Miller Place's Nicole Mazullo is first person voted out this season on 'Survivor'

A financial-crimes corporate consultant originally from Miller Place said she hoped her skill set would prove practical as she competed for the $1 million grand prize on season 49 of "Survivor," which premiered Wednesday. 

"A thousand percent," said Nicole Mazullo, 26, who works for the Chicago-based accounting and financial consulting giant Crowe in regulatory compliance and financial crime, out of its Manhattan office.

Alas, Mazullo had the dubious distinction of being the first person eliminated from the reality competition this season. Her tribe voted her out by a 5-1 decision, which shocked her. "They got me. That was a true blindside, so 'numbers don't lie, but people do' is absolutely true. I felt like I was on the right side of the numbers, and with the majority, but they were good liars," Mazullo said during her exit interview. "They kicked it into high gear, and I just completely missed it."

Nevertheless, before the show debuted, Mazullo told Newsday that people in her field — who help institutions ferret out money launderers and other miscreants in their ranks — "are good schmoozers," she said by phone from her apartment in Philadelphia, where she lives with her girlfriend. "We can talk to anyone and our goal is to convince them of something or get them to like you more than maybe they naturally would. And so, going into the game that was my strong suit — that ability to be dynamic in building connections and tugging at people's emotions. As a consultant you have to make everyone happy, but in a way that's benefiting you and your firm."

That only worked so far, the lifelong "Survivor" fan said. Being on the show — shot in Fiji’s Mamanuca Islands, as it has been since season 33 — was "what I thought it was going to be in the sense of the gameplay and how manipulative people were and things like that, but I didn't expect the challenges to be as large as they were. It really felt like I was a small person on this big game board."

Mazullo also had not expected the camera crews to be so ubiquitous. "There’re cameras around you at all times," she said. "You always have to be ‘on,’ in a way. I thought maybe there would be more, I don’t know, seclusion from them" — adding, lightheartedly, "If you come up with enough excuses to go to the bathroom, then you're in the clear!"

Born in Huntington and living there and in Melville as an infant before moving to Miller Place with her parents and eventually three younger siblings, Mazullo attended the St. Patrick School in Smithtown until the family relocated to Richfield, Ohio, two weeks before she was to start high school.

"My mom got a big, big job promotion, and we moved out there," she said. Her mother, Caryl-Lyn Mazullo, is a wealth manager for Morgan Stanley, while retired dad Dominic Mazullo was a carpenter and, from 2014 to 2020, owner of the New York Bagel Deli in Medina Township, Ohio. Nicole Mazullo graduated with honors from The Ohio State University in 2021.

In her "Survivor" introductory video, Mazullo had boasted that her father had New York water shipped to Ohio to give his bagels authenticity. But she admitted when pressed, "I may have exaggerated. I don't even know what it was." (For the record, her dad told an Ohio newspaper in 2020, when he sold the business, that in actuality he would have fresh bagels shipped in from the Bronx.)

But before that, Nicole had said something else in her video that has since brought her good-natured grief: "I was born in Long Island, New York ... ."

In? In? "My mom called me immediately and was, like, ‘What's the matter with you?!’ Literally: ‘What's the matter with you?!’ I was, like, ‘Oh my God, I'm so sorry. I don't know why I said that. I don't think I've ever said that in my life,’ "knowing that the correct word for the phrase, of course, is "on."

"I have actually yelled at some people," she added, laughing, "who said ‘in’ when they asked me where I'm from!"