by John Glatt
“I don’t believe the government has submitted evidence of a sufficient nature to convict my client,” he declared.
“I deny the motion,” Judge Karas ruled. “I find there is more than sufficient evidence to convict on these charges.”
FIFTY-FOUR
“IF EVER THERE WAS A PLOT HATCHED IN HELL”
On Tuesday, June 12—the thirty-second day of the trial—as assistant U.S. attorney Andrew Dember was about to deliver the government’s closing arguments, Cristobal Veliz insisted on addressing the court, against his attorney’s advice.
Speaking in fluent English, Veliz now claimed to have known everything about the plot and said that the government knew only 25 percent of it.
“If I know who the killers are,” Veliz told Judge Karas, “I can give a full explanation of what happened. Then you can judge me.”
“Mr. Veliz,” the judge said. “The evidence is over. Let the jury decide. Have a seat. Your testimony is done.”
Then prosecutor Dember walked over to the lectern in front of the jury to begin his closing argument.
“You’ve sat and listened over the last seven weeks to an extraordinary amount of testimony and information in this case,” he began. “You’ve seen two different orchestrations that led to the deaths of Ben and Bernice Novack. They hired hit men and bought people to carry out their enterprise—to punish Ben Novack for his marital indiscretion and take over his business and assets.”
Dember then began methodically laying out the evidence, likening it to large and small pieces in a jigsaw puzzle.
“Garcia and Gonzalez were the hit men,” he told the jury. “They didn’t come into these homicides, these acts, by accident. They were brought into this by these defendants—”
“By May Abad!” Cristobal Veliz suddenly yelled from the defense table.
Judge Karas immediately dismissed the jury, and started reading from a U.S. Supreme Court decision that the right of a defendant to be present in court is not absolute. He then castigated Veliz for his behavior throughout the trial, by banging on his desk and often shouting to get his points over.
“You are not allowed to intervene,” he told Veliz. “I expect you and everyone in this courtroom to act with sufficient respect for the system of justice. You are not allowed outbursts. If you can’t abide by these simple instructions, you will be placed in a pen. Do you understand?”
“Yes, I stay quiet,” the defendant replied.
Judge Karas then brought the jury back, and Dember continued.
“Garcia and Gonzalez were hired by Mrs. Novack and Mr. Veliz—these people over there,” he declared, pointing at the defense tables. “So much of the defense case is that it wasn’t them that hired the killers. It’s May Abad. It’s May Abad. This is frankly incredible.”
The prosecutor told the jury that Garcia and Gonzalez were just hired hit men with absolutely no loyalty to May Abad. “There is no relationship between [them] and May Abad,” he said. “They don’t even know who she is.”
Sifting through all the evidence against the two defendants in both killings, Dember said the phone call that Narcy Novack made to her brother Cristobal’s “dirty phone” at 6:39 A.M. on July 12, 2009, was especially damning.
“It’s go time,” Dember said, “and Mr. Veliz tells Garcia it’s time. [The killers] didn’t rely on luck. They didn’t knock down the door. They didn’t drill [the lock]. They didn’t use a key card. Narcy Novack ushers them into the room and they inflict a vicious, brutal attack on Ben Novack.”
Once again Dember led the jury through all the cell phone and credit card records, placing Cristobal Veliz at key locations at the same time as the killers. He ridiculed Veliz’s claims that May Abad had set him up, and that Francisco Picado had used his Pathfinder, cell phone, and credit cards at critical times.
Dember then accused Veliz of distancing himself, in a calculated manner, from everyone doing his dirty work. “It’s all a question of Cristobal Veliz trying to outsmart everyone,” the prosecutor said.
On Wednesday morning, Andrew Dember systematically picked apart Narcy Novack’s alibi for the morning of her husband’s death, saying she had made a lot of mistakes.
“[There were] real doozies,” he told the jury. “The first one was that they had a plan to tie up Narcy and her husband, so it looked like a robbery.” He said she had put “the kibosh” on that without thinking out the consequences.
