by John Glatt
“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.
In his cross-examination, Elliott Jacobson got Zippay to admit that even if the postnuptial agreement had been valid, as the defense claimed it had been, Narcy would have received twice as much with Ben dead than in a divorce.
“Were you paid for your service?” Jacobson asked Zippay.
“I received an initial retainer,” Zippay replied, “but Mrs. Novack never paid me any more money. I received ten percent of what I was owed.”
The next defense witness was retired police detective Robert Crispin, whom Tanner had hired to try to discredit May Abad. The private investigator testified that he was paid $5,000 to conduct six “trash pulls between November 2009 and February 2010. He said he had waited for May Abad to put her trash out in front of her home before rifling through it.
Crispin testified that he found several shut-off warnings from the electric company and late-payment notices for Abad’s Toyota. Then, on June 28, 2010, he found a two-page handwritten list of May’s future aspirations. Written on notepaper adorned with butterflies and ladybugs, May’s long-term goals included: having fifteen to twenty properties within five years; moving into a five-bedroom house on the water with a pool and a small boat; and spending more time with her three sons. She also wanted to buy a “hole in the wall bar,” as well as make $1 million by the age of forty and retiring.
“Would you agree,” Tanner asked, “the note reflects the wishes of someone who wants to become very rich?”
Prosecutor Jacobson objected, but Judge Karas allowed him to answer.
“Yes,” Crispin replied.
The private investigator also testified that he had visited 2501 Del Mar Place looking for any sunglasses with missing temple pieces. He had found about six pairs in that condition and placed them on a small glass table to be photographed. None of them had been Valentinos.
In his cross, Jacobson asked Crispin if he had been given specific instructions to look for a pair of Valentino sunglasses with a missing temple piece.
“I may have,” Crispin replied.
“And you didn’t find any Valentino sunglasses?” the prosecutor asked.
“No,” he replied.
Jacobson noted that Narcy Novack had lived at the house until she was arrested in July 2010 and could easily have broken off the temple pieces.
“You have no idea if the sunglasses were accidentally broken or intentionally broken,” Jacobson asked.
“I do not,” Crispin replied.
Crispin conceded that he also did not know where or when Abad’s “Long Term Goals” note had been written, agreeing that there had been no attempt made to destroy it.
“These notes,” Jacobson asked. “What kind of trash were they found with?”
“Food and garbage,” the investigator said.
“‘Trash pulls’—isn’t that a fancy way of saying you’re going through somebody’s trash?”
“Yes,” Crispin said.
“You have no way of knowing if the aspirations, hopes, and dream for her to have her life changed, [were written after seeing] a seminar at a convention?”
“Yes,” Crispin acknowledged.
The next defense witness was Jeremy Morris, the Rye Town Hilton manager on duty the weekend of Ben Novack’s murder. He testified that Narcy was visibly distraught over her husband’s death.
“There was a lot of screaming and crying,” Morris told the jury.
“Would you describe her as emotionless?” Tanner asked.
“Definitely not emotionless,” Morris replied.
During his questioning, Morris suggested that May Abad had appeared more upset with her mother’s behavior than her stepfather’s murder.
“May told her to shut up and stop it,” Morris testified, “or it was going to make her throw up.”
On Friday morning—the thirtieth day of the trial—Howard Tanner announced that Narcy Novack would not be taking the stand in her own defense. This followed a report in The Miami Herald that Narcy was so furious that Detective Alison Carpentier would not be called as a defense witness that she had threatened her lawyer after court recessed on Thursday.
“My client has instructed me to put on the record that she does not wish to testify,” Tanner said. “I met with my client … on numerous occasions to discuss this issue. She has stated to me that she has said what she is going to say. She continues to assert her innocence.“
Then Judge Kenneth Karas asked the defendant to verify that it was her signature on a document Tanner had just given him stating her intention not to testify. Narcy Novack refused to answer the judge directly, going through her attorney instead.
“She has just whispered, ‘Yes, I do,’” Tanner said.
“Is the decision [not to testify] made by you of your own free will?” the judge asked.
“Yes,” her attorney relayed to the court.
“This is for the record,” Judge Karas said. “Mrs. Novack has elected not to communicate with me directly and through Mr. Tanner.”
For the rest of the trial, Narcy Novack would not utter a single word, staring straight ahead defiantly. It was as if she no longer recognized the federal court.
* * *
That afternoon, Howard Tanner called Carlos Veliz’s daughter Karla to the stand. Narcy Novack’s niece testified that she flew down to Fort Lauderdale a couple of days after Ben Novack’s murder to stay with her aunt.
“She’s a human being,” Karla said. “I wanted to be there emotionally for her.”
Previously, Judge Karas had ruled that the jury could not hear about Fort Lauderdale Police being called to 2501 Del Mar Place, or about May Abad’s allegation that her mother had attacked her with a crowbar. But Karla would be allowed to describe what had led up to the confrontation.
“Comes a time you had an interaction with May Abad?” Tanner asked.
“Yes,” Karla Veliz replied, explaining that it was first time she had ever met her cousin.
“When you went into the guesthouse, what happened?”
“I saw [May] in Ben’s office,” Karla said, “and she was just leafing through the folders and files. She kept repeating, ‘My father, my father—he has something for me.’”
In his cross-examination, Elliott Jacobson asked Karla if she was Carlos Veliz’s daughter and if Melanie Klein was like a stepmother.
“She’s my father’s partner,” Karla said.
“Are you aware that there’s been evidence that your father gave a bag of guns to Alejandro Garcia,” the prosecutor asked, “to plant in May Abad’s trunk?”
“No,” she replied.
“Are you aware that your father attempted to have Garcia maim May Abad?”
“No.”
“Are you aware your father has been implicated in racketeering?”
“No.”
In redirect, Tanner asked Karla what May Abad’s demeanor was while rifling through Ben Novack’s papers.
“She was extremely nervous,” Karla replied. “She wanted to get in and out. She was going through each and every folder feverishly.”
On Friday afternoon the defense rested its case after calling just eight witnesses. The government then began its rebuttal case, and after the jury was dismissed for the weekend, Howard Tanner called for a mistrial.