Free The CBS Murders by Richard; Hammer

flat, hovering at about $500,000 annually. Suddenly it was as though a rocket had been attached to its tail and ignited. The company became, according to the invoices it filed with Maguire, a lot more successful than anybody could have dreamed possible, its sales soaring into the stratosphere at a pace anybody who gave it some thought might have considered neither possible nor logical. But apparently nobody thought very hard about it, if they thought about it at all.
    Aided and abetted by Barbera and her fertile imagination, Margolies took off in several directions. Behind it was an adaptation of the scheme hatched and brought to a certain perfection in the 1920s by Charles Ponzi in Boston: Pay the investor back with his own money, only make sure he keeps on investing at an ever-increasing rate so that the debt never catches up with the income. If it’s done right and with panache, it will be a long time before the investor catches wise that all he’s getting back is his own money from earlier, smaller investments.
    On more occasions than not, Margolies simply ignored the stricture to paste the Maguire sticker to his invoices and bills, telling the customers that the sales were factored and that payments should be made not to Candor but directly to the Maguire post office lock box. So the bills—the legitimate ones, at least—continued to go out as always and the customers continued to pay Candor, and then Candor paid Maguire. Only once did anyone at Maguire notice that Margolies was violating the rules and raise a howl. In November 1980, Peter O’Neill, the Maguire officer handling the Candor account, came across one of those Candor checks sent in to pay for an invoice that had been assigned to the factor. O’Neill immediately called Margolies and demanded an explanation. Margolies, with his salesman’s winning ways, calmed O’Neill. What had happened, he explained, was that the customer hadn’t followed directions and had sent his check to Candor. Rather than go to the bother of sending the check back and making the customer write and dispatch a new one, Margolies simply had deposited the check in the Candor account and written his own to Maguire. O’Neill was appeased. But he warned Margolies not to let it happen again. If it did, Maguire might consider that grounds for ending the factoring agreement. Margolies was not at all concerned. Too many checks had already slipped past Maguire for him to think that O’Neill’s catching this one had been anything but an accident that was unlikely to happen often, if ever again. Margolies just ignored O’Neill’s warning and continued to do as he had been doing, only more so.
    If he could get away with continuing to collect as always from his legitimate customers and writing his own checks to the factor, then he had a clear road into the Maguire treasury to stage a raid on a massive scale. Like a magician pulling rabbits out of a hat, Margolies seemingly pulled names out of directories. Some were the names of retail stores with which Candor had never done any business, or had done no business in a long time, or had done business only on a minimal scale. Onto invoices went their names, showing that they were now making ever-increasing purchases from Candor. Off to Maguire went the invoices. Into Candor’s bank account went 85% of the sales figure listed on the invoice.
    That was one way. There were others. Candor sent off invoices to Maguire showing that it had made large sales of jewelry to such firms as Paramount Gems, Palazzo D’Oro, and others. The only problem was that they weren’t retailers. They were suppliers to Candor of diamonds, gold, and other materials and so, of course, were not in the market for Candor’s goods.
    Candor sent off invoices to Maguire showing that it had sold and shipped a large quantity of jewelry to a company called M & M Merchandising. What it didn’t tell Maguire was that M & M