True Crime Campfire - The Heir: The Murder of Ben Novack, Pt 1

Episode Date: July 17, 2026

It has sometimes been said that great wealth is a curse—usually by people who have never had to go hungry, but there is something to it. The idea of the miserable millionaire goes back much further than Ebeneezer Scrooge. If you dedicate everything you have to the pursuit of wealth, then what’s left over for the rest of your life? In particular, the children of the very wealthy can have a tough time, sometimes both cosseted and ignored, sailing out into life without the lessons hammered into the rest of us by hard experience. It can leave them prone to making bad decisions. It can make them targets. Visit quince.com/campfire for 365 day returns and free shipping! Join us live at Wet Hot Bad Magic Summer Camp in Equinunk, PA, September 10-13th! Visit ⁠badmagicproductions.com⁠ for more info and to buy tickets. Tickets are on sale now for CrimeWave 2.0! Visit crimewaveatsea.com/CAMPFIRE to get your discount code for $100 off your cabin and a private meet-and-greet with us! The cruise is Feb. 8-12, 2027. Sources: The Prince of Paradise, John Glatt Follow us, campers! Patreon (join to get all episodes ad-free, at least a day early, an extra episode a month, and a free sticker!): https://patreon.com/TrueCrimeCampfirehttps://www.truecrimecampfirepod.com/Facebook: True Crime CampfireInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/truecrimecampfire/?hl=enEmail: [e-mail]! https://true-crime-campfire.myspreadshop.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hello, campers, grab your marshmallows and gather around the true crime campfire. We're your camp counselors. I'm Katie. And I'm Whitney. And we're here to tell you a true story that is way stranger than fiction. We're roasting murderers and marshmallows around the true crime campfire. It is sometimes been said that Great Walth is a curse. Usually by people who have never had to go hungry.

But there is something to it. The idea of the miserable millionaire goes back much further than Ebony's Scrooge. If you dedicate everything you have to the pursuit of wealth, then what's left over for the rest of your life? In particular, the children of the very wealthy can have a rough time. Sometimes both cosseted and ignored, sailing out into life without the lessons hammered into the rest of us by hard experience. It can leave them prone to making bad decisions. It can make them targets. This is part one of the air, the murder of Ben Novak Jr. So, campers, for this one, we're in the village of Rye Brook, New York, in the Hilton Rye Town

Hotel, Sunday, July 12, 2009. Around 7.45 a.m., a.m., a. 74-year-old guest named Rigoberto Wilson got lost on his way to breakfast and wandered through the corridors looking for the dining room. He came across an attractive. middle-aged blonde woman leaning against the wall outside the open door of a suite. She looked up, saw him, and immediately started screaming. Help me! My husband! Mr. Wilson asked what was wrong, but the woman was frantic, pounding on nearby doors and screaming.

He went in through the open door to see what had happened. Inside, he found the body of the woman's husband. This was Ben Novak, Jr. The woman screaming outside was his wife, Norton. It was an awful scene. Wilson said later, I saw blood on the bed. The man was tied up with his feet and arms tied behind his back. He had duct tape over his mouth.

He was facing down with his head turned to the left and there was blood all around his neck. As a crowd gathered outside, Narcy rushed back into the room and straddled her husband's lifeless body as it lay face down on the floor, smacking his shoulders with her fists and screaming, why, why? Hotel security arrived quickly, one of the officers having to lift and carry Narsi to keep her from climbing back onto Ben's body as she screamed. EMT, Carrie Conrad, and her partner were there in minutes, just behind the police. Carrie tried to find a pulse, but there was nothing. The heart monitor showed no activity. The body, wearing only underwear, was blue-tinged, cyanotic, and was at about room temperature. Ben Novak Jr. was dead and had been for hours. Carrie found Narcy in the

sweet's living room sitting on the sofa. Her frantic screams of a few minutes ago had vanished completely, and she seemed strangely calm. Carrie offered her condolences, and Nancy grabbed her wrist. Are you sure he's dead? She said, I'm sure, Carrie said. Narsi didn't seem upset at all. News of the death raced through the hotel. Almost everyone there knew Ben, who had organized the Amway convention currently being held there. And plenty of people knew that Ben wasn't just a convention organizer. He was the son of a famous hotelier and the heir to a storied fortune. So how the hell did he end up here?

Dead and brutalized in a hotel room. More so than in most cases, to get a clear picture of who Ben Novak was, we need to look at his parents. Ben Novak Sr. was born in Brooklyn in 1907, and when he was a teenager, his family moved to the Catskills to open a resort hotel, the laurels, which soon thrived. In the mid-1930s, after their father died, Ben and his older brother took over the hotel. Ben, though, had already started what would be a lifelong habit of destroying his relationships with the people closest to him. He fell out with his brother and moved to New York, opening a haberdashery. In 1940, he had a new wife, Bella, and $1,800 he'd gotten from selling his business, and he moved to Miami Beach. Miami Beach at the time was a glitzy winter retreat for the rich and famous, and Ben hadn't forgotten the skills he'd learned working at the family hotel.