“Narcy Novack did not have an endgame,” he said. “She didn’t have an exit strategy about what happens next.”
Dember told the jury, Narcy could not just get into a car and drive off, or be found in the suite “unharmed and untied,” either. Therefore, she needed an alibi.
Although she showed up at the Amway breakfast to make it look like she was helping out, all she did was park herself in front of a hotel security camera. “She makes an appearance so she can be seen,” the prosecutor said, “so people can say, ‘Oh, I saw Narcy Novack.’”
Her big flaw was that she was visible only after the killers had left the hotel.
“It’s all after the fact,” Dember said. “It doesn’t help her.”
At the end of his six-hour summation, Dember told the jury that there was not “a scintilla of evidence” that May Abad had had anything to do with either of the murders.
“The evidence is overwhelming against Narcy Novack and Cristobal Veliz,” he said. “There is only one logical and natural conclusion to be drawn from the evidence in this case. We will ask you to reach a verdict that speaks the truth—a verdict that beyond a reasonable doubt Narcy Novack and Cristobal Veliz are guilty.”
Judge Karas then called a recess, and as the U.S. marshals were taking the defendants out of court, Cristobal Veliz suddenly shouted, “I want to change my plea!”
* * *
When the court reconvened an hour later, at 1:30 P.M., Larry Sheehan clarified that his client wanted to change his plea only as it related to May Abad. Once again Sheehan told Judge Karas that, against his advice, Veliz wished to address the court.
“I want to plead guilty,” Veliz told the judge, “and I want to speak on my behalf. I want to tell the real truth [in English].”
He then attacked his attorney for not asking him enough questions, and working with the prosecution against him.
Judge Karas refused to allow him to change his plea, or to testify again.
“You had a chance to answer the larger questions,” Karas told him. “To the extent you don’t think your testimony went the way you want, it’s over.”
“It’s not over!” the defendant defiantly replied.
“It’s over,” the judge reiterated. “The evidence is all in. Your testimony is over. If you can’t sit quietly there’s a place for you in the pen.”
At 1:45 P.M., after the jury had filed back into the courtroom, Larry Sheehan walked over to the jury box to begin his closing argument.
“It’s been a long trial,” he told the jury. “I’ve got the summation jitters. I’ve got to tell you it’s been a long road, and you have no idea how happy I am to be here.”
For the next forty minutes, Sheehan methodically recited dozens of inconsistencies between Alejandro Garcia’s and Joel Gonzalez’s testimony. He attacked them as “sociopaths” who would lie “at the drop of a hat.”
“They’re people without conscience,” he told the jury. “They’re people without souls. They can’t get their stories straight, folks, because they’re lying. Were they testifying or testi-lying.”
Sheehan’s summation went into Thursday morning, as he suggested that May Abad had masterminded the killings. He told the jury that it would take only a single doubt to find his client not guilty.
“Reasonable doubt begins with Garcia and ends with Gonzalez,” he declared. “My job is now over and yours begins. It’s time to reach a good verdict. Please take your time and discuss it and you’ll come back with a just verdict of not guilty.”
Then Howard Tanner stepped up to
the lectern for his closing argument.
“The government’s case is as flimsy as a house of cards built on a shaky foundation, based on suspicions, assumptions, hearsay, and speculation,” he told the jury.
He said the government was trying to get into his client’s head and guess at the motive. “They’re missing facts, firsthand witnesses,” he said. “Not people who say what they heard that Narcy Novack said.”
Tanner said the real reason prosecutors had made a deal with two sociopathic killers was because they didn’t have anything else. Calling Garcia and Gonzalez “monsters,” he said they had lied to prosecutors, hoping to get out of prison one day.
He also questioned whether Narcy Novack had even made that crucial 6:39 A.M. cell phone call that set the attack in motion, saying “a phone is not a person.”
He claimed Narcy had never brought her so-called secret phone to New York, although someone else obviously had, he added, intimating that it was Narcy’s daughter, May.
“If someone wanted to make it look like Narcy Novack made that call,” Tanner said, “it would be very easy to use that phone to do so.”
