by Gus Russo
In 1947, after military service during World War II, Ruby moved to Dallas and legally changed his name to “Jack Leon Ruby.” Texas reporter Lonnie Hudkins says Ruby told him he was run out of Chicago after becoming an informant for the FBI. “He had to leave Chicago,” claims Hudkins. Ruby was certainly a P.C.I. (Potential Criminal Informant) for the FBI when he lived in Dallas. The FBI retains documentary proof of Bureau contact with him. Also, according to its records, the FBI assigned agent Charles Flynn as Ruby’s case officer, who proceeded to contact Ruby on at least nine documented occasions.
Partnering with his sister, Eva, who had previously relocated to Dallas, Ruby now tried his hand at the nightclub business. Managing and owning “show-bars” would be Ruby’s vocation until his arrest for the Oswald murder in 1963. With names like the Singapore, the Silver Spur, Bob Wills’ Ranch House, the Vegas Club, the Sovereign, and finally, the Carousel, Ruby’s clubs never managed to provide him the success and notoriety he craved. More often than not, his ventures led to bankruptcy. However, these failures failed to dampen his enthusiasm for a city which gave him numerous chances for a fresh start. As Ruby wrote in his “Jail Diary:”
I loved Dallas so much, I would boast to people what a wonderful city this is. . . I used to boast about the skyline, about our master plan. I just know Dallas was going to be the most beautiful city in the world. This is the city that if you wanted to sell anything at all, you could walk into a millionaire’s office and they would listen to you.
Ruby called these times his “bucket of blood” days. Joe Cavagnaro, a later employee of Ruby, recalled, “I saw him hit a guy one night for taking advantage of a girl. He hit the guy clear across the sidewalk.”5 Ruby was known to deck patrons for merely putting their feet up on the tables. He was notorious for his hobby of throwing patrons down the stairs from his second-floor Carousel Club. Officer Joe Cody recalled, “Jack was a fighter, there was no question about that. We’d get a disturbance call down there and we’d just wait at the bottom of the stairs because in just a few minutes, whoever was creating the disturbance was gonna come falling down the stairs. He was pretty violent.”6 Wally Weston, Master-of-Ceremonies at the Carousel Club in the fall of 1963, said Ruby “did his own bouncing in the club. He didn’t need anyone else.”7
Ruby himself would often be injured in the altercations, but that only made him madder. He rendered one victim unconscious after realizing his opponent had inflicted a serious stab wound upon him. Once, when in a fistfight with club guitarist Willis “Dub” Dickerson, Jack threw a punch which came to rest on Dickerson’s mouth. Dickerson proceeded to bite Ruby’s index finger until it was mangled so badly that it had to be amputated. True to character, Ruby quickly forgot the fight, and remained Dickerson’s friend.
Ruby’s “Jail Diary” is a virtual paean to his pugilistic prowess. In it are numerous anecdotes of throwing people down the stairs, or dismantling an entire gang with a baseball bat in defending the honor of a woman he didn’t even know. There are repeated tales of knocking out someone’s teeth with his pistol, or with monogrammed brass knuckles. He would seize upon the slightest excuse to “mix it up” with someone. As he wrote:
Once, when some smart aleck came to the door and tried to give me a hard time, and I tried to be very pleasant to him, and he was becoming all the more belligerant [sic], and I finally had to hit him and knocked some of his teeth out.
One nite a fellow got into a hassle with our comedian Wally Weston, and Wally threw a punch at him, and the fellow said some remark about Wally to go to Russia. Anyway, I picked him up and bodily threw him down the stairs.
One evening some fellow had broken a beer bottle over this man’s head and it just made me sick, and I hit this other fellow with my pistol and he went down. They both pleaded with me that they would never come back if I would just let them go.
The fights in the club escalated to such a point that Ruby soon decided to carry a pistol. After that, he almost always was “packing heat.” He wrote:
Some drunk tried to throw a heavy wooden chair at me. I decided in time to save my life and I started to hit him and beat him up—close to death. I then realized how important it was for me to always have my pistol on me if I wanted to stay alive.
