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.