Reclaiming History (375 page)

†In
Case Closed
, Posner writes that the Warren Commission did not place those like “Weiner, Pecora, or Baker under oath. However, the telephone calls are not evidence of a conspiracy to kill JFK, since most of the calls were made before the President’s trip to Dallas was even announced” (Posner,
Case Closed
, p.365 footnote). This is a little misleading in that although many phone calls fell into that category, the calls he cites, the same ones the HSCA found troubling, were made on October 26, October 30, and November 7 and 8, all
after
the president’s trip to Texas was announced on September 26, 1963 (CE 1368–1369, 22 H 620–621).

^*
The Warren Commission said it found it “difficult to attach credence to a newspaper reporter’s contrary statement [to the FBI] that his undisclosed ‘syndicate sources’ revealed Ruby was connected with organized crime and confidence games” (WR, p.790; newspaper reporter: CE 1321, 22 H 495–496). There are several reasons for rejecting this. It is totally at odds with what others have said about Jack Ruby and with everything we know about Ruby. Also, the reporter, a crime writer for the
Chicago Daily News
, apparently never thought enough of the information to write about it in his
own
newspaper (apparently this reporter was the one out of a thousand reporters who didn’t like scoops), and finally, he refused to identify his sources. We know that the information provided by the “sources” was incorrect in two instances. They told the reporter that Ruby had been arrested in Milwaukee on bookmaking charges and in Chicago on charges of “confidence games,” but there is no evidence of either of these arrests. He was also told by his “sources” that Ruby was part of a group of Chicago mobsters who went to Dallas in 1947 to take over gambling. This is an old charge that we have seen has been proved false.

^*
Author Gerald Posner agrees with the conspiracy theorists that the Warren Commission “underplayed Jack Ruby’s underworld associations” (Posner,
Case Closed
, p.411). But it would have been hard for the Commission to underplay those associations when none were of any significance to underplay. If any were, what were they? Even the HSCA never came up with anything. And even assuming, for the sake of argument, that the Warren Commission underplayed Ruby’s underworld associations, it couldn’t have been, as many conspiracy theorists allege, intentional. To believe that, one would have to believe that the seven distinguished Commission members were trying to protect the American Mafia and cover up their possible involvement in the assassination.
Though this is a more subtle point, since a Mafia connection with Ruby in the killing of Oswald necessarily bespeaks premeditation, if the Warren Commission were trying to protect the mob (which is a thought unworthy of even being considered), anything that showed a lack of premeditation on Ruby’s part would of course help them. Yet, although the Warren Report adequately shows Ruby’s propensity for violence, it negligently fails (though the Commission’s volumes don’t) to focus in on the spontaneity of that violence and Ruby’s extreme volatility, which would tend to be supportive of an unpremeditated act, and hence, away from the conclusion that Ruby was a part of any conspiracy to kill Oswald.

†Although several of Ruby’s friends and acquaintances noted that he engaged in playing cards and attended the horse races, Ruby did not consider himself to be a gambler (CE 1536, 23 H 27; CE 1559, 23 H 48; CE 1742, 23 H 351; 5 H 201, WCT Jack L. Ruby). Jack’s longtime girlfriend of nine years plus, Alice Nichols, stated that he gambled on occasion, but that she did not believe Jack gambled with any large amounts of money,
and that he confined his gambling to card games (Nichols [Alice R.] Exhibit No. 5355, 20 H 673, 679). Another acquaintance, though, remembers Jack as betting “heavily” with frequent telephone bets on horse races and basketball games (CE 1505, 22 H 924).

^*
Particularly Sinatra, who much evidence shows was very friendly with leading mob figures like Lucky Luciano and Sam Giancana for years (e.g., see Summers and Swan,
Sinatra
, pp.130–133, 252–255).

