The Man Who Killed Kennedy

by Roger Stone, Mike Colapietro

  39. Kantor, The Ruby Coverup, pgs. 385–386.

  40. Ibid.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  RUBY

  Dallas nightclub owner Jack Ruby arrived at Dallas police headquarters at just after 7 o’clock on the evening of November 22, after the assassination. He quickly made his way to the third floor and toward room 317, the Homicide Bureau Office where Lee Harvey Oswald was being held and interrogated for the alleged killing of President Kennedy and Dallas Police Officer J. D. Tippit.1 In the office, Oswald would maintain a categorical denial of killing either, a steadfast claim he stuck to since being arrested at the Texas Theatre at 1:45 p.m. The interviews with Oswald conducted by Secret Service agent Thomas J. Kelley were mostly lost. At the instructions of Johnson’s Secret Service cohort James Rowley, the interrogations were not recorded.

  Later, to the Warren Commission, Rowley would claim the failure to properly question Oswald was an error caused by the confusion and time constraints caused by the assassination.

  “I don’t know whether we had tape recorders,” Rowley said, “but I think you must recognize, under the situation at that time, that Mr. Kelley was rushed down there, and even if he had the funds to rent a tape recorder, I don’t think he would have had the time to do so. Furthermore, I don’t think that he would have anticipated the type of confusion that he encountered as he described it to you, nobody would have.”2

  What little did come out of the interrogations provided a picture of a less-than-complacent Oswald.

  “I insist upon my constitutional rights,” Oswald said while detained in the room, “the way you are treating me, I may as well be in Russia.”3

  Outside the room, Ruby was looking for an opportunity. He attempted to enter but was turned away by the guard on duty; he was friendly with many officers in the department, but the guard assigned to the homicide bureau door, Clyde F. Goodson, could not identify him when later shown pictures.4

  One who could identify Ruby was detective August Mike Eberhardt, who was in the burglary and theft bureau, across the hall from the homicide office. Ruby had worked as an informant for Eberhardt on a case of check forgery and narcotics trafficking. There were at least two other detectives whom Ruby knew personally who were in the room as well.5

  Ruby opened the door to the burglary and theft bureau office and walked in with a greeting and a handshake for Eberhardt. He had brought corned beef sandwiches and coffee for the reporters and officers and told Eberhardt, notebook in hand, that he was there as a translator for the newspapers.

  “Of course, I knew that he could speak Yiddish,”6 Eberhardt said.

  Ruby had purposes beyond delivering deli sandwiches and assisting Israeli newspapers—he needed access to Oswald. He found out after hanging around for five to ten minutes that he could not get as close as was necessary, and he left.

  “Well, he said that he—he called me by my middle name he said, ‘It is hard to realize that a complete nothing, a zero like that, could kill a man like President Kennedy was,‘” Eberhardt recalled. “He said that ‘it is hard to understand how a complete nothing,’ that is what he referred to him as, ‘a complete nothing could have done this,’ and then he left, and then I didn’t notice where he went.”7

  Oswald was hardly a complete nothing, but Ruby most certainly wished he was. The alleged killing of Kennedy by Oswald had set into motion a chain of events that Ruby would have to follow through to the end.

  Ruby’s disposition following the assassination of President Kennedy was irregular to say the least—like that of a man who knew that he was doomed.

  Reporter Seth Kantor saw Ruby at Parkland Hospital in the emergency room area before his appearance at Dallas police headquarters. Ruby tugged on the back of Kantor’s coat to get his attention. In the estimation of Kantor, Ruby was “miserable. Grim. Pale. There were tears brimming in his eyes.”8

  Ruby asked Kantor if he thought it would be a good idea if he shut down the Carousel Club, the nightclub that Ruby ran and owned, for the next three days. Kantor told Ruby that he thought it would be a good idea and then hurried ahead to complete his story.9

  Ruby denied both the run-in with Kantor at Parkland Hospital and his appearance outside of Oswald’s interrogation room later that evening. The Warren Commission accepted his version of the story and concluded that Kantor and the detective must have been mistaken. If Ruby had been at the locations at the times witnesses gave, it would lend credence to the argument that his subsequent slaying of Oswald on national television, with almost an entire police force on hand, was premeditated.

