(1900-1933): Assassin
Joseph
Zangara is always listed as and was executed
as
the would-be assassin of President-elect Franklin
D.
Roosevelt and the killer-by-mistake of Chicago
mayor
Anton Cermak. However, a strong minority
view
is that Zangara never wanted to kill FDR — con-
trary
to his own later confession — but was a hired
Mafia
hit man assigned to shoot Mayor Cermak
while
he was with the president-elect in Miami in
February
1933. Indeed, Judge John H. Lyle, gener-
ally
held to be the most knowledgeable non-Mafia
man
on Chicago crime, stated categorically that
"Zangara
was a Mafia killer, sent from Sicily to do a
job,
and sworn to silence."
Cermak,
elected as a "reformer," was anything
but
that. He waged war on the Capone Mob (at the
time
Big Al was already in prison) but not so much
to
clean up the city as to replace the Capones with
his
own gangsters, headed up by Teddy Newberry.
He
moved against Frank Nitti, Capone's at least titu-
lar
successor, once Big Al was behind bars. In fact,
court
testimony later indicated that the mayor had
dispatched
some "tough cops" to erase Nitti, which
they
attempted to do after handcuffing the unarmed
gangster.
Nitti was shot three times in the back and
neck
but miraculously survived, whereupon the
mayor
of America's second city hurriedly left his
bailiwick
for Florida.
The
way the theory goes, Nitti had Newberry
killed
and then sent a hit man — Zangara — to take
care
of the mayor. Considering the fact that the
mayor
had left Chicago on December 21, 1932, and
was
still in Florida on February 15, 1933, it is con-
ceivable
that he might not have been planning to
return
at all, figuring Florida sun was preferable to
Windy
City lead.
On
February 15 Cermak was in an open car with
FDR
in Miami when Zangara opened fire, fatally
shooting
the "wrong man" Cermak. Yet Zangara
had
won several pistol-shooting awards when he was
in
the Italian Army. The fact that he of all people
failed
to hit the president-elect led some crime
observers
to believe that he might have hit his real
target
after all. Lingering in his deathbed for three
weeks,
Mayor Cermak declared he had no doubt
that
he had been Zangara's real target.
Why
had Zangara missed FDR? According to
press
accounts, his failure was due to the alert reac-
tions
of fearless spectators who grabbed his arm and
shoved
it upward as he began to fire. Privately Zan-
gara
contradicted this version to his lawyers, saying
his
arm had not been seized until he had gotten off
all
his shots. A policeman who helped bring him
down
confirmed this version of the events. It made
the
theory that he had hit his target all the more
plausible.
Zangara
ranted and raved against capitalists, yet
there
was nothing on the record to indicate he was
an
anarchist, communist, socialist or even Fascist.
Despite
all his ravings previously against "capitalist
presidents
and kings," Zangara turned out to be a
registered
Republican.
Joseph
Zangara was almost stripped of all his clothing
after
being seized in his unsuccessful attempt to
assassinate
President-elect Franklin D. Roosevelt. Some
have
insisted Zangara was a Mafia hit man who did get
his
actual target, Chicago mayor Anton Cermak.
For
two years before the shooting Zangara had
lived
in Florida, his main occupation seeming to be
betting
on horses and dogs. One researcher on Zan-
gara,
the Reverend Elmer Williams, wrote that Zan-
gara
had worked in a syndicate "cutting plant" in
Florida
"convenient to a canal where the whisky was
run
in from the islands." Williams's thesis was that
Zangara
got in trouble with his underworld employ-
ers
and was given the choice of being tortured and
murdered
himself or killing Cermak.
Of
course Zangara went to the electric chair pro-
claiming
his pride with his act, insisting he had
wanted
to kill FDR. He said of Cermak, "I wasn't
shooting
at him, but I'm not sorry I hit him."
Was
that the real Zangara speaking or the Mafia
hit
man sticking to his cover story? If it was the lat-
ter,
it was hardly unbelievable. The mob always
could
draw on such unlikely sources ready to lay
down
their lives in some secret agreement. In The
Godfather
Mario Puzo tells of the Bocchicchio fam-
ily,
which permitted one of its members to confess to
a
murder he hadn't committed and go to the chair for
it.
That was fiction but it was hardly outside the
behavior
patterns within certain Sicilian Mafia fami-
lies.
The family was made an offer, a reward, it
couldn't
refuse. Had Zangara got an offer he too
could
not refuse? The majority view says no, that he
was
a political assassin, period. There are those in
law
enforcement and the underworld who laugh at
that.