The CBS Murders (15 page)

For years she had not had very much to do with her family. But she did not know where else to turn. She called her brother, Barney Barbera, at his home in Pennsylvania, told the jeweler, for that's what he was, that she had to get out of the city, that somebody was after her and she had to get away. She went to him for a visit, stayed a couple of weeks, returned to Ridgewood in February to resume her hunt for Chin, went back to Pennsylvania again, and, early in March, returned to the city for good, despite what her brother said were his constant pleas to her to leave New York forever, that there was nothing for her there except whatever it was she was afraid of.

She had one other source of help outside her family. She turned to her lawyer, James R. Cooley. She had gone through several other lawyers since the mess began, had left them for one reason or another, had finally found Cooley, who seemed to be what she was looking for. The increasing pressure of the government on her to persuade her to talk and to turn over to the authorities whatever evidence she might have, had begun to get to her. With the disappearance of Chin, she was just about ready to be cooperative, if Cooley could work out some sort of deal for her. She might want to turn Margolies in and see him suffer, but not if doing so meant she would have to go to jail herself. Cooley began the long and difficult negotiations to see what the government would be willing to give in exchange for what she had to give.

Those discussions became more critical and intense once Chin had vanished. For Barbera, terrified now, the important thing was protection against whoever might be after her. According to Cooley, within a few weeks after Chin's disappearance and the discovery of her bloodstained, abandoned car, he and Barbera went to see Stephen Schlessinger, an assistant U.S. attorney who was handling the legal ramifications of the Candor Diamond fraud. They told Schlessinger that Barbera was in fear for her life and that the person she was afraid of was Irwin Margolies.

But at that moment Barbera still was not a cooperative witness, the negotiations not yet at a decisive stage. The government is traditionally not particularly concerned about providing protection for its antagonists, or even those who may be wavering. Perhaps a little fear might push them over, might tip the balance. Further, Schlessinger, like almost everybody investigating the fraud, people who did not know Irwin Margolies well or personally and so had no understanding of what he might be capable, believed that Barbera was the victim of an overactive imagination, was starting from phantoms. Schlessinger responded to the request, Cooley says, by telling them, “Mr. Margolies is not the type of fellow to commit violence, and this is not the type of case where violence is involved.” (The government later was to dispute Cooley's charges. John S. Martin, then the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, said, “If they were seriously concerned, they would have put it in writing and would have raised the matter with someone in a supervisory position in the office. To my knowledge, none of that was done.”)

The Schlessinger comment was a belief held by just about everybody except Barbera. This was, after all, a white-collar crime, an ingenious fraud to make away with millions. As far as anyone knew at that moment, nobody had been hurt, only money was involved. This wasn't a robbery or a mugging or some other kind of violent crime committed by lowlifes. This was on a more sophisticated level. People on that level just don't resort to violence to keep their fruits. Nobody was likely to go to prison for a long time on this one. If Margolies gave in and returned the diamonds and a good part of the money—not even all of it, just part of it, as was usually the case in this kind of episode—neither the government nor Maguire was likely to come down very hard on him. If he were cooperative, it was just possible that he might get off with a fine and a suspended sentence. At the most, he probably would get a couple of years in one of the prison resorts the government runs for high-class felons.

So despite three or four additional entreaties from Cooley and Barbera for protection in the next weeks and months, the government had no occasion to change its view, at least not until Barbera was in its pocket. No protection was provided. No one, really, thought she needed it.

But Cooley was beginning to make progress in his attempt to negotiate a deal for Barbera. By March, after weeks of long and hard arguments, a bargain was struck. The government would make no promises. It never does. But the indications were that Barbera could expect very lenient treatment, perhaps a suspended sentence, at most a very short spell in a comfortable place in exchange for what she might reveal.

