STERN: And then what happened?
SORRELS: He was told that they were going to move him to the county jail, and he requested that he be permitted to get a shirt out of his--the clothes that had been brought in, that belonged to him, because the shirt he was wearing at the time he had been apprehended was taken, apparently for laboratory examination. And so Captain Fritz sent and got his clothes and, as I recall it, he selected a dark colored kind of a sweater type shirt, as I recall it. And then he was taken out, and, at that time, as I recall it, Inspector Kelley and I left and went up to---I say up---down the hall to the executive office area of the police department, and to the office of Deputy Chief Batchelor.
And we remained in that vicinity. I looked out the window, and saw the people across the street, on Commerce Street, people were waiting there. And I saw an individual that I know by the name of Ruby Goldstein, who is known as Honest Joe, that has a second-hand tool and pawnshop down on Elm Street, and everyone around there knows him. He was leaning on the car looking over in the direction of the ramp there at the police station. And we were just waiting around there. And for a few minutes I was talking to one of the police officers that was on duty up there in that area. And he had made the remark, “talking about open windows, I see one open across the street over there” at a building across the street.
I looked over there. I didn’t see any activity at the window. And we had walked out into the reception area of the executive office of the Chief of Police there when this same police officer said that he just heard that Oswald had got shot in the stomach in the basement by Jack Rubin, as I understood at that time, R-u-b-i-n--who was supposed to run a night club. Inspector Kelley and I then went just as hurriedly as we could to the basement.
STERN: As I understand it, Mr. Sorrels, you covered all the relevant information from this point of time on with Mr. Hubert yesterday.
SORRELS: Yes. And actually back just a little bit.254
The Honest Joe’s Gun and Pawn Shop vehicle sighting was an important one, at least to Forrest Sorrels. To Forrest, it showed that the friendly Rubin Goldstein may have information about the assassination. Of what sort he did not yet know. But that the Honest Joe’s Edsel was seen on the day of the assassination, and that Forrest saw Rubin Goldstein in the same car on the ramp entrance of the Dallas Police Department where Jack Ruby entered the day Lee Harvey Oswald was shot could not have been coincidental. He determined to interview the man who knew very well.
Rubin Goldstein, also called ‘Ruby’ the owner of Honest Joe’s Gun and Pawn Shop, was a Jewish merchant who had moved from New York to Dallas in 1931.255 He and his brothers David and Isaac opened up pawn businesses along Elm Street. His pawn shop catered to poor blacks and whites who would pawn anything from false teeth to prosthetic arms for quick cash.256 Also, several Dallas Police officers and sheriff’s frequented his business, as well as celebrities like Sammy Davis Jr. and Tony Curtis. Honest Joe was also a friend of Jack Ruby, who frequented Honest Joe’s often. In later years, Honest Joe would place a picture of Jack Ruby in his store for posterity. When Jack Ruby died, Goldstein was an appraiser for his estate as he was familiar with the .38 revolver Ruby used to shoot Oswald.257
Forrest knew of Goldstein from his frequent abuse of the Texas Blue Laws. The Texas Blue Law was a law in force at the time to prevent businesses from being open every Sunday. Goldstein, the ever clever pawnbroker, found ways to circumvent the law, and one way was by buying a shack next to his shop so he could bypass the Blue Law258 and be open on consecutive Sundays. He called the shack, ‘Truthful Joe’s’.259 Forrest had talked to Ruby Goldstein often. He even went to Honest Joe’s the day of JFK’s assassination and asked to see a Mannlicher-Carcano rifle; one of the two weapons purported to have been used by Oswald. Goldstein happily showed him one, thereby affirming to Forrest that Oswald could have gotten the rifle from Honest Joe’s.260 Goldstein also owned an Edsel station wagon covered with advertising signs and with a nonfunctional submachine gun on the hood. He would often drive downtown in the vehicle as a way to advertise. The submachine gun on the hood was as distinctive as Goldstein; that’s why Forrest had recognized it that day in Dallas. It was the only car on the street. He wasn’t surprised that the Dallas Police had allowed him access to the motorcade route that day: everyone knew Honest Joe liked to advertise. But that he was there again on November 24th, 1963 made Forrest suspicious. Why wasn’t it suspicious to the Warren Commission? Or was this just one more thing they needed to cover up from the American people. The Warren Commission never interviewed Rubin Goldstein and no record has been found of any agency interviewing him after the assassination. The only researcher to interview him was Jones Harris.
