The Prince of Paradise

by John Glatt

“This one was no beauty, and Bernice hated her,” said Maxine. “She was so uneducated and spoke with a thick Hispanic accent. [Bernice] said, ‘Maxine, if I want to see my son, I have to be nice to her.’”

  Charlie Seraydar believes Bernice suffered from so-called Jewish mother syndrome. “She didn’t like her from day one,” said Seraydar. “You know the Jewish mothers never think their sons’ girlfriends are good enough for them.”

  To many, Ben Jr. and Narcy seemed a good match, and Pete Matthews had never seen his friend so smitten.

  “He was devoted to her,” said Matthews. “I’ve known many women that Benji socialized with … and I’ve never seen any warmth or compassion or sincerity in any of his relationships that I was aware of, except Narcy.”

  Matthews observed that Narcy did not fit Ben’s usual taste in girls, making him wonder what special qualities she possessed. “It was surprising,” he said. “Narcy was not tall and kind of on the zaftig side. The girls that had appealed to him over the years were very tall, very sleek, and not overly bosomed, with an hourglass figure. Everyone has a stereotype, and she was not that. But apparently she did something to attract him.

  “I never talked to Benji about that but there were always rumors that she was kind of a free-spirited young lady, if you know what I mean. And Benji never really confided in me any of his fetishes or anything. It was just one of those things that he didn’t discuss.”

  * * *

  Narcy now worked alongside Ben Novack Jr. in his Convention Concepts Unlimited business. She joined a small staff that included William Roszell, who set up the company’s computer programs. It was a cash-only operation, and Novack picked up thousands of dollars in bills at each convention. He was now earning millions of dollars a year from his business, much of which went unreported. According to Roszell, Novack was hiding large sums of cash in offshore accounts, to evade the IRS as his father had done. “He would basically get kickbacks from conventions,” said Roszell,” who left the company in 1991.

  Bernice did the books for her son’s company, now listed as a religious organization. Narcy, too, soon proved a great asset when Ben started bringing her along to Amway conventions. Her Spanish would be invaluable in building up the growing Hispanic Amway convention business.

  “In the years that he started his business,” said Charlie Seraydar, “she was right there with him.”

  The last weekend of July 1990 they did a major Amway convention, at the David L. Lawrence Convention Center in Pittsburgh. After it was over, Ben Novack Jr.complained he had been overcharged, and threatened to pull out of two future conventions at the center.

  The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette covered the story, reporting how every other organization had always given the convention center high marks in the past.

  “Novack said convention center officials tried to wrongfully extract a fee for a percentage of the merchandise his company sold at an Amway sales and marketing seminar,” the story read. “He also complained about the quality of food and food service at the hall and a lack of cooperation with the hotels.”

  The center explained that Novack’s complaints were the result of “an honest staff error and a misunderstanding caused by his verbally abusive overreaction.”

  Mark Gatley said this behavior was quite normal for Ben Novack Jr., now known in the industry as “the meeting planner from hell.”

  “It goes back a long way,” Gatley explained. “He would ask for certain things free or with a huge discount. If we wouldn’t bend, he’d call the chairman of my board or the mayor. He’d threaten to first, and we’d go, ‘He’s not going to do that.’ But he would, and you’d end up having to cave in.”

  On the other hand, Novack always paid his bills, however reluctantly, and brought lucrative Amway business to convention centers all over America and beyond.

  “Everybody knew who he was,” said Gatley. “And when he came into your community, everybody said, ‘Brace yourself, here comes Ben.’ At the end of the day, you’d say, ‘Well, did he complain?’ Yeah, it’s Ben. We expect it.”

  * * *

  In the summer of 1990, Ben Novack Jr. hired a building contactor named Joe Gandy to build an extension on his Pompano Beach house. Soon Gandy would become his trusted right-hand man, just as Ahmed Boob had been for Ben’s father at the Fontainebleau.

  “When I met Ben,” Gandy remembered in 2011, “he was living out of a Pompano house … a little house on the water. Every neighbor hated him. They hated him across the canal. They hated him everywhere. He just made enemies. As soon as you looked at the man, you could tell he was an asshole.”

