"Touhy had the syndicate
on the ropes and they were ready to throw in the sponge but then they killed
Anton Cermak."-Saul Alinsky
Anton Cermak had an animal's instinct for survival,
and after the failed attempt on Frank Nitti's life, he knew his own days were
numbered. In fact, a few weeks after the botched murder attempt, Louis
"Short Pants" Campagna, Capone's former bodyguard who had risen to
syndicate chief, had personally planned Cermak's murder, almost succeeding in gunning
him down in an early morning ambush inside the Loop.
Cermak tried to postpone the inevitable by
beefing up his bodyguard detail from two to five men and augmenting them with
private security forces. He also took the added precaution of moving from the
accessible Congress Hotel to the more secluded Morrison, where he paid for a
private elevator that went nonstop to his penthouse suite.
It didn't matter how careful he was. They
were going to kill him. They had to kill him. They planned to kill Touhy, too
but that could wait because they knew that wouldn't end the war. Cermak would
just replace him with another ambitious hood. Murdering Cermak was the key.
Kill the head and the body dies.
While it was true that there was a huge risk
in killing the mayor of the second largest city in the United States, it was
the key to their survival and maybe, just maybe, they would get away with it. A
Chicago mayor had been gunned down in the past. Chicago's mayor Henry Harrison
was killed in October, 1893. The shooter was one Eugene Pendergast, who claimed
that the mayor had reneged on a political appointment.
The syndicate knew the shooter they found
would have to be a "nutcase" as they put it, but they could find a
patsy to take the fall. That was the easy part. It was all a matter of timing
and opportunity, both of which came together when Anton Cermak announced that
he would greet President-elect Roosevelt in a public park in Florida.
Finding the patsy to take the blame for the
murder fell to Paul the Waiter Ricca. Ricca earned his nickname while working
in a restaurant owned by his mentor "Diamond Joe" Esposito, a
colorful underworld character whose deep political contacts enabled him to
finagle a federal license to import sugar from Cuba into the states. Sugar, and
lots of it, was the primary ingredient needed to make bootleg whisky.
Esposito was a major player in the
underworld. With the money he made by importing sugar, Esposito was able to
expand his criminal holdings into the control of several vital teamster unions which
he flatly refused to share with Capone. So they killed him. He was shot on the
street while his wife and two small children watched.
As a reward for setting up his boss for the
kill, Capone allowed Ricca to take over most of Esposito's operations including
the legal and profitable sugar importing business which Ricca handed over to a
young hood named Dave Yaras from Chicago's west side. Ricca invested in Yaras'
move to Florida and in exchange got a handsome cut of all of Yaras' illegal
ventures, including a piece of his narcotics smuggling ring based out of
Havana. Within a year after his arrival, Yaras' rackets in south Florida and
Cuba were second only to Meyer Lansky's in size and profitability.
According to mob boss Sam Giancana, it was
Yaras who decided that Cermak's killer would be Giuseppe Zangara, a
thirty-two-year-old bricklayer who preferred to be known by his Americanized
name of Joey Zangara.
Giuseppe Zangara was a mean,
near-illiterate, sullen little hood from Southern Italy. He arrived in America
in 1923 and took up residence with an uncle in Paterson, New Jersey.
In September of 1929, Zangara and a
syndicate hood, Tony Adgostino, were arrested for violating the prohibition law
by running a 1,000-gallon still in Mount Vail, New Jersey. At the station
house, Zangara claimed his name was Luigi DiBernardo and pleaded guilty,
telling the police he owned the still, thus allowing the higher-ranking
Adgostino to walk away from prosecution. For his troubles, Zangara was
sentenced to one year and a day at Atlanta Federal Prison. During sentencing,
United States Attorney Philip Forman, later a federal judge, asked 'Your real
name is Zangara, isn't it?" leaving the implication that Zangara was no
stranger to the courtroom. Off the record, the bootlegger admitted that he was
Giuseppe Zangara but that he would enter prison under the assumed name of Luigi
DiBernardo. Several years later, when the United States Secret Service
investigated the Cermak shooting, agents compared photographs of DiBernardo the
bootlegger with Zangara the assassin and determined that they matched.
Remarkably, the agent never followed up the lead.
Paroled from prison in 1931, Zangara moved
to south Florida where he kept to himself. One of his few known contacts was
his roommate, an Italian immigrant named Joseph Patane who worked at
Valentino's restaurant in Miami, a mob hangout. Patane was introduced to
Zangara by their landlady, Constantina Vatrone, a Sicilian immigrant whose
husband Petro Vatrone had been active in the mob in Florida until he was
stabbed to death in 1924, in what she later told the Secret Service was
"an underworld incident. "
Zangara spent most of his time gambling and
losing heavily. In need of cash, he took a position as a mule, or courier, in
Dave Yaras' heroin smuggling operation, working out of a narcotics processing
plant in south Florida. Zangara's job was to transport the drugs up to New York
where he turned them over to distribution specialists like Ben "Bugsy"
Siegel in Brooklyn, Abner "Longy" Zwillman in New Jersey and others
who would pay for the delivery. In turn, Zangara was supposed to hand the cash
over to Yaras.
