We will miss Gaeton Fonzi, who did excellent work on the staff of the House Select Committee on Assassinations regarding the role of the CIA and the anti-Castro elements they employed in covert operations against Cuba and assassination plans against Castro, and their intersection with Lee Harvey Oswald and the JFK assassination. He was a speaker at COPA in the past, and his book, The Last Investigation, is one of the best in the field on these topics.
Had the homicide investigator Richard Sprague retained his position as Director of the HSCA, he would have increased the level of real criminal investigators and inquiry and the Congress might have seriously met its mandate years ago. Sprague brought in the real investigators like Fonzi at the start, but their efforts were frustrated by the forced conclusion that organized crime alone was responsible for the murder of President Kennedy.
The Director that replaced Sprague, Robert Blakey, has belatedly realized he was lied to and misled by the CIA and other intelligence agencies to reach his foregone conclusions. Fonzi’s work points to the need to finish the real criminal inquiry into the unsolved homicide that helped to kill democracy in America.
Excerpted from a local obituary in Florida, Thursday, August 30, 2012
Gaeton Fonzi, 76, of Satellite Beach, died peacefully on Thursday, August 30 surrounded by his loving family. He is survived by Marie, his wife of 55 years, four children (Irene, Guy, Maria, and Christopher) and their spouses (Jeff, Dolly,Victor and Gina), eight grandchildren, and two great-grandchildren.
Previous to his involvement investigating the assassination, Mr. Fonzi was Senior Editor of Philadelphia Magazine where he wrote over 100 major feature articles and won the magazine’s first national journalism award. During this time, he published Annenberg: a Biography of Power and was featured in Best Magazine Articles 1968.
An honors journalism graduate of the University of Pennsylvania, Mr. Fonzi served in the US Army Infantry and rose to Captain in a Civil Affairs reserve unit. Upon moving to Miami in 1972, Mr. Fonzi became editor of Miami Magazine and senior editor of its sister publication, Gold Coast. Throughout his career, Mr. Fonzi wrote for New York Times Magazine, Esquire, Penthouse, Avenue Magazine, the New York Daily News and the Chicago Tribune. He won numerous awards including two local Sigma Delta Chi Awards and a National Sigma Delta Chi Award.
Mr. Fonzi was an avid runner who completed numerous races and three marathons. His greatest joy was sailing with loved ones on his Mariah Jones. He has been called the best investigative reporter who ever drew breath, a man whose courage and judgment could be trusted without hesitation. So who could dispute this lifetime Yankee fan’s claim that he was indeed Joe DiMaggio.
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