Narcy Novack and Ben Novack Jr. - Part 1

0:00 Hi, I'm Rich Tina. And if there's one thing we've learned and over twenty. Years of marriage, some days you'll feel like killing your husband. And some days you'll feel like killing your wife. Welcome to love, Mary. Kill Hey Tina, Hey rich How are you taking good? How are you? I'm doing great? Great? Good to hear good. You seem very perky today? Sure am. I hope all you listeners enjoyed that theme song because apparently you all love it so so much and it's just the best ever.

0:45 They do love it. I love it too. I think it's great. If you don't follow us on Instagram. Recently, I posted a poll because I'm not even like being like cute snarky. I really don't like her theme song. I've made that pretty clear year. Since you really tried to. It's been evinced people that we should change it. I haven't given up, but I posted a poll and everyone was like, I love it, Yeah, don't change it. Yeah. It was at least ninety percent, and there is a fair amount of people that answered the pole. So thank you so much for participating in that poll and keep enjoying using our theme song fun because they don't normally listen to the podcast, but I think I was clicking over because now we're on YouTube. I clicked over to YouTube just to see how things were going over there and a little quiet, but it was I had to hear the theme song, and I was like, you still maintain that you love it?

1:38 I really do love it. I think it's very It's just I feel. Like we're kind of perky and the song just is just such a downer. I don't think it's a downer at all. It makes me remember our glorious wedding day. You are so wrong because we played music like Weezer, right, and we play Weezer, and we played they might be giants, they might be giants. It was a very festive occasion, and that song is not a festive This. Song does make you think of weddings. Okay, well, enough about that, you one. I hope you're happy. I hope all you listeners are happy to well. I have a consolation prize for you, in the form of a snack. Okay, would you are you hungry? You know what, I am very hungry today. I go through days where I'm like I could eat or not, and then some days I just want to eat. Like a side of beef, and today is a site of beef day, so that's good. Yeah, I brought you the side of beef.

2:25 Costco corn muffins. You shut up. You are the worst husband in the universe. We went to Costco yesterday together. Yeah you do. You had to, like you want everyone to be impressed that he went to Costco. Ladies listeners, He's gone to Costco three times in his entire life. Who goes every week? Twice a week? Me, I know, I'm just I'm just cheesing. He's a wonderful I brought the corn muffins. It was funny because we went to Costco and whenever anyone goes with me grocery shopping, I always say you can get whatever you want because I'm just always so happy to have company. Yeah, and when you put we a lot of times don't always, but we get the like a thing of Costco muffins, and we won't go into the new smaller sized Costco muffins because we all feel a certain way about that in our house because we used to cut them in half and I would like throw them in the freezer and like you could get a blueberry muffin whenever you want. I don't like the new ones as much, so I guess I wouldn't.

3:20 Yeah, you said you weren't going to go into it, but you did, but. Well a little bit. But anyway, you could have picked any muffin, and you picked the cornffins. Yeah. I love corn bread, I really do, and. These I actually really hate corn bread. I don't know why. I just really don't like it. Yeah I do, So tell us how you felt about the corn muffins. I think they were great. I think really good. Yeah, but let me bring out the real snacks I bought you. They're really not that much more exciting. I think part two snack you're going to be really excited about. But but part one, I brought you some buffalo Cheetos crunchy. I mean Cheetos buffaloes. I've never had that. Can I apologize? I need to offer apology to you for calling you the worst husband in the universe, because that might have been a slight exaggerator. I was pretty sure you were joking about that. But then I also, because this episode is going to drop right around Easter, I brought you some peeps party cake flavor peeps Peep.

4:09 Yeah, you're back to the worst husband on the planet of all the kids in all the world. When have you eaten a peepe? I've eaten many peeps in my life. So the other night we were sitting at the dinner table and our kids were like, don't buy peeps. Do not buy peeps for the Easter baskets. And our kids are definitely too old for an Easter basket, but they still get an Easter basket. But yeah, they the peeps are great. I just like the doing the peeps. If you've never done this before, you take up two peeps and you give them, put like stuff a toothpick in their beak, and then you put them in their microwave, and I don't know, I don't remember how long. You do it. Because it looks like they're bad like their sort. You don't remember this.

4:50 I remember putting them in the microwave, but I don't. If you do, like with a toothpick, and it looks like they're battling dueling. Oh okay, all right, so you're going to make me eat what flavor is. The cake flavored? Okay, we'll be right back. What did you think about the buffalo crunchy Cheetos and the party flavored Peeps. I'm gonna have to go with no, no. No, no, I'm both. Yeah. Really, I mean I love I really love Cheetos, which I'm embarrassed to say as an adult like I but the Buffalo I am not. I'm not a fan. And the peep you know that it tasted like a normal peep.

5:31 The party cake didn't impress me much. Wow, Okay, I'm sorry to disappoint you. I think you'll appreciate you. I think you'll like part two, Sack, let's just do it. No, I brought I made it part two intentionally so you would have to come back for part two. You were worried. I'm always a little worried. Give us a rating. When I walked into the room, you were like recording on your own. I was like, all right, i'll see you later. Give us your rating for your for the Cheetos. The Cheetos, I would go like four out of ten and the peeps, sorry peeps, a one out of ten. Oh my, how about you. I would give the Cheetos a seven out of ten and I'd give the peeps a seven out of ten. Wow, I can both and I think they pair really well together because the cheetos are a little spicy, and then the peep afterwards is really very kind of cools your mouth off, so I'd recommend them together.

6:23 And you also brought me a gas station soda, so that was very nice. If you thank you, You're welcome. You are not the worst husband. No, all right, well we should talk about the case of Ben Novak Junior and Narsi Novak. This is a recommendation from our listener, and thank you and for the recommendation. Super interesting case. I don't know why I seem to gravitate toward cases that are about wealthy people, because I'm just sort of fascinated by like people who have a lot of money and just screw up their lives in one way or another. So this is another example of that. And if I have a content warning for this case, it's that everyone, almost everyone in the story is a horrible person. It's nice to be able to say, like the victim was a great presence. No, not in this case. You're not going to like anybody noted. In the early morning hours of July twelfth, two thousand and nine, screams rang out through the Hilton Westchester in Ryebrook, New York. Narsy Novak sobbed atop her husband's mangled body. Tape was stretched across his face. Both of his eyes had been gouged out.

7:26 Ben Novak Junior was dead. He was the heir to a fortune built on an iconic American institution, an eccentric and abrasive millionaire who managed to alienate nearly everyone he met. With a drug habit, multiple mistresses, and a jaw dropping collection of jewelry and pop culture memorabilia. He lived a life of excess. There was a long list of people who might have wanted him dead. It was the second family tragedy in a short period of time. Ben's mother had died only three months earlier, seemingly due to a fall. Rumors were floating around the family. Narsy and Benja Junior had always had problems, but people couldn't help wondering had she finally had enough of his running around. Benjamin Novak Senior was born to a Russian Jewish family in nineteen o seven. He was the youngest of four children. His parents were Sadi and Hyman Novic. Ben would later change his last name americanizing it to Novak instead of Novic.