^*
Three tourists from Chicago told the FBI they saw Ruby at the Tropicana during Labor Day Weekend. However, the FBI was unable to verify their story through a search of records at the hotel in Miami Beach they said they stayed at before leaving for Cuba. The airline they said they flew on from Key West to Havana was no longer in existence and the location of the airline records was unknown. (CE 1765–1774, 23 H 375–379, 381–382)

^*
“Was Jack concerned about baldness?” Warren Commission counsel asked George Senator, Ruby’s roommate. “Oh, you should only know. He used to drive me crazy.” Senator went on to tell of Ruby’s going somewhere for “treatments” for his growing baldness and “the stuff” Ruby would “rub into his head.” (14 H 288)

^*
Ruby’s brother Sam was the only other sibling who lived in Dallas, but except for seeing him on Jewish holidays and speaking over the phone occasionally, he was not close to him. All his other siblings lived in Chicago or Detroit. (WR, p.803)

^*
Barney Weinstein, one of Ruby’s competitors with his nearby Theatre Lounge, nonetheless had a soft spot for Jack and knew him well. He would later say, “Jack had to
be
there, even when he wasn’t wanted.” Weinstein said he once put on a benefit for a performer of his who died and Jack offered to sell ten tickets. “But he never let well enough alone. He met people as they came in that night and tried to get them to buy
more
tickets. I said, ‘Jack, leave them alone. They already bought their tickets.’ So then he wanted to sell
special
tickets for the best seats; he wanted to be my usher; he wanted to help, and he only got in the way. Once he dropped by when my houseman had not come in. He said, ‘Don’t worry, I’ll stay and take care of any trouble.’ I told him, ‘I don’t
want
you to, Jack.’ You know, he doesn’t stop trouble, he starts it…Jack had seven fights a week. I’ve had three fights in thirty years…But he stayed anyway. He had a wonderful heart. When he hardly knew me, he read about my mother’s funeral in the newspapers and came to it. He just had to get into everything, including the excitement of that weekend Kennedy died.” (Wills and Demaris,
Jack Ruby
, pp.13–14)

†Just the previous day, Ruby approached Joseph P. Rossi, who was engaged in the real estate business and had known Jack for eleven years. Shortly after Oswald’s murder Rossi told the FBI that Ruby had discussed opening a new club and wanted Rossi to invest money in the club and perhaps help in management of the venture. Ruby talked of future plans in a manner that indicated he did not anticipate getting into any kind of trouble. (FBI Record 124-10062-10290, January 13, 1964, pp.1–2; see also 15 H 237, WCT Joseph Rossi)

^*
In his torrent of words, Ruby obviously misspoke here, from the context probably meaning that prior to this thought of killing Oswald on Sunday morning he had no previous thought to kill him. This likelihood is further increased by Ruby’s being notorious for misusing words.
Malicious
doesn’t mean an intent to kill, but
malice aforethought
, a term most lay people have heard, does, and this could have been the source of Ruby’s incorrect selection of the word
malicious
. Of course, there is also the possibility that Ruby wasn’t confused at all, and in his mind, the further back in time his hatred for Oswald and decision to kill him commenced (i.e., Friday afternoon), the more likely he’d get the death penalty because of the longer premeditation.

^*
This was not the first time Ruby said he acted alone in killing Oswald. He told the FBI on the very day he killed Oswald that he was not involved in any conspiracy with anyone, that no one asked him or suggested to him that he shoot Oswald (Hall [C. Ray] Exhibit No. 2, 20 H 44). On December 21, 1963, he told the FBI, “I told no one I was going to kill him. No one knew I was going to shoot him. I didn’t discuss anything with anyone about shooting him” (Hall [C. Ray] Exhibit No. 3, 20 H 57).

^*
Before the test was administered to Ruby, his lawyer, Joe Tonahill, said on the record that “when I entered the defense of Jack Ruby back in December of 1963 with Mr. Belli, at that time we insisted before undertaking his defense that he agree to a polygraph test and truth serum test or any other scientific test that would reflect whether or not there was a connection between him and Lee Harvey Oswald or in any respect a conspiracy. He agreed and insisted at that time that there was no such conspiracy…[and] he did not know Lee Harvey Oswald and there was no connection between them and that he would undertake any type of a scientific test that we could have made available for him. Jack Ruby has insisted on those tests ever since. We have from time to time proposed to the FBI…that a lie detector test be given Mr. Ruby. We have filed motions to obtain scientific tests” (14 H 507, WCT Jack L. Ruby).

^*
Though he did not personally know Ruby, Ralph Salerno, the chief consultant to the HSCA on organized crime who spent twenty years with the New York Police Department investigating the Mafia, told the HSCA, “Jack Ruby cannot be characterized as an organized crime figure in any way in my estimation. Jack Ruby would not have made a pimple on the back of the neck of a real organized crime figure” (5 HSCA 464).

