Part One: Push the Button: The Brief Life and Quick Death of Giuseppe Zangara

Margaret talks with Miriam about an Italian man with chronic pain who decided to kill someone important.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Cool Zone Media.

Speaker 2 (00:04):
Hello, and welcome to Koby Bulleted Cool Stuff. What is
usually your weekly reminder about that when there's bad things,
you can do good things, But sometimes it just is
a weird show. But I'm your host, Margaret Kiljoy, and
with me today is my guest Miriam. Hello, Miriam, how
are you hi?

Speaker 3 (00:25):
Margaret? That bodes extremely strangely. I can't wait to hear
what we're talking about now.

Speaker 2 (00:30):
It's like this week is almost just a true crime episode,
but not quite. You'll probably figure out pretty quick what
it's about, but the audience might take a little bit longer.
But Sophie is here. Hi, Sophie.

Speaker 1 (00:42):
I'm really mad that we're recording because we were having
such a good time, so this is gonna be a
but you promised me this was a fun one, so
I'll accept.

Speaker 3 (00:51):
I'll accept.

Speaker 2 (00:52):
I believe you that I promised that. And our audio
engineer Rory. Hi, Rory, Hi, riy Hey Rory. Our theme
musical is written for us by unwoman because well it's
not the because doesn't go there. Well, but what we're
doing that should be fun is I want to do

(01:13):
something a little bit different this week. Today. I want
to talk about a story that is morally complex. I
want to talk about someone who, at the end of it,
is not a hero whose actions I don't support, but
whose reasoning is really interesting. Because I want to talk
about something that no one is talking about. I want
to talk about a young man with an almost cliche

(01:35):
Italian name who was suffering from chronic pain and went
out and bought a gun and killed someone rather important.

Speaker 3 (01:44):
I've already figured it out. Yeah, is it, Jiuseppe Zangara?

Speaker 1 (01:48):
It is. Yes, I'm obsessed with you, Miriam.

Speaker 3 (01:53):
And I'm obsessed with Stephen Sondheim.

Speaker 2 (01:58):
And you. Obviously it's even some I'm the guy who
wrote the musical.

Speaker 3 (02:01):
He wrote the musical Assassins, in which Jasepi Zangara gets
a song about, Yeah, how he killed Roosevelt. Well, he
tried to kill Roosevelt. He didn't. He killed the mayor
of Chicago.

Speaker 2 (02:13):
I see you know the cliff notes already of this
particular story.

Speaker 1 (02:16):
This is going to be very fun.

Speaker 3 (02:18):
It is one of many pieces of American history that
I know, primarily through the musical About It. The only
parts of American history I don't know from the musical
about It is anything to do with Alexander Hamilton because
I just don't care for that show that much.

Speaker 1 (02:33):
I've never seen it.

Speaker 2 (02:34):
I had this theory. I was thinking about it because
for some reason, the musical Assassins comes up a lot
in my life. But it might be because I talked
to you a lot.

Speaker 3 (02:44):
Yeah, I was gonna say that, does it? Does it
come up usually when I'm around because I talk about
the musical Assassins like more than most people.

Speaker 2 (02:52):
And I have this theory that the two kinds of
people who know this musical are theater nerds and history nerds.

Speaker 3 (02:59):
Hmmm, I stand at the overlap of that Ben diagram.

Speaker 2 (03:04):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (03:05):
Assassins of course famously features Emma Goldman as a character,
and she gets a lot of good lines.

Speaker 2 (03:12):
I actually never seen it. I really need to see it.

Speaker 3 (03:14):
It's worth checking out.

Speaker 2 (03:16):
I've heard some of the songs, I think from you.
Probably About ninety years ago, the US elected a disabled
man named Franklin Delano Roosevelt to the office of the
President of the United States of America FDR. I will
call him from here on out, because there's another Roosevelt,
and they're not They're not as related as you like

(03:38):
think they are related, but it's not like he's not
Teddy's kid. Whatever. I've looked this up before. FDR went
on to become one of the most progressive presidents in
US history and was the longest serving president by a
real solid amount. He got elected four times before he
died in office, and shortly afterwards people are like, we

(04:00):
should have term limits.

Speaker 3 (04:02):
Yeah, I believe that. Prior to his third term, the
two terms thing was just like a tradition. It was
basically like just accepted that if you serve two terms
as president, you would not run again. And it was
only like when he just kept running and kept getting
elected that people were like, oh, maybe this isn't just
like a practice, but it should be like a rule.

(04:23):
And I think, like not to bring up the current
era too soon, but like the entirety of the Trump
presidency has been like was like the first one obviously
was people discovering like what things happening in American government
were like normalized practices rather than rules, you know, like, oh, oh,
he was allowed to do that the whole time. It

(04:44):
just simply wasn't done up until then, and then realizing
like maybe we should have actually said they couldn't do that.

Speaker 2 (04:52):
So are you saying that FDRs is the Trump of
his time.

Speaker 3 (04:56):
I mean, he certainly did put a lot of people
in concentration camps, so that's true. I'm not actually saying that.
But there's are two points of comparison right there.

Speaker 2 (05:08):
Yeah, two of the least similar American presidents that have
ever existed, but with two strong interesting points of overlap. Yeah,
FDR oversaw America the United States during two of the
most existential threats has faced, the Great Depression and then
World War Two. He also gave my hobo grandfather a
job by enacting the New Deal, and he legalized drinking alcohol.

(05:32):
That's some other stuff.

Speaker 3 (05:33):
People were real ready for that one, you know.

Speaker 2 (05:36):
Yeah, I don't think that was like even like, I
don't think he was like, Ah, this is the thing
I'm gonna that was just gonna happen under his watch.
But we actually covered the first woman Secretary, Francis Perkins,
on this show, who gave him a lot of the
ideas for the New Deal. Most of what we said
about FDR in the show has been in those episodes,
and they're worth listening to. I'm not trying to be
like and he was perfect in every way. There was

(05:57):
the whole concentration camp thing like it's he was a
president of a giant, evil colonial power, you know. But
as far as things go, I think it's worth understanding
for the fact that our hero Zengar is not a hero.

Speaker 3 (06:13):
Our guy protagonist, we'll say protagonist is a protagonist.

Speaker 2 (06:17):
FDR almost didn't become president because about three weeks before
the inauguration on February fifteenth, nineteen thirty three, an unemployed
brick layer from Italy named giuseppe's Angara tried to kill
him instead. As Miriam has already told you spoilers, no,
it's fine, this whole this is the whole spoiler section anyway, right,

(06:41):
Giuseppe took out the mayor of Chicago by accident, a
guy named anton Cermac, who I was like, well, I
bet that guy was like bad, right, No, literally.

Speaker 3 (06:53):
The only thing I know about him is that as
he like lay dying, he said to FDR like, I'm
glad he hit me instead of you, which is like
just such a cool thing for a shot and dying
person to say that. I can only assume he like
at least was a little cool. Despite the whole being
a mayor thing.

Speaker 2 (07:09):
His actual last thing he said was even cooler. Oh shit,
And I'm not going to tell you what it is
until he got to it.

Speaker 3 (07:17):
I gotta say, I mayor of Chicago is not like
a job associated with being a cool person.

Speaker 2 (07:23):
So exactly. And so I had this whole like the
whole time, I'm like, well, you know, he did kill
a politician and sometimes, and then I was like reading
about it and I was like, oh no, oh no,
this whole story is a tragedy. It's a really interesting tragedy.
Jiuseppe took out the mayor of Chicago and then he
was immediately arrested, tried, and executed in the fastest legal

(07:46):
execution in the United States in the twentieth century. It
was three weeks to conviction, five weeks to his death.
He's one of the most forgotten would be assassins in
US history because no one quite wants to claim him.
The left isn't really excited about him having been he
was a leftist. He wasn't ideologically associated with any particular

(08:08):
like group, but people are like not quick to claim
him on the left because he was FDR was kind
of the best thing going to me. It's a little
bit like if Bernie had won in twenty sixteen and
then like a kind of wing not leftist to try
to take him out.

