Thanks for all the accolades. This knocked about a year off my life span I am sure. What I discovered is that yes I had been backing up the files, so I had all those, but I was not using the back-up utility to save the data base. And without that, all I had was a bunch of files.
So after working on this six or more hours every day for the last week and getting no-where except giving myself a killer headache every day, I submitted a work ticket to the provider and asked if they had a back up, and they did, from 30 Aug. Some shameless begging on my part for them to restore back to the 30 Aug snapshot, and they did.
So now I am backing up correctly and we will be able to (hopefully) avoid this happening again. I am still completely amazed that anyone would be such a f**king asshole to delete the site in the first place. I guess people like that are out there unfortunately. The task is not to fall to their level and let them squirm in the gutter alone.
I want to thank those that offered advice and tried to help, especially Robert and Peter_Suciu. No luck unfortunately, but I sure appreciated the effort. Thank you guys.