The Prince of Paradise

by John Glatt

  Then Ben Jr. brought in Joe Gandy to organize a construction crew to renovate the new house from top to bottom.

  “When he moved to Lauderdale and bought the big house,” said Gandy, “we had four or five guys working sixteen to eighteen hours a day, seven days a week on it.”

  Novack also had Charlie Seraydar plan the secret locations for his various safes, along with full outside video surveillance.

  “Security was a big factor in his mind,” said Seraydar. “All of that stuff was installed at my direction.“

  Two years later the Novacks bought two adjoining lots in Del Mar Place, taking out a second $400,000 mortgage. They converted a large house on one of the lots into business offices for Ben Jr.’s flourishing Convention Concepts Unlimited business.

  Money was no object as Joe Gandy and his team transformed 2501 Del Mar Place into Ben Novack Jr.’s exclusive compound, complete with its own street sign reading, “Novack Drive.” They built a state-of-the-art gym and weight room for Narcy, and an enormous fish pool in the backyard behind the new office. By the side of it was a large mermaid statue that had once adorned the pool at the Fontainebleau.

  “They put pink quartz stones around the edge of the pool, so it looked very glamorous,” remembered Estelle Fernandez. “There was a little bridge to walk over.”

  Ben Jr.’s fifty-foot Cary boat, White Lightning, was now moored behind the house, near a newly constructed seawall. He started taking her on short trips up and down the Intracoastal Waterway.

  “It was a classy neighborhood,” said Charlie Seraydar, “so he could put his shiny boat out there.”

  Gandy also constructed a large storage area behind one of the houses, to store Ben’s growing collection of antique cars. Ben had also begun amassing old Coca-Cola collectibles, in honor of his mother, who had once modeled for the company.

  “He was a Coca-Cola freak,” said Gandy, “Anything Coca-Cola. He had a collection that you could not imagine. It was just unbelievable.”

  Narcy now started going on spending sprees, buying hundreds of pairs of designer shoes, many of which she never even wore. Always frugal, Bernice strongly disapproved of her daughter-in-law’s excesses, but didn’t dare complain to Ben.

  “The woman was a tremendous spendthrift,” said Maxine Fiel. “Her house looked like a shoe store. Coming from a dirt-poor country in Central America, and to suddenly have all this money. She just bought everything. It bothered my sister a lot, but she didn’t want to interfere as she wanted to see her son.”

  * * *

  Approaching forty, Ben Novack Jr. was a multimillionaire, boasting on his new company Web site that his business generated $50 million a year. Yet he still counted every cent.

  “He had more money than God,” said Joe Gandy, “but he was stingy. He would pay me, but we’d argue a little bit about the bill first.”

  Novack now started giving his trusted right-hand man other tasks besides supervising construction and helping with his conventions. Ben had always led a secret life, having several mistresses around town to be available at his beck and call. Now he had Gandy set them up in apartments, and take care of all their bills.

  “He always had two or three women,” Gandy explained. “I knew everything. I had to pay every bill, because he wouldn’t give them cash. I would go pay the condo bills and the furniture bills, or whatever they would need. The groceries and everything, I took care of. That became my main job.”

  * * *

  Soon after moving into 2501 Del Mar Place, Ben Jr. and Narcy Novack met their neighbor Robert Hodges, also known as Prince Mongo. The colorful eccentric had known the Brazilian family who had previously owned the Novacks’ house, and he now started socializing with Ben and Narcy.

  “Ben didn’t have many friends,” recalled Mongo. “He was kind of sarcastic in his own way. He was deliberately insulting … an arrogant person.”

  As Mongo got to know his new neighbor over cookouts and sailing trips, he realized that there was a good side to Ben that Novack rarely let people see.

  “I understood him,” said Mongo. “Under that skin he was a nice person, and I didn’t really care what he was. He’d fly off sometimes and say, ‘Hell … you’re an idiot.’ Whatever. That’s okay. Everybody’s an idiot once in a while.”

  Narcy often invited Mongo over to their house for a cookout, where they would be joined by Ben.

