The woman charged with engineering the murder of Fontainebleau hotel heir Ben Novack Jr. — his wife, Narcy — now stands formally accused of masterminding his mother’s murder three months earlier.
Narcy Novack, 54, and her brother, Cristobal Veliz, 57, operated what amounted to a “criminal enterprise,” according to a federal indictment unsealed this week in New York state. The goal: kill Novack Jr. for his money, after first eliminating his mother, Bernice, who had been designated executor of his estate.
In a sinister twist, they tried to pin Ben Jr.’s killing on Narcy’s daughter, May Abad, by paying someone to falsely claim she was behind the plot to kill Ben, authorities say.
The federal accusations against the siblings include murder, robbery, domestic violence, stalking, theft, money-laundering, witness-tampering and obstruction of justice.
Once the pair started killing, the feds say, it was hard to stop. Fearing one of the killers was about to betray them to authorities, Veliz tried to hire yet another person to permanently silence that killer, the indictment states.
Narcy Novack’s attorney, Howard Tanner, said Tuesday that his client continues to assert her innocence.
The bloodshed began in early 2009 when, prosecutors say, Narcy Novack and Veliz hired two people to break into Bernice Novak’s Fort Lauderdale home and kill her. The indictment does not give a precise date for the hire.
Bernice Novack, a spry, vigorous 87-year-old, was found dead April 5, sprawled in a pool of blood in her Fort Lauderdale home. Police and the Broward County medical examiner called her death accidental, saying it probably stemmed from a fall she had had a week earlier in a bank parking lot.
At first, Ben Novack Jr. believed her death was an accident. But then he grew suspicious, according to his lawyer. Before he could act on those suspicions, Ben, too, died a violent death more than 1,000 miles away.
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