Uncle John's Great Big Bathroom Reader (72 page)

J
ack Ruby was a 52-year-old nightclub owner well-known to the Dallas underworld and the police. On Sunday, November 24—two days after Kennedy was killed—Ruby became known to the whole world. As the Warren Report tells it:

At approximately 11:20 a.m. Oswald emerged from the basement jail office flanked by detectives on either side...a man suddenly darted out from an area on the right of the cameras where newsmen had been assembled. The man was carrying a Colt .38 revolver in his right hand and, while millions watched on television, he moved quickly to within a few feet of Oswald and fired one shot into Oswald’s abdomen. Oswald groaned with pain as he fell to the floor and quickly lost consciousness...he was pronounced dead at 1:07 p.m.

The man who killed Oswald was Jack Ruby. He was instantly arrested and, minutes later, confined in a cell on the fifth floor of the Dallas police jail. Under interrogation, he denied that the killing of Oswald was in any way connected with a conspiracy involving the assassination of President Kennedy. He maintained that he had killed Oswald in a temporary fit of depression and rage over the President’s death.

On March 14, 1964, Ruby was found guilty of killing Oswald and was sentenced to death. Following an appeal, however, Ruby’s conviction was overturned in October 1966—which meant he could have gone free on bail within months. But it never happened. Two months later, on December 9, Ruby was diagnosed as having inoperable cancer. On January 3, 1967, he died.

WAS IT A CONSPIRACY?

Was Jack Ruby just a distraught admirer of John F. Kennedy, acting on
his own—or did the Mafia order him to silence Lee Harvey Oswald?

Anguished American?

• In an interview with the FBI, Ruby said he’d shot Oswald because he “had cried a great deal,” and his anguish about the president’s death finally “reached the point of insanity.” The national media duly reported Ruby’s grief and love of the Kennedy family as fact. Yet on Saturday, the day after Kennedy was slain, Ruby was seen at the Dallas police station joking with reporters and passing out cards to his strip joint.

• Later that same day, he visited a newspaper production room to display a “twistboard” exercising device that he was trying to sell. “Considerable merriment developed when one of the women employees of the
Times-Herald
demonstrated the board, and Ruby himself put on a demonstration.” (Warren Report)

• At a polygraph hearing in 1964, Ruby himself dismissed the story he had told the FBI: “If I loved the President so much, why wasn’t
I
at the parade [motorcade]?...It’s strange that perhaps I didn’t vote for Kennedy, or didn’t vote at all, that I should build up such a great affection for him.”

Ruby and the Mob

• Jack Ruby’s connections to the Mafia and Teamster President Jimmy Hoffa—which went back thirty years—were well-known to the Dallas police and the FBI. Yet, strangely, the news media largely ignored those ties.

• After being declared an “incorrigible youth” and put into a foster home, Ruby (known then as Jack Rubenstein) gravitated to crime. Boxer Barney Ross, a close friend of Ruby, told the FBI that he “might have run innocuous errands for Capone.”

• Ruby may have been a Mob hit man. A December 9, 1939, story in the
Chicago Tribune
describes Jack Rubenstein as the prime suspect in the killing of Leon Cooke, the honest president of a local Teamster’s Union, No. 20467. Because police records on the case disappeared, it’s unclear how the case was resolved, but Local 20467 was soon taken over by the Mafia.

• According to David Scheim in his book,
Contract on America
,
Rubenstein moved from Chicago to Dallas in 1947, as part of a Mafia takeover of Dallas crime. There he changed his name to Ruby and bought the first of several bars. Scheim says that Ruby was a Mob “lieutenant” who made sure Chicago bosses got their cut from Dallas gambling, prostitution, and narcotics. In time, Ruby became the Mob’s “pay-off man for the Dallas Police” and used those contacts to get into the police station to kill Oswald.

• According to FBI and U.S. Army Intelligence reports quoted in
Contract on America
, Ruby “was active in arranging illegal flights of weapons from Miami to the Castro organization in Cuba” in the 1950s. When Castro double-crossed the Mob and threw it out of Cuba, Ruby then began supplying weapons to anti-Castro Cubans being trained by the CIA, according to several sources.

