XIII
THE FATES AND JOE VAROTTA
On an afternoon in the autumn of 1920, Salvatore Varotta took his eldest son for a ride on Long Island. Perhaps it was not quite the right thing to do. The big motor truck did not belong to him. His employers might not like the idea of a child being carted about the countryside in their delivery van. Still, what did it matter? The day had been hot. Little Adolfo had begged to go. No one would ever know the difference, and the boy would be happy. So this simple-hearted Italian motor driver set out from the reeks and throngs of New York’s lower East Side on what was to be a pilgrimage of pleasure.
There was a cool wind in the country and the landscape was still green. The truck chauffeur enjoyed his drive as he rolled by fields where farmers were at their late plowing. The nine-year-old Adolfo sat beside him, chattering with curiosity or musing in pure delight. After all, it was a bright and perfect world, for all men’s groans and growls.
Presently, Salvatore came to a crossing. Another truck lurched drunkenly across his path. There was a horrid shriek of collision, the shattering tinkle of glass, the crunch of riven steel. Salvatore Varotta was tossed aside like a cork and landed in the ditch. He picked himself up and staggered instinctively toward the wreck and little Adolfo. There was a volcanic spout of flame as one of the tanks blew up. The undaunted father plunged into the smoke and managed to draw out the boy, cut and crushed and burned to pitiful distortions, but breathing and alive.
Adolfo was carried to Bellevue Hospital suffering from a frightfully cut and burned face and a crushed leg. The surgeons looked at the mangled child and shook their heads. There was a chance of putting that wretched leg into some kind of shape again, and it might be possible to restore that ruined face to human semblance, but the work would take many months. It would cost a good deal of money, in spite of free hospital accommodations and the gratuitous services of the doctors.
The Varottas were shabbily poor. They lived in a rookery on East Thirteenth Street, the father, the mother and five children, of whom the injured boy was, as already noted, the eldest. Varotta’s pay as truck driver was thirty dollars a week. In the history of such a family an accident like that which had overtaken Adolfo means about what a broken leg does to a horse: Death is the greatest mercy. In this case, however, some one with connections got interested either in the boy or in the surgical experiment and appealed to a rich and charitable woman for aid. This lady came down from her apartment on Park Avenue and stood by the bedside of the wrecked Adolfo. She gave instructions that he was to be restored at any cost. She grew interested not only in the boy but his family.
One day the neighbors in East Thirteenth Street were appalled to see the limousine of the Varotta’s benefactress drive up to their tenement. They watched her enter the humble home, pat the children, talk with the burdened mother, and then drive away perilously through the swarms of children screaming and pranking in the street. The “great lady” came again and again. It was understood that she had paid much money to help little Adolfo. Also, she was helping the Varotta family. That Varotta was a lucky dog, for the injury of his son had brought him the patronage of the rich. Surely, he would know how to make something of his good fortune. To certain ranks of men and women, kindness is no more than weakness and must be taken advantage of accordingly. The neighbors of Salvatore Varotta were such men and women.
Pacific & Atlantic Photo.~~ JOE VAROTTA ~~
Pacific & Atlantic Photo.~~ JOE VAROTTA ~~
Pacific & Atlantic Photo.
~~ JOE VAROTTA ~~
Little Adolfo was still in the hospital, being patched and mended, when his father sued the owner of the colliding truck for fifty thousand dollars, alleging carelessness, permanent injury to the child, and so on. The neighbors heard of this, too. By San Rocco, that Salvatorewasa lucky dog! Fifty thousand dollars! And he would get it, too. Did he not have a rich and powerful patroness?
Thus, through the intervention of a charitable woman and a lawsuit, Varotta became a dignitary in his block, a person of special and consuming interest. He had or would soon have money. In that case he would be profitable.... But how? Well, he was a simple and guileless fellow. A way would be found.
In April, 1921, when Adolfo was discharged from the hospital with his leg partly restored but with his face still in need of skin grafting and other treatments, Salvatore Varotta decided to buy a cheap, second-hand automobile. He could make money with it and also use it to give his family an airing once in a while. The car, for which only one hundred and fifty dollars had been paid, attracted the attention of the East Thirteenth Street neighbors again. What? Salvatore had bought an automobile? Then there must have been a settlement in the damage suit over little Adolfo’s injuries. Salvatore had money, then. So, so!
One of the neighbor women happened to pass when the rickety car was standing at the curb, and Mrs. Varotta was on the stoop, her youngest child in her arms.
“Ha! Salvatore can’t have much money when he buys you a hundred-and-fifty-dollar car,” mocked the woman.
“He could have bought a thousand-dollar one if he wanted to,” said the wife with a surge of false pride.
That was enough. That was confirmation. The damage suit had been settled. Salvatore Varotta had the money. He could have bought an expensive car, but he had spent only a hundred and fifty. The niggardly old rascal! He meant to hold on to his wealth, eh? So the word fled up and down the street, to the amusement of some and the closer interest of others.
As a matter of fact, the damage suit had not been settled. It was even doubtful whether Salvatore would ever get a cent for all his son’s injuries and suffering. The man whose car had collided with Salvatore’s had no means and could not be made to give what he did not possess. So it was an entirely false rumor of prosperity and a word of bragging from a sensitive wife that brought about many things.