8:20 Hyman ran a hotel in the Catskill Mountains in the southeastern part of New York State. The area was commonly referred to as the Borscht Belt or the Yiddish Alps, as it was the premier vacation destination for Eastern European Jewish immigrants. Many other hotels and resorts at this time would bar Jews from entry, which left a big opening in the market, a hole which was filled by many Eastern European Jews who immigrated to the area and started their own hotels. Ben's father died in the mid nineteen thirties and he took over operation of the hotel along with his older brother. But Ben wasn't good with teamwork. He and his brother fought a lot, and eventually they had a falling out. So Ben moved to New York City and started Kemp and Novak, a clothing supply haberdasherie.

9:04 This business failed as Ben had another falling out with a business partner. You'll see that as a theme as the story goes on. Ben had a hard time getting along with people, and that also passed along to his son, Ben Junior as well. So I just asked you if they only made hats, because I thought Habitasherie meant a hat maker. And that's what I thought as well. The Google says that it is a maker of men's. Yeah, clothing and accessories. Yeah. I had the same thing in my mind that haberdashery meant a hat store. But apparently that is not the case. After Ben's haberdashery failed, he liquidated all of his assets so that he had some money to use to relocate. In nineteen forty, he and his new wife, Bella Novak, relocated to Miami Beach, Florida.

9:48 He got very lucky with his timing because upon arrival, he and multiple business partners purchased the Monroe Towers Hotel, which the United States government then rented out for use as a military training after the Pearl Harbor attacks. Ben used the profits from Monroe Towers to purchase four other hotels, which in turn the army paid him to rent out, so he effectively became a hotel magnate off the back of government subsidies. Wealth changed Ben almost overnight. He started wearing nice suits and shaving his mustache in the French manner. He was already a jerk prior to arriving in Miami. But afterwards he really became a tyrant. He was cold blooded and spiteful and double dealing. He would often try to stiff people who worked for him.

10:31 I'm sorry, what is shaving a mustache into the French manner? Mean? I just sent you a picture, but it's very much like a like just a neat, kind of thin mustache, like very well well groomed. Okay. Ben and Bella adopted a two year old son named Ronald, but Ben was an adoptive father in name only. He was far too busy with his hospitality business, and he often had to take long trips to New York City for business. He claimed. In nineteen fifty one, he abruptly divorced Bella he had fallen in love with another woman, a model named Bernice Stemple. Bernice was born in nineteen twenty two in the Upper West Side of New York City. She was one of two daughters born to William Stemple and Rowena Stemple. Bernice's father was a wealthy playboy who made his fortune in New York's insurance business. He didn't take his wedding vows seriously and could often be found around town cavorting with any woman who looked his way.

11:25 Rowena decided who could play at that game, and she began an affair with William's best friend. When William found out, he threw Rowena out of the house. Their divorce became tabloid fodder for the local press. William won custody of his two daughters, Bernice and Maxine, but he had no interest in actually raising them. Custody was more of a prize or a point of spite. He didn't want Rowena to have the kids, but he didn't really want them either, so William sent Bernice and Maxine to live with his sisters. The ants weren't equipped to raise the kids either, so these extremely wealthy children were sent to an orphan instead of simply being allowed to be raised by their mother. This is horrible. This is what I mean when I say that almost everyone in this story is a horrible person, Like they just no interest in raising their kids. Just ship them off somewhere and let someone else raise them.

12:16 So Rowena wanted the children, but he wanted to win the court battle more. Yes, exactly right. Oh that's horrible. Bernice became painfully shy due to the intense emotional trauma this upbringing inflicted upon her. As young women, both Bernice and Maxine were quite striking, turning heads wherever they went with their red hair and freckles. When she finished school, Bernice was on her way to a career as a secretary, but then fate intervened. She was spotted by a talent scout on the street who offered her a job as a model. She began working for Conover Model Agency, the business which basically created the concept of supermodels and coined the phrase cover girl. Bernice modeled for the Coca Cola company and Old Gold Cigarettes. She became, for a period the face of Coca Cola. She would often frequent the Stork Club, a speakeasy turned Manhattan nightclub famous for its wealthy and glamorous clientele think of it as Studio fifty four before Studio fifty four. Frequent patrons included Lucille Ball and Desi Arnez from The I Love Lucy Show.

13:18 You really you have to tell people where Lucille Ball and Devinez Junior Chi. I know everyone as as much history of you know, watching old TV shows as you and I might, but also the Roosevelts, the Vanderbilts, Ava Gardner, Ernest Hemingway, Frank Costello. Pretty Much any movie star, politician, or mobster who wanted to feel important came to the Stork Club. It was the sort of place Bernice would become intimately familiar with later in life. Then first met Bernice in a nightclub, not the Stork, but the La Martinique a few blocks west. The thirty eight year old bought champagne for her table and bragged about his plans to build a hotel empire. Bernice was not particularly impressed by this sweaty, married, middle aged man who had to yell over the music of the nightclub to speak with her. To see Bernice again, Ben hired the Conover agency and made up a photo shoot. He said he wanted an all American girl with red hair and freckles, describing Bernice's appearance to a tea. A week later, Bernice arrived at the shoot and found Ben there smiling.

14:22 Bernice must have been impressed by Ben's tenacity, because she began seeing him every time she came to New York for business. You imagine, just like having the money to make up a modeling photo shoot just so you could hire a girl that you like. It seems a little manipulative, if you ask me a little bit. Bernice was already married when she first met Ben, to a middle class man named Arthur Dreysen, who had been sent to fight in Europe shortly after their wedding. His absence, not to mention his lack of wealth, destined theirs to be a short marriage. Drawsen took the break up well, and the two remained friends for the rest of their lives. Bernice's affair with Ben lasted for seven years before he finally divorced Bella and tied the knot with Bernice. They married in New York in nineteen fifty two.

15:07 Bernice's father refused to allow Rowena, her mother, to attend the wedding. In marrying Ben, Bernice gave up a profitable modeling career because he insisted that she stopped working. She moved to Miami Beach, away from everybody she knew. She soon found herself in the midst of a personal crisis. Ben didn't have much time for her, as he was deep in the weeds developing his next hotel. His business partners and their wives were all much older than she was, so she didn't have much in common with them. She grew extremely lonely and spent most of her time in her bedroom. Bernice's sister Maxine had this to say about Ben quote, Bernice married a man just like our father, controlling, self centered, and not particularly sensitive. Ben opened the Fountain Blow Hotel in nineteen fifty four. It was a big deal, becoming the most famous hotel in Miami and up to that point, the most luxurious. Named it after the Fontainbleau Palace in Paris, though whenever Ben pronounced it, he always called it the Fountain Blue instead of the Frends pronunciation Fontainebleau.

