Judge Cannella read the memoranda and reached his decision. On December 1, 1982, he sentenced Irwin Margolies to 28 years in federal prison and fined him $72,000. “I am satisfied,” the judge said, “that there is no real remorse in this defendant at this time. He feels it’s like paying rent for a loft. I believe that after serving his sentence, the fruits of his crime will still be there for him.” The judge then added that he hoped the Manhattan district attorney would take additional and appropriate action against Margolies if he found sufficient evidence to bring him to trial for murder. But the twenty-eight years for fraud was the longest term ever handed down in New York for a white-collar crime. Judge Cannella ordered Margolies remanded to prison without delay, and the once and still millionaire jeweler was shackled and led off a few blocks to the federally run Metropolitan Correctional Center, the first stop on a long journey, the place where he would remain until the authorities decided where he would go next.
Three days later, it was Madeleine Margolies’s turn to face Judge Cannella. She was tearful, contrite. “I relied on my husband’s advice on anything I may have done,” she said, sobbing. To which federal attorney Ira Block retorted sarcastically, “One would have to accept the fact that Mrs. Margolies lived in a cocoon.” Judge Cannella heard her out and then sentenced her to three years in a federal prison, which meant she would be eligible for parole in a year, and fined her $35,000. He gave her until late January to get her affairs in order before beginning that sentence.
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Madeleine Margolies had a lot to do and not much time to do it. Sometime between Christmas and New Year’s, she paid a call on family friend and still, in some things, adviser and attorney Henry Oestericher. With her she carried a wallet containing several hundred thousand dollars’ worth of diamonds. Following Madeleine’s orders, Oestericher walked up to Forty-seventh Street and paid a call on another Margolies friend and ally, jeweler Joseph Gubits. He handed the wallet with its horde of diamonds to Gubits and passed on Madeleine’s instructions: Gubits was to protect those diamonds and, when ordered, turn them piece by piece into cash to be delivered to Madeleine’s brother, Scott Malen, to Oestericher, or to some other trusted person, to take care of the Margolies family needs while she was away.
A few weeks later, she summoned her brother, who was then acting as president of Madeleine Chain. She gave him an envelope. In the envelope were $100 bills, $50,000 worth. He was to use the money to pay the expenses of running the Green-burgh house and taking care of Douglas and Steven Margolies, to pay lawyers, and to pass on to whomever else Madeleine or Irwin told him to pay.
And there were people to pay. Irwin Margolies did not like the Metropolitan Correctional Center one bit. He kept protesting his innocence, kept looking for ways to get out, and kept blaming a lot of other people for his troubles. If at anyone, his ire was directed at Maguire-Irying Trust attorney David Blejwas. If Blejwas hadn’t been so dogged in his digging into the swindle, if Blejwas hadn’t been so determined to put the onus on Margolies, it all would have blown away, the blame would have rested on Margaret Barbera, and Margolies would be free and guiltless. Margolies had tasted blood, even if only by proxy, and he had found the taste not unpalatable. He had come to believe that more blood, more murder, was the solution to all his problems. Anyone who crossed him deserved to die. And that was particularly true of David Blejwas. Of course, Margolies would not stoop to doing such a deed himself. There were always others he could buy who would do it for him, and he had plenty of money to do the buying. It didn’t matter that he was locked up in a cell. In fact, what better place to find a killer-for-hire than in a prison cell.
But, as a matter of fact, prison may be just the wrong place to look for a killer-for-hire, and especially the Metropolitan Correctional Center. As Chartrand says, “The feds and the federal marshals at MCC have an unlimited number of informants in there. One floor is nothing but federal informants. I would say that a good number of the other floors have persons that are federal informants. And it was no time at all before friendly businessman Irwin is being suckered to death by the other inmates, the informers, the people on the staff. I don’t know whether it’s totally corrupt or not, but extras are always available if you have the wherewithal, and, of course, Irwin had the wherewithal. So he lived rather comfortably. Irwin liked his food, and so he ate reasonably well. And there were a couple of other obese chaps there who ate reasonably well, too, on Irwin, because they promised to do good things for him and, of course, they had to be rewarded for doing those good things. But Irwin rarely discussed with them what he was doing and planning. With a very few exceptions.”
It did not take very long before the word began to circulate on Margolies’s floor at the Metropolitan Correctional Center that the jeweler was interested in putting a proposition to someone who might be interested in listening. The proposition entailed a little contract for some violence. As Chartrand says, “There were several maneuvers going on within the system as to who may be open to accept this contract. There were a number of people who were anxious to have this contract because this man stole five and a half million dollars, and there’s got to be money out there he can control and get loose. So even if we don’t do it, we can fuck him out of it and there’s nothing he can do about it.”
Among all those inmates looking for a piece of the Margolies action, two just hapened to be his cellmates at various times during December and January. Both were career criminals, as people with long records are called these days. One was Henry Adair, who, though only in his early thirties, had been convicted of a variety of major crimes on ten different occasions and was then awaiting a transfer to a more permanent facility after a conviction for smuggling a boatload of narcotics and receiving a sentence of twenty-five years. The other was Vincent Calise, a little older than Adair but his match when it came to a criminal past and present. Neither had any great desire to spend the rest of their good years on the inside. Both would do almost anything to get back on the outside.
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 th
e 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.
The CBS Murders Page 16