The Plots Against the President (12 page)
Chapter Twenty
On the night of February 15, 1933, having been disarmed and transferred to the Dade County Jail, Zangara said repeatedly that he was sorry he had not killed Roosevelt and that he hoped he would have another opportunity to do so. Thirty-two years old, single, ill-disposed, unhealthy, and with a burning hatred of the privileged class, Zangara immediately, and unwaveringly, confessed to attempting to kill the president-elect and proclaimed his desire to kill all the torture agents of capitalists. All the while he rubbed his stomach in a circular clockwise direction.
At the jail that night, Zangara was stripped, searched, photographed, and interrogated. Reporters seized on the opportunity to ridicule his pubescent physique and mimic his foreign accent.
“Why do you want to kill?” reporters asked him.
“As a man I like Meester Roosevelt. As a president I want to keel him. I want to keel all presidents.”
The jail was on the top six floors of the South's tallest building, a twenty-four-story granite tower that housed Dade County government. Around ten P.M., Zangara, battered and bleeding from the blows of the spectators and policemen who had set upon him, was whisked from the basement to the top level were he was stripped.
“When we arrived at the jail,” Zangara said, policemen “threw me on the stone pavement like a dog. After a while they took all of my clothes away and left me nude.” He was cooperative and cheerful except when the subject turned to the capitalist oppression of the working class, which set him off on a tirade. Most of his interrogation was conducted by Sheriff Dan Hardie, who claimed to speak Italian. The
Miami Herald
described Hardie as “something of a linguist,” though in fact he knew only a couple of words in Spanish, which he inserted into his questions. The prisoner recounted his horrific Italian childhood, his immigration to America, and his steady work from the time of his arrival in 1923 until 1929, when the construction industry in New Jersey dried up. He had taken a bus to Miami in August 1932 and stayed at various hotels and cottages on the beach before settling in a third-floor apartment in the boardinghouse near Bayfront Park. He was paying two dollars a week in rent for the run-down attic space at 126 Northeast Fifth Street. He idled about on the wharves, gambled on the horse races, and played shuffleboard in Lummus Park.
On Thursday, February 16, 1933, Zangara was charged with four counts of attempted murder for the botched assassination of Roosevelt and the wounding of three other victims who suffered minor injuries. He was not initially charged in connection with the wounding of Cermak or Mabel Gill, as the severity of their condition was not yet apparent. Rumors of a planned vigilante attack on Zangara by a lynching party prompted county officials to tighten security in the sixth-floor courtroom of Judge E. C. Collins. Observers were searched for weapons, and armed guards were stationed at all entrances to the courthouse. Zangara, wearing a checked shirt and dress trousers, was swept in by a mass of brawny policemen who engulfed the tiny prisoner. Seated in a massive leather chair that enveloped him, Zangara announced that he did not want legal representation. Still, Collins appointed three defense attorneys in order to guarantee that the Dade County justice system could not be accused later of railroading the defendant.
The defense team made a request for the appointment of a lunacy commission to determine Zangara's mental stability. The county physician, Dr. E. C. Thomas, had conducted a physical examination of Zangara on the night of his arrest. He had diagnosed the stomach pain as gastritis triggered by nervousness and fear, and had pronounced him not only “normal in every respect” but also “sane.” Thomas's declaration would be the first in a long line of professional opinions that the assassin was sane. The judge appointed two local psychiatrists, who rushed to the jail to examine him near midnight. They issued their eighty-three-word finding the following morning, saying that Zangara had a “perverse character” and a “psychopathic personality,” but they did not call him insane. Zangara's chief counsel also declared him to be “a sane man,” as did Judge Collins. In any case, Zangara and his lawyers had no intention of using an insanity defense, apparently leaving that decision to the defendant himself.
The wheels of justice in Miami gave new meaning to the term “speedy trial,” as the criminal process against Zangara proceeded with uncharacteristic dispatch. Even Cermak commented on Florida's unique legal system. “They certainly mete out justice pretty fast in this state,” he said. “If the law could be enforced this swiftly in other states ⦠it would have a great tendency to check crime.” At ten A.M. on February 20âa mere four days after the shootingâZangara's trial began. The
Miami Herald
editorialized that morning that the United States should “round up” people of the “Zangara class” and send them back to their country of originâ“any with radical opinions must be barred.”
Reporters, photographers, and newsreel operators swarmed the courtroom and corridors. Zangara appeared composed and alert, as if his steady jailhouse diet of milk and eggs was agreeable with his stomach condition. “The people could not understand how I could take things so calm and contented,” he wrote in his memoir. “They marveled at the way I took it. I was not worried.”