On March 18, 1982, Barbera met with the government attorneys and FBI agents and began to pour out her tale. She told in detail how the fraud had commenced and progressed, who was involved, and who did what when. While she implicated herself, she tried to minimize her role. What she did, she said, was fictionalize books and records and now and then make a suggestion. She did not have access to the bank accounts. Only Irwin and Madeleine Margolies did. She could not write the checks. Only Irwin and Madeleine Margolies could. They were the ones who had done it. With just a little help from her. What she did not tell the prosecutors and did not reveal to Cooley or anyone else was that she had the books that could prove what she was relating, though they might implicate her more than she wanted. She felt they were still her protection, and she was determined to hang on to them for as long as possible.

On March 25, she appeared in court to make her plea. The government had decided to accept a guilty plea to a single count of mail fraud, a felony. In its sentencing memorandum to the judge, it would describe how cooperative she had become, and between the lines anyone could read that the prosecutors were in favor of the greatest leniency. That court session was held
in camera
, in the strictest privacy and secrecy. The government did not want the word to get back to Margolies that Barbera had turned. Now it wanted her safe, even though nobody yet believed that she was in any particular danger. But her testimony was vital to the case that was being built against the diamond manufacturer, and it would be best if nobody knew about it.

Once her plea had been accepted, Barbera was informed that this was just the first step. She would be called in late April to testify before a grand jury, empaneled to hear the evidence in the Candor swindle. When indictments were handed down against Margolies and his wife and others, she could expect to be the government's star witness at their trials.

Somehow, Margolies learned that she was talking. He was furious. Her testimony would put an end to all his dreams, all he had worked for so long and so hard. But if she did not appear before the grand jury, there still might be hope. He got in touch with Nash and railed about the delays. There had already been considerable trouble because Nash had taken so much time, more than three months since Margolies had given him the contract. He had not done what he was being paid to do. Margolies demanded action, without delay.

Nash tried to explain the difficulties. Barbera had disappeared for weeks at a time since he had taken Chin, and whenever she reappeared, she was very careful and watchful. There had been no chance to get at her. Margolies didn't want to hear excuses. He was beginning to believe that Oestericher's initial reaction had been right, that Nash simply was the wrong person for the job, that he should have found somebody else, a true professional. It was too late now to do anything about that. All he could do was prod Nash, make him perform. And Nash was determined to do Margolies's bidding. He did not have much more time in which to do it. On April 13, he had to report to the Manhattan Correctional Center to begin serving his sentence for cloning a cab.

He and his nephew Thomas Dane took a drive up the Hudson into Rockland County, to the Nanuet shopping mall. They stopped at a sporting-goods store. Nash asked to see a .22-caliber rifle and some ammunition. He bought a hundred rounds of ammunition, said he'd think about the rifle, and then left. He went down the road to another sporting-goods store, bought more ammunition, then returned to the first store and this time bought the rifle. That return made the clerk, John Gaine, remember him. Something else made Gaine remember him. As Nash pulled back his jacket to reach for his wallet, Gaine saw the butt of a .22-caliber pistol on his hip. And Gaine remembered that as Nash paid for the rifle, he had laughed and said he wanted it “for a little varmint hunting and target practice.”

Target practice, indeed. At home, Nash spent hours practicing with the pistol against the side of his garage, against targets pinned to trees, perfecting his aim.

And he began to track Barbera more intensely. He was out in Ridgewood, around her apartment almost every day now. As usual, he made those collect calls home and to his nephew from the phone booths in the area. But what Nash did not know was that he had been spotted. Not that anybody paid any attention to it then, but he had been spotted, nevertheless. The FBI had agents in the area, doing surveillance on a reputed organized-crime hangout. One of the things the agents do during such an operation is move through the neighborhood, noting the license plates on the cars parked there. On the night of March 31, as the agents roamed the blocks, one of them jotted down the plate numbers of a silver Chevrolet van. Back at headquarters the next day, those numbers were fed into an FBI computer and stored, available for retrieval if anything ever arose linking that van to the organized-crime stakeout or to anything else.

