Reclaiming History

by Vincent Bugliosi

  Soon after Jack resumed operating the Singapore Supper Club, he changed its name to the Silver Spur (though it was sometimes referred to as the Silver Slipper), and Eva left for the West Coast, where she operated a restaurant behind a bar on Sunset Boulevard in Los Angeles and later sold fishing tackle and radios on the road. She remained a partner with Jack in the club, gave him power of attorney, and invested money when she could, but she only returned to Dallas sporadically over a ten-year period until her permanent return in 1959.163

  Jack, meanwhile, in about 1952, purchased another club, the Bob Wills Ranch House, located in an industrial area at Corinth and Industrial streets, with money obtained from a friend, Ralph Paul. Jack had met Paul, as was his style, by simply walking up to him one day in 1948 in the Mercantile National Bank, where they both did business, and introducing himself. Paul, like Jack, had come to Dallas the previous year. He was from New York City and in 1948 was half owner of a nightclub called the Sky Club. Paul invited Jack to see the show at his club, and later Jack reciprocated and invited his new buddy Ralph to see his club. They became fast friends, and a few years later Jack went to Paul and told him he wanted to buy the Bob Wills Ranch House and asked to borrow $2,000 so he could “show” some people he had the money, which he would promptly return the next day. It turned out that wasn’t enough. As Paul told the Warren Commission in 1964, “Subsequently he [Ruby] roped me in for $3700.” Eventually, Paul ended up with a note, or part ownership, on the Silver Spur.164

  Norman Weisbrod and his partner, Sam Lasser, operated a photograph and popcorn concession at the Ranch House for a year. Weisbrod, calling Ruby a “Damon Runyon type character,”* said he became convinced that Ruby was “crazy” in the manner he operated his newly purchased club and performed as master of ceremonies. According to Weisbrod, Ruby purchased Western clothing, and at times got up on stage and attempted to entertain the customers with a guitar. Sam Lasser commented on Jack’s efforts at being a guitar-playing cowboy by saying that Ruby could not sing or play the guitar.165 However, Ruby did occasionally have “first-class” entertainment, including Tennessee Ernie Ford, the country western singer Tex Ritter, and big bands including Artie Shaw and other entertainers, many of whom he also, it seems, tried to shortchange. Lasser stated that on one occasion Jack had considerable trouble when he tried to cheat Tex Ritter out of two hundred dollars that Ritter was owed.166

  With both the Bob Wills Ranch House and the Silver Spur to run, Jack encountered severe financial difficulty in 1952. He apparently had completely dissipated his $14,000 and was doing so badly that he moved out of his apartment and started sleeping and cooking in the back of the Silver Spur. Dallas police officer Gerald Henslee recalls driving with his partner one summer night up the alley behind the nightclub and seeing a man sleeping in his underwear just inside the screen door. When they rousted him, Ruby identified himself as the owner of the place, and they advised him to find safer sleeping accommodations, considering the bad neighborhood. Jack disregarded the advice but told them to return to his club anytime, everything on the house.167 Jack soon went completely broke and lost both clubs, first the Ranch House and then, about a month later, the Silver Spur, and had a “mental breakdown.”168 Marty Gimple (Jack’s friend from Chicago who had sold punchboards with Jack in 1941) and his business associate Willie Epstein assumed some of the debts and took over the Silver Spur.169 After pulling down the shades and “hibernating” in the flea-bag Cotton Bowl Hotel in Dallas for three or four months, and declining to see his friends, Jack went back to Chicago and was mentally depressed to the point where he told his brother Earl, “Well, it looks like it is the end for me.” Jack was penniless and Earl tried to help him out and find a business for him to run. However, he was listless and wouldn’t go anywhere. Earl even had to force him to wash and clean himself.170

  Jack came out of his depression after a month or two and returned to Dallas in 1952, saying he did not like being in Chicago, owed a lot of money to people in Dallas, and wanted to make money so he could pay off his debts.171

  Starting his “comeback,” Jack tried operating the Silver Spur again, taking it back from Gimple and Epstein, who apparently were more than happy to get rid of it. And for a few months in 1952 into 1953 he even operated the Ervay Theater, a motion picture theater next door to the Silver Spur.172

