Monday, Jul. 20, 1998

The Landlady Vanishes

By ADAM COHEN

Irene Silverman, a wealthy 82-year-old widow, was very particular about who rented the eight antique-filled apartments in her swank Manhattan town house. But when 23-year-old Manny Guerin sauntered into her marble lobby in mid-June, she readily handed over the keys to a first-floor flat. Guerin, who dropped the name of a friend of a friend of Silverman's, seemed an ideal fit for her upper-class boardinghouse. Six feet tall with blue eyes and slicked-back blond hair, he was a smooth talker with a Jay Gatsby wardrobe. He tooled around town in a 1997 Lincoln Town Car and paid the first month's rent of $6,000 in cash.

But Silverman's new tenant turned out to be an unwelcome addition. He seemed to have no job and no visible means of support. According to the household staff, he had a way of staring at Silverman that made her uncomfortable and of turning his head away from the house's security camera. And he and Silverman were seen engaging in an angry shouting match. Though he had moved in only three weeks earlier, Silverman was reportedly about to send him packing.

But Silverman disappeared first. A former dancer with Radio City Music Hall's Corps de Ballet, she was last seen walking through her home in a nightgown one morning last week. Police found blood drops outside the house and noticed that the suspicious Guerin was missing himself. A New York City detective who saw a sketch of him on television realized that he bore a striking resemblance to a Kenneth Kimes, who had been arrested just the previous day with his mother Sante on an outstanding fraud warrant from Utah. The detective had a good eye. "Manny Guerin" was apparently an alias for Kenneth Kimes.

The Kimeses may be the biggest mother-and-son crime team since Ma Barker and her boys swore off bank robbing. The Oklahoma-born Sante, 63, has a rap sheet stretching back to the 1960s. Among her more exotic crimes: stealing a $6,500 fur at a Washington piano bar and enslaving illegal Mexican immigrants to work as maids. Kenneth has been convicted of robbery and assault. Mother and son are jointly accused of using a worthless check to buy their $14,000 Lincoln Town Car--the charge for which they are now locked up in a New York jail. They have not been charged with any crime in connection with Silverman's disappearance.

Perhaps the most notable part of the Kimeses' history is their habit of being around people shortly before they mysteriously disappear. The Los Angeles police want to talk to the pair about the demise of David Kazdin, 63, a longtime acquaintance and business associate of Sante Kimes' who was found shot to death in a Dumpster near Los Angeles International airport in March. Police suspect the Kimeses may have fraudulently obtained a $260,000 loan on property listed in his name. And Bahamian police have unanswered questions about the death of banker Syed Bilal Ahmed, who vanished in Nassau in September 1996. Sante Kimes reportedly had dealings with Ahmed shortly before he disappeared.

Police suspect the Kimeses may have been trying to relieve Silverman of her multimillion-dollar home. A notary public has come forward to say that Kenneth Kimes and an unidentified woman called him to the mansion to notarize a document that already bore a signature reading "Irene Silverman." When he asked the woman to sign another piece of paper so he could check her signature, she hesitated and he left. When they were arrested, the Kimeses reportedly had Silverman's passport and financial documents with them.

So far, there is no trace of Silverman. But knowing the Kimeses' record, police fear the worst. They have used bloodhounds in Silverman's town house and nearby Central Park to try to sniff out her trail. And they are pursuing leads that she may have been killed and dumped in the grassy medians along New Jersey's Garden State Parkway, where the Kimeses are believed to have driven the afternoon Silverman vanished.

Film-noir fans quickly spotted the similarities between the Kimeses and the mother-and-son team of con artists in The Grifters, the 1990 movie starring Anjelica Huston and John Cusack. But any reader of dime-store detective novels knows that true grifters take their haul by trickery, not violence. When the police investigation is over, the Kimeses may be known by a less exotic word in the criminal lexicon: murderers.