The Prince of Paradise (7 page)

N
INE

“GAMBLERS AND HOODLUMS”

As his parents battled in the divorce court, Ben Novack Jr.
had the run of the Fontainebleau—to the annoyance of many.
He got in the way of the staff, who were always too scared to complain about his boisterous behavior.

“He was in everybody’s hair,” recalled Lenore Toby.
“He was a little tyrant.
He had no discipline whatsoever.
He was really Peck’s Bad Boy,” she said, referring to the 1934 film starring Jackie Cooper.
Benji had been raised in the corridors and the lobbies of that hotel by the security officers, and had never had a real father and mother.

At that time, Ben Novack Sr.
had given his adopted son from his first marriage, Ronald, a lowly job as a reception clerk, and kept his distance, never allowing Ronald to live at the hotel.
Benji had little to do with his adopted half-brother, and avoided him, too.

“[Benji] didn’t have siblings,” said his cousin Meredith Fiel.
“He had the Fontainebleau.
The waiters.
The waitresses.
His nannies.
That was his family.”

*   *   *

In January 1966, ABC-TV broadcast the first episode of the
Batman
TV series, causing a sensation.
Ten-year-old Ben Novack Jr.
became a huge fan, and lived for the weekly shows.
The small boy totally related to the caped crusader’s fight for good against evil foes such as the Joker, Catwoman, and the Riddler.

He was now hanging around the Miami Beach police officers who worked security at the Fontainebleau, who took him under their wing.
The precocious little boy latched on to the Fontainebleau head of security, Ronnie Mitervini, who became like a father to him.
“Benji just hung on to him,” said Toby.
“He now wanted to be a detective, and his whole life was security.”

“He was like a mascot to the police,” recalled Officer Pat Franklin, “because his dad owned the Fontainebleau and would feed the cops for free.”

Another Miami Beach police officer, James Scarberry, said that it was common knowledge that you had to take care of Benji if you wanted to keep getting the well-paying details at the Fontainebleau, along with the other perks.
“We would be working at the hotel,” said Scarberry, “and he would just tag along with us.
Benji always wanted to be a policeman.”

*   *   *

By the mid-1960s, the Mafia had quietly taken over the Fontainebleau hotel, reportedly paying Ben Novack $2 million a year as their frontman.

“Because it was run by the Mafia,” Alan Lapidus explained, “there have probably been more movies and TV shows shot in the Fontainebleau than any building on earth.
Jerry Lewis and all those guys made all their movies there to promote the building.
Frank Sinatra had his own suite and there was definitely Mafia [involvement there].”

At 4:20
P.M
.
on March 1, 1966, the Miami Beach Police Department received a warning that an assassination attempt would be made on Frank Sinatra during his performance at La Ronde that night.
The FBI was immediately alerted.

Sinatra “had received a telephone call from an anonymous male caller,” the FBI’s official report read, “who said, ‘a hand grenade will be thrown at Frank Sinatra sometime tonight during the show.’”

That evening there was a heavy FBI and Miami Beach Police Department presence at the Fontainebleau, but nothing untoward happened.

A year later, Sinatra filmed
Tony Rome
at the hotel during the day while performing at La Ronde at night.
He did the same thing in 1968, with
Lady in Cement.

Whenever Sinatra and his entourage moved into the Fontainebleau, there was always an undercurrent of violence in the air.
Sinatra was a heavy drinker, and unpredictable.
He could explode at any time.

Once, at an after-party in the Poodle Lounge, Sinatra and Ben Novack Sr.
were drinking champagne when the star reached over to an ice bucket to refill his glass.
Discovering that the bottle was empty, he threw a tantrum.

“He was as drunk as a skunk,” recalled Lenore Toby.
“So he picked up the bucket with all the ice in it and turned it over Ben Novack’s head, saying, ‘You run a lousy hotel.’”

The Fontainebleau owner merely laughed it off, not wanting to upset the real chairman of the board.

On another occasion, Sinatra took umbrage at something and threw all the furniture in his room off the balcony and into the gardens below.

“Benji was later over there,” said Toby, “collecting the furniture off the ground.”

Sinatra always roamed around the hotel with a team of armed personal bodyguards to do his bidding.
One night, the comedian Shecky Greene was opening for the singer, and cracked a joke about him.

“Sinatra got really pissed,” said Pete Matthews, another Miami Beach police officer who worked security at the Fontainebleau.
“Frank had some of his friends bounce him around to express his anger at comments that he made onstage.
Benji told me he saw Greene, and he’d got the shit beaten out of him.”

Years later, the comedian incorporated the beating into his act, joking that Frank Sinatra had literally saved his life.
He’d tell the audience that five guys were beating him up when he heard Sinatra say, “Okay.
He’s had enough.”

A couple of years before joining the Miami Beach Police Department, Pete Matthews had been driving along Indian Creek, by the Fontainebleau, when he spotted a young boy dressed in a full scuba diving outfit, complete with an oxygen tank, and wading around in the water next to the Fontainebleau’s
Calypso
houseboat.

When Matthews asked what he was doing, Benji explained that he was retrieving the hotel’s silverware, which Frank Sinatra had thrown off the side of the boat the night before.

“Frank was partying on the boat,” said Matthews.
“Sometimes he would go off on the deep end when he had too much to drink.
He didn’t like the utensils, so he’d dumped them over the side.
Benji had such a terrible speech impediment that I spent ten minutes just trying to get it out of him.”

