21

They had a very good case against the van. Now they began to build an even better case against Donald Nash. Some of the pieces came through the drudgery of good, solid police work. Some came almost through accident, because somebody knew somebody, because somebody remembered something that hadn’t seemed very important at the time.

Everything was done according to the rules. When a search warrant was needed, a search warrant was obtained before anyone went anywhere. When somebody had to be warned of his Miranda rights, he was warned of his rights. Nobody was about to do anything that would jeopardize this case.

With those search warrants in hand, the New York cops, the FBI, and local New Jersey cops descended on Nash’s house in Keansburg. Scuba divers went to work in the creek that flowed behind it, laboriously sifting through the mud, screening whatever they brought up. In addition to all the junk that filled the creek bottom, they dredged up a.22-caliber shell casing. It matched the five they already had, and it had been fired from the same pistol. Into and around the garage went the investigators, and immediately several very interesting things attracted their attention. On the floor of the garage was the outline of the van in black paint, the same black paint that had been used to recolor it. And, indeed, Nash’s nephew Thomas Dane admitted that he had gone shopping with his uncle for that paint and had helped him with the job. There was nothing suspicious about it, Dane maintained. The van had a number of chips and scrapes and dents, and grease stains that just wouldn’t come off, so repainting was the only solution.

In the outside walls of the garage, toward the rear, there were a number of small holes, like the holes made by bullets fired through during target practice. But there were no holes on the inside. However, when the garage was measured, the outside proved to be larger than the inside. The investigators went to the inside rear and found a door leading to a small storage room, now nearly empty. The walls of that room were peppered with bullet holes, and on the floor there were other shell casings, all from the same gun. An intensive search was made for that gun, of course, but it was never found. Not that it was needed. With all those shell casings that had been fired from it and that could now with a certainty be tied to Nash, it would have been nice to have but it was, in reality, extraneous.

Almost at the same time, other cops were checking on that Newark Airport parking ticket that had been found under the visor of the van. With it, they could now prove not only that the van had been in the long-term parking lot on the night of the murders, but that it had entered some time after those killings, long enough after so that Nash could have had plenty of time to do what he was then suspected of doing. They went through every parking ticket from the lot for that period, accounted for every one except that ticket that had been issued to the car that had followed Dane into the lot. Now they had that one, from the visor of Nash’s car. It had been issued to a silver van; it was found in a black van.

There was more. “By chance,” says Chartrand, “I get a phone call from a guy I used to work with, a retired detective. He says, ‘My future son-in-law works in a sporting-goods store in Rockland and he remembers this fellow that you now have arrested, that he came into the sporting-goods store and he purchased ammunition.’ He tells us the type of ammunition. We ultimately go back up there and they have a record of the transaction.”

It was all closing in around Nash. The FBI computer check showed that his van had been parked near Barbera’s house. That van had become a regular parker on the pier within days of Barbera, had entered and left in a pattern that showed it was tracking her. There was the record of phone calls, available because of Nash’s ingrained habit of charging calls to his home phone. There was the series of calls from public phones out in Ridgewood, within blocks of Barbera’s house. There was the call from his office on Forty-fifth Street to his home in Keansburg, and a second call within a very short time of the murders from the booth across the street from FBI headquarters in lower Manhattan to Dane, and that call had been made only a short distance from the alley where Barbera’s body was found.

It was, of course, all circumstantial. The one witness to the murders on the pier, Angelo Sicca, could not identify Nash, and the two teenage witnesses to the abduction of Jenny Soo Chin likewise were uncertain of the identification. But circumstantial evidence, when there is enough of it and it is good enough, can be just as damning and just as convicting as direct evidence, and the circumstantial evidence here was just that.

