WHO CAN TURN THE WORLD ON WITH HER LARCENY?

Byline: - David Kronke

If a good movie exists out there, it's in the story of Sante Kimes, the loving mother/gold-digger/arsonist/enslaver/scamartist/convicted murderer that wreaked havoc from Hawaii to the Bahamas, from Los Angeles to Las Vegas, Washington, D.C., and New York. Unfortunately, that good movie is not ``Like Mother, Like Son: The Strange Story of Sante and Kenny Kimes.''

Digging her claws irretrievably into a millionaire wasn't enough for Sante, who had grifting wet-wired into her system. Even after she married Ken Kimes, she had the biological need to live on the wrong side of the law. Ken could've bought her furs; she preferred stealing them. Ken could've hired the most unctuous of servants; she preferred driving to Mexico, sneaking illegal aliens across the border and enslaving them. Ken bought her houses; she burned them down for insurance money.

Sante (who is thought to have grown up in Studio City) served jail time in the '80s for keeping servants against their will; the trials cost Ken much of his fortune, and what he didn't spend he hid in offshore accounts, so when he died, his widow didn't have what she considered enough money to live in the manner to which she was accustomed. So she recruited her and Ken's equally sociopathic son, Kenny, for another, far more deadly, crime spree that left corpses or missing bodies in L.A., the Bahamas and New York.

``Like Mother, Like Son'' focuses on the murder for which she got caught - of socialite Irene Silverman, whose tony New York mansion she also contrived to steal. But she got sloppy - investigators found her to-do list, which included everything but an entry reading, ``Murder Irene; dump the body.'' Kimes is now serving a life sentence in New York; son Kenny was extradited to California and is currently standing trial for another murder, the killing of 63-year-old David Kazdin, a Granada Hills businessman whose body was found dumped in a trash bin near Los Angeles International Airport on March 14, 1998. Earlier this month Kenny pleaded not guilty to the charge. (In a classic case of Sante's dissembling, she posited herself as too infirm to endure another trial.)

This is unbelievably jaw-dropping material, but if you want a cogent version of the story, pick up the recent book ``Son of a Grifter,'' by Kent Walker (Sante's son from a previous marriage) and Mark Schone - 400 pages of scams and outrages and, incredibly enough, it never gets old. Wide-eyed but clear-headed, Walker pieces together the life of a woman the presiding judge in the Silverman case called ``the most degenerate defendant who ever appeared in this courtroom.''

``Like Mother, Like Son,'' on the other hand, shockingly sanitizes the material. It's a passing diversion, sure, to watch '70s sitcom icons Mary Tyler Moore (as Kimes) and Jean Stapleton (as Silverman) circle each other warily, and Moore goes off in campy rages a couple of times. When Kent vows never to steal again after getting caught swiping a surfboard, Sante sternly corrects him: ``No - don't get caught!''

Director Arthur Allan Seidelman, working off a haphazard script by Paul Eric Meyers, hasn't a clue as to how to depict the material, awkwardly juggling scads of flashbacks-within-flashbacks, often shifting perspective without warning. A full-throttle Grand Guignol approach is what's called for here.

And Moore, showing off her legs as often as possible, is woefully miscast as Kimes - she was a stout, buxom woman who, in her day, had a passing resemblance to Elizabeth Taylor. (The Taylor of a decade back, channeling her performances in ``Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?'' and ``Boom!'' would've been heavenly here). As played by Gabriel Olds, Kenny is depicted as a guy who occasionally struggles with a conscience that Walker's book makes pretty clear never existed after his adolescence. (Try the Malcolm McDowell of the first half of ``Clockwork Orange'' on for size.)

Moore only suggests a woman with a misguided level of entitlement, hardly a murderous sociopath. In terms of depicting the brazen wrongdoing that the Kimeses managed, ``Like Mother, Like Son'' barely scratches the surface.

``LIKE MOTHER, LIKE SON: THE STRANGE STORY OF SANTE AND KENNY KIMES''

What: Docudrama about the notorious crime family.

The stars: Mary Tyler Moore, Gabriel Olds, Jean Stapleton, Robert Forster.

Where: CBS (Channel 2).

When: 9 tonight.

Our rating: Two stars

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Mary Tyler Moore takes on a frightening persona as Sante Kimes, a twisted grifteer, in the movie ``Like Mother, Like Son,'' airing tonight on CBS.