  Even though the association between Oswald and Ruby is murky, it is crystal clear that both men had connections with Carlos Marcello. In August 1963, Oswald was arrested for public disturbance. The person who arranged for bail was “an associate of two of Marcello’s syndicate deputies.”10 The HSCA found that one of those deputies, Nofio Pecora, had received a telephone call from Ruby on October 30, 1963.11 Did Oswald know Ruby? According to witnesses, Oswald had been at the Carousel Club in the months before the shooting—at least once in the company of Ruby.

  Carousel patron Wilbur Waldon Litchfield positively identified Oswald as a man who came into the club, entered Ruby’s office, and approximately twenty minutes later, walked out with the nightclub owner. Upon walking out the office, Litchfield got a close look at Oswald, who passed within two feet of him.12 Carousel entertainer Bill Demar and stripper Karen Carlin also remembered Oswald attending the club. Demar told the Associated Press that he was positive that the man he had seen was Oswald.13

  Rose Cheramie, who warned Louisiana authorities about the Kennedy assassination plot and Jack Ruby’s involvement as early as November 20, also had seen Oswald in Ruby’s club.14

  In the mid-1970s, comedian Wally Weston also recalled Oswald showing up at the Carousel Club on at least two occasions.

  Oswald, according to Weston, “walked up in the middle of the club, right in front of the stage [where Weston was performing] and for no reason, he said, ‘I think you’re a communist.’ I said, ‘Sir, I’m an American. Why don’t you sit down?’ He said, ‘Well, I still think you’re a communist,’ so I jumped off the stage and hit him. Jack was right behind him when I hit him. He landed in Jack’s arms, and Jack grabbed him and said, ‘You—, I told you never to come in here.’ And he wrestled him to the door and threw him down the stairs.”15

  Weston said that he had withheld this information for such a long stretch of time due to fear. “So many people connected with it [the assassination investigation] died or disappeared.”16

  The Oswald whom Weston saw in the Carousel Club had all the personality traits of the Oswald imposters who were seen in Dallas and other locales before the assassination: tempestuous, violent, and overtly communist.

  Jack Ruby’s temperament could also swing wildly. Once, at a previous establishment owned by Ruby, the Silver Spur Club, Willis “Dub” Dickerson, a musician who worked for Ruby, was blocking an aisle with his chair. Ruby told him to move, and Dickerson told Ruby to “go to hell.”17 A fight ensued in which Ruby had Dickerson pinned against the wall. With Ruby’s left hand holding back his face, Jack proceeded to knee Dickerson repeatedly in the groin. Dickerson reacted by biting down on one of Ruby’s fingers, mutilating it. The tip of the finger would subsequently be amputated.18

  These were the types of businesses Ruby owned and ran. He would frisk strippers who he thought were pinching booze and had been known to submit them to lie-detector tests if he suspected them of providing customers with personal services.

  “This isn’t a goddamn bedroom,”19 Ruby once told one of his girls.

  The clubs were known for their rough-and-tumble clientele as well.

  “Jack had seven fights a week,” said Barney Weinstein, a club owner who competed with Ruby. “I’ve had three fights in thirty years.”20

  The violent nature of the clubs was the product of an owner who had grown up around criminal elements. Ruby was raised in Chicago, the
son of Polish immigrants. He grew up fighting in Jewish street gangs, in the Air Force, and eventually in his clubs. In 1939, he was implicated in the murder of Leon Cooke, head of the Chicago Waste Handlers Union for which he worked as an organizer.21 Ruby’s picture would appear in connection with the murder in the Chicago Tribune, but the arrest record on him disappeared.22 Ruby’s official title was union secretary, but he worked as a bagman.

  Ruby’s life played out as a low-level Mob associate until he died of cancer in prison in 1967. In 1947, when he moved from Chicago to Dallas, he was an associate of Paul Roland Jones, a member of the Chicago Mob outfit who was also a payoff man to the Dallas Police Department. Following a ten-year period of no communication between the two, Jones would appear the week before the assassination.

  Even though the Warren Commission determined that Ruby had no credible ties to the mob, it was found later by the HSCA that this conclusion had been in error.