Speaker 3 (08:24):
Yeah, I mean, I don't think. But my impression, and
again my impression drawn primarily from a single song in
a musical, is that whatever his politics were, he did
not view his own action as politically motivated so much
as like personally motivated.

Speaker 2 (08:41):
Is that No, that's the thing. That's the thing about Zengara. Okay, great, everyone,
like there's all of these things that were like, we
don't know why he did it. He wrote really clear,
he's a whole autobiography. We're gonna do huge excerpts from it.
It's a short autobiography, but like it's like Zene length autobiography.

(09:02):
He was really clear about why he did it, and
it was like spoiler, it was because capitalists are bad
and he wanted communism. Like okay, but people are like,
we don't know what was possibly in his mind, and
they're like, he wrote it out. He just wasn't part
of a He also like wasn't a communist in the
nineteen thirty three cents right, he had no allegiance to

(09:23):
any political party, let alone Russia. But anyway, all right, well, and.

Speaker 3 (09:27):
Like just in terms of the strategy of his you know,
like lan chol Gosh killed President William McKinley because he
was an anarchist and fuck presidents and fuck McKinley in
particular was sort of his approach, And there's like a
coherence to that, right, even though it actually ended really
badly for anarchists. But like, my impression was that the
targeting of FDR in particular was not as like, okay.

Speaker 2 (09:52):
But yeah, let me tell you about why am I at?

Speaker 3 (09:54):
You're going to tell me?

Speaker 1 (09:55):
So?

Speaker 2 (09:56):
There are articles and articles and books about Joseppe Zangara
full of wild conspiracy theories. But after reading all of
this stuff, everything I could find about the case and
about him and stuff, I get the appeal of the
conspiracy thinking that has drifted into this particular narrative. This
is how I was like, Oh, lord, I now understand
the appeal of doing true crime investigation, because like there's

(10:19):
some really interesting holes in the official story about.

Speaker 3 (10:22):
Him, as long as your version of true crime is
about like unpacking ninety year old attempted assassinations of FDR
and not about like encouraging white, middle class suburban women
to think they're going to get sex trafficked in the
target parking lot, like, I'm okay with it.

Speaker 2 (10:41):
Oh yeah, No, I thought all true crime was just
about political assassinations from one hundred years ago. Is there
another kind that sounds awful?

Speaker 1 (10:49):
No?

Speaker 3 (10:49):
I must have dreamt that kind.

Speaker 2 (10:51):
Yeah, totally. But we do know. We know he tried
to kill FDR because FDR was a capitalist. He was
the president of the capitalist country, and JOSEPPI wanted to
kill capitalists. He did it because he was poor as
fuck and he'd been absolutely fucked over by capitalist healthcare
his entire life. Doctors, I don't know, is this in
a song? Doctors took out his appendix because he had

(11:13):
chronic stomach pain and digestion problems, and they didn't have
any reason to believe that it was his appendix that
was causing that problem.

Speaker 3 (11:21):
The chronic stomach pain is in the musical, and there
is a scene where he complains loudly about how much
his stomach hurts, and another character in the like surreal
all the assassins hanging out scene goes, well, have you
considered assassinating FDR?

Speaker 2 (11:39):
Well, the surgery didn't solve anything. And also assassinating FDR
wouldn't have solved anything.

Speaker 3 (11:44):
Well, he was executed, which did probably fix the stomach pain.

Speaker 2 (11:48):
That's true. That's true.

Speaker 3 (11:50):
That's not like the best approach, but it can't be
denied that five weeks later he had no stomach pain.

Speaker 2 (11:57):
No, and I mean, honestly, like my end result, the
thing that I was like after reading all this, I'm like,
this is an elaborate suicide by cop. This is a
suicide by state.

Speaker 3 (12:08):
Right, And that's probably why he was executed so quickly, right,
because I'm sure he didn't like do appeals, right.

Speaker 2 (12:14):
Oh yeah, No, his like defense was I killed them.
I wanted to kill him because he was a capitalist.
That was just like a he was. Really he stuck
to his guns in all ways. Well, he only had
one gun, but oh, a couple overtime. Anyway, we'll talk
about it.

Speaker 3 (12:28):
One literal gun and some other metaphorical guns.

Speaker 2 (12:31):
Oh no, there was other literal guns earlier in his
life when he tried to kill a king. But that's
besides the point.

Speaker 3 (12:36):
He tried to kill a king.

Speaker 2 (12:37):
Oh no, it would have been so much better. This
would be a regular people who did cool stuff if
he'd killed the king who made Mussolini the dictator.

Speaker 3 (12:46):
Like that seems like a cool thing.

Speaker 2 (12:48):
He tried to do it anyway. Okay. The saga of
Giuseppe Zangara Jiseeppi's Angara had a fucking rough life. He
was born on September seventh, nineteen hundred, which makes it
really easy to know how old you are. I'm just
gonna say, like, be born on a round number.

Speaker 3 (13:06):
Don't even have to do math.

Speaker 2 (13:08):
Yeah, totally in the southern region of Italy called Calabria.
This is the toe of the boot, the southwestmost part
of Italy. While still on the mainland. Just imagine that
the boot is kicking Sicily, which is an island, and
now you just you know whatever. His mother was named Rosina.
His father was Salvatore. Neither was particularly good to him.

(13:32):
He wrote, quote, the first day I was born, the
doctors found a sickness in my ears and decided to
operate on them at once. When my mother heard about
the sickness, she said, I was bad luck. I do
not remember my mother. She died when I was two
years old while giving birth to a child. The child
died also, Jesus, that.

Speaker 3 (13:53):
Is I'm sure neonatal ear surgery was in great shape
in the year nineteen hundred.

Speaker 2 (14:00):
Oh yeah, I mean that part seemed to work. I
doubt that caused his stomach pain. You know. No, but
I think his mother was wrong about which child was unlucky.
I will just go ahead and say.

Speaker 3 (14:14):
Maybe the bad luck just took a while.

Speaker 2 (14:16):
To kick in. Yeah, maybe that is rough.

Speaker 3 (14:19):
That is a rough first day.

Speaker 2 (14:20):
Yeah, oh yeah, no, And then here's the next couple
of years of his life. Quote again. When I was
three years old, I remember falling down two flights of
stairs in the house where we lived. The stairs were
built of stone, and when I was picked up, everyone
thought I was dead. When I was four years old,
I remember falling into a fire and burning my leg.
Thus my bad luck continued. Also, this was the first

(14:41):
time I remembered my name and realized that my mother
was dead. I remember this dimly, just like a dream.

Speaker 3 (14:48):
Oh buddy, Yeah, you should be allowed to kill the
king of Italy.

Speaker 2 (14:53):
I know, I know.

Speaker 3 (14:54):
If it is it going to make you feel better
to kill the king of Italy, yeah, V for it.

Speaker 2 (15:00):
At the age of five, while visiting one day at
a house of a friend of my aunt, I fell
down the stairs and broke my wrist. I remember my
aunt telling everyone how unlucky I was and mentioning to
them all my hard luck and all the accidents I
already had.

Speaker 3 (15:14):
I don't want to go back to that first piece
of bad luck. But this is a lot of falls.
And if his ear, oh, that's okay. And why am
I trying to diagnose this guy? But like I'm just saying,
if his ear was fucked up by perhaps some nineteen
hundred surgery, then that might have damaged his inner ear.

(15:36):
And that's why he keeps falling downstairs and into fires
and like all that shit, I'm sure there's some more
falls coming. What else happened to this guy?

Speaker 2 (15:44):
Most of the rest of the incredible bad stuff I'm
going to talk about now is because of how terrible
his family his father was. But one of the worst
bits of luck he had was being born to his father.
He wanted to go to school, but his father started
making him work in the fields. I want you to
guess how old he was when he started working.