  In 1953, Jack, with a partner, Joe Bonds, obtained an interest in another Dallas nightclub, the Vegas Club, one he would continue to operate right up to the time he shot Oswald more than ten years later. The Vegas Club (or Club Vegas) was formerly the Studio Lounge, and was located in a semicommercial district on Oaklawn Avenue. The owner, Irving Alkana, had purchased the club in the latter part of 1952 or early 1953. However, Alkana, owing the government $6,000, signed a lease purchase agreement with Jack, whom he had met a year earlier while frequenting the Dallas nightclub scene. Jack completely controlled the operation of the club, which sold beer, wine, soft drinks, and some prepared food items, and managed it along with Bonds. Jack bought Bonds out a few months later for $2,500.173

  It was around this time that Jack discovered—no one remembers how—a ten-year-old black boy from Dallas called “Little Daddy Nelson” (real name, Ben Estes Nelson), who was the greatest little singer, dancer, and piano player Jack and many others had ever seen. Little Daddy started performing regularly at the Vegas Club to highly appreciative audiences. No one recalls how Little Daddy came up with his second name, Sugar Daddy, but it may have been Jack’s doing since he felt he had finally struck gold with the young black performer whom he was going to ride to fame and fortune in New York, Vegas, and Hollywood. Jack spent every penny he had on Little Daddy and on March 18, 1952, signed a contract with the boy’s legal guardian and father, Columbus Nelson, giving Columbus and his wife, presumably the boy’s mother, 25 percent of the action and Little Daddy 50 percent, with Jack getting the remaining 25 percent as his manager. The contract even provided for a tutor for Little Daddy while he was on the road. Jack took Little Daddy to New York and Chicago to line up TV and radio appearances, but just when things were about to happen, a second mother, or a second woman claiming to be Little Daddy’s real mother, showed up as the fly in the ointment, and Jack, on the advice of his lawyer, backed off, afraid of all the legal entanglements that would inevitably follow.174

  In September of 1953, some three months prior to the option date of Jack’s lease purchase agreement, Jack informed Alkana that he would not be able to obtain the funds to make the purchase. Alkana took over the management of the club and Jack retained a one-third interest. However, numerous disagreements ensued, including a fist fight in May of 1954. After their brawl, Jack was arrested and charged with carrying a concealed weapon when the police found a .38 caliber snub-nosed revolver in his possession. Alkana said Ruby always had the gun on him because he carried large sums of money. Alkana also told FBI agent Carl Murano Jr. that he could not recall ever seeing Ruby pull his revolver on anyone, nor had he ever heard of Ruby threatening anyone with a gun, including himself when they had their fight and Ruby had the gun on his person. In June of 1954, Alkana sold Jack his two-thirds interest in the Vegas Club.175

  In 1955 Jack had difficulty paying federal excise taxes for the Vegas Club, so his brother Sam loaned Jack $5,500 to prevent the IRS from padlocking the door of his club. Sam was forced to sue when Jack defaulted on his payments. They went to trial but apparently the matter was settled before a judgment was rendered, Jack agreeing to pay the balance on the loan, $4,500. At the time of Jack’s death, Sam was still owed about $1,300.176 Jack sold his interest in the Silver Spur in 1955 but continued operating the Vegas Club. Right around this time, he opened another club named Hernando’s Hideaway on Greenville Avenue in Dallas, but it was not successful and he lost it after less than a year.177

  Jack continued ownership of the Vegas Club but turned over its operation to his sister Eva in 1959, when she returned from California. She ran the club as a salaried employee with no ownership in
terest.178

  Soon, a new club, the one history would forever link him with, was to come his way. An acquaintance, Joe Slatin, got the idea to open a private membership club in Dallas, and with borrowed funds he leased the upstairs second-floor property at 1312½ Commerce Street, located halfway between the county jail and the Dallas Police Department, and began the process of redecorating and finding employees. Slatin, however, had used up all of his initial capital, so he approached Ruby, who had visited the premises during the redecorating, regarding additional financing. Ruby eventually put up $5,000, money he mostly got from his brother Earl and his friend Ralph Paul, and the Sovereign Club was established as part of S&R Inc. S&R (Slatin and Ruby) was a corporation Ruby formed in February of 1960, though Ralph Paul, Slatin, and a third party are listed in the articles of incorporation, not Jack. Earl Ruby is listed on the board of directors with the above three parties, but again, Jack isn’t.179 The club opened in the early part of 1960. Not only was business poor, but Slatin accused Ruby of trying to be “too high class” in the operation of the club, thereby dooming any chance of success. Seeing no hope for success, Slatin voluntarily withdrew. Jack promised to pay Slatin $300, but never did.180

