A Conspiracy of Goodwill
From rags to pilfered riches
In the late 1990s, my sister Lori owned an iconic vintage clothing shop on University Avenue, the beating heart of Palo Alto’s downtown district. I helped her set the place up, built the dressing rooms, and assisted with the store layout. Later, I helped track down merchandise to keep the racks stocked. Lori lived for the thrill of the hunt—rare antiques, glittering jewelry, and the grooviest threads were her obsession. She stalked thrift stores within a 30-mile radius every week, and I’d sometimes tag along, my knack for spotting men’s fashion gold making me a secret weapon in her popular second-hand business.
Thrifting to find store items was like panning for nuggets in a river of rags—row after row of discarded garments saved from the landfill, most of it still garbage. Spotting a piece worthy of Lori’s shop was only half the battle; you had to hope torn stitches, stained fabric, or insect damage didn’t disqualify it. That’s why curated vintage stores are so popular—every item is a handpicked gem, saving customers the time and effort of sorting through thrift store chaos on their own. The items they purchase also hold much of their value and can be resold back to the shop they were purchased in, or another one up the street.
From 1979 to 1997, Goodwill President Andrew Liersch, Carol Marrs, and Faye Marcil ran a ruthless scam, hawking donated goods, hiding the sales, and siphoning the cash for themselves. Marrs pocketed $3,000 in weekly cash drops from 1988 to 1997, distributed by Faye from her San Jose store, with well over $1 million in Marrs’ accounts.
In those days, we sought one prize above all: vintage Levi’s, blue denim relics that still spark a frenzy today. Some pairs were beginning to command thousands, others hundreds, with ease. Posting a Levi’s logo in the shop window drew customers by the busload. In the early days of the internet, large donation centers had no clue of their value. If luck was on your side, you could nab a pair for $6 and flip them for $3,000 to a collector in Japan—at least that was the dream–and it seemed everyone and their mother was on a treasure hunt.
Something was off at the Palo Alto Goodwill store, and Lori could feel it in her bones. The store, once a treasure trove for rare ‘60s and ‘70s finds and scores of Levi’s, had become a wasteland. Weeks turned into months—six, to be exact—without a single pair of Levi’s for her efforts. Confused, Lori poked her head into the stockroom to get answers. “Don’t you ever get Levi’s?” she pressed. A worker nodded toward large barrels stuffed with blue jeans and spilled the beans: “Those go to a man who sells them overseas for big money.”
The words didn’t land right. Something had disrupted the natural order of things, but what could she do, anything? Back home, Lori called the Santa Clara County Goodwill office, her mind beginning to race with suspicion. The setup reeked of deceit—were the higher-ups aware that donated items weren’t being put out for the public? Did she stumble upon shady backroom deals at her local store?
When Lori spoke to Carol Marrs, Goodwill’s General Manager of Store Operations, she was met with venom: “Mind your own business,” Marrs barked, cutting the call before Lori could respond. The rebuff only fueled her fears. She hounded Goodwill’s corporate headquarters with call after call, but got nothing—likely, Lori mused, because they were too busy counting their dirty money. She reached out to the San Jose Mercury News and other newsrooms, but the story found no takers. Then, nine months later, the truth exploded in the papers: Carol Marrs, entangled in a criminal conspiracy that siphoned millions from Santa Clara County Goodwill stores, including the Palo Alto location run by her family, had shot herself dead rather than face the consequences.
At first, Lori was stunned at the news. Had she set a police investigation in motion by contacting the media and reporting what she learned?
In a blistering court takedown, the District Attorney laid bare a two-decade-long embezzlement racket run by Carol Marrs and her family-dominated network of Goodwill store managers. Police raids on Marrs’ home turned up $350,000 in cash, financial statements topping a million, $55,000 hidden in her Goodwill HQ desk, and a receipt for a cash-bought Mercedes that screamed of her guilt. The house of cards collapsed when Jeff Marcil, estranged husband of co-conspirator Faye Marcil, exposed the scheme after being cut off from the profits. Authorities found $400,000 in Faye’s home and office. Her sisters, both Goodwill managers, were also neck-deep in the fraud.
From 1979 to 1997, Goodwill President Andrew Liersch, Carol Marrs, and Faye Marcil ran a relentless scam, hawking donated goods, hiding the sales, and siphoning the cash for themselves. Marrs pocketed $3,000 in weekly cash drops from 1988 to 1997, distributed by Faye from her San Jose store, with well over $1 million in Marrs’ accounts and six houses tied directly to the fraud. The operation was a shady masterpiece: skimming store registers, selling barrels of choice merchandise to dealers for markets in Russia, China, and Japan, and washing the money through fake front companies. The scam drained Goodwill of an estimated $26 million, propped up by $30,000 weekly bribes to a 100-strong underground workforce.
All news reports (and Goodwill Industries itself) portrayed Marrs and Marcil as the masterminds behind the operation, downplaying the involvement of Goodwill’s then-President, who the Feds pursued for international money laundering. He was finally apprehended in 2003 at LAX, facing wire fraud charges with over $800,000 in hidden overseas accounts. In a maddening miscarriage of justice, he pleaded guilty to a minor tax evasion charge unrelated to Goodwill, skating free from the looting charges with a sweetheart deal that remains an enigma to this day.
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⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ "What a page turner! This story is an amazing piece of investigative work—both compelling and heartbreaking." - Amazon review
⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ “I’d seen the author’s work in OZY but was blown away by this book. It’s SUCH a great read, written from the heart! Full of interest for those historians of the hippie generation, North Beach, corrupt cops, mobbed up pols, and San Francisco in general. Very well written and paced up to the last pages. Truth is indeed stranger than fiction. Buy this book now!" - Amazon review