by John Glatt
Toby also sensed that the teenager craved his father’s approval, but never got it. “Benji was belligerent, because he was trying to make his place in the world,” she said. “I don’t think his father respected him or thought he’d be anything but a playboy. I don’t know what went on behind their closed doors, but he was not a happy kid.”
* * *
In December 1974 the Fontainebleau celebrated its twentieth anniversary. Miami Beach had undergone a seismic change since the hotel opened, with tourism plunging by half over the last ten years, as Las Vegas surpassed it.
Three years earlier, Ben Novack had welcomed the opening of Disney World in Orlando, forecasting that it would draw millions of new visitors to Florida, ultimately benefitting Miami Beach. But he had been proved wrong, when it in fact began syphoning business away from the Fontainebleau and the other hotels.
Other negative factors were cheap air travel, and package vacations to the Caribbean islands. The growing cruise industry had also cut into profits, as the luxury floating palaces offered gambling.
By the mid-1970s the Fontainebleau was surviving on convention business alone. It had been an uphill struggle for Ben Novack Sr. since the Sorrento wall had collapsed.
“Social business had declined terribly,” explained Toby. “The main account in those years was IBM. They had several meetings back to back during the height of the season, and that kept the hotel afloat for the rest of the year.”
Ben Novack was now mortgaged up to the hilt, owing millions to the banks and other lenders. After he paid his huge monthly bills, there was not enough cash to maintain the Fontainebleau, and it was becoming badly run-down. Its French Provincial furniture now looked outdated, and there was no money to replace it with something more contemporary.
Years later, Ben Jr. described the condition of the Fontainebleau hotel rooms as deplorable. “TV sets needed to be replaced,” he said. “Wallpaper, furniture, fixtures and equipment needed to be modernized.”
* * *
In February 1975, the Miami News reported that Ben Novack Sr. was being investigated by the Internal Revenue Service for possible tax evasion. The story, later picked up on the wire services, claimed that the IRS had compiled a detailed dossier of Novack’s sex habits, drinking, spending, and other social activities.
THIRTEEN
THE BLACK TUNA GANG
In late 1976, Ben Novack Sr.’s protégé, Ahmed Boob, threw a party on the Calypso houseboat, moored across from the Fontainebleau. Among the guests were two New Yorkers, Robert Platshorn and Robert Meinster, who had just started smuggling millions of dollars worth of marijuana from Colombia to Miami.
“That’s where we originally hooked up with Boob,” Platshorn recalled. “And that party cemented our relationship. Right about that time we brought in our first load, maybe fourteen hundred pounds or something.”
Over the next few months, the two smugglers became close friends with Boob. He began catering their parties for prospective buyers through Boob’s Steak House, as well as providing girls from the Poodle Lounge as the entertainment.
Boob arranged for Platshorn and Meinster to move into the Fontainebleau’s $1,000-a-night Governor’s Suite, where Ben Novack Sr. and his family had once lived. He even pulled strings for Platshorn to take over the barbershop concession in the basement lobby, and the hotel’s yacht charter business.
“Thanks to the owner’s valet, Ahmed Boob, we based our smuggling and distribution operations [at the Fontainebleau],” Platshorn wrote in his 2010 autobiography, The Black Tuna Diaries. “With its miles of underground parking and service corridors, we could move around and reappear in any part of the hotel, without using public elevators or hallways. Because we owned and operated the barbershop and yacht club at the hotel, our presence there was unremarkable.”
In his book, Platshorn vividly described checking into the Fontainebleau’s Governor’s Suite. “Ahmed Boob was waiting in the lobby,” he wrote. “A short bone thin, hawk nosed, dark complected Moroccan. Boob was a combination, meeter, greeter, host, dealer, concierge and pimp. Most times Boob was either coked up or luded out.
“Only occasionally, he could be found at his restaurant, ‘Boob’s Steak House,’ located in the hotel lobby. After his usual greeting of a big hug and a couple of very sloppy wet Moroccan man-kisses, he informed me that Robbie and Gene [Myers] were up in Penthouse A, and that he was sending me up a steak and a Caesar’s Salad from Boob’s.”
