The CBS Murders by Richard; Hammer Page A

safety-deposit box measuring nearly two feet by two feet by two feet. A little later, she reappeared with the bag and handed it back to Malen. It was now empty. (Two years later, the FBI obtained a search warrant and went into that box. It recovered four hundred diamonds worth about $600,000. That is about all that has ever been recovered of the $2,250,000 in diamonds purchased by Margolies and the other $3 million swindled from Maguire.)
    But the diamonds in the safety-deposit box at Manufacturers Hanover and in other safety-deposit boxes in other banks, in the United States and abroad, were only part of the horde. Another part was put into the hands of a jeweler friend on Forty-seventh Street, Josef Gubits, to hold for safekeeping and, if necessity dictated, to turn quickly into cash.
    But in his own amassing of great wealth and turning it to his own purposes, Irwin Margolies did not forget Margaret Barbera, who kept his books and who advised him and showed him ways to work his scheme so it would not be detected. She had been hired in June as a part-time bookkeeper. By September 1980, she was the full-time comptroller of Candor, keeper of the several sets of books and accounts and of its secrets. And her salary was $32,000 a year. But that wasn’t enough, not with all the Margolieses were getting away with. She thought she deserved more. Margolies complied. He doubled her salary.
    The Margolieses were buying cars every time she turned around. Barbera thought she ought to have a car, too, and she told Irwin Margolies so. He bought her a BMW.
    She had a very close friend, Jenny Soo Chin, who was getting bored with life as a housewife. Besides, they were such close friends that they wanted to spend as much time together as they could. Barbera told Margolies she needed an assistant, and she wanted him to hire Jenny Soo Chin as that assistant. Margolies offered no argument. He hired Chin.
    After a few months, Barbera told Margolies that she was working so hard, she needed a vacation. She and Chin would just love to go to Europe for a few weeks. Margolies agreed that she deserved that vacation and, what’s more, he would foot the tab for that European vacation for her and Chin. And he did it not once but twice. (There is some speculation, but no hard evidence, that on those European trips, Barbera and Chin did more than play. The theory goes that she carried with her cash and diamonds, that she deposited them in safe-deposit boxes and secret numbered accounts, and that if some of those boxes and accounts belonged to Margolies, others belonged to her, and that what she put there will now remain unclaimed.)
    One thing she hated, she told Margolies, was regular office hours, a nine-to-five job. Besides, the kind of work she was doing for him was not something she, or he, wanted done when there were other people around with prying eyes. He complied. She could set her own hours. She did, often arriving for work just as everyone was leaving, and working long into the night, often arriving for work on Saturday and Sunday when the office was otherwise empty, unless, of course, there was special work to do. Margolies never complained. But, then, there was little for him to complain about. Barbera was everything he had hoped for when he hired her, and more.
    And so anything Barbera wanted, Margolies granted, within reason. But, with it all, with all of Margolies’s compliance with her every wish, she never completely trusted him, no more than he completely trusted her. She took steps to protect herself should she need protection. She took sets of the Candor books and ledgers home and secreted them in her cluttered closet, and she let Margolies know that she had them.
    Margolies always had intended that when and if his scheme collapsed, it would be Barbera, not he and Madeleine, who would take the fall. Barbera would be his patsy. Perhaps it was her revelation that she had in her possession the records that would clearly show