The Prince of Paradise (48 page)

“You’ll have to explain that,” the investigator replied.
“What do you mean?”

“She was crying,” Tanner said.

“Not when I was with her,” Murphy said.
“When I first saw her I expressed my sympathy for her loss.
She was calm.
She was in control.
She said she would do anything to find out who killed her husband.”

At the end of the day, before Judge Karas recessed for the long Memorial Day weekend, Howard Tanner expressed concern about his client’s mental condition.
“I want to put on record that she has been visibly disturbed all day,” he said.
“She has been crying throughout the day and I have not been able to communicate with her.
It may be she’s just having a bad day.”

Then Tanner asked the judge for time to prepare Narcy to take the stand in her own defense, in the event she decided to do so.
“If she’s going to testify,” he told the judge, “I’m going to have to have her ready, because Mr.
Jacobson will have a lot of questions.”

*   *   *

On Tuesday, May 29, the jury returned from the four-day Memorial Day recess, as the trial entered its sixth week.
The government now wrapped up its marathon case by presenting an elaborate four-hour-long PowerPoint presentation.
Prepared by the government’s fiftieth and final witness, Dean DeLitta, a Cisco Systems cell phone expert, it would irrefutably link the two defendants and the killers to one another during both murders.

The jury watched as DeLitta tracked Cristobal Veliz and the two killers in real time, driving to the Rye Town Hilton on July 9, 2009, for a reconnaissance mission.
Then he showed the jury how they had returned to the hotel two days later for Ben Novack’s murder.

The government’s coup de grace was the 6:39
A.M
.
call from Narcy Novack’s secret phone to her brother Cristobal, launching the attack.
The presentation graphically illustrated her call from the hotel bouncing off a cell tower less than a half mile away to Veliz’s phone at a Port Chester gas station just five minutes away from the Hilton.
The records showed it was the only call her secret 954-816-2089 cell phone would make that morning.

The presentation also tracked Alejandro Garcia’s and Melvin Medrano’s cell phones on April 4, 2009, the night Bernice Novack was murdered.
It showed numerous calls between them and Cristobal Veliz that night.

The voluminous cell phone records corroborated much of the two killers and their accomplices’ testimony.
Under defense cross-examination, DeLitta conceded, however, that there was no way of knowing what was said during the phone calls or even who was making them.

On Wednesday at 11:50
A.M
.
DeLitta was excused, and the government rested its case against Narcy Novack and Cristobal Veliz after almost twenty-five days and fifty witnesses.

F
IFTY-
T
HREE

THE DEFENSE

After the lunch recess, Cristobal Veliz took the stand in his own defense.
With newly cropped receding hair and wearing a new shirt, his first change of clothing since the start of the trial, Veliz would spend the next four days testifying through two Spanish-language interpreters.

Veliz told his attorney, Larry Sheehan, that May Abad had reached out to him as a teenager after an incident with Ben Novack Jr.
“She asked me for help,” he testified, “so I went down [to Florida] to help her.”

Judge Karas refused to allow Veliz to tell the jury what he claimed his niece had said, except that it had led to a conversation between him and Ben Novack.

“As a result of what May had told you,” Sheehan asked, “did you see a change in Ben and May’s relationship?”

“It changed a lot,” Veliz replied, “because she seemed to take control over him.”

“How?”
Sheehan asked.

“She would ask him for gifts,” he said.
“Everything she wanted she would get.”

In early July 2009 he had encountered May at a barbecue at Keyling Sanchez’s house in Miami, and they had had a conversation.

“We can’t say anything about the conversation,” Sheehan said, “but would it be fair to say she was speaking loudly?”

“She was almost out of control,” Veliz said.
“She was very upset.”

“Did she indicate something she was going to do to Ben Novack?”

“Yes.”

“Did she say she was going to cut off Ben Novack’s testicles?”

“Yes.”

“As a result of the conversation, did you speak to Ben Novack?”

“Yes.”

A few days later, Veliz testified, just before Ben Novack’s murder, he had met Alejandro Garcia for the first time.
He had been pumping gas at a Miami gas station a couple of blocks from Sanchez’s house when May pulled up in her Honda.
Inside the car was Alejandro Garcia, whom Veliz claimed never to have met before, and another Hispanic man who he later discovered was Joel Gonzalez.

Veliz claimed his niece asked him to drive “her friends” to New York, where they were working for Ben Novack at a convention.
He had refused, saying he had to drive a girlfriend somewhere.

Veliz also testified that his niece had seemed very happy at the gas station.
“She said Ben Novack had just given her fifty thousand dollars,” he told the jury, “and had told her that in his will he had left a hundred and fifty thousand for each of her children and herself.”

