Miami,
FloridaFebruary 15, 1933
A warm Wednesday evening in Bayfront Park. President-elect Franklin Roosevelt has just finished a short speech from the back of an open touring car when a five-foot-one Italian bricklayer named Giuseppe Zangara climbs onto a wobbly folding chair, pulls a thirty-two caliber revolver, and fires five shots into the crowd. Roosevelt is untouched. But Chicago Mayor Anton Cermak, who had just stepped away from the president-elect's car, takes a bullet to the lung. He will be dead in nineteen days. Zangara will follow him to the grave thirteen days after that — one of the fastest trips from crime to electric chair in American history. The official story is a madman and bad aim. But in Chicago, where the mayor's own police bodyguards had recently tried to assassinate the head of the Capone organization, not everybody was buying it.
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