16:09 And I think, honestly, most people call it the Fountain Blue. I've been to this hotel for conferences before, and I've always heard people refer to it as the Fountain Blue Hotel. That's what I thought, too, But I can't say words in English, let alone French. So bear with me. I'll do the best week. Well, you do it pretty well. I think you had French in like high school. I've never had French. I should probably do like the French duo lingo or whatever. So he had never actually been inside of the Paris Fontainbleau. He seemed mostly interested in channeling the idea of an old world palatial luxury. There was no sign outside of the Fontamblau to advertise the purpose of the building. Then liked it that way and thought it lent the building a similar majesty to European chateaus. Those never had signs either.

16:55 He thought, if you didn't know what the building was, then you didn't belong there. The Fountain Blow was famous for its unique curved shape, which set it apart from other hotels in the area. Ben took all the credit for the design. He claimed that he was struck by inspiration while sitting on the toilet and sketched the plans out right then and there for two hours while his pants were still around his ankles. Thank you for including all of this extra detail. So hopefully it creates a little picture, yeah. That you don't want, while it's a good story. The architect Morris Lappetis disputes this claim. Given his tendency for big, blustery exaggerated claims, Ben was probably not actually responsible for the design. Morris Lappetist spent years of his life working on the fontain Blow for next to nothing. Novak paid him an insultingly low wage, taking advantage of Lappetus's passion for the project. Lappets put up with it because he knew the project could put him on the map, make him far more famous, and lead to better jobs. He basically bankrupted him himself building the Fontain Blow, and even took out personal loans to complete the construction. Meanwhile, Ben Novak was making money off of the graft while he told his financial partners that he was paying Morris Lapidis two hundred and fifty thousand dollars for the project, In actuality, he had only paid Lappetis eighty thousand, with an additional handshake deal for seventy five thousand dollars to be paid upon completion. Ben pocketed the difference for himself. So this

18:26 is a year's long project. Yeah, I think it took two years to build that. I'm sure there was more time before they started building for the design. So yeah, definitely length A lengthy project. When the construction was finally completed and Lapidis asked for his additional seventy five thousand dollars, Ben pretended that he'd never made any such deal. Lappetis so strung out and tired from all the work and stretched so financially thin completely snapped. He chased Ben around the hotel grounds and a jacked him. People had to pull the two apart when lappet Has explained the situation. They were curious that Ben would try to con them out of their money. Lappetis eventually got paid, but he and Novak became lifelong enemies.

19:08 Moore's Lapidus would later design the rival Eden Rock Hotel right next to the Font and Blow for Ben Novak's real estate enemy, Harry Muffson. Is a form of revenge for being stiffed. Ever spiteful and not to be outdone, Ben strategically built a seventeen story blank wall on the Font and Blow property to block the sunlight from hitting the eden Rock Pool during peak sunbathing hours. This became known as the Spite Wall. There was only one large window in the wall, which was strategically designed to give line of sight from Ben and Bernice's dining room to the eden Rock Pool area. Ben loved looking out as the shadow crept over the pool, sending sunbathers scurrying away to sunnier locations.

19:51 That's crazy, isn't it. Its Banyana. There were lawsuits over this whole thing too, But I don't think I don't think Muffson ever succeed getting the wall removed. Really, it's not still there though, is it. It is still there, but it's not just a wall. He actually built or somebody actually built another tower right next to like where the wall is, so it's not just a blank wall blocking the sunlight. But there is a building there blocking the sunlight. Wow, that is nuts. The Fontain Blow became the its spot in the nineteen sixties. The store Club for Miami Beach JFK would stay there and was rumored to have stayed there with Marilyn Monroe. Frank Sinatra was a frequent guest, which led to his entire social circle becoming regulars. The rat Pack and the Mob were now font and Blow staples, and with the Mob's presence, drugs and prostitution followed. A steady supply of cocaine and marijuana was available for those who wanted it, and call girls could easily be found in the hotel's poodle room lounge. Then and Bernice Novak became unbelievably wealthy.

20:53 Bernice had more jewelry than she knew what to do with, including a massive diamond necklace personally gifted to her by Frank Sinatra. Ben began calling himself mister Fontaineblow in day to day conversation. Can you describe the font and blow to us? It's beautiful, beautiful property. I think since this time that we're talking about the case, it went downhill and then it got renovated at some point. So what I saw was after it was renovated and modernized, but a beautiful hotel, very luxurious, very swanky. I was there at a conference once and it was just a beautiful place. Did you see Sammy Davis Junior and drink Sinatra? I didn't. I think it might have been a little mare time. No, not Dean Martin either.

21:38 We'll be back after a break. I apologize for what I said when you tried to give me corn muffins. Sometimes I'm a little snarky and I'm just saying in a jokey manner, and I feel like it comes across as like I'm a really mean. I know that you're joking, so that's the main thing that matters. I think pretty much everybody knows you're joking to me. Let's go back to the case now, Okay. Bernice gave birth to Benjamin Novak Junior in nineteen fifty six. Benji, as everyone called him, was faded to become a little monster.

22:20 Neither of his parents had any time for him. Whenever Halloween rolled around, he was sent trick or treating in a chauffeur limo. He was raised a rich boy. He was raised in a five star hotel with free room service and cleaning whenever he wanted it. Basically, he grew up with a staff of servants at his beck and call. He was constantly exposed to the lifestyles of the rich and famous, so he bore witness to drug use, excessive drinking, and prostitution. At an early age, he was taken care of by a strict German nurse named Bella, who did everything for little Benji, including wiping his mouth when he would eat. She also forced the naturally left handed boy into using his right hand, which traumatized him. According to real relatives, Benji was extremely poorly socialized and had no manners whatsoever. He was incapable of interacting with other children, who usually couldn't stand to be around him.

23:10 When he had tantrums, which was often everyone was afraid to be near him. The few times he stayed with his aunt Maxine and her children, she was horrified by the child's behavior. It sounds like you're being overly harsh to poor little Ben here. I don't think so. I think he was a little monster. Ben and Bernice weren't raising their kid because they were too busy cheating on each other a lot, like a ridiculous amount. It was more Ben seeing other women than Bernice seeing other men, but they were both doing it. This reached a boiling point when Bernice slept with one of the musicians headlining a performance at the Fontain Blow. Ben found out, had the man beaten and threw him out of the hotel. Divorce proceedings went forward. It took a long time for the legal battle to settle, but eventually Bernice was freed from Ben's shackles. She moved out of the Fonta Blow, maintaining only a perfunctory presence in her son's life, and devoted most of her time to the Science of the Mind Church. As Benji grew older, he developed a stutter so bad that he was practically nonverbal.

24:09 He basically couldn't communicate with anybody, especially not kids his own age. He filled the social hole in his life with Batman. He became obsessed with the sixties television show starring Adam West. I had to include a little bit of the Batman core memory. And this is really funny, Like, obviously I was not a child of the sixties, but it was as a rerun later. I remember as a little kid, whenever we would watch Batman, I had a special dance that I did.