At about two o’clock on the afternoon of May 24, 1921, Giuseppe Varotta, five years old, the younger brother of the wounded Adolfo, put on his clean sailor suit and his new shoes and went out into East Thirteenth Street to wait for the homecoming of his father and the automobile. Giuseppe, familiarly called Joe, did not know or care whether the car had cost a hundred or a thousand dollars. It was a car, it belonged to his father, and Joe intended to have a ride in it.
For some minutes Joe played about the doorstep. Then his childish patience forsook him, and he ran down the block to spend a penny which a passer-by had given him. Other children playing in the street observed him by the doorstep, saw him get the penny, and watched him go down the walk to the confectioner’s. They did not mark his further progress.
At half past three, Salvatore Varotta came home in his car. He ran up the steps into the house to his wife. She greeted him and asked immediately:
“Where’s Joe?”
Varotta had not seen his little son. No doubt he was playing in the street and would be in soon.
The father sat down to rest and smoke. When Joe did not appear, and twenty minutes had passed, his mother went out to the stoop to call him. She could not find him in the street, and he did not respond to her voice. There was another wait for half an hour and another looking up and down the street. Then Salvatore Varotta was forced to yield to his wife’s anxious entreaties and set out after the lad.
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.
The young woman was not long in the house before things began to happen. First of all, she observed that the Varotta tenement was being constantly watched from the windows across the street. Next she noted that she was followed when she went out, ostensibly to do a little shopping for the house, but really to telephone to Fiaschetti. Finally came visitors.
The first of these was Santo Cusamano, a baker’s assistant, who dwelt across the street from the Varottas and knew Salvatore and the whole family well.
Cusamano was very sympathetic. It was too bad. Undoubtedly the best thing to do was to pay the money. The Black Handers were terrible people, not to be trifled with. What? Varotta had no money? He could raise only five hundred dollars? Sergeant Fiaschetti had instructed Varotta to mention this sum. The Black Handers would laugh at such an amount. Varotta must get more. He must meet the terms of the kidnappers. As for the safety of the boy, the Varottas could rest easy on that point, but they must get the money quickly.
The following day there were other callers from across the street. Antonio Marino came with his wife and his stepdaughter, Mrs. Mary Pogano, née Ruggieri. The Marinos, too, were full of tender human kindness and advice. When Antonio found out that Varotta had reported the kidnapping to the police he shook his head in alarm. That was bad; very bad. The police could do nothing against a powerful society of Black Handers. It was folly. If the police were really to interfere, the Black Handers would surely kill the boy. Antonio had known of other cases. There was but one thing to do—pay the money. Another man he had known had done so promptly and without making any fuss. He had got his son back safely. Yes, the money must be raised.
Then Cusamano came again. He inquired for news and said that perhaps the Black Handers would take five hundred dollars if that was really all Varotta could raise. He did not know, but Varotta had better have that sum ready for the messenger when he came. As he left the house, Cusamano accidentally made what seemed a suggestive statement.
“You will hear from me soon,” he remarked to Varotta.
While these conversations were being held, Mrs. Nicoletti, the detective, was bustling about the house, listening to every word she could catch. She had taken up the rôle of visiting cousin, was busy preparing meals, working about the house, and generally assisting the sorrowing mother. Whatever suspicion of her might have existed was soon allayed. She even sat in on the council with Cusamano and told him she had saved about six hundred dollars and would advance Varotta five hundred of it if that would save the child.
Mrs. Nicoletti and her chief were by this time almost certain that their original theory of the crime was correct. The neighbors were certainly a party to the matter, and it seemed that a capture of the whole band and the quick recovery of the child were to be expected. Plans were accordingly laid to trap the messenger coming for the money and any one who might be with him or near the place when he came.
On June first, a man whom Varotta had never seen before came to the house late at night and asked in hushed accents for the father of the missing boy. The caller was, of course, admitted by Mrs. Nicoletti, who thus had every opportunity to look at him and hear his voice. He was led upstairs to a room where Varotta was waiting.
When the dark and midnight emissary of the terrible Black Hand strode across the threshold, the tortured father could hold back his emotion no longer. He threw himself on his knees before the visitor, lifted his clenched hands to him, and kissed his dusty boots, begging that his child be sent safely home and pleading that he had only five hundred dollars to pay. It was not true that he had received any money. It was impossible for him to ask his rich patroness who had befriended Adolfo for anything. All he had was the little money his wife’s good cousin was willing to lend him for the sake of little Joe’s safety. Would the Black Hand not take the five hundred dollars and send back the child, who was so innocent and so pretty that his teacher had taken his picture in the kindergarten?
The grim caller had very little to say. He would report to the society what Varotta had told him and he would return later with the answer. Meantime, Varotta had better get ready all the money he could raise. The messenger might come again the next night.
