Read Reclaiming History Online
Authors: Vincent Bugliosi
For those who might say it isn’t 100 percent clear from these paragraphs that Holmes himself was conducting the interview,
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and therefore his mere presence at the interrogation session did not lengthen it, let’s look at some snippets of his testimony on this point: “In questioning him about the boxes, which I had original applications [for] in front of me”; “I brought it up first as to did he ever have a package sent to him from anywhere. I said, ‘Did you receive mail through this Box 2915 under the name of any other name than Lee Oswald?’”; “‘Well, who is A. J. Hidell?’ I asked him”; “I showed him the box rental application for the post office box in New Orleans and I read from it. I said…”; “And I said also it says ‘A. J. Hidell’”; “When I was discussing with him about [the] rental application for Box No. 6225 at the Terminal Annex, I asked him if he had shown that anyone else was entitled to get mail in that box”; “I said, ‘…What did you show as your business?’ and he said, ‘I didn’t show anything’”; “I asked…‘Is that why you came to Dallas, to organize a cell of this organization in Dallas?’”
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It is very clear, then, that if Holmes hadn’t decided to go downtown to the police station on Sunday morning, November 24, a completely fortuitous event, the interrogation session would have ended quite a bit earlier, and Oswald would have been transferred to the Dallas county jail well before Ruby arrived in the basement—in fact, probably before Ruby even left his apartment to go to the Western Union office.
So unless Postal Inspector Holmes was part of the conspiracy to murder Kennedy or to cover it up—a possibility that would be just fine with conspiracy theorists—Ruby’s killing Oswald was exactly as he said it was, a spontaneous decision on his part that was not pursuant to any conspiracy involving others.
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Parenthetically, it was stated on radio and television that Oswald was to be transferred to the sheriff’s office at 10:00 Sunday morning.
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In fact, Ruby himself acknowledges knowing this.
19
Since there is no evidence that anyone from the Dallas Police Department was in touch with Ruby to inform him of the new time for transferring Oswald, if Ruby’s shooting of Oswald was planned, and part of a conspiracy, why wasn’t he down at the police station at 10:00 a.m. to carry out his assignment? We know that Ruby was still at his apartment at 10:00 a.m. Records from Southwestern Bell Telephone Company show that Ruby’s employee, stripteaser Karen “Little Lynn” Carlin, called Ruby at his apartment at 10:19 a.m. on Sunday.
20
This was the call asking for money that led to Ruby’s going downtown to the Western Union office to wire twenty-five dollars to Carlin. And George Senator, Ruby’s roommate, testified that Ruby didn’t leave the apartment until around 11:00 a.m., some time after the call, among other things first shaving and getting dressed.
21
Anthony Summers, in his book
Conspiracy
, sets forth the conspiracy theorists’ position that someone did inform Ruby of Oswald’s new transfer time and more: “The suspicion is that somebody in the know kept Ruby closely in touch with Oswald’s changing timetable.”
22
As indicated, cell phones were not in existence in those days, and though the conspiracy theorists have struggled long and hard, they haven’t come up with any evidence to support this hypothesis, support for which they would be willing to donate one of their bodily organs. The conspiracy theorists have focused their “suspicion” on four Dallas police officers—Sergeant Patrick Dean, who was in charge of securing the basement garage against unauthorized persons, and three of his men assigned to the security detail, Officer William Harrison, Detective Louis D. Miller, and Lieutenant George Butler—claiming suspicious behavior on the part of all four. But in the process, they rewrite the official record. For instance, shortly after 8:00 that Sunday morning, Harrison and Miller went out for coffee at the Deluxe Diner near the police station. Summers writes that Miller testified that while there, “Officer Harrison received a telephone call from an unknown person.”
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But despite the quotation marks Summers uses, that was not quite Miller’s testimony. He testified, “When the person that works there at the diner answered the phone, he said, ‘Phone for one of you.’ Officer Harrison answered it and came back to the counter and said we were to come back to the office as soon as we finished eating and were to remain there until further notice.”
Question: “Did he tell you who made the telephone call?”
Answer: “No, sir, he never did, and I never did ask him.”
Question: “Do you know whether it was somebody from the police department that made that call?”
