Tuesday, July 14, 1998 | 10:48 a.m.
NEW YORK -- Wherever she went, flaunting her bad wigs and paste diamonds and hostile charm, something seemed to disappear: a neighbor's wristwatch in Las Vegas, a car from a dealer's lot in Honolulu, a mink coat from a piano bar in Washington. Then, it was people who vanished.
There were the Mexican women taken for slaves in her homes in California, Hawaii and Nevada. There was the banker in the Bahamas who met her for dinner and was never seen again. There was the Los Angeles businessman who knew enough to be terrified of her. He was found shot to death.
And last week, after the 63-year-old grifter calling herself Sante Kimes had come to New York with her son, Kenneth Kimes Jr., 23, it was Irene Silverman, an elderly, eccentric millionaire who disappeared in what the authorities call a not-so-mysterious plot to take over her fortune and her Manhattan town house.
Mrs. Silverman, an 82-year-old widow, was probably killed, officials say, and while her body has not been found, the police say they have virtually solved the crime and have had the suspected killers in custody since hours after Mrs. Silverman vanished a week ago. The Kimeses were seized in midtown on an unrelated warrant, along with documents that the authorities say suggested an extensive history of both subtle and violent crime.
"They are the most ingenious, evil con artists we've seen in a long time," a senior law-enforcement official said as a task force of New York and federal investigators sought to piece together what they characterized as a huge mosaic of fraud, theft, arson and murder that reached across the country and into the past.
But behind the record of crimes and its litany of dates, places and victims, lies another story, as a review of court records and more than two dozen interviews with former acquaintances, law-enforcement officials and others show, about a tyrannical mother and a malleable son caught in a love-hate relationship and in a perilous dance of scams, aliases and life on the run that would have seemed, at least from the son's standpoint, highly improbable a few years ago.
It is a strange story of two generations of a family that experienced poverty and riches; that had several luxurious homes but staffed them with indentured servants; that owned motels and a construction company but often acted penurious; that fought endless battles, in court and out, with insurance companies that believed Mrs. Kimes was trying to scam them.
The central characters might have stepped out of Faulkner or O'Neill: an outrageously flamboyant mother with a dark and secretive side, stealing things endlessly, obsessed with manipulating and controlling others; her husband, an older man, sometimes drunk, often remote but seeming to have cared deeply about his son, and the boy who was caught between them.
Acquaintances said Kenneth Kimes Jr. grew up in well-to-do circumstances but in a turmoil of emotions, dominated by a mother who hired his private tutors, selected his clothes, decided who his friends would be and swept him off to another home, another town, if he did not obey or got into trouble. Some neighbors said the boy hated his mother, while others said he may have loved her but also was ashamed of her, and feared and distrusted her.
Sante Kimes had a criminal record dating to 1961 and made no secret of her penchant for theft and scams. Two of her houses were burned - one of them twice - in what authorities called suspicious fires to collect insurance. She had aliases and phony papers to keep creditors at bay.
Only when Sante Kimes went to prison for three years, the neighbors said, did her son lead a relatively normal life, growing closer to the father who indulged him and dreading the day of his mother's return. When she came back and reimposed her controls, the boy attacked and beat her, a neighbor said. His father's death in 1994 was a crushing blow, a friend said. And when he went to college in California, court papers show, he beat up one student, hit a girlfriend and threatened others in a dispute over $40.
Reports that Kenneth had become his mother's criminal accomplice stunned many who had known him as a boy. "This is what astounded us on the news, that he would team up with her," said one woman. "He hated her. It's unbelievable that she could make him do these crimes."
But several others said his father's death was the turning point in his life.
Vittorio Raho, 23, a childhood playmate in Las Vegas, who called Kenneth "one of the first friends I ever had," said there was no hint of trouble in the boy he knew, no impulse to cheat, steal or lie.
Raho said things might have been different if Kenneth's mother had been kept in jail and his father had survived a few more years. "If his mother was never allowed out, I don't believe these events would have occurred," Raho said. "I think a lot of it had to do with his father's death, and his mother's return. Those two combining factors may have pushed him over the edge."
No formal charges have yet been filed against Sante Kimes and her son in the disappearance of Mrs. Silverman; in the slaying of David Kadzin, who was found dead in Los Angeles last March; in the 1996 disappearance of Syed Bilal Ahmed in the Bahamas, or in a recent series of arson, theft and fraud cases in which one or both are suspects. For now, they are being held in New York without bail for an Aug. 6 hearing on a charge of defrauding a Utah car dealer.