24:49 You know, it was like the Batman Dance song, and I did it every time just to annoy my sister and I would like to do it right. For the teav That is really funny. While we're on a tangent, you mentioned the Science of the Mind church, which sounds like a cults type situation. Was that the case. I don't think it's so much of a cult as more of like a kind of a New Age type religion. So they were probably really happy to have a wealthy divorce a in their presence. Yes, I'm sure Benji's Batman hobby led him to an interest, maybe even an obsession, with stopping crime. He started hanging out with all of the ex cops who worked security at the font and Blow. It quickly became understood among the security staff that keeping their jobs was contingent on their willingness to babysit Benji. When he was fifteen years old, Ben Senior arranged for Benji to go out on a weekly ride alongs with the police. Since he had become so obsessed with the idea of being a crime fighter when he grew up, and since Ben Novak Senior was such an influential guy and all of the retired cops went to the Fontain blow for security work, there was an unofficial employment pipeline which he presided over. The police department had no choice but to let the kid ride along, though the actual working cops had much less patience for him than the Fontainblau security did. Eventually, Benji applied to join the Miami Beach Police Department. He did so when he was in the midst of working on a bachelor's degree.

26:16 He was accepted into the Southeast Florida Institute of Criminal Justice in nineteen seventy four. He went through the mandatory one hundred and sixty hours of training, graduated, and officially became a member of the police department, a reserve officer. Two ten hour shifts per month, so not a full time officer. When his shifts rolled around, nobody in the department wanted to ride with him. He had an incredibly grating presence, was very high maintenance, entitled, whiney and rude. On top of all that, he drove like a crazy person in the squad car, making anyone unlucky enough to find themselves in the passenger seat afraid for their life. He had already been in a car accident once the previous year, accidentally ramming his Ford Thunderbird into an ambulance.

27:00 He got off scott free, probably because of his dad's connections. But Benji needed a job outside of his two shifts per month roaming the streets wearing a badge and gun, so his dad appointed him vice president of the Fontainbleau. The position came with a salary, a company car, and a luxury apartment inside the hotel. So he's like twenty three, twenty four maybe, and she's vice president of this massive hotel. Yeah, which he has lived in his whole life. What could go wrong? Yeah? Exactly. Sounds like the staff just adores him too, right, with. Free reign to do whatever he wanted in the hotel, he would often play security guard. He could be found prowling the halls looking for trouble, his police radio in hand turned to full volume. All of the actual security guards hated him. To give you an idea of Benji's appearance, he was six foot three inches tall, towering over his father.

27:51 He had long black hair and a big, bushy beard, neither of which were ever combed or groomed. He wore oversized nineteen seventies style glass, a style that he preferred for the entirety of his adult life. While ben Novak Senior was a man who placed stock in old world ideas of glamour and class, preferring a tailored suit and a tie, and the occasional Trilby hat, which is similar to a fedora. I had never heard of a Trilby hat before myself. Benji exclusively wore Hawaiian shirts halfway buttoned up. His furry chest was always prominently displayed to the world. If he really had to dress up, you might see him wearing a black T shirt under a blazer. There was a rumor, never explicitly confirmed, that Benji had lost his virginity very early in life to one of the escorts who hung around the poodle room lounge. Given his tendency to pester the staff of the hotel until they did what he wanted lest he tell his father about their disobedience, it adds up that he might have propositioned one of the escorts and leveraged his father's influence to make it happen. He certainly had a type that was similar to the poodle room women, tall, glamorous, voluptuous. When he got a little older, he had a rotating roster of women who he'd see almost exclusively sex workers, showgirls, and strippers. He brought his favorites to his friend, doctor Larry Robbins, a plastic surgeon for breast augmentation surgeries. He was always adamant that he picked the size of the implants, and that he watched while Robins performed the surgery.

29:17 Well, this is a little creepy. It's a lot creepy. His first serious relationship of note was with Jill Campion, a twenty nine year old former showgirl. Benji was only twenty at the time, but he had lied and told her that he was thirty. With his massive beard, he could pass for older. He had also at this point gotten a handle on his stutter. Benji was very controlling and much like his father, he was unfaithful from the very beginning, regularly cheating on her with a flight attendant. He insisted upon Jill being as skinny as possible. He made her take diet pills and would often choose her clothing for her. Jill's friends, surprise, surprise, hated Benji. He was rude and brash and had no filter.

29:58 He would often tell Jill's friends that they ought to change the way they dress, or he would criticize how they wore their hair. At this point, along with the cheating, he also developed a taste for cocaine. He always had a bag on him and he would even sniff the stuff when he went out on patrol. He liked using it, of course, it got him high, but he also liked just having it. It kept people coming to him. He had something that people wanted, which in turn made him feel wanted and powerful. Even though he was a terrible boyfriend, Jill saw something in him and decided to move in with him. After dating for two months, He proposed to her soon after, in what is probably the least romantic way to propose to someone. He simply left a ring on her dresser, never even verbally asking her to marry him.

30:44 So she said yes. Apparently she just started wearing the ring in that guess, so very strange. The fontam Blow started to hit harder times in the late nineteen seventies after several changes in the hospitality market. Disney World opened up in Orlando, siphoning business away from Miami Beach. Las Vegas became the new crazy party destination with the added bonus of legal gambling, so those seeking debauchery were less inclined to make the trip to Florida. Cruises were becoming a lot more popular as well, with more fun and novelty to offer vacationers compared to the krusty old font and Blow. The font and Blow was great if you were a mobster, old school rep retpac guy, or a sleazy politician looking to hire a sex worker in the poodle room, but that's not enough to build a whole business on where it mattered. The font and Blau was being outclassed, and their once handsome, French inspired decorp now just looked dated. So the way you're describing this, it became kind of like the cdmotel in town where maybe illegal activities happened.

31:49 Yeah, and I think the whole town kind of went downhill a little bit too, because people were going to other other places, more so than Miami Beach at that time. With less money pouring in, Ben Seniors stopped paying his taxes. It turns out the IRS doesn't like it when you do that. Don't do that if you're thinking about it. They began investigating the Fontainebleau, and by nineteen seventy six they informed Ben's Senior that he owed one point three million dollars in back taxes. He either needed to pay up or the hotel would be auctioned off to the highest bidder by the government. Ben Senior managed to scrounge up two hundred and fifty thousand dollars to pay off some of the debt and keep the lights on for a little longer, but the financial toll was being felt by the staff and guests. The font and Blow staff stopped receiving health coverage. Their paychecks were late if they came at all. The bartenders were told to pour cheap champagne into the dom Perignon bottles. The local three point fifty five union for hotel workers went on strike due to the poor treatment. Ben's Senior handled that how you would expect, threatening to fire them and hire new employees who wouldn't complain. Frank Sinatra, wanting to preserve the memory of his old haunt, tried to buys Ben's Senior out and take over the hotel, but Ben Senior was stubborn as always and refused to even think about it. This led to a knocked down fistfight between the two men.

