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.