Answer: “I presumed it was.”
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In other words, the caller was not an “unknown person”; the caller was only unknown to Miller. And the call wasn’t specifically for Harrison, it was for either Harrison or Miller. Moreover, Harrison himself testified that the call was from the deskman at the police station, Charles Goolsby, telling him and Miller to “come on back to the bureau when we got through eating.”
25
In
The Ruby Cover-Up
, conspiracy theorist Seth Kantor writes that Harrison was given a polygraph test “concerning his movements as they could have involved Ruby on that morning” and the results were “not conclusive.” Kantor quotes no source for any of this.
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The only testimony regarding the issue of whether or not Harrison passed the polygraph test came from Dallas police lieutenant Jack Revill. Revill said that Harrison was given a polygraph test on the sole issue of whether Harrison had seen Ruby standing to his left rear before Ruby shot Oswald, and Harrison, who denied seeing Ruby, passed the test.
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The Dallas Police Department, naturally very concerned about its failure to protect Oswald, and cognizant of all the whispers that maybe one or more of its officers had helped Ruby sneak into the basement garage, conducted an extensive investigation that revealed no evidence of complicity between Ruby and any Dallas police officer.
28
It should be noted that at Ruby’s trial for murdering Oswald, perhaps more than any other evidence against him, the testimony of Dallas police officers as to what Ruby told them right after he shot Oswald refuted and negated his defense of temporary insanity. (See discussion in Ruby trial section.) Therefore, the charge of Dallas police complicity with Ruby “ignores,” as Ruby author and appellate attorney Elmer Gertz points out, “the implications of Ruby’s failure to accuse the [Dallas] police
after
the imposition of the death sentence [against] him. Why would Ruby remain silent if the police had aided and then double-crossed him?”
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Instead, Ruby maintained to the end that the officers in the Dallas Police Department were his friends.
30
After the trial, he even gave Sergeant Patrick Dean, whose testimony of Ruby’s statements were the most damaging of all to Ruby’s case, a copy of the Warren Report “with a fond inscription in it, and tried to give him his watch and his gun.”
31
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Not that we can persuasively cite Jack Ruby himself to rebut the never-ending suspicions of the conspiracy theorists, but Ruby did testify that when he drove past City Hall (on the way to the Western Union office after 11:00 a.m.) and saw a crowd gathered there, “I took it for granted that he [Oswald] had already been moved.”
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The reason why it is highly probable that Ruby was telling the truth is that he took his beloved dog Sheba with him that morning and, even more tellingly, left her in the car when he entered the basement. As one of his appellate lawyers, William Kunstler, argued to the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals in Austin, Texas, on June 24, 1966, “Was that the act of a man planning to shoot another in a crowded basement, knowing he would never get out?”
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Ruby’s friends have said that his love for Sheba was such that if he had planned in advance to shoot Oswald in the basement of the police station, he never would have left his beloved dog in the car, since he would have to know he would be taken into custody and would not be coming back to the car.
34
C
ountless words have been written on the importance of Jack Ruby in the Kennedy assassination. Every conspiracy book that propounds the “mob killed Kennedy” theory tries to establish, above all, the connection between Ruby and organized crime. Richard Billings, a former
Life
magazine editor who wrote extensively on organized crime and coauthored the book
The Plot to Kill the President
, puts it this way: “If there’s a smoking gun in this case, it’s the pistol that was used by Jack Ruby to kill Oswald in the basement of the police station.
The main piece of evidence of Organized Crime complicity in the conspiracy is Jack Ruby
.” Billings goes on to say that “if you’re going to determine the final answer to this crime, the murder of the president, the character of Ruby is crucial.”
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To address the character issue, the story of Jack Ruby’s life is presented here. It takes the reader up until the early morning hours of the day of the assassination. “Four Days in November,” as you may recall, took the story from there.
J
ack Ruby (born Jacob Rubenstein), arguably history’s most notorious avenger and embodiment of vigilante justice, was born in 1911 in Chicago, Illinois, the fifth of eight children of Fannie and Joseph Rubenstein, Ruby having one older brother and three older sisters. Births were not required to be recorded in Chicago prior to 1915, and Jacob’s may not have been. If it was, it’s hard to explain why there is so much confusion about his exact birth date. There is no conflict in the year—it was 1911—but the date has been listed in various places as March 3, March 15, March 19, April 21, April 25, April 26, May 15, and June 23.