33:08 Sinatra would never return to the Fontainblue Wow. In January nineteen seventy seven, the Fontainbleau went into state court receivership, now owing twenty seven million dollars in back taxes, Ben Senior filed for a Chapter eleven bankruptcy just to stay at the Helm a little longer. He was allowed to keep running the hotel as if it were normal, but it was no longer the bastion of five star luxury it was once famous for. Employees were not being paid, the bed sheets weren't even being washed. Seeing the writing on the wall, Novak moved all of his assets into offshore accounts, trying to hoard as much wealth as possible as he could for the eventual doomsday when he would be ousted from the Fontain Blow. That day came in nineteen seventy eight, when housing developer and land barn Stephen Muss bought the hotel. He hired Hilton to manage the day to day of the hotel and put a large sign outside for the first time in its twenty four years of operation. Ben Senior was devastated. Here he was mister Fontenblau, who had lived in the hotel for decades, kicked out of the building he had made into his identity.

34:18 Ben Senior moved in with his sister and sued to have his alimony payments to Bernice terminated now that he didn't have an official income. Of course, this was just legal acrobatics. In reality, he had plenty of money. He began drowning his sorrows, drinking himself into oblivion. While not quite as upset as his father, Benji wasn't happy about the change in ownership either. He had been hoping to eventually inherit the Fontenblou. Now he didn't even have the make work job his dad had given him. He downgraded to working for the health and beauty and multi level marketing company Amway. International. He had a forty five thousand dollars per year salary, running conventions and entertaining board members.

34:59 Benji and Jill Mary in nineteen seventy nine in an Orthodox Jewish ceremony. Joe and through the conversion process a few months earlier for Benji. The two never took a honeymoon. Benji was too busy with work. He did find time to head out on a business trip immediately after their ceremony. Though Bernice was displeased by the marriage, feeling her son could do better than some former show girl, and she made her distaste for Jill well known to anybody who would listen. She also didn't like the age gap and felt Benji ought to be with someone closer to his own age. Jill, of course, didn't actually know Benji's real age, or at least not until they were married. One night, he confessed to Jill that he'd bled about his age and that he was ten years younger than he said he was. It suddenly made much more sense to Jill why Bernice had been so cruel to her. Benji and Jill tried to buy a house together, but Bernice got on the way confined to his forty five thousand dollars annual salary. Benji was dependent on his mother for her most large expenses. Bernice would only help her son purchase a house if Jill's name was kept off the deed, So no house for them. So forty five thousand dollars a year, this is like nineteen seventy eight ish. That's still a very good salary.

36:12 Bad, but yeah, I think he was still just getting started though. One day, Jill found girafts for divorce papers in their apartment. She confronted Benji with them, and he told Jill that they were forgeries. His mother had been bothering him so much about his marriage to Jill that he'd lied to her and told her that they'd gotten divorced. Jill couldn't stand how controlling Bernice was and how ben humored her interventions. This, on top of constant cheating, led to a real divorce only two years after they'd gotten married. Benji turned his amway job into something bigger. Leveraging his name and family reputation, He courted other corporate clients, organizing conventions for them as well. He started his own company called Convention Concepts Unlimited. Bernice now on the board of the Science of the Mine Church joined Benji's company. In a scene your position, she used her leadership role in the church to register Convention Concepts Unlimited as a religious organization exempt from taxes.

37:09 That's pretty shady, I'll say. Be also applied to become a detective, but he was rejected due to the remaining vestiges of his stutter, which came out under stress. This was a problem for police work, which requires constant communication over the radio in stressful situations. His father was no longer in a position to pressure people to promote his son. To scratch the itch, Benji formed his own private security company called Eagle. It functioned primarily as a partner corporation for Convention's Concepts Unlimited, offering security services for corporate events and conventions, but also offered other services such as discreete surveillance for divorce attorneys. Now, whenever he wanted to play detective, Benji had the opportunity to spend the night staking out the home of a suspected cheating spouse.

37:58 He really really wanted to fight crime bad. Yeah, he really did. So he's got these two businesses. It's kind a lot going on here, so what is the convention's concepts unlimited? So it's basically like an event planning organization, like companies that need to put on a convention or whatever. He would help organize the convention and manage it. Did he kind of hand that over to his mom and that became her project. No, I think they worked on it together, and I think the security company was just sort of a side project and he would just, you know, his convention company would hire his security company to do security at the conferences that he managed. In nineteen eighty three, Benji was out at a strip club with his cop buddies, something he did a lot, especially post divorce, and found himself enthralled by a blonde Ecuadorian stripper who called herself Sylvia.

38:47 He was generous with his money and slipped quite a lot of cash into her thong. As he was leaving, he handed Sylvia his business card and told her to call him. Sylvia was a stage name. The woman's real name was Narcisa Vali Pacheco, but everyone just called her Narsy. She was supposedly born in nineteen fifty three, but we have no tangible proof of that, and she was known to lie about her age. Narsy was raised in Guadyakiel, the largest city in Ecuador. Her family wasn't completely impoverished, but they were definitely on the poorer side. One of eight children, she toughened up quickly out of necessity. When she was twenty three, Narsy emigrated from Ecuador to the United States, settling down in Hyalia, Florida. She was following in the footsteps of several of her older siblings who had made the move before her, and ended up in New York or Naples. She brought with her her husband and their two year old daughter, may Abad. The husband was not in the picture for very long. The marriage broke up soon after they arrived in Florida. Now a single mother with bills to pay and a mouth to feed, she became an exotic dancer to make ends meet. The club she danced at was called Folly's International. Her coworkers found her unpleasant. She was easily angered and poorly mannered, so she was a perfect matt for Benji.

40:02 Think you read a little hard on poor Benji. She called him, dialing the number on his business card. Once she learned he was the son of the ben Novak senior and the heir to a small fortune. Within two months of meeting Benji, Narsy moved in with him. But there was a catch. He didn't want May, her daughter, living in his home. Narsy was fine with that one less responsibility for her and her relationship with May wasn't good anyway, There was no love lost. It was probably for the best for May to get away from her mother, who was allegedly sadistic and physically abusive. She would sometimes whip May with electrical cords or make her kneel on the sharp edges of crushed beer cans.

40:42 What the heck. At eight years old, May was shipped off to Naples, Florida, where she lived with Narcy's sister. So, yeah, yet another person in the story who just doesn't want to raise their kid and just like, yeah, not interested in doing that. Well, it sounds like May was better off, yes, out of the picture. Anyway, Yeah, absolutely. Meanwhile, ben Novak Senior was continuing his dissent. He was not handling his absence from the limelight. Well, he was in a wheelchair, becoming forgetful, rarely appearing in public, and no longer wearing his trademark tailored suits. However, he never stopped carrying on his affairs with much younger women. Once, while in his seventies, he began a fling with an eighteen year old, even accompanying her to her high school prom.

41:31 Saw this, No, I wish I did. I'll try to find some, but I have not come across any. But I can't even It just boggles my mind. Seventy some years old. Yeah, why would an eighteen year old once? I don't know. I don't know. And in his final years he could often be seen arm in arm with the former Miss Uruguay. He must have had a really good personality. I bet he did. In a bid for a new business venture, he bought a supermarket in Boynton Beach, a neighborhood in the Miami area, and renovated it, turning it into a high end restaurant. It was going to be called Alcatraz and themed around the idea of prison. Prisons are known for great food that people would want to pay money for.

