Reclaiming History (251 page)

With Slatin out and in need of money to pay the rent, Jack turned to his old friend Ralph Paul—the one he had “roped in” for $3,700 in order to buy the Bob Wills Ranch House, and whom he still owed $1,200. Paul advanced Jack another $2,200, enough to pay the Sovereign Club’s rent for four months.
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As time passed, rent money became due again, and again Jack had difficulty paying. Paul, Jack’s personal piggy bank, was there again for Jack with another $1,650, but this time there was a condition. The number of anticipated private memberships had never materialized, so Paul insisted that the club become “an open place”—a burlesque house. Jack, who according to Paul felt the Sovereign Club was dead, agreed. Thus, in late 1960, the Carousel Club, not a private club where members could buy hard liquor, but an open place where customers could buy beer, was born.
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The Carousel Club, a classic burlesque house
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with striptease acts, Jack’s first club with strippers,
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was much more difficult to manage than Ruby’s Vegas Club, which had no regular acts and was basically a rock-and-roll dance club in a rougher part of town.
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The Carousel Club opened at 8:00 in the evening. The cover charge was paid to an attendant in a tiny cashier’s booth at the top of a narrow flight of stairs leading from the street below. The mostly male customers came to the club to see “Ruby’s Girls,” over twelve in all—waitresses, cigarette girls, cocktail girls, and the main attraction, the four strippers. Though the girls were sexy, Ruby made sure no prostitutes worked at the club.
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Indeed, if Ruby suspected any of his “girls” of hustling johns out of his club, he would have them followed to see if they were making arrangements to meet the patrons outside. He was even known to have the girls take lie detector tests.
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Ruby felt so protective, almost paternal, toward his girls, that he had several physical fights with known pimps in the Dallas area who tried to recruit them.
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A four-or five-piece orchestra was situated at the back of the stage to play for the performances and between acts. There was no dance floor. The strippers displayed their wares on three short runways into the audience. In addition to beer, the Carousel Club served Coca-Cola, champagne, and pizza, the only food the Carousel served, which was made in the kitchen behind the bar.
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Customers wanting hard liquor had to bring their own bottle and order a set-up, ice and a glass. Although the club stayed open until 2:00 a.m., seven days a week, drinking of hard stuff had to cease at midnight on Sunday through Friday and at 1:00 a.m. on Saturday night (early Sunday). By Jack’s admission, the beer was the cheapest he could buy, and the champagne was “pure rotgut,” bought for $1.60 a bottle and peddled to the customers for $17.50 a bottle.
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As indicated, the legal ownership of the Carousel Club was S&R Inc., but it’s hard to know exactly who all the people were who were putting up the money and owning the shares. Paul was the recipient of half of the shares in the corporation, five hundred.
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Jack, though, insisted he had no financial interest in the club—he was just the manager.
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Stanley Kaufman, a lawyer who handled many of Jack’s legal matters including the S&R incorporation, agreed.
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And Social Security Administration files only show Ruby as being “an employee” of the club.
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No matter. It was Jack’s club. He ran the Carousel, paid the bills, and banked the receipts, and it was his favorite of all the clubs he had ever had. “This is a fucking high-class place,” he would assure any doubters as he threw them down the dimly lit stairs.
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Class
. That meant a lot to Jack. Everyone who knew him knew it. The only problem is that Jack had no class. Tammi True, a stripper who worked for Jack off and on for almost two years and was one of his favorites, thought the world of Jack (though they cursed each other out regularly), but said, “I don’t care how much money Jack had. If he had been a millionaire, he wouldn’t have been one bit different. He didn’t have any class, and he really wanted to…He used the word class quite often, so I know it was an important thing with him…Everything had to have class, and I think that is what he wanted, but he could never have it, because Jack was just Jack.”
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The Carousel became Ruby’s life, his real home. “You can’t write about Jack’s life outside the club,” Andrew Armstrong, Jack’s black bartender, later told a Ruby biographer. “There
wasn’t
any. Even when he was outside, he was at the newspaper or the radio stations trying to get more publicity;
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he was handing out passes to the club, or thinking of some new scheme to push it.”