It has been well-documented that both the CIA and the FBI failed to inform the commission about their various arrangements with the Mafia, another prime suspect in Kennedy’s killing for conspiracy realists. They considerably underplayed Oswald killer Jack Ruby‘s organized crime ties. “The evidence does not establish a significant link,” the commission asserted, but in fact, Ruby was in frequent contact with mobsters, both Jewish and Italian.261 According to the House Select Committee on Assassinations report, Ruby was casually employed as a provisional criminal informant in regards to those criminal organizations.262
Why didn’t the Warren Commission enrobe itself in democracy? There was more than enough money to give them everything they needed to get to the bottom of this travesty. Why wasn’t honesty upheld? The moral, circumstantial, emotional, and intellectual aspects of the case should have been transparent to anyone reading the final report. During the quick formation of the Warren Commission, several key witnesses were still alive to give testimony. Today that isn’t so and vital evidence and testimony has been lost. Unfortunately, in 1964 there was an agenda: and that agenda was to protect the government under the guise of letting the nation heal. With the many mistakes the Warren Commission made in their findings, there would be no way for the nation to heal; the wound would be perpetually opened with each new lie.
Forrest wasn’t the only one to see the vehicle that day. Jones Harris saw it in the enlarged frame he had gotten from the camera original Orville Nix film… the one from UPI.263 The studies he and his friend Bernie Hoffman made with cutting-edge investigative tools would not be seen by the American public until 1965, and even then the lies were still being told. This time the lies would be told by ITEK, a CIA operated photographic lab where Maurice Schonfeld took the Nix film to be properly analyzed.264
CHAPTER
EIGHTEEN
OF SHADOWS: IN THE NIX FILM, IN THE MIND AND THE GOVERNMENT
“Those who are able to see beyond the shadows and lies of their culture will never be understood let alone believed by the masses.”
Plato265
In the early versions of the Nix film, there is a car seen in the shadows next to the pergola, between the wooden stockade fence and the low concrete wall. It is Honest Joe’s vehicle in plain view. It remains there throughout the entire length of the film.
Jean Hill and one other witness on the north side of Elm Street, a US Marine veteran named A.J. Millican, gave testimony that they had seen the Honest Joe wagon with cardboard-covered windows driving around Dealey Plaza supposedly for advertising purposes before the arrival of the presidential motorcade. Millican gave his testimony to the Dallas Police, and like Orville Nix, he was not called before the Warren Commission.
Jean Hill did testify before the Warren Commission, though no mention of the Honest Joe’s truck was made. It would come later though, during her interview with Mark Lane in Rush to Judgment and in an interview conducted by the FBI on March 23, 1964. The report reads:
“Jean again described wanting to take photos and conversing with a policeman near the TSBD entrance. She had noticed a vehicle with “Honest Joe’s Pawn Shop” printed on its side, with cardboard windows circling the area, but was told by the policeman that he had been permitted to drive near or through the motorcade rout
e. In regard to the assassination itself, Jean described calling to the President while Mary (Moorman) prepared to take a photo, seemingly not aware that he had already been hit once or possibly twice.”266
Jean later told Jones Harris that she and her friend Mary Moorman were at the parade to take pictures of their motorcycle policemen boyfriends. This seems strange as Mrs. Hill was married, though Moorman, at the time was not. Harris told the author, “When little Jean Hill told me that story, the motorcycle patrolman she was there to see (J. B. Martin) and was at the interview told her “to never mention publically seeing that car again.”267
Over the years, whether by aging memory or for some other reason, some of Jean Hill‘s testimony changed. In fact, she verified the comments she made to author Anthony Summers in his book, Conspiracy in regards to her reason for being at the parade:
“…she was paying special attention to the motorcade because one of the police outriders was her boyfriend of the moment. She was sure there were more than three shots.” Summers quoted her as adding: “I heard four to six shots, and I’m pretty used to guns. They weren’t echoes or anything like that. They were different guns that were being fired.”268
In 1991 at a conference held in Dallas and in an interview for the Dallas Morning News, Hill again talked about the motorcycle policemen whose name was later to be cited as J.B. Martin:
‘Well, actually there were a couple (of) cute motorcycle officers that we were interested in, and they couldn’t see us if we were in a crowd,’ she said.269
Though parts of her story changed over the years as to what she did that dreadful day, what didn’t change was that she had obviously heeded her policeman boyfriend’s advice. She never again mentioned the Honest Joe’s sighting that day.