There were, of course, two witnesses who could have rung the final knell, whose testimony alone could well have been enough to convict Nash. But Alberto Torres, the superintendent on West Forty-fifth Street, had a very serious lapse of memory. He could remember nothing, he knew nothing, he had seen nothing; in fact, he said, he hadn’t even been in New York on the evening of the murders. And Henry Oestericher knew nothing about the murders or about Nash. All he knew were stories about Margaret Barbera and the very bad things she had done to his friend and client Irwin Margolies. It would have been nice to have had their real stories. But even without them, there was little hope for Nash.

There was now no question that Nash was the shooter. But there still was the major question: Who had supplied the gun and aimed it? As the evidence against Nash mounted, so, too, did the indications that the man who had bought and paid him had to be Irwin Margolies, despite the original conviction that white-collar criminals just don’t do such things. Going through Nash’s telephone records, the cops came up with a series of calls, from December until March, from Nash’s phone or from Dane’s, which Nash used frequently, to Oestericher’s private office number. Some of those calls were made when Oestericher was not in residence, but when Margolies was using that office as his own. Some of those calls made while Oestericher was there to answer were followed almost immediately by calls from Oestericher to numbers where Margolies was known to be. All circumstantial, of course. What was needed was a direct link between Nash and Margolies, but unless Oestericher decided that truth was the better part of valor, it didn’t then seem likely that they would come up with one.

There were other directions to go, certainly, with regard to the jeweler. He was, even after the murder of Barbera, still proclaiming his innocence in the matter of the Candor-Maguire fraud, still asserting that it had all been Barbera’s doing, that she had stolen the jewelry and the cash, that she had masterminded and carried out the swindle without his knowledge, that he was an innocent victim of her scheming, and that her murder must have been the result of some private peccadillo of which he knew nothing. If he was concerned that something might emerge to tie him directly to Nash, he gave no sign.

What would have helped, certainly with the fraud investigation, were the Candor books that Barbera had made away with and hidden. One of Jenny Soo Chin’s relatives told police that Barbera had stored a suitcase she said contained very important records in the Chin garage in Teaneck. But a few weeks before Chin’s abduction and murder, Barbera had retrieved the case. It had not been seen since. The constant and thorough searches of Barbera’s apartment had failed to uncover it or any records, though much else had been found and gone through, mostly of a private nature not relating to her work at Candor.

Where, then, to look? Barbera had a safety-deposit box. Perhaps the records might be there along with, if Margolies was telling the truth, some of the diamonds and cash. A search warrant was obtained. John Wales went out to a Chemical Bank branch in Queens and served it on a Saturday morning in late April. “The box,” he says, “was empty. That was the big joke. I went out and hid it myself, with millions of dollars in diamonds missing, and it was empty. I came back and I said to the captain, ‘I hid that box.’ He said, ‘How did everything go?’ I said, ‘Well, I’m retiring very shortly.’”

But Chartrand had better luck. He had interviewed Barbera’s brother and sister several times. “And while I’m talking to Margaret’s sister, Faith, Faith tells me that there were some business records that the family removed from the apartment. And I said, ‘What did they look like?’ She said, ‘Well, my brother’s got them. They had a company name on them. They were big portfolios.’ So I went to the loving brother and I asked him if this was so, and he said, ‘Yes.’ And I asked him if it would be possible for me to have them. He then says, ‘I must talk to our attorney.’”

Barbera’s family soon after the murder retained William Kunstler, the well-known and controversial attorney, to represent them in the suit they intended to bring against the federal government for failing to protect their sister.

“So,” says Chartrand, “I called William and I told him who I am and I tell him what I’ve been told and I ask him if I could have them. He calls me back and says, ‘The family says you may come and get them.’ They turned out to be the true and accurate records of the Candor Diamond Corporation. They were examined by federal experts and the district attorney’s accountants. And they pictured the entire fraud on paper by figures. And so now Mr. Margolies is going to hit the jackpot. He is going to have very great problems with the income-tax people and he is going to have very great problems with the fraud people and we are going to put him on ice for a while and make sure he does not decide to run away again while we continue to look for more.”

