansel and Gretel in the end, mother and son, dropping crumbs that any Cub Scout could have tracked.

But maybe Mom has one more move left. If she's the great con police describe her as, Kenny will take the fall. And then we'll know she's a pro.

--With reporting by Elaine Rivera/New York

With reporting by ELAINE RIVERA/NEW YORK