Moreover, gaps remain in the portrait of mother and son drawn from interviews with former acquaintances and documentary evidence. It is unclear, for example, what happened to the millions that the senior Kimes, who died in 1994, had accumulated, and why scams were resorted to in the light of such riches. But many people who knew Mrs. Kimes said she simply had a compulsion to steal.
Sherry Meade, a Las Vegas accountant who was the family's bookkeeper in 1993 and '94, said Mrs. Kimes was remarkably up front about that.
"I'm a crook - don't trust me," she quoted Mrs. Kimes as saying. "She'd tell you that right up front. She thought it was funny. To her it was like a game of Monopoly. She just liked to do it, and when she got away with it, she was as happy and excited as a little kid."
While much of the family's early history is unclear, court records indicate that Sante Kimes was born Sandra Louise Walker in Dust-Bowl Oklahoma in 1935. She grew up in Las Vegas. Her earliest arrest record was for petty theft in Sacramento in 1961, and more followed: larceny, auto theft and other crimes in Los Angeles, Santa Ana, Calif., and Palm Springs, Calif., and elsewhere.
In the early 1960s, she gave birth to a son, Kent Walker. A decade later, she married Kenneth Kimes, a businessman 16 years her senior. For 20 years, he had owned a construction company that built motels in California, and he owned at least five himself, including one across the street from Disneyland and one in Palm Springs.
Unlike his wife, Kimes was quiet and shy.
"He was a little strange, I guess you would say," said William R. O'Connell Jr., a hotel owner in California. "He did not socialize much. He kept to himself. He was kind of eccentric. He was almost, on a much smaller scale, like a Howard Hughes personality."
The marriage changed the fortunes of Sante, as she began to call herself. Over time, she and her husband maintained homes in Honolulu, La Jolla and Santa Barbara, Calif., and Las Vegas. In 1975, when Kimes was 56 and his wife was 40, she gave birth to their only son, Kenneth Kimes Jr.
Kent Walker was 12 years older than his half-brother. Now a vacuum cleaner salesman in Las Vegas, he has been estranged from the family for years, and has declined in interviews to discuss the estrangement, his years with the family or the allegations against Sante and Kenneth Kimes.
In the 1970s, the family spent much of its time at a beachfront house in Honolulu. Charles F. Catterlin, a lawyer who represented Mrs. Kimes in Hawaii, recalled visiting her "spacious and absolutely beautiful" home. He also said he was cheated out of $12,000 in legal fees and expenses.
"She stiffed me," Catterlin said from Texas, where he now lives in retirement. In his unsuccessful lawsuit to collect, he listed 22 aliases he said she used. It included many variations of Sandra: Santa, Sante, Santee, Sandy, Sane Taj, and surnames that included Chambers, Jacobson, Powers, Saligman, Singer, Singhers, Singhrs, Walker and Kimes.
Once, he said, she stole a white Cadillac from a dealer in Honolulu, and later tried to bilk an insurance company for $100,000, saying she had lost an antique quilt.
In 1974, on a trip to Washington, the Kimeses met Vice President Gerald Ford and his wife, Betty, at a reception at Blair House. Kimes got into the affair by calling himself an honorary official of the Bicentennial Commission.
On another visit to Washington, in 1980, Mrs. Kimes was arrested at the Mayflower Hotel with a $6,500 mink coat she had stolen from a piano bar. Using medical excuses, she succeeded in delaying the trial for five years, but she was eventually convicted in absentia.
In 1980, the Kimeses moved to Las Vegas and bought a two-story, 4,000-square-foot house at 2121 Geronimo Way, a cul-de-sac on the edge of the Las Vegas National Golf Club. It is a neighborhood of lawyers and other professionals, retirees and casino workers with houses valued today at up to $350,000.
From the start, the Kimeses were regarded with suspicion, and 18 years later the animosity lingers. A day after moving in, with no phone yet installed, Mrs. Kimes went next door to make a call, said the neighbor, who spoke on condition of anonymity. Right afterward, his Bulova wristwatch was missing, he said.
He and his wife remember Sante Kimes vividly: a voluptuous woman who wore heavy makeup, all-white outfits, big black wigs and picture hats or turbans, and had a Hollywood flamboyance to go with them. Frank Clemens, a lawyer who represented Mrs. Kimes, said: "She had mounds of hair. She was a large woman who wore scads of jewelry and an enormous amount of perfume."
