The CBS Murders

by Hammer, Richard;

On March 25, she appeared in court to make her plea. The government had decided to accept a guilty plea to a single count of mail fraud, a felony. In its sentencing memorandum to the judge, it would describe how cooperative she had become, and between the lines anyone could read that the prosecutors were in favor of the greatest leniency. That court session was held in camera, in the strictest privacy and secrecy. The government did not want the word to get back to Margolies that Barbera had turned. Now it wanted her safe, even though nobody yet believed that she was in any particular danger. But her testimony was vital to the case that was being built against the diamond manufacturer, and it would be best if nobody knew about it.

  Once her plea had been accepted, Barbera was informed that this was just the first step. She would be called in late April to testify before a grand jury, empaneled to hear the evidence in the Candor swindle. When indictments were handed down against Margolies and his wife and others, she could expect to be the government’s star witness at their trials.

  Somehow, Margolies learned that she was talking. He was furious. Her testimony would put an end to all his dreams, all he had worked for so long and so hard. But if she did not appear before the grand jury, there still might be hope. He got in touch with Nash and railed about the delays. There had already been considerable trouble because Nash had taken so much time, more than three months since Margolies had given him the contract. He had not done what he was being paid to do. Margolies demanded action, without delay.

  Nash tried to explain the difficulties. Barbera had disappeared for weeks at a time since he had taken Chin, and whenever she reappeared, she was very careful and watchful. There had been no chance to get at her. Margolies didn’t want to hear excuses. He was beginning to believe that Oestericher’s initial reaction had been right, that Nash simply was the wrong person for the job, that he should have found somebody else, a true professional. It was too late now to do anything about that. All he could do was prod Nash, make him perform. And Nash was determined to do Margolies’s bidding. He did not have much more time in which to do it. On April 13, he had to report to the Manhattan Correctional Center to begin serving his sentence for cloning a cab.

  He and his nephew Thomas Dane took a drive up the Hudson into Rockland County, to the Nanuet shopping mall. They stopped at a sporting-goods store. Nash asked to see a .22-caliber rifle and some ammunition. He bought a hundred rounds of ammunition, said he’d think about the rifle, and then left. He went down the road to another sporting-goods store, bought more ammunition, then returned to the first store and this time bought the rifle. That return made the clerk, John Gaine, remember him. Something else made Gaine remember him. As Nash pulled back his jacket to reach for his wallet, Gaine saw the butt of a .22-caliber pistol on his hip. And Gaine remembered that as Nash paid for the rifle, he had laughed and said he wanted it “for a little varmint hunting and target practice.”

  Target practice, indeed. At home, Nash spent hours practicing with the pistol against the side of his garage, against targets pinned to trees, perfecting his aim.

  And he began to track Barbera more intensely. He was out in Ridgewood, around her apartment almost every day now. As usual, he made those collect calls home and to his nephew from the phone booths in the area. But what Nash did not know was that he had been spotted. Not that anybody paid any attention to it then, but he had been spotted, nevertheless. The FBI had agents in the area, doing surveillance on a reputed organized-crime hangout. One of the things the agents do during such an operation is move through the neighborhood, noting the license plates on the cars parked there. On the night of March 31, as the agents roamed the blocks, one of them jotted down the plate numbers of a silver Chevrolet van. Back at headquarters the next day, those numbers were fed into an FBI computer and stored, available for retrieval if anything ever arose linking that van to the organized-crime stakeout or to anything else.

  At the beginning of April, suddenly the break that Nash and Margolies had been waiting for came. Nash had been sitting on Barbera through long hours, day and night, away from home more than he wanted to be, for his stepdaughter was about to have her baby. His breaks now were often to call home to see how she was, and then she went into the hospital, and he called there to check on her condition. Then, one morning at the beginning of April, Barbera broke the pattern that Nash had become so accustomed to. She left home early, drove into Manhattan, to West Fifty-fourth Street, stopping in front of the Camera Service Center. She had a job. She had regular hours. She would be out in the open.