  “Narcy and I became very close,” said Mongo, “I would go to the house all the time to visit, and Narcy would cook me a bag of popcorn and some dried fruit.”

  Narcy had now reinvented her past, as befitting her new social position. She now claimed to have been the pampered daughter of a rich Ecuadorian family before moving to New York and becoming a successful fashion designer.

  “She said she was wealthy when she met Ben,” said Mongo. “She claimed that her father was a shrimp farmer and [her family] were very wealthy people. That she had a big business in New York and was a designer at a clothes manufacturer in the garment section.”

  * * *

  After Ben Novack Jr. opened up his new offices next to the house, his mother came to work for him as office manager. (Ben had also hired a young man named Matt Briggs, along with several freelancers, to help him run conventions.) He gave her the title of vice president of Novack Enterprises. Every morning, Bernice Novack drove seven miles to the office, putting in a full day’s work before going home.

  Now in her mid-seventies, Bernice Novack looked far younger. She had had three facelifts and her teeth capped, and her striking red hair was always perfectly styled.

  Many of her friends could not believe that she had gone back to work, her first job since being a Conover Girl more than half a century earlier.

  When Estelle Fernandez questioned her about it, Bernice said it gave her access to her son.

  “She wanted to be able to see Ben,” said Fernandez. “Ben was very rude to his mother. He never called her ‘mother’; he called her ‘Bernice.’ But Bernice loved him and that was her son. So by working, she got to see him.”

  One Passover Bernice invited Estelle Fernandez and her husband to a friend’s Seder. Bernice was there with George Rodriguez, with whom she’d remained close friends. Ben Jr. and Narcy also attended.

  “It was the first time I met Benji,” said Fernandez. “I had never seen eyes like that. They were so dark. He had a lot of black hair and a black beard. He looked like a terrorist. He really did, and just looking at you, you’d be frightened.”

  On the rare occasions Estelle saw Ben Jr., she found him cold and unfeeling.

  “He was extremely emotionless,” she said. “[Bernice] would say it’s very hard. She’s all by herself and her son is not a touchy-type person. He has no emotions toward her. She said, ‘I know he loves me, but he doesn’t tell me.’”

  * * *

  In the late 1990s, Ben Novack Jr. started living big. He now ran approximately sixty conventions a year all over the world, and the money was pouring in.

  He bought an island in the Bahamas, as well as a half-share in a Citation II private jet, with his friend Jerry Calhoun, who had made millions renting his customized coaches out to touring rock bands.

  “They shared the expenses,” said Mongo, who was part of their circle, “like a lot of people do that own jets. And their friendship developed from there into the partnership.”

  But Novack was so rude to his pilots that they refused to fly him anywhere.

  “Pilots wouldn’t fly the man, because his attitude got so bad,” said Joe Gandy. “He had to fly commercial, although he owned his own jet.”

  Gandy, who now spent most of his time with Ben Jr. and Narcy, either at conventions or at their house, was in a perfect position to observe their increasingly hostile relationship.

  “I was there everyday with them,” he said. “In the beginning [Narcy] was decent. She was normal. But she then turned into [being] just like him. An asshole.”

  Later, Narcy would claim that she and Ben lik
ed kinky sex, enjoying S&M and heavy bondage. Most of their sexual relations involved Ben being tied up or restrained in handcuffs. He was also obsessed with amputee pornography, a taste he’d developed during his childhood at the Fontainebleau, after photographing some visiting handicapped children.

  Narcy always suspected that Ben was cheating on her, and was constantly trying to catch him out.

  “She was on his ass twenty-four hours a day,” said Gandy. “He couldn’t take a shit without her following him. He’d try and go outside and talk on the phone, but he couldn’t because of her. He had phones hidden everywhere. It was crazy.”

  Whenever she confronted him with her suspicions, it led to violent arguments.

  “They would have these horrific fights,” recalled Prince Mongo, “and they were famous for tearing up the bathroom. I would see Gandy in the hardware store buying fifteen-hundred-dollar gold-plated fixtures. I’d say, ‘Gee what are you building over there?’ He’d say, ‘Well, they got into a fight yesterday and they tore the bathroom to smithereens.’ It was a wild thing, but that’s what they’d do.”