  With Slatin out and in need of money to pay the rent, Jack turned to his old friend Ralph Paul—the one he had “roped in” for $3,700 in order to buy the Bob Wills Ranch House, and whom he still owed $1,200. Paul advanced Jack another $2,200, enough to pay the Sovereign Club’s rent for four months.181

  As time passed, rent money became due again, and again Jack had difficulty paying. Paul, Jack’s personal piggy bank, was there again for Jack with another $1,650, but this time there was a condition. The number of anticipated private memberships had never materialized, so Paul insisted that the club become “an open place”—a burlesque house. Jack, who according to Paul felt the Sovereign Club was dead, agreed. Thus, in late 1960, the Carousel Club, not a private club where members could buy hard liquor, but an open place where customers could buy beer, was born.182 The Carousel Club, a classic burlesque house* with striptease acts, Jack’s first club with strippers,183 was much more difficult to manage than Ruby’s Vegas Club, which had no regular acts and was basically a rock-and-roll dance club in a rougher part of town.184

  The Carousel Club opened at 8:00 in the evening. The cover charge was paid to an attendant in a tiny cashier’s booth at the top of a narrow flight of stairs leading from the street below. The mostly male customers came to the club to see “Ruby’s Girls,” over twelve in all—waitresses, cigarette girls, cocktail girls, and the main attraction, the four strippers. Though the girls were sexy, Ruby made sure no prostitutes worked at the club.185 Indeed, if Ruby suspected any of his “girls” of hustling johns out of his club, he would have them followed to see if they were making arrangements to meet the patrons outside. He was even known to have the girls take lie detector tests.186 Ruby felt so protective, almost paternal, toward his girls, that he had several physical fights with known pimps in the Dallas area who tried to recruit them.187

  A four-or five-piece orchestra was situated at the back of the stage to play for the performances and between acts. There was no dance floor. The strippers displayed their wares on three short runways into the audience. In addition to beer, the Carousel Club served Coca-Cola, champagne, and pizza, the only food the Carousel served, which was made in the kitchen behind the bar.188 Customers wanting hard liquor had to bring their own bottle and order a set-up, ice and a glass. Although the club stayed open until 2:00 a.m., seven days a week, drinking of hard stuff had to cease at midnight on Sunday through Friday and at 1:00 a.m. on Saturday night (early Sunday). By Jack’s admission, the beer was the cheapest he could buy, and the champagne was “pure rotgut,” bought for $1.60 a bottle and peddled to the customers for $17.50 a bottle.189

  As indicated, the legal ownership of the Carousel Club was S&R Inc., but it’s hard to know exactly who all the people were who were putting up the money and owning the shares. Paul was the recipient of half of the shares in the corporation, five hundred.190 Jack, though, insisted he had no financial interest in the club—he was just the manager.191 Stanley Kaufman, a lawyer who handled many of Jack’s legal matters including the S&R incorporation, agreed.192 And Social Security Administration files only show Ruby as being “an employee” of the club.193 No matter. It was Jack’s club. He ran the Carousel, paid the bills, and banked the receipts, and it was his favorite of all the clubs he had ever had. “This is a fucking high-class place,” he would assure any doubters as he threw them down the dimly lit stairs.194Class. That meant a lot to Jack. Everyone who knew him knew it. The only problem is that Jack had no class. Tammi True, a stripper who worked for Jack off and on for almost two years and was one of his favorites, thought the world of Jack (though they cursed each other out regularly), but said, “I don’t care how much money Jack had. If he had been a millionaire, he wouldn’t have been one bit different. He didn’t have any class, and he really wanted to…He used the word class quite often, so I know it was an important thing with him…Everything had to have class, and I think that is what he wanted, but he could never have it, because Jack was just Jack.”195

  The Carousel became Ruby’s life, his real home. “You can’t write about Jack’s life outside the club,” Andrew Armstrong, Jack’s black bartender, later told a Ruby biographer. “There wasn’t any. Even when he was outside, he was at the newspaper or the radio stations trying to get more publicity;* he was handing out passes to the club, or thinking of some new scheme to push it.”196

