The CBS Murders

by Hammer, Richard;

  Now Nash was ready. He drove out to Ridgewood, parked near Barbera’s building, and examined the area, marking the potential places where he might take Barbera and Chin, together or separately, undetected. He waited. The opportunity did not come quickly. But he had the photographs of Barbera and Chin and so could recognize them when they appeared. When Barbera emerged from her building, either alone or with Chin, he followed wherever she went, day after day, noting her schedule, her routine, the places she went, the times she went out alone, and the times when Chin was with her. He kept watching for an opportunity to take them together. It did not come. Perhaps out of some half-realized sense of impending danger, perhaps merely following the normal habits of the years, Barbera rarely was in an isolated place, seemed always to move about in daytime, among other people, on the road with other cars, invariably returning home by dark and not venturing out again. Even when Chin was with her in Ridgewood or she was with Chin in Teaneck, they stayed after dark within the protection of the home.

  Nash watched and waited patiently, learning all there was to learn about the way Barbera lived. And, good family man that he was, he checked in nearly every day to see how his wife, his pregnant stepdaughter, and his nephew were, calling his home and Dane’s from pay phones within a radius of a few blocks of Barbera’s apartment, always charging those calls to his own home phone.

  And he checked in with Margolies, explaining what he was doing, explaining the reasons for the delays. Most of those calls he made from his home or Dane’s, calling Oestericher at the lawyer’s private unlisted office number, having Oestericher pass on his messages, or reaching Margolies direct at the Oestericher number when Oestericher was away, which happened constantly during December, January, and February, a time when Oestericher was hospitalized off and on with a heart ailment.

  Only once during the holiday season did Nash sense an opportunity to fulfill his contract. Barbera and Chin had gone out on a shopping expedition in her BMW one afternoon. They were cruising along one of the main boulevards in Queens, Nash following at a careful distance, close enough always to keep them in sight, not so close as to give them any concern. Suddenly, steam began to pour out from under the hood of the BMW. Barbera pulled over to the side of the road, stopped, got out of the car, and looked at the steaming engine uncertainly. She seemed helpless.

  Nash pulled to a stop close behind. He got out of his car and walked toward her and Chin, who also had come out of the car and was standing with Barbera. He later told Oestericher that he considered doing the job then. But it was daylight and there were too many people around. Instead, he decided to play Good Samaritan. He asked if something was wrong, if there was anything he could do to help. Barbera pointed to the overheated engine, to the steam.

  Nash went to the front of the car, opened the hood, and took a look. “You’ve got a broken fan belt,” he told her. “Wait a minute. I’ll fix it for you.” He went back to his own car, the onetime cab, dug around among the junk that filled it, and found a spare fan belt that might suffice for a while, at least. He returned to Barbera’s car, removed the broken belt, replaced it with his spare, and made a few adjustments. “That’ll hold for a while,” he said. “But you’d better stop at the next gas station to get the right kind.”

  She thanked him, got back into her car with Chin, and they drove off. Nash waited a moment and then followed.

  Only once more would he be so close to Barbera, and only on one other occasion would he be so close to Chin.

  Margolies was pressing. Margolies wanted action. Margolies had paid Nash a few thousand dollars down and wanted results. And he had seen none. Through Oestericher and in his own conversations, he demanded to know what was being done, what the reasons were for the delays. Nash tried to placate him. There had been no opportunities to get the two of them alone, without witnesses. There hadn’t even been an opportunity to get one of them alone in the right place. For some reason they seemed very careful, they never went out into deserted streets, day or night.

  Margolies was very upset. He was sure that soon after the new year, the government would increase its pressures on Barbera and Chin, and he was afraid that one or both of them might capitulate, especially if the government offered a reasonable deal. (It never occurred to him that another former employee, Gaye Broffman, might have something to say to the government and might be saying it.) He told Nash he wanted results, and he wanted them fast. Nash promised results as soon as the holidays were over.

  Nash was as good as his word. On January 4, he was back in Ridgewood, resuming his surveillance. He had followed Chin in her red Pontiac station wagon from Teaneck, though now he was driving not his beat-up onetime cab but a silver Chevrolet van he had borrowed from a nephew, Robert Dane, brother of Thomas. He watched Chin enter the apartment building. He waited. Chin did not reappear. After some hours, it was obvious that she was spending the night, a not uncommon practice he had come to understand. He drove home.

  Late the next afternoon, January 5, he was back in Ridgewood, once more in the silver van. He had with him, as he always did now, the .22 automatic, silencer attached, fully loaded. He waited. At about seven o’clock, Chin came out of the building and started down the street. She was alone. It was dark. So it would not be the two of them at the same time. It would not even be Barbera first, which was the way Margolies wanted it. It would have to be that the first one to go would be Chin. Margolies wanted results. Nash would give him results. They might not be what he most wanted, but they would have to suffice. He would take Chin now.

