Reclaiming History (255 page)

With respect to Dallas, the Warren Commission stated that its evaluation of the record revealed no evidence connecting Ruby to organized crime in Dallas, and went on to say that both state and federal law enforcement officials came to the conclusion that Ruby “was not affiliated with organized crime activity.”
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As Dallas assistant district attorney Bill Alexander, who prosecuted Ruby, put it, “If there was any connection between Ruby and the syndicate, Mafia, or other hoodlums, it would have come to the attention of our office through various gamblers and hoodlum informants of his office, and no such information has come to our attention.”
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The Warren Commission went on to say that not only law enforcement but also “numerous persons have reported that Ruby was not connected with [organized crime] activity.”
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As his sister Eva said, “Jack himself never had any connection with gangsters for money, for business, for sociability. On the other hand,” she said, “when we saw them we acknowledged them.”
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This observation went far beyond Ruby’s family. A few examples: Reagan Turman, a longtime boxer friend of Ruby’s who also worked for Ruby on many occasions, including managing Ruby’s Vegas Club, said that although Ruby was “acquainted with practically all the known gamblers in the Dallas area, he had no business dealings with them at all.”
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Frank Ferraro, who worked as a handyman for Ruby at the Carousel, said that “‘there were no illegal activities’ that Ruby was involved in.”
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Johnnie Hayden got to know Ruby well as the business representative of the American Federation of Musicians, and said that Ruby “talked and dressed like a Chicago hoodlum, but had no known hoodlum connections.”
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And so on. In fact, even those few who did not like Ruby rejected out of hand the notion he was connected to organized crime. As mentioned earlier, Sam Lasser was a concessionaire at Ruby’s Vegas Club before a business dispute ended their relationship. He said he had no use for Ruby, characterizing him as a man of high temper, a show-off, and a “real tough guy,” but said he felt “certain Ruby had no connection with any hoodlum element.”
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Janet Conforto, Ruby’s head stripper, “Jada,” at the Carousel Club until late October of 1963 when the relationship degenerated into accusations, recriminations, and a dispute over wages and Conforto sought a restraining order against Ruby, said that although Ruby would tell people he “knew all the boys,” she did not know of any association he had with the underworld.
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The Warren Commission summarized the situation by saying that its “investigation disclosed no one in either Chicago or Dallas who had any knowledge that Ruby was associated with organized criminal activity.”
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The Commission further concluded that its investigation of Ruby did not “produce any grounds for believing that Ruby’s killing of Oswald was part of a conspiracy.”
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The HSCA reached the same conclusion about Ruby not being a member of organized crime “in Dallas or elsewhere.”
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However, the HSCA Report went on to say that although there was no evidence available to the committee that Ruby was a member of organized crime, he “had a
significant number of associations
and
direct
and indirect
contacts
with
underworld figures
, a number of whom were
connected
to the
most powerful La Cosa Nostra leaders
. Additionally, Ruby had numerous associations with the Dallas criminal element.”
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This was either innocently sloppy language or deliberately misleading, allowing conspiracy theorists to cite this language, which unquestionably suggests that Ruby was connected to the Mafia. If this wasn’t just terrible writing, then shame on the HSCA for making a statement that implies what its own thorough investigation clearly disproves. Shame on the HSCA for writing this about someone whom its own investigation showed to be no more than a buffoon, someone who had far less connection to the Mafia than Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, and Sammy Davis Jr.
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And shame on the HSCA staff, most of whom were lawyers and investigators, for not knowing that when they make an assertion like this, they have at a minimum a moral, if not a legal burden to prove it. They failed miserably in their effort to prove this allegation, unless one is naive enough to believe that Ruby’s association with the likes of Joe Campisi and Joe Civello satisfied the HSCA’s burden of proof, a burden so low that an ant would have difficulty crawling under it.