42:16 Yes, yes, the diners would be inmates, taken to their cells where they would be served prison food. It was a terrible idea and it was a miserable failure. So he goes from the Fontain blow to serving prison food. Yes. The nicest thing anybody had to say about it was that it was different. It's like the zoo, like when we would go to the Toledo Zoo and like they have the restaurant in the cage and I'm talking about it. Oh, yes, yeah, very very much. You got hamburgers right, hot dogs. In July nineteen eighty four, Benji was promoted to detective after receiving commendations for chasing a dots in which was veering around on the road erratically. When Benji apprehended the man inside, he immediately confessed to a string of auto thefts.

43:00 It was a case of being in the right place at the right time more than any actual police work, but Benji was very proud of it. In nineteen eighty five, ben Novak Senior had a major stroke and was sent to the hospital. He died a week later, his heart and lungs had failed due to complications created by the stroke. He was seventy eight. He was buried in New York in his family plot. Miss Uruguay tried her hardest to get a piece of the will, but unfortunately for her, it pretty much all went to Benji. Do you know how much was it? Millions? Yeah? I think his estate was estimated to be worth about ten million at that time. So probably about thirty million today. Yeah, we'll be back after a break.

43:46 Now folly in control of his family's estate and no longer reliant on his mother for money, Benji went hogwild. Any semblance of humility or human decency. I thought you said he didn't have any human decency. I don't oh if he did, but at. This point it seems to have left him. He bought a luxury yacht fifty feet long, which he called White Lightning. So yachts, I know, very a lot is fifty fifty feet as a relatively small yacht. I mean, it sounds like a perfect size for me. But I guess in the grand scheme of things, if you look at, you know, the wide variety of yachts that are out there, it's probably. On the smell. Quick Google search told me fifty two one hundred.

44:26 Feet of the average yacht size. Yeah. He would often have Narsy pose on the bow as some sort of living figurehead. He bought a private island, had a share of a private jet, though he still had a flight commercial because he always managed to make the pilots mad with his ill mannerisms. Once he brought Nursey Intouble plastic surgeon for a nose job, but when she woke up along with her new nobles, she had giant breast and plants put in without her knowledge or consent. It's horrible, really horrible and horrible that he could find a doctor who would do that. Absolutely, Narsy put up with a law from Benji. She took the breast and plants and stride along with his crass behavior, his mother's constant disapproving jabs, and the occasional violent altercations. Ultimately, she enjoyed the incredible access to extravagant wealth.

45:18 She loved having a closet full of more designer shoes than she could ever possibly wear. But where she always drew the line was infidelity. Whenever she discovered Benji was seeing another woman on the side, and he was always seeing another woman on the side, she would go nuclear, threatening to burnt down their house. Bernice hadn't liked Jill, and her interference was what ultimately led to the end of that relationship. She hated Narsy in the company of her friends and loved ones. She would refuse to even speak Narsy's name, and she had no longer any financial leverage over Benji, so she couldn't control him the way she used to. And even though Benji was a cold, unaffectionate son, often not even calling her mom, he just called her Bernice, she still desperately loved him and wanted to be in his life, so she bit her tongue and chose her battles. When Benji asked Narsi to marry him in December of nineteen ninety, instead of objecting to the marriage completely, she instead only insisted that Narsi convert to Judaism. Benji's company, Convention Concepts Unlimited, had now become very profitable and popular. In nineteen ninety, the value of the business was now three point two million dollars, with profits being squirreled away in offshore accounts. That's a lot of money and Benji didn't want to share control of it, so he had Narsy sign a prenuptial agreement. If they were divorced within the next ten years, she would receive none of the estate. After those ten years, she would receive a single payout of sixty five thousand dollars in

46:48 the event of a divorce. That sounds like a poultry sum compared to his networth. Yes, for sure, she would be excluded from all life insurance, any trusts, and after his death the estate would move into z session of his next of kin, which would be as mom Bernice. Since ben had no children. In the prenup, there was a stipulation made that this could all be superseded by Benji's last will and testament if he wished. Narcy reluctantly signed the agreement. Narsy began lying about her past to fit in better with her luxurious surroundings. She claimed to have been from a wealthy Ecuadorian family and that she was the daughter of a shrimp farming magnate. She also claimed that she used to be a fashion designer. May Narsi's daughter, had a child when she was only sixteen years old. Narsy was now a grandmother. She hadn't even been interested in parenting, but something about becoming a grandmother seemed to have softened her a bit. May and her child would now visit occasionally. Benji, for the most part, seems to have disliked his stepdaughter, but would occasionally throw work her way as a favor to Narcy. She would sometimes stop in and do jobs at the convention's Concepts Unlimited offices, where Benji's mother, Bernice could often be found, and may formed a bond of sorts over their mutual hatred of Narsy. In early nineteen ninety four, Benji and Narsy moved to Fort Lauderdale. They renovated a house there from top to bottom, turning it into more of a compound.

48:13 They had an enormous fish pond in the back left over decor from the funt and blow, and a dock for Benji's boat. A big house for Benji to fill with all of his Batman memorabilia. Since childhood, Benji had an all encompassing obsession with the comic book character Batman. In the nineties, he'd started amassing a massive, world class collection of all things Batman. He went on massive spending sprees on eBay and would often frequent comic conventions. Every morning, boxes would pile up on the porch. The large house was soon filled with Batman collectibles. They literally could not stuff any more Batman memorabilia under the roof. That sounds really.

48:54 Class sounds like your dream house, doesn't it. He rented out warehouses so he could store everything. The collection would eventually grow so large that it filled four warehouses. The rarest, most expensive stuff stayed in Benji's house, which he transformed into his own personal Batman museum. His father had the fontain blow, Benji had Batman. Another collection Benji amassed, but which he was far more secretive about, was his extensive collection of amputee pornography. Thousands of photographs of men and women without limbs, naked or scantily clad, being fitted for prosthetics. That is a fetish I did not know existed.

49:36 That is very niche sure. Benji's sexual appetite was voracious and diverse. He and Nursey would often engage in bondage. He enjoyed amputee porn, and he always had two or three other women in apartments around the Miami area. He paid their rent and bills and bought them groceries. The arrangement was that they'd stop and every once in a while, and they'd show him a good time. Benji's cheating became more obvious as time went on, and is previously mentioned. Whenever Narsy caught wind of infidelity, she exploded. Their arguments grew worse, sometimes getting so violent that the interior of their house would be torn apart. I hope none of their Batman memorabilia was daking the same thing. Their fights became increasingly physical. The bruises were sometimes so bad that Narci couldn't hide them with makeup. In nineteen ninety nine, Bernice became convinced that Narcy was trying to poison her.

50:29 Bernice noticed that every time she drank water which Narcy had given her or had put in the fridge of the office, her throat would nearly swell shut. She'd have difficulties. Swallowing and breathing. She told those around her about it, but nobody took Bernie seriously. They found the idea that Narsy might poison anybody preposterous. But it wasn't just pernice. There were at least two separate instances of Benji going to the hospital after eating food prepared by Narsi. In two thousand and two, Benji found out that Narci had cheated on him. Even though he'd been cheating on her for their entire marriage, he was still boiling with rage. Benji decided he wanted out of the relationship and started making preparations for divorce. Narsi was not about to let Benji leave her with the paltry sixty five thousand dollars in the prenup, not when his estate was worth millions.