He talked people into investing $20,000 for a one-year lease on the Monroe Tower's hotel. Ben worked his fingers to the bone, with Bella working as a chambermaid, but the hotel biz has a notoriously high rate of failure, and there was every chance that that's where Ben was headed. They got lucky, though, because the U.S. joined World War II and turned Miami Beach into a basic training center for the Army Air Corps and U.S. Navy. They requisitioned hundreds of hotels and compensated the owners with $10 a night for every room. that's about $200 in today's money. So this was a gold mine. Your hotel was guaranteed to be full, or almost full, all year round, and you didn't even have to feed your guests or provide them with much of anything other than a bed.

Ben Novak immediately invested his profits in buying another hotel, so he'd make even more money. By the end of the war, he owned five hotels and was filthy, filthy rich, and became kind of a fancy man with brightly colored suits and a thin mustache that he had his barber trim for him every morning. Like many rich and powerful men, Ben saw fidelity in marriage as more of a guideline than a rule. Actually, I don't know why I'm saying rich and powerful there. Plenty of guys come to this conclusion no matter what their bank accounts look like. He always had an eye out for pretty ladies, and in the spring of 1945, he walked into La Martinique nightclub in Manhattan.

and almost immediately fell for Bernice Stemple. Bernice was born in New York, the daughter of an English furrier and an Irish sales girl. Her dad was 15 years older than his new wife and kind of a playboy always out playing cards and drinking and speak-easies. One night he didn't want to leave his wife alone at home, so he asked his best friend to keep her company. I'm sure you see where this is going. Hey, Chum, I really want to hang out with the guys, so how about you spend a lot more time with my beautiful young wife, who I neglect and don't show any affection to. When the inevitable affair was revealed, Bernice's dad filed for divorce and threw her mom out

of the house. She didn't have money to fight his lawyers, and he won full custody of Bernice and her younger sister Maxine. But he'd only wanted custody to spite her mother. The girls were farmed out to aunts and eventually went into an orphanage, then foster care. They had both inherited their Irish mom's red hair and beauty, and when Bernice was was 10 years old and uncle suggested that both girls model hats for New York department stores. This was fun, but it paid almost nothing. After high school, Bernice was about to start secretarial school when a talent scout for the Conover model agency spotted her on the street. Conover was the biggest model agency in New York, and Bernice was immediately in huge demand.

She appeared in a bunch of ads for Coca-Cola. If you see a vintage Coke ad with a redhead in it, it's probably her. And if you want to add a little surrealism to your day, search for tap dancing pack of old gold cigarettes because one of those pairs of legs belonged to Bernice. She had no shortage of suitors, some of them very wealthy men, but married a normal middle-class guy named Archie Dresen.

The two of them moved into a Greenwich Village apartment, but Archie almost immediately went to Europe to fight in the war. By 1945, when Ben Novak walked into La Martinique and saw Bernice at a table with some girlfriends, Archie was still in Europe. He and Bernice still wrote regularly, but they'd spent a lot more time apart than they ever had together, and their letters had become more friendly than passionate. They'd stay friends all their lives, but as soon as Archie got back to New York, they separated. By then, Ben Novak was pursuing Bernice, like a dog running after a truck full of sausage. At first, she'd be able to be a little of sausage. At first, she'd been entirely unimpressed by him. He bought champagne for her table and bragged about his hotel business.

They didn't really talk because the childhood swimming accident had left Ben mostly deaf in his right ear, with a wire running down from a hearing aid to a microphone hanging on his breast pocket. This didn't work too well in a nightclub, but Ben was the kind of guy who was perfectly happy to talk without worrying too much about what the other person was saying. He was 38, and Bernice was 23, which is a big gap at that age. It wasn't that he grossed her out or anything. He was a charming, decent-looking dude. It's just that being hit on by middle-aged men in the club was an entirely unremarkable experience for her. But Ben was determined. The next day, he went back to the club and bribed the matriety into giving him Bernice's phone number, but instead got the number

for the Conover agency. So, just so that he could spend more time talking to Bernice, he called Conover to set up an ad shoot on a Cuban beach, telling them he wanted an outdoorsy-looking redhead with freckles. Bernice and another model flew to Havana with a makeup artist and photographer, and when the models walked out onto the beach in their swimsuits, there was Ben, with a big smile on his face. All this is borderline creepy, maybe not so borderline creepy, but the 40s were a very different time, with a fuzzier border between romantic pursuit and, and, you know, and harassment. At a time when most Americans were still living with wartime restrictions on luxury goods, Ben sent Bernice wine, at stakes, and baskets of fruit. He told Bernice's sister Maxine,

I want her to know how she can live if she marries me. It worked. You have to remember where Bernice came from. She was a poised, glamorous model now, but just a few years ago, she'd been an anxious teenager, abandoned by her family and raised in an orphanage and foster care. There was nothing that appealed to her as much as security. Ben and Bernice began an affair, while Ben burned the midnight oil building his first new Miami Beach Hotel, the Sans Sousie, which opened in 1949. Never one to undersell himself or his work, Ben's brochure for the hotel stated, in Paris, it's the Eiffel Tower, London, Buckingham Palace, and in Miami Beach, the Sans Sousie.