“Jack carried quite a bit of money around in his pocket, twenty-five hundred, three-thousand dollars,” remembers Ruby’s friend, Dallas policeman Joe Cody. “He wanted a safe to start with and I explained to him the safe was gonna cost him three or four thousand dollars. He said, ‘I can’t afford it.’ I said, ‘Well, why don’t you get a gun?’ And so we went to Ray Brantly’s hardware store, looked all the guns over, and he said, ‘I don’t know what to get.’ I told him I carried a Colt Cobra. He said, ‘That’ll be fine.’ So we bought the Cobra. I never saw it again until on television.”8
Ruby’s tenure in Dallas was highlighted by his affection not only for policeman Joe Cody, but for all his brethren on the Dallas Police force. With free drinks and other “courtesies” provided the men in blue, Ruby’s clubs became a favorite cop hangout. “He was a stickler for the law,” remembered Bob Larkin, an employee at Ruby’s Vegas Club. “He thought of himself as a kind of cop.”9
Another Ruby friend, reporter Lonnie Hudkins, testified that Ruby had been issued a card by Justice of the Peace Glen Bird, which read, “The Bearer is an honorary Deputy Justice of the Peace.”10 Ruby’s friend, Dallas Police Deputy Al Maddox, recalls his friend fondly, saying, “Jack was always very hospitable to us [the Dallas Police]. There was always plenty of liquor, dancing girls, or anything else if Jack Ruby knew that you were a law enforcement officer. . . He always thought it may help him in case he got fined or got into jail—that we’d be able to help him, and we probably would have.”11
Ruby’s civic interests extended far beyond the boundaries of Dallas. He became fascinated with U.S. presidents after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor (in 1941). From that point on, Ruby became a fierce, sometimes violent, defender of the nation’s highest office. One of his business ventures included selling busts of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, whose death (in 1945) had caused Ruby to weep. Ruby’s younger brother Earl recalled, “He had fights about Roosevelt, even Eisenhower, later on.”12 In the diary, he writes: “It’s a terrible feeling one has knowing you had such a great love for your country and your president, and that someone can frame you and completely reverse that.”
Ruby was nothing if not a manic personality who saw the world of politics in black and white. It was the white knights of the Oval Office versus “those lousy commies.” And those who knew him best have no doubt who was Ruby’s main knight—John F. Kennedy.
Jack Ruby’s sister, Eva Grant, testified that “one of the things he loved about this President, he didn’t care what you were, you were a human being and Jack felt that this was one time in history that Jews are getting the break. He [Kennedy] put great Jewish men in office.”13
On the night before the assassination, Ruby jumped to the stage of the Carousel Club, demonstrating his newest get-rich idea, the “twist board.” Ruby told his audience, “Even President Kennedy tells us to get more exercise.” When a heckler yelled out, “That bum!” Ruby screamed. “Don’t ever talk that way about the President.”14
Wally Weston recalls a similar Ruby anecdote reflecting his high opinion of President Kennedy: one morning, Ruby got the idea that he could promote his club by getting one of his stars to become the first person in Dallas to answer JFK’s call to participate in 50-mile walks. Showing up unannounced at Weston’s apartment, Ruby directed Weston to get dressed. The last piece of clothing Weston donned were his rigid leather performing shoes. Ruby proceeded to drive Weston 50 miles outside of town, whereupon he informed him of his patriotic walking mission. Ruby then drove back to Dallas. That night, having successfully completed his walk, Weston performed at Ruby’s club, sitting down, with his swollen feet in a bucket of ice. He retains photos of that performance to this day.
Weston well-remembers
Ruby reading the riot act to comics who made anti-Kennedy or other unpatriotic jokes. In his diary, Ruby wrote: “I tried to correct Wally [Weston] on some things he said about our President.” Once, when Ruby, a rabid anti-communist, saw an acquaintance with some right-wing literature, he grabbed the material away, saying, “I’m going to send this stuff to Kennedy. Nobody has the right to talk like this about our government.”15 (The literature, from oil millionaire H.L. Hunt’s propaganda mill, was found in Ruby’s trunk after he killed Oswald. In a typical truth-reversal, some critics used this to link Ruby with JFK’s right-wing haters.)