  After one particularly bad fight, Mongo saw Narcy with a black eye, and heavy bruises to her face. “Ben would sometimes hit her,” he said. “And she was ashamed. I’ve never heard her say anything bad about Ben, other than he hit on her. She was unhappy a lot of the time, and she hated it.”

  Joe Gandy witnessed numerous arguments over the years. “They battled every which way there is,” he said. “They chased each other with cars down the street. You wouldn’t believe it.”

  TWENTY-FOUR

  PARANOIA

  In 1999, Ben Novack Jr. launched an ambitious new Convention Concepts Unlimited Web site touting his experience at his father’s Fontainebleau hotel. He had developed a new company logo showing a little figure standing beside a check-in desk with the motto “CONTACT THE EXPERTS—That’s Us!”

  “Your convention,” the site’s homepage stated, “whether a once-a-year meeting for a few or multiple events for a few thousand, is very important to you, so why take chances?”

  The company president claimed that his team of “hotel-trained negotiators and coordinators” had more than seventy-five years combined experience and a proven track record. The company also claimed to organize sixty events a year, generating $50 million.

  “For over twenty years we have utilized this expertise,” the site continued, “combining our talents to conduct events of all sizes, from California to Maine, Washington to Florida, as well as Hawaii, Canada, Mexico, the Caribbean and Central and South America.”

  “[Ben Novack Jr.] did meetings in so many different places,” said Mark Gatley, who was now in charge of the Broward Convention Center in Fort Lauderdale. “He was extremely busy and knew all the ins and outs. You would marvel at his business acumen … and then hold your breath and wonder where he was going to find fault with what you were doing.”

  * * *

  In July 1999, Ben Novack Jr.’s longtime friend Jim Scarberry was appointed the police chief of Hollywood, Florida. And Ben viewed this as an opportunity to set up his own reserve program.

  “It was closer to his Fort Lauderdale home than Miami Beach,” said Scarberry, who is now retired and runs his own private investigation agency. “But he also wanted to be in charge of the reserve program and have the take-home Hollywood [police] car.”

  To pitch the idea, Novack invited Scarberry and his wife to his home for dinner. It was the first time they had met Narcy Novack.

  “She was dressed to the nines,” recalled Scarberry, “with the extreme tightest clothing you could get. Eventually we heard she was a former stripper, which fit … the way she dressed.”

  Over the next few months, Ben Jr. lobbied hard for his own reserve program and police car. “But it wasn’t a priority on my list to get Benji in the reserve program in Hollywood,” said Scarberry. “I had so many other things going on at the time.”

  * * *

  That same summer, seventy-eight-year-old Bernice Novack became convinced that Narcy was trying to poison her. She told her best friend, Estelle Fernandez, that her daughter-in-law practiced voodoo and that her own life was in danger.

  “They all worked in this little area,” Estelle explained, “but not Narcy, who seldom worked there. One day Bernice put her bottle of water in her little refrigerator, and when she went to drink it she [thought] it tasted funny. She drank it anyway.”

  A few hours later, when she got home, Bernice’s throat swelled up and she could hardly swallow. A lifelong asthma sufferer, she thought she was going to die.

  Bernice also told her friend how Narcy had often boasted of using voodoo spells against people she didn’t like, and now felt that she was the target.

  “Narcy did practice voodoo,” said Fernandez. “She made dolls and she’d stick pins in them. She also grew a lot of herbs in her front yard … some of them boiled down could be a little bit poisonous. So Bernice knew she couldn’t eat anything from her. You couldn’t trust her.”

  Bernice confided her fears about Narcy to others.

  “She called me up,” recalled her sister, “and said, ‘Maxine, I’m so deathly sick,’ I said, ‘What happened?’ She said, ‘Well, I got up and wasn’t feeling well, so Narcy brought me a glass of water. After that my jaw closed and I couldn’t speak.’ She said it was the most awful feeling. She couldn’t swallow.”

  Joe Gandy never ate anything cooked by Narcy, as he suspected she had tried to poison Ben, too. “A couple of times Ben went to the hospital from eating her food,” he said. “It was a dangerous fucking situation.”