A Mafia-Ruby-CIA Hypothesis

• According to
Double Cross
, an account of the life of Mafia boss Sam Giancana, Ruby did more than kill Oswald. The book alleges that a CIA-Mafia plot resulted in Kennedy’s death and asserts that Giancana “put Ruby in charge of overseeing the Outfit’s [Mafia’s] role in the assassination, collaborating in Dallas with the [CIA] government agents.”

•
Double Cross
also claims that Oswald—whose uncle worked for New Orleans mobster Carlos Marcello—was in on the plot and was killed so he wouldn’t talk. So, because Ruby was “the person representing the Outfit in Dallas, the task had quite naturally fallen to Ruby to silence Oswald when he was unexpectedly captured alive.”

• At least one part of
Double Cross’s
theory has been corroborated. In the mid-1970s, mobster John “Handsome Johnny” Roselli, who had close ties to Ruby, “began to describe Ruby as ‘one of our boys’ and speak of Ruby’s having been ordered to eliminate Oswald to silence him.” Roselli repeated that claim to columnist Jack Anderson, Senate investigators, and others before his dismembered body was found in an oil drum in Miami’s Biscayne Bay. (
Contract on America)

FBI Ties

• Author Jim Marrs corroborates Ruby’s Mafia-CIA ties and implicates one more U.S. agency in his book
Crossfire:
“In early 1959, at
a time when Jack Ruby may have been involved in smuggling activities with Cubans, he contacted the FBI and said he wanted to provide the Bureau with information....The relationship between Ruby and the Bureau was mentioned in a letter from Hoover to the Warren Commission dated June 9, 1964.” The letter remained classified until 1975.

• In the letter, Hoover claimed that Ruby “furnished no information whatsoever and further contacts with him were discontinued.” However, Bureau records show that FBI agents met eight times with Ruby between April and October of 1959—which makes Hoover’s assertion extremely suspect. (
Crossfire)

The Songbird

• When Earl Warren, Gerald Ford, and lawyers from the Warren Commission interviewed Ruby in Dallas on June 7, 1964, he begged them eight times to take him back to Washington, because he feared for his life if he told the truth in Dallas. The commissioners refused.

• When it became obvious that the commissioners were leaving without really probing for what he knew, Ruby persisted, “You can get more out of me, let’s not break up too soon.” Finally, despairing, he said, “Well, you won’t ever see me again. I tell you that.... A whole new form of government is going to take over the country, and I know I won’t live to see you another time.” (Warren Report)

• Not long before his death, Ruby told psychiatrist Werner Teuter that Kennedy’s assassination was “an act of overthrowing the government,” that he knew “who had Kennedy killed,” that he had been part of that plot, and that he “was framed to kill Oswald.”

Ruby’s Death

• On October 5, 1966, the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals overturned Ruby’s conviction and ordered a new trial. It seemed likely that Ruby would be released in a matter of months; authorities anticipated that he would receive a short prison sentence, and that his time served would count against it. (
Crossfire)

• “On December 9, 1966...Ruby was moved from the Dallas County Jail to Parkland Hospital after complaining of persistent coughing and nausea. Doctors initially diagnosed his problem as
‘pneumonia.’ The next day, however, the diagnosis was changed to cancer and shortly after, it was announced that Ruby’s lung cancer was too far advanced to be treated by surgery or radiation.” At 9 a.m. on January 3, 1967, “he suffered a spasm and, despite emergency procedures, he was pronounced dead at 10:30 a.m.” (ibid.)

• Ruby believed that he had been injected with a carcinogen. One of Ruby’s Dallas County jailers, Deputy Sheriff Al Maddox, told researchers in 1982 that “a phony doctor came in from Chicago” who, though supposed to care for all the inmates, “spent half his time up there talking with Ruby.” One day, said Maddox, Ruby told him that that doctor, while pretending to treat him for a cold, had injected him with cancer cells. When Maddox said, “You don’t believe that shit,” Ruby replied, “I damn sure do!” (ibid.)