Dozens of Ruby’s friends and relatives testified, as with one voice, that when Kennedy was killed, Jack Ruby was devastated. They described him as sobbing uncontrollably all weekend. Using words like “incoherent,” “deeply disturbed,” and “emotionally devastated,” one might guess that they were describing a member of Kennedy’s immediate family (who ironically appeared stoic and controlled). Many said it was the first time they had ever seen him cry. Jack’s brother Hyman testified about Ruby’s loud weeping at his synagogue the day after the assassination: “They didn’t believe a guy like Jack would ever cry. Jack never cried in his life. He is not that kind of guy to cry.”16 Ruby told his sister Eva Grant that “I never felt so bad in my life, even when Ma and Pa died. . . Someone tore my heart out.”
Ruby’s attorney Phil Burleson remembers that Ruby admired Kennedy, not only as a leader but as a father of young children. According to Burleson, Ruby felt that “Oswald didn’t just kill the President, he killed the father of the First Family.”17
Joe Cavagnaro, a Ruby employee at the Vegas Club, recalled Ruby in the wake of the assassination: “He felt very remorseful for Mrs. Kennedy and the family. He carried on like you would if it were your own cousin or brother.” (Later, in jail, Ruby sobbed on the phone to Tony Zoppi, “Those poor kids, without a father. I grew up without a father.” In that same jail, Ruby kept a picture of President Kennedy, which he kissed daily.) In jail, two weeks after killing Oswald, Ruby wrote a friend, saying, “I loved my President and was in such deep mourning about his tragic passing.”18 Further, in his jail diary he wrote:
Saturday morning before I left the house, I watched television and they had a prayer service for the President. And Rabbi Silverman was speaking [about] how the President was so courageous and fearless and fought every adversary—and to have someone shoot him from behind, this broke what little pieces were left of my heart.
Kennedy’s death clearly put Ruby over the edge. From the moment Oswald was arrested until the day Jack Ruby died three years later, Ruby referred to Lee Oswald as “that lousy Commie.” Disconsolate over what Oswald had done to the Kennedy family, Ruby called his old Chicago friend, Lawrence Meyers, and said, “Those poor people, I have got to do something about it.”
It would later be learned that Ruby, who spent much of the assassination’s tragic weekend at police headquarters, had decided that if the opportunity presented itself, he would heal the nation with his ever-present pistol. After he was arrested, Ruby spoke candidly with another police friend, Detective Jim Leavelle, who remembers, “Jack said he’d thought about it from Friday night on.”19 Ruby made a similar admission to Look magazine writer T. George Harris. “In fact, he attempted to get a shot off Saturday night in the hall of Justice, but we [the press] were blocking him,” says Harris.20 Ruby said much the same to Lonnie Hudkins, when he told the Houston reporter before his trial, “I was afraid of hitting one of you guys.”21
Although Ruby stalked Oswald all weekend, his first opportunity for a clear shot arrived when he least expected it. Just after 11 a.m. on Sunday morning, Ruby drove past the City Police station on his way to the Western Union office, located one block east of the station. Because Oswald’s transfer to the County jail had been slated for 10 a.m., Ruby may have abandoned his vendetta, assuming Oswald to now be in the more secure county lockup.
Ruby later told police, “When I passed the station, I looked down the ramp to my right and saw a lot of people down in the basement. So when I finished with Western [Union], I walked west and down the ramp just out of curiosity.”22 ATF agent Frank Ellsworth remembers, “Jack had walked up and down that ramp two or three times a day for years. He practically lived at the police station. He was a police nut.”23 In Ruby’s “deathbed tape,” he testifies:
The ironic part is this—hadn’t I made an illegal turn behind the bus to the parking lot—had I gone the way I was supposed to go, straight down Main street, I would never have met this fate. Because the difference in meeting this fate was 30 seconds one way or the other. . . So I walked down the ramp. I noticed a police squad car at the head of the ramp, and an officer leaning over talking to him with his back to me. All I did was walk down there—down to the bottom of the ramp, and that’s when the incident happened, at the bottom of the ramp.
At his trial, Ruby testified that Oswald “came out [into the police basement] all of a sudden, with a smirky, defiant, cursing, vicious, communist expression on his face. I can’t convey what impression he gave me. I lost my senses.”24
“You rat, sonofabitch! You shot the President!” Ruby screamed as he got off a shot.25 Before he could get off another, Ruby was wrestled to the ground and dragged to a holding room. On the way, Ruby yelled, “I hope I killed the sonofabitch! I hope I killed the sonofabitch!”26 Dallas Police Detective D. R. Archer said to Ruby, “Jack, I think you killed him.” To which Ruby responded, “I intended to shoot him three times.”27 In his jail diary, he wrote: “No one felt as indebted to this city as I. It has been so good to me. I guess I owed more to Dallas than anyone. My heart was broken. I was so proud of Dallas.”