*   *   *

By the late 1960s, Las Vegas was threatening to eclipse Miami Beach as America’s leisure capital.
For the Nevada desert town had one big advantage over the Florida beach resort: gambling.
Despite Ben Novack and his Mafia partners’ dream that Florida would one day legalize casinos, the religious vote up north always proved too powerful.

To add insult to injury, Vegas’s thriving Caesars Palace Casino had stolen many of the Fontainebleau’s designs and innovations, substituting a Roman theme for a French one.

But the confident Fontainebleau owner and president always talked a good game during press interviews.
“Sometimes I am ready to give Miami Beach back to the Seminoles,” he told
The New York Times
in February 1963, “but not today.
Our volume now places us with the top five hotels in the world.
We are enjoying 85 percent occupancy, and could do better if we had any way of bringing in guests on a stand-by basis.”

Novack also dismissed any suggestion that the Caribbean islands were threatening Miami Beach.
“Until last year we lost a great deal of business to Jamaica, Nassau and the Virgin Islands,” he said.
“Now these wanderers are coming back.
They thought they wanted a complete rest, that peace and quiet were all they needed on a vacation.”

Ironically, several months later, Novack decided to expand his empire and build a Fontainebleau Resort and Casino in the Bahamas, on one of the Cat Cay Islands.
Unfortunately, his application for a license was ultimately turned down by a royal commission, on the grounds of “unfavorable police information on his character.”

Talking to the Associated Press, Novack conceded that he knew a number of American underworld figures, but vehemently denied that they controlled either him or the Fontainebleau.

“Novack also said the Bahamian cabinet rejected his casino license application,” read the AP article, “because it did not want a third casino in the colony, not because of police reports on his character.”

*   *   *

In January 1967
The Miami Herald
ran two investigative articles claiming that organized crime controlled the Fontainebleau.
Two reporters had spent months examining thirteen years of the hotel’s financial papers and had concluded that Ben Novack was a front for the Mob, which used his hotel to launder vast sums of money.

The first damning front-page exposé alleged that “gamblers and hoodlums” actually owned the hotel, which was run by Meyer Lansky, on behalf of a Mob syndicate called the Minneapolis Combination.
The reporters branded the Fontainebleau as “a jungle of corporate and financial manipulation.”

In the wake of the articles, eagerly picked up by other newspapers across America, Ben Novack’s good name was put on the line.
Powerful bankers and other financial institutions that provided him credit began turning their backs, and his complex web of financing soon dried up.

Novack sued
The Miami Herald
and the two reporters for libel, asking for $10 million in damages.
The Knight-Ridder–owned newspaper refused to reveal its sources for the stories, claiming it was not in the public interest.

Miami Herald
executive editor John McMullen explained this decision: “We don’t believe that the authors of our laws,” he said, “intended to permit assorted hoodlums, protecting organized crime interests, to refuse to testify and yet require a reporter, working in the public’s interest, to divulge his confidential sources.”

In April, the
Herald
’s lawyers made national headlines by subpoenaing Frank Sinatra to testify about the Mob’s involvement in the Fontainebleau.
Reluctantly, the singer gave his testimony in his suite at the Fontainebleau, with his attorney Milton Rudin present.

Under oath, Sinatra claimed he had no idea how much money he had made performing at the Fontainebleau over the years.
He also denied there was any connection between Ben Novack and Meyer Lansky or Sam Giancana, although he admitted meeting the Chicago Mob boss.
He testified that he might have played pinochle in the Fontainebleau card room “for a dollar or two,” but was unaware of any other gambling there.

The following February, Sinatra canceled several performances at La Ronde after coming down with a mysterious case of viral pneumonia.

“I don’t know when he’ll open,” a concerned Ben Novack told the
Miami News
on February 29.

A week later, Sinatra’s distraught young wife, Mia Farrow, arrived at the Fontainebleau, her marriage on the rocks.
Sinatra was furious that Mia was filming Roman Polanski’s
Rosemary’s Baby
instead of being with him while he filmed
Lady in Cement
at the hotel.
Farrow had flown in from London in a final attempt to save her marriage.

“It was a hot and humid night as the taxi drew up to the Fontainebleau Hotel,” she wrote in her 1997 autobiography,
What Falls Away
.
“A giant sign said FRANK SINATRA in lights, and all the way out on the driveway, I could hear the band playing, ‘It’s my kind of town, Chicago is…’ He was standing in that familiar smoky light with his tuxedo and microphone and hair and black tie.”

Although Farrow’s autobiography maintained she spent “a restless night” with Sinatra, Bernice Novack and Hal Gardner both claim that the singer refused even to see her.

“I found a young girl dressed in a T-shirt and jeans,” the hotel publicity director later told
Ocean Drive
magazine.
“It was Mia Farrow who had travelled from the filming of
Rosemary’s Baby
to be with Frank.
But he refused to let her come upstairs.
Finally he sent down an envelope of money and told her to take the next plane home.”

Bernice also recalled the incident, saying she felt terrible for the fragile young star.
“She sat there like a little waif, a tiny little thing bent over with her arms over her knees.
That was a horrible thing to do any way you look at it.”

A few weeks later, with Ben Novack’s imminent
Miami Herald
libel trial, the newspaper’s lawyers again subpoenaed Sinatra.
To avoid the process servers, he barricaded himself in his Fontainebleau suite.
That night, when he went onstage at La Ronde, he recognized the process servers sitting in the audience.