Judge Collins asked Zangara how he wanted to plead to the charges against him. “Your Honor,” one of his lawyers said, standing to address the court. “My client has insisted on his guilt. He has one gruesome regret. He is sorry he did not succeed in his attempt on the life of President-elect Roosevelt. He scoffs at the idea he may be insane. After talking with the doctors and Zangara, we came to the conclusion he could be nothing but sane.”
Before sentencing Zangara, the judge briefly questioned him, hoping to determine some semblance of motive. Zangara, rambling and overwrought, summarized his incentive for killing Roosevelt: Capitalists were responsible for his father's poverty and oppression. His father reacted by abusing Zangara, which caused Zangara's physical problems. Hence, capitalists caused his stomach pain, and Roosevelt was the supreme capitalist. “You see I suffer all the time and I suffer because my father send me to work when I was a little boyâspoil my life ⦠If I was well I no bother the president.” As he told his story, newspaper photographers and newsreel cameras captured his words and images and flashed them throughout the world.
Collins brought the tirade to a halt and directed Zangara to leave the witness box and approach the bench for sentencing. The prisoner had pleaded guilty to four counts of attempted murder, each one punishable by up to twenty years in prison. Dispensing the maximum sentence, Collins ordered him remanded to eighty years of hard labor in the state penitentiary.
Laughing out loud, Zangara shouted insolently: “Oh judge, don't be stingy. Give me hundred years!”
“Perhaps you'll get more later,” Judge Collins replied.
Chapter Twenty-one
At six fifty-seven A.M. on Monday, March 6ânineteen days after the attempted assassinationâCermak was pronounced dead. Just hours later, Giuseppe Zangara was indicted on charges of first-degree murder.
“Not my fault. Woman move my hand,” Zangara said when informed that Cermak had died. When asked whether he was sorry, he replied: “Sure I sorry, like when die bird, or horse, or cow, I sorry.”
Thousands of Miamians turned out to watch the funeral cortege that took Cermak's body from the Philbrick Funeral Home to the railroad depot. American Legion pallbearers carried the bronze, flag-draped coffin as a band played “Nearer My God to Thee” and church bells pealed in the early evening air of March 6. A special seven-car train, swathed in black and purple, would take the martyred mayor back to his beloved Chicago.
When the train arrived two days later at Chicago's Twelfth Street Station, it was met by the city council and swarms of bereaved citizens. Flags were at half-mast, and the open casket was taken to Cermak's home in the Chicago neighborhood of Lawndale, where nearly fifty thousand came to view the body. It then lay in state at City Hall for twenty-four hours, attracting another seventy-five thousand spectators. At Chicago Stadiumâwhere, ironically, Roosevelt had been nominated over Cermak's opposition less than a year earlierâthe floor became a “sea of lawn and flowers in the form of a great cross,” according to one account. More than half a million souls lined the procession of what was the largest funeral in Chicago history. The fifty-nine-year-old Czechoslovakian immigrant had risen to power in one of America's toughest cities, fighting organized crime and a longtime Irish American stranglehold on the city. He was eulogized as a symbol of patriotismâthe man who gave his life for Franklin Rooseveltâbut the cause of his death was shrouded in controversy.
Zangara could be charged with murder only if his bullet had directly resulted in Cermak's death. But medical evidence indicated that if surgeons had removed the bullet the night of the incident, Cermak probably would have survived, raising the specter of malpractice. Still, all nine of his physicians signed the autopsy report stating that death culminated “as a result of the bullet causing cardiac failure, gangrene of the lung and peritonitis.”
After a Florida grand jury indicted Zangara on charges of first-degree murder, he was rushed before Miami Circuit Court Judge Uly O. Thompson three days later for sentencing. His previous three defense attorneys were reappointed. “These ones take care of me,” Zangara said facetiously, apparently referring to their facilitation of his previous maximum sentence. Again he pleaded guilty, and again the judge questioned him perfunctorily, and again Zangara insisted that he did not mean to kill Cermak or anyone else except Roosevelt. “Supposed to kill the chief,” he said. “The chief is the boss.”
Zangara had remained incarcerated at the Dade County Jail for the intervening three weeks since the shooting, in anticipation of murder charges in the event either Cermak or Gill expired. During that time he began his memoir, which plainly and unrepentantly recorded his hatred for capitalists and desire to kill Roosevelt.
In staccato shouts from the witness stand that were reminiscent of his earlier hearing, Zangara reiterated his intentions. “I want to kill all capitalists. Because of capitalists, people get no bread ⦠I feel I have a right to kill him [Roosevelt] ⦠It was right. I know they give me electric chair, but I don't careâI'm right.”
