Free The CBS Murders by Richard; Hammer Page A

Merchandising just happened to be a shell company owned by Madeleine Margolies’s parents, Herman and Molly Malen, and that among the officers of M & M were Irwin and Madeleine Margolies.
    In October 1980 it appeared that Candor had scored a real coup. It dispatched to Maguire invoices amounting to $250,000 for the purported sale and shipment of jewelry to Venture Stores. As ever compliant, Maguire deposited $212,500 into Candor’s account, representing 85 percent of the sale. What Margolies neglected to tell Maguire was that the shipment was on consignment, not a true sale, and, for obvious reasons, since no money changes hands and no bills are rendered on consignments until the sale is made, consignments were specifically excluded from the factoring agreement.
    Three months later, as the payment from Venture Stores to the Maguire lock box was supposedly due, somebody at Maguire made a call and inquired when that payment might be expected. The people at Venture Stores were not a little surprised. For one thing, they had never been told by Margolies that his sales were factored and payments were to be made to Maguire. For another, as they now informed Maguire, there had been no true sale anyway, only a consignment. To prove their point, they displayed the invoice sent them by Margolies, showing the shipment had been on consignment. That, of course, was not the same invoice that had been sent to Maguire.
    The factor immediately called Margolies and demanded an explanation. Margolies said he was shocked. He said he had supplied Maguire with the correct invoice showing the shipment had been a sale. Venture Stores must be mistaken.
    We’ve seen a copy of the invoice in their possession, Maguire said. It shows a consignment, not a sale.
    That doesn’t jibe with my invoices, Margolies declared. And he produced photocopies of the invoices in his possession. They showed that the merchandise had been shipped and sold to Venture Stores.
    It was his word against that of Venture Stores, then. Margolies decided not to take a chance on which one Maguire would believe. He told his friend and attorney Henry Oestericher that his credibility and the continued success of the scheme were at stake. He ordered Oestericher to file a civil suit against Venture Stores, asserting that the chain had violated its purchase agreement with Candor, and he promptly notified Maguire that he was taking this action. If Maguire had been about to bring the factoring agreement to a sudden and decisive end as a result of the Venture Stores disclosure, this stopped them. If Margolies was taking this kind of action, then, Maguire officials reasoned, they must be dealing not with a crook but with honest Irwin Margolies, a man wronged by his customer. And so the agreement, and Margolies’s raid on the Maguire treasury, continued unabated.
    And a raid it was. By the end of 1980, according to the invoices sent to Maguire, which Maguire honored by depositing the required funds to Candor’s account, the jewelry company’s sales had more than doubled over the year before, reaching $1.2 million from about $500,000. Nobody at Maguire expressed surprise or suspicion. This was just the beginning. As the year turned into 1981, Candor’s sales, as reported to Maguire, began to grow almost geometrically month after month. In May 1980, for instance, as the factoring agreement was in its germinal stages, Candor reported sales to Maguire of $41,000; a year later, in May 1981, it claimed sales of $1.393 million. In July 1980, as Candor was in the initial stages of its sudden and phenomenal growth spurt, it told Maguire its sales had reached $87,000 that month. A year later, in July 1981, it claimed sales of more than $2.4 million. All told, between May 1980 and July 1981, a period of just fourteen months, Margolies sent Candor invoices to Maguire claiming sales of about $10 million, nearly $9 million in the first half of 1981 alone. In return, Candor and