Mysteries of the missing

by Edward H. Smith

The remains were already sorely decomposed and the face past recognition, but Salvatore Varotta looked at the swollen little hands and feet and the blue sailor suit. He knelt by the slab where this childish wreck lay prone and sobbed his recognition and his grief.

A coroner’s autopsy showed that the child had been thrown alive into the stream and drowned. Calculating the probable results of the reaction of tides and currents, it was decided that Giuseppe had been cast to his death somewhere above the point at which the recovery of the corpse was made.

Long and tedious investigations followed. When had the child been killed and by whom? Was the little boy still alive when the two messengers arrived at the Varotta home for the ransom and the trap was sprung which gathered in five chief conspirators and five supposed accessories? If so, who was the confederate who had committed the final deed of murderous desperation? Who had done the actual kidnapping? Where had the child been concealed while the negotiations were proceeding?

Some of these questions have never been answered, but it is now possible, from the confession of one of the men, from the evidence presented at four ensuing murder trials, and from the subsequent drift of police information, to reconstruct the story of the crime in greater part.

On the afternoon of May twenty-fourth, when little Joe Varotta went into the candy store with his penny, he was engaged in talk by one of the men from across the street, whom Joe knew well as a friend of his father’s. The child was enticed into a back room, seized, gagged, stuffed into a barrel and then loaded into a delivery wagon. Thus effectively concealed, the little prisoner was driven through the streets to another part of town and there held in a house by some member of the conspiracy. The men engaged in the plot up to this point were all either neighbors or their relatives and friends.

On the afternoon of May twenty-ninth, Roberto Raffaelo was sitting despondently on a bench in Union Square when a stranger sat down beside him and accosted him in his own Sicilian dialect. This chance acquaintance, it developed later, was James Ruggieri. Raffaelo was down on his luck and had found work hard to get. He was, as a matter of fact, washing dishes in a Bowery lunch room for five dollars a week and meals. Ruggieri asked how things were going, and being informed that they might be better, he told Raffaelo of a chance to make some real money, explaining the facts about the kidnapping, saying that a powerful society was back of the thing, and representing that Varotta was a craven and an easy mark. All that was required of Raffaelo was that he go to the Varotta house and get the money. For his pains he was to have five hundred dollars.

Raffaelo was subsequently introduced to Cusamano and Marino. The next night he went to visit Varotta with the result already described.

After Raffaelo had made one visit it was held to be better tactics to send some one else to do the actual taking of the money. This man had to be a stranger, so Raffaelo looked up John Melchione, an old acquaintance. Melchione, promised an equal reward and paid fifty dollars in advance as earnest money, went with Raffaelo to the Varotta home on the night of June second, to get the money. Melchione went upstairs and took the marked bills while Raffaelo waited below in the vestibule. It was the former whom Detective Pellegrino caught in the act. Neither he nor Raffaelo had ever seen little Joe and both so maintained to the end, nor is there much doubt on this point.

On June second, the night when Raffaelo, Melchione, Cusamano, Marino and Ruggieri were caught and the others arrested a little later, Raffaelo made some statements to Detective Fiaschetti which sent the officers off the right track for the time being. This prevarication, which was done to shield himself and his confederates, he came to regret most bitterly later on.

On June third, as soon as the word got abroad that the five men and their five friends had been arrested and lodged in jail, another confederate, perhaps more than one, took Joe Varotta up the Hudson and threw him in, having first strangled the little fellow so that he might not scream. The boy was destroyed because the confederates who had him in charge were frightened into panic by the sudden collapse of their scheme and feared they would either be caught with the boy in their possession or that the arrested men might “squeal” and be supported by the identification from the little victim’s lips were he allowed to live.