Dark secrets about the death of her Instagram husband Brandon Miller on Millionaire Row

Cobb Isle Road is one of the most exclusive addresses in one of the most exclusive enclaves in the country – a private road in Water Mill, New York, where multi-million dollar homes overlook Mecox Bay in the Hamptons.

But on July 1, it wasn’t celebrities passing by on Cobb Isle Road. It was the local fire department, called because a carbon monoxide alarm went off in an $8 million, five-bedroom waterfront mansion.

There they found a scene of horror: Brandon Miller, 43, was lying unconscious in a car in the garage. The carbon monoxide alarm had been triggered by exhaust fumes that had overwhelmed him, the Daily Beast learned.

Southampton Volunteer Ambulance Services transported the unconscious Miller to Stony Brook Southampton Hospital, where he was placed in the intensive care unit and was in critical condition. He was beyond rescue and died on July 3.

The Millers’ luxury life

Brandon Miller loved the luxury life. His boat, which was docked nearby, was called MillerTime. In addition to his house in the Hamptons, he rented an apartment on Park Avenue on the Upper East Side of Manhattan that cost $47,000 a month.

And unlike his discreet neighbors in the Hamptons, everything was documented on social media for the world to see, because Miller was the Instagram husband and, along with his wife Candice, part of an internet power couple.

Candice Miller is one half of the influencer sisters Mama and Tata. Candice was mom, her sister Jenna Crespi was Tata, the aunt.

“We tell our story from the perspective of a fashion-conscious mother of two, Candice, and a newly pregnant and curious mother-to-be, Jenna,” the blog’s “About Us” section states. “We want to share our experiences and impart our insights on how to be a great mother while maintaining beauty, style and glamour in everyday life.”

Daily life wasn’t so mundane, except maybe in the Hamptons. On Instagram and her blog, there was a dizzying picture of the good life: weekly $800 facials, a personal chef, dinners for 40 by the pool in the Hamptons in the summer, glitzy charity events in Manhattan, vacations in swanky European hotels, and Thanksgiving in Palm Beach, Florida, followed by a double-collagen cosmetic mask to repair any sun damage.

A photo shows mom with her two girls on a balcony at the Hôtel Plaza Athénée in Paris. Suites there start at $2,500 per night.

Her portrayal of an ideal life was reinforced by the ultimate influencer endorsement: she was mentioned by the mainstream media alongside people with more traditional claims to fame. In a report on the Youth America Grand Prix gala in New York last April, the Daily Mail mentioned her and her family alongside Steve Jobs’ daughter Eve and Rupert Mudoch’s former third wife Wendi Deng.

“Candice Miller – one half of the blogger sister duo Mama and Tata – attended the event with her real estate developer husband, Branodn Miller, and their two daughters. She looked radiant in a chiffon caftan-style dress, her long brown locks cascading down her shoulders.” The article added that Candice Miller “was spotted hanging out with Ivanka Trump.”

What saved her from coming across as a Park Avenue Marie Antoinette was her seemingly genuine devotion to her family. Posts often featured her two adorable daughters and sometimes her handsome husband. Her followers generally assumed that the second-generation real estate developer was the one funding this lifestyle.

Candice was quoted in Mini Magazine in 2019 as saying: “I have the most supportive husband who encourages me to do what I love and is always there to cheer me up. I owe a lot of my courage and strength to his unconditional love and support, as well as that of my children.

“Most days, what I look forward to most is coming home and sitting down to dinner with my husband and daughters, followed by some delicious cuddles before bedtime, during which we all confess our love for each other over and over again.”

She added: “We do this in the truest sense of the word.”

End of the dream

When her husband was pronounced dead on July 3, her idealistic internet life came to an abrupt end: Candice Miller quietly deleted @mamaandtata.

Confused, the followers who had made the Millers’ Instagram famous looked for answers elsewhere in the virtual world – on Reddit.

SCannon95 had followed Candice Miller for her “extravagant” lifestyle and was jealous of her trips and parties. Now she wrote, “I also can’t believe how much content I’ve consumed and taken at face value.” She admitted that she and other followers had been under the spell of “what looks like a perfect life online, even though we know IG and reality are different.”