  * * *

  On Labor Day, Ben Novack Jr. invited Prince Mongo to the annual Kruse International Classic Car Auction held in Auburn, Indiana, as he wanted to buy a rare 1970 Jaguar XKE Convertible and a 1957 Thunderbird. Mongo, who was staying at his second home near Memphis, Tennessee, declined, not wanting to leave his pet Rottweiler alone.

  Ben insisted he come, offering to remove the backseat in his private plane to accommodate the large dog.

  “I said if you do that, you have a passenger,” said Mongo. “So Ben says, ‘Okay.’”

  The Thursday before Labor Day, Ben and Narcy flew in their private plane to Millington, Tennessee, to collect Mongo and his pet. They then flew on to the Indiana auction. After they landed, as arranged by their friend Jerry Mohoney, a coach picked them up and took them to their hotel.

  At the auction, Mohoney let them use Willie Nelson’s original fitted coach, which he was selling, as their “relief zone.” “We could go there and use the restroom on the bus,” said Mongo. “There were Cokes, drinks, and food [and] we could eat on the bus.”

  On Saturday, Ben Jr. bought the E-Type Jaguar he wanted, ordering his pilot Doug to fly back to Fort Lauderdale to collect the money for it.

  “So Bernice had to go to Ben’s lock-up box to get the money for Doug,” said Mongo. “[Ben] actually sent Doug home two times, because he bought two cars and he didn’t get [enough] money.”

  * * *

  In the late 1990s, Ben Novack Jr. got serious about his Batman memorabilia, setting his sights on building up a world-class collection. Up to now he had quietly bought up the pieces on eBay, occasionally visiting comic book conventions. He now knew all the major dealers in Batman comics, toys, and other related items, but had been careful not to let them know his identity or long-term intentions, until he was ready.

  “Guys that move in the circles that Ben moved in are usually covert,” explained Chicago-based Batman dealer Scot Fleming, “until they get a trust built up with a dealer. So I was probably selling things to Ben for years and not knowing it.”

  Around the millennium, Novack finally revealed himself, and began cultivating relationships with all the major dealers of Batman memorabilia worldwide.

  “Ben was not around in any shape or form before the millennium,” said England’s top Batman dealer, Ed Kelly. “Ben collected all sorts of things. He was a collectorholic.”
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br />   Once he had unmasked, Novack started buying anything and everything relating to the world of Batman. He was especially interested in items from the 1960s Batman TV series, which he had loved as a young boy.

  “Ben collected all over the mark,” said Fleming, “but he really, really liked the vintage stuff. So anything that was tied into the older-looking style—the sixties—that’s mostly what he bought from me.”

  Every morning, boxes and boxes of Batman stuff started arriving at 2501 Del Mar Place, and it was Joe Gandy’s job to store them.

  “The Batman stuff overruled the house,” he recalled. “Every morning there were boxes of Batman toys on the front porch ten foot tall. They were from all the different places that had Batman stores. It didn’t matter what it was—Batman pogo sticks or Batman basketball. Everything you could think of for Batman.”

  Soon the house became so crowded with boxes of Batman stuff that Gandy rented out a large warehouse to store everything. Over the next few years, there would be another four such warehouses needed.

  “Every month we had to get a Ryder truck,” he said, “and take it all to the warehouse.”

  Scot Fleming estimates that Ben Novack Jr. was now spending up to $100,000 a year building his collection. He concentrated on the rarest, most-sought-after Batman comics and other memorabilia. He even had Joe Gandy build a Batman museum in his house, to exhibit his finest pieces.

  Just as he had done in the convention business, Ben Novack Jr. now applied his aggressive business methods to collecting—and soon gained a bad reputation.

  “Ben considered himself part of a tiny group of guys [who] outbid each other,” said Fleming. “And there was a friendly competition that was probably not so friendly at times. A lot of guys had issues with Ben.”

  Ben Novack Jr.’s Batman collection was as important to him as the Fontainebleau Hotel had been to his father. And he approached it with the same obsessive determination and single-mindedness. Within a couple of years he was on his way to achieving his dream.