Sheehan’s next question, regarding where Veliz was in the early morning of July 7, 2009, appeared to throw the defendant off balance.

“We skipped a lot,” Veliz replied uncomfortably.
“I was on my way to New York from Miami.”

He testified that he next saw May Abad at 10:30
P.M
.
on Friday, July 10, two days before Ben Novack’s murder.
She had unexpectedly turned up outside the Apex Bus stop on Allen Street, New York, as he came off his driving shift.

“She was in a car with three people,” he said.

“Recognize any of them?”
his attorney asked.

“Yes.
Alejandro Garcia.”

“Did May ask you for anything?”

“Yes,” he replied.
“She asked me to get her a taxi.”

Veliz said his niece wanted Garcia and Gonzalez to be taken to a convention at a hotel in Westchester.
She asked him to call his son-in-law Denis Ramirez, knowing he worked part time as a taxi driver.
Veliz said he had then called Ramirez, who arrived soon afterward.

“I told him my niece wanted to speak to him,” Veliz said, “and they made the deal.”

Then, according to Cristobal Veliz, the two men had gotten into the car with Ramirez and driven off.

*   *   *

The defendant also offered elaborate explanations to counter all the government’s cell phone evidence, and the two trips to New York the killers claimed Veliz had made with them.
Veliz explained he always kept his cell phone in his Nissan Pathfinder, which was often used by Francisco Picado.

“I had many complications,” he told the jury, “because a lot of women would call me, and I didn’t want my wife to find out.”

He claimed Laura Law, who was a nurse, had become “very sick” from radiation from the X-ray machines she used.
She suffered acute allergies and asthma, leaving her too weak for sex.

“I chose to love her instead of making love to her,” he explained.
“If I wanted to do something as a man, I would do it outside.”

“So that’s why the phone was in the car?”
Sheehan asked.

“I had a lot of women,” Veliz replied, as several jurors laughed.

His attorney then asked about his trip to Florida in early July 2009 with Picado.
Veliz explained that he had become intimate with a very high-class lady from Hong Kong during a ten-day Canadian bus tour.
When it was over, as she still had a week’s vacation left and wanted to see Miami, he had offered to take her sightseeing there.

He was so embarrassed at the state of his old Pathfinder that he had borrowed Picado’s brand-new Nissan Murano for the trip, letting Picado use his vehicle while he was away.

“The woman was very refined,” Veliz told the jury.
“And Frank’s SUV was new and nicer than my old Nissan.”

*   *   *

On Monday, June 4, Cristobal Veliz was back on the witness stand, as the trial went into its seventh week.
That morning, Larry Sheehan read him a long list of accusations that had been leveled at him by government witnesses.
And over the next two and a half hours, the defendant replied “No” more than two hundred times, denying any involvement whatsoever in the murders of Ben Novack Jr.
and his mother, Bernice.

He categorically denied everything the two confessed killers had testified about him, insisting that he had never recruited them or paid them, let alone accompanied them to the Rye Town Hilton for Ben Novack’s murder.
He claimed that his Pathfinder had been stolen, along with his credit cards, which had been used to frame him for the murders.

“I had nothing to do with this,” he maintained.
“I never touched my brother-in-law.”

That afternoon, Veliz testified that May Abad had had him kidnapped on September 3, 2009.
He said he was on his way for a Chinese meal when he was attacked in a Philadelphia underpass and knocked unconscious.
He had then woken up in a basement blindfolded and tied up.
Over the next eighteen days he had been kept prisoner, he said, eating only his four jailors’ leftovers.

“[I was] treated like an animal,” he told the jury.

He claimed that May Abad had eventually come to the basement, at which point he begged her not to kill him or hurt his grandchildren.
She had then ordered his release, after he agreed to have Narcy give her money from Ben Novack’s estate.

Veliz had wanted to testify that May Abad had also confessed to murdering Ben Novack, telling him, “Ben got what he deserved,” but Judge Karas had ruled it hearsay and disallowed it.

“It’s a way for Mr.
Veliz,” said the judge, “to try and contort the rules of evidence to pin this on someone else.

Late Monday afternoon, assistant U.S.
attorney Andrew Dember began his cross-examination of Cristobal Veliz, picking apart his testimony piece by piece.
For almost four hours on Tuesday, Dember confronted Veliz with his bank statements and bank withdrawals, pointing out glaring inconsistences in his sworn testimony about his movements up and down the East Coast during the first seven months of 2009.

Facing the prosecutor’s questions, Veliz was often evasive, and lost his temper several times after Judge Karas cut him off for hearsay.

