Reclaiming History (254 page)

The Warren Commission and FBI did not do as complete a job as they should have in investigating all of Ruby’s phone calls, made from his home and the Carousel Club. But the investigation they did caused them to conclude that all his calls were related to AGVA and the Weinsteins.
³¹⁸
And Ruby’s sister Eva testified that she was very familiar with her brother’s problem with the Weinsteins and knew “he had contacted people all over the country trying to find out who knew the bigwigs in the union [AGVA]” who could help him.
³¹⁹
Ruby even called his brother Hyman in Chicago. “He wanted me to contact some people in Chicago who had connections with AGVA in New York,” Hyman recalled, and he made some calls for his brother.
³²⁰
Even Larry Crafard, the drifter who worked at the Carousel, recalled that Ruby “was doing his best to get the union to force them [the Weinsteins] to stop.”
³²¹

If the Warren Commission and FBI didn’t do quite as thorough a job as they should have investigating Ruby’s telephone calls, certainly the HSCA did, conducting an extensive computer analysis of all his telephone toll records during the period in question. And although the HSCA’s chief counsel, G. Robert Blakey, eventually became very partial to the notion that organized crime was behind Kennedy’s death, the committee, after this analysis, was compelled to conclude “that the evidence surrounding the calls was generally consistent—at least as to the time of their occurrences—with the explanation that they were for the purpose of seeking assistance in [Ruby’s] labor dispute.”
³²²

However, the HSCA said it was “not satisfied” with the explanations given for the calls to three of the mob figures Ruby contacted. One was Irwin Weiner, a Chicago bondsman well known as a financial front man for organized crime and the insurance broker and bondsman for Jimmy Hoffa’s Teamsters Union, whom Ruby called, records showed, for twelve minutes on October 26, 1963. The FBI, aware of the call, sought to question Weiner about it on November 27, 1963, but he declined to cooperate. The reason he later gave is that when the FBI called his home after Ruby killed Oswald, he was in Florida, and the agent told his daughter that he wanted to talk to her father about the assassination of the president. “She was shaking with fright,” Weiner later testified before the HSCA, and “because of the way they mistreated my daughter,” he refused to talk to them.
³²³
Although Weiner later told a reporter that Ruby’s call had nothing to do with Ruby’s labor problems (though not saying what the nature of the call was), he told the HSCA that he might have told any reporter who called him anything, since he was not under oath and always lied to reporters.
³²⁴

In Weiner’s testimony before the HSCA, he said he may have met Ruby “four or five times in my life,” mostly in the 1930s as a result of his going to school with Ruby’s brother Earl, a friend of Weiner’s, and didn’t remember anything about these brief occasions, and “never had anything to do with Jack Ruby at any time in my life.” He assumed that Ruby called him in October because of his earlier relationship with Earl.
*

Weiner told the HSCA, “Jack Ruby called me. Evidently he had a nightclub in Dallas, Texas.” He said that Ruby said that “one night a week he had an amateur striptease. Some union that was affiliated with entertainers had stopped him…because the amateur entertainers were not members of the union. He stopped and another competitor of his opened up.” Some lawyer had told Ruby, Weiner recalls, to get an injunction against his competitor, but he would need a bond to do this. Ruby “wanted to know if I would write a bond…I told him no…That was the extent of our conversation.”
³²⁵

The notion that Weiner, a mob bail bondsman, was involved with Ruby in the assassination of Kennedy is so far-fetched that, as indicated, when Weiner declined to talk to the FBI, the FBI never made any further effort to contact or interview him.
³²⁶
But wait. Maybe Ruby wanted to know if, after he killed Oswald for the mob (or was Oswald’s handler in Oswald’s killing of Kennedy), the mob would be kind enough to help him post bond for his release on bail pending trial. I say we look into the Weiner matter further.

