COP CRACKED CASE
5 kidnappers busted, but 5-year-old still ended up dead in river
Giuseppe Varotta, 5, disappeared on May 24, 1921. Six days later, a woman with a pleasant face and two suitcases arrived at his family’s tenement home on E. 13th St. in Little Italy.
Antoinette Varotta, the missing boy’s mother, told neighbors that the woman was a cousin who had come all the way from Detroit to help with cooking, cleaning and caring for the couple’s four other children.
But the woman was neither from Detroit nor kin.
She was Rae Nicoletti, an NYPD police officer, sent undercover in the most dangerous assignment of her life.
“If the kidnappers had found me out, I never would have left the Varotta house alive,” she recalled in a 1924 Daily News feature.
The story started around 2 p.m. on a beautiful spring afternoon. Giuseppe, wearing his sailor suit, wanted to wait outside for his dad, Salvatore, to return from his job. Antoinette gave her son a penny to buy candy and sent him to play.
About an hour and a half later, Salvatore entered the apartment. Giuseppe was not with him.
His parents ran out into the streets, calling his name and frantically searching. Morning brought no sign of Giuseppe. Instead, his parents received a letter. In Sicilian, the writer demanded $2,500 (around $38,000 today) in small bills packed in a shoebox.
“If you don’t pay, you will not see him anymore because we will drown him, and you will not be able to see him even dead.”
The letter ended with a drawing of a black hand holding a dagger dripping blood.
It was the signature of the Black Hand — ruthless Italian criminals who had terrorized major U.S. cities since the 1890s. They were characterized by their extortion method — terrifying letters to merchants and other wellto-do citizens.
The kidnappers warned that involving police would be a death sentence for their young captive.
But Varotta contacted Detective Michael Fiaschetti of the NYPD’s Italian Squad, a small group of police officers who monitored the cramped poverty-stricken neighborhood.
Varotta was an unlikely target for the Black Hand. He was scraping by as a truck driver and mechanic, barely bringing in enough to feed his wife and five children.
Still, gossips had decided that he was hiding a fortune, money that supposedly had come to him due to a tragic accident. About a year earlier, Salvatore and his older son, Adolfo, 9, were traveling to a job on Long Island when a truck collided with them. Varotta’s truck blew up with Adolfo inside. The boy’s leg was crushed, and his face severely burned.
A society matron, Mary Biddle, came to their aid. At the same time, Salvatore filed a $50,000 lawsuit against the other driver.
Word of Biddle’s generosity and the lawsuit found its way to Little Italy’s rumor mill, spreading the notion that the Varottas were rich. It didn’t matter that the suit had gone nowhere, and Biddle’s money went to Adolfo’s treatment.
Varotta was as poor as ever, with no hope of scraping together $2,500. But no one believed him.
More letters arrived, with increasingly violent threats.
That’s when Nicoletti showed up, using her domestic skills as a disguise.
The detective sat at the window, crocheting, as she surveyed the neighborhood. She noticed a man intently watching the Varotta home from a building across the street. Salvatore told her that he was Antonio Marino, someone he thought was a friend. Nicoletti observed another man talking with him, often looking toward the Varotta home. The other man was Santo Cusamano, a baker.
Nicoletti was frying eggs when Marino and his wife came for a visit. They talked about the kidnapping, trying to find out how much money Varotta was willing to spend to save his child.
Later, Cusamano visited. Varotta said he only had $500. “The Black Handers would laugh at $500,” Cusamano told him. “You must get the money.”
Roberto Raffaelo, a Black Hand messenger, came next. He brought the news that the gang decided to accept $500 and would come for the money at 10 p.m.
Nicoletti and the NYPD set their trap, with one detective inside, posing as a plumber, and plainclothes cops posted all around the house.
Another gang member, John Melchione, came to pick up the ransom and was immediately arrested. Before dawn, the squad had rounded up Raffaelo, Cusamano, Marino, and his stepson, James Ruggieri.
They were indicted for the kidnapping, but there was still no sign of the boy.
Then on June 12, newspapers carried the sad but not surprising end to Giuseppe’s story.
“BLACK HAND GANG KEEPS THREAT TO KILL STOLEN VAROTTA BOY; BODY FOUND IN RIVER AT NYACK,” was The News headline on June 12, 1921.
An autopsy revealed that he had been tossed in the river, alive, after the arrest of the five men snagged at Varotta’s home.
Giuseppe’s killers were still out there and were never caught.
Three of the kidnappers were tried, convicted and received death sentences, later commuted to life in prison. One went mad and was institutionalized, and the other had his case dismissed.
Misery continued for the Varotta family with ongoing death threats. Salvatore could not get work because employers feared that Black Hand violence would follow him into the workplace. Even selling vegetables on the street was too dangerous.
Two years after Giuseppe’s murder, members of the city’s upper crust funded an ocean liner trip to take the family back to their native Corsica, with the hope that they could rebuild their lives there.
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