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One such friend since childhood, Peter Kaufman, said that he waited at a Westchester County bar to meet Sam, as previously arranged, but Sam did not arrive. Kaufman called the house of Sam's mother in Purchase, N.Y., about 20 miles south of Yorktown, where Sam had been staying while preparing a Manhattan apartment for use when he started his new job next month. There was no answer. Day by day, these events followed:
SATURDAY. At 1:45 a.m., Jose Luis, the butler at the Edgar Bronfman home in Yorktown, responded to a ringing telephone. It was Sam. "Call my father; I've been kidnaped," he told Luis. The receiver was clicked off at Sam's end in less than a minute. "He sounded very sad, very nervous," recalled Luis. "Sam is a very sweet boy." Edgar Bronfman notified the FBI and the local police. They soon found Sam's car parked in the garage at his mother's house, the key still in the ignition. His mother was away on a cruise. Servants in a separate building reported hearing nothing unusual.
Members of the family, learning the news, quickly gathered in Yorktown. Edgar Bronfman was firmly in charge. Flying back to be at his side was his former wife of some 20 years, Ann Loeb Bronfman, who had divorced him in 1973. Also present were three of their five children: Holly, 18, Matthew, 16, and Adam, 12. The fourth, Edgar Jr., 20, joined the family temporarily, then moved into his father's Fifth Avenue apartment to follow events from there. All through Saturday, there was no word from the kidnapers.
SUNDAY. A mailman handed a special delivery letter for Edgar Bronfman to Frank Vida, the doorman at Bronfman's Manhattan apartment on Park Avenue. It was a dime short in postage, which Vida paid and duly noted on the envelope. The letter was a curious two-page, single-spaced typewritten document from the kidnapers, and it contained these main provisions:
For Sam's release, Bronfman must pay $4.6 million, and the money must be paid in cash, with no more than half of the bills in an "uncirculated" condition and at least 200,000 of them in $10 denomination. The kidnapers would use the code name "Raven" in making contact with the family and would disguise their voices with speech-altering devices. To signal that the ransom was ready for delivery, the Bronfman family should place a personal ad, signed "Fred Bollard," in New York newspapers.
The letter also implied that Sam was buried alive or held in some sort of vault or cave, with only enough air and water to survive for ten days. Thus, if Bronfman did not respond quickly, the note warned, there might be a "tragic end for the victim." Said the letter, in an understatement: "Contemplate the position that puts you in."
The letter suggested a purely monetary motive for the kidnaping. It claimed that the abductors were "outcasts"—Viet Nam veterans once hooked on narcotics. They wanted the ransom to "give us a chance in life that we have been denied." A bizarre threat was added. If police sought to capture them before the ransom was paid, the kidnapers would use cyanide-dipped bullets to resist; if captured, they would commit suicide. Any ring member not captured would hunt Edgar Bronfman down and kill him.