  He put a ski mask over his head, just in case anyone happened to be around and might see him. He put the loaded gun with the silencer in his pocket. He got out of the van and started down the street after Chin. She turned the corner. He was only a little way behind. He turned the corner. She reached the Pontiac and bent to unlock the door. He came up behind her, thrust her into the car, leaped in after her, and slammed the door. She screamed. It was the last thing she would ever do. He pulled out the silenced automatic and shot her in the head. Then he started the ear and drove away, heading for Manhattan.

  Once across the Fifty-ninth Street Bridge, he headed west, across Manhattan, until he reached a deserted block far west on Thirty-fifth Street. There he parked. The silver van had followed him in, through Queens, across Manhattan, and to this spot. Who was driving it? The police can only speculate; they are sure they know, but no one has ever been charged as an accessory before and after the fact. In the darkness, in the night, Chin’s body was removed from the Pontiac and thrown into the rear of the van. The Pontiac was abandoned. Inside, there were bloodstains and there was a shell casing from a .22 automatic. The van drove off, drove through the tunnel and into New Jersey. And Chin’s body vanished forever. Where it was put, Nash has never said, as he has never said anything publicly. But later, when Oestericher asked, he told the lawyer, “Don’t worry. It’s someplace nobody will ever find it.”

  But before he performed his magician’s trick and made Chin disappear, Nash did one more thing: He took a camera and snapped a picture of the dead woman.

  On January 6, the following day, Nash appeared at Oestericher’s office. The lawyer was there, and so was Margolies. Oestericher walked out of the office, leaving Nash and Margolies alone. He said later that he didn’t want to know what they were going to talk about. He knew enough already.

  Nash and Margolies were alone for some time. Then Nash left, and Oestericher returned to the office. Margolies was very angry. According to Oestericher, he said, “That son-of-a-bitch. He killed Jenny. I told him I didn’t want her to be the first one. But he said the opportunity was there, and so he did her. And then he showed me a photograph to prove that he’d done it.” Margolies pointed to an ashtray. The photograph was there. Margolies had burned it, so Oestericher never saw it whole. But he believed what Margolies said, that it was a photograph of the bloody, dead body of Jenny Soo Chin.

  Nash did one more thing that day. He must have been worrie
d about the van, about the possibilities that there were bloodstains from Jenny Soo Chin in it, that there might be other evidence as well, and that if someone somehow came across it in his possession or in the possession of his nephews, all would not be well. The Van had to be ditched. The van was driven across the river into the city and up to the Bronx, and then abandoned on a lonely road near a cemetery. The expectation, of course, was that what would happen to it was what happens to nearly every abandoned car in New York after a few days. Vandals would come along, notice that the van had been parked there and unclaimed for days, and so begin the job of stripping it. Within a week or so, there would be nothing left but a rusting, rotting, empty shell.

  The following day, Robert Dane showed up at the Palisades Park, N.J., police department. He wanted to report that his Chevy van had been stolen from a parking place in the town sometime after he had left it on the afternoon of January 5 (the day, of course, when Jenny Soo Chin was abducted and murdered). Inside, he said, was a large quantity of air-conditioning ducts, filters, tools, and other equipment from his small construction business. He intended, he said, to file for recovery of the loss with his insurance company, which he did. (Later Dane would admit that the whole thing had been a hoax. The van, he claimed, had been abandoned in the Bronx in the hopes that it would be stripped and never found, except eventually to be hauled away and thrown on a scrap heap, so he could collect large sums in insurance. He needed the money, and the van was a drain. That was his only reason for doing this, he said.)

  Dane and Nash had a right to think that they would get away with this ploy. The chances of an abandoned car being found in the city and returned to the owner are minuscule. But, once more, the near-impossibility became the reality. The vandals passed by and, except for an occasional smack with a stick or a pipe, which left some dents and scrapes, they left the van alone. And after a few weeks, the cops came along, tagged it, called a towing company, and the van was hauled away. A check with the hot car reports revealed that it had been reported stolen. The Palisades Park police were notified; Dane was notified and came to reclaim the van. He complained a little about its condition and complained that the New Jersey license plates that had been on it were there no longer. Somebody must have stolen them, at least. (Nobody did, of course. Dane had simply removed them and, later, turned them over to his uncle.)

  With the recovery of the van, the bulletin went out over the FBI line that it should be removed from the hot car list, though the license plates should remain, since they had not been recovered. The order was followed around the country, except in New Jersey, where, for some reason, the van continued to appear as a stolen vehicle.

  And then Robert Dane got rid of the van altogether. Once it had been recovered, he turned around and, for a few hundred dollars, sold it to his uncle, Donald Nash. So Nash no longer had to borrow it to use for his purposes. It belonged to him now.

  17

  Margaret Barbera was a very frightened lady. Her best friend and lover had vanished, and then her car had been found, bloodstains and a cartridge casing inside, so there was a distinct possibility that she was dead. If Barbera didn’t know for certain who had done it, or had been behind it, she thought she had a pretty good idea. And then there had been a terrifying phone call to her home, one she wouldn’t talk about to anyone. (Telephone records revealed that a phone Donald Nash had access to and often used was the number from which that call had been placed.)

  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 an
d 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.