Really? Buckingham Palace. The affair and the new hotel didn't leave much room for his actual marriage. A couple weeks after the Sonsu C opened, Ben and his wife Bella adopted a two-year-old boy, which seems very much like a desperate attempt to refloat a sinking ship. Ben didn't have much time for the kid,

and two years later, he and Bella finally divorced. Ben immediately had a nervous breakdown. apparently because in the divorce, Bella won the tract of land the Sans Soussi stood on. He ran away to Arizona. A friend was so concerned about Ben's mental health that he asked Bernice to give him a call. When she did, Ben tried to convince her that the only thing that would help his recovery was if she agreed to marry him, which she did. Emotional extortion, not exactly the world's greatest love story. But at the start of 1952, they got married in a civil ceremony.

in New York. Bernice's dad gave her away, but he'd refused to tell their mom about the wedding and wouldn't tell Bernice and Maxine where their mom was. Maxine had always gotten along well with Ben. Much later, she spoke with author John Glatt, whose book The Prince of Paradise was our main source for this case. She said, Bernice married a man just like our father, controlling, self-centered, not particularly sensitive. Bernice gave up her modeling career and moved into Ben's Ben's fancy suite at the Saint-Soucée, but he was always busy with his next hotel project, and she didn't know anybody else in town. Having worked so hard to get her, Ben now almost ignored her,

almost like a collector who got a rare doll just to put her on a shelf in a dark vault. She was lonely and depressed and barely left the suite for five months, feeling like she'd made a huge mistake. Ben's next project was an enormous 550 room hotel that would be the biggest one in Miami Beach. He and his partner agreed to buy the property for $2.3 million, but right before the deal, his partner found out Ben had been swindling him and pulled out. Ben frantically hit the phones, trying to find new financing in just 24 hours. He got the money, but couldn't be picky about where it came from.

For example, one of his new partners was Chicago Marlain. mafia boss, Sam Giancana, which predictably would have long-lasting effects. Eh, come on, it's just a little light mob involvement. What's the worst that can happen? I'm sure it'll be fine. There are only a few hundred movies and TV shows about why it's a terrible idea. The new hotel, named after the Fontainebleau Palace in France, slowly grew into life over the course of a year, and a its opening was a huge event. Inside, the place was full of French decor and statues, all very glamorous and glitzy. Mid-century Miami Beach was kind of Vegas before Vegas, so you can imagine the vibe here. Ben may have needed a new dictionary because he proudly declared his new

project to be the most pretentious hotel in the world. He probably wasn't wrong. Right. I think he accidentally hit the nail on the head. I do not think that word means what you think it means. Thanks to Ben's new mafioso business partners, Frank Sinatra started playing there on the regular, getting a permanent penthouse suite on the 17th floor in return. Bernice and Ben were also on the 17th floor in a huge four-bedroom apartment with an ocean view. They lived like royalty, and Bernice was expected to ask. act like a queen, as in her main job was to be seen looking beautiful and jewels in high fashion, turning her life into an extended modeling gig.

She didn't enjoy it much and didn't even get to keep the jewelry and fancy clothes, which were owned by the hotel. Oh, man. Yeah, exactly. I think you'd at least get to keep the swag. Mm-mm. In January of 1956, a year after the grand opening of the Fontainebleau, their son Ben-Gi, Jr. was born in Manhattan. Ben Sr. flew up from Miami Beach, got his photo taken with

Little Benji, and almost immediately flew south again to look after the hotel. Bernice and Benji followed a week later, moving the kid into the penthouse apartment that would be his home. The war is over and both sides lost. Kingdoms were reduced to cinders, an army scattered like bones in the dust. Now the survivors claw to what's left. of a broken world praying the darkness chooses someone else tonight, but in the shadow dark, the darkness always wins. This is old school adventuring at its most cruel. Your torch ticks down in real time,

and when that flame dies, something else rises to finish the job. This is a brutal rules-light nightmare with a story that emerges organically based on the decisions that the characters make. This is what it felt like to play RPGs in the 80s, and man, it is so good. to be back. Join the Glass Cannon podcast as we plunge into the Shadow Dark every Thursday night at 8 p.m. Eastern on YouTube.com slash the Glass Cannon with the podcast version dropping the next day. See what everybody's talking about and join us in the dark.