Speaker 3 (16:01):
God, Okay, I'm gonna try. I'm not gonna like say
a comically you know, young age, Like I'm not gonna
say like seven months, you know, But I'm trying to think, like,
at what age a child, Like if I were a
real evil bastard, what what age could I imagine a
child performing a useful function in a field?

Speaker 2 (16:20):
Yeah?

Speaker 1 (16:22):
Six?

Speaker 2 (16:24):
Close? You are too optimistic.

Speaker 3 (16:27):
Five oh man, literal preschool age. Huh.

Speaker 1 (16:31):
I was going like this the entire time you were guessing, listeners,
I was flashing a five.

Speaker 2 (16:38):
Yeah, so we called it.

Speaker 3 (16:40):
Write it down next time.

Speaker 2 (16:42):
Well, we've all learned that hand gesters don't mean anything.
There's one thing we've learned this last week.

Speaker 3 (16:50):
Maybe Elon was just trying to tell us.

Speaker 2 (16:51):
Five yeah, totally, just very emphatically.

Speaker 3 (16:54):
Oh fuck that.

Speaker 1 (16:56):
Okay.

Speaker 2 (16:57):
I think what happened. I think his first jobs weren't
even just at his own farm. I think his dad
was buying livestock on credit. His dad was like poor
but owned stuff like he owned a farm, and he
owned some land, and he was always trying new like
ventures and stuff like I'm gonna open a vineyard. But
his only capital he had was IDT a five year old,

(17:18):
So he would he would buy live stock on credit
and then be like the credit repayment is that my
five year old will go work for you.

Speaker 3 (17:28):
Jeesus, Like, I have some questions for the people who
took him up on that deal.

Speaker 2 (17:32):
Right, like like what's wrong with you?

Speaker 3 (17:35):
Yeah? Like what the fuck?

Speaker 2 (17:36):
Yeah? And whenever he failed at work, his father would
beat him more or lesson to unconsciousness, and so his
stomach troubles began at the age of five or six
when he entered the workforce. He was very convinced and
I see no reason to doubt him that his trouble
started when he started working at the age of five,
and it is because of the stress and the beatings

(17:57):
that his lifelong illness began.

Speaker 3 (18:00):
I mean, you're not supposed to be working and getting
beaten at age five, so I'm sure it had some
negative health impacts.

Speaker 2 (18:06):
Yeah. His dad started leaving to go to the US
to work for months or years at a time when
JOSEPPI was like nine or so, but left strict orders
with the stepmother that the kid could not go to school,
he had to go to work. By the time he
was eleven, he had to manage the family farm by himself.
Come on, he know, hey know, I barely remember being eleven,

(18:32):
Like I was reading my first fantasy books. I mean, uh,
probably before then, but like I don't know.

Speaker 3 (18:40):
When I was eleven, my biggest like responsibility was that
I was supposed to clean the kitty litter box. Yeah
I often did not.

Speaker 2 (18:50):
Yeah totally. He got sicker and sicker. One time he overslept,
so his father stripped him naked and beat him with
a piece of wood and left him in the fields.
I don't normally go into the sort of like more
details around this kind of like abuse and stuff. I
think it's a little bit important to understand his mindset.
And then also because the whole strip naked and beaten

(19:11):
thing is going to come up later when he's in
the hands of the state.

Speaker 3 (19:14):
It does feel important to know because like a thing,
a sense that I had about him was that he
had a life that sucked. But I truly did not
realize how much his life sucked, and we have not
even gotten like through the first fifteen years of bit.

Speaker 2 (19:27):
Yeah he's like eleven right now. Yeah totally. Another time
his pants were ripped and so he fixed them, so
his father beat him. I don't understand that one, and
I don't think Joeppe did either.

Speaker 3 (19:39):
Actually seems like he performed a chore.

Speaker 2 (19:43):
Yeah, saved his dad some money. Another time he was
bed ridden for two weeks because he was beaten in
the head so hard, which I'm sure didn't help anything.
Jeppie never grew up to be a particularly large kid.
I feel like the the thing that might have been
made it into the musical. He was five foot one

(20:05):
when he died. He was all of one hundred and
five pounds.

Speaker 3 (20:08):
Well, I do know from the musical that when he
did the assassination he was standing on a chair to
see above the crowd. It's true, he must not have
been a you know, he probably wasn't six foot, but no,
five to one is little.

Speaker 2 (20:20):
Yeah. His only real interest in life at any point
was traveling. Seemed to be the only thing that brought
him happiness.

Speaker 3 (20:28):
Yeah, because he wanted to get the fuck away from
his dad.

Speaker 2 (20:31):
Oh yeah, that was the first thing he did.

Speaker 3 (20:33):
He's like interests traveling places anywhere that isn't this specific farm.

Speaker 2 (20:38):
Yeah. I would like to not be in the toe
of the boot anymore.

Speaker 3 (20:41):
Yeah, gotta be better places.

Speaker 2 (20:44):
Yeah. When he was seventeen, he left home to work
all over Italy despite intense chronic stomach pain. I think
he was basically a hobo. He talks about how he's
like sleeping outside and taking whatever work he could get,
and all along he started hating how rich people had
to be addressed differently than working people, how they needed
to be called like maestro and shit like that.

Speaker 3 (21:05):
Legit.

Speaker 2 (21:06):
I don't know a lot about the honorifics he used
in nineteenth century Italy, but you know, he didn't like it,
and he hit upon his first political realization. Society shouldn't
be structured so that poor kids have to work while
rich kids go to school.

Speaker 3 (21:21):
No lies detected so far.

Speaker 2 (21:24):
Yeah. One of his earliest memories, he's about five. He
is digging in the dirt next to a road, watching
a carriage full of rich kids go by on their
way to school. And he basically was like, well, that's
not that's not good. That's not how things should be.
And he actually, I think while his dad was away
when he was like five or six, he got to

(21:44):
go to school for about two months and it was
like the most joyous, happy thing in his life or whatever,
and then like dad came back, was like, no more school.
That was the end of his schooling.

Speaker 4 (21:53):
So was he illiterate. I mean, I'm assuming no, no,
that's what's interesting too. He was smart as shit. He
spoke way more languages than all the people hated him,
but every European does. But he was not educated and
he wasn't even like theory he did. He wasn't even
self educated really in terms of like theory and stuff, right,
But he certainly at the end of his life was

(22:16):
reading both English and Italian. And he also he passed
the citizenship tests in the US, which were harder at
that point than they were at some point later in
the twentieth century. I couldn't tell you exactly, and part
of that was like proving multiple English competency exams. WHOA
so I believe it was probably like written in oral.
He spoke with a really heavy accent. So everyone thought

(22:37):
he was dumb because he was speaking a second language
while they were speaking a first language, and white Americans
are not smart at understanding things. But yeah, no, he
he could read and write, Okay, yeah, wow, He wasn't
writing Shakespeare's stuff, you know.

Speaker 2 (22:56):
He wrote a very plain and direct with two months
of school. Yeah, so this is you know, his earliest
political realizations is school specifically matters to him, and he
blames his bad luck in life on the fact that
he didn't get to go all the while, it remembers said,
I was easy to keep track of his age. When
he is seventeen, there is a.

Speaker 3 (23:18):
World war going on, some stuff going on.

Speaker 2 (23:20):
Yeah, so as soon as he turned eighteen, this is
the military has better ethics than the workforce. Yeah, as
soon as he turns eighteen, they can script him as
a laborer into the military and he starts digging trenches
at the front. And he wrote about this time, quote
this is not another part of the whole, like, oh, yeah, totally.
I didn't have any politics, he wrote, quote, I did

(23:42):
not have any ill feelings against the Austrians and did
not consider them my enemies. My real enemy was the
capitalist government that we were fighting for. The capitalist is
to blame for all wars and the suffering of the poor.
He's so sympathetic, but you know what is also sympathetic.
I'm not sure either. But here's ads unrelated and we're

(24:11):
back much like those advertisements ended only a few weeks
after they started. The war ended only a few weeks
after he was conscripted because he turned eighteen and nineteen
eighteen the.