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Sam Ruby said that his other brother Earl told him he had visited Dallas in 1961 in an attempt to get back some money that their sister Marion had loaned Jack for the Carousel and was now regretting. Not only was Earl unsuccessful, but since he was in town, Jack got a further loan from Earl too.
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Jack’s sister Eva told the Warren Commission, “And I understand Jack has taken money from Earl and probably from my sister Mary [Marion] and God knows who else in the family. There was none of his money in there. If he had a thousand dollars of his money, it was a lot of money.” She went on to say that after her brother shot Oswald, the beneficent Paul had given her all five hundred shares of S&R stock that he had received from Jack.
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The stock, perhaps unbeknownst to Paul, had become worthless on July 17, 1961, when the Texas Secretary of State’s office in Austin ruled that S&R Inc. had forfeited its right to do business in the state as a corporation (as opposed to a partnership or sole ownership), finding that the corporation had no assets from which a judgment for franchise tax penalties and court costs could be satisfied.
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Jack, it seems, never paid back any of Paul’s loans to Jack for the club on Commerce, whether the club was making any profits or not. “He never paid me a dime,” said Paul, who didn’t seem to be particularly upset about it, possibly because he considered Jack his “best” and “closest” friend and was confident Jack felt the same way about him.
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When informed by Warren Commission counsel, who added up the loans, that apparently Jack Ruby still owed him $5,050, Paul replied, “Well, what am I going to do?”
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What is fairly certain is that Jack collected and deposited all the cash receipts; he seemed to always be behind on his bills; and whether the club seemed to be doing well or not, he always claimed he was going broke. Somehow though, he still had the ability to siphon off funds for new schemes he might be involved in, and to afford the many gratuities he gave to ingratiate himself with members of the Dallas Police Department.
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Just what were Ruby’s receipts and expenses at his club? Unfortunately, the only tax records in the Warren Commission volumes for Ruby’s clubs were for his Vegas Club, not the Carousel Club, and the National Archives has “no tax returns for the Carousel Club.” A fairly typical year was 1962, when the gross receipts for the Vegas Club were listed as $48,150, the gross profit as $41,462.77, and the net income as $5,619.65.
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There is very little reference in the testimony of Warren Commission witnesses as to how much Ruby took in at the Carousel and how much he paid out. One of the few references came from handyman Curtis “Larry” Crafard, hardly a good source, not only because of his low-level job but also because of the short time he was at the club. He told the Commission that on a Friday, Saturday, or Sunday night, Ruby took in “anywhere from $100 to maybe $1,000.” When Ruby once took in a total of $1,400 for a Friday and Saturday night, Crafard heard the bartender, Andy Armstrong, say it was the most the Carousel had taken in for a two-day period over the past year or so. Crafard said, “The Carousel made enough to clear the bills,” which is why he was puzzled when he heard that Ruby was taking money from his Vegas Club to keep the Carousel going.
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Though we have no tax records for the Carousel Club, we do have a two-month snapshot (assuming Ruby wasn’t seriously misreporting income and expenses) from which we can extrapolate approximately what Ruby was making at the club in 1961–1963. In his car shortly after his arrest, the Dallas police found two handwritten papers, dated November 13, 1963, one captioned “Aug. Receipts for 30 days,” the other “Sept. Receipts for 30 days,” prepared for a “Bobby,” to whom he writes, “These above records will show everything, and perhaps you will believe me now, that I’m having a rough time. Sincerely, Jack Ruby.” For August, he took in $2,945.52 at the “bar” and $4,176.00 at the “door.” After deducting an anticipated 10 percent federal tax for the bar income and 20 percent state and federal taxes for the door, he said he had a net of $5,304.68 before expenses. His payroll is interesting. He paid his lead stripper, Jada, $300 per week and the three others $110; his emcee, Wally Weston, $200 weekly; and the house band $330, for a total weekly payroll of $1,160, or $4,640 for the month. (Since Ruby makes no reference to salaries for his waitresses and cocktail girls, apparently he did not pay them any wages and they had to subsist on tips.) After employing a math that didn’t compute on the page, he said his average net profit for one week for the month of August was $1,237.74 (for September the net was $1,350.93), but that this was “not counting” what he had to pay for “rent, utilities, advertising, bartender” or “porter,” which, for whatever reason, he did not set forth but which must have virtually eliminated the $1,237.74 amount.