From the parents behind Law and Order comes a mystery the whole family can enjoy. Patrick Pickle Bottom Everyday Mysteries. Step into the whimsical world of Patrick Picklebottom, a precocious 11-year-old with a love for reading, and an uncanny ability to solve mysteries. Inspired by the beloved children's book of the same name, this podcast vividly brings Patrick's tales of deduction and everyday adventures to life as he unravels baffling enigmas and solves clever cases. Patrick Pickle Bottom Everyday Mysteries is perfect for kids

and is just as entertaining for grownups who love a good mystery. The whole family can listen now wherever you get your podcasts. Apparently, Bernice's own sad childhood had left her largely clueless about this whole family thing was supposed to work, and she was pretty cool and distant by nature anyway, and Ben Sr. wasn't exactly a warm and fuzzy guy, completely consumed by his work. So young Benji's penthouse home was hardly a Norman Rockwell painting. His frosty parents only occasionally present and focused on him. It's a cliche to say that the children of wealthy parents are mainly raised.

by their nannies, but it's one of those clichés that comes from a real place. I mean, y'all remember our episode about John DuPont, right? These caregivers can sometimes be a welcome source of warmth in a child's life, but poor Benji got stuck with a German weirdo named Bella who would wipe his mouth after every bite he took and also forced the naturally left-handed Benji to use his right hand. It's so weird. Like, people back then really hated left-handed kids, and I do not understand why. It's really bizarre. I don't understand it at all.

She was alternately smothering and strict, which is the kind of treatment that can, and in this case, would, lead to some pretty interesting little peccadillos later in life. Benji's Aunt Maxine was convinced that this high-stress nannying was what caused the severe stutter Benji would have all his life. But overall, he was ridiculously spoiled. Everyone in the hotel was scared of his father and gave him whatever he wanted, treating his tantrums like they were as serious and terrifying as tsunami warnings. He grew up surrounded by people like Frank Sinatra, Elvis Presley, and Jerry Lewis. He and his parents were guests at the inaugural call for President Kennedy, who would stay at the Fontainebleau the following year.

The flip side to all this famous glamour was the hotel's deep mafia connection. Al Capone's cousin Joseph Fichetti made thousands of dollars a year as a talent scout for the hotel. A con named Max Raymond ran the hotel's linen and lingerie store. I mean, kind of. Max Raymond was called Little Maxi, which implies the existence of a big and potentially a medium-sized maxi. Maxis of all sizes. You got your heavy flow, you got your light days, you know. Regardless, little Maxie was not actually up there given ladies' advice on silky underwear.

What these guys actually did was sit in back rooms playing endless hands of cards and occasionally making calls on public phones. Ben Novak's mafia investors had asked him to give them jobs, and what was he going to do? The mob's investment in the Fontainebleau was essentially a gamble on gambling, namely that they hoped it would be legal in Miami Beach and they could rake in those big casino bucks. That wouldn't happen, and eventually the focus would shift westward to Las Vegas, but for now, the mob treated the hotel as a comfortable home away from home. Mafia boss Meyer Lansky lived a couple blocks north, but the FBI had his phones tapped,

so he came to the Fontainebleau every day with his little chitzu named Bruiser, playing cards by the pool and using the public pay phones to do business. You know, business. Security at the Fontainebleau mainly came from off-duty Miami Beach cops, and because they were pretty much the only people who treated little Benji as just a kid, he became obsessed with them, desperate for any kind of semi-parental figure. From an early age, he wanted to be a cop. These officers knew their gig. Enjoy the free food, don't ask any questions about big guys with nicknames like Terry the Thumb, and don't worry about the dozen high-class sex workers who worked out of the poodle lounge every night.

When Benji was five, his parents went to France on vacation, so he went to a fancy summer camp. But unlike the staff at the Fontainebleau, other kids didn't go out of their way to grant his every whim, and he hated it, made no friends at all. So he called home a week later, and Ben came and picked him up from camp in a helicopter. Remember when you were young and your dad put him, picked you up from camp and his helicopter. Just a very normal American childhood. He started at a private prep school but didn't make friends. He was self-conscious about his stutter and hid his loneliness behind big talk about all the movie stars he knew. For his birthday party, he didn't have any friends to invite, so Ben Sr. just rounded up random kids who were

staying at the hotel. At Halloween, he went trick-or-treating alone, chauffered around Miami Beach in his dad's limo. Ugh. It's like, instead of solving the actual problem, we're just going to slap a, slap a bandaid over the gushing, sucking, bullet wound. That's horrible, I know. It's horrible.

I'm only laughing because, like, this poor kid. No, it's, it's funny because it's absurd. It's such a sad story. Around this time, the marriage between Benji's parents was imploding. When Bernice and Ben first met, he was a married man picking up pretty younger women in nightclubs, and not much had changed since then. With Mambo fever sweeping the nation, Bernice's response was to have some fun of her own with some of the Cuban musicians who regularly played at the Fontainebleau.