Also, although I believe the Warren Commission and FBI could have gone into more depth than they did on Ruby’s possible connection with organized crime, I also believe that the HSCA’s position that the FBI “was
seriously
delinquent in investigating the Ruby-underworld connection” was
seriously
overstated.
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R
uby’s travels outside of Dallas have proved to be fodder for conspiracy theorists, who allege the trips were probably for some clandestine purpose. But it is Ruby’s trip (or, as some believe, trips) to Cuba that has garnered the most attention. Jack went to Cuba around Labor Day of 1959 as the guest of his friend, Lewis McWillie, a gambler Jack met in Dallas around 1947 or 1948. McWillie worked at the Top of the Hill Club between Dallas and Fort Worth. He and Ruby became fast friends and, according to McWillie’s mother, visited with each other on an almost daily basis.
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McWillie went to Cuba in September of 1958 and became manager of the gambling casino at the Tropicana Night Club.
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He told the HSCA that the Fox brothers, the owners of the Tropicana, which had the premier cabaret in Latin America, were trying to stir up business for the casino, so McWillie suggested he call his friend Jack Ruby and ask if he could bring Tony Zoppi, the entertainment columnist for the
Dallas Morning News
who was a friend of Jack’s, down to Havana to see the Tropicana. The idea was to have Zoppi write a great column that would induce Dallasites to visit Havana, and the Foxes thought it was a good idea. When Ruby called Zoppi, Zoppi agreed and McWillie sent two tickets, one for Zoppi and one for Ruby, but as Zoppi said in a 1976 letter, “Jack Ruby and I were supposed to visit [McWillie] in Havana but I got sidetracked. Jack went on ahead…The quick buck artists [conspiracy theorists] are saying Jack went down there to plan the assassination. He couldn’t have planned a gas station holdup…All of a sudden he’s a CIA agent, a Mafia don, etcetera, etcetera, [it’s] sickening.”
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The understanding had been that Zoppi and Ruby could stay at any hotel they wanted during their trip to Havana, all expenses paid by the Foxes, but when Ruby showed up sometime around Labor Day Weekend—September 4, 5, and 6, 1959
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—alone, the Foxes, understandably upset, didn’t pay for any of Ruby’s expenses, and he ended up staying at a small hotel.
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Along the lines of the “guilt by association” thinking of most assassination conspiracy believers, since McWillie knew Florida mob boss Santo Trafficante, who had operated the Sans Souci Hotel in Havana before Castro took power in early January of 1959, it follows that Ruby, while in Cuba, must have met Trafficante, who the conspiracy theorists claim was a prisoner at the time in Trescornia, a Cuban detention camp on the outskirts of Havana. Trafficante, however, denied under oath that he ever met Ruby, telling the HSCA, when asked if he knew Ruby, “No, sir, I never remember meeting Jack Ruby.”

Question: “Are you aware it has been alleged that Jack Ruby visited with you while you were at Trescornia; have you heard that?”

Answer: “I’ve heard that but I don’t remember him visiting me…There was no reason for this man to visit me…I have never seen this man before. I have never been to Dallas. I never had no contact with him. I don’t see why he was going to come and visit me.”
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Indeed, not only is there no credible evidence that Ruby ever met Trafficante in Havana (or elsewhere), but such a meeting would have been impossible since Trafficante was released from Trescornia on August 18, 1959, and left for Miami that same day.
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So Trafficante was no longer in Havana when Ruby arrived there around Labor Day. Even if Trafficante had been there, such a meeting between Ruby and Trafficante would have been difficult since McWillie himself wasn’t close to Trafficante. “He knew who I was,” McWillie said about Trafficante, “and he shook hands with me when he saw me, but that was it.” McWillie told the HSCA that he did not visit Trafficante in Trescornia, although he visited two other inmates there, one twice, while Trafficante was there, and may have simply said hello to Trafficante on the second visit. He said Ruby did not know Trafficante, and he did not believe (though he said it was possible) that Ruby was visiting him in Havana at the time he went to Trescornia, and accompanied him there.
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The HSCA, which looked very hard for a Ruby-Trafficante connection, admitted it was relying “mainly” on the fact that McWillie knew Trafficante, but this, of course, was no evidence at all, particularly with McWillie saying he was the most casual of acquaintances with Trafficante, and the HSCA failing to prove otherwise.

The only other thread the HSCA had to go on was that a British journalist, John Wilson Hudson, who was allegedly detained in the same prison in Havana as Trafficante in 1959, told the American embassy in London shortly after Kennedy’s assassination that a man named “Santos” (presumably Trafficante) was “visited frequently” by a man named Ruby.
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But why would Ruby visit Trafficante “frequently” or at all? To plan Kennedy’s assassination, though Kennedy hadn’t yet been elected? If not, for what other reason? The story is completely uncorroborated and sounds ridiculous on its face. Rather than visiting Trafficante “frequently,” McWillie says that during Ruby’s visit to Cuba, “he was right out there where I worked. Every morning when I got up he was there. When I left the place, he went with me to eat and went to bed…I don’t remember a darn thing he did but bug me all week.”
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Yet during a six-day visit to Havana, Ruby, according to Hudson, visited “frequently” with Trafficante.