A woman whose child played with Kenneth said of Mrs. Kimes: "You just knew she was strange. The moment you spoke with her, you just didn't want your child to be in her company. She had a condescending attitude." She added, "When Kenny was little, she didn't want neighborhood kids to play with him because he was a 'genius."'
Another woman said she believed that Kenneth disliked his oppressive mother, but was afraid to say so. But neighbors say Kimes sometimes appeared to be drunk, unable to intervene for the boy.
The Kimeses were reclusive, as well, rarely inviting anyone in. Brambles and a tall fence shielded the yard from the golf course and prying eyes; the house, of a 1950s ersatz Frank Lloyd Wright design, had almost no windows, only sliding glass doors with "keep out" decals on them.
The family often went away, leaving the house empty for months. Long absences and poor maintenance left the place shabby, and that, too, stirred resentment in the neighborhood. So did a Fourth of July incident involving Kenny, who launched a rocket that set fire to a neighbor's house and caused $170,000 in damage. A lawsuit led to a settlement.
"I never really thought he was too bright," one neighbor said of Kenny. "He didn't have a lot of common sense the way he rationalized and thought about things. Basically, he just didn't care. I wouldn't say he was inconsiderate, but he wouldn't think of others when he would do things."
Kenny was regarded as an oddball for another reason. For several years, in the early '80s, his mother did not send him to school. Instead, she hired tutors who accompanied the family on their travels. Cynthia Montano, one tutor, went with the family from Las Vegas to California and then to Mexico City.
In Mexico City, she said, she was told to roam poor sections and find teen-age girls who spoke no English to work for the Kimeses as maids. She was told to assure their families that they would be well paid and cared for, given regular days off and allowed to call home.
At least eight young Mexican women were lured away and smuggled into the United States by the Kimeses, usually one or two at a time, over several years. Neighbors reported seeing them in and around the family's homes in Las Vegas, La Jolla and Honolulu in the early to mid-1980s.
In the summer of 1985, one of the Mexican maids sought refuge at the door of a neighbor in Las Vegas. "She looked panicky, frantic," the man recalled. He said the young woman asked in broken English for the police.
Mr. and Mrs. Kimes were arrested in August 1985, on federal charges of enslaving the maids. Seven testified in February 1986 that they were never paid, were allowed no days off and were not permitted to leave or contact relatives. They also told of beatings and other abuse by Mrs. Kimes.
Kimes pleaded guilty to a reduced charge - that he knew of the offenses and did nothing about them - and was given a three-year suspended sentence and ordered to pay a $70,000 fine. But his wife was sentenced to five years in prison. And their son's life began to change dramatically.
Kenny was 11 when his mother went to jail. His father, who had always been generous, installed a swimming pool, bought the boy a piano and gave him freedom to be with friends. He also dropped the tutors and sent the boy into sixth grade at a Catholic elementary school, where some of his friends went.
Vittorio Raho, the childhood playmate, referred to the time of Mrs. Kimes' imprisonment as "Kenny's golden years," adding: "His father was a very kind guy, a good friend. We'd go over to his house and he'd buy 10 McDonald's. There would be four or five of us there lazing around."
He said Kimes rushed construction of the pool for Kenny's birthday and threw a party. Later, he took Kenny, Vittorio and another friend on a weekend trip to Beverly Hills, Calif. They stayed in a hotel on Rodeo Drive, went shopping and had breakfast in bed.
Kimes, then 67, made more time for his son by veering away from business. He sold his motel in Anaheim near Disneyland, the Mecca, to his fellow hotelier, O'Connell, for $3.4 million in late 1986. "He kind of gave me the impression he was throwing in the towel, that he planned to retire, that he was tired," said O'Connell, who estimated Kimes' net worth at $10 million.
Meanwhile, Kenny had almost no contact with the mother who had dominated his earlier life. "He didn't even want to speak to her on the phone," Raho said. "He was ashamed of her."
Another friend said Kenny began to voice resentment against his jailed mother. "He said he hated his mom," the man said. "He just said she was crazy."
In 1988, the boy graduated from grade school and began classes at Bishop Gorman High School. He soon become interested in sports, clothes, computers and "had several short-term girlfriends," Raho said.
But everything changed in 1989, when Mrs. Kimes was released after serving three years of her five-year term. "He was very traumatized when she got out of prison," a female friend said. "That was when the whole roller coaster started. He dropped out of high school, then started travels to Tokyo, Hawaii, the Bahamas."