When Jim Leavelle spoke with Ruby immediately after the shooting, Ruby’s bravado had been muted by the reality that had set in. Realizing that he had now prevented authorities from learning if Oswald had accomplices, Ruby told Leavelle, “All I wanted to do was just be a hero, but it looks like I just fouled things up good.” (A similar realization was voiced a century earlier, when Lincoln’s assassin, John Wilkes Booth, realized he had done more harm than good to the South’s cause.)
Later, this statement started Leavelle thinking about an incident with Ruby thirteen years prior. “I was in Jack’s Silver Spur Club,” remembered Leavelle, “and while talking to him he made the statement that he always wanted to see two police officers in a life and death struggle, about to lose their life, so he could jump in there and save them. So it made him truthful to me when he said, ‘All I want to do is be a hero.’”28
After his incarceration, Ruby’s visitors found him to be the least bit repentant. To Joe Campisi, Ruby bragged, “Well, Jews have got class. Nobody but me could do it. . . Somebody had to kill him.”29 To Carousel comic Breck Wall: “I was right to kill Oswald.” To Tony Zoppi of the Dallas Morning News, Ruby said he did it to prove that “Jews have balls.”30
He reiterated this theme to his Carousel Club M.C., Wally Weston. On Weston’s first visit to Ruby in jail, Ruby greeted him with these words, “I’ve got balls, ain’t I baby?” “Yeah, Jack,” Weston replied, “and they’re going to hang you by them too.” Weston, who of course knew Ruby well, was utterly convinced that his boss acted on personal motives alone: his intense desire to be a hero. “He wanted everybody to know that Jewish guys had guts,” remembers Weston. “That was what it was all about—’I’ve got balls and that’s it.’”31
Dallas Policeman Elmo Cunningham knows what Ruby may have concluded in making his murderous decision: “In those days in Texas, a murderer could have expected two to ten years, with time off for good behavior.”32 Indeed, Carousel Club bartender Andrew Armstrong, after visiting Ruby in jail, said, “Jack talked as if it would be no time before he was back running things.”33 An attorney friend of Ruby, Jim Martin, added, “He never expected to spend a night in jail.” In fact, Ruby’s lawyer, Tom Howard, was even granted a writ for Ruby’s release on bond. When [D.A.] Bill Alexander heard this, he “hit the
roof” and immediately had it changed to a “dry writ”—one that demands a hearing before a prisoner can be let out.34
Ruby’s first lawyer was Tom Howard, who often defended pimps and prostitutes, but had the rare distinction of never having lost a capital case to D.A. Henry Wade.35 Wade was prosecuting the Ruby case, and had a legendary reputation in Dallas for securing convictions. The convicted men were known as “the Wade Parade,” as one local journalist put it, adding, “Henry sent more people to the electric chair than even Tom Dewey.”
If Ruby had calculated he would serve a short term, it was a reasonable deduction. In Texas, there existed a “murder without malice” charge that could have been applied to a person as emotionally wrung-out as Ruby. It carried a maximum five-year sentence. However, Ruby made a fatal miscalculation, firing Howard and replacing him with the high-profile attorney Melvin Belli. Belli refused to defend Ruby on the grounds that he had temporarily “lost it.” Instead, he tried to convince the jury that Ruby was clinically insane. Taking advantage of Belli’s flawed strategy, Wade soon won his familiar electric-chair conviction against Jack Ruby.
“Belli took a good five-year murder-without-malice case and made it into a death penalty for his client,” recalls former Dallas Assistant D.A. Bill Alexander. “He put on this God-awful defense. . . Instead of Jack’s being a hero, Belli was bringing out all this stuff about Jack’s mother being in the insane asylum and how Jack himself was sick. [Ruby] just wanted to get on the stand and say, “I shot the guy because he killed my President,’ but Belli hacked away at his family in public. It was humiliating for Ruby. I actually felt sorry for him. It took away whatever dignity he had left.”36