But, according to several published reports,
while Zangara was on one of his runs he made off with the mob's money and lost
it at the track. Yaras decided to kill him. Then news came from Chicago City
Hall that his Honor, Anton J. Cermak, would make an appearance in Miami's
Bayfront Park to greet President-elect Roosevelt.
Anton Cermak would make a public appearance
in a crowded, open area. It was a godsend for the mob. Ricca sent word down to
Yaras that they were going to kill Cermak at the park and that Yaras was to
line somebody up to take the fall for the murder. It was too big a hit to not leave
a gunman to take the blame. The shotgun killing of Cook County's Assistant
States Attorney Billy McSwiggin a few years before had taught them a valuable
lesson: always leave a fall guy.
Yaras called Zangara into his office, and
gave him his two dismal choices. The mob could kill him, or Zangara could take
his chances and shoot Cermak for them. Maybe the cops would kill him, or maybe
the crowd would rip him to pieces, or maybe he'd get lucky. Maybe he'd get
caught after he killed Cermak. He could claim he was insane and if the judge
and jury bought it, at the most he might get ten maybe fifteen years in an
insane asylum and then he could walk, all debts forgiven. Yaras knew what he
was talking about. Florida, second only to Texas, had the most lenient laws on
the books in dealing with mentally ill criminals.
Zangara chose to kill Cermak and take his
chances with an insanity plea or the possibility that he could slip into the
crowd and disappear.
As implausible as it might seem, Zangara may
have actually believed that he was going to get away with it. After the
shooting, when Secret Service agents searched Zangara's room, they found his
neatly packed travel bag sitting in the middle of his bed. Inside were his
clothes, a book, The Wehman Brothers' Easy Method for Learning Spanish
Quickly, several newspaper
clippings about Roosevelt's trip to Florida and another on the Lincoln
assassination conspiracy.
Despite Zangara's fantasies of escape, the
mob had no intentions of letting him slip away and disappear. They needed a
patsy to take the fall. They had already started painting a picture of Zangara,
the conservative registered Republican, as Zangara, a radical communist who
wanted to overthrow the American government. But better than a patsy, they
wanted a dead patsy. According to Roger Touhy, the second after Zangara shot
Cermak, a mob assassin would shoot Zangara and disappear into the crowd,
leaving the Miami police, Secret Service or Cermak's private guards with the
credit for killing the Mayor's murderer. The gunman was also there to make sure
that Zangara followed through on his assignment. As Chicago newsman Jack Lait
wrote, 'had Cermak escaped Zangara's bullets, another trigger man would have
gotten him."
The two back-up gunmen were Three Fingers
Jack White and A1 Capone's former bodyguard Frankie Rio, both of whom were
picked up at the Chicago train station two days before Anton Cermak was shot.
But the police had no reason to hold the two smirking hoods who explained that
they were on their way to Florida for a short vacation. 'You mugs slay
me,"White said. "First you ride me to get out of town and then when I
try to leave, you want me to stay."
The next day, down in Florida, Giuseppe
Zangara went to the Davis pawn shop in downtown Miami and spent eight dollars
on a .32 calibre revolver and ten bullets. While still in the shop, Zangara
placed five bullets in the chamber and kept five in his pocket and then began
stalking Anton Cermak. Zangara
walked to the Bostick Hotel
because he had read in the papers that the hotel's owners, Horace and May
Bostick, were close friends of Cermak and expected him to drop by that evening
before he went to Bayfront Park. Zangara went to the hotel, which was actually
more of a rooming house than anything else. He paid his dollar for the night
and asked to see all of the exits and entrances. Then he went to his room where
he proceeded to sit on the edge of the bed, with the door open, and stare down
the hallway toward the front door of the hotel, waiting for Anton Cermak to
arrive so he could kill him.
At 5:30, after six hours of waiting, Zangara
probably realized that Cermak wasn't coming and left the hotel by a back door.
He quickly walked several blocks to a cigar manufacturing plant owned by Andrea
Valenti, a Sicilian immigrant. Zangara, Valenti and two other men, Steve
Valenti and Lorenzo Grandi, left the factory at about 7:30 and made their way
to Bayfront Park. But they miscalculated how many people would turn out for the
event. By the time they arrived at the park, at about eight o'clock, 10,000
spectators filled it to standing room only. Slowly, and sweating profusely,
Zangara and the others obnoxiously pushed and shoved through the crowd trying
desperately to make their way to the bandstand.
At about that same time, Anton Cermak was
preparing to leave his hotel room for the park. He was dismally sick with
peritonitis causing him to double over in pain. A lesser man would have
canceled the night's engagement but Tony Cermak had always been extraordinary.