Raho agreed. "When the mother came back, she told Kenny that she did not want her son associating with any of the friends he had made," he said.
Kenny was transferred to Green Valley High School, and the family moved to a house across town where he had no friends. Before they left, a neighbor said, Kenny, now 15, became so angry that he attacked and beat his mother. But his rebellion was soon over, and he was swept off to other homes and more tutors.
In Montecito, an affluent enclave of Santa Barbara, they leased a luxurious seaside house and contacted a friend, John Boettner, a retired teacher, who helped them find several tutors for Kenny. During what would have been his last three years of high school, the tutors accompanied the family to Hawaii, the Bahamas and Europe.
Boettner called Kenny "a courteous young man who had some obvious academic abilities," and said he did well enough to be admitted to the University of California at Santa Barbara.
But trouble seemed to follow the family. On Sept. 19, 1990, a suspicious fire destroyed the Kimeses' house on Portlock Road in Honolulu. There had also been a suspicious fire there in 1978, and the insurers, Chubb Corp., refused to pay the 1990 claim.
Mrs. Kimes, meantime, filed suit against Chubb and began making threatening calls to Chubb executives. The company counter-sued and obtained an injunction against her. Her suit was eventually dropped. No criminal charges were filed in the fire, which was never formally declared to be arson.
While the Honolulu case was a standoff, there were always other scams, other questionable activities.
At the Las Vegas house, an open garage door occasionally revealed television sets and other appliances that some neighbors thought might be stolen.
At one point, neighbors said they saw a moving truck cart away some furnishings from the house. Shortly thereafter, an insurance investigator came to their doors to ask about Mrs. Kimes' claims that burglars had taken the furnishings.
Ms. Meade, the Las Vegas accountant who was the Kimeses' bookkeeper in 1993 and 1994, said Mrs. Kimes always had many lawsuits going, some against her and others against a myriad of opponents.
Ms. Meade said Mrs. Kimes created confusing paper trails for creditors, process servers and lawyers, and sometimes used Ms. Meade's address or phone number to throw off the hounds.
One gimmick, Ms. Meade said, was to list Kimes properties in the names of other people; some of these people were paid, while others were used unwittingly. She said she once learned, to her surprise, that she was the owner of the house near Green Valley High, and Kadzin, the Los Angeles businessman whom they had known for years, became the unwitting owner of the Geronimo Way house - an arrangement that held sinister portents.
While the couple had millions, Ms. Meade said, Mrs. Kimes could not resist the temptation to steal and scam. Once, Ms. Meade said, Kenny wanted a laptop computer with certain features and specifications. Even before it could be bought, Mrs. Kimes was submitting an insurance claim for such a computer, saying it had been stolen from her car. It was her way of getting the laptop for free, Ms. Meade said.
Ms. Meade said Kimes had told her not to give his wife details of his portfolio of stocks. And when she refused to give in to Mrs. Kimes' demands for information about his holdings, she said, Mrs. Kimes dismissed her.
In the fall of 1993, Kenny enrolled at the University of California at Santa Barbara, and in 1994, after several years of failing health, his father died, apparently of natural causes. The size of his estate and how it was disposed of is unclear, investigators say. But a few months before his death, property records show, he transferred a laarge parcel of land in Santa Maria, Calif., to his wife.
Even as Kimes' ashes were being spread over a bay in Hawaii, his wife was looking at engineering companies to survey the Santa Maria site, consisting of 170 building lots, for a future housing development - and then refusing to pay them.
Kenny was devastated by his father's death, a friend said. Moreover, it seemed to move him closer to the mother he had long distrusted.
"Months, maybe a year after his father's death, he still seemed near tears about it," Raho said. "He changed after his father died, because he said he did love his mother. I said, 'Are you serious - you love your mother?' He said, 'She's my mother, man."'
At college, Kenny Kimes' own violent streak surfaced. In November 1995, a student, Carrie Louise Grammer, filed for a restraining order against him, saying he had become abusive after his cat had soiled her roommate's bed. Kimes, she said, had promised to pay for the $75 worth of bed linens and then handed over only $35.
Her petition said Kimes "came at me in a threatening manner" and "proceeded to angrily curse me." She also maintained that Kimes had "hit his ex-girlfriend" and had beaten another student so badly that he had to be hospitalized. Kimes denied these charges, and a state judge told him and Ms. Grammer to stay away from each other.