Speaker 3 (24:25):
Great War in so many ways, like a child no ad.

Speaker 2 (24:30):
Stuck in your head, can't get away from it.

Speaker 3 (24:33):
It's just one of the ones that irritates me the most, Like,
can I say that on the air.

Speaker 2 (24:37):
I think we should bleep out jumping and then that
way it'll stay okay.

Speaker 3 (24:43):
An unspecified company whose ads truly need to stop? Yeah,
I mean no, they need to keep giving you money.

Speaker 2 (24:49):
Yeah, sorry, yeah, no, they're great. I love that advertiser,
just like I love all the advertisers and the Great War,
just like as I as I go back to reading
about how capitalists government destroys everything, so I'm.

Speaker 3 (25:03):
Like one expecting him to get the Spanish flu too.
This everything bad seems to happen to this guy.

Speaker 2 (25:09):
You know, he doesn't actually, or at least he doesn't nice.
It doesn't make it into anything I've read the Spanish flu.

Speaker 3 (25:15):
Took one look at his stomach and was like, nab good.

Speaker 2 (25:18):
Yeah, I just want to know.

Speaker 1 (25:19):
Magpie was my kidney Stone paid the inspiration for you
writing this episode, Sophie.

Speaker 3 (25:27):
What are you gonna do with all your abdominal pain?

Speaker 1 (25:30):
I know, nothing actionable on an open line.

Speaker 2 (25:36):
Good call. The reason I am covering this is because
this other Italian decided to stop being a plumber and
do some other stuff last fall and I was like,
this is really interesting, and someone really in passing was like, oh,
like Zangara, and I'm like, oh, yeah, I totally know
what you're talking about. And then I like googled it
and then I ordered the book because I started reading
more about it, and then I there's only one book

(25:58):
that I've found so far about It's called The Five
Weeks with j just Sepizungaram and the back of it
is just his autobiography, right, and I just like read
it in one sitting and I was just like, oh
my god, this guy's interesting. Yeah. Yeah, Like I'm going
to break from format to talk about this guy. It'd
also been kind of on this Italy kick with the
podcast anyway, but knowing about the pain you were dealing

(26:20):
with did help make me make the decision. And I
also specifically was like, we need a Miriam for this
one because it's gonna be a morally complex one. And
also Miriam has heard me talk about this person. We've
talked about him before.

Speaker 3 (26:32):
We have previously discussed this guy last time I sang
it you, but I'm not going to do that this time.

Speaker 2 (26:37):
No, And it was in much less detail.

Speaker 1 (26:39):
I'm just grateful my pain is being turned into art
and that Miriam is here. Yeah.

Speaker 3 (26:45):
Yeah, and all our dogs got to see each other.
We're having a great time.

Speaker 2 (26:49):
We're doing great.

Speaker 1 (26:51):
My kidney stone past.

Speaker 2 (26:53):
Yeah, much like the Great War.

Speaker 1 (26:56):
Wow, you did it?

Speaker 2 (26:57):
What a podcaster I know. And also he's going to
become a stone mason. Oh, he sticks around to help
rebuild the city that had been leveled in the fighting.
That was like the closest to where he was when
he when it ended. And so he becomes a stone mason.
And when he gets home, his dad's like, great, you're
a stonemason. Build me a new house. So he builds

(27:20):
a new house for his dad.

Speaker 3 (27:21):
Throw a rock at your dad's head, like, honestly at
this point.

Speaker 2 (27:24):
Oh, he he sends money to his dad. His whole
life heartbreaking, part of the tragedy of this whole thing.

Speaker 3 (27:32):
Oh, that's so sad.

Speaker 2 (27:34):
Yeah, Like his dad is like the capitalist here he was.
Like supporting your family and being supported by your family
is a wonderful thing. People who traveled to other countries
and then send money home to their families are heroes.
When your family views you as purely a non person
that they can just extract resources from. That's bad.

Speaker 3 (27:53):
That's so interesting that he saw so clearly the exploitation
of capitalism and did not, for whatever reason, break free
of the extent to which that was the main dynamic
in his family.

Speaker 2 (28:07):
A lot of psychologists later when they were trying to
figure out whether he was crazy, and put a lot
of thought into that particular part of it. But part
of it was because they couldn't conceptualize that, like hating
the state was a rational thing, you know. So they
were like, Oh, he just had daddy issues. That's why
he killed FDR.

Speaker 3 (28:24):
So many people have daddy issues and so few people
have killed FDR.

Speaker 2 (28:28):
Yeah, I don't remember what killed FDR in the end,
so I can't make an effective joke.

Speaker 3 (28:32):
I think he died of natural causes.

Speaker 2 (28:34):
So yeah, and he gets home and he rebuilds his
dad a house, and he's like, I want to work
anywhere but for my dad, but no one in town
will hire him because they're like, no, you have to
go work for your dad. I think the dad has
like scared everyone.

Speaker 3 (28:49):
Well, his dad sounds fucking scary.

Speaker 1 (28:51):
I know.

Speaker 2 (28:52):
When he was twenty one, they conscripted him back into
the army as a soldier this time, even though, as
he put it, quote, I was not physically fit or able,
but they took me anyway. Damn. It was terrible for
him and his health. His stomach hurt most of all
when he held a rifle. He saw army doctors who
told him that his pain was chronic and there was

(29:13):
nothing that could be done, and that was because he
had been worked too hard as a kid. That's what
he claims. They said, I have no particular reason it
to believe him, but this is like the thing he
holds onto, you know, like this is the diagnosis I got. Eventually,
he wound up the orderly for a forty five year
old captain with a twenty year old wife, and he

(29:34):
spent all of his waking hours like shining that guy's
shoes and bringing him food and stuff. And he hated it.
And he was like, why are all the officers of
the rich people this hmm, I'm starting to notice a trend,
continuing theme. Yeah, he asked for a transfer, and he
actually kind of like the captain was sort of oddly
wasn't like terrible to him, Well, sometimes he was, but

(29:57):
like when he was like, hey, I want to transfer.
I don't want to do this any more. The captain
was like, okay, I'm building a farmhouse. You can go
build me a farm house and tend to the garden.
But as the army.

Speaker 3 (30:10):
I mean that sounds corrupt, but also very very low
chance of getting shot while building a farmhouse.

Speaker 2 (30:17):
So right, And then after they built the house he
asked for another transfer. He ended up a guard at
a payroll office, and he spent his time dreaming of
stealing the payroll.

Speaker 3 (30:26):
I mean, yeah, who wouldn't.

Speaker 2 (30:28):
Yeah. No, Somewhere along the line, while he was a soldier,
he tried to do something that if he had succeeded,
well I already spoiled what.

Speaker 3 (30:36):
It is, but yeah, I think it was killed the
King of Italy.

Speaker 2 (30:39):
Yeah, he wanted to kill the King of Italy. Yeah,
and we would have all been saying, good job, Joe
if he had done it, because when he got to America,
I everyon't called him Joe. This is just after the
king appointed Mussolini, like within a couple months. So when
Giuseppe heard that King Vittore Emmanuel the third was coming
to town, he was like, all right, oh, that guy.

(31:01):
And then it would have been particularly interesting because Vittoria
or Victor was the son of Mberto the second, who
was the one who gotten killed by an Italian anarchist
named Gatano Bresci, who was living in Patterson, New Jersey.
And that's gonna come back into the story later. But
he didn't successfully kill the king, and there wasn't a like,

(31:22):
no one knew that he tried to kill the king.
He didn't take a shot, he h He found out
where the king was gonna be. He waited there with
a gun and he was too short, nobody. He couldn't
see over the six foot tall guards.

