Candice and Brandon Miller showed the public a world of glittering parties and vacations. The money to sustain it did not exist.
Add articles to your saved list and come back to them any time.In the modern Gilded Age of New York, where Instagram is awash in unrestrained displays of wealth, Brandon and Candice Miller were royalty.party, they celebrated with a few dozen friends in the backyard of their 510-square-metre vacation home in the Hamptons.
The Midsummer Night party was in 2019. Five years later, the glamorous image that Candice Miller cultivated and promoted has disappeared, replaced with heartbreak, anger and a mountain of once-secret debt.Her husband is gone. The home they so ostentatiously lived in, saddled by several mortgages, is not truly their own.
This account of the family’s rise and fall is drawn from property records, legal filings and interviews with those who knew and worked with Brandon Miller. Because of the sensitivity of the subject, few agreed to be cited by name. Candice Miller, 42, added to that canon when she and her sister, Jenna Crespi, started the Mama and Tata website and Instagram account in 2016 to provide fashion, shopping and decorating tips for wealthy women.
The Miller children’s birthdays were also an opportunity for Miller to entertain on a grand scale – for friends and online fans. Brandon Miller, on the other hand, eschewed social media – he primarily used a flip phone. Friends described him as a movie buff, basketball fan and car aficionado. He and his father also bought two connecting lots in the Hamptons – one on the water and one behind it. They built homes on both and sold one on the open market. Brandon Miller kept the other – a lavish home with expansive grounds that easily accommodated sit-down dinners for 60 friends.
“You’re dealing with people who can lose everything,” said Jay Neveloff, a real estate lawyer in New York. Instead, they rented a 407-square-metre, five-bedroom apartment on the corner of Park Avenue and East 71st Street, according to court records – keeping up appearances for $US47,000 per month. They decorated with rented furniture for which they paid $US180,000 for one year, according to a lawsuit filed this spring, and $US12,000 per month after the first year.
The day before the meeting, the friends spoke by phone to discuss their approach. As they did, one of them searched the internet for a property that Miller was ostensibly developing in Brooklyn. The friend had invested $US1 million in the project and had encouraged several colleagues to invest an additional $US500,000 in all.
Miller broke down in tears. He insisted he had not done anything wrong but lamented that he had let his friend down. Within months, Miller fell behind in making the lease payments, Benny Barmapov, the landowner, said in an interview. Even then, their financial straits were growing more perilous. In early June, he borrowed $US208,000 against the house from a company offering short-term loans. He never paid it back, according to the lender.
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