by Gus Russo
In March 1964, after he was convicted and sentenced to death, Jack Ruby’s already delicate mental state deteriorated rapidly. He now saw conspiracies everywhere. But they weren’t conspiracies against Kennedy. They were directed at the Jews.
Earl Warren, Chairman of the Warren Commission, visited Ruby in jail when the Commission was in Dallas gathering evidence. Warren found Ruby to be in bad mental shape. “The fellow was clearly delusional when I talked to him. He took me aside and said, ‘Hear those voices? Hear those voices?’ He thought there were Jewish children and Jewish women who were being put to death in the building there.”37 He mentioned as much to his sister Eva Grant, saying, “25 million Jews have been slaughtered on the floor below.” His jailers remember Ruby placing his ears to the jail wall, whispering to them, “Shhh! Do you hear their screams? They are torturing the Jews again down in the basement.”38
Ruby begged Warren—and repeated his plea at least eight times, in and out of Warren’s presence—to take him to Washington so he could tell him the truth.
I may not live tomorrow to give any further testimony. . . I can’t say it here. . . It can’t be said here. . . Gentlemen, if you want to hear any further testimony, you will have to get me to Washington soon. . . I want to tell the truth and I can’t tell it here. . . Gentlemen, unless you get me to Washington, you can’t get a fair shake out of me.39
An early proponent of conspiracy theories—his treatment of Ruby’s testimony to Chief Justice Warren has been called “a surgical masterpiece”—offered this as evidence that Ruby killed Oswald in furtherance of a conspiracy. Now, the theory went, Ruby could not tell the truth about the “conspiracy” because he too would be killed by an agent of the other “conspirators.”
This theory conveniently ignores the context of Ruby’s remarks. Ruby did use the word “conspiracy” in his ramblings—but what he was talking about was a conspiracy against the Jews. He imagined Dallasites believing there to be a Jewish conspiracy to kill President Kennedy. He was trying to say that there was no such Jewish conspiracy—the only conspiracy was the one to frame the Jews for Kennedy’s death. Ruby feared talking in Dallas because he was obsessed by thoughts of this alleged Jewish persecution. His paranoia drove him to talk and write frequently of pogroms, genocide, and another holocaust. Specifically, he feared that unless he was present in Washington, his fears about Jewish persecution would not be entered into the record.
Ruby clearly thought that, by killing Oswald, he was doing everyone a favor, and would be treated as a hero. In fact, he was not far from wrong. Certainly many in Dallas, if not the rest of the world, despised Oswald. Max Rudberg, a bail bondsman friend of Ruby, remembered, “Everyone was saying, ‘The sono-fabitch needs killing,’ and Jack was anxious to please.”40
Detective Jim Leavelle echoes this sentiment, recalling, “I had a lot of people tell me, ‘Oh, if I could have got to him on Friday, my anger was such that I would have killed him without looking back.’ There’s a lot of people that felt that way.”
Even the wife of Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas exclaimed when Oswald was shot, “Good! Give it to him again!”41 As Ruby’s sister Eva Grant says, “Millions of red-blooded Americans wanted to kill Oswald. Jack was there. That’s all.”42
Wally Weston, Ruby’s frequent jail cell visitor, recalled, “Jack wanted everybody to know that he did it, and he had the guts to do what everybody in Dallas probably wanted to do, including myself.”43
After his arrest, Ruby’s police friends predictably gave him the best possible treatment. He was given two jail cells for his comfort, with meals often sent in from the outside. Regarding his overlarge cell, Ruby friend and Dallas Police Deputy Al Maddox says, “I don’t even know that it was ever locked.”44
Despite this mountain of consistent testimony and evidence, some critics postulate that Jack Ruby was a cold-blooded Mafia assassin. Casting aside Ruby’s stated motive, this scenario ignores the larger subject: the modus operandi of crime figures. Many Mafia experts have disputed the logic of letting Oswald live two days before shooting him. Most agree that if it had been a mob conspiracy, Oswald would not have left the Book Depository alive. And if that opportunity had been missed, another one later on Friday would never have been passed up.45
Downplayed by the Warren Commission was the fact that Ruby had an acquaintanceship with some shady characters linked to organized crime. However, for this mob hit scenario to play out in actuality, Ruby necessarily would have needed direct, meaningful contact with organized criminals, and they in turn needed to be linked to Oswald—this kind of speculation blithely assumes that organized crime was linked to Oswald, and thus had a need to eliminate him. Those linkages have never been made. The fact is that for every witness who claims that Ruby had direct contact with the Mafia, there are hundreds who know that to be an absurdity.
But the critics parlayed the “he-knew-somebody-who-knew-somebody” catch-all to show Ruby involved in a conspiracy. If that kind of logic carried legal weight, virtually everyone would be involved in conspiracies on a daily basis.
One of the so-called “connected” people close to Ruby was professional gambler Lewis McWillie, who had close ties to numerous underworld figures, especially Santos Trafficante, from his days as a pre-Castro casino operator in Havana. On one occasion, in late 1959, Ruby travelled to Havana to visit McWillie. Ruby later passed polygraph tests, stating that the excursion was merely a pleasure trip. No evidence to the contrary has ever surfaced.
After the assassination, testimony from Ruby’s associates indicated that he had sent guns to Havana, via McWillie. Thus began the legend of “Ruby the gunrunner,” sending weapons to Cuban haters of JFK. Once again, the truth is far different. In a letter Ruby wrote from jail, he explained:
What happened was that a friend of mine by the name of McWillie called from Havana, Cuba in 1959—that was during peace negotiations with Cuba—and we really hadn’t found out what kind of person Castro was. What this Mr. McWillie wanted me to do was to call a Ray Brantly of Ray’s Hardware, and Mac wanted him to send four Cobra pistols to him, and all I did was relay the message. Mac wanted these guns because he was managing the gambling casino and wanted some protection for himself, and his wife, and that was all I had to do with it.
Those who actually knew Ruby during his Dallas period know that he was never a mob functionary. Ruby’s close friend, officer Joe Cody, who purchased Jack’s pistol for him, remembers, “My partner and I would go down to his club every night when we got off and, to my knowledge, I have never seen Jack Ruby associate with any members of organized crime or anything.”46 Another Ruby friend, Detective Jim Leavelle, suggests that “Ruby was a name-dropper. The mob would never hire him—he had such a loud mouth.”47 ATF agent Frank Ellsworth, who knew Ruby well, concludes, “the mob wouldn’t have hired Jack Ruby to be a janitor.”48
Dallas Police Detective Elmo Cunningham summed up his friend, Ruby, this way: “Jack loved Dallas. It was the center of his universe. After two days of watching his idols being pilloried—Dallas, the cops, the Jews, and his President—he just lost it.”49
Perhaps Ruby himself deserves the last word. In 1966, nearing death from cancer, Ruby spoke to his rabbi from a hospital bed in what amounted to a deathbed-taped confession.50 In a shaky voice, the dying man said again, as he had from the first, that he had not been part of any conspiracy. “It all happened,” he said, “because I was so emotionally upset.”
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