Speaker 3 (31:39):
Oh no, I'm just picturing him like hopping up it.

Speaker 1 (31:46):
Yeah, that was so secere ol buddy.

Speaker 2 (31:53):
He waited at a railroad depot with a gun in
his pocket, but he couldn't see the king.

Speaker 3 (31:58):
As a person of not tallience myself, I can really empathize.
Usually for me, it's just not being able to get
something from the shelf.

Speaker 1 (32:08):
But like, still, that's my life, that's all my life.
But all my local friends are very tall women.

Speaker 2 (32:18):
See, they could kill the king anyway.

Speaker 3 (32:23):
They can do whatever they want.

Speaker 2 (32:24):
Yeah, and then for the second time in a couple months,
I will now tell a story that includes and then
he wandered the streets of Rome, armed, hoping to see
someone that he wanted to kill. This is the fourth
person that I have described as doing that in the past.
Three of the others were trying to kill Miscellini.

Speaker 3 (32:44):
Oh okay, well I know the answer.

Speaker 2 (32:47):
Irish lady shot Mussolini in the nose. Yeah, and she
just wandered around. But before that, shoot whatever. You can
go listen to my people who tried to kill Miscellini episode.
And so he's wandering around and then described as time
as he put it, all the time I was a soldier,
I saw nothing but the sons of the capitalists as officers,
and the sons of the working people were the common soldiers.

(33:09):
That was why I wanted to kill the head of
such a government, because I thought that this was the
only way to help the poor working people. The officers
always ate at the table and were served by the
common soldiers. They ate the finest food, while the poor
soldier was treated like a dog. I could not see
why the officers should be treated any better just because
they are the sons of the capitalists. I believe everyone

(33:30):
should be treated alike, what did this man believe?

Speaker 3 (33:38):
Oh man, that's a mystery. Yeah, he made it pretty clear.

Speaker 2 (33:42):
I think.

Speaker 3 (33:43):
Actually, yeah, that's so interesting. It doesn't fit. It doesn't
fit the American narrative.

Speaker 5 (33:49):
Because of FDR, right, because like at the time and
like still to this day, FDR was like being called
a communist by the American right. Yes, so the idea
that like somebody would kill FDR because or try to
kill FDR because they were anti capitalist kind of doesn't
compute with like the narrative of American history.

Speaker 2 (34:11):
It's true, and I also think that like he was
probably falsely one to one comparing a president to a king. Yeah, Like,
I don't think it was a good plan that he
later ended up with. You know, I don't think it
would have helped the poor working people, whereas killing the
king kind of mighta.

Speaker 3 (34:29):
Yeah, it's hard hard to see how it could have.

Speaker 2 (34:32):
Yeah, Yeah, which is funny because it's such a crapshoot
when it's like a when it's a king. But literally
killing Emberto made Italy a more progressive place.

Speaker 3 (34:40):
So kings are bad. I mean presidents aren't great either,
but like, yeah, it is, it is a different it
is a different.

Speaker 2 (34:50):
Type of action totally than an elected temporary leader.

Speaker 1 (34:53):
Mm hmm.

Speaker 3 (34:55):
Although FDR did try to be as permanent as he could.
That's fairs as discussed, but he didn't nobody knew that
at the time. People liked him and kept voting for him,
like for reasons.

Speaker 2 (35:05):
It was probably good that. Like anyway, whatever, I haven't
read enough about FDR. Maybe I'll do a whole I'll
read about FDR and be like, oh my god, what
was I thinking? You know, I don't know.

Speaker 3 (35:14):
I mean the concentration camps. You kind of robust qualifies
from any status as a cool person. If being president
didn't already do it concentration camps, would.

Speaker 2 (35:24):
I suspect being a president probably cuts you out of it.

Speaker 3 (35:28):
Yeah, I think so. I don't like presidents.

Speaker 2 (35:31):
No, neither does our hero or Nope, not hero, our protagonist,
our sympathetic tragic character, antiher.

Speaker 3 (35:40):
We don't need a hero. We each have dogs with us.

Speaker 2 (35:45):
He's a bad one in particular. After his mandatory service
was done, he moved home for a few months. Then
he got aboard a ship heading to the US, arriving
I can't imagine why I wanted to get away from
his dad, arriving September second, nineteen.

Speaker 3 (35:59):
Twenty Oh, it's almost his birthday.

Speaker 2 (36:02):
Yeah, exactly, Oh, good memory. He moved in with his
uncle who lived in Patterson, New Jersey, where all.

Speaker 3 (36:10):
The Italian anarchists were hanging out.

Speaker 2 (36:12):
Yep. However, since about nineteen twenty two, with the first
Red Scare, the Italian anarchist movement had gone pretty underground. Yeah,
and so that's kind of one of the big question
marks in my Italian of this. I will talk later
about his feelings about anarchism specifically, but it's like, I
don't know. This is where he moved to. This is

(36:34):
the place that was like the hotbed of Italian anarchism,
and under interrogation, Giuseppe always said that he had no
political allegiance and no accomplices. Apparently, when I said I
was gonna talk about it later, I met really soon.
The federal investigation supports this idea that he did not
have political allegiances and he had no accomplices. There are

(36:56):
a ton of witnesses claiming this or that or some
completely thing, including a lot of lying cops. So there
are people who claim dat accomplices. There are people who
claim he was part of different organizations, everything from various
mafias to anarchist organizations to communist organizations. Everyone has made
all kinds of claims, but most likely he was acting alone,

(37:17):
working with a sort of anarchistic, communistic ideology that came
from his own mind but also probably from conversation with
other people. But he was also intensely a loner, almost
as much as he has quotes that are like, I
don't like no kings, I don't like no capitalists. He's like,
I don't like people. He's like he.

Speaker 3 (37:38):
Hasn't had great experiences with them.

Speaker 2 (37:40):
No, he's like, my stomach hurts and I want to
be alone. That's he's really consistent about that. But it's
possible from my point of view that his uncle and
some of the other brick layers are part of the
now underground anarchist movement of Paterson, New Jersey or I
don't know. This is fairly raw conjecture on my part,
but there are odd coincidences about money and where he

(38:02):
got it, Like he was getting checks from his uncle
at one point, despite the fact that he had some
other money. Like all of the stuff around his money
is really weird, and it's the only thing I know
he lied about in his autobiography.

Speaker 3 (38:14):
I mean, it's reasonable if he wants to protect his
uncle from any implication that he was involved, that he
you know, whether his uncle was involved or not.

Speaker 2 (38:25):
You know, yeah, I did it all alone. That is
what you say, No matter what happened, is I did
all of it alone.

Speaker 3 (38:30):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (38:31):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (38:31):
And like even if his uncle had like given him
money so that he could like eat right, saying oh,
my uncle didn't give me any money would help protect
his uncle when he is on trial for murder.

Speaker 2 (38:43):
It's true, but it's a different thing he lied about.
We'll get to it. And so he's like, oh man, yeah,
this is literally what it says next to my script.
Any political assassin worth anything is going to say I
did it alone. And Gioseppi was the perfect guy to
be able to say that. He had this legacy as
a loaner, and he had this like very clear, indirect
but uneducated but smart way of speaking, and he just

(39:04):
he absolutely could come across that way. But you know
what comes across a certain way. The irony with which
I transitioned ads. It is why everyone likes me, and
it's why if he subscribed to cooler zon media. You
just get the transitions, which is like all of the bonuses.
Here's ads, here, they are right, now, here, go and

(39:35):
we're back. So there's this other complication to what he
would have had to say at various points too. Giuseppe
he's gonna shoot some people, He's gonna go to jail.
But for a while, the mayor of Chicago was expected
to live. So Giuseppe wasn't facing the death penalty. Oh
but there was, and technically still is. Don't listen to this,

(39:57):
right wingers, right wingers, close your ears. There is a
law in the US that says it's illegal to be
a foreign born anarchist.

