NY man gets time served in Fla. hotel heir's death
NY man sentenced to time served in connection with Fla. hotel heir's beating death
WHITE PLAINS, N.Y. (AP) -- A New York man who admitted being the driver for two other men in the beating death of a Florida millionaire was sentenced Monday to time served in connection to the 2009 killing.
Denis Ramirez was sentenced in federal court in White Plains. A spokesman for the U.S. attorney's office said he's been jailed since his arrest, approximately two years.
Spokesman Herb Hadad said Ramirez's cooperation with the government in its investigation into the death of hotel heir Ben Novack Jr. was cited at his sentencing. Ramirez is likely to be deported to his native Nicaragua.
Ramirez pleaded guilty in February 2011 to driving two men to a Rye Brook, N.Y., hotel, where Novack was found dead. Novak was the son of the builder of the Fontainebleau hotel in Miami Beach, Fla.
His wife, Narcy Novack, and her brother were convicted of hiring hit men for the beating deaths of Novack in New York and his mother, Bernice Novack, in Florida.
Novack's father built the Fontainebleau, a celebrity hangout in the 1950s and '60s that appeared in the movies "Scarface" and "Goldfinger."
The 53-year-old was beaten to death with dumbbells in July 2009 in his bed at the hotel in Rye Brook where his travel company was managing an Amway convention. A man who admitted carrying out the killing testified that Narcy Novack ordered her husband's eyes sliced with a knife and offered a pillow to muffle his screams.
Three months earlier, Novack's 86-year-old mother, Bernice, was killed in Fort Lauderdale by being hit in the teeth and head with a plumber's wrench.
