Eric Garcetti is Mayor of Los Angeles. He has a sufficiently colorful family history to keep campaign biographers busy for a couple of years. Longer.
- Paternal side: His father’s grandfather, Massimo (Max), immigrated from Italy to Mexico. In Mexico, he eventually became a judge. He was hanged during the Mexican revolution.
- His father, Salvador, was brought to from Chihuahua, Mexico to the United States as child after the hanging.
- Salvador married Juanita Iberri of Arizona, one of 19 children of Mexican immigrants to the US.
- Salvador’s son and Eric’s father Gil Garcetti was elected a Los Angeles County District Attorney, best known for being the DA during the OJ Simpson murder trial.
- Maternal side: His great grandfather Louis Roth had been an apprentice tailor in Poland.
- His grandfather, Harry Roth, wanted to be a musician. Didn’t work out. He created a clothing brand instead – Louis Roth Clothing.
- His mother “Sukey” – there’s an American story – married Gil Garcetti.
- Eric went to the UCLA Lab School, the Harvard-Westlake Prep School, and Columbia. He won a Rhodes and went to the The Queen’s College, Oxford, then to the London School of Economics.
- He married Amy Westlake, a fellow Rhodes Scholar.
- Three more tidbits:
- He is a Lieutenant in the US Naval Reserves
- He is a jazz pianist and photographer
- He is actively Jewish, member of a synagogue; more observant that his parents.
He is smart. He is smart enough to know that mayors don’t get elected president. He expressed interest; later announced he would not run. If he were a New Yorker, he might have learned that from John Lindsay or Rudy Giuliani.