51:17 At one a m on June ninth, two thousand and two, three armed men burst into Narsi and Benji's bedroom. Benji went for the handgun he kept in his night stand, but was stopped as Narsi shouted to the men, look out, he has a gun on his night stand. One man pinned him to the bed, another put a pillow over his face. The third took the gun from Benji's hand and smashed him in the head with it. Narsi rushed off to disable the house's alarm system while the men tied him to a chair. When Narsi returned to their bedroom, she threatened Benji. She told him that she was going to slice his penis off and throw it in the canal behind their home. She never made good on her threat, but it was enough to keep Benji quiet and obedient Over the next day. While Benji was indisposed, Narsi ransacked their house. She took several hundred thousand dollars worth of cash, family heirlooms, jewelry and antiques, multiple guns, business records, Benji's precious Batman memorabilia, and she even took his precious amputee pornography.

52:17 As Narsi was leaving her spoils in a large moving van, she removed Benji's blindfold. She told him that she would call a neighbor in a few minutes once she was gone, and would have them release him. Then, she said, if I can't have you, then no one will have you. The men that helped me will come back and finish the job. I can have you killed any time I want. You're not dead now, only because I stopped them. After being set free, Benji wasn't sure what to do. He was worried about calling the cops, as he thought the men who had raided his home may still be watching him. If they saw the police coming up his driveway, they might come back and kill him. But after talking it over with his mother and a former cop friend, he decided to file an official report. He rang the Fort law Dderdale Police Department, asking them to show up in unmarked cars and to keep a low profile. When detectives arrived on the scene, they found Benji covered in cuts, his wrists still raw from the binding. He told them everything, showed them the damage, and enumerated his stolen property. He made sure they knew exactly how much money was taken, four hundred and forty thousand dollars. Bernice drove to the house as well to make sure Benji was okay. She mentioned to the police that she suspected Narci had tried to poison her in the past. In fact, earlier that afternoon, just hours before the home invasion, she had ingested water that Narci had been in contact with, and her mouth was still numb. The police ordered her to the hospital and they took the water bottle in question for evidence.

53:44 Benji called Narci and tried to negotiate with her over the phone, hoping to at least get her to return his money, if nothing else. The detectives working the case also called Narci's cell. She agreed to come into the police station for an interview. She wanted the police to know her side of the story, feeling there were likely some things Benji wasn't sharing with them. When Narsi arrived at police headquarters. She brought an accordion file in with her. She emptied it out in front of the detective working the case. It was Benji's collection of amputee pornography. She told the police that they would fight all the time, that he'd broken her nose. At one point. She told them about the breast implants that were forced upon her. Quote is a vicious circle. I have left him twenty times, or forty times or fifty times. She'd had enough of it, so she was moving out. That's why she had the moving truck. And those men that Benji claimed tied him up, they were just laborers who she had hired for moving help.

54:38 As for the marks on his wrists, those were just from their routine sexual bondage. He had willingly submitted to being tied up. Narsi had just chosen not to untie him as she was moving out, to make it easier on herself. The business records were ammunition for divorce proceedings, and she also claimed that she had only taken five thousand dollars in cash, not the four hundred and forty thousand Benji had claimed. The detectives noted several discrepancies in Narci's story and pointed them out to her. She changed her story over the course of the interview and eventually admitted to threatening Benji, but she claimed they were just words, just meant to scare him. She would never actually cut his penis off. The detectives called Benji and told him about the reams of amputee porn that Narcy had shown them, and how his fetish would certainly be made a part of the public record if he decided to pursue charges against her. If Benji could manage to convince Narsi to return his property without police involvement, it might be better for everybody. So Benji hired a private investigator named Pat Franklin to find Narsi. The two had first met when Benji was a teenager at the Fountain Blow. Benji told Pat two separate stories about the events of June ninth.

55:48 In the first story, he said that he, Narsi and another woman were engaged in a threesome. They had him tied up at the foot of the bed, and he had been watching them have sex. Then, while he was tied up, the armed men charged arged in He didn't know what happened to the other woman. In the second story, Benji said that he was just asleep. The two men jumped on the bed, covered him with a sheet and pillows, and beat the crap out of him. He went for the gun, then Narsi shouted, warning them. The entire time, Narsi was on the phone with a man called Lou, an ex boyfriend who had just gotten out of prison who Narsi had dated back when she was working as an exotic dancer. Pat Franklin likely concluded that he wasn't going to get the complete truth out of Benji. He decided the important part was to just do what he was paid for, track down Narsi and find Benji's stuff.

56:36 It wasn't hard. Pat called Narsi and she immediately agreed to meet. They convened in a diner. Pat called Benji and put him on speaker phone, then handed the phone to Narsy. Benji and Narsi started speaking to each other in baby talk. Narsi apologized, said she'd make it all up to Benji and started crying him, begging him not to prosecute her for the home invasion. Benji agreed to drop all the charges as long as his belongings were returned. When Narsy hung up, she immediately stopped crying and winked at Pat. Then she led Pat to the storage unit where she had been keeping all of Benji's stuff. Among the piles of boxes and furniture, there was an accordion folder. Narsy made sure to show Pat everything inside. Wanting to humiliate her husband, Benji officially dropped all the charges, signing a form at the police station. Whatever was the truth of what happened on June ninth, two thousand and two, it was a harbinger of things to come, things that we will talk about in part two.

57:34 Well, no one has been killed, so they lived happily ever after. You can go on believing that until we get to part two. Part two is going to be how they got back together. Benji went into therapy and dealt with his issues, and Narsi went to marriage counseling and all worked out. Yeah, and Narsi reconciled with her daughter. May now you've given it all away. Now no one's going to come and listen a part too. You should definitely come back to part two. What do you think so far of ben Junior, Benji and Narsi? They are a couple of characters. They certainly are. When we tell all these stories about these people that have, you know, like these fetishes, and you know, there are narcissisms, and I just feel so boring and normal. I think the apt porn, I mean, that's really that is very disturbing stuff. I've I really didn't know that I existed.

58:25 Yeah. Same, So I wasn't lying in the beginning when I said that almost no one in this story is likable. I think may Narcie's daughter. We haven't talked about her a lot, but I think she's about the only one that has sort of has, you know, some reading good redemption. Arc Yeah, pretty much. I do feel like we've been a little bit hard on Benji throughout this story. But I don't know, do you do you feel any sympathy for him just because of his upbringing? Obviously he didn't he wasn't brought up in the best of circumstances, but he's also seems like he was a real jerk and not a great guy. Yeah, sure, I mean I have empathy for any one who had a hard upbringing, just because you grow up with money and you know, and everything is given to you on a whim. I mean, I can still have empathy for you. It's hard to grow up with absentee parents and not have you know, love and yeah, someone there for you all the time.