Boob then led Platshorn through the kitchen, and into the service elevator up to the seventeenth floor, so Platshorn couldn’t be followed.
Platshorn maintains that neither Ahmed Boob nor Ben Novack Sr. knew of his massive smuggling operation, and played no part in it. But hotel manager Lenore Toby says that nothing happened at the Fontainebleau without Ben Novack’s knowing about it, so he must have received a cut.
“Absolutely,” she said. “He was part of that. He had to have been. He was so close to Boob, I don’t know how he wouldn’t have known his actions. I knew that Boob was involved in drugs. He was high all the time. He was living on that boat more than in the hotel, and had parties all the time.”
Over the next few months, Platshorn and Meinster ran their massive drug-smuggling operation from the luxurious seventeenth-floor oceanfront penthouse. They would later become infamous as the leaders of the “Black Tuna Gang.”
Fifteen years later, a U.S. Tax Court report listed the gang’s involvement with the Fontainebleau hotel during 1977 and 1978:
“The purposes of the Hotel suites,” the official report read, “were to provide a place for payments of money, to host elaborate parties for petitioners and their friends at which drugs were freely available. And to create the aura of wealth and importance. Further, the Hotel was the most prestigious in Miami Beach, and [they] hoped that this factor would help to establish their credibility in the drug trade.”
The U.S. Tax Court report mentioned Ahmed Boob by name, claiming he personally arranged for discounts on the expensive penthouse suite, which was always paid for in cash.
“Platshorn and Meinster,” the report stated, “received a special discount rate on accommodations as a result of the influence of Ahmed Boob, owner of Boob’s Steak House and a close associate of the owner of the hotel, Ben Novak [sic].”
Over that period, Lenore Toby noticed how Boob was taking keys and using them to let friends into rooms while the guests were not there. On numerous occasions she would check a guest into the hotel only to have him come back to Reception complaining the room had been used.
“And I had said, ‘Boob, listen,’” she recalled. “‘You have to stop doing this. You can have all the rooms you want, but please let me know in advance so I can put them out of order.’”
Now in his early thirties, the Moroccan liked using a bedroom right next to the suite Ben Novack Sr. was presently living in. One night, Toby gave the suite to an important lady travel agent and sent up a basket of fruit.
“There was a small gun lying next to the basket of fruit,” Lenore said, “so she thought it was a gift, as those toy cigarette lighters were popular then. Then she pulled the trigger, shooting a bullet through the wall of the room.”
After their first huge Colombian drug run, the Black Tuna Gang celebrated with a wild party on one of the Fontainebleau houseboats. The party, fully catered by Ahmed Boob, included the gang’s rich drug buyers from New York and Philadelphia and other associates.
Platshorn later described the highlight of the party as “some ladies Boob had dragged out of his bar at the hotel.”
* * *
It is impossible to know if the Fontainebleau hotel’s vice president of security, Ben Novack Jr., was aware that multimillion-dollar drug deals were going down in the same penthouse suite he had grown up in. He was always extremely loyal to his father, and would never have wanted to cause a scandal to blacken the Fontainebleau’s name.
* * *
Although Ben Novack Jr. never had a steady girlf
riend, he regularly visited the strip clubs around the Miami Beach area, for rowdy nights out with his cop buddies.
“This was my zone,” said Officer Pete Matthews, who worked Vice. “So I knew all the clubs and club owners. And I would prearrange everything.”
There were always available women for the handsome bearded heir to the Fontainebleau fortune, and like his father, Ben Jr. was attracted to tall, beautiful, busty women.
A natural flirt, he dated a string of showgirls whom he met at the Fontainebleau and local strip clubs. And he always sent his favorites to cosmetic surgeon Dr. Larry Robbins. “He had a lot of girlfriends,” said Dr. Robbins, “and yes, he brought them all to me.”
Ben Jr. particularly enjoyed watching the world-famous plastic surgeon perform breast augmentation operations on his dates. And Dr. Robbins was only too happy to oblige him. “I used to let Ben come in and watch the surgery,” he remembered. “I would always give my advice, and he always said, ‘I want to pick the size.’ So I said, ‘Okay, Ben, whatever makes you happy.’”
