9

Margaret Barbera was very good with numbers. She could take a balance sheet, a set of account books, invoices, bills, and more, juggle and manipulate the figures, and, presto, thousands became millions, losses became profits, profits became losses, sales soared or fell, whatever her employer desired, and it would take an expert auditor knowing precisely where to look and what to look for to figure out what she’d done, and even then, it still might slip by. There is an underground of people like Margaret Barbera, eagerly sought after by businessmen in trouble, especially in volatile and unstable industries such as garments and jewelry. Ask the right questions of the right people, and pretty soon a Margaret Barbera, or somebody very much like her, will come knocking at the door.

She had grown up in New York City, in the outlying boroughs of Brooklyn and Queens, child of a large nomadic family—some would say they were much like Gypsies, residing for a time in her childhood in the back of a small truck parked in vacant lots and at curbs, constantly on the move around the city, picking up work and dollars wherever they could be had.

Margaret was the smart one in the family. She was good at figures and was adept at figuring out the angles. When she graduated from high school in 1961, she got a job as a bookkeeper for a major chain store, worked there for a couple of years, and then moved on to mastering computers. But without a college education, she complained, her chances for advancement, for a good job at high pay, were strictly limited. So at twenty-seven, still holding down a full-time job, she got herself an apartment in Ridgewood, Queens, where she would remain until her murder, and went back to school, enrolling in the School of Commerce at New York University. She graduated in three years, with honors and a bachelor’s degree in business administration. For another year, she was in graduate school at New York University, but then dropped out. Her grades had fallen sharply and, she told someone, besides, she felt she had learned about all the school had to teach her.

It was 1974 then, and she was a very busy lady. During the day she worked as an accountant for a large midtown company, and at night, in her Ridgewood apartment, she began to develop the skills that would bring her to the attention of needy businessmen. At her daytime job, she was earning $17,000. Nobody knows how much she was taking in at her after-hours work, but what is obvious is that it was occupying more and more of her time and energy, enough so that she was constantly inventing excuses for absences from her regular job. She compiled a long, sad story of constant and unrelenting bad luck. Her mother had cancer, she explained, and so she had to go and take care of her. Other relatives suddenly had fallen seriously ill, and she had been called on to tend them. She herself was ill—with cancer, with a variety of other ailments, serious and not so serious, and she was under treatment, which meant she could not go to work. Her fiancé (a man nobody who knew her seemed aware of) had been killed in an automobile accident and she was in mourning, too stricken to reach the office. By 1977 it had all become too much for her employer, and he felt he had no choice but to let her go.

For the next three years she worked sporadically as an accountant at jobs she picked up through a temporary agency. At night and at other times she continued to ply her growing expertise in less legitimate accounting methods. She, too, it seemed, was waiting for the right moment, the right thing.

Her personal life was an enigma. Obviously she was earning a lot of money at her spare-time vocation, but what she was doing with it, nobody seemed to know. And nobody seemed to know her. Although she had lived for a decade in the same fourth-floor walk-up apartment, her neighbors knew her not at all. Sometimes they saw her on the stairs, passed by, nodded, but she never spoke a word. All any of them knew was that she had few visitors, only one with any regularity, an Oriental woman who arrived and often spent several days. And that was all.

In the spring of 1980, when Irwin Margolies began looking for an expert with figures to help him take John P. Maguire, someone who would become the patsy to take the fall when that day came, Margaret Barbera was exactly what he was looking for. As he had been throughout all his initial dealings with Maguire, Margolies moved with a certain caution. He asked his own auditors, H. W. Freedman Company, if they might happen to know a good accountant who wanted a job. Candor Diamond, he explained, was on the verge of major expansion, its business beginning to show substantial growth that should continue far into the future. As a result, the ledgers and books, the invoices and billings, all the record-keeping was going to be a very complicated matter. He needed somebody who could keep track of it all; there were going to be the government tax people and the state tax people and Maguire and a lot of others who were going to have to be kept informed, and informed correctly. He just wasn’t going to have the time to take care of all this himself; he was going to be too busy designing and supervising the manufacturing and the selling. So he had to have somebody who was good and who was reliable. It just so happened that at that very moment, Margaret Barbera was working at Freedman on one of her temporary jobs. She seemed to know her business; she seemed reliable; she seemed just the kind of person to send along, with high recommendations, to Freedman’s client, honest Irwin Margolies.

But Margolies was not about to take Barbera on Freedman’s word alone. If she was all Freedman said, she certainly was not what Margolies had in mind. He did a little quiet checking among some like-minded friends. Did they know Margaret Barbera? What kind of person was she? Could she be depended on? Would she follow orders? The questions, subtly put, of course, were the tip-off as to what he meant, and the responses he elicited more than satisfied him. Detective Richie Chartrand later learned the identity of at least one of those who had given Margolies the good word about Barbera. “I knew the guy who referred her,” he says. “I’m sure his recommendation was of the highest. I’m sure that knowing Irwin and what Irwin must be looking for, he said she was just the right kind of person. I wouldn’t believe a word he ever said. One time he got robbed. They took everything he ever owned. He said, ‘They held me up at gunpoint one night and I only had two Manhattans. They took all my goods. My watch.’ But they didn’t take his wedding ring. My God. You being robbed, they want to take your stuff, they’ll take your wedding ring, they’ll cut your finger off to get it. So if you’re looking for a special kind of thing and he knows it, he’s the right person to go to.”

And so, at the beginning of June 1980, Margaret Barbera went to work for Margolies and Candor Diamond as a parttime bookkeeper. All the pieces of Margolies’s plan were now in place. He had Maguire, which appeared by its actions, or inactions, over the first months of the factoring agreement, not merely gullible but almost anxious to be swindled, so pleased to have taken the first step into a new factoring market that it would be a long time, if ever, before anyone there had any suspicions or asked any questions. He had someone to doctor his books and to appear, on the surface at least, a responsible party. But when the crunch came, she would be his pigeon. It was, then, time to grow, time to become rich.