As he prepared to put on his light blue and white jacket, a bodyguard handed
him a bulky black bullet-proof vest but Cermak didn't want it. It was too humid
and he was weak. It was a mistake that would cost him his life.
Cermak arrived at the park about a half-hour
before Franklin Roosevelt's car pulled up to the bandstand. At about the same
time, Zangara pushed and shoved his way up to the second row of chairs.
F.D.R. placed himself on the car's rear
seat. He took a small black microphone and made a short speech as a flood light
beamed down on him in his white suit. He was the perfect target, but Zangara,
less than thirty-five feet away, never fired.
When Roosevelt's speech ended, he turned and
looked up at the stage and saw Cermak sitting in the front row and waved 'Tony!
Come on down here. "
Smiling broadly, Cermak rose from his chair
and walked toward F.D.R., his bodyguards stepping up to join him, but Cermak
told them to stay where they were. It was unseemly, he said, for the Mayor of
Chicago to be photographed with more bodyguards than the President-elect.
The two men shook hands and chatted for less
than three minutes, then Cermak stepped away from the car and turned to his
right and then, for some unknown reason, walked a dozen steps away from the
stage and toward the place where Zangara was waiting.
At that moment, Zangara leaped out of the
crowd and sprang onto an open seat, drew his revolver from his trouser pocket,
fired five rounds directly at Cermak. One bullet hit Cermak in the right armpit
and pushed its way to just above his heart and then drove itself into his right
lung, causing the mayor to grab his chest with both arms and slowly sink to his
knees.
Several other bystanders were struck by
bullets, yet Zangara maintained, repeatedly, that he never got off more than
three rounds from his five-round pistol. Remarkably, police recovered seven
bullets from the scene.
Just minutes after the shooting, United
States Representative-elect Mark Wilcox and Chicagoan Robert Gore, told a radio
newsman they were standing a few feet from Zangara. Gore said, "He was
shooting at Cermak. There is no doubt about that. The killer waited until Mr.
Roosevelt sat and then fired. "
Based on Gore and Wilcox's statement,
reports that Cermak had been shot by Chicago gangsters went out over the wires
at once. But after the first day, there was no other mention of gangsters being
involved in the shooting. Later, when Roosevelt waited in the halls of the
Jackson Memorial Hospital where Cermak was being treated, he pointed out that
not one of the six persons hit by bullets were near him when they were shot. In
fact they were at least thirty feet away and only two or three feet away from
Cermak and, added Roosevelt, Zangara had not fired off a single shot at him
while he had a full eight minute window during his speech. Roosevelt concluded
that Zangara was "a Chicago gangster" sent to kill Cermak.
In 1959, at his last parole hearing, Roger
Touhy said that when Zangara started shooting, Jack White and Frankie Rio, both
wearing Cook County Deputy Sheriff's badges, waited until Cermak fell to his
knees and then stepped out from the crowd and fired a .45 caliber pistol at
Zangara but the shot missed and nicked several bystanders instead. Before they
could get off a second shot, the crowd had leaped onto Zangara, in effect
saving his life.
From his hospital bed Anton Cermak insisted
that he was Zangara's target. When his secretary arrived from Chicago, Cermak
said to him, "So you're alive! I figured maybe they'd shot up the office
too."
Cermak was in relatively good condition on
the first few nights in the hospital and issued his own news bulletins on his
condition. By the third day, however, colitis complicated Cermak's wounds and
caused him great pain. At one point Cermak's intestinal trouble made his
temperature rise to 101.6. On February 27, Cermak contracted pneumonia and
died. Giuseppe Zangara went on trial for murder.
Zangara's three lawyers appointed by the
state didn't speak Italian, had never tried a criminal case and none of them
had ever argued before a jury. It was their recommendation that Zangara plead
guilty. When he did, the court sentenced him to death less than two months
after he fired the fatal shots that killed Anton Cermak.
His last few days were dismal. The only
people to visit him in jail were the prison chaplains, whom he cursed and threw
out regularly. Just before he was walked out to the death chamber, the prison
warden asked Zangara if he was part of an organized group that plotted to kill
Cermak "No. I have no friends. It was my own idea. "
Then the little murderer strutted down the
hall and sat himself in the electric chair, but he was so short his feet didn't
touch the ground. Just before the guards placed a hood over his head Zangara
turned to the warden, smirked and yelled "Viva Italia! Viva comorra!"
The word comorra was one of many Italian
terms for the Mafia. Then he leaned back and waited. The room was filled with
an uncomfortable silence as 2,300 volts snuffed out Zangara's strange life.
Ed Kelly, Chicago's next mayor, was the kind
of city official that Frank Nitti could live with. When reporters were looking
to tell Kelly that he was Chicago's new mayor, they found him gambling at a mob
owned race track in Havana. When asked if he thought that the syndicate had
anything to do with Cermak's killing, Kelly replied "Boys, from now on,
there is no such thing as organized crime in the city of Chicago."
