Overview

In Miami on 15 February 1933, Giuseppe Zangara, an unemployed New Jersey bricklayer from Italy, fired five pistol shots at the back of President-elect Franklin Roosevelt's head from only twenty-five feet away. While all five rounds missed their target, each bullet found a separate victim. One of these was Mayor Anton Cermak of Chicago, who died of his wound some three weeks later. A scant two weeks after that, Zangara was executed in the electric chair. It was perhaps the swiftest legal execution in twentieth-century American history. With his death, Zangara took to the grave the answer to one of the most baffling unsolved mysteries in the annals of Presidential assassinations. Was FDR Zangara's real target? Or was he a mob hitman who actually intended to kill Cermak, as legendary columnist and FDR confidant Walter Winchell believed? Many questions are dealt with in this first-ever analysis of a fascinating true crime. This work is based not only on trial transcripts, police records, personal interviews and newspaper accounts, but on Zangara's own memoir, which had been lost in the prison warden's papers until it was unearthed by the author. Readers interested in the machinations of the law and politics, as well as those interested in medical ethics, will find this an absorbing and instructive book.

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9780897334952

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Reviews

.. . this obscure episode clearly deserves the 'sober analysis' that Blaise Picchi has given it. -- Baltimore Sun

.. . provides a fascinating, if frustrating, glimpse into the twisted mind of a man who came dramatically close to altering history.

Author Information

Blaise Picchi has served as state and county prosecutor, special public defender and criminal defense attorney in South Florida. He practices law in Ft. Lauderdale.

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