'Don't Let Her Suffer"

At 8:10 one morning last week, Graziella Ortiz-Patino 5, was sitting in the back seat of a station wagon, waiting the family chauffeur to drive her to kindergarten. As he strolled out of the servants' quarters at the villa near Geneva, two men emerged from the shrubbery and pistol-whipped him down. They forced the child into a waiting car and sped off toward the French border, two miles away

Graziella's father Jorge Ortiz-Patino, 50, a nephew of Bolivian Tin Tycoon Antenor Patino, made an emotional plea to the kidnapers. Graziella, he said, "is a delightful little girl, an innocent little girl who is life itself. Please don't let her suffer too much." Ortiz-Patino, whose family fortune is estimated at $300 million, was reported ready to pay a large ransom for his daughter's release.

Geneva's first kidnaping in 25 years terrified the city's moneyed expatriates. Some of them are Italians who have taken refuge in Switzerland to avoid the pandemic of kidnappings that has plagued Italy. Fearful of an outbreak of Italian-style kidnappings in Switzerland, many wealthy residents of Geneva stayed home and hired bodyguards.

Worries about the virulence of the Italian kidnaping disease were soon reinforced. On the same day as the Ortiz-Patino abduction, Italian police logged their 60th kidnaping this year. The victim was Giorgio Garbero, 4, grandson of Orfeo Pianelli, a wealthy Turin industrialist The child was seized from his stroller by two men as his grandmother wheeled him home from a park. Before the accompanying guard could reach his revolver, he was clubbed and then blinded by a chemical that one of the kidnapers sprayed in his face. The ransom demand, thought to be the highest in Italian history: $11.3 million.

The day after the Pianelli kidnaping, Italian police rescued Medical Student Giuseppe Luppino, 21, from captivity in a crude hut near the southern Italian village of Seminara. After Luppino's seizure more than a month ago, his ft earlobe had been cut off and sent to his father with a note saying, "Unless you pay us 500 million lire, you'll get me head of your son, not just his ear."

This grisly modus operandi was used in the 1973 abduction of the grandson of Oil Billionaire J Paul Getty who was persuaded to pay $2.8 million in ransom after kidnapers dispatched the boy's right ear to a Rome newspaper. In the Getty and Pianelli cases, as in most Italian kidnappings, the criminals have not been simply political fanatics out to punish the rich, but professional hoods --often Mafia members--seeking high profits.

Young Luppino was relatively fortunate. Of the 218 Italians kidnaped since the Getty abduction in 1973, 27 have vanished or are still in the hands of kidnapers. Ransom demands have risen steadily. In 1973, Italian families paid an estimated $3.5 million to ransom 17 victims. The total so far this year, not including the Pianelli case: $45 million.

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