In the autumn of 1925, every policeman in New York City was hunting for two thirteen-year-old boys.
They were brothers. Greek refugees from the Asia Minor catastrophe, in their second year in the United States. Their names on the Daily News appeal were “John, 15, and his brother Peter” — Peter being the American school-enrollment name of Takis Jeannopoulos, Panagiotis in Greek. They had been placed in NYC public school classrooms with much younger children because they couldn’t yet speak English. They had been bullied. They were furious.
So they came up with a plan. They earned the money themselves. They forged two Greek passports. And they walked into the Greek Consulate of New York with a story.
“Our parents are dead. We have no family in America.”
The consular official believed them. He issued travel papers. He shipped them home.
The parents’ response
Back in Manhattan, Lazaros and Eftyhia discovered the empty beds. They called the police. They placed newspaper appeals. The October 11, 1925 Daily News ran the headline “HUNT MISSING BOYS” — every policeman in New York City was deployed, alongside more than a thousand DeWitt Clinton High School students who combed the city block by block.
The boys were already at sea.
An opportunist — likely a copycat of the Italian Black Hand racket that was still active in 1925 NYC — saw the newspaper headlines and sent the family a ransom note demanding $1,000. “Dear Doctor… your life is in danger.” Lazaros read it once, didn’t pay, and called the police anyway. The note survives in the family archive.
Eftyhia goes to Greece
The most striking thing about the whole episode, surfaced from the actual SS Byron arrival manifest in May 2026, is what happened next: Eftyhia herself sailed to Greece to retrieve her sons.
She packed a single suitcase. She left her husband Lazaros to manage the NYC end. She crossed the Atlantic alone, at fifty years old, to find the village where the family in Greece had taken her runaway boys in. There was no anger — only the long way home. The SS Byron arriving New York harbor on December 31, 1925 carried all three of their names on the same manifest line: Eftimia Yannopoulos · Takis Lazare Yannopoulos · John Lazare Yannopoulos.
A NYC public school principal eventually re-enrolled the boys at De Witt Clinton High School at the proper grade level, with extra English-language support. He, too, was moved by the story. His name is lost to the record.
The two brothers grew into doctors, both. They never spoke much about the runaway in adulthood — Aline Pepe, John’s daughter, learned about it from her father in pieces over decades. Eftyhia never spoke about going after them at all.
The story is in the family’s bones now anyway.