Giuseppe Zangara was a strange little man. Five feet tall and swarthy, the Italian immigrant spent most of his sad, small life alone, bedding in one rooming house or another, invisible and inconsequential. Yes, jilting Joe had some kin up in Jersey, and when his loot ran low, the itinerant bricklayer sometimes surfed their couch, but he never got close to anyone.

Worse, he was wracked by excruciating abdominal pain, the byproduct of a pop who had him work hard on the farm from the time he was a wee lad. In other words, Joe hurt, a lot. And the Depression wasn’t helping any.

This is why he wanted to kill the president.

So, on Feb. 15, 1933, little Joe Zangara picked up a pistol at a North Miami Avenue pawn shop, made his way to Bayfront Park, then stood upon a chair and took five shots at president-elect Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

He missed. Well, he missed the president, anyway. But the ever-jilting Joe did hit Chicago Mayor Anton Cermak, and four other bystanders to boot.

Cermak would later die from his wound; Zangara would later fry — in the chair known as Old Sparky.

Such is the story told in Blaise Picchi’s The Five Weeks of Giuseppe Zangara (Academy Chicago, $17.95), a well-wrung chronicle of the last days of one of history’s most inept assassins.

As footnotes go, this one probably should be better known; after all, the dope did try to kill one of America’s most popular presidents. But in death, as in life, Joe Zangara just couldn’t make a mark.

Nor, apparently, could he hit one. Oh, it’s not entirely the runt’s fault. See, FDR, by then already bound to a wheelchair, was careful not to have anyone see him handicapped, so he took the mike propped up in the back of Vincent Astor’s drop-top limo. And chair or no chair, the pint-sized Calabrian couldn’t see enough to get off a good shot, not with the crowd that thronged Bayfront.

And what a crowd: 7,000 seats filled and another 18,000 spilling outta the park and across Biscayne Boulevard. Onstage at the onion-domed amphitheatre (think Opa-locka as rendered by Shriners) were such dignitaries as FPL Chairman Joseph H. Gill, Hialeah Racetrack founder Joseph Widener, hotelier Colonel Henry Doherty (owner of The Biltmore and Roney Plaza), Miami Herald publisher Frank B. Shutts and Fort Lauderdale Florida News publisher Robert H. Gore.

Then there was Cermak, who’d come down to personally ask the president for help paying Chi-town teachers, who’d inadvertently been victimized after the Association of Real Estate Taxpayers mounted a tax strike that left empty the city’s coffers. It was a request that the mayor finally got to deliver — on his deathbed – and it was a request that FDR summarily honored once he took office.

To this day, some say Cermak was the target, that the cat had double-crossed The Outfit who’d helped put him in the mayor’s seat. And while the fact that Cermak Road stretches from Capone’s old Lexington Hotel headquarters on 22nd Street on Chicago’s South Side to the gang leader’s Cicero powerbase makes for an interesting talking point, it’s hardly evidence of any collusion.

Zangara sought to assassinate “all capitalist presidents and kings”; Cermak had simply gotten in the way.

Coming off as a cross between Erik Larson (Devil in the White City) and Miami’s own Seth Bramson (whose numerous books about the history of our town should be required reading for everyone who lives here), Picchi, who was privy to Florida State Prison Warden L.F. Chapman’s voluminous papers, as well as Zangara’s death house memoir, brings this fatal footnote to life.

But, adept as he is, even Picchi can’t compete with the insane blanche of Zangara’s last words:

“Get to hell out of here, you sonofabitch [spoken to the attending minister] ... I go sit down all by myself.... Viva Italia! Goodbye to all poor peoples everywhere! ... Lousy capitalists! No picture! Capitalists! No one here to take my picture. All capitalists lousy bunch of crooks. Go ahead. Pusha da button!”

And away he went.

Blaise Picchi reads from The Five Weeks of Giuseppe Zangara at 6 p.m. Sept. 20 at the Historical Museum of Southern Florida, 101 W. Flagler St., Miami.

Comments? E-mail letters@miamisunpost.com. John Hood is online at therealjohnhood.com.