The detectives were ready when the time came. In the course of the next day Varotta went to the bank as if to get the money. While there he was handed five hundred dollars in bills which had previously been marked by Sergeant Fiaschetti. Later on it was decided that Mrs. Nicoletti would need help in dealing with the kidnappers’ messenger, who might not come alone. Varotta himself was shaken and helpless. Accordingly, Detective John Pellegrino was dressed as a plumber, supplied with kit and tools, and sent to the Varotta house to mend a leaking faucet and repair some broken pipes. He came and went several times, bringing with him some new tools or part when he returned. In this way he hoped to confuse the watchers as to his final position. The trick was again successful. Pellegrino remained in the house at last, and the lookouts for the kidnappers evidently thought him gone.
A little after ten o’clock on the night of June second there was a knocking at the Varotta door. Two men were there, one of them the emissary of the Black Hand who had called the night before. This man curtly announced the purpose of his visit and sent his companion up to get the money from Varotta, remaining downstairs himself.
Varotta received the stranger in the same room where he had kissed the boots of the first messenger the night before, talked over the details with him, inquired anxiously as to the safety of Joe, and was told that he need not worry. Joe had been playing happily with other children and would be home about midnight if the money were paid. This time Varotta managed to retain some composure. He counted out the five hundred dollars to the messenger, asked this man to count the money again, saw that the bills were stuffed into the blackmailer’s pocket and then gave the agreed signal.
Pellegrino, who had lain concealed behind the drapery, sprang into the room with drawn revolver, covered the intruder, handcuffed him and immediately communicated with the street by signal from a window. Other detectives broke into the hallway, seized the first emissary who was waiting there. On the near-by corner, Sergeant Fiaschetti and others of his staff clapped the wristlets on the arm of Antonio Marino and James Ruggieri, his stepson. A few moments later Santo Cusamano was dragged from the bakeshop where he worked. Five of the gang were in the toils and five more were seized before the night was over.
Cusamano and the first messenger, who turned out to be Roberto Raffaelo, made admissions which were later shown in court as confessions. All the prisoners were locked into separate and distant cells in the Tombs, and the search for Joe Varotta was begun. Sergeant Fiaschetti, amply fortified by the correctness of his surmises, took the position that the child was not far away and would be released within a few hours now that the members of the gang were in custody.
Here, however, the shrewd detective counted without a full consideration of the desperateness and deadliness of the amateur criminal, characteristics that have repeatedly upset and baffled those who know crime professionally and are conversant with the habits and conduct of experienced offenders. There can be no doubt that professionals would, in this situation, have released the boy and sent him home, though the Ross case furnishes a fearful exception. The whole logic of the situation was on this side of the scale. Once the boy was safely at home, his parents would probably have lost interest in the prosecution, and the police, busy with many graver matters, would probably have been content with convicting the actual messengers, the only ones against whom there was direct evidence. These men might have expected moderate terms of imprisonment and the whole affair would have been soon forgotten.
But Little Joe was not released. The days dragged by, while the men in the Tombs were questioned, threatened, cajoled and besought. One and all they pretended to know nothing of the whereabouts of Joe Varotta. More than a week went by while the parents of the child grew more and more hysterical and finally gave up all but their prayers, convinced that only divine intervention could avail them. Was little Joe alive or dead? They did not know. They had asked the good St. Anthony’s aid and probably he would give them his answer soon.
At seven o’clock on the morning of July eleventh, John Derahica, a Polish laborer, went down to the beach near Piermont, a settlement just below Nyack, in quest of driftwood. The tide was low in the Hudson, and Derahica had no trouble reaching the end of a small pier which extended out into the stream at this point. Just beyond, in about three feet of water, he found the body of a little boy, caught hold of the loose clothing with a stick, and brought it out.
Derahica made haste to Piermont and summoned the local police chief, E. H. Stebbins. The body was carried to a local undertaker’s and was at once suspected of being that of the missing Italian child. The next night Sergeant Fiaschetti and Salvatore Varotta arrived at Piermont and went to see the body, which had meantime been buried and then exhumed when the coming of the New York officer was announced.
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.
Raffaelo was brought to trial in August and quickly convicted of murder in the first degree. He was committed to the death house at Sing Sing and there waited to be joined by his fellows. When the hour for his execution had almost come upon him, Raffaelo was seized with remorse and declared that he was willing to tell all he knew. He was reprieved and appeared at the trials of the others, where he told his story substantially as recited above. Largely as a result of his testimony, Cusamano, Marino and Ruggieri were convicted and sentenced to electrocution while Melchione went mad in the Tombs and was sent to Matteawan to end his life among the criminal insane. Governor Smith finally granted commutations to life imprisonment in each of these cases, because it was fairly well established that all the convicted men had been in the Tombs at the time Joe Varotta was drowned and had probably nothing to do with his actual murder. They are still in prison and will very likely stay there a great many years before there can be any question of pardon.
In spite of every effort on the part of the police and every inducement held out to the convicted men, no information could ever be got as to the identity of the man or men who threw the little boy into the river. The arrested and convicted men, except for Raffaelo, who evidently did not know any more than he told, absolutely refused to talk, saying it would be certain death if they did so. They tried all along to create the impression that they were only the minor tools of some great and mysterious organization, but this claim may be dismissed as fiction and romance.