Reclaiming History

by Vincent Bugliosi

  *As indicated earlier in the book, Ruby’s affection for the police was not one-sided. Although many of his police friends and acquaintances tried to disassociate themselves from him once he shot Oswald (9 HSCA 1120 note 49), there can be no question about the relatively close relationship Ruby had with Dallas law enforcement. In fact, the gun that Ruby used to kill Oswald, a .38 Colt Cobra, was registered to a friend of his, Dallas police detective Joe Cody! Rather than buying a wall safe at his club, which Cody told him would cost, with wiring, a couple of thousand dollars, Ruby took Cody’s suggestion to “just get a pistol” as protection for when he carried the day’s receipts home with him. About a year or so before the assassination, Cody and Ruby went to a hardware store in West Dallas that sold guns (Ray Brantley’s hardware store), and to save Ruby the eight or nine dollars in sales tax, a tax police didn’t have to pay when they bought guns in Texas at the time, Cody paid the $62.50 purchase price himself and Ruby reimbursed him. After Cody heard the announcement that Ruby had shot Oswald, he said, “It all hit me that Jack Ruby was a friend of mine and that I had bought that pistol for him, and the pistol was in my name.” (Sneed, No More Silence, pp.470–471)

  *The Rubensteins were almost as nomadic as the Oswalds, though, unlike the Oswalds, the changes of address were always to another place in the same city, Chicago. Between 1911, when Jack was born, and 1933, a period of just twenty-two years, the Rubenstein family had moved ten times (CE 1185, 22 H 304).

  †All the books on Ruby say he grew up in Chicago’s “west side,” and those who grew up with him in Chicago told the FBI that Ruby “grew up in the neighborhood of the west side” (CE 1266, 22 H 371). Ruby himself said he was born on the west side of Chicago and grew up there (Hall [C. Ray] Exhibit No. 1, 20 H 37). Yet, his brother Earl told the Warren Commission that the Rubenstein family grew up in “what is known as the east side of Chicago” (14 H 366). Richard Lindberg, a Chicago author and historian who has written eleven books on Chicago’s crime and history, says that Ruby’s brother, who had long since moved out of Chicago, “spoke loosely and his words should not be interpreted literally. Ruby grew up in Chicago’s ‘near west side,’ the word near meaning close to the downtown Chicago area. Back then, and for years, Chicago had no east side. If the term was used at all, it referred, jokingly, to Lake Michigan. The term east side was coined in the 1980s by real estate people who created a little development near the Gold Coast, the affluent lakefront area of Chicago.” Lindberg did allow that the Maxwell Street area was on the “eastern side of Chicago’s near west side,” the dividing line between the west side and the commercial development area of Chicago’s downtown area being Halsted Street. (Telephone interview of Richard Lindberg by author on February 11, 2005)

  *Joseph lived away from home for fifteen years, part of the time with another woman, before returning. Since he worked very sporadically and since Fannie only did crocheting for some shops for a limited period, Jack and his siblings, for the most part, had to support their parents with money they earned from whatever jobs they could get, and Joseph having a separate apartment increased the burden, causing them to ask him to move back home in 1936, which he did. (CE 1281, 22 H 392; CE 1281, 22 H 407) Even when Ruby was in the military, he arranged for a deduction from his pay to be sent to his parents (CE 1706, 23 H 185).

  *The prophet Mohammed said, “Tell me you can move a mountain, but don’t tell me that people change.” As we’ve seen earlier in this book, Jack Ruby, the Chicago street hustler, was selling “twistboards” around the time he murdered Lee Harvey Oswald some forty years later.

  †A boyhood friend of Jack’s whom he idolized, Barney Ross, was so good with his fists that he became the welterweight champion of the world in the late 1930s, by all accounts one of the greatest Jewish fighters in boxing history (15 H 21, WCT Hyman Rubenstein).

  ‡Ruby hung around with hustlers because that’s what he was. When the FBI, days after the assassination, interviewed a series of old friends of Ruby’s from his Chicago days, the words that kept coming up to describe him were “hustler” and “ticket scalper,” but never “criminal” (FBI Record 124-10070-10295, November 26, 1963, pp.1–2, 4, 6).