  Gandy already knew about Novack from a friend who had once worked at the Fontainebleau. “He told me stories about Ben before I ever met him,” said Gandy. “I know about him having his ass beat at the Fontainebleau when he was fourteen, and when he was seventeen he was peed over, because he didn’t like marijuana.”

  The first time Gandy met Ben Jr., he could hardly understand a word he said. “He stuttered so bad,” said Gandy. “His head would go back and forth like a bubba doll, and the eyes and stuff. It was terrible.”

  After finishing the extension, Ben Novack Jr. hired Gandy to be his go-to man, to run various errands. Gandy was one of the few people Ben Jr. trusted, and he soon became privy to some of Ben’s darkest secrets.

  “Anything he wanted me to do I would do,” Gandy said. “Ben would take me wherever he needed to go. He’d give me big wads of money that you couldn’t imagine, to buy all the toys he wanted.”

  TWENTY-TWO

  MRS. NARCY NOVACK

  In December 1990, Ben Novack Jr. asked Narcy to marry him, and she readily agreed. The day after Christmas, they took out a Broward County marriage license, but it would be another nine months before they went through with the ceremony.

  That spring, Ben Jr. informed his fiancée that he wanted her to convert to Judaism to please his mother.

  “She converted for Ben,” said Charlie Seraydar, “and that blew Bernice away, for Narcy still practiced voodoo at the house. She was very open about it.”

  Then, on August 15, 1991, the day before they were due to get married, Ben insisted Narcy sign a prenuptial agreement drawn up by an attorney. The agreement listed Ben Novack Jr.’s assets at $3.2 million, with $1.57 million in liabilities. It stated that if they divorced within ten years, she would receive nothing. After that, she would get a single payout of $65,000, plus her expenses. Narcy was also excluded from ever benefiting from Ben’s life insurance, trusts, gifts, or any business interests.

  “Upon the death of either Narcy or Ben,” read the agreement, “the estate … of the deceased shall descend to or vest in their respective heirs-in-law … as if no marriage had ever taken place between Narcy and Ben…”

  However, the agreement could be superseded by a valid will.

  The following morning, Ben Novack Jr. and Narcy were married in an Orthodox Jewish ceremony, with just a few close friends and family present.

  After the ceremony Ben Jr. and his new bride left for a honeymoon tour of Hong Kong, Fiji, and Australia.

  “It was a nice wedding,” Charlie Seraydar recalled. “But you could tell that Mama Bernice was not a happy camper. She asked me to talk to Benji to see if I could dissuade him, but Benji was his own guy and did what he wanted.”

  Soon after they were married, the couple took out a $150,000 mortgage on a home in the prestigious Miami neighborhood of Snug Harbor. But most of the time the newlyweds were out of town, running conventions all over the world.

  * * *

  Three months before their wedding, Narcy, who was now applying for U.S. citizenship, had become a grandmother when her sixteen-year-old daughter, May Abad, gave birth to a son she named Patrick. The unmarried teenager, who was still living with her aunt Leticia in Naples, Florida, soon became pregnant again, giving birth in June 1993 to another son, named Marcello.

  “May would come visit [Narcy and Ben] for a week or two,” said Charlie Seraydar, “but s
he was always sent back. She had always been shunted from pillar to post, and it wasn’t until her teenage years that Narcy had any interest in May. And I guess the solidifying factor was actually the grandkids. That’s what really put them all together.”

  Although Narcy doted over her two grandsons, she wanted little to do with her own daughter.

  “There were always hard feelings and animosities between May and her mother,” Seraydar explained.

  In 2009, May would tell a reporter for The Miami Herald that her mother physically abused her as a young child. According to May, Narcy would punish her by making her kneel on sharp beer caps until her knees bled, or whipping her with an electrical extension cord.

  “If I told you half the stuff she did,” she said, “you would wonder why I was still standing.”

  According to Joe Gandy, Ben Novack Jr. disliked his stepdaughter, whom he occasionally employed as a gopher. “He hated May,” said Gandy. “May and her mother would go sometimes three or four years [without] talking at all. No kids came by. No nothing. Then they would make up, and Ben would let her back in the office to work.”