Ben was absolutely livid. I mean, what the hell? Only guys are allowed to do that kind of thing. He had some goons, be the same. up one of Bernice's boyfriends, then the two of them got into a screaming argument that ended with Ben moving out into an apartment elsewhere in the hotel. And maybe there's a connection between all this domestic tumult and Benji's reaction to the Batman TV show that just started airing, which grabbed a hold of every piece of his 10-year-old imagination. Batman punching the Joker in the

face made a lot more sense than his mom and dad screaming at each other. It was an escape from reality. In 1968, Benji was 12 years old, and Bernice had a freshly minted divorce and a fat alimony settlement. They moved to Fort Lauderdale, where Bernice's drummer boyfriend, George Rodriguez, soon moved in. They'd live essentially as husband and wife, but never officially tied the knot because Bernice wasn't going to give up her alimony payments, which, to be honest, I feel like she earned. No kidding. Benji started at a new prep school, where he, again, failed to make a little bit of a

make many friends. He was a tall, nervous, awkward kid. He liked technical things, though, and helped with sound and lighting for school plays. It was there that he made one of his few real friends, the kid playing Brutus and Julius Caesar, a young Kelsey Grammer, the guy who played Frazier in case you're not familiar. Wow. The tragedies of Kelsey Grammer's life could get an episode by themselves, but the extremely short version of it is that four members of his immediate family have either died in tragic accidents or been murdered. He met Benjie Novak just a few months after his father was murdered. They were two troubled kids and they bonded immediately. When he wasn't in school, Benjie was usually back at the Fontainebleau, following off-duty

cops around like a puppy dog. Ben Novak Sr. didn't like being seen. Ben Novak, Sr. didn't like being single and got married again the year after his divorce. He had a type. Bernice had been a model in her 20s when they'd first gotten together, and 62-year-old Ben's new wife, Janie, was also a model in her 20s. Oh, my God. Shockingly, this didn't work out. Ben kept screwing around and Janie divorced him after a couple of years.

Like, dude, why are you even getting married? I don't understand it at all. It's, you know. You could just, you could just keep screwing around with models in their 20s. Like, you don't have to keep paying alimony. Like, it's fine. She's young enough to be your granddaughter, man. Leigh.

He's like that dazing and fused character. I keep getting older, they just stay the same. In 1974, right after his 18th birthday, Benji went after one of his long-held dreams and became a auxiliary officer with the Miami Beach PD. This required two 10-hour shifts every month and gave Benji most of the authority of a full officer. He had an uniform and a gun and could make arrests. He saw himself as the Fontainebleau's chief of security and would wander the corridors jangling a big set of keys and listening to the police radio. Sheriff of Paddies for you

always sunny in Philadelphia fans. Benji was now six foot three and thin as a rail and had grown a beard so people might think he was older and take him more seriously. No one did. Everyone still saw him as a kid playing at being a cop. He could be thin-skinned and twitchy if people didn't show him proper respect. Fact is, I don't think I'd have enjoyed spending time with Benji at any point in his life. He was difficult and draining, just kind of an exhausting person to be around. But having said that, I feel bad for him. If you look at the bizarre world he grew up. up in? I mean, each of his parents was a distant weirdo in different ways. He's raised in an environment where he wanted for nothing, but every interaction was colored by someone being scared

of his dad. What chance did he ever have to be normal? None at all. He was studying at the University of Miami, but Ben Sr. made him a vice president of the hotel with a hefty salary, company car, and an apartment. Most people treated this for what it was, an empty gesture. His father didn't take Benji seriously, thought he was just a goofy kid who spent all his time either playing cop or chasing after the girls working in the Pood Lounge. Ben Sr. should have been more careful with his money, because by the mid-70s it was clear that the Fontainebleau was failing. The quick growth of Vegas and the Bahamas as vacation spots, along with the opening of Disney World in Orlando, cut Miami Beach's tourist traffic in half.

The hotel was mortgaged to an incredible. incredible amount. Ben was millions of dollars in debt, and the hotel owed more millions in backed taxes. He had barely any money left every month for the upkeep of the hotel, which became shabby. Soon, to save money, instead of washing sheets, they'd just switch the bottom and top ones. Ew. It's probably no coincidence that around this time, the Fontainebleau became the base of operations of the notorious black tuna gang who smuggled hundreds of tons of weed into the U.S. from Columbia, a lot of it moving through the service tunnels and underground parking lots of the hotel. Everyone involved insisted that Ben Sr. played no part in this, but he was a total control freak

about everything in that hotel, and there is zero chance he didn't know what was going on, or that he didn't get a cut. Benji was apparently oblivious to the hotel's struggles. devoting his energies and attention to the normal obsession of 18-year-old boys, l'amour, or at the very least, la Passione. Like his dad, Benji had a particular type. It's very likely his first sexual experiences were with the glamorous sex workers of the poodle lounge, and that kind of cemented what Ben was looking for.