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However, Ruby himself most frequently, but not always, gave the date of March 25, the date that is also on his driver’s license as well as in Dallas Police Department records,
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though he gave March 19, 1911, as his date of birth at the time of his arrest for killing Oswald.
38
Later that day he gave the FBI March 25 as the date of his birth.
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Ruby’s father, Joseph, was born in 1871 in Sokolov, Poland, a small town near Warsaw. With Poland under the rule of czarist Russia, Joseph, at age twenty-two, entered the Russian army (artillery).
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In the army, he was trained as a carpenter. Both his father and brother were carpenters. He also learned how to drink excessively, being a heavy drinker the rest of his life.
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Joseph served in China, Korea, and Siberia, but reportedly hated these places and army life in general.
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While in the army, Joseph took a bride through the services of a professional matchmaker.
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Her name was Fannie Turek Rutkowski, who is believed to have been born in 1875 near Warsaw. Fannie came from a well-to-do family and was considered to be very pretty but with little intelligence.
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In 1898, tiring of the military, Joseph simply “walked away” from it and about four years later emigrated to England and then Canada. Eventually, in 1903, he entered the United States. Fannie followed him in June of 1905 with their two children, Hyman and Hannah (Ann), both born shortly after the turn of the century.
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Joseph and Fannie settled in Chicago and had six more children, of whom Jack was the third. Besides Hyman and Ann, his older siblings included two sisters—Marion, born in June 1906, and Eva, born in March 1909. Jack had two younger brothers, Sam, born in December 1912, and Earl (Isadore), born in April 1915, and a younger sister, the last child, Eileen (Ida), born in July 1917.
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The couple had another child, a girl, who died at the age of five after she tipped over a vat of boiling chicken soup onto herself and suffered fatal burns.
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In 1904, a year after his arrival in Chicago, Joseph joined the carpenters’ union and remained a member until his death in 1958, although he was mostly unemployed for the last thirty years of his life.
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He learned to speak a little English, whereas Fannie spoke and wrote virtually no English, though she went to night school around 1920 in a failed effort to learn. In fact, as late as 1940, thirty-five years after she entered this country, she had to write an “X” for her signature in the affidavit for her Alien Registration Form. The language spoken in the Rubenstein household was predominately Yiddish.
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Fannie, unlike her husband, felt her children required an education if they were to better themselves. Joseph, having received scant formal schooling himself, argued that his children needed to go only to grammar school.
50
When Jack was born, the Rubensteins lived near Fourteenth and Newberry streets in Chicago, the first of many Jewish neighborhoods in which they lived.
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At age ten, Jack and his family were living at 1232 Morgan Street, their fourth different address on Chicago’s teeming west side.
52
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All were lower-class Jewish neighborhoods, his brother Earl said, in “the Maxwell Street district.” This, he said, “was like the ghetto of Chicago,” with people selling their wares out on the street in pushcarts.
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Sister Eva elevated the description to “below the middle class but yet it wasn’t the poorest class.”
54
Indeed, the Maxwell Street Market at the time was called “the World’s Greatest Outdoor Market.”
†
They would eventually move farther west (away from downtown) in the city, near “Dago Town,” an improvement over the Maxwell Street neighborhood but where fighting in the street between Italians and Jews was the norm,
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as was the domestic fighting that occurred within the Rubenstein home. Joseph’s drinking, coupled with Fannie’s uncontrollable temper and constant nagging, led to his frequent arrests for disorderly conduct and assault and battery charges, some of which Fannie brought against him.
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Around the neighborhood, Joseph was known as “Poppa Joe,” the neighborhood carpenter, and a drunk.
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Fannie also questioned Joseph’s fidelity, accusing him of philandering and spending his money away from home.
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A July 1922 report from the Jewish Social Services Bureau, dealing with Jack’s “truancy from school” and “behavior trouble in school and at home,” used these adjectives for Joseph: “alcoholic,” “sexually promiscuous,” and “quick tempered.”
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