The CBS Murders

On Easter Monday of 1982, Margaret Barbera, an accountant, was shot to death in a parking lot on a Manhattan pier; three technicians from the nearby CBS-TV studios who went to her rescue also were killed. Hammer here recreates the crime and the police work that led to the killer, Donald Nash, a handyman hired by a jewelry manufacturer named Irwin Margolies. Margolies, only a marginally successful entrepreneur, had hatched a plot with the aid of a lawyer to defraud a factoring firm owned by a New York bank. The scheme, which netted millions thanks in part to creative bookkeeping by Barbera, began to unravel, and Margolies determined that the safest course was to eliminate her. Nash, the gunman, is now serving a 100-year sentence, Margolies 50 years. Hammer (The Vatican Connection, Hoodlum Empire has done an outstanding job of detailing the case thoroughly yet succinctly. Photos not seen by PW. (June 24)