The long Ponzi nightmare is finally over for the residents of Lux 74, the UES condo building where celebrity-scamming money manager Kenneth Starr owned an impressively flashy triplex. Starr's townhouse-style place?with 5BRs, 6 BAs, a wet bar, a sauna, a banquet room, and a 1,500-square-foot yard?came up for sale at a government-run auction this morning, and we swung by to observe. So did a lot of other people: about 40 or 50 folks filled the lower-level Marriott meeting room where the auction took place, but only 17 of those were registered bidders, and most of the action consisted of tiny-increment bidding between two of them. The winning bid: $5,630,000. Bidding began at $3 million, and despite the auctioneer's exhortations that "the more you pay, the more you like it," bidders were pretty determined to stick to the mid-$5 millions.
Starr himself paid a bit more than $7.6 million for the apartment (and that was a discount off the original $8.2 million list price), so this buyer did well. That's assuming, of course, that he makes it past the condo board, which has the right of first refusal.
Here's the unit floorplan:
· Scammer Kenneth Starr's UES Triplex Headed for Auction [Curbed]
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