He dated tall, sexy, busty ladies, usually showgirls and strippers. Ideally for him, that bustiness came from, breast implants. If a girlfriend hadn't already have it, he'd insist she have enhancement surgery, which I'm guessing he only got away with because that was a good career move for the ladies he dated. Ben always chose how big the new boobs would be and actually enjoyed watching the surgeries, which, not going to lie, that gives me the freaking hebes. Like, what the hell, man? I'm going to buy you boob implants and I'm going to watch and put in. It's just weird. None of these relationships lasted for long, but there was always a new lady on the horizon.

Benji was a good-looking guy, and his family were famously loaded. Casual dating was not a problem. When he was 20, Benji started dating a pretty flight attendant. The couple getting engaged just two weeks after they met. That's not usually a recipe for success, and after just a few months, Benji ditched her for Jill Campion, a six-foot-tall Vegas showgirl that a friend introduced him. to. Jill was a catch. She was also 29 years old and Benji worried, probably correctly, that she'd be dubious about dating a 20-year-old guy. So Benji just lied, telling her he was actually 25.

Nothing like starting off a new relationship with a huge lie. Welcome to Mick Unplugged, the number one podcast for self-improvement and modern leadership. I'm Mick Hunt, your host, and I'm here to challenge your why and fuel your because. This is where leaders, entrepreneurs, and go-getters come to level up. Each week, I bring you unfiltered conversations, game-changing strategies, and the kind of motivation that transforms lives and legacies. I've learned from legends like Les Brown, Damon John, and Robert Irvine. And now, I'm bringing their lessons, along with mine, straight to you. From modern leadership tips to creating unstoppable momentum, this is the podcast that redefines what's possible.

finds what's possible. Hit play, subscribe, and join the millions who've made Mick Unplug their go-to source for growth and greatness, because your next breakthrough is just one episode away. This is Mick Unplugged, the voice and face of modern leadership entrepreneur and self-improvement. Let's get started. Goodbye, Kyle. Did the sound of those words call to you like Pavlov's dog? Then you might enjoy our podcast, Turtle Time. Every week, you can join me. me, Riley Hamilton, and my co-host, Amy Scarlotta, as we cover the most pressing Bravo news

and dig into the new episodes to answer important questions like, Who the hell is Adrian Maloof in this world? Listen to Turtle Time on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. New episodes every Wednesday and Friday. Jill later suspected that it was the difference in their ages that caused Benji's mom, Bernice, to be kind of cold to her, although it never took much to get Bernice to turn down the heat. Jill got along better with Ben Sr. Who was always most comfortable with pretty young women around

and who now, 70 years old, ask Jill's best friend to date him. Ugh. Ew. I just imagine him tottering around, just asking any woman under 30 to go out on a date. In fact, Jill got on better with Ben Sr. than his only. son did. If he had a message for Benji, the old man would call Jill to pass it on rather than speak

to Benji directly. A few months after they met, Ben sort of proposed to Jill. He just left a $2,000 diamond ring in a box on the dressing table in the apartment they shared. No words on the subject were ever said, but they both now considered themselves engaged. Well, quite right, quite right. I mean, who wants to talk about emotions, right? Those are for poor people. Between the engagement and their marriage, the family's involvement in the Fontainebleau imploded. Unable to pay the taxes he owed, Ben Sr. was legally compelled to sell the rundown hotel, which quickly transformed into a Hilton. He moved in with his older sister, deeply depressed. He'd soon move into a condo and start managing an apartment complex. quite a step down from a world-famous hotel.

He also lost his damn horny mind, going as an 18-year-old schoolgirl's date to prom, then dating a 20-something former Miss Euro way. There is a line between old flirt and old creep, and you, sir, have crossed that line. Like light years ago. Like light years, your light years from the line, dude. Gross.

And I don't care how rich he was. Can you imagine anything weirder and more humiliating than having a 73-year-old man be your prom date? Like, for the rest of her life, that is going to be the first thing people remember about that girl. Like, hey, remember Peggy? Yeah, yeah, yeah. The one who brought the septuagenarian to the dance. Anyway, yeah, I saw her the other day. Yeah, she opened a salon.

Like Jesus, Murphy. Settle down, Hiff. Everybody probably thought he was her pop pop. Yeah, I think she brought her grandfather to the dance, not she brought her old boyfriend to the dance. That's awful. Awful. Benji and Jill had a fairly low-key wedding in 1979, although most low-key weddings don't include gifts from Frank Sinatra. Not long after the honeymoon, Benji casually called out from the shower.

