Reclaiming History (260 page)

It is very noteworthy that without exception,
not one of these conspiracy theorists knew or had ever met Jack Ruby
. Without our even resorting to his family and roommate, all of whom think the suggestion of Ruby being connected to the mob is ridiculous,
those who knew him
, unanimously and without exception, think the notion of his being connected to the Mafia, and then killing Oswald for them, is nothing short of laughable.

As we have seen, Ruby wasn’t a member or even an associate of organized crime. To supplement what has already been written in the biography of Ruby, Ruby’s roots were in Chicago, and few knew more about the mob in Chicago than Lenny Patrick, the “Jewish capo” of the Chicago mob suspected of being behind many of the “Outfit’s” murders in Chicago. Right after Ruby killed Oswald, the late William Roemer, the senior FBI agent assigned to investigate organized crime in Chicago, contacted Patrick, whom he had hounded for years. Patrick, Roemer said, “was a very personable guy, except that he had killed six people.” Roemer said that Patrick was not a mob informant for the FBI, but Roemer added, “I had done a big favor for Lenny, so I could talk to him.” Patrick told Roemer that he knew Ruby and that Ruby wasn’t a part of organized crime in Chicago, going on to call Ruby unstable and unreliable. Of course, if the mob had Ruby kill Kennedy, Patrick couldn’t be expected to tell Roemer the truth. But Roemer knew Patrick well and said that what Patrick told him “was convincing” to him.
⁴⁹⁹

Jack Clark, an investigative consultant for the Chicago Police Department, told ABC in 2003, “I knew Sparky in the 40s and 50s. He was in all the gymnasiums with all the boxers. It was
well
known that Jack Ruby was
meshuga
—that Jack wasn’t playing with a full deck. He was a nice guy, but he just wasn’t playing with a full deck.” As to whether he had ties with organized crime in Chicago, Clark said, “The Chicago mob had nothing to do with Jack Ruby. Jack Ruby was working with the rag-tag guys, on the street, downtown Chicago. Some of them were bookmakers. They were just guys who made a buck through their wit or charm. But they were not gangsters.”
⁵⁰⁰

Luis Kutner, a Chicago lawyer who knew Ruby from Ruby’s Chicago days, before Ruby moved to Dallas, told investigators for the HSCA that Ruby was “the type of person who was always seeking out someone who was in the limelight” and that “Jack Ruby had no connection with organized crime other than his mouth.”
⁵⁰¹

Janet Conforto (“Jada”), Ruby’s headline stripper at the Carousel, had all types of problems with Ruby over the high wages she was supposed to receive, but, as noted earlier, acknowledged that she was unaware of any association he had with members of the underworld, though she said he’d like to say, “I know all the boys,” an apparent reference to racketeers.
⁵⁰²
If you were trying to prove Ruby’s connection to organized crime, how much could you deposit in the bank with that type of remark, particularly from a braggart like Ruby, who, after one short conversation with DA Henry Wade at police headquarters on the night of the assassination, was telling people later in the evening that Wade was his “friend.” But of course Ruby, particularly because he came from the wrong side of the tracks in Chicago and operated a strip joint in Dallas, did know members of the mob, like Dallas mob boss Joe Civello. But again, so did Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, and Sammy Davis. It means nothing at all. The only thing that means anything is whether he was a mobster himself. And Ruby was not. In fact, former Ruby prosecutor Bill Alexander says Ruby “wasn’t even a common criminal. He didn’t steal. He didn’t pimp. He wasn’t a drunk. Jack wasn’t a lawbreaker.”
⁵⁰³

During the HSCA testimony of Jack Revill, a detective in charge of the criminal intelligence section of the Dallas Police Department at the time of the assassination, counsel asked, “Did you have any knowledge of Jack Ruby’s associations with any gamblers or anyone else involved with illegal activity?”

Revill: “Jack Ruby was the type of person who would have been
acquainted
with persons involved in gambling activities and other criminal activities, but as far as Jack Ruby being actively engaged or a member of any groups, no, nothing to indicate this.”

Question: “What was your personal impression of Jack Ruby?”