Another telephone contact that troubled the committee was with Robert “Barney” Baker, a top aide to teamster boss Jimmy Hoffa, an avowed enemy of the Kennedys, particularly JFK’s brother Bobby, who, as the attorney general, eventually succeeded in putting Hoffa behind bars. This history naturally was alarming to the HSCA, but there is little else about Ruby’s two conversations with Baker to arouse suspicion. Baker, who had a background in settling labor disputes,
³²⁷
was someone whom Ruby would likely call. Baker told the FBI in 1964 that Ruby called him in November of 1963 (telephone records show it was November 7, 1963) at his home in Chicago. He wasn’t in but returned the call, collect, to Ruby that day, after his wife advised him of it. Ruby, who Baker said was a complete stranger, told him, “You don’t know me but we have mutual friends,” whom he did not name. Ruby proceeded to tell him of his dispute with his competitors, who were “attempting to knock me out,” and that the “mutual friends” had said Baker was good at handling matters such as this, and then asked Baker if he would contact AGVA in New York for him. Baker declined, having been released in June from a federal penitentiary in Minnesota after serving time for violating the Labor-Management Relations Act (Taft-Hartley), with a condition of his parole being that he not engage in labor dispute matters for five years. Because Baker indicated he had no further contact with Ruby, whereas the HSCA claimed the records showed Ruby called him the next day (November 8) too, the committee said it was “hard to believe that Baker…could have forgotten it.”
³²⁸
But it is the discussion itself that one is likely to remember, fifteen years later, not whether it required one phone call or two. In the absence of anything else, and the HSCA had absolutely nothing else, this is much to-do about nothing.
*

The final telephone conversation the HSCA was troubled by was a one-minute call made by Ruby at 9:13 p.m. on October 30, 1963, to the business office of the Tropical Court Tourist Park, a trailer park in New Orleans. The owner of the park and manager of the one-man office was Nofio J. Pecora (alias Joseph Pecorano), an associate of New Orleans mob boss Carlos Marcello, suspected by many in the conspiracy community of being behind Kennedy’s murder. Telephone records showed that four months earlier Marcello had called the same number at the park that Ruby had. This would, indeed, look a little suspicious were it not for the fact that a fairly good friend of Ruby’s, New Orleans nightclub manager Harold Tannenbaum, happened to live at the park. Ruby had visited Tannenbaum’s club, the French Opera House, in June of 1963 to scout for talent, and Tannenbaum had introduced Ruby to a marquee stripper, “Jada” (Janet Adams Conforto), who ended up working for Ruby at the Carousel. Since that time, Ruby and Tannenbaum had been in regular contact by telephone. Pecora told the HSCA that the subject phone call was probably to his office to relay a message to someone who lived at the park, though he said he did not recall talking to Ruby, whom he said he did not know, or relaying any message from Ruby to Tannenbaum. But he obviously must have, since phone records show that Tannenbaum called Ruby one hour after Ruby called Pecora’s park office.
³²⁹
It is understandable, of course, that Pecora, in 1978, would not recall the Ruby phone call fifteen years earlier, and there can be no reasonable question that the call from Ruby was for Tannenbaum. If the conspiracy theorists want to believe and allege that Ruby’s call was actually to talk to Pecora for one minute (or less) about the murder of JFK, I guess this is a free country and they have that right under the First Amendment.
†

The position of the conspiracy community—that these phone calls by Ruby to mob figures in September, October, and November of 1963 were related to the assassination—necessarily assumes that Ruby not only silenced Oswald for the mob, but also was a party with the mob in a conspiracy to murder the president. Why would the mob have these alleged conversations with Ruby in the months leading up to Kennedy’s murder if he was not? But not too many people, even in the conspiracy community, believe that Ruby was part of the conspiracy to murder Kennedy. Most simply believe that the mob contacted him to kill Oswald once Oswald survived the assassination, the implication being that after Oswald killed Kennedy for the mob, the mob immediately tried to kill him (or hoped law enforcement would) and failed. But the conspiracy theorists offer no evidence that the mob tried to kill Oswald right after he killed Kennedy, and there would be no reason for the mob to feel completely confident that law enforcement would kill Oswald, which, as we know, they did not.