* * *
On June 7, 1976, it was revealed that the Fontainebleau hotel owed $1.3 million in back taxes, and faced being sold at a public auction. A few days earlier, Ben Novack Sr. had told the Miami Beach City Council that despite a “fairly good” tourist season, “We don’t have the money to pay the taxes.” He said he was now making arrangements “so we can pay our taxes very soon, I hope.”
The iconic hotel was said to be two years in tax arrears, and had until November 1 to settle its debt, or county officials would seize the hotel and sell it to the highest bidder.
* * *
In early 1976, twenty-year-old Ben Novack Jr. had fallen in love with an attractive air stewardess, after meeting her on a flight. Within a couple of weeks they were engaged.
“They were pretty serious,” recalled Pete Matthews. “I met her a couple of times, and she was a very stunning woman.”
Nevertheless, in the fall of 1976, Matthews played Cupid, setting Ben Jr. up on a blind date with the daughter of a neighbor.
Jill Campion was a shapely six-foot-tall, twenty-nine-year-old Las Vegas showgirl taking a break from dancing to decide on her next move. Matthews told Benji he had to meet her, so they concocted a ruse for her to come to the Fontainebleau.
“He set us up on a date,” said Jill, “and I thought it was a job interview.”
After the interview, Jill nervously asked Ben Jr. if she’d gotten the job. “Ben says to me,” she remembered, “‘Well, I’m sorry that I can’t hire you for anything at this hotel.’ And I said, ‘Why?’ And he goes, ‘because we have a policy that you can’t date anyone that works in the hotel, and I intend on dating you.’”
Then, after admitting that the interview had been a setup, Ben Jr. took her to Boob’s Steak House for a champagne dinner.
“And that was the beginning,” she said. “He swept me off my feet.”
A few days later, Ben Jr. took Jill for dinner at the exclusive Celebrity Club at the Diplomat Hotel. As they walked into the restaurant, Jill was shocked by his rudeness to the maître d’. “I said, ‘Who the hell do you think you are?’ And he looked at me like nobody had ever talked to him like that before. And that began our little challenge.”
Ben Jr. loved the way Jill stood up to him, always calling him out for his rudeness.
“He ordered people around,” she explained, “and talked to them as if they were servants. Like he owned them and they didn’t matter. It was degrading.”
During their first few dates, Ben Jr. was charming and flirtatious, rarely opening up about himself. He stuttered badly when he started speaking, but once he got into the flow of a conversation, he improved.
He claimed to run the Fontainebleau, adding ten years to his age to make himself seem more worldly. He also showed her the gun he always carried, explaining that he had done so ever since a threat to kidnap him as a child.
One night over dinner, Ben Novack Jr. suddenly announced that all his girlfriends must have boob jobs, which he would be happy to pay for. Without missing a beat, Jill replied that, being a dancer, she had already had hers done.
Soon after they met, Ben Jr. broke off his engagement to the stewardess, amid bitter allegations from both sides. “It was ugly,” said attorney Richard Marx. “There were overtones of maybe blackmail involved.”
* * *
On Friday, November 5, the Connecticut General Life Insurance Company, one of Ben Novack Sr.’s biggest creditors, filed to place the Fontainebleau in foreclosure on the hotel’s first mortgage. Novack frantically hit the phones, managing to come up with $250,000 to save his hotel.
That month, as Novack battled for survival, he stopped paying his employees’ health insurance, and was often late with paychecks. To save costs, he ordered his bar staff to pour cheap champagne into Dom Perignon bottles, and then charge customers for the good stuff.
With the Fontainebleau in serious financial trouble, Ben Novack Sr. started receiving numerous offers of backing to keep him afloat. “It was as if he had two great eagles on his shoulders,” said Toby, “saying, ‘All the con men of the world, here I am.’”
He began courting possible backers, taking them for expensive dinners and giving them free rooms at the hotel. But each month, as the mortgage checks went out, the noose on the Fontainebleau tightened.
At one point Frank Sinatra stepped in, offering to buy the Fontainebleau. And when Ben Novack refused to sell, the two had a knockdown fistfight.