Although he was suggesting that May Abad was behind everything, he acknowledged that he couldn’t be certain. The reason, he explained, was that investigators had never bothered to search May’s hotel room, or properly question her about where she was when Ben Novack was killed.
“I don’t have to prove May Abad is guilty,” he told the jury. “I don’t have to solve this crime. They have to prove Narcy Novack is guilty.”
* * *
At 1:38 P.M. on Thursday, it was prosecutor Elliott Jacobson’s turn to have the final word, before the jury went out to deliberate. Wearing his trademark red bow tie and an immaculately pressed checked suit, the wiry prosecutor told the jury that the only way the killers had had access to Ben Novack was through his wife. He said no one else in the entire world would have known the exact time to send in the killers to carry out “these horrific and savage crimes.”
“If ever there was a plot hatched in hell, it was this one,” the prosecutor said.
He then compared Cristobal Veliz to a child telling fairy tales on the stand under oath.
“It was perjury so palpable,” he said, “that many of you were laughing. You knew what he said up there doesn’t [comport] with reason and logic. Why did he pitch that nonsense? Because Cristobal Veliz has been buried under a mountain of investigative evidence, and will say just about anything not to go to jail for the rest of his life, for the brutal slaying of two human beings.”
At the end of his summation, Jacobson told the jury that Narcy Novack was ultimately responsible for these “brutal and particularly sadistic” murders.
“They didn’t just want to kill these people,” the prosecutor said. “Somebody wanted to make them suffer. Somebody was out for revenge. Someone wanted to make sure that Bernice Novack would never speak again. Someone wanted to make sure Ben Novack would never look at another woman again. That someone was, and is, Narcy Novack.”
FIFTY-FIVE
THE VERDICT
At 11:00 A.M. on Monday, June 18—the thirty-sixth day of the trial—the eight men and four women of the jury entered their deliberation room to try to reach a verdict. Over the nine-week trial there had been nearly sixty witnesses, more than three hundred exhibits, and four hundred pages of testimony to examine.
Ninety minutes into deliberation, the jurors sent a note to Judge Karas requesting the testimony of Gladys Cuenca and Francisco Picado. Then, at 6:00 P.M., the jury left, ending its first day of deliberation.
Deliberation resumed at 9:45 on Tuesday morning, and an hour later the jury asked Judge Karas for the legal definition of “robbery.” This was significant, because to find the defendants guilty of Ben Novack’s felony murder, the government had to prove that the two killers had taken his diamond bracelet, making the crime a robbery. The bracelet had never been recovered.
While the jury continued to deliberate throughout the day, Larry Sheehan and Howard Tanner remained outside the courtroom chatting with journalists and trying to keep a positive spin on things.
Late Tuesday afternoon, jurors asked the judge to clarify some of the charges as far as they related to racketeering conspiracy. After consulting all the attorneys, the judge called the jury back into the courtroom and did so.
At 5:30 P.M., jurors sent in a note saying they wanted to leave for the day, and they were excused.
* * *
On Wednesday morning, temperatures hit 93 degrees in White Plains as jurors began their third day of deliberations.
Then, at 11:45 A.M., lead court security officer Tom Delehanty walked into Judge Karas’s courtroom holding a white envelope. The judge, who was now presiding over another trial for illegal gun possession, opened it and announced, “We have a verdict.”
It had taken the jury sixteen hours to reach it.
Over the next hour, there was great expectation as word of the verdict spread. As the gun case continued, Court 521 began filling up with some of the major players in the Novack/Veliz case. Westchester County district attorney Janet Di Fiore took a front-row seat in the public gallery, alongside Rye Brook Police chief Greg Austin and Detective Sergeant Terence Wilson, who came with former detective Alison Carpentier.
At 12:20 P.M., after the gun trial recessed for lunch, the prosecutors and defense attorneys for the Novack/Veliz trial retook their places for the verdict.
A U.S. marshal brought in Cristobal Veliz, but there was no sign of his sister. A few seconds later, Howard Tanner walked in from the holding pen, shaking his head.