• Could Ruby’s claim be credible? Perhaps. Such carcinogens were known at the time. A 1952 CIA memo, for example, reported on the cancer-causing effects of beryllium: “This is certainly the most toxic inorganic element and it produces a peculiar fibrotic tumor at the site of local application. The amount necessary to produce these tumors is a few micrograms.” (ibid.)

FOOTNOTE

Did Ruby Know Oswald?

A number of witnesses claimed they saw Jack Ruby and Lee Harvey Oswald together
before
the assassination of JFK. But the Warren Report says: “All assertions that Oswald was seen in the company of Ruby or anyone else...have been investigated. None of them merits any credence.”

• Karen Carlin, a stripper at Ruby’s Carousel Club, talked with the Secret Service on the evening of Oswald’s death. She told them that Oswald and Ruby had been involved together in a plot to assassinate President Kennedy. Terrified, she asked that any information that she gave “be kept confidential to prevent retaliation.” Months later she was found shot to death in a Houston hotel. The Warren Report says: “Mrs. Carlin was...not certain that the man was Oswald nor was she sure where she had seen him.”

• The Associated Press reported that William Crowe, an entertainer
who specialized in memory tricks, said he was “positive” he had seen and interacted with Oswald at the Carousel Club. Crowe later told the
Dallas Morning News
that after the AP story appeared, the FBI advised him to go into hiding for a while. The Warren Report quoted Crowe as telling the Commission: “I never stated definitely, positively, and they said that I did, and all in all, what they had in the paper was hardly even close to what I told them.” The report added: “When asked how certain he was that the man he saw was Oswald, Crowe testified: ‘The face seemed familiar as some faces do, and I had associated it with a patron that I had seen in the club a week before. That was about it.’”

• While seated in the Carousel Club, Dallas attorney Carroll Jarnagin “overheard Jack Ruby—whom he knew well—talking with another man. Jarnagin heard the man tell Ruby, ‘Don’t use my real name. I’m going by the name O. H. Lee.’” According to Jarnagan, they discussed killing Governor John Connally and Robert Kennedy. Jarnagin gave the Texas Department of Public Safety this information—before JFK’s assassination—but nothing came of the warning.
(Crossfire)

RECOMMENDED READING

•
Crossfire: The Plot to Kill Kennedy
, by Jim Marrs (Carroll & Graf, 1989)

•
Contract on America: The Mafia Murders of JFK
, by David Scheim (Zebra, 1991)

•
Double Cross
, by Sam & Chuck Giancana (Warner Books, 1992)

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TALES OF THE CIA

Quiz:
What motto is inscribed on the wall of the CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia?

A)
“Keep the Faith”
B)
“And Ye Shall Know the Truth and the Truth Shall Make You Free”
C)
“A Secret Kept Is a Secret Saved”

Answer: B

1—a

In 1978, Gary Guthrie, a disc jockey for WAKY AM in Louisville, Kentucky, was in the process of breaking up with his wife. One night, a friend played them the new Neil Diamond album. Guthrie recalls: “When it got to ‘You Don’t Bring Me Flowers,’ my wife started crying and this other lady started crying. I knew it was special, but I couldn’t help feeling there was something missing. I just couldn’t figure out what. A few days later, the new Barbra Streisand LP came into the radio station, and she was doing the song too. It set off this image in my mind, in
The Sound of Music
, when Christopher Plummer and Julie Andrews were onstage singing ‘Edelweiss’ at the Austrian Music Festival...and a lightbulb! It needed
two
people singing it to each other.”

The Diamond and Streisand versions happened to be in the same key. Guthrie had a brainstorm. “I went into the studio, and after sixteen hours and five days of putting things together, I came out with my finished product of ‘You Don’t Bring Me Flowers.’” Guthrie had spliced the songs together to create a duet.