Revill: “Jack Ruby was a buffoon. He liked the limelight. He was highly volatile. He liked to be recognized with people, and I would say this to this committee: if Jack Ruby was a member of organized crime, then the personnel director of organized crime should be replaced.”
⁵⁰⁴

Bert Shipp, the assistant news director for Dallas’s WFAA-TV (Channel 8) around the time of the assassination, knew Ruby well and had a similar assessment: “The Mafia wouldn’t have trusted Jack Ruby to take change to the bank…I’ve talked to two guys that were pretty high up in [local organized crime], and they laugh when you talk to them about Jack Ruby…being part of the mob, the Mafia.”
⁵⁰⁵
In other words, the mob didn’t get to be as successful as it was by trusting someone like Jack Ruby.
*

Hugh Aynesworth, a
Dallas Morning News
reporter at the time of the assassination who had more firsthand knowledge about the participants in the assassination drama than any other reporter, and writes about them well in his book,
JFK: Breaking the News
, knew Ruby because he’d see him around town whenever anything was happening. “My goodness,” Aynesworth said, “I even saw him at a restaurant fire, a police raid. How he’d find out about these things, I don’t know, but he’d be there.” At the suggestion that Ruby was a member of organized crime, Aynesworth laughs. “Mafia guys aren’t talkers,” he says. “Ruby, if he found out anything he thought was important, he’d tell someone else about it within one block. Jack was the type of guy, if he was at a fire, he’d run two or three blocks to tell people there was a fire.”
⁵⁰⁶
Aynesworth sums up Ruby this way: “Jack Ruby was the quintessential wannabe but never-was.” He was “full of big stories, bigger dreams and lusty braggadocio.”
⁵⁰⁷

If Ruby’s sieve-like mouth made him someone the mob wouldn’t conspire to bird-watch with, he “made up for it,” as the expression goes, by being so volatile and emotional. As a friend of Ruby’s, one who had known him for over fifteen years, said, he couldn’t “plan anything in advance” because he “couldn’t concentrate on one topic for more than five minutes.”
⁵⁰⁸

Rabbi Hillel E. Silverman, who knew Ruby and his sister Eva for about ten years prior to the assassination and visited him two or three times a week when Ruby was in custody, described Ruby as a “simple and shallow, yet eccentric and unbalanced man” of little intelligence and education. “I think I know Jack Ruby well enough to say,” Silverman said, “that he was not a member of any organized criminal element, and I find it inconceivable that he conspired with anyone to kill Oswald,” adding that he felt confident that Ruby’s decision to kill Oswald was a “spur-of-the-moment act.”
⁵⁰⁹

Elmer Gertz, one of Ruby’s main appellate lawyers who succeeded in securing a reversal of Ruby’s death sentence for murdering Oswald, and later wrote a book,
Moment of Madness: The People vs. Jack Ruby
, referred to Ruby as “an undisciplined man-child,” and says, “Ruby was a compulsive talker,” and “if he were involved in a conspiracy, in five minutes the whole world would know it.”
⁵¹⁰

Emmett Colvin, another of Ruby’s criminal appellate lawyers, said the notion that Ruby was a hit man for organized crime when he killed Oswald was “ludicrous. Jack Ruby was a pitiful man. Having practiced law since 1942, I am well aware of the characteristics of a hit man. These are cold, calculating people. This cannot be equated to Jack Ruby.”
⁵¹¹

Bill Alexander, who we know prosecuted Ruby for Oswald’s murder, had known Jack for years, though he had never socialized with him. He said, “It’s funny that I’d be in a position of defending Ruby, but Ruby has been maligned and besmirched for years with these mob allegations by people who are just not in possession of the facts.” He told me that in all his years as a part of Dallas law enforcement, “I never heard anyone say that Ruby had any association with organized crime, or was involved in any kind of organized criminal activity. I can tell you that with all the scrutiny he was under because of the clubs he was operating, if he’d have been involved with the mob or doing anything bad, Dallas police intelligence would have picked up on it.” When I asked Alexander about the age-old assertion that the mob got Ruby to silence Oswald for them, Alexander, who rarely laughs, couldn’t resist laughing. “The mob,” he said, “would not have let Ruby within five miles of one of their meetings because he was an extroverted blabbermouth.”
⁵¹²

Tony Zoppi, for years the entertainment columnist for the
Dallas Morning News
, who knew Ruby very well and said, “We were really good friends,” also laughs at the notion that Ruby was connected to organized crime. “It is so ludicrous to believe that Ruby was part of the mob. The conspiracy theorists want to believe everybody but those who really knew him.”
⁵¹³