59:16 I also wanted to know how you felt about a seventy plus year old man going to prom with an eighteen year old. That's a real head scratcher for me. I mean, I'm sure he was. I was just going to say a great guy, but we know that that's actually not the case. Maybe it was just kind of like a joke, or maybe he just paid for everything. I don't it's hard to imagine. It is a real head scratcher. Maybe it was just the novelty of the whole thing. I don't know. I don't know. Well, there is a lot more to come in part two, so be sure to come back and join us. Should we have a Love Mary Kill convention at the funt and Blow. I think we should. Yeah, I think do it all right, Everybody meet us at the onto.

1:00:00 The week of November, second week of November. Sure, that gives us plenty of time to plan it all out. Sure, we'll see you there. I had kind of a crazy work experience a couple of weeks ago that I wanted to share. It was pretty I don't know, kind of scary in a way. I'm a little nervous to talk about it, but I think I think it's past now. But I was hiring someone for a job, and so I was interviewing different people in the way that because you're very important, very important. So the way it works when you're hiring someone is we have a recruiter in our company who does, like the initial interview with people, and then if if the recruiter thinks that it's someone worthy, then they'll send them on to me and I'll do the next interview, and then if I think they're good, then I'll get like some of our executives involved, and then make a decision. So we are interviewing a bunch of different candidates, and our recruiter sent me this candidate. I'm going to call him Bob, not his real name. I interviewed Bob, and I was sort of like he was okay. He wasn't the best candidate in the world, but he wasn't bad either. He was kind of in the middle. But at the end of the day, I didn't I didn't love him like I had other candidates. I liked better, and he sort of gave me a vibe that I was just like I didn't love. So I told our recruiter, now, let's let's reject this guy and move on. And so our recruiter we always like close the loop with candidates so they're not left hanging, so he contacted him and said, yeah, we've decided not to move forward. The next day, our recruiter messaged me and he said, just just so you know, I woke up this morning and I had like seven missed phone calls from Bob, this guy, and he said,

1:01:33 I thought I thought that he was it was maybe a butt dial or something like that, like in the middle of the night. So he called him back and he said the guy was like slurring his words and was like really angry that we had rejected him, and basically like told our recruiter Michael to f off and hung up on him. So the recruiter told me this because he's like, I just want you to know just in case you may hear from him or something. Sure enough, the next morning, I wake up to like ten emails from this guy that are like horrible, like I can't even. Can you read some of them? Please please, I. Mean, I I can. Maybe I'm gonna have to. I'm gonna have to skip a lot of words, but I'll sure I'll read you one.

1:02:16 All right. I'm gonna read this one, and I just a warning for people who are sensitive. There are some words in here I would never ever use. I'm just gonna read them, though, because this is what he wrote. The subject line of the email is your hatred of Christians, which I had no idea of his religion. We never talked about religion on the phone. But anyway, you both think you can and this is to me and the recruiter. You both think you can mock God and act like him on earth by judging others and determining their life outcome. Fuck both of you. You will be sent to eternal damnation and have a pineapple shoved up your ass in hell every day. The best thing is here. He signs his email best Bob. So, yeah, I woke up to like all these emails the next morning, and it was it was pretty freaking out.

1:03:07 You were a little freaked out. Luckily he lives far away, so I wasn't like, you know, super concerned about my safety. But still that's like very strange behavior. I've never had anything remotely like that happen. Yeah, I think the Bobers may have a substance abuse problem. And we wish him well. I hope he he found a job, and I hope things went better for him. I would I hope no one hired. I mean, I wouldn't want to hire. I thought about it because I didn't really dislike him. I thought, boy, if we had hired this guy, like what a disaster that would have ended up being. But I do hope he gets help because he obviously has some pretty serious issues. I mean, it's tough out there. It's tough finding a job right now. And yeah, but anyone who's ever like interviewed and looked for jobs, you get rejected nine times out of ten.

1:03:52 Like it's just the way that the whole thing works. So if you're going to react like that every time you get rejected, you're in for a hard time. But we we like blocked him. Luckily, he didn't have my phone numbers. He had the recruiter's phone numbers. Oh okay, that's why you got the emails. Yeah, he was calling the recruiter over and over again, and we we we blocked him everywhere. I blocked him on LinkedIn and haven't heard anything in over two weeks now, so I'm hopeful that he has just moved on. Yeah, you mentioned at the beginning of this episode that you've done several cases about people who have a lot of money, and I'm just curious if you had, you know, ten million dollars or well, I guess thirty million dollars, would you buy a yacht, would you charter a private plane?

1:04:34 What would what would be your you know, biggest indulgence. That is a really good question. I've honestly not really thought about it much. Yeah, because you know, we're never going to have a million dollars, probably. Not, But the main I mean, to me, the main thing would be buying like a house that we really really loved in a location that we really really loved, like a beautiful house on the shores of Lake Michigan. Yeah, that would which which I think we always thought would be like that was always kind of our dream, and I think we've slowly realized that it's probably not going to happen because real estate keeps going up, and yeah, that's we have a lovely house though, So I feel like Honestly, I was just thinking about this the other day.

1:05:15 And this is going to sound cheesy, so forgive me, but I was looking around and I'm like, you know, I mean, our life isn't perfect, but we really couldn't ask for much more. Yeah, for sure, you know, we've we've got our health, We've got you know, beautiful children. You know, we've got more than enough of everything. So even though we're not multimillionaires, we're you know, yeah, really about all you can really ask for. Well, now I feel like you've tricked me by asking what I would do if I had thirty million dollars. You came back and said, well, I don't. I don't need anything. By all the corn muffins in the world for you, we would have just a corn muffin closet just for you. Actually, listeners, I we sit here. You know, it takes us probably two or three times as long to record as the episode is. And I was bored when you were going to the room and I ate some of the corn muffin.

1:06:01 I welln't wasn't as bad as I had it was going to be. It's tasted more like like a moist muffin than a corn muffin and I'm going to create the cheetos to like. Yeah, you've been lunching on the little bit. Yeah yeah, So anyway, sorry for roasting you, but I'm not sorry because I think you deserve. You need to be roasted. I know I need to be humbled. You used to be roasty like you like to be roast. I would miss it if I wasn't roasted by you. Before we go. I just want to give a sincere thank you to all of you for continuing to support us and encourage us, and for your friendship and support. It means the world to us. I wish we could give all of our listeners a big hug.

1:06:43 Yeah I do too, because we really do, genuinely appreciate. Yeah, it means so much to us every time we hear from you, every time we get feedback, and just knowing that you're out there listening to us. And I know we say it a lot, but we can't say it enough because there wouldn't be a podcast without your support. Very true. If you'd like to listen to part two of this story right now, you can join us on patreon dot com slash Love Marykill. We have one tier at five dollars a month, which gets you early ad free access plus a monthly bonus episode. Please rate, review, follow and subscribe. Find us on social media or YouTube, or send us an email at Lovemarykill at gmail dot com. I almost give my personal email until next time.

1:07:24 Don't kill your wife and don't kill your husband.

1:08:11 That opened the Fontaine Blow Hotel in nineteen fifty four was some big to you. It did a great job.