1900
Birthday of an Assassin
On February 15, 1933 President Franklin Roosevelt was giving a speech from an open car in Miami, Florida. From the back of the crowd of onlookers, a short man stood on a chair and began firing pistol shots. Before he was subdued, he had wounded five people, including Chicago Mayor Anton Cermak who later died from his injury.
The killer was brick-layer Giuseppe Zangara born on this date in 1900 in Calabria, Italy. It was assumed at first that his target had been the President, a motive that seemed to be corroborated when he stated in the police station: “I have the gun in my hand. I kill kings and presidents first and next all capitalists.” Despite a history of mental illness Zangara was quickly found guilty of first-degree murder and sentenced to death in the electric chair, a fate which he scorned, telling the judge: ““You give me electric chair. I no afraid of that chair! You one of capitalists. You is crook man too. Put me in electric chair. I no care!” He was executed on March 20.
Since his death suspicions have been expressed that FDR was not the intended victim and that Cermak had been the real target. This was at the time when Chicago housed gangsters such as Jake “Greasy Thumb” Guzik and Frank Nitti, Al Capone’s successor as head of the city’s organized crime syndicate. Cermak was rumoured to have ordered a hit on Nitti in which the mobster was shot three times, and Zangara was supposedly a hitman hired to take revenge.