Having nothing at all to go on, the HSCA was far, far too tentative in merely saying that “the evidence was not sufficient to form a final conclusion as to whether or not such a meeting [between Ruby and Trafficante] took place.”
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F
or years, the person the conspiracy theorists have tried to connect Ruby with the most, of course, is Lee Harvey Oswald. Both lived in the Oak Cliff area of Dallas, 1.63 miles by surface street from each other. The conspiracists are convinced that Ruby and Oswald knew each other before the events of November 22, 1963, and predictably, like people who see Elvis in supermarkets, several people thought they saw Oswald hanging out with Ruby at the Carousel Club, some even alleging that they were homosexual lovers. The Warren Commission, naturally, had no choice but to investigate each and every one of these claims, and said, “All such allegations have been investigated but the Commission has found none which merits credence,” concluding that “Ruby and Oswald were not acquainted.”
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It should be noted that Ruby’s prosecutors knew that getting the death penalty against Ruby would be easier if they could link Ruby to Oswald—creating the specter of their being part of a conspiracy to kill Kennedy—than if Ruby was just some enraged citizen seeking vigilante justice. But the Dallas DA’s office, and Dallas police detectives assigned to work with the DA’s office on the case, were unable to connect Ruby and Oswald in any way. Dallas district attorney Henry Wade said that “you can see how much it would have helped us…if we could prove Oswald and Ruby were together…Everything that indicated there might be a connection was checked out more carefully than anything else by our office,” but he said they could find no connection.
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No one would have wanted to show that Ruby knew Oswald more than author Seth Kantor, who wrote a pro-conspiracy book about Ruby, yet after thoroughly investigating all the claims, he said, “There is no evidence,…not a shred of proof…that Ruby and Oswald even knew each other, despite claims by several people over the years that the two had been seen together.”
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Although author Gerald Posner said that “the Warren Commission and the Select Committee…both concluded there was no ‘evidence they [Oswald and Ruby] were ever acquainted,’”
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this is misleading. The HSCA, as opposed to the Warren Commission, never did get around to expressly saying, as Posner said, that there wasn’t any evidence that Ruby had any contact or acquaintanceship with Oswald. In fact, the HSCA, in some of the most irresponsible and misleading language of its entire investigation, said its investigation revealed that “the Warren Commission was, in fact, incorrect in concluding that Oswald and Ruby had no significant associations.” The HSCA said it found “associations of both Ruby and Oswald that were unknown to the Warren Commission.”
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(Actually, the Warren Commission only said Ruby and Oswald “were not acquainted.” By the use of the nebulous word
associations
, the HSCA was giving itself much more latitude, expanding the situation, clearly, to include people Ruby and Oswald each knew, though they may not have known each other.) But what were these “significant associations”? If the HSCA found them, it certainly kept them an enormous secret. In a blatant violation of research and scholarship principles, remarkably, the HSCA didn’t give one single citation in its report for its highly inflammatory, misleading, and almost assuredly erroneous assertion about the alleged Ruby-Oswald associations. And there’s nothing in its volumes specifically addressing this question, and answering it affirmatively with solid, credible citations and support.

We should not forget that in addition to the Warren Commission and FBI trying to find any connection between Oswald and Ruby (as well as Tippit), there was the media. As
Dallas Morning News
reporter Jim Ewell would later say, “If there’d ever been any connection between Oswald, Tippit, and Jack Ruby, we would be talking about it [now] as if it happened.” He pointed out, “There was an all out intensive effort on the part of the press [in Dallas] to be the first to find these connections, and there were some very good reporters in those days looking into that.” Ewell and fellow
Morning News
reporter Hugh Aynesworth were a part of that effort. He said they all wanted to “break the ‘story of the century’” that there was a “conspiracy behind the assassination of Kennedy.” Also in Dallas, he adds, were “some of the best newspapermen” from around the country “trying to find those angles. You also had the best from the television networks.” But Ewell said no one found anything. “It was never established.”
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