  *A boyhood friend of Jack’s remembers the incident more clearly. Jack, he said, was probably around fifteen at the time, and was struck hard on the head by a policeman who caught Jack trying to sneak into one of the most famous fights in boxing history, the “long count” heavyweight championship fight in 1927 at Chicago’s Soldier Field between Jack Dempsey and Gene Tunney. In the seventh round, Dempsey knocked Tunney down but didn’t immediately go to a neutral corner, as required. The referee didn’t start counting until four or five seconds later, which, some claim, gave Tunney time to recuperate. (Others say that if the count had started when it should have, Tunney would have simply gotten up earlier.) Tunney went on to win in a unanimous ten-round decision. And Ruby went on, his friend seems to recall, to having a metal plate installed in his head because of the severe injury. (CE 1191, 22 H 311)

  *That mental illness ran in the Ruby family is clear. Jack himself, we all know, had considerable mental and emotional problems. His brother Earl said that Jack received psychiatric help when he was ten (14 H 414–415, WCT Earl Ruby), though this has never been confirmed. Earl himself was hospitalized in August of 1960 harboring thoughts of self-destruction by sleeping pills, gun, or asphyxiation (FBI Record 124-10062-10290, January 13, 1964, p.1).

  *Jack’s sister Eileen often felt that Jack was her mother’s favorite child (15 H 278 WCT Eileen Kaminsky; see also 14 H 120, WCT Alice Reaves Nichols).

  When Jack’s father died many years later, while Jack was living in Dallas, Jack, not a devout Orthodox Jew, and accustomed to attending synagogue services only on high holidays, attended the synagogue twice daily for eleven months (CE 1183, 22 H 296, Interview of Rabbi Hillel Silverman by Warren Commission staff member Murray J. Laulicht on July 20, 1964).

  *The Damon Runyon allusion was an apropos one. Runyon, the legendary Broadway reporter and writer, captured in his short stories the era between the 1930s and the 1950s. His stories were populated by smalltime crooks, broads, hustlers, and cops on the beat operating in a street world of neon lights, burlesque joints, racetracks, and boxing clubs. Some of these stories were adapted to Broadway and the movies (e.g., Guys and Dolls), and one might say that Runyon had been writing the story of Ruby’s life right up to the moment Jack fired the shot that forever plucked him out of that world.

  *The Carousel was one of three burlesque houses in downtown Dallas, the other two being the Theatre Lounge and the Colony Club (13 H 319, WCT Andrew Armstrong Jr.; 15 H 212, WCT Thomas Stewart Palmer).

  *Everyone agreed that Ruby was, as former Dallas assistant district attorney Bill Alexander said, “a publicity seeker.” As an example, Alexander said, “When they had boxing matches at the city auditorium, Jack would come in after the preliminary, just before the main event, and while the house lights were on, he’d walk down the aisles greeting everybody and inviting them to the club that night. He made sure that everybody saw that he was seated ringside.” (Sneed, No More Silence, pp.549–550)

  *The items found in Jack Ruby’s white, two-door, 1960 Oldsmobile, with Texas license plate number PD-768, after it was impounded on November 24, 1963, following his shooting of Oswald, were listed in great detail in eighteen pages of an FBI report. Reading through the items found in the glove compartment, trunk, and interior of his car conjures up visions of a homeless person’s car overflowing with all of his life’s belongings. It is comical, and inevitably sad. To give the reader an idea of what was contained in Ruby’s rolling, low-brow thrift shop, the following incomplete list is offered: numerous business cards, notebooks, unpaid traffic tickets, newspapers and clippings, paint bucket and paddle, bars of soap, pistol holder, adding machine, dog muzzle, phonograph records, door threshold molding, old telegrams, yellow legal pads, income tax book, three American Express traveler’s checks, transcript of a radio show, a
paper sack containing $837.50, box of razor blades, staples, blanket, bathing cap, umbrella, roll of toilet paper, receipts, golf shoes, several golf balls, jar of Coffee-Mate, jar of dietary food, two spotlight lenses, several “Twist Waist Exercisers,” bail bond cards, a suit and pair of slacks, sport coat, empty wallet, several Dallas Morning News newspapers, extension cord, four photographs (including one of the “Impeach Earl Warren” signs), partially filled can of varnish stain, chrome fender molding strip, maps, rubber tips for chair legs, microphone, blank bank drafts, book of stamps, bottle of deodorant, one pair of ladies’ gloves, car insurance policy, two beer-can openers, twelve cigarette butts, two packets of tooth space cleaners, leather belt, pair of horn-rimmed glasses, two tie clasps, two pairs of aluminum knuckles, various items of advertising, a wristwatch, address book, magazines, box of hardware, box of stationery, box of handkerchiefs, gooney bird in plastic bag, forty-two permanent pass cards to the Carousel to be laminated, another seventeen permanent pass cards, numerous scraps of paper with writing on them, and much more, including a carton of several hundred glossy 8 × 10 photos of exotic dancer Jada. And even with all this, there was still room in his trunk for the spare tire and jack! (CE 1322, 22 H 501–514; see also CE 2417, 25 H 518–520)