  “The Committee also established associations between Jack Ruby and several individuals affiliated with the underworld activities of Carlos Marcello,” noted the HSCA Final Report. “Ruby was a personal acquaintance of Joseph Civello, the Marcello associate who allegedly headed organized crime activities in Dallas; he also knew other individual who have been linked with organized crime, including a New Orleans nightclub figure with whom Ruby was considering going into partnership in the fall of 1963.”23

  In another intersection of crime, oil, and politics, Civello represented Marcello at the Murchison mansion the night before the assassination.

  Ruby had ties to at least eight members of the Marcello crime family, the most prevalent of these being Civello. Bobby Jean Moore, a former hired hand of Civello who also periodically played piano at Jack Ruby’s Vegas Club, went to the Oakland FBI office a few days after the assassination. Moore had heard a colleague of Ruby on television discounting the Mob ties of the Dallas nightclub owner. Moore told the FBI that he “came to suspect that [Joseph] Civello and his partner Frank LaMonte were engaged in racket activities,” and that he “came to believe Civello and LaMonte were importing narcotics.”24

  Moore also informed the FBI that Jack Ruby “was also a frequent visitor and associate of Civello and LaMonte.”25

  Joe Campisi, the proprietor the Egyptian Lounge, a notorious organized crime hangout, was another Dallas Mob associate close to Ruby. He was good friends with the Marcello brothers; he golfed and gambled with them often. Every Christmas, Campisi would send the family 260 pounds of homemade sausage.26 Campisi was Ruby’s first visitor in jail after the slaying of Oswald. The two men had a ten-minute long conversation not recorded by the Dallas police.27 Ruby also had dinner with a member of the Marcello crime family the night before the assassination.28

  Ruby had ties not only to Marcello but was networked like the Mob itself. He had connections to Trafficante in Tampa through a friend to Trafficante associate Norman Rothman, and he helped Rothman with Cuban gun smuggling.29 Publicly, Trafficante said that he did not know Ruby, but he knew that the man was a Mob functionary.30 When Melvin Belli, Ruby’s Los Angeles defense attorney, later represented Trafficante attorney Frank Ragano in a libel suit, Santo had choice words for Ragano: “Whatever you do, don’t ask him about Jack Ruby. Don’t get involved. It’s none of your business.”31

  Ruby was also close with Lewis McWillie, known as a “Mooney Giancana underling.”32 Ruby had gone with McWillie on several mysterious trips to Cuba in 1959, a record he lied about to the Warren Commission considering “transportation records show that he was there twice in 1959, and CIA files report him there at least twice more after it became illegal for Americans to travel to Cuba.”33 Ruby was in Cuba to assist the release of Trafficante from Triscornia—a mission to protect the interests of organized crime.

  “It is a bad sign,” Sam Giancana said to his brother Chuck concerning the Mafia’s fortunes in Cuba. “Marcello’s worried about his drug rackets … We could lose a lot down there besides gambling and Santo Trafficante. But I’ll get him out… . Ruby’s workin’ on it. It’s gonna cost me, though, because Castro knows Santo was real close with all the old guard. I may have to go down to Havana myself. What the hell, I got investments to protect, right?”34

  When pressed by the HSCA to recollect the visit from Ruby, Trafficante again reinforced his denial of knowledge concerning Ruby.

  “There was no reason for this man to visit me,” Trafficante professed. “I have never seen this man before. I have never been to Dallas. I never had no contact with him. I don’t see why he was going to come and visit me.”35

  In the time leading up to killing Oswald, Ruby owed the government in excess of $39,000 on income and excise taxes. On November 19—three days before the murder of JFK—Ruby appeared at the office of his tax attorney Graham Koch and told him of a contact who would furnish Ruby the money to settle his debt. He then signed a power-of-attorney, giving the lawyer control over Ruby’s monetary issues with the government.36

  It was the CIA who developed Oswald as a patsy, and the Mob who used Ruby to eliminate him.

  The mercurial Ruby had ingratiated himself with the police department for years, providing the officers information and company; he also supplied drinks and dates through the Carousel Club. There were at least seventy officers whom Ruby knew by name.37

  Members of the Dallas Police Department helped Ruby gain access to the police headquarters basement to kill Oswald in clear view of the entire world. Oswald was scheduled to be transported to a maximum security cell at the Dallas County Jail in an armored van that was to be backed into the basement. He was expected to be moved at approximately 10 a.m., but it would not be until the moment that Ruby arrived on the scene that Oswald was paraded to his death.