So in one sense, the conspiracy community believes that Ruby’s calls in the September–November period leading up to the assassination were assassination-related, and then, inconsistently, they believe the mob contacted Ruby only after Oswald survived the assassination. But as author Gerald Posner points out, if the latter is true, then we could expect Ruby’s contacts with mob figures by phone (since the conspiracy community has locked itself into this alleged mode of communication by the mob with Ruby) to have increased after the assassination.
³³⁰
Yet,
all
of Ruby’s contacts by phone with unsavory mob figures took place in the many weeks
before
the assassination. There is no evidence of any taking place between the assassination on November 22 and Ruby’s killing of Oswald on November 24.
³³¹

It could not be clearer from all the direct and circumstantial evidence that the increased number of calls Ruby made in the two months preceding the assassination to those connected to the underworld were related to his effort to seek their help in solving his labor problems with the Weinsteins, and the Warren Commission and HSCA so found. When there is not a speck of evidence pointing in the opposite direction, there’s really nothing more that needs to be said, except that even if we were to accept the premise that Ruby was a part of a conspiracy with organized crime to kill Kennedy and/or Oswald, we can virtually know that the mob would not have been talking to him about it from phones all over the country. Even assuming, for the sake of argument, that they didn’t think of the possibility of their telephone conversations being tapped by the FBI, surely they would have to know that Ruby’s phone records would automatically be obtained and would reveal the existence of his contact with them. Obviously, either the mob would summon Ruby out of town to receive instructions, or one of the mob conspirators would be dispatched to Dallas to meet privately with Ruby.

Before moving on, I should ask the rhetorical question that if Ruby was a member of the mob or was as well connected with organized crime as so very many conspiracy theorists insist, and particularly if he was involved with it in a plot to murder Kennedy and/or silence Kennedy’s killer, how come he wasn’t able to get the mob to help him in such a small matter as getting AGVA on his side in his dispute with the Weinsteins? Particularly when the FBI found that AGVA was frequently used by members of organized crime as a front for their criminal activities, and was described by others as having “racketeer” links and being “completely corrupt.” Instead, Bobby Faye, the person who ran AGVA at the time, didn’t even show Ruby the courtesy of meeting with him when Ruby flew to New York City in August of 1963 seeking the union’s help.
³³²
Can there really be too much doubt that if the Mafia were in Ruby’s corner, just one phone call to the Weinsteins would probably have solved the problem for Ruby? And yet as late as two days before the assassination, Ruby made a long-distance call to Chicago for the purpose of getting AGVA support.
³³³

T
here are essentially two periods to Ruby’s life, the Chicago and the Dallas years. With respect to the Chicago years, the Warren Commission concluded that “Ruby was unquestionably familiar, if not friendly, with some Chicago criminals, but there is no evidence that he ever participated in organized criminal activity.” The Commission went on to say that those who knew Ruby in Chicago did not connect him to organized crime.
³³⁴
As Dave Yaras, who along with Lenny Patrick was another alleged mob hit man in Chicago who knew Ruby well enough to refer to him by his nickname, Sparky, and by all accounts was a leading member of the Chicago Syndicate, told the FBI in 1963, Ruby was “positively not Outfit [the name of the mob in Chicago] connected.”
³³⁵

Well-known Chicago mobster Lenny Patrick, Ruby’s neighborhood chum, said he lost track of Ruby after grammar school, and the next time he became aware of him was when he learned Ruby was selling items such as salt shakers with one of his brothers. He said he was “certain” that Ruby had nothing to do with the rackets in Chicago. He told the FBI the day after Ruby shot Oswald, “No matter how much you investigate, you’ll never learn nothing, as he [Ruby] had nothing to do with nothing.”
³³⁶
And James Allegretti, reputed to be a top organized-crime figure in Chicago at the time, told the FBI that he had never even heard of Jack Ruby’s name before he killed Oswald, having no knowledge of him in the Chicago area.
³³⁷
Other Chicago mobsters and associates told the FBI the same thing.
³³⁸
*
In other words, although Ruby may have drifted around the edges of the Chicago underworld, he never entered and became a part of it.

The HSCA came to the same conclusion—that Ruby was not a member of organized crime in Chicago.
³³⁹

Former FBI agent Bill Roemer, who investigated the mob in Chicago, told author Gerald Posner in 1992, “Ruby was absolutely nothing in terms of the Chicago mob. We had thousands and thousands of hours of tape recordings of the top mobsters in Chicago, including Sam Giancana, and Ruby just didn’t exist as far as they were concerned. We talked to every hoodlum in Chicago after the assassination, and some of the top guys in the mob, my informants. I had close relationships with them—they didn’t even know who Ruby was.”
³⁴⁰