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Ruby told his strippers once that the most he had netted at the Carousel in a year was $5,000.
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Though they were inclined to believe he was lowballing it, he may have been telling them the truth. Armstrong, who worked for Ruby for a year and a half, said that the financial condition of the Carousel Club was “not good” and the club was only “making enough [money] to pay the bills and…overhead.”
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Although Jack did buy a safe for his office just two weeks before President Kennedy’s assassination,
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for most of the time that he managed the club he kept his funds in his trouser pockets and the trunk of his car. One acquaintance remarked that Ruby “operated out of his hip pocket.”
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At the time of his shooting of Oswald, Ruby had $2,015.33 in cash on his person, consisting of nine $100 dollar bills, thirty $10 bills, forty $20 bills, two $5 bills, four $1 bills, and $1.33 in change. All the money, Ruby said, was for his club’s payroll and money to pay his excise tax.
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His pockets being his principal bank, at the time of the shooting the Carousel Club’s balance at Merchants State Bank on Rose Avenue in Dallas was only $199.78.
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Murphy Martin, a WFAA (Dallas) radio and TV reporter who knew Ruby, said that Jack was “the type of person that, I think, would have $5,000 in his pocket and not a dime in the bank.”
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And safe-deposit box records showed that Ruby had not used his boxes for more than a year prior to the events in November, and when later opened, they were empty.
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As could be expected from someone who was continually late paying his bills, Ruby was also late filing his taxes. His records were in chaos, and one accountant quit because Ruby’s habit of having his important papers and tax records and receipts at either one of his clubs, his apartment, or his mobile home (his car)
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made doing his returns next to impossible.
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When Jack did get his taxes done, he was almost always late, and he frequently requested extensions, citing his inability to get his Carousel and Vegas club records together in time.
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The Warren Commission, examining Ruby’s financial records, found them to be “chaotic” and in “hopeless disarray.”
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The IRS, of course, breathed down Jack’s neck for years with phone calls, letters, and meetings because of tax delinquencies dating back to 1958.
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In 1960 the government filed two tax liens for the years 1956 to 1959 in the amount of $20,200.21.
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Jack was put on a monthly payment plan to pay off his income and excise tax obligations, and his frequent offers to pay a lesser amount were always rejected.
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The bottom line for Jack Ruby in all of his complicated and convoluted tax dealings with the federal government was that he was liable for close to $40,000 at the time he shot Oswald, mostly in excise taxes. In June of 1963, he had made an Offer in Compromise of $3,000, one-thirteenth of the amount owed, to settle the entire amount, saying he would borrow the money from a friend. On November 24, 1963, the day he killed Oswald, his offer was still pending.
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Jack’s involuntary change of residence on that day to the Dallas city jail rendered moot all of his previous seven years’ tax problems, although the IRS, later rejecting Jack’s offer, sent a Notice of Levy to Dallas chief of police Jesse Curry on December 9, 1963, advising him that the “taxpayer” in his custody, Jack Ruby (actually, Jack was now in the custody of the sheriff’s department), now owed them $44,413.86.
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As we have seen, from the time of Jack’s arrival in Dallas some sixteen years earlier, he was primarily a nightclub operator, moving into burlesque (or a “girlie club”) in his final and most famous venue, the Carousel Club. However, this hardly took all of his time. Those who worked with Jack knew him to show up at the club usually in the early afternoon, when the club was closed, although his comings and goings in the afternoon were “unpredictable,” and he’d stay for a few hours before leaving. The first show at the Carousel was at 9:00 p.m., and Jack would usually show up again between 9:00 and 10:00 p.m. and stay until closing time.
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There was plenty of time for Jack to “make a buck” on other endeavors. And there weren’t too many others trying to make a buck who could keep up with Jack, at least as far as motley attempts were concerned.