They made an odd pair. He was 20 years her senior, wore impeccable suits and had a perpetual tan. His hair was always coiffed and shoe-polish black.
She had buzz and infectious enthusiasm, but skipped the fussed-with, made-up look. She was more casual and unaffected, the kind of woman who paid for business lunches out of her own pocket and flew 15 hours from Hong Kong in coach.
Argo declined to be interviewed for this article, as did most others contacted by The Sun, including those who vouched for her character in court. No one answered the telephone at Caputo's West Chester, Pa., home, and no voice mail was available. A letter sent by Express Mail to his house and signed for by his wife received no response.
But previous interviews, testimony, regulatory filings, public records and detailed court papers - which include excerpts from letters submitted on Argo's behalf - shed some light on her character and its contradictions.
She's a woman bound tight by relationships, the letters said. As a child, she became the glue binding her brother and sister to their parents. As a wife, she lent an ear to her sister-in-law, whose marriage was failing, and later a truck to move out. As a mother, she moved her boy to a new school to get him away from bullies, and became his best friend and running partner.
In an informal interview with The Sun in 2004, she talked about her admiration for Caputo. He had taken her in and promoted her. She was his right hand.
She was the one that Caputo asked to issue him stock options stamped with a date selected to earn him the most possible money. She was the one who chose not to account for the transactions.
And she was the one who would pay the price.
`Good character'
Argo came into SafeNet with a salary of about $69,000, and she got a bonus of $26,000 that first year. By the next year, 2000, her salary ballooned to $161,000, and her bonus tripled.
That year she and Stephen, her college sweetheart husband, moved into a 3,500-square-foot house in Baltimore with their three young children. They paid a half-million dollars, taking out a $350,000, 30-year mortgage.
She settled into the soccer-mom life and joined the Cathedral of Mary Our Queen in Homeland, where she would eventually begin a Cub Scout pack to please her middle son.
"She would have to be a saint to do that," Monsignor Robert Armstrong joked during a recent interview. He thinks of Argo, who also filled in as a substitute catechist teacher, as a "woman of good character."