  *The twistboard was the latest gadget Jack was selling, and he was very serious about it. His roommate, George Senator, said that in the last few weeks before the assassination, Ruby had been getting up many mornings at eight or nine o’clock, earlier than normal, to visit department stores in Dallas in an effort to promote the board (CD 106, p.89, FBI interview of George Senator on December 19, 1963). Just, of course, what you would expect a big mob hit man to be doing in the weeks and days leading up to the biggest day of his mob career, when he would be “silencing” Oswald for them.

  *One big reason Ruby had for cozying up to the police over and above any fondness for them (one member of law enforcement thought it was the reason) was to protect perhaps his most valuable asset, his liquor license, commonly referred to as the “beer license” because beer was by far the main alcoholic beverage sold at the Carousel (which also, as noted earlier, sold champagne) and other clubs in Dallas. The beer license had to be renewed every year, and the Dallas Police Department was one of five agencies (it would seem the most important one) that recommended whether the license should be approved or disapproved. (Sneed, No More Silence, pp.540–541)

  *Although Ruby never maintained to anyone that he had gotten away with anything because of his association with the Dallas Police Department, an acquaintance of Ruby’s did tell the FBI that “he did not personally like Ruby as Ruby always attempted to be the big shot and boasted not only to him but to other people in his presence that he could do anything he wanted in Dallas as he had enough information on the Police Department and judges that he could not be convicted” (CE 1746, 23 H 354, FBI interview of Walter Clewis on November 27, 1963). This is pure braggadocio, of course. Whatever Ruby may have learned about the private peccadillos of some officers or judges could never compromise and immobilize the entire Dallas Police Department and Dallas judiciary.

  *Though Jack Ruby was no more of a mobster than you or I, he liked to intimate that he had contacts with underworld figures. “Jack would like to put on a facade that he was connected,” said former Dallas police sergeant Patrick Dean, who was friendly with Ruby (HSCA Record 180-10073-10050, November 15, 1977, p.19). At least one Ruby acquaintance, Irvin Charles Mazzei, the regional director for the American Guild of Variety Artists, said that on one occasion Ruby actually told him he was connected with the “Syndicate” in Chicago and used to work for it. But Ruby, at the time, was trying hard to get Mazzei to stop Ruby’s nightclub competition, Abe and Barney Weinstein, from using amateurs as strippers at their club (see later discussion), and Mazzei felt that Ruby was always trying to impress him, Ruby also showing Mazzei a gun he carried in his belt and an honorary Dallas Police Department membership card, and telling Mazzei he had “ins” with the Dallas Police Department. (CE 1543, 23 H 34–35) He also told a business associate, with whom he had had a fist fight and many disagreements, that he had contacts with various underworld figures, but only mentioned one by name, Los Angeles mobster Mickey Cohen, saying he used to know Cohen (CE 1228, 22 H 336).

