Miami-Dade

Defendant’s alibi takes a beating at Novack murder trial

 

Cristobal Veliz denied being on the road trip to New York to kill Ben Novack Jr. Video from an ATM camera shows otherwise.

It was one of those “gotcha” moments that prosecutors savor: the moment that they catch a witness in a lie.

After spending three days insisting that he had nothing to do with the plot to kill Ben and Bernice Novack, Cristobal Veliz got caught — in vivid color, on video.

There he was, withdrawing $200 at 6:18 a.m. from an ATM machine in Jessup, Maryland. It was on July 9, 2009, three days before Ben Novack was found bludgeoned to death in a Westchester County, N.Y. hotel.

On the video, which was shown Wednesday in court by Assistant U.S. Attorney Andrew Dember, Veliz is seen leaving the ATM and, about three minutes later, the image of a green Nissan Pathfinder towing a Ford Thunderbird is captured on the ATM camera, leaving the area.

Veliz, however, had already sworn that he wasn’t driving his Pathfinder on July 9. He testified he was driving a load of 57 passengers on a tour bus to Kings Dominion amusement park in Doswell, Virginia.

The video seemed to blow up Veliz’s alibi, and his claims, that he wasn’t involved in the trip from Miami to New York to kill Ben Novack.

Confronted with the video, Veliz promptly told Dember: “That’s not my car.”

But the odds that some other green Pathfinder, with a T-bird in tow, was in the same place at the same time as Veliz seemed pretty slim. It also corroborated the testimony of the two hit men who claimed that Veliz hired them for the contract killing.

The two killers, Alejandro Garcia and Joel Gonzalez, had previously testified that Veliz bought a beat-up Ford Thunderbird for them to use as the getaway car in the crime. After purchasing it in New York from his son-in-law, Veliz bought towing equipment and, attached the vehicle to his Pathfinder, then hauled the jalopy to Miami, where it was repaired, the killers testified.

On July 9, 2009, Garcia and Gonzalez, in the T-bird, headed to New York to kill Ben Novack. They didn’t get far, however, when the car broke down again and Veliz came to their rescue, towing the Thunderbird behind his Pathfinder, toward New York, the killers testified. It was during that leg of their trip that Veliz was caught on the ATM’s video.

Eventually, Veliz was forced to abandon the idea of using the T-bird, and Veliz instead enlisted his son-in-law, Denis Ramirez, to drive another vehicle to the Hilton Rye Town, the morning of the murder, witnesses have testified.

Narcy Novack, 55, and Veliz, 58, are on trial in federal court in connection with the murder-for-hire killing of Novack’s millionaire husband, Ben Novack, Jr., 52, and his mother, Bernice Novack, 86, heirs to the Fontainebleau hotel fortune.

Ben Novack, who lived with his wife in Fort Lauderdale, had been staying at the Westchester County hotel overseeing a convention he had organized as part of his business. The killers testified that on the morning of July 12, 2009, Narcy Novack let them into the couple’s hotel suite and stood by has they beat him to death with hand weights, then bound him with duct tape and slit his eyes. Garcia testified that Veliz also hired him and another man, Melvin Medrano, to bump off Novack’s mother. Garcia confessed that he was paid $500 for the hit, and he ambushed her in the garage of her Fort Lauderdale home and beat her with a monkey wrench.

The brother and sister are charged with two counts of first-degree murder, racketeering and a litany of other felonies that could put them behind bars for life.

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