Steven Kunes (born 1956) is an American conman and screenwriter. He has been convicted of felony commercial burglary and grand theft by false pretenses.
With Norman Lear, Kunes co-wrote a pilot TV episode for NBC in August 1984 called P.O.P. about a "lovable con artist"[3] and he was a writer on two single-season sitcoms, a.k.a. Pablo in 1984 on ABC[4]: 5 and Marblehead Manor in 1987-88.[4]: 96–7
Kunes sold the screenplay First Comes Love for $1.2 million in 1992,[5] though no film was made.[6]
In 1982, Kunes attempted to sell to People magazine an interview with reclusive author J. D. Salinger, whom he claimed he had met.[11][12] Salinger sued and settled the case under the conditions that Kunes was "permanently enjoined from representing by any means that he is associated with Salinger", barred from "exhibiting, transmitting or exhibiting documents, writing or statements attributed to Salinger" and "required to collect and turn over any such documents or writings for destruction". The interview was never published.[13][14] He later succeeded in selling a fake interview with Jimmy Buffett to the Santa Barbara Daily Sound.[15]
Kunes was arrested on March 17, 2011, for purportedly swindling his friend, former Café Buenos Aires owner Wally Ronchietto, out of $2,000 for a nonexistent movie deal.[15] On April 23, 2011, Noozhawk, a Santa Barbara online publication, announced that it had removed six of Kunes's articles from its digital archives as two contained plagiarized passages.[16]
On August 27, 2011, a Santa Barbara judge issued a $200,000 bench warrant for his arrest when he failed to appear in court.[17] Thought to have been hiding in Bucks County, he was apprehended in New Jersey less than a month later.
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At court, Kunes pleaded guilty and admitted to forging checks.[19]
On May 4, 2012, he was sentenced to five years in jail for felony commercial burglary and grand theft by false pretenses. A plea deal allowed for a sentence of only four years if Kunes had paid restitution to his victims, but no payments were made.[20][21]
In February 2013, Kunes was re-arrested. He had been serving his five-year sentence and had been approved for electronic monitoring on August 1, 2012. Kunes removed the device on August 22, 2012, and mailed the device back to the Santa Barbara County Sheriff's Office. A photo posted on the Sheriff's Office Facebook page led to his identification at a Carpinteria cafe and his subsequent arrest.[22][23] He was released from prison in June 2015 but arrested again for violating the terms of his probation after falsely telling the Bucks County Courier Times that he was producing a Netflix series called Over My Dead Body.[2][23]
^Daily Variety, June 10, 1992, at Variety Ultimate.com: subscription required: "Westport Film Partners, a newcomer to production, has paid $ 1.2 million for 'First Comes Love' by Steven Kunes."
^Weber, Myles. "Augmenting the Salinger Oeuvre by Any Means" in Bloom, Harold, ed. J. D. Salinger New York: Infobase Publishing ("Bloom's Modern Critical Views" series), 2008; pp. 199, 202, 210