Honey, I'm not actually 27. I'm 25. Actually, I just turned 23. This was a surprise, but not the deal breaker it might have been when they'd first met. Benji, who had hotel connections all across the country, had gotten a gig organizing conventions for Amway, and by 1980 had set up his own convention planning company. This involved a lot of traveling, often with Jill at first, playing the beautiful trophy wife just like Benji's mom had done for his dad.

The company did okay, but not spectacularly, but Benji's expensive lifestyle was mainly bankrolled by his mom, and Bernice usually got what she wanted. Their marriage was always doomed because Benji couldn't keep his pants on when he traveled for work alone, but Bernice did her best to hurry along its demise. She was always smiling and charming when she met Jill, but behind her back, she was constantly pressuring Benji to divorce her. In 1981, the couple were ready to make an offer on a house when Benji, a grown-ass man, said, I can't do it. I can't buy this house and put your name on it. My mother won't let me. Jeez, Louise. Thinking Benji was cheating on her again, Jill once did a little snobes. Jill once did a little

snooping and was astonished to find some divorce paperwork from an attorney that declared the two of them were no longer married. Benji explained that this was a fake he'd drawn up to get his mom off his back, which was just bizarre. The two of them still went over for dinner every weekend with Bernice and George Rodriguez, still clearly a couple with no one ever bringing up this imaginary divorce. The actual divorce arrived just a few weeks later, with Jill accepting a settlement of $4,000 and her engagement ring to end the marriage less than two years after their wedding. Bernice really should have been bending every fiber of her being toward keeping Benji and Jill together, because this was as good as it was ever going to get as far as his romantic partners went.

Benji was still an auxiliary police officer and had been for seven years. He still had Batman-inspired dreams of becoming a detective, but this wasn't going to happen in the police department. His stutter made it almost impossible for him to use the radio, and he couldn't speak at all in high-stress situations, which are not uncommon for cops. Anyway, to scratch that itch, he started a private security firm called Eagle. It was definitely a small-time affair, just hiring security guards for private functions and doing surveillance work for divorce attorneys. I don't think Batman ever did that, as I recall. he was friends with a lot of cops and often went with them to strip clubs.

Post Jill, he reverted to his old dating habits of picking up dancers and paying for boob jobs. He was popular with the ladies in the clubs. A decent-looking young guy who had money and was generous with it was like strike and gold. So, so far this story has been a big family soap opera, but we started things off with a scene of horrific violence, and we have plenty of threads that could lead to that awful outcome. We have the mob. We have an international drug-running group.

We have infidelities and a controlling mother. We've seen every single one of these lead to murder in other cases. But none of those was the culprit here. In August of 1983, Benji visited the Follies International Club in Hyaliyah and spent all night slipping dollar bills into the garter belt of a beautiful blonde dancer named Sylvia.

At the end of the night, he gave her his business card and asked her to call him. Later, in the dressing room, Sylvia asked the other dancers who this man was. When they told her he was the heir of the Fontainebleau Hotel fortune, she tucked the business card away. Sylvia was actually Narcisa Sira Veliz Pacheo, and she was a psychopath from her stiletto heels to her crempt blonde hair. Narcisa, as everyone called her,

claimed to have been born in 1956 the same year as Benji, although she might have actually been a few years older. She'd grown up in Guayaquil, the biggest city in Ecuador, which is somewhere that can definitely be a dangerous place. But Narcy and her siblings apparently had a fairly sedate normal childhood, with their parents owning a grocery store in a dairy farm. She'd later claim she'd learned voodoo hexes and potions as a young girl in Ecuador, but it's much more likely she picked this up later on. in Florida. Narsi was the youngest of six siblings, three of which immigrated to the U.S. before her. Most notably for our story, her older brother Christabel had been in Brooklyn for four years before Narcy arrived in the U.S., working in a bakery. Narsi arrived in Florida in 1978, along with her husband and two-year-old daughter May. The marriage didn't last long state-side, and Narsi

sent her daughter North to stay with Christobal. Alone in Hylia, Narsi soon found employment at a kind of seedy full-nude strip club named Follies International. She was shy at first, but that didn't last long when she started making money. The club's featured performer, a young lady who worked under the name, Big Fanny Annie, took Narcy under her wing and showed her the ropes. For our international, for our international fans, for the record, in America, Fannie means rear end, okay? It's even funnier for the people in the UK. I know.

I know. I know. But I had to clarify that it wasn't as blue as they might think it is. Marcy wasn't a super popular dancer at the club at first, because according to Annie, the club's mainly Latino clientele wanted a blonde with big boobs, something they weren't getting at home. Narcy didn't fit either of those criteria, but a visit to the hair salon and some thorough grooming took care of one of them. And she was now a blonde named Sylvia. She quickly gained confidence with some chemical help, because in common with many other strip clubs in the 1980s, everyone working at Follies was coked up to the eyeballs most of the time. This didn't help much with Narcy's temper, which was always volatile and on a hair trigger.