  Ruby also tried to create the impression he was a “tough guy.” Lawyer Luis Kutner, who knew Ruby from his Chicago days, recalled Ruby wearing “sharp” suits back then as well as a pearl gray fedora with the broad brim turned down in front, a style Al Capone had made a hoodlum fad (New York Times, November 26, 1963, p.15). But was Ruby, in fact, a tough guy? “He wasn’t a tough guy,” says Chicago police captain Louis Capparelli, the longtime commander of the Maxwell District of Chicago, where Ruby was born. “But he was a very aggressive salesman when he was selling something.” (New York Times, November 26, 1963, p.15)

  †Jones was just one of about twenty Chicago mobsters who were sent to Dallas in 1946 to open up the city for them. One of them was a reputed friend of Ruby’s from Chicago’s west side named Paul Labriola, who was slain in 1954. (New York Times, November 26, 1963, p.15; Scheim, Contract on America, pp.81–83)

  *All of Ruby’s long-distance calls from his home and from the Carousel Club between September 26, 1963, and November 22, 1963, are set forth by the Warren Commission in Commission Exhibit No. 2303 (25 H 237–245).

  *Indeed, Earl Ruby told author Gerald Posner, “I gave Irwin Weiner’s number to my brother. I had gone to school with Weiner…He was a big bondsman for everyone, and he handled the Mafia…I thought he might be able to help Jack with the union. Jack didn’t even know Weiner, for God’s sake” (Posner, Case Closed, p.363). However, in Earl Ruby’s testimony before the HSCA years earlier, in 1978, he did not mention, as one would have expected him to, that he had advised his brother to call Weiner in 1963 (9 HSCA 1043).

  *Not that Baker needs any support, but anti-conspiracy author Posner says that Baker’s telling the FBI in 1964 about the subject of his conversation with Ruby, independent of knowing that Ruby had also told the police that the conversation was about his labor problems, confirms that that was what the conversation was really about (Posner, Case Closed, p.364). But that presupposes the very point in issue—that Ruby’s call to Baker had nothing to do with the assassination. I mean, if it was about the assassination, we could expect Ruby and Baker to be on the same page as to the alleged subject matter of this conversation.

  †In Case Closed, Posner writes that the Warren Commission did not place those like “Weiner, Pecora, or Baker under oath. However, the telephone calls are not evidence of a conspiracy to kill JFK, since most of the calls were made before the President’s trip to Dallas was even announced” (Posner, Case Closed, p.365 footnote). This is a little misleading in that although many phone calls fell into that category, the calls he cites, the same ones the HSCA found troubling, were made on October 26, October 30, and November 7 and 8, all after the president’s trip to Texas was announced on September 26, 1963 (CE 1368–1369, 22 H 620–621).

  *The Warren Commission said it found it “difficult to attach credence to a newspaper reporter’s contrary statement [to the FBI] that his undisclosed ‘syndicate sources’ revealed Ruby was connected with organized crime and confidence games” (WR, p.790; newspaper reporter: CE 1321, 22 H 495–496). There are several reasons for rejecting this. It is totally at odds with what others have said about Jack Ruby and with everything we know about Ruby. Also, the reporter, a crime writer for the Chicago Daily News, apparently never thought enough of the information to write about it in his own newspaper (apparently this reporter was the one out of a thousand reporters who didn’t like scoops), and finally, he refused to identify his sources. We know that the information provided by the “sources” was incorrect in two instances. They told the reporter that Ruby had been arrested in Milwaukee on bookmaking charges and in Chicago on charges of “confidence games,” but there is no evidence of either of these arrests. He was also told by his “source
s” that Ruby was part of a group of Chicago mobsters who went to Dallas in 1947 to take over gambling. This is an old charge that we have seen has been proved false.

  *Author Gerald Posner agrees with the conspiracy theorists that the Warren Commission “underplayed Jack Ruby’s underworld associations” (Posner, Case Closed, p.411). But it would have been hard for the Commission to underplay those associations when none were of any significance to underplay. If any were, what were they? Even the HSCA never came up with anything. And even assuming, for the sake of argument, that the Warren Commission underplayed Ruby’s underworld associations, it couldn’t have been, as many conspiracy theorists allege, intentional. To believe that, one would have to believe that the seven distinguished Commission members were trying to protect the American Mafia and cover up their possible involvement in the assassination.