  Nash watched to make sure. Perhaps somebody at the camera shop mentioned it to her, perhaps she just saw the sign that overhung the roadway, nobody later could be sure, but Barbera needed a place to park her car, and there it was, only a couple of blocks away, Pier Ninety-two, and it was cheap, only $40 a month. On Thursday, April 1, she drove onto the lot, filled out an application, and paid for a month in advance.

  Nash continued to tail her, planning his next move. This could have been a diversion, could have been nothing. He followed her in from Ridgewood to Pier Ninety-two on Friday, and again on Monday, April 5. A new pattern in her life had evolved, she was on a regular schedule. And now he had only a week to do what Margolies had paid him to do; on the morning of April 13, he had to report to the authorities and then spend the next few weeks in the slammer. If Margolies was getting desperate, so was he. He moved. That Monday morning, he followed her as she drove up onto the pier. He was stopped at the gate, was told he could not enter, could not park unless he was a monthly customer, was told to drive on through and exit out the next ramp. He did what he was told. But the attendant, obeying the Kinney dictates, made a note of his license plate: New Jersey 192-SFV. Nash, it seemed, had a habit of switching license plates from one of his cars to another, as whim or reason dictated. This one, it turned out later, should have been on a Ford Pinto he owned, not on the van he was driving.

  On Tuesday, April 6, Nash took the next step. Barbera drove in from Ridgewood, up onto the pier, parked, and walked over to work at the camera shop. A half hour later, Nash arrived in his van and announced to the attendant, Tom Phillips, that he wanted to rent a monthly space. Phillips handed him an application. Nash filled it out. He wrote his name: Donald Nash. He wrote an address: Rubin Construction, 436 West 45th Street, New York City, and, indeed, Rubin Construction was what he was calling his struggling business. He wrote a telephone number, prefixed by the Manhattan area code so that it appeared to be the construction company’s local number; it wasn’t. It didn’t exist. But if it had been prefixed by the New Jersey area code, it would have been his own home phone. He wrote a license plate number for the Chevrolet van: New York 53924-GH, which was the number that happened to be on the van at that moment, and was the number that belonged on the van, registered to Donald Nash of 436 West 45th Street. But then Nash apparently got a little worried. If it came, identification would be too easy. He crossed out the real plate number and wrote another, 939-HG New York, a plate that had never been issued by the New York Motor Vehicle Department, it later turned out. He handed the completed application to Phillips along with the $40 monthly parking fee in advance and then drove on through and out onto the pier parking lot. The application was put in the Kinney files, along with those of the hundreds of other cars that parked on the pier or had, in the past, parked there.

  If Nash intended to take Barbera that day, the weather was against him. It started to snow, and the snow turned into a blizzard, and offices closed early. Nash had all he could do just to drive home to Keansburg. And on Wednesday, the city was digging out and few cars could enter or leave, and offices remained closed. Another day lost, and time was growing short.

  On Thursday, April 8, Barbera drove in early in the morning, as was becoming her habit. Nash arrived just before four in the afternoon. He waited. Barbera appeared at about six. But so did others. There were just too many people around for Nash to make his move and get away in safety. Barbera departed. Nash sat in his van on
the pier for another fifteen minutes and then drove off.

  On Good Friday, April 9, Barbera was on the pier again just after eight. Nash arrived at about three. But Barbera was already gone. The camera shop had let its employees off early because of the holiday. Barbera had another Easter to live.

  Monday, April 12. Nash was out of time. It was this day or never. He would begin serving his time the next morning, and by the time he got out, it would be too late for Margolies, for Barbera would have talked before the grand jury by then. Nash had spoken with Margolies once more over the weekend, had heard the rage in his employer’s voice, had promised that it would be done on Monday. And the more he thought about it, the more Monday seemed the ideal time. He would do it, get away, get rid of the body, and then, in the morning, report and go to jail. Let people look for him if somehow they stumbled on something, though if all worked as he and Margolies had planned and hoped, nobody would. Barbera would simply have disappeared, and there were few who would miss her immediately. By the time somebody did, no one would be sure just when she had gone. And if nobody looked for her right away, it would not be until the end of the month, when her parking permit expired and her car still was there, that anybody would realize that she was nowhere around. Margolies then would be able to tell the story he had concocted: Barbera had sent Jenny Soo Chin ahead and now she had joined her somewhere, probably in Europe, with all Candor’s diamonds and all Candor’s cash. And Nash? He would have been in jail. What better place to hide?

