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IMPORTANT IMPORTANT IMPORTANT, screamed the note on the boy's bed. The warning was hardly necessary. Missing from the bed was Kenneth Young, 11. He had been kidnaped while sleeping in his Beverly Hills home.

The note told Herbert Young, 35, president of Los Angeles' Gibraltar Financial Corp. (assets: $423.5 million), exactly how to get his son back--alive. Young was instructed to take a $250,000 ransom to a West Los Angeles filling station two days after the kidnaping; there he was to wait for a ring on the pay phone at exactly 6 p.m. If he told the police or failed to follow instructions, "the merchandise"--Kenneth --would be "vindictively destroyed."

No one doubted it for a minute.

Though Beverly Hills police and FBI agents were quickly brought into the case, not a word of the kidnaping leaked out to the public. Young even took his two other sons out of school when one of them bragged that his brother had been kidnaped. Clutching the ransom in an overnight bag, Young followed instructions exactly. At 6 p.m., the pay phone rang and he was told by the kidnaper to go to a second station. There, about 45 minutes later, a man drove up in a white Chevrolet, motioning Young to follow him. Along a dark stretch of Sepulveda Boulevard, the kidnaper pulled over and got out to take the money. "He had his left hand free," Young recounted, "but his right hand was in his jacket. I didn't see a gun."

Eight hours later, Kenneth, left by his abductor in a car in Santa Monica, knocked on the door of an apartment, and--clad only in shorts and socks--asked to use the telephone, shyly explaining to the man who answered the door that he had been kidnaped. "Dad," he said into the phone, "I got away and I'm all right. I'm awfully tired. Would you come and pick me up?"

"I Wasn't Scared." Kenneth had been well enough treated, though his head had been shaved so that a blindfold could be taped securely over his eyes, and he had been given sleeping pills to make him drowsy. Kept in one room, he had been fed TV dinners, soup and meat loaf. Otherwise, it had clearly been something of an adventure for the eleven-year-old. "I didn't feel chicken about it," he told reporters. "On the first day, he said I would be home Wednesday night. I wasn't scared except when he showed me the gun."

Whoever "he" was--the FBt was un certain whether one person or more were involved--the kidnaper had considerable knowledge about the Youngs. He knew the layout of their house, the names of Kenneth's maternal grandparents, probably even the Youngs' unlisted telephone number: six calls had been received while Kenneth was gone, with the caller silently hanging up each time. The FBI was confident that he would be captured: of 740 kidnapings investigated previously under the Lindbergh Act, all but four have been solved. At week's end, banks across the nation were being given serial numbers of the $250,000 (all in $100 bills). It was the biggest ransom ever paid in the U.S. that ended in the safe return of a kidnap victim.

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