Gaeton Fonzi
Biographical Information
BIOGRAPHICAL INFORMATION
Gaeton Fonzi was raised in West New York, New Jersey, and was graduated
with journalism honors from the University of Pennsylvania in
1957. He served as an officer in the U.S. Army Infantry and a
Civil Affairs Reserve Company. He worked briefly as a reporter
with the Delaware County (Pa.) Daily Times and as an associate editor
with the Chilton Company.
In 1959, Fonzi joined Philadelphia magazine and was later senior
editor. Fonzi won the magazine's first national journalism award
and wrote more than 100 major feature articles.
In 1972, Fonzi became editor of Miami magazine and senior editor of its
sister publication, Gold Coast in Fort Lauderdale. In 1975, on
the basis of articles he had written on the subject while at
Philadelphia magazine, Fonzi was asked by U.S. Senator Richard
Schweiker, then a member of the Senate Select Committee on
Intelligence, to become a staff investigator probing the assassination
of President John F. Kennedy. In 1977, Fonzi was invited to join
the U.S. House Select Committee on Assassinations as a staff
investigator. Later, as a special team director, he wrote and
edited a major appendix, Volume X, of the Committee's Final
Report. Subsequently, his article for Washingtonian magazine,
detailing the political limitations of the Committee's investigation,
received national media coverage and earned the magazine record
readership. Fonzi has been a contributing editor of Gold Coast
and South Florida magazine, a feature writer for New York's Avenue
magazine and contributed to Penthouse, Esquire and The New York Times
Magazine. He has worked on special investigative
projects for the New York Daily News and the Chicago Tribune involving
the FBI's use of criminal informants in political investigations.
In addition he has been a consultant to "60 Minutes," "NBC Nightly
News," and "Inside Edition."
Among the awards given Fonzi's articles are the Philadelphia Business
Club Award, the Philadelphia Bar Association Award, two local Sigma
Delta Chi Awards, a National Sigma Delta Chi Award, four Florida
Magazine Association Awards, a City Regional Magazine Association
Award, a Florida-Atlantic University Enterprise Reporting Special Award
and a Washington Monthly Award. Fonzi has been a finalist in
Columbia's National Magazine Awards and has received the William Allen
White Investigative Journalism Award from the University of
Kansas. He has been a guest lecturer in journalism at the
University of Pennsylvania and the University of Michigan.
Fonzi is the co-author of an article TIME magazine honored in 1970 as
one of the ten most significant press stories of the decade. That
article appeared in the book, The Best Magazine Articles of 1968.
He is the author of Annenberg: A Biography of Power, published in 1970
by Weybright & Talley in New York and by Anthony Blond in London,
and of The Last Investigation, published by Thunder's Mouth Press
in 1993 and, in trade paperback, in 1994.
In 1995 he was one of a select few to attend an International
Conference on President Kennedy's assassination Rio de Janeiro and
later attended the meeting of historians with Cuban State Security in
Nassau on matters pertaining to the assassination.
Because of his government investigative experience on the Kennedy
assassination, he is recognized as an authority on those aspects of the
assassination involving anti-Castro Cubans and the Intelligence
agencies. He is often consulted by other authors and researchers
for advise, documentation and firsthand knowledge of his investigations
into the subject.
He is a member of the South Florida Researcher's Group and a participant in the Researcher Directory.
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