  At about five in the afternoon, he drove up on the pier.

  At about six, Barbera appeared.

  PART FOUR

  CHASE

  18

  Tuesday, April 13. The chase was on. There was just one trouble: At this stage, nobody knew whom he was chasing. But the mayor was incensed. This was the kind of thing that just didn’t happen in his city, and he wanted action fast. The police commissioner was promising action—publicly, at least—but he knew the kind of action he was going to get right away might well be action for action’s sake. The public was outraged. This hadn’t been mobsters killing mobsters, something people could basically ignore, could dismiss with a sense that maybe the guys who got it deserved it and the guys who gave it would one day get the same thing in their turn and, besides, good riddance to bad rubbish. This had been the murder, cold-blooded, of three innocent bystanders who had merely tried to come to the, aid of a woman in trouble, and their reward had been a bullet in the head. It gave pause; it gave a feeling that nobody really was safe in this city. The press, especially the sensational press, was at its most sensational, sensationalizing what already was sensational enough. There were a thousand rumors, and most of them appeared in the papers. There had been not one but two or more killers. There had been accomplices overseeing the job and reporting its success, via car telephone, to an unknown employer and referring to the killer as “the fall guy.” It had been a mob hit done by a professional; one detective in the organized-crime task force was quoted as theorizing that the killer was from one of the syndicate families and “he’ll probably be dead by the end of the week; mob hits are supposed to be done anonymously; they don’t like fanfare.” Almost everybody any reporter talked to had an opinion, and those opinions were diverse, and those opinions were printed.

  Nobody but a minor bureaucrat in the criminal-justice system noticed that Donald Nash didn’t keep his appointment that morning. He failed to surrender to the authorities to begin serving his term for cloning the cab. That bureaucrat did what he was supposed to do: He went to court and had a judge swear out a bench warrant for Nash’s arrest. It was all part of the system, the way things are done and, in the normal course, it would have meant very little. Nash’s offense had been so trivial that to expect the cops to go out and look for him on that warrant would have been expecting too much from an already undermanned and overworked department. So nobody then except that bureaucrat thought much about the fact that Nash didn’t show when he was supposed to; it happened all the time, and even the bureaucrat probably forgot all about it once he had done his duty and gotten the warrant and filed it.

  At Midtown North, the hard and convoluted task of trying to make sense of the pieces that were in hand and trying to find all the missing pieces had begun. Almost the first thing done that morning was to set up a task force to handle the investigation. In the chain of command, Captain Eugene Burke was in charge and Lieutenant Dick Gallagher was assigned to run the operation. But it was, in reality, the case of the men who would go out and run down the leads. There was, of course, Richie Chartrand, and he was joined by Bobby Patterson. John Wales, a cop since 1961, a detective since 1971, much of that time in Midtown North, a large man in size and girth, garrulous, with a thousand stories and anecdotes to illustrate every eventuality and situation, had been off the day of the murders. When he arrived on the thirteenth, he went onto the task force. So, too, did Detective Richie Bohan, another large man and another longtime veteran, and Augie Sanchez, a small, tough cop whose manner was enough to frighten the unwary and those who had something to hide. And Sergeant Tom Kenney was detached from his usual duties for work on the task force. Do a good job, solve this thing and bring in the guy, they were promised, and you’ll all get rewards, promotions to the next grade for detectives, pay at the next rank on the official ladder, and more.