As indicated earlier, who could have possibly known Jack Ruby, warts and all, as much as the cocktail waitresses and strippers at his club who worked with him and were exposed to his personality seven nights a week? “Jack’s girls” both loved and hated him, with a lot more love than hate. Two of his strippers, Diana Hunter and Alice Anderson, speaking for themselves as well as, they knew, for the others, wrote, “We believe we knew Jack Ruby better than anybody else, including all those experts who tried so hard to analyze him from the day he committed his notorious crime until the day he died more than three years afterward…And we’re as sure as we can be that Jack Ruby…was not part of any conspiracy.”
⁵¹⁴

In addition, those on the wrong side of the law in Dallas referred to Jack as a “fink”
⁵¹⁵
because he gave information to the Dallas Police Department on criminal activity he learned about. Dallas police detective Joe Cody, who used to ice-skate with Ruby from time to time, said that Ruby was “very cooperative” with the Dallas Police Department, and on “several cases” passed on information “that resulted in arrests.”
⁵¹⁶
“People in Dallas…knew Ruby was a snitch,” Zoppi says. “The word was on the street that you couldn’t trust him because he was telling the cops everything. You have to be crazy to think anybody would have trusted Ruby to be part of the mob.”
⁵¹⁷

Seth Kantor, author of
The Ruby Cover-Up
, writes, “Ruby was an informer on every different police level there was. He fed tips to…the Dallas police force regularly. He met in Dallas with two Chicago detectives to provide them information less than three months before the Kennedy assassination.”
⁵¹⁸

Indeed, and please get this, during the Kefauver Committee hearings (named after its chairman, U.S. Senator Estes Kefauver from Tennessee) investigating organized crime in 1950, Ruby actually contacted his lawyer friend from Chicago, Luis Kutner, who had become a staff attorney for the Kefauver Committee, and volunteered to testify as a witness
against
the mob. And although he was unable to furnish the Senate committee with any information of real value, he traveled to Chicago from Dallas when the committee was there and met with Rudolph Halley, who was the chief counsel for the committee, and George Robinson, one of his investigators.
⁵¹⁹
With Ruby’s background of wanting to testify against the mob, to think it would come to him after Oswald killed Kennedy and say, “Jack, we got a little job for you,” is high humor.

In addition to Ruby’s being close to law enforcement, emotionally volatile and erratic in his behavior, and someone who couldn’t keep a secret, all of which would automatically disqualify him as a Mafia hit man, we know that whomever the mob employed would be someone it knew was not virtually crazy, which Ruby was close to being. These are just a few of the observations about Ruby’s mental condition from those who knew him. Stripper Janet Conforto said that “I don’t think he is sane.”
⁵²⁰
Ruby’s prosecutor, Henry Wade, said, “No question Ruby had some loose cells in his brain.”
⁵²¹
At his trial Ruby was shown to have organic brain damage, and lay witnesses told the jury about their impressions of Ruby: The general manager of the parking lot next to the Carousel said he “sometimes” wondered “about Jack’s sanity.”
⁵²²
A close friend of Ruby’s said he “was sure” that Ruby was “suffering from some form of…mental disturbance.”
⁵²³
Edward Pullman, whose wife was employed by Ruby at the Carousel, said, “I realized that he was a very erratic person…I have seen him just haul off and lambast or hit someone without thinking twice…He was psycho…I mean, he was not right.”
⁵²⁴
Just the type of hit man the mob would hire to commit the second biggest murder in its history, a man it could have total confidence in.

To repeat, to think that organized crime would come to someone of Ruby’s background and ask him to murder Oswald for them is worse than a bad joke, particularly when there’s not the tiniest speck of evidence that they did so.

I
f Ruby didn’t kill Oswald for the mob, just why did he kill Oswald? Rabbi Silverman summed it up this way: “He [Ruby] did this in a fit of anger and passion. He was a great patriot and he thought he was doing a great favor for the people of the United States. He was doing justice, Texas justice, to a terrible man who had shot his beloved president.”
⁵²⁵

Two of Ruby’s brothers also mentioned the “patriotic” motivation. “Our brother did this for only one reason—he’s a good, patriotic American, and he got carried away,” said Hyman Rubenstein.
⁵²⁶
Ruby’s brother Earl said his brother was “almost aggressively patriotic.”
⁵²⁷
“Jack was the most patriotic member of the family,” Earl said, and he “was tremendously in favor of President Kennedy. He was a great admirer of the president. He thought he was a great guy.”
⁵²⁸
Ruby’s sister Eva, who knew Ruby the best, testified that her brother “didn’t have” any attitude toward politics, but “if you said anything against” America or its leaders, “he would knock the hell out of you.”