Killer Dads (14 page)

Perhaps those most profoundly affected by the bloodshed were Stephanie's roommates, who were drawn together even more closely after her death. They did travel abroad the following year, graduated from Loyola in 2011 and went on to careers without her. They began a scholarship in Stephanie's honor their senior year in college, and it has grown to one of the largest the school offers. “Not a day goes by that I don't think about Stephanie,” says Malley, who still wonders if there was something else she could have done to save her friend's life. More than anything in the wake of Stephanie's murder, “the Mates” needed the one person who always had an uncanny ability to make them smile in any situation—Stephanie. “I miss you more than you know, Little Steph,” wrote suitemate Lauren Gallieni on a Facebook page tribute to the Parente victims. “Keep an eye on us now because we need you more than ever.”

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I stayed in room 1029 at the Sheraton Towson, though it has been re-numbered because, as a maid explained, people are “superstitious about it.” I don't like to think I'm superstitious, but I was hoping the room would give me an insight—or maybe I would sense something from the haunted souls there. The only thing it offered was a restless night, a fear that I would suddenly feel fingers on my shoulder, and a crushing, overwhelming sadness. I tried to imagine the blur of family members interacting in some sped-up time-machine past—with a dad slipping on his watchband, a sister ordering room service or telling her sibling to hurry up and get out of the bathroom so someone else could use it, a mother brushing her hair in front of the mirror, threading a silver hoop earring through her earlobe. I imagined the murmur of voices as they communicated the things families talk about in a hotel room as they share time away from home together. But they told me nothing.

The rest of Bill Parente's devastation became apparent after the bodies of his family were found in the Sheraton Hotel room. Bruce Montague was convinced Parente's failed investment operation triggered the murder-suicide. He met with his partners at his Queens law office to discuss what steps he should take. “Fortunately, I have a law firm,” he explained. “I knew there were other investors out there facing the same losses—and in many cases, more—without the resources I had.”
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Montague and his partners decided to go public. A lawyer from Montague's firm contacted the New York attorney general, the Manhattan District Attorney's Office and local FBI officials to reveal what Montague suspected was a Ponzi scheme likely operated by Parente for several years. Montague and his partner Steven Drelich talked to the press about the tragedy and its suspected link to the investment scam. The next day Montague's office was inundated with calls from reporters—and pleas for help from investors now out millions of dollars. Montague's office began collecting affidavits from investors to pass on to law enforcement authorities. Many Parente investors were elderly and came to him through his mother or his mother's friends, like Dorothy Schimel. A number of them lost their life savings trusting Bill Parente. Montague's office collected 22 affidavits, though subsequent research during legal proceedings regarding Parente's estate would uncover some 66 investors. Not everyone lost money. Some earned more than they invested and, for a time, were considered targets in potential clawback actions in an operation that was estimated to have collected millions.

The unbelievability of the Parente family murders coupled with the decades-long scheme operated by the apparently super-straight, ultra-
reliable Bill Parente spawned a bizarre myth about Parente's crimes. Because he told clients some investments went to Russian developers in Canada, some investors became convinced he and his family had been assassinated by thugs in the Russian mob. Even Alan Kornblau was convinced, for a time, that Parente had been the target of a mob hit. Some of that was a human need to make sense of the senseless. “We tell ourselves they're all in the witness protection program,” said Susan Deluca, a co-owner of a Brooklyn photo studio that took the Parentes' Christmas photos for 18 years. “We know that's not really true, but it's a way for us to deal with it.”

In fact, as far as authorities could determine, there were never any developers who received loans from Parente or his clients. After being contacted by Montague's office, the FBI seized files and computers from Parente's office. “There were no co-conspirators” uncovered, a New York FBI agent told me months after the investigation was completed. “He may have made some penny stock investments or some loans over the years, but nothing showed up in his accounts. He had no separate investment accounts for any of his clients. He even co-mingled his own personal and business funds.” A police search of Parente public records showed some 30 different business names with a lower Manhattan address registered in his name, including Internal Resource Services (with the useful IRS acronym) and Flomar Accessories Corp., which Parente used to pose as investment or construction and mall-development operations. Other retail and restaurant business names registered by Parente likely served as paper fronts for imaginary distributors and stores in his imaginary malls.

A court judgment in the distribution of the assets of the Parente estate, which called the scam and murders a “tragedy of epic proportion,” described the lawyer's operation as a classic Ponzi scheme in which money was never invested—only used to pay off earlier investors and Parente's own expenses.
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Victims filed nearly $36 million in claims against Parente's estate.