  By midmorning the FBI showed up, Special Agents Don Richards, Bob Paquette, John Truslow, and others. They offered themselves and all the facilities of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, anything they and the agency could do to help. They would be, they explained, a support service in what was about to become a joint investigation of the murders of three innocent bystanders and one, or possibly two, witnesses in a federal investigation. “That is a very fancy way of saying, if you need something, you ask us and we will do it,” says Chartrand. “And this was one of the very few times that I know that the New York City Police Department and the FBI really worked in a very cohesive manner. There was a free-flowing input of information. We all had to introduce ourselves to each other that morning, and we all had to satisfy ourselves that we would trust each other, and we had to establish who was going to handle what. The ground rules were set up. Everything would be handled out of Midtown North, and from that early stage, the federal agents worked out of our office. They would show up at our office on time. They were always ready and willing to assist.”

  Assist they did, and without delay. Physically, the FBI wanted its agents, and so, by association, the New York cops, to be comfortable, to have all the best and the most modern, and the FBI has plenty of money to provide. “It was unbelievable,” John Wales remembers. “I never saw anything like it. We got tables, typewriters, telephones, everything. We had telephones with no numbers. The expenses were astronomical and we didn’t even get a bill on it. Nothing. And the telephone bill for the first month, I was told, was more than six hundred dollars. Now, the police department, it doesn’t go six hundred dollars in six months for the phone, and then it screams. But we got everything instantly. All we had to say is, ‘We need it.’ I mean, they pushed buttons and things worked. Like banks. They got us all the records, accounts, everything. Stuff you never could get. You get on a regular homicide, it’s impossible, it’s on microfilm, they tell you, and we don’t know where it is. But this time they pushed the button and we went right down and they had it right waiting for us. But now, anything we wanted, we got. We got a subpoena and it was honored, by the banks and by everybody. I mean, normally I get a subpoena and give it to them and, somehow, they’ve lost everything. Banks especially. They never really give you anything. But here, anything we requested, we got, with a minimum of trouble.”

  Action was what was being demanded, and in those first days, there was plenty of action, running off in every direction. “The only thing we knew for sure,” Wales says, “was that a man who shot some people got into a van and drove away. We had no good identification of the man. And the van, basically, it was white or li
ght-colored with stripes on the side and it had a sliding door on the side. That’s it. No year, no make, no license plate at all.”

  Maybe, somebody said, some of those people on the Rotterdam were taking pictures when the liner was leaving the pier, and maybe they got a shot of the killer waiting in the parking lot. So the word went out. Contact the ship and ask the people who had been taking pictures to turn in the rolls so the cops could go through them. It was a long shot, but at least it was a shot, it was something. (The rolls were turned in, developed, examined, and revealed nothing.)

  Maybe, somebody suggested, somebody was looking out of a window in one of the buildings overlooking the pier parking lot, and maybe that somebody saw something and didn’t realize what he was seeing, but under questioning he might remember. So detectives were sent to the nearby buildings and talked to tenants from whose windows the surface of the parking lot could be seen. Nobody had seen anything.

  Everybody had an idea. “Did anybody check to see if there was an airplane flying overhead?” Wales remembers. “You might say, what a stupid idea. But if one of the big shots suggested it, you did it. God forbid, somebody writes a letter in and says, ‘Dear Police Department, I was going back home on the plane and I was looking out the window and I saw a strange thing. I saw what looked like this man playing tag. It looked like he had something flashing in his hand. I didn’t think anything of it until I got home and my cousin told me, gee, you just missed a big shooting in New York. And I said, oh, my God, I saw the whole thing.’ If you get that kind of a letter and you didn’t go and check the airports, you can imagine. But if it’s just me and another guy, you can’t waste time going around looking at everything. If you don’t have the men, you don’t have the time, you can’t do that. But if you have so many men, like we did on this thing, you can do it. When you have a million guys, just to keep them going, because they stagnate if they’re hanging around, the boss will come in and say, hey, you and you, go and do this, you and you, go and do that. You get things going and everybody keeps going and maybe you come up with something.” But it didn’t happen with the planes or the buildings or the ship or nearly anything else.