Free The CBS Murders by Richard; Hammer Page B

Margolies received about $8.5 million from Maguire, most of it in the spring and early summer of 1981.
    How explain such a fantastic sales growth? Margolies explained it easily, telling Maguire’s Peter O’Neill one day that his company was booming at such a rate because the beautiful designs and high quality of the merchandise were creating great demand, and even more, because Margolies’s own brilliant salesmanship had won some very large accounts.
    Did anyone doubt? Margolies was prepared to show that the shipments were pouring out of the office. In early November 1980, for instance, Peter O’Neill announced that he would like to come into the Candor office and spend a day matching purchase orders and delivery documents against the invoices Candor had submitted regarding certain very large sales to the Caldor chain. Margolies had to oblige him. According to Gaye Broffman, who was working as Madeleine Margolies’s assistant office manager at the time (a position she held for only a few months, between August and November 1980, when she departed with a certain distaste for what she had been witnessing), she had gone into the office on a Sunday to catch up on some paperwork. As she was getting ready to leave late in the afternoon, Irwin and Madeleine Margolies and Margaret Barbera stopped her. They asked her if she could stay on for a few more hours to do some essential work relating to O’Neill’s expected arrival the following morning. What essential work? It seemed, Margolies said, that the original documents relating to delivery of merchandise to Caldor had been misplaced during Candor’s recent move from one side of Forty-seventh Street to the other. What would have to be done was to prepare copies of Federal Express and Purolator delivery forms showing that the merchandise had been shipped from Candor to Caldor. Through the evening and into the morning, and when it became obvious that she couldn’t finish the job alone, with the help of a friend Barbera asked her to recruit, Broffman typed hundreds of such delivery forms and then, on Barbera’s orders, forged signatures of courier employees to every form. By the time O’Neill arrived, everything was in order.
    Five months later, in April 1981, when Maguire officials announced that they wanted to make another inspection, the forgery party was repeated, this time by Irwin and Madeleine Margolies and their two teenage sons, along with Madeleine Margolies’s brother, Scott Malen, who was working as a Candor salesman, and Barbera.
    When it came to repaying Maguire for its advances as they came due, Margolies showed equal ingenuity. The main method, of course, was the simple formula of writing Candor checks in payment for supposed sales. Margolies was certain that, despite the one occasion when O’Neill had voiced his displeasure at this violation of the contract, nobody at Maguire would notice that the checks were coming from Candor and not its customers, that in the main Maguire would be concerned only with getting what it was due when it was due and not about the source, and in keeping on the good side of a company that was becoming such a valuable client.
    Even so, there were occasions when Margolies did call Maguire to explain why some checks had been drawn on Candor’s account and not sent directly by the customers. The customers, he explained, had mistakenly sent their checks to Candor, and Candor’s new and inexperienced bookkeeper (Barbera) had mistakenly deposited them in Candor’s account at Bank Leumi. To save time, Margolies said he had simply issued offsetting checks to Maguire.
    On at least one occasion, he even offered documentary evidence to prove that this was exactly what had happened. Late in October 1980, as payments for a number of invoices were coming due, Margolies withdrew $60,000 in cash from Candor’s account at Bank Leumi. Immediately the cash was deposited into Madeleine