Margaret Barbera, a 38-year-old woman, had been pulled into a world far removed from the ordinary routines of work and home. An accountant who had served as comptroller for Candor Diamond Corporation, she became a cooperating witness as federal investigators dug into the company’s collapse and suspected fraud. The closer the investigation tightened, the more dangerous her position became.
Through her attorney, she sought police protection, fearing that her cooperation could cost her her life, but the request was refused.
On the evening of April 12, 1982, she headed to where her car was kept on Manhattan’s West Side, the rooftop parking area at Pier 92 along the Hudson River. What should have been a short walk turned into something terrifying: a man in a ski mask was seen dragging a woman’s limp body toward a van. Three CBS employees—Leo Kuranuki, Robert Schulze, and Edward Benford—moved toward the struggle to intervene, and in seconds the scene erupted into gunfire. Each of the men was shot once in the head. Another CBS employee, Angelo Sticca, saw what was happening from nearby and fled in his car as the gunman escaped.
By the next morning, Barbera was no longer just “missing.” Her body was found in Manhattan, dumped away from the pier, killed execution-style with a single shot to the back of the head—an ending that made the message unmistakable. Early reporting described a. 22-caliber weapon and raised the possibility of organized-crime involvement as detectives tried to make sense of why a woman connected to a financial case had been taken, and why three strangers trying to help her had been murdered on the spot.
Investigators began to see the crime as part of something larger than a single night’s violence. Barbera was tied closely to another Candor employee and friend, Jenny Soo Chin, who had vanished earlier that year; the cases began to converge as police and federal agents traced leads around the fraud probe, the witness list, and the people who might most want those witnesses silenced. The trail pointed toward a man using the name Donald “Bowers” or Donald Nash, and the hunt stretched beyond New York. Less than a week after the killings, Kentucky authorities arrested Donald Nash during a stop near Frankfort, and investigators focused on his movements and vehicles as they worked to connect him to the abduction at the pier and the murders that followed.
The case ultimately produced not just a suspect but convictions. Nash was prosecuted in New York for the murders tied to the Pier 92 rooftop killings and the conspiracy connected to the witness-silencing plot; after a high-profile trial built around forensic and circumstantial evidence, he was convicted on May 24, 1983 of four counts of second-degree murder and conspiracy, and he received a 100-year sentence. The investigation also reached back to Candor’s leadership: Irwin Margolies, the company’s president, was accused of arranging the murders as the fraud case closed in on him, and he was later convicted in New York state court in connection with Barbera’s murder as well.
