NY Times Review: Miami Vice

John Glatt’s ‘Prince of Paradise,’

By MARILYN STASIO

Published: May 31, 2013

Summer is no time to be virtuous. So before you pack those classic tomes you’re determined to read on vacation, let me tempt you with a few guilty pleasures.

The murder case John Glatt recounts in lurid detail in THE PRINCE OF PARADISE (St. Martin’s, $26.99) is too bizarre for a work of fiction. In fact, it’s a true crime story, originating at the Fontainebleau hotel in Miami Beach and harking back to the fabled era when stars like Elvis Presley and Frank Sinatra entertained the crowds at the front of the house while mobsters ran the show behind the scenes. Ben Novack Jr., the little prince of the title and one of the murder victims in this sordid story, was the son of the colorful entrepreneur who built the hotel and reigned over his fabulously vulgar empire for almost 25 years.

Pampered but neglected, the child everyone called Benji had famous guests like Jerry Lewis and Ann-Margret for playmates, but no one for a friend. No wonder the kid grew up to be a thoroughly obnoxious man. “Every neighbor hated him,” according to someone who knew him well. “They hated him everywhere.” Novack’s second wife, a former stripper, hated him enough to have him murdered — and his mother for good measure. But while Glatt does a professional job of covering the lonely life and violent death of this unhappy prince, his style is much livelier when he’s writing about Novack’s father, the king of glitz.

John Glatt’s ‘Prince of Paradise,’ and More – NY Times

WLRN Interview

True Story: a Hotel Heir, His Seductive Wife, and a Ruthless Murder at Miami Beach’s Fontaineblueu

04/16/13 – Tuesday’s Topical Currents looks at the saga of the famed Miami Beach Fontainebleau Hotel, and the events which ended the lives of its “matriarch” and her son. Ben Novack, Junior, wasraised in sumptuous Fontainebleau suites. When the family lost the hotel, he took a second wife: Narcy. She was an exotic dancer who performed in Hialeah. Years later, Narcy Novack executed a plot to kill her widowed mother-in-law and husband to gain their estates. We’ll speak with journalist John Glatt, author of PRINCE OF PARADISE. Tuesday 1pm on WLRN-HD1, rebroadcast at 7pm on WLRN-HD2 and audio on-demand after the live program.

CLICK HERE FOR THE INTERVIEW: WLRN Interview: True Story: a Hotel Heir, His Seductive Wife, and a Ruthless Murder at Miami Beach’s Fontainebleau

News 12

Novack murder case chronicled in new book, ‘The Prince of Paradise’

WESTCHESTER – A book chronicling the Narcy Novack murder case is due out this week.

“The Prince of Paradise”by John Glatt details the murder of hotel heir Ben Novack Jr. and exposes parts of Narcy’s hire-to-murder scheme that, according to Glatt, have never before been revealed.

Also featured in the book is a recap of an exclusive interview by News 12 with Narcy Novack while she was behind bars.

VIDEO: Novack murder case chronicled in new book, ‘The Prince of Paradise’

The Prince of Paradise

The True Story of a Hotel Heir, His Seductive Wife, and a Ruthless Murder

John Glatt

St. Martin’s Press

Ben Novack, Jr. was born into a life of luxury and opulence. Heir to the legendary Fontainebleau hotel, he spent his childhood surrounded by some of the world’s biggest stars, including Frank Sinatra and the Rat Pack, Elvis Presley, and Ann-Margret, who performed regularly at the Fontainebleau’s La Ronde Room. He sat by while his parents entertained presidents and movie stars, as they reigned over Miami Beach in the ‘50’s and ‘60’s, and when the family business went sour he became wealthy in his own right, founding a multi-million dollar business using connections he made at the Fontainebleau.

But Ben, Jr.’s luxurious, celebrity-studded lifestyle would end in another hotel room—a thousand miles away from the one where he grew up—when police found him bound up in duct tape, beaten to death.

Seven years earlier, police found Novack in an eerily similar situation—when his wife Narcy duct-taped him to a chair for twenty-four hours and robbed him. Claiming it was a sex game, he never pressed charges and never followed through with a divorce. Now prosecutors claimed Narcy let the vicious killers into the room and watched as they beat her husband with dumbbells. They also suspected she was involved in the horrendous death of Novack’s mother, just three months before. But it would be Narcy’s own daughter who implicated her to the police—in this twisted case of passion, perversion, and paradise lost.

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Read the Review by Publishers Weekly (February 11, 2013)

Review: The Prince of Paradise

The True Story of a Hotel Heir, His Seductive Wife, and a Ruthless Murder

Publishers Weekly
Reviewed on February 11, 2013

From the provocative opening sentence (“When retired police chief James Scarberry heard in July 2009 that Ben Novack Jr. had been brutally murdered, with his eyes gouged out, he was not surprised.”), true-crime veteran Glatt (Love Her to Death) grabs the reader’s attention. With a perfect amount of detail, he traces the sad life of Novack—whose father, Ben Sr., founded Miami Beach’s legendary Fountainebleau Hotel—from an unhappy childhood to his death in 2009 at the age of 53. This is no whodunit—the path that ended with Novack’s savage slaying in a Hilton in Rye, N.Y., was a long one, and he wasn’t the only victim; just months before, Novack’s wife, Narcy, a former stripper determined to take control of the family’s assets (including Novack’s warehouse of valuable Batman memorabilia), orchestrated the brutal killing of his mother, Bernice. In fact, it was a medical examiner’s incredible ruling that the severe head trauma sustained by Bernice was an accident that allowed Narcy to go free long enough to plan her husband’s murder. This gripping account is proof that truth can be stranger—and far more disturbing—than fiction. 8-page b&w photo insert. Agents: Jane Dystel and Miriam Goderich, Dystel & Goderich Literary Management. (Apr.)

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