At the beginning of April, suddenly the break that Nash and Margolies had been waiting for came. Nash had been sitting on Barbera through long hours, day and night, away from home more than he wanted to be, for his stepdaughter was about to have her baby. His breaks now were often to call home to see how she was, and then she went into the hospital, and he called there to check on her condition. Then, one morning at the beginning of April, Barbera broke the pattern that Nash had become so accustomed to. She left home early, drove into Manhattan, to West Fifty-fourth Street, stopping in front of the Camera Service Center. She had a job. She had regular hours. She would be out in the open.

Nash watched to make sure. Perhaps somebody at the camera shop mentioned it to her, perhaps she just saw the sign that overhung the roadway, nobody later could be sure, but Barbera needed a place to park her car, and there it was, only a couple of blocks away, Pier Ninety-two, and it was cheap, only $40 a month. On Thursday, April 1, she drove onto the lot, filled out an application, and paid for a month in advance.

Nash continued to tail her, planning his next move. This could have been a diversion, could have been nothing. He followed her in from Ridgewood to Pier Ninety-two on Friday, and again on Monday, April 5. A new pattern in her life had evolved, she was on a regular schedule. And now he had only a week to do what Margolies had paid him to do; on the morning of April 13, he had to report to the authorities and then spend the next few weeks in the slammer. If Margolies was getting desperate, so was he. He moved. That Monday morning, he followed her as she drove up onto the pier. He was stopped at the gate, was told he could not enter, could not park unless he was a monthly customer, was told to drive on through and exit out the next ramp. He did what he was told. But the attendant, obeying the Kinney dictates, made a note of his license plate: New Jersey 192-SFV. Nash, it seemed, had a habit of switching license plates from one of his cars to another, as whim or reason dictated. This one, it turned out later, should have been on a Ford Pinto he owned, not on the van he was driving.

On Tuesday, April 6, Nash took the next step. Barbera drove in from Ridgewood, up onto the pier, parked, and walked over to work at the camera shop. A half hour later, Nash arrived in his van and announced to the attendant, Tom Phillips, that he wanted to rent a monthly space. Phillips handed him an application. Nash filled it out. He wrote his name: Donald Nash. He wrote an address: Rubin Construction, 436 West 45th Street, New York City, and, indeed, Rubin Construction was what he was calling his struggling business. He wrote a telephone number, prefixed by the Manhattan area code so that it appeared to be the construction company's local number; it wasn't. It didn't exist. But if it had been prefixed by the New Jersey area code, it would have been his own home phone. He wrote a license plate number for the Chevrolet van: New York 53924-GH, which was the number that happened to be on the van at that moment, and was the number that belonged on the van, registered to Donald Nash of 436 West 45th Street. But then Nash apparently got a little worried. If it came, identification would be too easy. He crossed out the real plate number and wrote another, 939-HG New York, a plate that had never been issued by the New York Motor Vehicle Department, it later turned out. He handed the completed application to Phillips along with the $40 monthly parking fee in advance and then drove on through and out onto the pier parking lot. The application was put in the Kinney files, along with those of the hundreds of other cars that parked on the pier or had, in the past, parked there.

If Nash intended to take Barbera that day, the weather was against him. It started to snow, and the snow turned into a blizzard, and offices closed early. Nash had all he could do just to drive home to Keansburg. And on Wednesday, the city was digging out and few cars could enter or leave, and offices remained closed. Another day lost, and time was growing short.

On Thursday, April 8, Barbera drove in early in the morning, as was becoming her habit. Nash arrived just before four in the afternoon. He waited. Barbera appeared at about six. But so did others. There were just too many people around for Nash to make his move and get away in safety. Barbera departed. Nash sat in his van on the pier for another fifteen minutes and then drove off.

On Good Friday, April 9, Barbera was on the pier again just after eight. Nash arrived at about three. But Barbera was already gone. The camera shop had let its employees off early because of the holiday. Barbera had another Easter to live.