The CBS Murders (21 page)

Margolies whiled away the hours in his cell playing checkers and chess with Adair or Calise, and doing a lot of talking, about the unfairness of the criminal justice system, and especially about the people on the outside who were responsible for putting him where he was. During these conversations, Margolies learned a lot about his cellmates, and the more he learned, the more he thought they were just the right guys for him. He made a proposition, to Adair and to Calise. And one after the other, they ran to the authorities. In exchange for a little courtesy and assistance, they said, they were willing to turn informant and wrap up Margolies for the authorities. The little courtesy and assistance they wanted, of course, was freedom and a new life as protected witnesses. It was not an uncommon arrangement, and there were few arguments. If they got what they promised, they would get what they asked.

Both were equipped with miniature tape recorders and wireless transmitters and, on different occasions when they shared the cell with him, sent back and told to engage Margolies in a little polite conversation. It was not a very difficult assignment. Margolies always was ready to talk to Adair or Calise about important things, such as hiring.

“I understand you're a magician,” he told Adair on one occasion. “I understand you make people disappear. I want somebody to disappear permanently.” Could Adair make this happen in a very professional manner?

Adair certainly could and, for the right price, would. Who was this person?

A lawyer named David Blejwas, Margolies said. How much did Adair charge for such a contract?

Adair threw out the figure of $15,000. Margolies did not quibble. Adair asked for some specifics about Blejwas so he would know how to reach him and recognize him. Margolies took out a piece of paper and wrote Blejwas's name, home and business address, employer's name, regular business hours, and a physical description. He supplemented that with a photograph of Blejwas he had clipped from a newspaper. What he truly desired, Margolies told Adair, was for Blejwas to get a bullet in the head. But it shouldn't be done from ambush, in the dark. Blejwas should know what was about to happen, and before he pulled the trigger, Adair should give him a message: “Let him know it's from Irv.”

A face-to-face killing might be a little more difficult, Adair explained. Was Blejwas married? Did he have children? If so, they might get in the way.

Yes, Margolies said, Blejwas was married and had children, but Adair shouldn't worry about that. “If they have to be taken care of,” he said, “take care of them.” And if it came to that, then Margolies would throw a little more into the pot to make up for Adair's additional trouble.

When Adair reported the conversation and proposal, and when the cops, federal and New York, heard the words, they immediately gave Blejwas around-the-clock protection until the danger finally passed.

With the contract agreed to, Margolies offered to make a down payment to Adair of $2,000, with the balance to be paid on delivery, though he didn't want Adair to make the delivery until Madeleine Margolies was out of prison, a year in the future. That was fine with Adair. He could report it all to the authorities, receive his part of their bargain with him, and Margolies would never be the wiser, unless and until Adair showed up in a courtroom to tell the world all about it. Still, Adair and the government wanted the down payment made to seal the deal. No problem for Margolies. All Adair had to do, he said, was send a friend or a messenger to Federal Express in Manhattan and Margolies would make sure that there was a package waiting for him. It would contain the money and a good photograph of Blejwas.

It was a simple thing for Margolies to get the word out and make all the arrangements. “Telecommunications in the MCC is no problem,” Chartrand explains. “You have to work that out with the other inmates. If four of us are on a floor, along with eight others, and I am known to be the possessor of millions of dollars, I spread it around, give some to a guy to keep an eye on my back, give some to a guy to keep an eye on my front, and I give you some and you some and then we give some to the other fellows so I can keep the phone. There's only one phone on that particular tier, or on any tier, and I want to keep that phone free and open to me between, say, seven and seven-twelve every evening. Irwin laid it out. They all have it. You pay for a legitimate phone answering service and you pay them a monthly fee for an allocated amount of time, and if you go over, you've got to pay for that, too. And every night between seven and seven-twelve, Irwin calls his answering service and the person he wants to talk to calls the answering service and the connection is made through the answering service. This is particularly valuable when you want to talk to someone in another prison, because calls from one inmate in one prison to another inmate in a different prison are not allowed. This way, neither inmate is calling another prison directly. Irwin and Madeleine did this all the time, every night, once she went away. If you have the money or the influence or the sock, you can have the particular time frame on the phone and that time frame is yours and nobody else can use it because you are paying for it. So Irwin had it every day.”

