The Kennedy Half-Century (41 page)

Bill Roemer, who helped the FBI dismantle mob operations in Chicago, is less wishy-washy. “I spent thousands and thousands of hours listening to surveillance tapes on the top mobsters in the country,” he says. “[W]hen the assassination of the president happened, they discussed it relentlessly, but there was never any sign they had anything to do with it.” Both Salerno’s and Roemer’s statements are compelling. These organized crime fighters, despite a strong desire to expose the mob’s sinister nature, could not find substantial evidence linking the Mafia to Kennedy’s death. This balances somewhat Robert Blakey’s strong, informed opinion that organized crime is the premier suspect.
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If mob bosses were orchestrating the Kennedy assassination, they needed small-time flunkies to carry out the murder. And thus we come to the checkered career of Lee Oswald’s killer, Jack Ruby, whose deadly act is one of the few connected to the Kennedy assassination that is undisputed. It was, after all, a nationally televised murder—the nation’s first-ever live TV homicide.

Jacob Rubenstein was born into a dysfunctional Polish Jewish family in 1911. As a child, he witnessed frequent fights between his alcoholic father and mentally ill mother. When the couple’s marriage ended in 1921, Rubenstein and his seven siblings were sent to live in foster homes. The divorce affected Rubenstein deeply and he soon began acting out; a psychiatric report labeled him as a “quick tempered” and “disobedient” young man.
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Jack quit school in the eighth grade and finished his education on the streets of Chicago. At one point, he earned money by running errands for Al Capone, the Windy City’s most notorious Mafia chief. During the Great Depression, Rubenstein scalped baseball tickets, sold busts of FDR, and worked as a singing waiter in order to make ends meet. In 1937 he took a job as a secretary for Chicago’s Scrap Iron and Junk Handlers Union, which brought him into contact with criminal elements. When his boss, a rogue named John Martin, shot the founder of the scrap iron union over a financial dispute, Rubenstein was questioned by police but found innocent of any wrongdoing. “Martin was replaced and the reorganized union was dominated by its secretary-treasurer, Paul J. Dorfman, a man with longstanding connections to Chicago racketeers.”
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During World War II, Rubenstein served in the Air Force. When the war ended, he set up a small business in Chicago with his brothers and shortened his name to “Ruby”; bowing to the anti-Semitism of the day, he thought Ruby sounded “more American.” When the business failed, he relocated to Dallas and established a series of nightclubs, most of which went bankrupt. Accustomed to using violence to settle disputes, Ruby would sometimes punch or pistol-whip customers who got out of line. And yet he never got into any real trouble with the Dallas police. Partly, this was due to Ruby’s untiring efforts to make friends with members of the department. Some officers even patronized his clubs and were treated well. This form of petty corruption was tolerated and even accepted by the department. As a result, the Warren Commission found that “Ruby’s police friendships were far more widespread than those of the average citizen.” As he was being wrestled to the ground after shooting Oswald, Ruby told the arresting officers, “I am Jack Ruby. You all know me.” They certainly did.
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Some individuals in organized crime also knew Jack Ruby. Irwin Weiner, one of Jimmy Hoffa’s closest associates, described the Chicago native as “a friend of mine.” FBI records show that Ruby phoned Weiner on October 26, 1963. “He called me,” Weiner admitted. “I talked to him. What I talked to him about was my own business. And I just don’t want to, don’t feel that I should discuss it with anyone. It has no relation, it has no bearing on anything.”
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Ruby made other possibly suspicious phone calls in the weeks leading up to the assassination. For example, on November 7, 1963, Ruby spoke with
Barney Baker, a Hoffa associate whom RFK once called a “roving organizer and ambassador of violence.” He talked to Baker on at least two other occasions during the same month, though no one knows for sure what they discussed. Ruby also made calls to Russell Mathews (a drug dealer who knew Carlos Marcello), Nofio Pecora (another Marcello lieutenant), Michael Shore (a record company executive with ties to the West Coast Mafia), Lenny Patrick (“a notorious member of Chicago’s outfit”), and other disreputable characters. Ruby later insisted that he was simply trying to get advice from these men on how to handle the American Guild of Variety Artists, a Mafia-controlled union that represented strippers and nightclub entertainers.
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As in so many other areas, the Warren Commission was slapdash and did not thoroughly investigate Ruby’s mob connections. That did not prevent the commission in its final report from stating categorically:

Based on its evaluation of the record … the Commission believes that the evidence does not establish a significant link between Ruby and organized crime. Both State and Federal officials have indicated that Ruby was not affiliated with organized criminal activity. And numerous persons have reported that Ruby was not connected with such activity.
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Fifty years on, it is clear that the Warren Commission was wrong, and that Ruby knew scores of mob figures, including David Yaras, a man whom the Justice Department considered a close associate of Sam Giancana’s. Ruby and Yaras had become acquainted in the late 1930s or early 1940s. Yaras described his friend as a silver-tongued “Romeo” who was good at “picking up girls.”
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Ruby also was acquainted with Joseph Campisi, “a close associate of Dallas mob boss Joseph Civello” and Frank Caracci, one of Carlos Marcello’s lieutenants. Campisi visited Ruby in jail a few days after he shot Oswald; Caracci and Ruby talked on the phone several times during the summer and fall of 1963 and met in person at least once. Ruby knew plenty of other mobsters, including Johnny Roselli (the same Roselli who met with the FBI’s Robert Maheu in Miami) and Lewis McWillie, another one of Sam Giancana’s associates.
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Chuck Giancana is convinced that his brother not only knew Ruby, but also ordered the hit on Oswald. According to Chuck, Sam used Jack to open “a seedy night spot that the Chicago [mob] syndicate would slowly transform into a jumping strip joint, offering clientele everything from bookmaking to prostitutes.” The job required someone who could deliver envelopes full of cash to local law enforcement personnel, and perhaps Ruby cultivated close
ties with Dallas police officers so that it would be easier to bribe them on behalf of Giancana.
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The FBI was aware of Ruby’s Mafia ties and tried to recruit him as an informant. In 1959 agent Charles Flynn approached Ruby nine times asking for information on gambling operations, drug networks, and organized crime in the Dallas area. But Ruby never divulged any useful information, and the FBI eventually ceased all contact with him.

And then there is Ruby’s apparent connection to Cuba. According to a former associate, James Beard, Ruby periodically delivered guns and ammunition to pro-Castro Cubans. Beard says that he “personally saw many boxes of new guns, including automatic rifles and handguns” onboard a boat piloted by Ruby. At the time, the mob was hedging its bets by supplying weapons to Castro’s friends and foes alike, hoping to win favor with whichever side ultimately triumphed. (Mobsters turned against Castro only after he seized power and began cracking down on their nefarious activities.) A Texas gunrunner named Robert McKeown says that Ruby got in touch with him in 1959 about transporting a number of jeeps to Castro’s army. McKeown gathered that Ruby was working for Santo Trafficante, the godfather in south Florida, and says that the nightclub owner asked for help in “getting some people out of Cuba” for “a man in Las Vegas.”
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Even the Warren Commission admitted that Ruby traveled to Cuba in 1959. Whether the commission coaxed the whole truth out of Ruby is another matter. “I want to tell the truth, and I can’t tell it here,” Ruby told Earl Warren in June 1964 from his Dallas jail cell. “Unless you get me to Washington, you can’t get a fair shake out of me.” Ruby insisted that his life was in danger if he stayed in Dallas, but Warren refused to transfer him. Ruby also reportedly told a friend who came to see him in jail, “Now they’re going to find out about Cuba, they’re going to find out about the guns, find out about New Orleans, find out about everything.”
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Persistent reports have also suggested that Jack Ruby and Lee Oswald knew each other. If true, this would add spice to accusations of a possible conspiracy. Yet these assertions have tended to fall apart upon close examination. Beverly Oliver, a Dallas woman who claimed she was in Dealey Plaza on November 22, declared that Ruby had introduced her to “Lee Oswald of the CIA” before the assassination.
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But it is doubtful that Oliver was present in Dealey Plaza, and her yarn changed a good deal over the years. The House Select Committee on Assassinations, after interviewing her in executive session, did not consider her legitimate.
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A Dallas waitress, Mary Lawrence, reported that Ruby and Oswald ate a late-night meal at her restaurant. Yet Lawrence said “Oswald” had a small scar near his mouth, which Oswald
lacked but Larry Crafard, a close friend of Ruby’s who resembled Oswald, did indeed have.
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Some of Ruby’s employees at the Carousel Club alleged that Oswald was often at the club, drinking and reveling with strippers. This contradicts testimony from Oswald’s landlady and other rooming house tenants that Oswald was regularly home by six P.M. Dallas policeman Jim Leavelle investigated some of these reports, but he found them groundless: “If Oswald had any redeeming qualities, [they were that] he didn’t drink alcohol and hang around clubs … People would say, ‘Oswald was up there in Ruby’s club drinking and all this stuff, and so-and-so saw it.’ And I’d go to so-and-so and he’d say, ‘well, I didn’t really see him but my friend George over there, he saw him.’ And I’d go to George—and he didn’t see Oswald, but his friend Frank did. And I never could get to the end of the damn line. There wasn’t nothing to it.”
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No single aspect of the Kennedy assassination has done more to perpetuate conspiracy theories than the cold-blooded execution of Lee Harvey Oswald. Americans already in shock over the president’s brutal death were further numbed as they watched a new killing happen on television. For almost everyone, the quick elimination of the accused assassin seemed frighteningly convenient. The government and the news media kept a great deal from the public in those days, but that didn’t mean people couldn’t reason for themselves. In millions of homes throughout America, people uttered versions of what my father exclaimed seconds after Ruby shot Oswald: “
They
want to shut him up.” Not “he,” but “they.” As Nancy Pelosi put it, “As soon as I saw Jack Ruby shoot Oswald, I thought, ‘Of course! That’s what they do to somebody who kills somebody—kill him so that he can’t talk.’”
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In my large extended family, gathering for a sad Thanksgiving less than a week after the events in Dallas, every single relative expressed a belief in a conspiracy, most because of Oswald’s elimination. Whether true or not, Americans sensed that large, evil, unseen forces were at work, and this gnawing suspicion added immensely to the disquiet of the time.

