Crime and Justice

The typed poem on the front of the frame (origin unknown since Zangara hadn’t the education to have persomally composed it) was given to me in 1973 by a former Miami, Florida policeman, who was one of the arresting officers of the attempted assassin. (The officer is pictured holding his service revolver on the culprit.) The retired officer, who was 45 years old in 1933, admitted he had found the folded poem in Zangara’s wallet and had “just took it as a piece of history.” (There is evidence by tape marks on the poem it had previously been displayed somewhere.) I asked the 84-year-old retired officer in a Miami, Florida nursing home if he shouldn’t have turned poem in to Federal officers who were conducting the crime’s investigation? He smiled and said. “They didn’t need any evidence, this guy was no doubt guilty and doomed to be convicted, executed for his act!” Even though he had guiltlessly responded this way, he had given me the historical poem with the understanding I wouldn’t name him as its former owner. During our brief conversation I had asked for his personal view of Zangara, as most had defined him as “double personality.”

“Well, I can tell ya the Zangara who fought our arrest like a wild man and one who sat in a kind of confused, but cheerful state, beside me in patrol car were two opposite people! I remember one day I heard him going nuts in his cell, throwin’ stuff around and shouting in loud Italian; but when I got to his cell he was quietly looking at newspapers and looked up at me as if nothing had happened, wondered why I was there? When looking at newspaper pictures and articles about his crime, he sometimes had sinister laugh and next time made him cry like a child! I remember the barber who came in to cut his hair, had asked him about the scars on his head, and he had answered that his mind had never been right since his father’s verbal and physical abuse from an early age when he was worked like a slave on their poor family farm in Italy. Jim, upon arrest, I’d thought ‘execute the little bastard;’ but got to know him and wished he’d got life instead.”