Margolies called Madeleine. He gave her instructions. She had to hurry because she was about to leave for prison herself. She hurried. On January 20, the day before she was to depart, she gave her brother, Scott Malen, a package. It contained twenty $100 bills, $2,000, and a very good photograph of David Blejwas. Later that day, Malen delivered the package to Federal Express, and very soon it was picked up by the messenger from Adair.

The deal complete, the government informed that the connection had been established, the bargain was kept. Adair walked out of the prison, a free man. He went to his friend, picked up his package, went to the FBI and handed it over, minus $200 that he kept for himself to pay for his trouble.

But Adair wasn't through. He was, after all, now a government informant, and he owed it to his new employers to keep them up to date on Margolies's plans, to supply them with plenty of information. So when Margolies called, he answered, and less than two weeks after he walked out of the Metropolitan Correctional Center, he walked back in. Only this time it was not as a prisoner. This time he carried credentials that identified him as Irwin Margolies's paralegal associate counsel, which gave him not only visiting privileges but also a nice private unbugged room to have a chat with Margolies in. Of course, it wasn't quite unbugged, or private, since Adair was nicely wired with a tape recorder. They talked about the contract. Margolies reiterated that Adair should wait to carry it out until Madeleine was a free woman again. Margolies asked if Adair had received the package. Adair assured him he had. Then Adair complained about how hard things were on the outside, how difficult it was to get enough money to live. Margolies said that was no problem. If Adair dropped around to see his brother-in-law, there might be a little envelope with some expense money waiting for him. Adair went to the offices of Madeleine Chain. The receptionist, indeed, had an envelope waiting for him. Adair thanked her, put the envelope in his pocket, hurried off to the FBI, and handed it to Special Agent John Truslow. Truslow opened it. Inside were five new $100 bills.

There was still more for Adair to do. Over the next few weeks, he spoke to Malen several times by phone, receiving messages from Margolies, had a direct telephone conversation with Margolies through the answering service hookup, and, in response to a Margolies request, agreed to drop by the Metropolitan Correctional Center again for another session of private paralegal-client conversation. That meeting was a rehash of the previous one, though during it Margolies assured Adair that any time he needed money, Malen would have it waiting for him. Indeed, Malen did, on several other occasions, passing on envelopes containing $100 or $200 at a time, envelopes that, naturally, Adair handed over to Truslow.

But Adair had a problem. He had never been able to stay out of trouble, had never been able to resist the chance for the big score if somebody presented him with one. Usually those chances led to a little time at public expense. Now, even with freedom and the start of a new life and a new chance, when a friend came to Adair with a proposition, Adair just couldn't turn it down. He took a little trip out of the country, and on the way back, the federal authorities were waiting for him. He was, it seems, carrying a bundle, and in the bundle was a lot of hashish. The federal agents took the hashish and put Adair back into a cell. His time on the outside was over, his career as a government informant was at an end, and, even with the tapes he had made, he was left with little credibility as a witness against Margolies.

Adair, though, was not the only inmate with whom Margolies was bargaining and handing out contracts. There was his other cellmate, Vincent Calise. Calise, if Margolies had his way, would be a backup in case something happened to Adair. And Calise would have a few jobs of his own to do for Margolies, because Margolies thought that not just Blejwas should be dead but others as well. There was an automobile dealer out on Long Island who, Margolies was sure, had screwed him when the jeweler had bought one of his cars. Nobody, of course, screwed Irwin Margolies and lived. And there was U.S. Assistant Attorney Ira Block who, Margolies declared, was “a very evil person who should be shot in the head.” How much would Calise want for doing these jobs, and backing up Adair, when Calise got out of jail?

