Cobb Isle Road is one of the most exclusive addresses in one of the country’s most exclusive enclaves–a private lane in Water Mill, New York, where multimillion dollar homes look onto Mecox Bay in the Hamptons.
But on July 1 it was not visiting socialites who drove into Cobb Isle Road. It was the local fire department, called by a carbon monoxide alarm being triggered at an $8 million, five bedroom spread on the waterfront.
There they found a scene of horror: Brandon Miller, 43, was unconscious inside a car in the garage. The carbon monoxide alarm had been triggered by exhaust fumes which had overcome him, the Daily Beast is told.
Southampton Volunteer Ambulance rushed an unconscious Miller to Stony Brook Southampton Hospital, where he was placed in intensive care and listed in critical condition. He proved to be beyond saving and died on July 3.
The Millers’ High Life
Brandon Miller loved the high life. His boat, docked nearby, was called MillerTime. The Hamptons home was matched by a $47,000-a-month Park Avenue rental on the Upper East Side of Manhattan.
And unlike his discreet Hamptons neighbors, it was all documented on social media for the world to see, because Miller was the Instagram husband part of an internet power couple with his wife Candice.
Candice Miller is one half of the influencer sisters Mama and Tata. Candice was mama, her sister Jenna Crespi was tata, the aunt.
“We tell our story from the perspective of a fashionable mom of two, Candice, and a newly pregnant and inquisitive mom-to-be, Jenna,” the blog’s about section reads. “We would like to share our experiences and impart our insights on how to be a great mom while maintaining beauty, style, and glamor in everyday life.”
Everyday life was not so everyday, except perhaps in the Hamptons. On Instagram and in her blog there was a dizzying picture of the good life: weekly $800 facials, a personal chef, summertime poolside dinners for 40 in the Hamptons, glittering charity soirees in Manhattan, vacations at elegant European hotels and Thanksgiving in Palm Beach, Florida followed by a double collagen cosmetic mask to repair any damage from sun exposure.
One photo showed mama with her two girls on a balcony at the Hôtel Plaza Athénée in Paris. Suites there start at $2,500 a night.
Her presentation of an ideal existence was reinforced by an influencer’s ultimate validation; being mentioned by mainstream media along with people who have more traditional claims to celebrity. In a report on the Youth America Grand Prix Gala in New York in April last year, the Daily Mail prominently mentioned her and her family along with Steve’s Jobs’ daughter Eve, and Rupert Mudoch’s former third wife, Wendi Deng.
“Candice Miller – one half of the sister blogging duo Mama and Tata – attended the event with her real estate developer husband, Brandon Miller and their two daughters. She looked radiant in a chiffon caftan-style gown, her long brown waves flowing down her shoulders.” The article added that Candice Miller had been “spotted palling around with Ivanka Trump.”
What saved her from coming off as a Park Avenue Marie Antoinette was a seemingly genuine devotion to her family. The posts often included her two adorable daughters and sometimes her handsome husband. The second-generation real estate developer was widely presumed by her followers to be the one funding the lifestyle.
Candice was quoted in Mini Magazine in 2019 saying, “I have the most supportive husband who encourages me to do whatever I love and always lifts me up. I attribute a lot of my courage and strength to his unconditional love and support, as well as that of my children.
“On most days, what I really look forward to is arriving home, and sitting for dinners with my husband and my girls, followed by some very yummy snuggles before bedtime, where we all profess our love for one another over and over again.”
She added, “Literally, we do that.”
End of the Dream
On July 3, as her husband was declared dead, the idealistic internet life came to an abrupt end: Candice Miller quietly deleted @mamaandtata.
Puzzled, the followers who had made the Millers Instagram famous went elsewhere in the virtual world–Reddit–to seek answers.
SCannon95 had followed Candice Miller for the “over the top” lifestyle and had felt jealous of the travel and the parties. Now, she wrote, “I also can’t believe how much of the content I consumed and took at face value.” She allowed that she and other followers had been in the thrall of “what looks like a perfect life online even if we know IG vs. reality is different.”
In retrospect, the hints of trouble in internet paradise were there if you looked carefully.
A few of the @mamaandtata postings have survived online and a video clip of the family from last year shows a small band playing “Can’t Help Falling in Love.” Candice Miller is singing along, moving to the music with both hands upraised, one clutching the hand of the daughter to the right.