  Sam Ruby said that his other brother Earl told him he had visited Dallas in 1961 in an attempt to get back some money that their sister Marion had loaned Jack for the Carousel and was now regretting. Not only was Earl unsuccessful, but since he was in town, Jack got a further loan from Earl too.197 Jack’s sister Eva told the Warren Commission, “And I understand Jack has taken money from Earl and probably from my sister Mary [Marion] and God knows who else in the family. There was none of his money in there. If he had a thousand dollars of his money, it was a lot of money.” She went on to say that after her brother shot Oswald, the beneficent Paul had given her all five hundred shares of S&R stock that he had received from Jack.198 The stock, perhaps unbeknownst to Paul, had become worthless on July 17, 1961, when the Texas Secretary of State’s office in Austin ruled that S&R Inc. had forfeited its right to do business in the state as a corporation (as opposed to a partnership or sole ownership), finding that the corporation had no assets from which a judgment for franchise tax penalties and court costs could be satisfied.199

  Jack, it seems, never paid back any of Paul’s loans to Jack for the club on Commerce, whether the club was making any profits or not. “He never paid me a dime,” said Paul, who didn’t seem to be particularly upset about it, possibly because he considered Jack his “best” and “closest” friend and was confident Jack felt the same way about him.200 When informed by Warren Commission counsel, who added up the loans, that apparently Jack Ruby still owed him $5,050, Paul replied, “Well, what am I going to do?”201

  What is fairly certain is that Jack collected and deposited all the cash receipts; he seemed to always be behind on his bills; and whether the club seemed to be doing well or not, he always claimed he was going broke. Somehow though, he still had the ability to siphon off funds for new schemes he might be involved in, and to afford the many gratuities he gave to ingratiate himself with members of the Dallas Police Department.202

  Just what were Ruby’s receipts and expenses at his club? Unfortunately, the only tax records in the Warren Commission volumes for Ruby’s clubs were for his Vegas Club, not the Carousel Club, and the National Archives has “no tax returns for the Carousel Club.” A fairly typical year was 1962, when the gross receipts for the Vegas Club were listed as $48,150, the gross profit as $41,462.77, and the net income as $5,619.65.203 There is very little reference in the testimony of Warren Commission witnesses as to how much Ruby took in at the Carousel and how m
uch he paid out. One of the few references came from handyman Curtis “Larry” Crafard, hardly a good source, not only because of his low-level job but also because of the short time he was at the club. He told the Commission that on a Friday, Saturday, or Sunday night, Ruby took in “anywhere from $100 to maybe $1,000.” When Ruby once took in a total of $1,400 for a Friday and Saturday night, Crafard heard the bartender, Andy Armstrong, say it was the most the Carousel had taken in for a two-day period over the past year or so. Crafard said, “The Carousel made enough to clear the bills,” which is why he was puzzled when he heard that Ruby was taking money from his Vegas Club to keep the Carousel going.204

  Though we have no tax records for the Carousel Club, we do have a two-month snapshot (assuming Ruby wasn’t seriously misreporting income and expenses) from which we can extrapolate approximately what Ruby was making at the club in 1961–1963. In his car shortly after his arrest, the Dallas police found two handwritten papers, dated November 13, 1963, one captioned “Aug. Receipts for 30 days,” the other “Sept. Receipts for 30 days,” prepared for a “Bobby,” to whom he writes, “These above records will show everything, and perhaps you will believe me now, that I’m having a rough time. Sincerely, Jack Ruby.” For August, he took in $2,945.52 at the “bar” and $4,176.00 at the “door.” After deducting an anticipated 10 percent federal tax for the bar income and 20 percent state and federal taxes for the door, he said he had a net of $5,304.68 before expenses. His payroll is interesting. He paid his lead stripper, Jada, $300 per week and the three others $110; his emcee, Wally Weston, $200 weekly; and the house band $330, for a total weekly payroll of $1,160, or $4,640 for the month. (Since Ruby makes no reference to salaries for his waitresses and cocktail girls, apparently he did not pay them any wages and they had to subsist on tips.) After employing a math that didn’t compute on the page, he said his average net profit for one week for the month of August was $1,237.74 (for September the net was $1,350.93), but that this was “not counting” what he had to pay for “rent, utilities, advertising, bartender” or “porter,” which, for whatever reason, he did not set forth but which must have virtually eliminated the $1,237.74 amount.205