Giuseppe Zangara
Giuseppe Zangara shot and killed Chicago Mayor Anton Cermak by mistake . . . his real target was President-elect Franklin D. Roosevelt. Zangara was born on September 7, 1900 in Calabria, Italy. After serving in World War I, he joined his uncle in emigrating to the United States in 1923. He settled in Paterson, New Jersey and on September 11, 1929, became a naturalized citizen of the United States. A poorly educated bricklayer, Zangara had several medical problems which could be attributed to an appendectomy performed in 1926. Physical and mental conditions made it increasingly difficult for him to work, and post-surgery adhesions were later determined to be a cause for his mental delusions. On February 15, 1933, Franklin
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Two of the men, dressed as police and pretending to conduct an ordinary raid, entered the garage and lined the associates of Irish gang boss George “Bugs” Moran’s up against the wall. Two others in civilian clothes followed with machine guns and, along with the “police,” opened fire on the seven men, pounding seventy bullets into them in what became known as the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre. The murders were never pinned on Capone, who claimed to be in Florida at the time. When public relief funds became scarce in Chicago during the Great Depression, Capone, playing up his sense of community, fed three thousand unemployed per day. In six weeks, he donated twenty thousand meals at a cost of $12,000. But true to his gangster life style, Capone spent more than $100,000 a year on himself. He stood supreme as head of the mob; he was capo dei capi (chief of chiefs), but there was an anxiety within the Mafia, a conflict between Neapolitan and Sicilian families and between old-line Italian traditions and American versions of organized