Mama is animated to the point it seems she is performing for the camera as much as actually enjoying a family night out. A subdued Brandon Miller sits across the table with the other girl on his left. The girl is drawing with crayons. He leans over and gives her a fatherly kiss, but otherwise seems detached from his wife’s determined merriment.
The real troubles, however, were not online, but in the world of New York real estate which had made the Millers–apparently–rich and carefree.
A Nepo Baby’s World Collapses
Brandon Miller was unashamedly a nepo-baby; hardly the first in the dynastic world of New York real estate. His father, Michael Miller founded Real Estate Equity Corporation, REEC, in 1978 and started by developing suburban shopping centers in the years of the mall boom. His son joined after attending Brown University, as the company moved into high end commercial and residential properties in Manhattan.
Its more prestigious projects include the 2011 construction of a luxury building in Tribeca. Brandon and Candice–they had been childhood friends before marrying in 2009–and their daughters moved into the penthouse, which served as a stage set during the internet ascension of Mama and Tata. That same year the couple bought their Water Mill home for $3.2 million and watched its value soar.
But in 2016, Miller’s belief in his father was shattered in the most atrocious way: at his funeral. Court papers reveal how as he mourned his father, Miller was approached by a man from Long Island called Donald Jaffe.
Jaffe, it turned out, had made several large loans to the elder Miller. They had facilitated the construction of the Tribeca building and the purchase of Brandon’s house in Water Mill.
In a deposition, Michael Miller’s assistant, Christine Frangipane, told how she told Brandon Miller about the loans and he was “clearly shocked at the amount of funds that his Dad borrowed from Mr. Jaffe and that so much was due.”
But then it got worse. “When I showed Brandon the loan documents, he immediately blurted out ‘that is not my signature’ and then he said he did not know about the loans and was very upset,” Frangipane said under oath.
In fact, the assistant said, Michael Miller had forced her to forge his son’s signature more than once. “Michael would instruct me to sign his and Brandon’s name or he would sign his name and tell me to sign Brandon’s name,” she said. “I would then notarize the documents.”
His father’s inheritance was poisoned: his debt to Jaffe was as high as $5.6 million (Brandon Miller settled in 2022), and TD Bank sued Brandon’s mother Barbara for $2.1 million Michael Miller owed, claiming mother and son tried to hide the father’s assets. They strongly contested the allegations.
Miller became REEC’s managing partner and a year after the father’s death, the firm acquired a row of four low-rise buildings for $21 million near the High Line in Manhattan’s Chelsea. The buildings were demolished to make room for a planned 10-story commercial building. But the project was scuttled by the pandemic and ownership passed to another developer. The lot is occupied by weeds and rats.
It was a pattern for REEC: It bought a row of seven low rise buildings on the Bowery in Manhattan’s Lower East Side in 2021 to build a “life sciences” facility for bio-tech startups. The buildings are still there, empty pending demolition. A project to build a 9-story office building on St. Mark’s Place in the East Village, once the center of the counterculture, suffered years of delay and is only now nearing completion.
The real end to the dream, however, was more personal than the struggles of post-pandemic real estate. Miller was sued by Interior Marketing Group (IMG), which is owned by Cheryl Eisen, once described as “the reigning prop princess of luxury New York real estate.”
The suit accused him of failing to pay $102,730.27 in rental for what it describes as “dining and family room fixtures, area rugs, table lamps, bedroom desks and chairs, credenzas, bed frames, pillows, draperies and sheers and artwork.” He was also said to have refused to return items valued at $64,000.
The Park Avenue image was a fraud: Even the furniture in the Millers’ videos wasn’t really their own.
And in the Hamptons, Page Six reported, he was being sued for $50,000 by the Lighthouse Marina in nearby Aquebogue for unpaid bills for MillerTime.
All the more poignant then, that last July his influencer wife told Gotham Magazine: “My favorite Hamptons memories are going on the boat with my whole family and all my closest friends on July 4 to see the fireworks and have dinner and a little party,” she said.
This July 4, her husband had been dead for 24 hours and her influencer life was over. Now mama and her daughters have only memories of a gilded life envied by tens of thousands with a secret dark void at its heart.