Looking back, the signs of trouble in the internet paradise were clear if you looked closely.

Some of the @mamaandtata Online postings have been preserved and a video clip of the family from last year shows a small band playing “I can’t help but fall in love.” Candice Miller sings along and moves to the music with both hands raised, one clutching her daughter’s hand on the right.

Mother is so animated that it seems as though she is acting for the camera rather than enjoying a family evening. A subdued Brandon Miller sits across the table from her, the other girl to his left. The girl is drawing with crayons. He leans over and gives her a fatherly kiss, but otherwise seems distant from his wife’s determined cheerfulness.

The real problems, however, were not online, but in the world of the New York real estate market, which had – apparently – made the Millers rich and carefree.

The world of a Nepo baby 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 began developing suburban shopping centers during the mall boom years. His son joined after graduating from Brown University as the company expanded into high-end commercial and residential real estate in Manhattan.

Among his more prestigious projects is the construction of a luxury building in Tribeca in 2011. Brandon and Candice – they were childhood friends before marrying in 2009 – and their daughters moved into the penthouse, which served as the stage set for mom and tata’s internet rise. That same year, the couple bought their Water Mill home for $3.2 million and saw its value skyrocket.

But in 2016, Miller’s faith in his father was shattered in the cruelest way possible: at his father’s funeral. Court records show that while Miller was mourning his father, he was approached by a Long Island man named Donald Jaffe.

As it turned out, Jaffe had made several large loans to the elder Miller, which had enabled 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 reported that she told Brandon Miller about the loans and that he “was obviously shocked at the amount his father had borrowed from Mr. Jaffe and that so much still had to be repaid.”

But then things got worse. “When I showed Brandon the loan documents, he immediately blurted out, ‘That’s not my signature,’ and then he said he didn’t know anything about the loans and was very upset,” Frangipane testified under oath.

In fact, the assistant said, Michael Miller forced her to forge his son’s signature on more than one occasion. “Michael would instruct me to sign in his and Brandon’s names, or he would sign in his name and tell me to sign in Brandon’s name,” she said. “Then I would have the documents notarized.”

His father’s inheritance was poisoned: his debt to Jaffe was $5.6 million (Brandon Miller paid off the debt in 2022), and TD Bank sued Brandon’s mother Barbara for $2.1 million owed to Michael Miller, claiming that mother and son tried to hide the father’s wealth. They strongly denied the allegations.

Miller became managing partner of REEC, and a year after his father’s death, the company purchased a row of four low-rise buildings near the High Line in Manhattan’s Chelsea neighborhood for $21 million. The buildings were demolished to make way for a planned 10-story commercial building, but the project was scuttled by the pandemic and ownership passed to another developer. The property is infested with weeds and rats.

For REEC, it was a textbook example: In 2021, the company bought a row of seven low-rise buildings on the Bowery in Manhattan’s Lower East Side to build a life sciences facility for biotech startups. The buildings still stand empty, awaiting demolition. A project to build a nine-story office building on St. Mark’s Place in the East Village, once the center of counterculture, has been delayed for years and is only now nearing completion.

But the real end of the dream was more personal than the woes of the post-pandemic real estate market. Miller was sued by Interior Marketing Group (IMG), owned by Cheryl Eisen, once described as “the reigning prop princess of New York’s luxury real estate market.”

The lawsuit accuses him of failing to pay $102,730.27 in rent for “dining and living room furnishings, carpets, table lamps, bedroom desks and chairs, credenzas, bed frames, pillows, curtains and drapes, and artwork” and refusing 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 sued for $50,000 by the Lighthouse Marina in nearby Aquebogue for nonpayment of his MillerTime bills.

Which makes it all the more poignant that his influential wife told Gotham Magazine last July: “My fondest memories of the Hamptons are going out on the boat with all my family and closest friends on the Fourth of July to watch the fireworks, have dinner and have a little party,” she said.

On July 4, her husband had been dead for 24 hours and her life as an influencer was over. Now Mother and their daughters have only memories of a splendid life that was the envy of tens of thousands, but inside of which there was a secret, dark emptiness.