Speaker 3 (40:04):
Oh yikes.

Speaker 2 (40:05):
I believe it's been a law since like nineteen oh
three or something like that.

Speaker 3 (40:09):
Wait, what if you are foreign born, come to the US,
and then become an anarchist?

Speaker 2 (40:14):
Still count I actually don't want to get into what
can be done with that law. Fuck it, no one
has done anything with this law in a long time.
It ties into some weird anarchist drama from the nineties
of I'm not going to that's that's for one on
one conversation. But so when they are like, are you
an anarchist or part of a communist party, blah blah

(40:34):
blah blah blah. Right, like, he probably wasn't, But he
also has to say no or they can deport him.

Speaker 3 (40:41):
Because he's at but he is being asked, did you
do this other crime?

Speaker 2 (40:45):
Right? And Italy is fascist at this point, and he
might not want to go there. Although in the like
every possible witness came forward to lie about him and
tell different versions of the story. One person was like,
he was a fascist, he loved Mussolini, and other people
are like, no, he hated Musolini, and he was I think.

Speaker 3 (41:01):
We've already seen ample evidence he did not like Mussolini.

Speaker 2 (41:04):
Yeah, no, he was not. But it's probable that it
all happened just like he told it. It's probably he
acted alone. It's probable that he had no ties to
any organizations. His uncle was later shocked, saying that in
all the years they lived together, he never heard just
set me say anything about politics. So he goes to Patterson.
He moves in with his uncle, and for a little

(41:24):
while he works at a silk factory with his uncle,
and then two months later he's laid off. And he's
always sick, right, it's too hot in the factory, it's
too cold outside. He started doing masonry work the local
Masonry Union. He doesn't like unions. He's a member of
the union, but he doesn't like him. The local Masonry
Union is associated with the AFL, the American Federation of Labor,

(41:46):
who are pretty mid at this point.

Speaker 3 (41:48):
Let's just say I remember correctly they were the bad
guys in the previous episode. Yeah I did.

Speaker 2 (41:54):
Yeah, so totally. So they show up and are like, look,
and actually any union would do this. They show up
and are like, look, you got to join the union
and you can't work as a stonemason around here. And
he's like, well, I have ten bucks and they're like,
all right, we're going to lend you the ten bucks
and then you have to pay us back. Just honestly, fine,
he's getting more money because it's union and whatever. Then

(42:16):
they're like, oh, but you can't get your card until
you prove that you have started your paperwork to apply
for American citizenship.

Speaker 3 (42:23):
Well hey, now, yeah, why.

Speaker 2 (42:26):
Because they're biggots. I don't know, those are nativist assholes.
So this is actually why he ends up in an
American citizen Wow. He uh, but it takes him six
years to get but he's allowed to work as long
as he's proving that he's in the process of it, that.

Speaker 3 (42:40):
He's like working on it.

Speaker 2 (42:41):
Yeah. And so then for a while in the nineteen twenties,
he worked. That was his life. He was quite good
at what he did, but he was constantly sicken in pain.
He ran crews and hired workers. He started saving money.
He's like kind of pulling off middle class brick laying
person and kind of it seems.

Speaker 3 (43:01):
Like sounds a little bit like he's bootstrapping it.

Speaker 2 (43:05):
Yeah, well, though not as much as the guy he's
got to kill, but yeah, and he starts saving up money.
When he died, there was like two or three thousand
dollars in his bank account, and he had sent two
or three thousand dollars back to his father. Three thousand
dollars is seventy thousand dollars. Now, wow, I don't know
a lot of people with seventy thousand dollars in savings,

(43:26):
you know. Yeah, But it's interesting because he's still a
working person, right, Like he knows he is not the
rich capitalist, you know. Yeah, and he's just suffering. And
so all he does is like work and suffer. That's
like all he does. In nineteen twenty six, he checked
into the hospital because of shooting pains in his stomach

(43:47):
and the doctor didn't find anything wrong, according to medical records.
Like literally the doctor was like, I don't know it's wrong,
but then told Giuseppe, you have a cute appendicitist and
we're going to take it. Oh, because the doctor decided
to take out his appendix just because it might work,
you know, like we need to rule it out, you know.

Speaker 3 (44:09):
I feel like back then they were like, yeah, I
got something wrong from the chest downwards, we'll take out
your appendix. Got something wrong from the chest upwards, We'll
take out your tonsils. Those are the two things we
know how to do, and we'll do them to everybody.

Speaker 1 (44:24):
I feel like they should teach people where their appendix
is in like grade school.

Speaker 2 (44:30):
So they can guard it.

Speaker 3 (44:33):
Fight off the doctors.

Speaker 1 (44:34):
No, just because just because it's like I can't I
can't even count them any times where it's like, well,
where does it hurt? I want to make sure it's
not your appendix, and somebody will point and then and
then you'll realize they don't know where their appendix is to.

Speaker 3 (44:48):
Their elbow, Zasha, I think it's my appendix.

Speaker 1 (44:52):
People should probably know where their appendix is.

Speaker 2 (44:55):
Just that be new where his was. It was on
a plate next to him because the and there was
nothing wrong with it, and the doctor was like, oh,
it looks like it's healthy. For some odd reason, JOSEPPI
was really bitter about this.

Speaker 3 (45:07):
Yeah, somebody cut out a part of him for no reason.

Speaker 2 (45:10):
Yeah, I'd be mad.

Speaker 3 (45:12):
I would be like, I wasn't using that, but I
might have.

Speaker 2 (45:15):
Yeah, I don't actually know what an appendix does. Lower
lower right No one tell me. Wait, you all can
tell me. I don't want any Internet stranger to tell
me what does it do?

Speaker 5 (45:24):
Oh?

Speaker 1 (45:25):
What does it do? I think you said, where is it?
Low kated? I was like your lower right side, magpie.

Speaker 2 (45:31):
I used to have so much like anxiety pain that
I kind of almost didn't want to know where these
things were. Because now it's fine because I got through
that part of my life. But I was like, so
good at having phantom pain everywhere.

Speaker 1 (45:43):
It's attached to your intestin and it helps with digestion.
Is like the short version.

Speaker 3 (45:48):
Okay, It's thought to have played a greater role in
digestion at an earlier stage of human evolution.

Speaker 2 (45:54):
Correct, Oh, interesting, okay, And so he's living this life,
it's he's not particularly happy. He talks in his autobiography
about how he spent all of his money super freely
and he never saved any money, and everyone thought he
was rich because of how he spent money. He spent
all of his money on girls and such. I think

(46:15):
he hired sex workers a lot. And I also had
the implication he would like go on dates and then
like blow a lot of money on whoever he went
on a date with. But all of his friends, well,
he claims he doesn't have any friends. He claims he
had only acquaintances. All the people who knew him were
like that man was stingy.

Speaker 3 (46:33):
Oh, that's so funny.

Speaker 2 (46:35):
So that's the thing he lied about.

Speaker 3 (46:37):
Like, I like when people's self conception is like so
far off base from like you, like, you know, you
know anybody who's like, oh, I'm the chillest person, I'm
so chill, and you're like you were the most dramatic
I know. Is like, honestly, most people who describe themselves
as chill actually and people are like, oh, I hate drama.

(46:58):
It's like all you do is drama. And I love
that he was out there being like, oh, I'm a
lavish spend thrift just throwing money around, and everybody else's like,
my dude has not had a new pair of socks
in six years.

Speaker 2 (47:10):
Yeah, no, he's he's always moving into the cheapest possible places.
But he also, like when he's arrested, he was like
living into like the cheapest possible boarding house he possibly could,
and he had a really cheap suitcase full of really
nice clothes.

