Free The Prince of Paradise by John Glatt Page B

doing, Benji explained that he was retrieving the hotel’s silverware, which Frank Sinatra had thrown off the side of the boat the night before.
    “Frank was partying on the boat,” said Matthews. “Sometimes he would go off on the deep end when he had too much to drink. He didn’t like the utensils, so he’d dumped them over the side. Benji had such a terrible speech impediment that I spent ten minutes just trying to get it out of him.”
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    By the late 1960s, Las Vegas was threatening to eclipse Miami Beach as America’s leisure capital. For the Nevada desert town had one big advantage over the Florida beach resort: gambling. Despite Ben Novack and his Mafia partners’ dream that Florida would one day legalize casinos, the religious vote up north always proved too powerful.
    To add insult to injury, Vegas’s thriving Caesars Palace Casino had stolen many of the Fontainebleau’s designs and innovations, substituting a Roman theme for a French one.
    But the confident Fontainebleau owner and president always talked a good game during press interviews. “Sometimes I am ready to give Miami Beach back to the Seminoles,” he told The New York Times in February 1963, “but not today. Our volume now places us with the top five hotels in the world. We are enjoying 85 percent occupancy, and could do better if we had any way of bringing in guests on a stand-by basis.”
    Novack also dismissed any suggestion that the Caribbean islands were threatening Miami Beach. “Until last year we lost a great deal of business to Jamaica, Nassau and the Virgin Islands,” he said. “Now these wanderers are coming back. They thought they wanted a complete rest, that peace and quiet were all they needed on a vacation.”
    Ironically, several months later, Novack decided to expand his empire and build a Fontainebleau Resort and Casino in the Bahamas, on one of the Cat Cay Islands. Unfortunately, his application for a license was ultimately turned down by a royal commission, on the grounds of “unfavorable police information on his character.”
    Talking to the Associated Press, Novack conceded that he knew a number of American underworld figures, but vehemently denied that they controlled either him or the Fontainebleau.
    “Novack also said the Bahamian cabinet rejected his casino license application,” read the AP article, “because it did not want a third casino in the colony, not because of police reports on his character.”
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    In January 1967 The Miami Herald ran two investigative articles claiming that organized crime controlled the Fontainebleau. Two reporters had spent months examining thirteen years of the hotel’s financial papers and had concluded that Ben Novack was a front for the Mob, which used his hotel to launder vast sums of money.
    The first damning front-page exposé alleged that “gamblers and hoodlums” actually owned the hotel, which was run by Meyer Lansky, on behalf of a Mob syndicate called the Minneapolis Combination. The reporters branded the Fontainebleau as “a jungle of corporate and financial manipulation.”
    In the wake of the articles, eagerly picked up by other newspapers across America, Ben Novack’s good name was put on the line. Powerful bankers and other financial institutions that provided him credit began turning their backs, and his complex web of financing soon dried up.
    Novack sued The Miami Herald and the two reporters for libel, asking for $10 million in damages. The Knight-Ridder–owned newspaper refused to reveal its sources for the stories, claiming it was not in the public interest.
    Miami Herald executive editor John McMullen explained this decision: “We don’t believe that the authors of our laws,” he said, “intended to permit assorted hoodlums, protecting organized crime interests, to refuse to testify and yet require a reporter, working in the public’s interest, to divulge his confidential sources.”
    In April, the Herald ’s lawyers