Gaeton Fonzi

Gaeton Fonzi (October 10, 1935 – August 30, 2012 He grew up in West New York, New Jersey. He studied journalism at the University of Pennsylvania and edited its daily newspaper, The Daily Pennsylvanian. In 1967, following a three-year investigation, Fonzi co-authored a Philadelphia magazine article exposing the activities of Harry Karafin, an award-winning American investigative journalist associated with The Philadelphia Inquirer who sought and accepted payment from potential reporting subjects in order to avoid negative coverage. Karafin was fired and then convicted on 40 counts of blackmail and corrupt solicitation.

In 1970, Fonzi published a book about Walter Annenberg and his publishing empire, which included The Philadelphia Inquirer. In 1972, having helped Philadelphia to its first National Magazine Award, Fonzi left Philadelphia and moved to Miami, where he worked on Miami Monthly and Gold Coast magazines.

In 1975, he was hired by Senator Richard Schweiker as a researcher for the Church Committee into the activities of U.S. intelligence agencies, and in 1977 he was hired as a researcher for the House of Representatives Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA). According to The New York Times, Fonzi was recruited as an investigator for the HSCA "mainly on the strength of scathing magazine critiques he had written about the Warren Commission and its conclusion that Lee Harvey Oswald had acted alone in killing the president in Dallas on Nov. 22, 1963."

In 1980, Fonzi published an article in The Washingtonian on the JFK assassination. The article aroused enough interest from the CIA for it to investigate whether Fonzi had breached his 1978 non-disclosure agreement with the CIA, which he had signed in order to gain access to classified files (it concluded that Fonzi had not). The article later formed the basis for his 1993 book, The Last Investigation.

Publications Books Annenberg: A Biography of Power. New York: Weybright and Talley (1970). . UK edition: Annenberg: Ambassador Extraordinary. London: Blond (1979). The Last Investigation. New York: Thunder's Mouth Press (1993). . Later editions include a foreword by Marie Fonzi (2013) and afterword by Dick Russell (2018).

Articles "This Town for Hire." Philadelphia (1968), pp. 52-63. Photos by Francis Laping. . "Plutocrats at Sea: The Robber Barons Could Teach Today's Tycoons about Shipping Out in Style," with Christopher Gray. Avenue (1990).

Pamphlets City Planning's Tweedy Boss (1960)