Her irritability made her unpopular with the other dancers, but she didn't care. She was just there to make money. One Christmas, she was sitting with a guy when his wife came in and started yelling, Come home, you have children. And Narcy started screaming back. Bitch, leave him alone. She wanted him to stay and give her money. Gross.

The very early stages of her relationship with Benji are kind of muddy, but within just a few months of them meeting, she quit working at Follies and moved into his new house in Pompano Beach. Just her, though. Ben didn't want Narcy's daughter, May, now eight years old, living there, so she shipped the poor kid off to yet another sibling, a sister in Naples. So everyone but her is raising her kids. Good. Ben's tastes hadn't changed much over the years, so the first thing he bought Narsi after she moved in was a boob job. As usual, he chose the size and watched the surgery. Evidently, his tastes would shift over the years because this was just the first of several boob jobs he'd get for Narsi, with her bust getting bigger and bigger each time.

Can I just stop for a second here? What, seriously, what in the name of Sweet Moses were these surgeons thinking? Just letting this dude sit in on his girlfriend's surgeries? Like, is this a thing? I mean, do they sit there with like a bag of popcorn, making little suggestions? Like, it's just so freaking weird. Like, I can't imagine that like a standard respectable plastic surgeon would have a cuck chair. So he must have paid them off, right? Like he... But you'd think if anybody doesn't need paying off.

It would be a plastic surgeon in Miami Beach. You know what I mean? Like, what the hell? I just, none of that makes sense. to me whatsoever. I'm very interested to know if any plastic surgeons are listening, is this a thing? And if it's a thing, why the hell is it a thing? And if you would, if you would ever let somebody come in and watch your surgery, why? Like, if you would let a, because like, I can't imagine, like, I wouldn't want to watch my loved one be cut open for any reason. No, it's weird as hell. It's so

weird. It, eh. Narsi knew she was on to a good thing and was on her. best behavior. Benji introduced her to one of his cop friends, Charlie's serradar, and Charlie was impressed. Narsi seemed smart and practical, with plenty of the good sense that Benji was lacking. But just a couple weeks later, Benji had taken Charlie out on his yacht when Narcy called him on his brand new cell phone. She just found out that Benji had been seeing another woman and was screaming that she was going to burn down his house. As Benji desperately tried to get her to calm down, Charlie thought to himself, Boy, are you in for a long, fucking hard ride?

And he was not wrong. But as you've probably guessed by now, the second part of this story is going to have to wait till next week. And trust me, when I say, it is going to get so much weirder. So much we're. Now, before we go, don't forget about our two elsewhere. amazing live shows coming up. First, we've got summer camp, September 10th through 13th, an amazing four-day festival at a real summer camp in Equinunk, Pennsylvania, hosted by Dan and Lindsay Cummins of Time Suck and Scared to Death. We'll be performing live alongside them and

the podcast astonishing legends in addition to a roster of stand-up comedians and local bands. Go to Bad Magic Productions.com for more info and to buy tickets. Then we've got our true crime cruise, Crime Wave 2.0, February 8th through 12th, 2027. If you want to come on vacation to the Bahamas with us and some of the biggest true crime and paranormal podcasts in the world, like case file, true crime garage, no sleep and scared to death, here's what you got to do. Tickets are on sale now, but they're 90% sold out at this point, so if you want to go, and you do, make sure you get over to crimewave at sea.com slash campfire and book your cabin ASAP. You'll get $100 off, plus a private meet-and-greet with us.

The great thing is you can pay all at once, or you can set up a payment plan and pay it off over time. So get on it, Jall. That's crimewave at sea.com slash campfire. So that was a wild one, right campers? You know, we'll have part two for you next week. But for now, lock your doors, light your lights, and stay safe until we get together again around the true crime campfire. And as always, we want to send a grateful shout out to a few of our lovely Patreon supporters. Thank you so much to Alexa, Lily, Melissa, Seabag, and Julie.

We appreciate y'all to the moon and back. And if you're not yet a patron, you are missing out. Patrons of our show get every episode ad-free, at least a day early, sometimes more, plus tons of extra content, like patrons-only episodes and hilarious post-show discussions. And when you join the $5 and up categories, you get even more cool stuff. A free sticker, a rad enamel pin, or fridge magnet while supplies last, virtual events with Katie and me, and we're always looking for new stuff to do for you. So if you can, come join us at patreon.com slash true crime campfire.

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Do you love top 10 lists? Then you are going to love our podcast Disney Countdown. Hi, I'm Megan the Magical Millennial. And Biscuits, I'm Jeremy, aka Jarendell, and we are the host of the hit Disney podcast Disney Countdown. On every episode of our fun and family-friendly show, we countdown our top 10 lists of all things, Disney. The parks, the movies, the music, the food, the lore. There is nothing we don't cover on our show, right, Jeremy?

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