Speaker 3 (47:24):
Oh good, Yeah, No, that's like what's important though. It's
better to have nice clothes and a cheap suitcase and
bad clothes and an expensive suitcase.

Speaker 2 (47:35):
No, it's a good point, sensible, and I think it's
I think that the end of the day. The thing
about it is that he just isn't seeing himself the
way that others people see him, and so he's probably
like constantly mad at himself about not saying, oh my godness,
that's probably yelling at him about not sending enough money home.

Speaker 3 (47:48):
Basically, yeah, yeah, he's probably brought up to think any
money he spends on himself is like money wasted, right.

Speaker 2 (47:55):
Yeah, that that actually makes the most sense, and he
seems to be getting a fair amount of money. He
does like a fair amount of like big jobs or whatever. Again,
not rich, and I was probably exaggero when it called
him middle class, but like working class union labor. You know,
he didn't take much joy in life. He mostly suffered.

(48:15):
He spent most of his time alone, suffering. He had
a few acquaintances. He went to his death claiming he
had no friends. He basically ate onion soup and did
not drink and did not smoke, and laid bricks and suffered.
In nineteen twenty nine, the economy collapsed and he was
mostly out of work. He started traveling, apparently just to wander,

(48:38):
probably not coordinating with an international conspiracy of anarchists to
kill world leaders. Legitimately probably not that. Just I'm like
ninety five percent sure about that, you know, like usually
you're one hundred percent on that?

Speaker 1 (48:52):
Is it?

Speaker 3 (48:53):
Like you want to you want to leave room for
the possibility, because that would be a pretty cool story.

Speaker 2 (48:58):
I mean, I don't want to claim him. I usually
want to claim people. But like, like I'm coming across
of anything Gus like too too soft an FDR of
this episode, But like I have.

Speaker 3 (49:09):
Noticed that this has been like a weirdly pro FDR vibe.

Speaker 2 (49:13):
The world would have been so much worse if he
had shot FDR. Nazis might have taken over the world,
you know. Yeah, yeah, Like I'm not a very big man,
a history kind of girl, and like maybe whoever else
was there would have done it instead. Maybe it would
have been better, but like my money is on the
world would have been a lot worse if he had

(49:33):
done this. I don't know, And it wasn't a it
was not a strategic decision, I believe, So I don't
want to claim him that the ninety certain that he's
not working with international anarchistic conspiracy is just around. Like
there are enough people who said, yeah he was. There
are enough people who are like, oh, we think he

(49:55):
was involved in the following plots and blah blah blah,
which almost certainly are nonsense, right, But like there's just
kind of a like, here's this brick layer from Italy
in Paterson, New Jersey who suddenly goes around and starts
like traveling around to San Diego and Cuba and Mexico,
and like he's probably just off to go wander because

(50:16):
he wants to.

Speaker 3 (50:17):
Yeah, he has some disposable income and nobody's building new houses.

Speaker 2 (50:22):
Yeah, that is almost certainly what is happening. And he
likes places with warmer weather.

Speaker 3 (50:27):
I mean, every time there was a assassination by an
anarchist back in those days when anarchists were doing a
lot of a lot more assassinations, the media narrative and
sort of the popular native was like, oh, they must
be connected with a big anarchist conspiracy, and like they
usually were just some guy who was an anarchist and

(50:47):
who did it. Like to the extent that there were conspiracies,
they were usually very small. They were not like a thing,
because when you plan an assassination or any kind of
big illegal action, the more people who know about it,
the less likely you are to be able to do
it successfully.

Speaker 2 (51:04):
But I think overall, I think that's true. But like
in the people trying to Kill Mussolini episodes, these were
like conspiracies crossing ideological and state lines amongst like hundreds
of people, and sometimes that's why they fell apart. And
as you can compare to a lot of the people
the anarchists who pulled off some other assassinations, they would

(51:24):
do things like drop out of their friend group and
then stop making friends with anyone and stuff like that,
and start keeping everyone away for the other people's safety.
So that's like where it gets I don't know whatever.

Speaker 3 (51:35):
Anyway, unless they really on gosh, because he was just
bad at making friends in the first place.

Speaker 2 (51:40):
He's a little bit closer to a show gosh. We'll
talk about that. I think we should talk about him
in sho gosh a little bit once we get to
the actual thing. Yeah, we're getting ahead of ourselves again,
all right, And now I want to say negative things
about our protagonist. Well, first, he wrote kind of sweetly
about this time that he was always chasing better weather
or the his condition might improve, and he would do

(52:02):
things like he would write about like, oh, I met
this like cute mother on a train and she was
nice to me and I was happy for a while.
And then he would also talk about like and then
I shacked up with a seventeen year old who I
think is a sex worker in New Orleans and then
let him let her live at his place and they
were dating for a while and then he left and
she was fine with it. Hmmm. And then he probably

(52:22):
tried to pressure his landlord's fifteen year old daughter into
marry him, and she had to tell him now multiple times.

Speaker 1 (52:27):
Hmmm.

Speaker 2 (52:28):
He would have been around thirty at that point.

Speaker 1 (52:30):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (52:31):
The number of times a thirty year old should ask
a fifteen year old to marry him is zero.

Speaker 2 (52:35):
Roughly, yeah, no, not roughly, yeah, just exactly, it's very
exact number. And another point, he's talking about how he
was going to marry this sixteen year old who did
want to marry him, but then he decided not to
because she was pregnant with someone else's kid and she
was just doing it to like get the kid taken
care of. And he was like, I got to get
out of here's.

Speaker 3 (52:56):
It's becoming a trend. It is now a trend of
this day.

Speaker 2 (53:00):
It started off with a nice mother and that was nice.
But yep, but yep, hmmm, yeah, don't like this. He
didn't really have any like great loves or anything like
that in his life. He wandered. He sometimes worked. Some
reports say that he would rabble rouse like giving speeches
anti government speeches during lunch breaks at work, and other
people are like that did not happen. One time, he

(53:22):
may or may not have heckled a street preacher for
telling the crowd. They shouldn't blame the government for their problems.

Speaker 3 (53:27):
I mean that sounds like a shitty street preacher. You
should heckle that guy.

Speaker 2 (53:30):
Yeah, no, totally, No, I'm fully in favor of him
rabble rousing and uh, you know, heckling that street preacher.
But I don't know, there's so much. He was very briefly,
very famous, and everyone wanted to have theories about him
and claimed interactions with him, and most people were lying.

Speaker 3 (53:48):
Oh, that's so interesting, Like yeah, because he was he
spent time as like just a wandering, you know, sort
of drifter guy, which means that when he became famous,
I bet a lot of people were like, I want
if that weird angry Italian I met five years ago?
Is this weird angry Italian?

Speaker 2 (54:05):
Yeah? Totally.

Speaker 3 (54:07):
You know, I have remembering some guy you saw get
into a fight with a preacher like that was probably
the guy. Then you tell people that for the rest
of your life to you know, get people to think
you're interesting.

Speaker 2 (54:18):
Totally. In nineteen thirty two, he left Patterson, New Jersey
for the last time. He wound up in Miami for
the weather. Miami is a newer city than you might think,
do you know this.

Speaker 3 (54:32):
I mean, I know that it like had that like
for a long time. People like Americans were like, Florida,
you can't build anything in Florida. It's all gross swamps
and stuff. And then in like the twenties they were like,
oh my god, actually Florida.

Speaker 2 (54:46):
Yeah, that's basically Yeah. In eighteen ninety six, Miami was
incorporated with a population of three hundred people, and pretty
soon people will realize that it was a nice place
to bring tourists and a nice place to do crime.
So it became a tourist and crime town, which I
wonder the impression that has not changed from but I
don't know.

Speaker 3 (55:03):
I think it's less involved in the illegal liquor trade
now than it was back then.