  Although Bernice Novack had initially shunned May when she started working in the office, she gradually warmed to her, finding common ground in their mutual dislike of Narcy.

  “Bernice put up with May,” said Estelle Fernandez, “because May kind of wore her down with how miserable Narcy was to her. She took a liking to her because of it.”

  * * *

  On December 2, 1992, Bernice Novack celebrated her seventieth birthday with a small party for her close friends. A few weeks earlier, a middle-aged couple named Bill and Rebecca Green had moved into the house next door, but she had still not met them. On the morning of her birthday, Bernice looked through her window to see a large sign near her new neighbors’ front door reading, “Lordy, Lordy, Rebecca is 40.”

  “It was my wife’s fortieth birthday,” said Bill Green. “So I made this sign and hung it out on our trellis. When Bernice saw that, she came over and knocked on the door, and we became good friends after that.”

  Rebecca Green said that although they shared the same birthday, Bernice never revealed her age. “She didn’t want anybody to know,” said Rebecca. “So for years we celebrated our birthdays together … but nobody knew how old she was.”

  Bernice was now living alone with her pet terrier, Mitzy. George Rodriguez had moved out after she caught him cheating on her. But they remained close friends.

  “There was a period of time when they weren’t connecting,” Bernice’s friend Temple Hayes explained. “There was a sabbatical or a dry spell.”

  Once a week, thirty-four-year-old Temple and Bernice had a girls’ night out in Fort Lauderdale. First they would dine at Bernice’s favorite Chinese restaurant, then go back to Bernice’s home. Over cocktails, Bernice would bring out her treasured photo albums from her days at the Fontainebleau and start leafing through them.

  “I had goose bumps,” Hayes recalled. “She knew Frank Sinatra and the Rat Pack, and had dinner with the Kennedys. I mean she had all these photographs of Sammy Davis Jr. I mean to be around all these stars all the time, and it was just a typical day in her life.”

  Sometimes Bernice took her young friend into the parlor, instructing her on makeup secrets she had learned as a model.

  “We had a rare intimate [relationship],” Temple explained. “There were times that she told me that I was the daughter she never had. She taught me a lot about grace … about being elegant and class.”

  One night, Bernice became emotional as she spoke about her tragic childhood, and being raised in an orphanage with her sister.

  “She was proud that she had survived such a horrific [past],” said Hayes, “and that was part of her story. She would say, ‘Temple, anyone can amount to anything … look at me.’”

  Bernice also voiced her strong disapproval of her son’s marriage.

  “She didn’t like Narcy from the beginning,” said Temple. “It haunted her … and she wondered what her son had gotten involved in. I think she felt that Ben had married down on the ladder. She didn’t feel she was authentic.”

  There were times when Bernice became so upset that she refused even to speak Narcy’s name.

  “I remember her saying several times,” said Hayes, “‘The woman that my son knows whose name I will not speak out loud.’ I’d go, ‘Bernice. Goodness.’ And we’d kind of laugh and she’d give me a little smirky smile.”

  * * *

  In May 1993, Ben Novack Jr. became front-page news in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, after pulling out of three major conventions when he couldn’t get his own way. Several months earlier, Novack had insisted that Amway be allowed to sell clothing and grooming products to its own operatives at the upcoming meetings. But as the convention center was publicly funded, city law dictated that anything available at retail stores could not be sold there.

  In the past the rule had been waived for Amway, but now the Downtown Merchants’ Association had taken on Ben Novack Jr., and were refusing to make an exception.

  The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette weighed in with an editorial, labeling the president of Convention Concepts Unlimited as “difficult,” but warning that upsetting him could damage the city financially.

  “Ben Novack Jr., of Miami,” read the April 28 editorial, “has done a lot of complaining about food quality and service at the center, as well as treatment from Pittsburgh Hotels. As difficult a customer as Mr. Novack has been to satisfy, Pittsburgh doesn’t want to risk … developing a reputation for being uncooperative in the sales area.”

