The adopted son of the Miami hotelier who built the lavish Fontainebleau Hotel hasn't been heard from for a few months now. Ronald Novack has been coming and going for years, showing up and disappearing. His cousin looked for him for years but finally petitioned the court to have Novack declared dead, to terminate his interests in his mother's multi-million dollar estate. Then, one day, Novack showed up again.

A court battle is brewing between Novack's cousin and an attorney who represented him a while back. The attorney believes the cousin, who is the trustee of the estate, has neglected Novack's welfare and has not provided the 64-year-old with the resources necessary to settle into a "normal" life.

The lawyer accuses the cousin of letting Novack live in "potentially inhumane" conditions. The lawyer has asked a Broward County probate court to appoint a new trustee.

Novack's father built the Fontainebleau along Miami Beach's Millionaire's Row in the early 1950s. He'd invested in a large tract of land there, building the Sans Souci before he tackled the more lavish Fontainebleau. When his first wife divorced him in 1951, she took Ronald and the Sans Souci site with her.

His father remarried and, for the most part, forgot about his adopted son. He made no provisions for the younger Novack in his will.

Novack's childhood hasn't received much attention in the press. Reports only note that he saw his father seldom and that he worked at the Fontainebleau as a clerk for a short time in the '60s. For the most part, the stories focus on his troubled adult years.

Miami residents may remember the headlines: "Homeless drifter turns out to be heir to Novack fortune." Plagued by mental illness, Novack has spent much of his adult life drifting from place to place, staying in hotels many steps below the hotel his father owned until 1977. Last August, he failed to appear in court -- he'd been charged with driving a rental car after suspension of his license. The court issued a warrant for his arrest.

All of this is information the lawyer is using in his complaint against Novack's cousin. But the cousin has a completely different story.

We'll get into that in our next post.

Source: Sun-Sentinel.com, "Lawyer seeks to oust trustee for homeless heir to millions," Juan Ortega, 07/10/2011