Calise was no cheapskate. He wanted $50,000, with $20,000 up front. His intention, he assured federal agents who were listening to the negotiations, was never to do the job but “to take the $20,000 and put it in my pocket.”

Unfortunately for Calise, the government, and Margolies, somebody who shouldn't have been listening was listening. Calise was wearing a wireless transmitter, sending the conversation back to agents. But down at the end of the cellblock, another prisoner happened to be listening to the radio. “He had one of those exquisite radios that he wasn't supposed to have but he had it,” Chartrand says. “The guy kept changing his channels and in doing so, he's hearing Irwin at the other end of the corridor holding a very confidential conversation. And, of course, he ran right back and told him, ‘I got you on my radio. I listened to you.'”

So ended the bargaining with Vincent Calise, and so ended Calise's visions of a new life on the outside. His twenty-five-year term for narcotics smuggling stood, unchanged.

Margolies, of course, had more on his mind than just arranging to have Blejwas, Block, and a car dealer murdered. He was very concerned about the well-being of his wife once she was shipped down to the Federal Prison for Women at Alderson, W. Va. She didn't like it at all. She didn't like the accommodations. She didn't like the terrible food, not only was it inedible, it also wasn't kosher. She didn't like being treated like a criminal. And she was particularly distressed with becoming the object of homosexual assaults. She would later claim, in a suit filed against the federal government, that on the day she arrived at Alderson, another inmate grabbed her, threw her against a wall, and began to fondle and otherwise molest her, declaring, “Welcome, Little Miss Rich Bitch, I want to give you a taste of what it's like.” She managed to break free, but then blacked out and fainted. That was just the beginning, she said. The assaults continued uninterrupted and “every day was a challenge to survive.” The place “was like a horror movie … made up of junkies, lesbians, and bull dykes fondling each other, tongue-kissing, and making sexual advances.”

“It did not come as any surprise to anybody, either in the FBI or us,” Chartrand says. Indeed, there was some cynical observation that not only were Madeleine Margolies's prison experiences no surprise, but also they were precisely what had been expected and hoped for. If things got too difficult for her at Alderson, then just maybe she might decide to make another deal, lay out for the authorities everything she knew about Irwin, including what she knew about his part in the murders of Jenny Soo Chin and Margaret Barbera, in exchange for a quick release and the comforts of home on the outside.

But Margolies himself was not unaware of that possibility. His wife called him, or he called her, through the answering services every night, and he heard her tales of woe. He did what he could to change her situation. He arranged for money to be sent down so that she could have a private table at meals and have kosher food. “Irwin paid,” Chartrand reports, “a sizable amount of money to have Madeleine removed from the general population and to have Madeleine treated more in the manner to which she was accustomed. And he made other arrangements. Another inmate convinced him that he had a sister in that particular correctional facility who would look after Madeleine and protect her from all those bad people. And Irwin went to the well again. And another fellow convinced Irwin that he could help Madeleine transfer to a much nicer place. And Irwin went along with that story as well. Irwin was very concerned about his wife. And he did all these things to help her and to make sure that she was as comfortable and loyal as a wife should be. And she was very loyal and while she was a prisoner she did not say anything to incriminate Irwin. But, of course, Irwin could never be sure and there came a time when he put out an exploratory contract on her. It never came to anything, but he explored it.”

24

The People of the State of New York v. Donald Nash, charged with four counts of murder in the second degree and one count of conspiracy to commit murder, opened before Justice Clifford A. Scott and a jury of nine men and three women in Supreme Court in Manhattan on March 31, 1983. Before it ended, nearly two months later, Assistant District Attorney Gregory Waples, without a single eyewitness who could point to Nash and declare positively, “I saw him do it,” deluged the court with testimony from 127 witnesses bolstered by more than 380 individual pieces of evidence and exhibits, a torrent of circumstantial evidence that would, he was sure, negate the need for the witness he lacked, would be potent enough to drown Nash.