  Ruby was at a Western Union office close to the police station sending $25 to one of his nightclub strippers at shortly after 11:00 a.m. The transaction was completed at 11:17 a.m., and Ruby proceeded to the police station with a loaded snub-nosed handgun in his right hip pocket.38

  “It just seemed like an act of God that Ruby got in there,” Police Chief Jesse Curry remarked. “I’ve thought about it a thousand times. We backtracked and walked the distance. We investigated from every possible angle.”

  It is laughable to think that it would be difficult for Ruby to gain access to the station that morning. Even though he was not a police officer, Ruby would walk in and out of the police station regularly. But is ridiculous to believe his explanation that, while out running errands, he had taken along a loaded gun, which he hadn’t planned on using that day and, in a flash of passion, shot Oswald who was led out to reporters at the exact time that he arrived because “someone owed this debt to our beloved president.”39

  In the words of FBI informant Edward Becker, “He (Ruby) was the ideal guy to get Oswald. As I see it, the original game plan was to knock off Oswald in jail. The Marcellos knew who Jack Ruby was, don’t kid yourself. They knew he had contacts in the police department, that he could get into the city jail at the right time … As for Ruby, he probably was happy as hell to get the hit. Now he could do something big for Uncle Carlos. It’s ridiculous to say that Ruby’s job on Oswald was emotional, spur of the moment. Listen, that was a professional job if there ever was one. Ruby just rolled in there like he had twenty years’ experience at it. Beautiful.”40

  Subsequently, there has been speculation that Dallas police did not help Ruby access the station. Instead, the Dallas policemen were a bumbling, Texas-sized version of the Keystone Kops.

  “So the Dallas PD came in, and at that point, they were a bunch of rednecks and didn’t know what they were doing,” Bill O’Reilly said recently while promoting his book Killing Kennedy. “Obviously, they let Oswald get killed.”

  In truth, it was not the incompetence but the corruption of the Dallas police force that led to Oswald’s slaying.

  The two officers most likely involving in aiding Ruby’s entrance and execution of Oswald were L. D. Miller and W. J. “Blackie”
Harrison, both of whom had gone out for coffee at the Deluxe Diner on Commerce Street in Downtown Dallas on the morning of Oswald’s public execution. Miller, who admitted to never going out socially with Harrison prior to that morning, could not remember a single thing the two had talked about at the diner.41 Harrison was equally evasive upon questioning.42

  The only thing certain about Harrison’s and Miller’s trip to the diner is that a call was placed to them with information pertinent to the Oswald transfer.

  Later, another call was placed to Ruby’s apartment from an unlisted number.43 Both Harrison and Miller returned to the station moments after the call. Upon their return, just before 11:00 a.m., at a time close to the transfer of Oswald, Harrison went alone to the station subbasement to purchase cigars from a vending machine. Also in the subbasement were four public telephones, any of which could have been used to transmit updated information to Ruby concerning the transfer of Oswald. Dallas Police Lieutenant Jack Revill, was questioned by Connecticut Senator Christopher Dodd in a 1978 HSCA hearing committee about the coincidental timing of Oswald’s transfer and Ruby’s arrival at the station:

  Mr. DODD: Prior to the shooting of Lee Harvey Oswald, in fact only minutes before, Jack Ruby sent a money order from the Western Union office. Did the special unit consider the possibility that Jack Ruby had utilized the sending of this money order to make his entrance to the basement and that the subsequent shooting of Oswald seemed a fluke or coincidence of timing?

  Mr. REVILL: We discussed it, yes, sir.

  Mr. DODD: What did you conclude?

  Mr. REVILL: If that be the case, then Ruby had to have had assistance from someone in the police department. To know exactly what time Oswald was to be transferred.

  Mr. DODD: Did the inspection unit assume that for Jack Ruby—I guess you have answered that by your response to your last question—you would have assumed he would have had to have assistance? Did you examine, or how thoroughly did you examine whether or not there was a possibility of such assistance.