Parente's tangled scheme became the focus of a macabre court battle over his assets. He had life insurance, including a $5 million irrevocable insurance trust he established in 2007 naming his wife and children as beneficiaries. The funds would be available even in the event of suicide. It's possible the insurance policy was part of Parente's Ponzi exit scheme.
Perhaps he considered committing suicide even then, and leaving his family the $5 million, but eventually opted instead to take Betty and his daughters with him.

Figure 6.1. The Parente family poses for one of their annual holiday studio photos in 2005. Bill didn't often have his photo taken with the family, but always accompanied his wife and daughters to watch them have their pictures taken.
Reprinted by permission from Portraits by Joanne.

The insurance policy, and Parente's other assets, were the target of a court challenge by a cousin of Betty Parente, Joseph Mazzarella, the 81-year-old owner of the Mazzarella funeral home that prepared the Parente bodies and was the administrator of Betty's estate. Betty, Stephanie,
and Catherine were buried together in a single grave, while Bill Parente was cremated separately at the insistence of friends and relatives furious with Bill. A suit by Mazzarella first challenged the determination of the heir in the suicide-murders. It demanded a hearing to determine definitively who was breathing last in Parente's rampage, because that would be the ultimate heir, and that person's “distributees” would get the estate's assets. “No evidence was presented as to the order of death among Betty, Catherine and Stephanie,” the action stated.
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“Arguably, based upon the death certificates and the police report, petitioner has made a prima facie showing that Betty, Catherine and Stephanie died before William, and that William killed them before committing suicide. However, the court must hold a hearing so that the respondent is given the opportunity to rebut the evidence presented, as these issues and the issue of the entitlement of William and his heirs to inherit from these three estates are inextricably linked.”

Whatever the determination, officials should leapfrog over Parente as the final holder of the estate in any case because he was a murderer and neither he nor his “distributees” should profit from his crime, Mazzarella's suit further argued. “It is well established law that one who takes the life of another should not be permitted to profit from his own wrong and shall be barred from inheriting from the person slain . . . no one shall be permitted to profit by his own fraud, or to the advantage of his own wrong, or to found any claim upon his own iniquity, or to acquire property by his own crime,” the suit said. The familicide required a hearing to officially determine Parente's status as a murderer, the lawsuit argued, a legal procedure usually skipped in such a situation once police determine what happened.

The court action was an attempt by Mazzarella to wrest away assets headed to Parente's defrauded investors and steer them to Betty's side of the family. The Nassau County probate court ultimately ruled against Mazzarella, and noted it's “undisputed Stephanie and Catherine predeceased William and that Betty died first, followed by Catherine, then Stephanie and finally William.”
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And regardless of William Parente's criminal actions, Betty's “collateral relatives could not have had any reasonable expectation of benefit from the insurance policy on William's life. It cannot be said that equity would be better served by directing the proceeds of the life insurance
trust to Betty's relatives, leaving the victims of William's Ponzi scheme with no hope of recovering even a small portion of their losses.”

Figure 6.2. Betty and Catherine pose for a photo on a vacation cruise early in 2009. Stephanie was away at Loyola and Bill decided to stay home to work because he was losing some important business and needed to put in extra hours, he told his wife, Betty confided to a friend.
Courtesy of Marianne E. Quinn.

Figure 6.3. An angelic Stephanie Parente, 8, smiles down at her baby sister, Catherine, for the photo that would be their 1998 holiday card.
Reprinted by permission from Portraits by Joanne.

Nevertheless, Mazzarella, as administrator of the estate of Betty and the girls, was granted control over some $500,000 in Parente family assets as part of a settlement with the Nassau County public administrator representing the Parente estate. That included proceeds from the family's
properties—the Garden City home, the condo in Westhampton, and Parente's mother's Bay Ridge co-op—along with all personal effects, including the family cars, which hadn't yet been paid off. Part of the money would cover the $30,000 bill for the family funeral, and Mazzarella agreed to spend up to $15,000 to erect a “permanent memorial tribute dedicated to the memory of Betty Ann Parente, Stephanie Ann Parente and Catherine Ann Parente, in the form of a dignified plaque.”
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Most of the proceeds from the sale of the properties would go to the husband and two children of Betty's late sister. The $5 million life insurance trust as well as proceeds from other life insurance policies were directed to be divided among Parente's scammed investors to cover some of the losses, though funds had not yet been dispersed by the time of this writing, late 2012, as the estate administrator attempted to validate the size of each claim. The judge concluded after the settlement: “I would like to say this is a very tragic event and these things, not only do they have emotional and family and personal aspects, but they have legal aspects. And with respect to the legal aspects, perhaps, this is the end of that part of it. I know this will never be the end to the personal sorrow.”
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