Then more began to surface. John Wales found the first possible direct link between Margolies and Nash that anybody on the official side knew about. Wales was moonlighting one weekend, doing some siding work on the house of a friend, a former FBI agent turned private investigator. In the middle of the afternoon, Wales took a break. He and his friend sat down, had a beer, and did some light reminiscing about police work, swapping tall stories, always trying to one-up each other. After a time, the friend asked Wales what he was working on. Wales said, “The CBS thing.”

“Oh, yeah,” the friend said. “I worked on that, or at least part of it.”

“Sure,” Wales said. “What did you do?”

“Then he started telling me about him and his son,” Wales says. “They were doing some investigating for John P. Maguire and they were supposed to tail this guy Margolies and see if they could find out what he had done with the money. So one day they followed him into a building in midtown and they saw him have a meeting with a guy in the lobby. He said the guy looked like a hoodlum. That’s how he described him. Only the description was Nash. The description fit Nash. Just Margolies and Nash. That was the one tie-in we could come up with at that time.”

It was a beginning.

New York State, in the guise of the Manhattan district attorney and, in particular, Assistant District Attorney Gregory Waples, concentrated on Nash. For the investigators in Midtown North, in the task force, Waples was an unknown quantity. Another assistant district attorney, Donald Sullivan, had been handling the case from its inception, but he had been offered a better job and was seriously considering it, both from a professional and a personal standpoint. “He called me one day,” Chartrand remembers, “and asked me to stop by, and we had lunch together. Lunch with Sullivan is a sandwich and a container of juice in the park behind the courthouse. He told me that he had been offered a spot as a bureau chief and he wanted the job. But he said that if he thought the selection of his replacement was not the guy to handle this thing, or for whatever reason, he would not agree to it and he would decline. And he talked about this with some of the high mucky-mucks in the DA’s office. And a day later, he told me he spoke to the guy who was going to take over and he said he wanted me to come down and meet him. That’s when I first met Greg Waples. I had never heard of Greg Waples until then. Greg Waples was a conservative-type person, but very, very competent in preparing. He did his homework. He didn’t miss a trick. He played both sides, played the devil’s advocate and was able to anticipate in many cases some of the moves of the other side. A good person and a good DA, and he’s what we call they’ve got hidden down there and they pull them out when they need them.” Armed with the massive circumstantial evidence the cops had gathered on Nash, Waples went before the grand jury and, in June 1982, emerged with an indictment of Nash for five murders—Jenny Soo Chin, Margaret Barbera, Leo Kuranuki, Robert Schulze, and Edward Benford.

Meanwhile, the federal government took out after Irwin and Madeleine Margolies for the Candor-Maguire fraud. Everybody agreed that the case, the still-incomplete case, against Margolies for murder must necessarily wait until after Nash’s trial. First things first. And so, possessed of the books that detailed the scheme to defraud Maguire and the Internal Revenue Service and to enrich the Margolieses, the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, in the persons of Assistant U.S. Attorneys Ira Block and Stephen Schlessinger, went before the federal grand jury that had been empaneled and that, once, had expected to hear the testimony of Margaret Barbera. When they emerged, they had won a wide-ranging indictment, of Margolies and his wife, charging them with over fifty counts of mail fraud, wire fraud, and interstate transportation of stolen property, to which would be added, a little later, additional counts charging personal and corporate income-tax evasion. They were released on $75,000 bail each after Margolies posted a $200,000 personal-appearance bond secured by his Greenburgh home, a bond that was accepted even though there was some question as to just who owned the home now that the courts had ruled that the mortgage payment actually was made with money Candor, and Margolies, had stolen from Maguire and so was not a legal payment. But just to make sure that Irwin and Madeleine Margolies didn’t take it into their heads to make another sudden trip to Israel or someplace else, the court put a travel restriction on them, limiting their movements to Westchester County, the Bronx, and Manhattan.