Two days before his arrest for allegedly cheating clients out of $59 million, financial adviser Kenneth Starr presided at one of Harry Cipriani’s coveted front-room tables, with a view of the Plaza and Central Park, and grinned when his wife, Diane, protested, not very seriously, that she’d thought their third-anniversary dinner would be a private affair.

Diane Passage, 34, was wearing a black Gucci dress with a scoop neck that kept slipping to expose more of her Brobdingnagian breasts than the designer had intended—only when she got home would she realize she had it on backward—but Starr, 66, was proud of his fourth wife’s provocative figure. He liked to brag about her pole-dancing prowess. Only when she brought up her past employment as a dancer at Scores strip club did he wince. Why, though? she would ask him. She had nothing to hide.

Starr seemed happy that night, or so thought Jim Wiatt, former chairman of the William Morris Agency and a Starr client, who had stopped by for dessert. The two men, longtime friends, agreed to meet the next night for a drink at the Regency Hotel—and they did, Starr ordering his customary Diet Coke.

As the story broke, Wiatt would play and replay in his mind the scene at the bar. How could Starr have looked him in the eye—sympathizing, joking—only weeks after allegedly stealing $1 million from the account he and his wife had turned over to the great Ken Starr to manage?

By then, armed federal agents had made a 6:30 A.M. entry into the small lobby of 433 East 74th Street, a new, seven-story, glass-walled, luxury condominium. As one building resident told it, the doorman’s eyes widened. “Madoff?”

He meant Andrew Madoff, the younger son of epic Ponzi schemer Bernard Madoff. Andrew had moved, not long before, into an apartment upstairs.

“No,” one of the agents said. “Starr.”

The doorman rang Apartment 1-C, the triplex with the pool and l,500-square-foot garden. Diane says she awoke to hear her husband saying into the phone to the doorman, “Tell them I’m not home, but my wife is.”

The agents went away. Diane went downstairs to get breakfast for her 12-year-old son, Jordan. While he ate, she went back up to the bedroom to hear Starr start muttering about legal problems. Diane had never heard him talk like that before. He was always so upbeat.

An hour later there was a banging on the apartment door. Starr looked sick. “Say I’m not home,” Diane says he told her.

She opened the door to six federal agents. “Ken’s not home,” she said dutifully. The agents showed her a warrant and came in anyway.

After the agents asked her a second time if Starr was home, the largest of them, a giant, leaned over and said in a low, serious voice, “I’m going to ask you one more time.” Diane recalled how in the movies people got arrested for lying to the F.B.I. That was when she whispered, “He’s in the bedroom closet,” and the agents went up to find a telltale pair of shoes protruding from beneath the hanging clothes.

Exclusive documents from Starr’s 2007 divorce settlement with his third wife, Marisa Vucci.

When the agents left with her husband sandwiched between them, Diane called a friend. What should she do? “Keep your son home from school and don’t talk to anyone until you have a lawyer.” So Jordan stayed home with his mother in the $7.5 million apartment they’d moved into just one month before, its big, boxy rooms still empty enough that their voices echoed, while Starr was hustled downtown to a cell at the Metropolitan Correction Center, on charges of fraud and money-laundering that could bring him a sentence of up to 45 years.