“Your Honor,” he said. “My client has informed me that she doesn’t want to be present for the verdict. I recommended that she be there, but she nevertheless wants to decline that right. She can hear everything from outside.”
After confirming Narcy Novack’s right not to be present at her own verdict, Judge Karas requested that she be brought in to confirm that she in fact didn’t want to attend it. She was led into the court, looking defiant and refusing to acknowledge the judge.
“Is she going to talk through you?” Judge Karas asked her attorney.
“Yes,” Tanner replied.
“Is it your intention,” the judge asked, “that you not be in the courtroom when the jury give its verdict?”
“She whispered in my ear, ‘Yes,’” her attorney replied.
“Miss Novack,” Jude Karas said. “If you want to leave, you can leave now.”
* * *
A few minutes later, the jury filed into the courtroom to deliver its verdict. The jurors were given no explanation for Narcy Novack’s absence from the defense table.
Then the clerk of the court read out the charges one by one, and the jury forewoman, Aro Edwers, responded to each charge in a loud, clear voice.
The jurors found both defendants guilty of all the charges except one, violent crime in aid of racketeering. This meant that they were not guilty of the felony murder of Ben Novack, as the government had failed to prove that Novack’s gold bracelet had been taken and that a robbery had been committed.
Narcy Novack, who could hear the verdict from a holding pen, was convicted of twelve of the thirteen counts against her. Her brother Cristobal Veliz was convicted of fourteen of the fifteen counts against him. He showed no visible reaction.
The verdict meant that the siblings now faced spending the rest of their lives in federal prison.
Then the judge dismissed the jury and set sentencing for November 1, at 10:00 A.M.
* * *
Outside the courthouse, Detective Sergeant Terence Wilson of the Rye Brook Police Department, who had devoted three years of his life to bringing Narcy Novack and Cristobal Veliz to justice, said he was delighted with the jury’s decision.
“We are very happy,” he said. “Bernice can now rest in peace.”
Maxine Fiel also applauded the verdict, saying she hoped Narcy Novack died in prison, for what she did to her sister. �
�That is such good news, I’m crying,” said Fiel. “The woman’s a sociopath. I hope she never sees the light of day again.”
Westchester County D.A. Janet DiFiore, who’d turned the case over to federal prosecutors at the end of 2009, refused to comment on the verdict as she left the courtroom. A few hours later she issued a statement: “These defendants, modern day ‘public enemies,’ planned, orchestrated, enlisted accomplices and assisted in the brutal killing of Ben Novack Jr. here in Westchester and his mother Bernice Novack in Florida.”
U.S. attorney Preet Bharara also issued a press statement, saying justice had been served. “Narcy Novack and her brother, Cristobal Veliz, will now have to answer for the blood of Ben Novack and his elderly mother.”
Hours after the verdict, the fight began for Ben Novack Jr.’s millions. If Narcy Novack is barred from her share of his estate by Florida’s Killer Statute, May Abad’s sons, Patrick and Marchelo Gaffney, will inherit it, with their mother receiving $150,000.
Within days of the verdict, a lawyer representing Ben Novack’s adopted half-brother, Ronald Novack, filed a suit contesting the will. Maxine Fiel and her two daughters are also expected to challenge it, and Ben Novack’s cousin Andrea Danenza Wynn, who is married to Las Vegas casino mogul Steve Wynn.
But there could be complications, as the jury did not technically convict Narcy of murdering Ben, so she may still try to argue that she is exempt from the Killer Statute and claim her husband’s estate.
EPILOGUE
At 11:00 A.M. on Monday, December 17, Narcy Novack and Cristobal Veliz were brought into Judge Kenneth Karas’s courtroom for sentencing. Dressed in a dark blue prison uniform, her long graying hair severely tied back in a ponytail by two rubber bands, Narcy stared straight ahead defiantly. Her sixty-year-old brother Cristobal, wearing beige scrubs and looking drawn and haggard, sat down at the defense table with his new attorney, Michael Keesee. After his guilty verdict he had fired Larry Sheehan.
