Tom had made Pamela one of the seven executors of his estate. She returned to New York in December 1990, she says, to find an avalanche of suspicious transactions involving the Carvels’ finances. Bank accounts were being closed and opened, apparently without Agnes’ knowledge, and large sums of money were being transferred between Carvel accounts, her lawyers told me. In the middle of these matters, Pamela says, were Davis and Arcadipane. Davis wasn’t a Carvel lifer, but he had a long history with Tom Carvel. While working for a Manhattan law firm, Davis had taken Carvel on as a client in 1969 to advise him on how to take his company public that year. Davis later helped negotiate the 1989 sale to Investcorp.

Hints of trouble surfaced before Carvel was even buried. As Agnes attended her husband’s wake, Davis entered the Carvel home without her permission to search for Tom’s will, bringing a locksmith to crack open the couple’s safe, court documents show. Shortly thereafter, Arcadipane began shredding ­records at the office, defying orders from other Carvel executors that she stop. The shredder was silenced only after Pamela burst in and cut the electric cord herself. Through it all, Carvel’s will could not ­be found. It had been given to Arcadipane for safekeeping, but she claimed it was lost. Its disappearance delayed Carvel’s executors from officially assuming control of his estate, leaving Davis and Arcadipane in command for months.

Agnes, during this period, seemed overwhelmed. Davis was pressuring her to loan the business $500,000, saying there were cash-flow problems. Agnes demurred, on the advice of Pamela, who considered the request improper. But ­Davis persisted. He sent another of Tom’s employees to Florida to talk to Agnes while Pamela was in New York, and this envoy convinced the widow to supply the funds. Meanwhile, Thomas Reddy, ­a lawyer and a family friend, got Agnes to sign papers creating a trust account for her money. Three trustees would manage the funds and have the authority ­to make distributions to her. Known as the Florida trust, it was touted as a safeguard for Agnes’ assets—but for the widow, it would become a nightmare.

Unusual things were also happening at the Thomas and Agnes Carvel Foundation. Davis emerged as the foundation’s first paid president, at a salary of more than $100,000 a year, and board members—including Arcadipane—began drawing stipends, records show. The payments were troubling to Agnes because she and Tom believed that any work for the charity should be done for free. Agnes also became bewildered by the foundation’s abrupt shift in direction. Although it bore their names, it was focused more on making six- and seven-figure grants to big, established institutions than on making small grants to the grassroots groups Tom and Agnes favored.

Worse for Agnes, a serious flaw emerged in the estate plan. With the Thomas and Agnes Carvel Foundation now under the sway of Davis and Arcadipane, it took an aggressively adversarial position, questioning Agnes’ spending and even challenging her right to continue Tom’s practice of giving gifts of $10,000 at Christmas, according to Agnes’ lawyers. (The foundation denies this allegation.) The charity had a reason to be aggressive: Every dollar that Agnes spent or gave away of her husband’s fortune would mean less money to the foundation when she died. Agnes and Pamela were rapidly coming to the conclusion that the two people Tom suspected of cheating him before his death had become their enemies too.

As Pamela and Agnes plotted to regain control of the foundation, they got some help. The New York State attorney general’s office opened an investigation in 1991. Its findings were shocking: The inquiry discovered that the charity paid $55,000 in tuition for Arcadipane’s nephew and two others and tried to camouflage the spending as grants. The attorney general also questioned Davis’ and Arcadipane’s roles in the foundation’s sale of Carvel stock, which reaped a quick $5 million profit for some company employees, including $300,000 for Arcadipane.