Speaker 2 (55:08):
But yeah, fair enough. Yeah, it was a kind of
a mafia place as best I can tell, tourism, crime,
and the fucking kkk oh. In the nineteen twenties and thirties,
Miami had the kkk Hella present. The WASP establishment was
happy to have clansmen enforcing segregation and marching and official
parades and guarding the city against Bolsheviks and black people

(55:31):
and Catholics and other such terrible monsters. The mafia was
reasonably important in the city too. Cops that tried to
fight corruption and organized crime were run out of their
jobs soon enough. Like there's like a I think a
sheriff who was like, all right, well we should probably
do some about this organized crime. And he's like, wait,
why don't I have a job anymore? What happened? I
don't understand.

Speaker 3 (55:49):
It's like, I don't think you get it. The crime
is organized, the call is from inside the house.

Speaker 2 (55:54):
But that's where I'm at. By nineteen thirty, when our
story hits his climax, Miami had a population of one
hundred and fifty thousand, which is about a third of
its current size, but it saw a million tourists a year.
And this was the city where the president elect, Franklin
eleanor Roosevelt, He's middle name I think I got wrong

(56:15):
last time, decided to go in vacation in February nineteen
thirty three. We should just make up new middle names
for him. I should. I should try and like, come
save some of my anarchy cred.

Speaker 3 (56:24):
By making fun of by getting his name wrong.

Speaker 2 (56:27):
Yeah, yeah, decided to go on vacation there in nineteen
thirty three, Franklin David Roosevelt and in what was almost
a rather ill fated decision but actually kind of turned
out fine but not well for him, but not for
the mayor of Chicago. Basically, before becoming president, he was like,
all I'm gonna go fishing for a while. We got
a boat and we went fishing for a while. About

(56:47):
ten days he was like, all right, I'm going to
do some speeches while I'm in Florida, and the city
of Miami wanted to honor the president elect with parades
and fanfare. Fdr agreed to give a very short, impromptu speech.
The city was making a way bigger deal out of
this than he was.

Speaker 3 (57:01):
Basically, he was like, I'm just trying to be on vacation.

Speaker 2 (57:04):
Yeah. Basically he's like, look, I'm about to take the
most stressful job. Like, can I just go catch some
fish and talk about people's weight anyway. We'll talk about
how it was weird obsession on people's weight later, and
I don't know it somehow came up multiple times in
this story that he is weird about people's weight. For
days ahead of time, newspapers published all the details of

(57:27):
his schedule, and the city turned out in massive numbers
to see him. It was the largest crowd in the
city's history. At that point. Twenty five thousand people were there.
People came from all over, especially from all over Florida.
FDR had won in a landslide four hundred and seventy
two to the incumbent, Herbert Hoover's fifty nine. And this
is partly because if you have a recession on your watch,

(57:50):
you're gonna lose. And if you have a great recession
on your watch, you're gonna lose greatly.

Speaker 3 (57:57):
If there are homeless encampments in every major city referred
to as Hooverville's, you're really gonna lose.

Speaker 2 (58:04):
Yeah, totally. Franklin Dwight Roosevelt was a popular man, but
not to everyone, not too Miriam, not to Giseepi. The
Zangaraji Seppi saw those newspapers and was like, all right,
time to buy a gun, except there's arguments about the order.
Here is not a little mystery. Again, it's like probably nothing,

(58:26):
but like he might have bought the gun before he
saw the newspapers, which would have been not because we
know where he bought the gun. So it wasn't like
he just had a gun, like, but he was like, all,
I'm gonna go buy a gun. And he might have
bought it before he saw the newspaper, so he probably
bought it after whatever. Anyway, get you get the true crime.

Speaker 3 (58:42):
Is there anything? Is there anything he might have been
interested in having a gun for that we can think of?
Besides this, was he just maybe like worried about the
about all the klansmen around or something.

Speaker 2 (58:54):
I think the implication would be that he would like
have found out some other way the president was coming.
But I don't know. But also like I mean, he
wanted to die like so I don't know, but he
probably saw the newspapers and then he went and bought
a five shot revolver chambered in thirty two. He bought

(59:17):
it and ten bullets for eight dollars, which is around
two hundred dollars to day, which is a cheap gun.
It was short barreled. It was basically like a self
defense or crime gun equivalent of a Saturday night special,
a gun for getting up to no good. To JOSEPPI,
of course it was a crime gun. He wanted to
commit a crime with it. As for what he did

(59:38):
with it, you'll have to wait until when. No, you
already know what he did.

Speaker 3 (59:42):
We mentioned it.

Speaker 2 (59:43):
Yeah, you know, he tried to kill Franklin Douglas Roosevelt
and he did kill the mayor of Chicago. But the
story is really good and it's gonna get even better
on Wednesday. Done, I know. But first you want any
other podcasts or something you want to plug?

Speaker 3 (01:00:00):
Yeah, I am on this published in this publishing collective
and podcasting network called Strangers in a Tangled Wilderness. We
actually have this really cool thing. We're about to publish
this book. We're doing a Kickstarter for it that will
launch in March. It's by Margaret Killjoy. Ever heard of her?

Speaker 2 (01:00:19):
I have not, Nope, what a pretentious name.

Speaker 1 (01:00:23):
Kill Joy anyway, sounds like somebody who's not filled a
lot of hope.

Speaker 3 (01:00:29):
It's a really good book. People are gonna like it,
and they if they want to find out more about
it as it as it nears publication, they should check
out our kickstarter, which they can find by googling or
using a different search engine to find. The Eternal Choir
Holds Every.

Speaker 2 (01:00:47):
Voice, The Immortal Choir, Immortal Choir.

Speaker 3 (01:00:50):
Jesus, I'm the editor. I should know that the Immortal
choir holds every voice.

Speaker 2 (01:00:55):
No one can remember my book titles. That's my special power.

Speaker 3 (01:00:58):
No, it's a really good title.

Speaker 1 (01:01:00):
I know.

Speaker 2 (01:01:00):
I write incredible titles that don't stay in people's minds.

Speaker 3 (01:01:03):
I've said it correctly every other time I've said it.

Speaker 2 (01:01:05):
It's just I.

Speaker 3 (01:01:06):
Wasn't being recorded at the time. The Immortal Choir holds
every voice. Check it out. Our cover art is gorgeous.
Follow Strangers in a Tangled Wilderness on Blue Sky or Instagram.
Don't follow us on Twitter. Listen to our podcasts. You
know you can hear more of Margaret and also me
and our other co hosts, and also cool people that

(01:01:26):
we interview who do cool stuff.

Speaker 2 (01:01:28):
Even Yeah, Sophie, you got anything you want to plug
because Miriam did mine apparently, Thank you, Miriam.

Speaker 1 (01:01:35):
Listen to Malli Conger's Weird Little Guys. It's yeah, so good.

Speaker 2 (01:01:40):
It's so good.

Speaker 1 (01:01:41):
It's so good. Mollie's so talented. Molly can find out
information like nobody I've ever known. It's just Molly's. Molly's Mollie.
I don't even know how to.

Speaker 3 (01:01:56):
She. She will process so much boring information to find
amazing stories hidden in them, you know, like, yeah, like
it doesn't matter how many like city council meetings, or like,
I don't know, fucking old newspaper article like she will find.

Speaker 1 (01:02:12):
It sometimes will be like, how's it going? And then
Mollie will like list off the craziest things you've ever
heard in your entire life. I've been reading insert insane
thing here for the last eight hours, but I found
out this one thing.

Speaker 2 (01:02:30):
You're like, Molly, are you okay?

Speaker 1 (01:02:36):
So you know, support Molly in her endeavor to read
the strangest things on the internet.

Speaker 2 (01:02:42):
I wholly endorse and I'll talk to you all on Wednesday.

Speaker 3 (01:02:46):
Babe.

Speaker 1 (01:02:52):
Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff is a production of
cool Zone Media. For more podcasts on cool Zone Media,
visit our website cool zone media dot com, or check
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