^*
At the trial, I had no time to go into the issue of whether Kantor was confusing seeing Ruby at Parkland with his seeing him elsewhere. Moreover, I was in no position to prove Kantor was wrong, so my questions assumed that Kantor had seen Ruby at Parkland.

†The ramming of his head against the wall on April 26, 1964, was not a little game Ruby was playing. He was knocked unconscious and had to be hospitalized. (HSCA Record 180-10113-10493, May 29, 1964) Ruby’s conviction for Oswald’s murder thrust him into great despair, triggering a hastening of the mental degenerative process and causing him to lose all hope for a successful appeal and to not cooperate with his lawyers, who were seeking to reverse his conviction on appeal. To protect Ruby from himself, Sheriff Decker assigned two round-the-clock guards to watch over Ruby, who slept on a mattress on the bare floor, lights always shining directly on him. When his sister Eva would visit him, he would urge her to do away with herself because he said his whole family was in jeopardy. His visions of his brother Earl and his children being dismembered were so clear that Eva said that since she wasn’t in daily contact with the rest of the family, she had “to sort of tell real lies, that I just got through talking” with them “and everything was okay.” He also told her that “25 million Jews have been slaughtered” and sometimes he could hear planes overhead bombing the Jews, and also saw Jews being boiled in oil. (Belli with Carroll,
Dallas Justice
, pp.261–264; 14 H 471, WCT Eva Grant; Kantor,
Ruby Cover-Up
, pp.316–319)
Not everyone was convinced of the sincerity of Ruby’s delusions. When he’d sometimes put his ear to the wall and say to his guards, “Shhh. Do you hear the screams? They are torturing the Jews again down in the basement,” they would tell him, “O.K., Jack, cut the crap or we won’t play cards with you anymore.” (Wills and Demaris,
Jack Ruby
, pp. 255–256)
After Ruby’s sentence of death, Ruby’s lawyers had a psychiatrist, Dr. Louis Jolyon West, examine Ruby for them, and the judge, Judge Brown, assigned another psychiatrist (R. L. Stubblefield) to examine Ruby for the court. West’s conclusion was that Ruby was “obviously psychotic” and “completely preoccupied with his delusions of persecution of the Jews,” believing that “all the Jews in America were now being slaughtered” because “the president’s assassination and its aftermath were now being blamed on him,” a Jew. West was convinced Ruby was not feigning psychosis, giving several reasons, among which were that West doubted “that someone unfamiliar with technical psychiatry could play the part of a paranoid delusional psychotic person with such accuracy, consistency, and typical detail.” Also, he said Ruby doesn’t want “to go to a mental hospital…and violently rejects the idea that he is mentally ill,” whereas “the true malingerer usually grasps eagerly” at such a diagnosis. Stubblefield agreed that Ruby had “an acute psychiatric illness” and also did not believe that he was feigning mental illness. (HSCA Record 180-10113-10493, May 29, 1964)

^*
It is not 100 percent certain that the incident described by Cox took place on the afternoon of the assassination, although a situation similar to the one Cox describes (absent Ruby’s crying) may have taken place at some previous time. The citation Kantor gives for this incident is an interview he had with Cox in Dallas on August 3, 1976, thirteen years after the assassination. But a very detailed chronology and reconstruction by the HSCA of all of Ruby’s known movements on the afternoon of the assassination, anchored by many witnesses and phone records, does not show any visit by Ruby to any bank on that afternoon (9 HSCA 1099–1100, 1102–1105).
Indeed, it’s not certain that this incident (like countless other incidents in the case) ever took place. To me, it doesn’t have a ring of truth to it. For starters, since Cox apparently never told Kantor that he asked Ruby, or that Ruby volunteered the information, how would Cox know the exact or even approximate amount of currency Ruby was holding in his hands? And why would Ruby be holding all this currency in his hands in the first place, particularly since he didn’t deposit any of it? Moreover, what was Ruby doing in line in the first place? Merchants State Bank records showed that the only activity on the Carousel Club’s account that day was a $31.87 withdrawal by check to pay a city water bill. (
Dallas Morning News
, October 12, 1978, p.16A)