  A month later, when the Public Auditorium Authority banned Amway sales in the convention center, Novack pulled the plug on three major meetings.

  “The way the deal has gone down,” said the Post-Gazette, “the Pittsburgh area is the big loser.”

  Although Ben Novack Jr. loved making money, he enjoyed wielding power even more, just as his father had done.

  “Ben Novack wanted to live life like his father,” said David Mann, a former Sheraton Birmingham, Alabama, conventions manager, who often worked with Novack in the 1990s.

  According to Mann, Ben Novack Jr. would constantly be popping pills during conventions to stay awake. Before he even checked into his hotel, he would send over a four-page list of demands that had to be complied with. “When he arrived in your hotel on Thursday,” said Mann, “till the time he departed on Monday, he literally took over your hotel.”

  One time, Novack had ordered Mann to call his general manager at home at 2:00 A.M., complaining that he couldn’t get a tunafish sandwich. But few dared ever challenge him, as his Amway conventions generated so much business.

  At the end of every convention, Ben Jr. and Narcy held court in their hotel suite, paying off the hotel management.

  “He always settled with his black American Express card,” said Mack Gatley. “His bill paying was well known in the industry. He would argue about little things, but he paid his bills.”

  Then he and Narcy would leave town with thousands of dollars in cash stuffed into a suitcase, moving on to the next convention.

  Eventually, Ben Novack Jr.’s rude and aggressive behavior caught up with him. He was blackballed by at least one hotel chain, because he was so rude to the staff. He also fell out with the American-based Amway families because of his bad attitude.

  Some believe that Narcy saved his business, by helping him forge a closer relationship with the Latin American and Hispanic Amway families, who picked up the slack.

  “Allegedly, he had a break with some of those U.S. families,” said Gatley. “Maybe they didn’t like [his] demeanor. But at the end of the day he apparently did get a hook into the Hispanic Amway business, and that’s what he was doing from a certain point forward.”

  From then on, Ben Jr. and Narcy, who had been promoted to registration manager, would work closely on Amway’s international conventions.

  “Narcy was important because of the language barrier,” s
aid Gatley, “because [Ben] couldn’t speak Spanish. We would assume that her involvement was to bridge that language barrier … help him chase this business and bring it into the fold.”

  * * *

  In May 1993 the Miami Beach Police Department asked Officer Ben Novack Jr. to fill in a new personal history questionnaire, as it had lost his original one. The long-serving volunteer replied with a sarcastic memo to his female superior, Detective Lee Ann Gutierrez.

  Lee Ann, in accordance with your memo … requesting that I fill out a new Personal History Questionnaire to replace the two previous editions that I filled out and which now for some reason can not be located, I am pleased to do one better.

  I am happy to report that my filing system seems to be a little bit more intact. I did keep photostatic copies of both the original “Applicant Questionnaire” that I filled out when applying for the Auxiliary Police Position back on February 8, 1974 (19 years ago) and the second Personal History Questionnaire that I filled out when converting to fully sworn (Reserve) Status on May 8, 1983 (10 year [sic] ago).

  Since I am not applying for a new position at this time I am sure that these will serve a more appropriate role in returning my file to its original complete status.

  Please let me know if you need anything else. Ofc. Ben Novack Jr.

  TWENTY-THREE

  2501 DEL MAR PLACE

  In early 1994, Ben and Narcy Novack moved to Fort Lauderdale to be closer to Ben’s aging mother. Narcy arrived first, on a reconnaissance mission to scout out suitable properties on the water, ones with mooring facilities for Ben’s yachts.

  She found a spacious two-story, six-bedroom house on sale for $825,000 in the exclusive Seven Islands development and immediately put in a bid. Several days later, her husband arrived to vet 2501 Del Mar Place, before arranging a $625,000 mortgage.

  Soon after moving in, they discovered that the six-thousand-square-foot house was infested with termites, and would require expensive treatment to be rendered habitable.

  “Bernice had a fit,” recalled Estelle Fernandez. “She said they paid over a million dollars, so you’d think they would have known about [termites] before. She said Narcy had wasted the money.”