“They beat the living hell out of each other,” recalled Robert Platshorn. “It resulted in black eyes, bruises and cuts. Ben was a bear in those days and Sinatra would fight at the drop of a hat.”
The fight became common knowledge around the hotel, and Ben Jr. was upset that his father had turned down Sinatra’s generous offer.
“I remember the fistfight,” said Jill Campion. “Benji told me that Sinatra wanted to buy the hotel and his father had refused. This was when they were starting to have problems. [Others] also offered to buy it, but he wouldn’t let it go. He just couldn’t sell it.”
After the fight, Ben Novack Sr. threw Frank Sinatra out of his suite, and the superstar never again played the Fontainebleau.
* * *
That Christmas, ten thousand members of the Hotel Employees Union Local 355 went on strike, demanding higher wages and better working conditions. The Fontainebleau and six other Miami Beach hotels were picketed by maids, waiters, bellhops, and bartenders.
At around 7:00 A.M. on December 27, with temperatures in the forties, a combative Ben Novack Sr. stormed out of his hotel to confront the one hundred striking picketers lined up outside the front entrance.
“That’s the thanks I get for giving them jobs,” Novack raged to Miami News reporter Bill Gjebre.
Novack vowed that he would never allow the strikers, mostly Cuban immigrants, to disrupt his hotel service, threatening to sack them and hire new ones. He told the reporter he was already using his executive staff to make beds and wait tables.
“There are a lot of jobs here for people,” he said. “We’ll function.”
FOURTEEN
DECLINE AND FALL
Ben Novack Jr. fell hard for his new girlfriend, Jill Campion. Most evenings he took her out on the town, to expensive restaurants and nightclubs.
“The thing Ben and I had in common was a love of the night life,” said Campion. “Me being a showgirl dancer was fitting for his lifestyle. We were always getting dressed up and going someplace to be seen and have fun and, on his part, do some business. It was all about packing in as much as we could.”
Ben Novack Jr. was also very generous.
“He bought me jewelry and clothes,” said Jill, “but he was very exacting on how he wanted me to dress and wear my hair.”
Although Ben Jr. always looked slightly unkempt, with his full beard and thick bushy hair, open-neck shirts, and leather jackets, he insisted Jill dress like a sexy fashion model. “He wanted me to be a
s skinny as possible,” she recalled. “So I used to take diet pills and exercise.”
In one photograph of the couple, taken backstage with Frank Sinatra after a show, Jill towers over the singer, wearing a sexy top and wraparound shawl.
“I look at the picture today, with me and Sinatra, and I’m embarrassed,” she said. “I’m half-dressed. That’s how [Benji] wanted me to be.”
Before long, he introduced Jill to his parents.
“[They] called him Benji,” she remembered. “He always tried to get away from it as an adult.”
Jill immediately noticed that he was far closer to his mother than his father. Most weekends, he would drive Jill to Fort Lauderdale for dinner with Bernice and George Rodriguez.
Although Ben Jr.’s mother was always friendly to her face, Jill always felt she strongly disapproved of the relationship. “His mother ran that show,” she explained. “She was very charming and lovely, but I know she wasn’t happy with him being with me.”
Jill felt far more comfortable with Ben Sr., who at seventy years old still exuded charm and flirtatiousness. “There was just something about him,” Jill said. “He was very charismatic and so charming he could make you melt. His eyes were just dreamy.”
She sensed that Ben Sr. was not particularly close to his son. “He would send messages to Benji through me,” she said, “If he wanted him [to do something], tell Benji this and tell Benji that. So I don’t think they talked a lot.”
She also met Ben Sr.’s right-hand man, Ahmed Boob, one night at his steak house. “He was quiet,” she remembered. “He was just there, and you almost wouldn’t notice him. So he didn’t draw any attention to himself, and I think probably with good reason.”
A few weeks after they met, Jill Campion moved into Ben Jr.’s modest two-bedroom apartment at Fontainebleau Park, in southwest Miami. Soon afterward, he took her to Victor Posner’s house for dinner.
“You walk in and there was this palatial pool,” she said, and “we were served by a bodyguard with a gun on his shoulder.”