As Hill stated, the Dallas police apparently gave Honest Joe permission to drive behind the pergola, as he was known as the “Mayor of Elm Street”, but they waved away other cars from driving into the area. 270
Though Hill and Millican are the only two witnesses on official record as seeing the Honest Joe’s Edsel that day, several people had. His future son-in-law, Marvin Levin, remembers seeing it drive ahead of the presidential parade about twenty minutes beforehand.271 In fact, when Rubin Goldstein died, his obituary stated “he was part of the presidential motorcade.”272
Honest Joe’s wagon was an Edsel station wagon. It had a mock machine gun mounted on the roof, and Honest Joe’s Pawnshop was painted on its sides.273 Jones Harris related to this author that he has in his possession, a large blown up frame from the camera original Nix film in which the vehicle is visible all through the seven seconds or so of the film; during the frontal head shot to the President, Jackie’s climb on the trunk of the car, Clint Hill‘s run and climb onto the trunk of the limousine, and the acceleration of the car onto the underpass. Generational copies of the Nix film do not show this car. Some believe the Bell film also shows a glimpse of this vehicle on the grassy knoll.274 Could the Nix film be altered? Could it have been altered so hurriedly that the technicians didn’t have time to alter other vital areas? The vehicle Harris sees is prominent. This was not a small vehicle; it was a large and very noticeable one. In fact, the Edsel station wagons were often transformed into use for ambulances; they were that roomy.
In early 1965, armed with the Jean Hill interview and the blow up of the Nix frame, Jones Harris showed Burt Reinhardt and Maurice Schonfeld of UPI his discovery of what he thought suspicious in the Nix film.
“There’s nothing there,” Reinhardt told Harris. “The Nix film is the runt of the litter.”275
But not everyone agreed with Reinhardt. As Schonfeld wrote:
Word spread fast about Harris’s theory of the Nix film. A European journalist wrote an article about a firing from the knoll. Other assassination buffs began to inquire about the film. CBS came over to view it. Nobody knew how to handle the story; nobody wanted to assume the cost of further investigation.276
Schonfeld, eager to make more money and fame, decided to take it to the cutting-edge photographic lab of ITEK. ITEK was a secretive Massachusetts maker of aerial photo gear. Their only customer? The CIA. ITEK was founded in 1957 with seed money from Laurance Rockefeller, that famous family’s, most adventurous, venture capitalist. The company’s name was a phonetic contraction of “information technology,” the sector of the economy that prescient analysts and investors foresaw as America’s future.277 ITEK benefited enormously from their optimism. In just three months, its payroll burgeoned from a handful of executives to over a hundred scientists, engineers, and technicians. After only a year, its revenues and profits soared into the millions. It went public after less than two years in operation, and within 18 months of the initial offering, the price of a share of its stock shot up from $2 to over $200. “ITEK was one of the great glamour stocks on Wall Street,” Lewis writes.278 “At its peak, ITEK’s fame rivaled the notoriety, and the price-to-earnings ratio, of the top Internet stocks of the great NASDAQ bubble of the late 1990s.”279
ITEK was manufacturing the world’s most sophisticated satellite reconnaissance cameras, and the information these cameras provided about Soviet missiles and military activity was critical to U.S. security. So was ITEK. It was contracted by the CIA to help develop the CIA’s Project Corona a spy satellite used for national security purposes.280 Later, ITEK ended up building cameras for the Apollo and Viking space missions, as well as the defective Hubble space telescope mirror. Eventually they ended up building the DB-110 reconnaissance pod. But in 1965, they studied the images Jones Harris saw in the Nix Film for free.