Once again, given an inadequate investigation when the trail was hot and after the passage of a half century, it is impossible to say with certainty whether Ruby was another “lone gunman” or part of a conspiracy. Ruby’s own contemporaneous comments lead us in two different directions. He told police that he had shot a smirking Oswald in a fit of pique so that Mrs. Kennedy would not have to return to Dallas and go through a trial “for this son-of-a-bitch.” Detective Barnard Clardy told the Warren Commission that he heard Ruby say, “If I had planned this I couldn’t have had my timing better,” and that “It was one chance in a million.” In addition, right after he was arrested, Ruby told Bill Alexander, Dallas’s assistant district attorney, that he was “proud
that he killed the man who killed the president because it showed that Jews have guts.” “He thought that he would be a hero,” Alexander told me. “He said, ‘you guys [the police] couldn’t do it.’ ”
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There is also testimony that Ruby became deeply upset about JFK’s death. He might have been acting, but his emotions appeared genuine to those who knew him best. Ruby’s sister, Eva Grant, put Jack’s demeanor over the weekend this way: “He was sick to his stomach … He looked terrible … He looked [like] a broken man [and said], ‘I never felt so bad in all my life even when Ma and Pa died … someone tore my heart out.’ ”
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Did Ruby, a self-professed admirer of the Kennedys, at least after the assassination, act on impulse when he shot Oswald? Or had he been hired to silence a patsy who might squeal to the police?

Unfortunately, Ruby’s trial was almost perfunctory and did not address these questions, and a Texas jury sentenced him to death for his crime. (The conviction was later overturned by an appeals court.) Jim Cunningham, a retired Texas Instruments engineer and one of the last surviving members of Jack Ruby’s jury, says that Melvin Belli, Ruby’s celebrity attorney from California, didn’t understand the Texas system and put on a poor case. But the key factor in the jury’s decision was Ruby’s own actions. While Cunningham was one of three jurors who at first voted against the death penalty, and considered a lesser penalty such as “murder without malice,” he joined all his colleagues in a vote for capital punishment in the end: “If [Ruby] had no malice, why was he in the basement of the police station with a gun? … Ruby had a temper and finally it got him into so much trouble he couldn’t get out of it.”
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