Although he acknowledged giving Alejandro Garcia his phone number in August 2009, when he claimed to have first spoken to him, he could not explain why the confessed killer’s cell phone contact list had his number logged under the name “Jefe,” which means “the Boss” in Spanish.

“It’s because you were Alejandro Garcia’s boss, weren’t you?”
Dember demanded to know.

“That’s what they wrote,” Veliz replied.

“My question to you was,” said Dember raising his voice, “Were you Alejandro Garcia’s boss?”

“No,” came Veliz’s defiant reply.

*   *   *

On Wednesday morning, Andrew Dember played the jury a surveillance video.
It was recorded at 6:18
A.M
.
on July 9, 2009, at a Bank of America drive-through ATM in Jessup, Maryland, and showed Cristobal Veliz withdrawing $200.
Prosecutors say he withdrew the cash during his second trip to New York with Garcia and Gonzalez, while towing the broken Thunderbird back north for repairs.

When Dember asked Veliz to account for his movements that day, Veliz insisted that he had been driving an Apex bus to an amusement park in Virginia, parking it a hundred meters away from the ATM to withdraw money.
He vehemently denied Garcia’s and Gonzalez’s claim that he was driving them to New York to assault Ben Novack Jr.

After Veliz agreed that it was him in the video, Dember played the rest of it.
Following the cash withdrawal, the video shows Veliz walking out of the camera’s view.
Then, two minutes later, a green Pathfinder can plainly be seen in the distance towing a Thunderbird out of the parking lot.

“Mr.
Veliz,” Dember said sternly.
“Do you see a green Pathfinder on the video?”

“That’s not my car,” he replied testily.

“That’s not your green Pathfinder towing your Thunderbird out of the parking lot?”

“No.”

Later, it would be revealed that prosecutor Perry Perrone had discovered this smoking gun only at 3:00 that morning, after reviewing the ATM video in preparation for the day’s questioning.
He had then alerted the other prosecutors, and they had worked through the night to duplicate a series of still photographs to show the jury that morning.

For the rest of the day, Cristobal Veliz seemed a beaten man, trying to ward off further blows to his credibility.
During one particularly heated exchange, Dember accused the defendant of fabricating the “refined lady from Hong Kong,” whom Veliz had finally named as “Chin Chu Lancha,” to place him in Miami instead of in New York with Garcia and Gonzalez.
The prosecutor noted how Veliz had used the exact same name for another lady he had claimed to have gone shopping with on August 13, when investigators had first come to his apartment.

When confronted with this, Veliz tried to laugh it off as a joke.
Then Dember pointed out that Chin Chu Lancha was actually a derogatory adaptation of the well-known Spanish expression
sin su lancha
, meaning “straight off the boat.”

“It’s used to make fun of how Chinese people speak,” Dember explained to the jury.
“It’s the phony name you keep for women.”

“You’re humiliating me,” Veliz replied.

“Mr.
Veliz,” Dember thundered.
“You make up these names for people because they don’t exist.”

“You’re humiliating me,” Veliz repeated, gripping his hands together.
“Don’t humiliate me anymore.”

“You say it for a joke,” Dember accused.
“You say it for a laugh, as you giggle in the witness stand.”

*   *   *

All through the trial, there had been great anticipation that Detective Alison Carpentier would be called as a witness.
In opening statements, both defense attorneys had told the jury that the whole murder investigation had been tainted by one of the lead detectives’ having given $5,000 to May Abad.

As a succession of investigators took the stand, the two defense attorneys had never missed a chance to refer slyly to Carpentier’s gift, reminding the jury of its implications.

Ultimately, the defense backed off calling Detective Carpentier to the stand, after Judge Karas warned that her testimony could open the door for prosecutors to ask her about Narcy Novack’s having repeatedly failed a lie detector test.

*   *   *

On Thursday morning, Cristobal Veliz stepped down from the stand, as his attorney, Larry Sheehan, had no further redirect questions for him.
Then, after playing the jury a seventy-three-minute video of Alejandro Garcia’s original interrogation—to demonstrate to the jury how he looked when he was lying—Sheehan rested his case.

Then Howard Tanner called his first defense witness, Narcy Novack’s former probate lawyer, Henry Zippay Jr.
Describing himself as “100 percent disabled,” the attorney testified by video link from his Fort Lauderdale office.
Tanner sought to discredit the government’s contention that, in a divorce from Ben Novack Jr., his client would have gotten only $65,000 based on their prenuptial agreement.
Zippay testified that under a postnuptial agreement, which had never gone into effect, Narcy would have received far more.