The president of ITEK at that time was Frank Lindsay; the Frank Lindsay of Kim Philby spying fame.281 Philby was a high ranking, British Intelligence agent who worked as a double agent. He defected to the Soviet Union in 1963. In an interview from Moscow in 1967, Philby claimed his greatest accomplishment was foiling the CIA’s Albanian operation. He states in the Izvestia interview:
*****
…AND HE DEFINITELY DIDN’T WANT TO LOOK LIKE A CRAZY CONSPIRACY THEORIST, EVEN IF IT MEANT FINDING ANOTHER SHOOTER ON THE KNOLL. TO ENSURE THAT DIDN’T HAPPEN, HE WROTE OF HIS EXPERIENCE.
As Philby told it, in 1951, shortly after Tito had broken with the Soviet Union, thus geographically cutting Albania off from the rest of the Communist world, the CIA arranged to airdrop anti-Communist Albanians into the mountains of their home country to lead a counterrevolution. Before the drop, the CIA checked out the operation with the great British and anti-Communist spy. From that moment on, the air drop was, of course, a disaster. According to Philby, the CIA agent in charge of the Albanian operation was named Franklin T. Lindsay.282
How odd that Schonfeld took the Nix film to a CIA company to decipher the shadows on the grassy knoll. Schonfeld swears it was coincidental, though he knew Lindsay’s assistant and Schonfeld’s contact Howard Sprague worked for the CIA. The fact is, Schonfeld never gave the Nix film the credence it deserved. He just wanted fast fame and fast money for UPI at the least possible expense of time or money…and he definitely didn’t want to look like a crazy conspiracy theorist, even if it meant finding another shooter on the knoll. To ensure that didn’t happen, he wrote of his experience. In an epilogue to an original essay he wrote concerning UPI’s work with the Nix film, Schonfeld wrote:
Of course! I thought. Who else but a former CIA man would head a company 60 percent of whose business came from the government, much of it consisting of analysis of aerial photographs shot for intelligence purposes? Perhaps, then, ITEK’s report might not be considered conclusive—at least by those who saw a CIA conspiracy behind every grisly happening anywhere in the world. Of course, ITEK had published, and widely distributed, its report, so that if the results had been fudged, other scientists would have caught it. On the other hand, how many people were there with the scientific ability to challenge ITEK’s report—and with no links to the CIA?
Among the people I told my story on myself to was Richard Sprague, one of the most dedic
ated investigators of the Kennedy assassination—and no, not related to ITEK’s Howard Sprague. It was, perhaps, inevitable that Richard Sprague would make contact with assassination buff Jones Harris. Perhaps it was equally inevitable that—given Watergate and the question of whether agents had assassinated (or had tried to assassinate) Fidel Castro and other political leaders—Harris would conclude that UPI and ITEK had engaged in a conspiracy to destroy his theory and cover up the facts of the assassination. In the summer of 1973 he informed Reinhardt and me that he had come to just this conclusion.
The art of electronic analysis had advanced in the more than six years that had elapsed since ITEK had completed its study. So I decided to try one more investigation, this time with a California company called Image Transform.
At this point, in late August 1973, the producers of the film Executive Action inquired about the use of the Nix film. I flew out to the Coast, made a deal—the film would be used only as stock shots, not as evidence of Harris’ theory—and then went out to Image Transform’s Los Angeles laboratories. There I learned that commercial apparatus could do little to enhance the quality of the Nix film. A technician suggested that, as a last resort, I should take the film to Dr. Kenneth Castleman, a scientist at the California Institute of Technology at Pasadena.
I took a taxi to Pasadena. Dr. Castleman and I viewed the film. He saw the shape. He suggested that more sophisticated digital computer techniques developed by Caltech to reconstruct lunar photographs could, perhaps, solve the riddle of the grassy knoll shadow. He found an interested Caltech graduate student, James Latimer, who did the computer image processing as a class project in a course on digital image processing. The processed images were then analyzed by Alan Gillespie, of Caltech’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
The Missing JFK Assassination Film Page 17