Judge Thompson used the opportunity to advocate for gun-control legislation. “Assassins roaming at will through the landâand they have killed three of our Presidentsâare permitted to have pistols. And a pistol in the hands of the ordinary person is a most useless weapon of defense. No one can foresee what might have happened had Zangara been successful in his attempt.”
When Thompson asked him whether he had any final words, the moment at which most capital suspects express remorse and plead for leniency, Zangara was resolute. “I want to kill the president because I no like the government. Because I think it is run by the capitalists, all crooks, and a lot of people make a lot of money. Things run for the money.”
Thompson sentenced him to death by electric chair.
“You is crook man too,” Zangara yelled at the judge. “I no afraid. You one of the capitalists.”
A squad of National Guardsmen armed with machine guns transported him from Miami to the Florida State Prison farm, four hundred miles north at Raiford. His execution was set for Monday, March 20âa mere ten days after his sentencing. He was placed in a tiny steel cell in the “death house,” a concrete building adjacent to the execution chamber. Once he was issued his striped prison uniform, he posed for the dozens of press photographers. The Florida governor had ordered that no one could interview the prisoner, but the prison warden, Leonard F. Chapman, was so intrigued by Zangara that he spent hours in conversation with him. Guarded twenty-four hours a day in his metal cage, Zangara worked busily to complete his memoir, which he then gave to the warden.
Chapman had become unusually fond of Zangara in the short time that the prisoner was housed at Raiford. He came to the conclusion that Zangara was sane and was a member of a secret Italian terrorist organization, similar to the Mafia, called Camorra. Chapman described Zangara as “a being utterly unassimilated, a foreigner wandering in a strange land and making no effort to understand that land; practicing the hatreds which came natural to him; bent on the ancient wheel; bringing to flower the code of the Camorra; attempting to correct a fancied wrong by wreaking personal vengeance.”
Lashing rains poured from the sky on Monday morning as prison guards retrieved Zangara for his death march to “Old Sparky,” as Florida's electric chair was affectionately called by avid proponents of capital punishment. Though more solemn than usual, he went willingly. “I am not making a hero out of Zangara,” recalled a psychiatrist who was among the forty witnesses, but he “had more nerve than any man I ever saw.”
Chapman had supervised more than 135 executions, but he had never seen such bravery as that exhibited by this little Italian, whom Chapman described as dapper in his striped prison outfit. As he walked to the electric chair, Zangara paused next to Chapman and handed him the three notebooks that contained his thirty-four-chapter autobiography, written in Italian, in longhand. “With a courtly bow, reminiscent of the days of old Italy, even with an almost ironical grace, he handed me these books, making the calm and confident announcement as if he were leaving for the ages a legacy of priceless value: âThis is the book.' ”
Having been pronounced sane but “perverse,” Zangara would be executed in the swiftest capital punishment in twentieth-century America. His head had been shaved for placement of the fatal electrode, a black hood was tied over his head, and his arms were strapped to the chair. Zangara then spoke his last words, powerfully and defiantly.
“Viva Italia! Viva Camorra! Goodbye to all poor people everywhere!”
Then, as if surprised that he was still alive, he said: “Push the button. Go ahead and push the button!”
“The execution of a man is unbelievably simple,” Chapman later wrote. “No smoke, no burning flesh, no odor. Just a rigid body and shortly death. Witnesses quiet. Newsmen taking notes.”
An autopsy on Zangara's body revealed a normal brain and a chronically diseased gallbladder. He was buried in an unmarked grave on the prison grounds at Raiford.
J. Edgar Hoover apparently never investigated any of the alleged ties between Zangara and either a national group of anarchists or Chicago organized crime figures. Characteristically, the nation's grandstanding top cop used the event to incite fear and thereby elevate his own stature and build power for his agency. As for the probe itself, Hoover showed no interest in determining whether Zangara acted alone, had accomplices, or was part of a larger conspiracy.
Had Zangara's bullet found its intended targetâhad Roosevelt been killed and Cermak livedâJohn Nance Garner would have become president, and there never would have been the New Deal that would revolutionize American government, business, culture, and society. Cermak, the boss of Chicago, was poised to dominate the political scene in that city for years to come. If he had survived, the powerful Richard Daley machine that would shape Illinois politics into the twenty-first century might never have risen.
“Had Giuseppe Zangara had steadier aim and a clearer shot in February of 1933, Franklin Roosevelt would be remembered now as a footnote to history instead of as the greatest President of the twentieth century,” historian Geoffrey C. Ward wrote.