By 1996, Kenny had dropped out of college, and he may have conspired with his mother for the first time in pair of malpractice lawsuits against a plastic surgeon, Dr. Joseph Graves of San Diego. Kenny sued for what he called a botched nose job. His mother claimed she had suffered a head injury falling off the doctor's operating table during a face-lift. "She portrayed herself as a 'longevity model,' an older person who is beautiful and still does modeling," said Joseph Lange, the lawyer for Graves. Both suits were dismissed after the plaintiffs failed to appear in court.
In September 1996, the mother and son were staying in Nassau, the Bahamas, when Syed Bilal Ahmed, 55, a native of Bahrain and an officer of the First Cayman Bank in the Cayman Islands, began investigating irregularities at a First Cayman subsidiary, the Gulf Union Bank in Nassau, investigators say.
Relatives of Ahmed's said he had been approached by the Kimeses about an online business venture. On his last trip to Nassau, his family said, Ahmed was accompanied by the Kimeses. Doug Hanna, chief of the criminal investigative unit of the Royal Bahamas Police, confirmed that Mrs. Kimes later went to the Gulf Union Bank in Nassau and saw Ahmed.
Ahmed's family said he had an appointment to dine that night with Mrs. Kimes. But he disappeared and was never seen again. His luggage also vanished from the Radisson Cable Beach Resort in Nassau. By the time the police learned that Ahmed had met with Sante Kimes, the woman and her son were gone.
Bahamian investigators say they would like to question the Kimeses, but have no proof linking them to the banker's disappearance or the bank's financial problems.
Then, late last year, investigators say, Sante Kimes, trying to cash in on the unused Geronimo Way house, began a series of complex financial transactions. Since 1992, the house had been listed in Kadzin's name, to keep it out of reach of creditors. Martin Handweiler, a lawyer and longtime friend of Kazdin, said Kazdin had signed a deed for the Las Vegas property as a favor for the elder Kimes.
Mrs. Kimes went to a Florida bank and took out a $200,000 mortgage on the house. After obtaining the money, she again changed the name on the title. The new owner became Frank McCarren, an indigent man she found in a Las Vegas homeless shelter.
In mid-January, investigators said, Mrs. Kimes took out fire insurance on the home in McCarren's name. The house was then heavily damaged in a fire on Jan. 31. Arson experts found that fires had been deliberately set, one upstairs and one downstairs, with a flammable liquid.
The insurance scam unraveled when McCarren told investigators that Mrs. Kimes had held him captive, beat him and forced him to memorize prepared lies for the inevitable questions. The insurance money was never paid.
Meantime, the Florida bank that had given a mortgage on the house contacted Kadzin, who said he had not applied for any mortgage. Kadzin, 64, who had known Mrs. Kimes for 20 years, was terrified of her, his family said.
Shortly after the bank called, a woman whom Kazdin did not recognize appeared at the door of his home in Granada Hills, Calif., and "made the statement along the line of, 'You know you got the loan, but you're working with a very vague memory," Handweiler said, adding that Kazdin then received several phone messages from the Kimeses.
And when Kazdin was found shot to death last March 14, suspicion fell on the Kimeses, whose whereabouts were unknown.
In fact, they were nearby, in rooms at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel. Before leaving the West Coast in April, they bought a green 1997 Lincoln Town Car from a dealer in Cedar City, Utah, who agreed to take the order by phone because the Kimeses had bought other cars from him without problems. It was delivered to Los Angeles, and Sante Kimes paid for it with a $14,900 check that bounced.
The dealer filed a complaint, but the Kimeses and the car were gone, headed for Florida. In Baton Rouge, La., they picked up an $80,000 motor home from a dealer with a similar scam, paying with a rubber check. The motor home was found abandoned in Florida several weeks ago.
By mid-June, mother and son were in New York, where Kenneth, using a phony reference, rented a $6,000-a-month apartment at the East 65th Street town house of Mrs. Silverman. By early July, investigators said, the pair had forged the paperwork to take over her money and town house. On July 5, Mrs. Silverman disappeared.
That evening, as Sante and Kenneth Kimes returned to the New York Hilton, they were finally arrested - not for murder, arson or any of the countless scams of which they are suspected, though their car was full of papers that appeared to implicate them in a vast web of criminality.
They had been tripped up by the Utah car dealer's bad-check complaint.
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