A celebrity makeup artist who has worked on such stars as Madonna, Cher and Diana Ross was the victim of a $60,000 jewelry heist at her posh Upper East Side apartment while praying at her synagogue, police sources said yesterday.
Police quickly nabbed a suspect — but the jewelry belonging to cosmetics queen Ilana Harkavi remain missing.
Harkavi, 64, the president of the Il Makiage cosmetics company, left her apartment at 118 E. 60th St. Saturday to attend services at the unspecified synagogue, police sources said. Then, a Time Warner cable repairman, identified as Chris Salikram, arrived at just before 1 p.m. to replace a cable box in an apartment down the hall from Harkavi.
A woman in the other apartment told The Post that Salikram, 26, was inside for about 15 minutes — wearing a striped Time Warner shirt — before “he said, ‘I have the wrong cable box, I’ll be right back.’ ”
“Twenty minutes later, he wasn’t back, and I called my doorman,” said the woman, who requested anonymity.
When the doorman went up to investigate, cops said, he saw Salikram coming out of Harkavi’s apartment, wiping down the doorknob with a white cloth.
“My doorman said, ‘Stop, it’s over, we’re calling the cops,’ ” recalled the woman in the other apartment.
She said she saw a scared-looking Salikram coming down the hall, wearing just a white T-shirt — not his Time Warner shirt — and “a white surgical glove” on his left hand.
“I ran inside to call 911.”
Salikram ran down a staircase, eluding the pursuing doorman, sources said. Cops caught him a short distance away — without any stolen items in his possession.
He was charged with burglary and released Sunday on $2,500 bail.
Harkavi told police she found that a number of $2 bills were missing from a drawer in her closet — along with three bracelets valued at $13,500, a watch valued at $20,000, five pairs of earrings valued at $7,000 and two rings valued at $20,000.
Salikram tearfully told The Post, “I never took no jewelry,” and said he mistakenly entered Harkavi’s apartment through a slightly open door after losing his bearings when the doorman told him to return to the floor via a service elevator — not the elevator he had originally used. “When I entered and realized nobody was there, I left,” he said.
But the witness said Salikram’s story doesn’t add up, noting that after he fled, a cable box and his Time Warner shirt were found on the floor outside the residents’ elevator.
Additional reporting by Rebecca Rosenberg