Mysteries of the missing

by Edward H. Smith

He visited the stores and houses, inquired of friends and neighbors, questioned the children, circled the blocks, looked into cellars and areaways, visited the kindergarten where the child was a pupil, implored the aid of the policemen on the beats, and finally, late at night, went to the East Fifth Street police station and told his story to the captain, who was sympathetic but busy and inclined to take the matter lightly. The child would turn up. Lots of children strayed away in New York every day. They were almost always found again. It was very seldom that anything happened.

So Salvatore Varotta went wearily back to his wife and told her what the “big chief policeman” had said. No doubt, the officer spoke from experience. They had better try to get a little sleep. Joe would turn up in the morning.

On the afternoon of the following day the postman brought a letter to Salvatore Varotta. The truck driver read it and trembled with fear and apprehension. His wife glanced at it and moaned. She lighted a candle before the tinseled St. Anthony in her bedroom and began endless prayers and protestations.

The letter was written in Italian, evidently by one habited to the Sicilian dialect. It said that the writer was a member of a powerful society, too secret and too strong to be afraid of the police. The society had taken little Joe. He was being held for ransom. The price of his life and restoration was twenty-five hundred dollars. Varotta was to get the money at once in cash and have it ready in his home, so that he could hand it over to a messenger who would call for it. If the money were promptly and quietly paid the boy would be restored safe and sound, but if the police were notified and any attempt were made to catch the kidnappers, the powerful society would destroy the child and take further vengeance upon the family.

There was a black hand drawn at the bottom of this forbidding missive with a dripping dagger at its side.

Varotta and his wife conferred all day in despair. They did not know whom they might trust, or whether they dared speak of the matter at all. But necessity finally decided their course for them. Varotta did not have twenty-five hundred dollars. He could not have it ready when the fateful footfall of the messenger would sound on the stairs. In his extremity he had to seek aid. He went to the police again and showed the letter to Captain Archibald McNeill.

The same evening the case was placed in the hands of the veteran head of the New York Italian Squad, Sergeant Michael Fiaschetti, successor of the murdered Petrosino and the agent who has sent more Latin killers to the chair and the prison house than any other officer in the country. Fiaschetti saw with immediate and clear vision that this job was probably not the work of any organized or powerful society. He knew that professional criminals act with more caution and better information. They would never have made the blunder of assuming that Varotta had money when he had none. The detective also saw that the plan of sending a messenger to the house for the ransom was the plan of resourceless amateurs. He reasoned that the work had been done by relatives or neighbors, who knew something but not enough of Varotta’s affairs, and he also concluded that the child was not far from its home.

Fiaschetti quickly elaborated a plan of action in accordance with these conclusions. His first work was to get a detective into the Varotta house unobserved or unsuspected. For this work he chose a woman officer, Mrs. Rae Nicoletti, who was of Italian parentage and could speak the Sicilian dialect.

The next day, Mrs. Varotta, between weeping and inquiring after her child, let it be known that she had telegraphed to her cousin in Detroit, who had a little money. The cousin was coming to aid her in her difficulties.

That night the cousin came. She drove up to the house in a station taxicab with two heavy suit cases for baggage. After inquiring the correct address from a bystander, the visiting cousin made her way into the Varotta home. So the detective, Mrs. Nicoletti, introduced herself to her assignment.