Pole-Dancing Wife of Accused Ponzi-Schemer Ken Starr Seeing Spotlight Again
Celebrity investment adviser Kenneth Starr (not to be confused with the Clinton prosecutor) was arrested Thursday on charges of bilking his clients out of an estimated $30 million. Though not charged, his lovely wife, Diane Passage, a former Scores stripper and pole dancer who danced under the name “Chase” according to the Huffington Post and also worked an advertising job by day to support her son prior to marrying Starr and becoming a music and movie producer, is alleged to have profited from his malfeasance, whether or not she was aware of it.
According to the New York Daily News, Passage held a series of jobs which entailed little responsibility and huge salaries not commensurate with the work she was doing. The paper reports,
The bodacious brunette held a series of “no-show” jobs at sham corporations and burned through money stolen from his wealthy clients, sources and court papers say….Court papers say Starr got her the $150,000-a-year gig and that she “had no real responsibility and showed up once per month.”
According to Gawker,
Passage is the founder of a group called Pole Superstar (warning, NSFW), which puts on a pole dancing competition. Its mission is to “recognize the increasing interest in pole dancing as a sport, fitness activity and art form, worldwide.”
But she’s a stripper with a heart of gold apparently: the group Passage founded, Pole Superstar, says that it benefits an organization called S.P.I.N. (Single Parents In Need). However, although the organization accepts donations on its Web site, it has not been incorporated as a nonprofit charity and is now under investigation, according to the New York Post. Gawker also notes that the uber-busy Passage is working on a movie adaptation of Larry McMurtry’s book Desert Rose, about which she blogged on Pumps Mag,
Coincidentally, I have the movie rights to Larry McMurtry’s novel The Desert Rose, which is a story about a Las Vegas showgirl. I obtained the rights about five years ago and started working on the movie with Martin Bregman, whose films include Scarface, Serpico, The Bone Collector, and more. This movie has been a slow process since I manage multiple projects, but I feel like my involvement with the Pole Superstar Las Vegas show will help me along with the movie since there are similar elements. The Desert Rose is about an aging Las Vegas showgirl whose underage daughter is being groomed to take the mother’s place as the star of the show. The story merges female competitiveness with mother/daughter tension – something that women can relate to, in the enticing Vegas setting that men can relate to.
Who couldn’t relate to that?
Anyway, it’s not really clear how aware Passage was of her husband’s financial misappropriations… The criminal complaint details some of the trinkets Passage received from her hubby over the years, one would assume purchased with the money stolen from clients:
Also mentioned in the criminal complaint, the $7.5 million condo they bought:
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