Reclaiming History

by Vincent Bugliosi

  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.

  If 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.”

  Question: “In other words, what you are saying to me is that if he has any kind of ‘ism’ at all, it would be Americanism?”

  “That’s right—he has that—he does have that—that’s his greatest.”529

  Though there probably was a patriotic component to Ruby’s act, most others who knew him put a little more of the emphasis on a more selfish motivation.

  From his impression of Ruby, Dallas detective Jim Leavelle said he doubted that Ruby “had given what he did much thought, but I believe what thought he did give to it was that he would be a hero for what he did, and when his case was taken to the grand jury, he’d only get a slap on the wrist and told not to do it again. In his mind I think he saw himself standing at the front door of the Carousel Club and people would come from far and wide to shake the hand of the man who killed the president’s assassin.” Leavelle said the first time he met Ruby, at the Silver Spur in 1950, Ruby told him he had always wanted to see two police officers in a death struggle with someone “and I could jump in to the fight and save the officer’s lives and be a hero.”530

  Not only did the chief prosecutor, Bill Alexander, believe that Ruby killed Oswald thinking he would become a hero, and argued this to the jury that convicted Ruby, but several members of the jury believed that was Ruby’s chief motivation for the killing. (See Ruby trial section later in the book.) Dallas attorney Jim Martin, believed to be the first lawyer who saw Ruby when Ruby was taken into custody, said, “He never expected to spend a night in jail.”531 And Ruby’s first lawyer, Tom Howard, told Captain Will Fritz he believed that Ruby probably felt that he would be a hero “and would be carried out on the shoulders of those present.”532 Among many others, Ruby’s Dallas and Havana friend Lewis McWillie also believed Ruby thought he would become a national hero.533 “I’m sure when he shot Oswald he thought this would make him a hero,” said Carousel stripper Janet Conforto.534 When Ruby’s friend Breck Wall visited Ruby in jail, he said, “The first thing out of Jack’s mouth was ‘I’m a hero.’ And that’s what really floored me, because everyone was still in shock over what happened. And I told him, ‘No, you’re not.’”535

  But of course Ruby’s fabled temper (he was “completely uncontrollable when he was angry,” said Conforto),536 together with the deep love and respect he had for the president and his family, were more than contributing factors in Ruby’s killing of Oswald. Without them, it is doubtful the motivation to be a hero would have been enough. When we tie all of these factors together (Ruby’s sense of patriotism and deep affection for Kennedy, his desire to be a hero, his anger at Oswald for what he had done, etc.), “Ruby’s killing of Oswald,” I argued to the London jury, “has all the earmarks of a very personal killing completely devoid of any outside influence.”537 Looking at all the components making Jack Ruby who he was, Tammi True, one of Jack’s strippers who knew him very well, said, “My first reaction [upon learning that Ruby had shot Oswald] was, if anyone in the world could have done that, it was Jack.”538

  I said earlier that the only people who believe Ruby was connected to organized crime and killed Oswald for the mob are those who didn’t know Ruby. That is a true statement with one exception, which isn’t strong at all, and it’s from someone who probably hardly knew Ruby. Seth Kantor was a reporter for the Dallas Times Herald for a few years in the early 1960s and later wrote a book called The Ruby Cover-Up. When Kantor wrote in an article datelined Dallas, November 25, 1963, “In disbelief, I watched a friend of mine, Jack Ruby, gun to death the man charged with killing President Kennedy,” his former Times Herald colleagues scoffed at his claim that Ruby had been a friend.539 In the 450 pages of Kantor’s book, the only thing he could say to establish his bona fides as someone who knew Ruby was “Ruby was someone I had known at the start of the Kennedy administration when I had been a reporter on a Dallas newspaper.”540 Per his testimony before the Warren Commission, that period of time was less than two years, “between September 1960 until May 1962.”541 So not only his brief time in Dallas but also his failure, in his book, to refer to any meaningful association with Ruby indicate that he was not really someone who “knew Jack Ruby.” He probably saw Ruby a few times around town, as almost everyone did, and exchanged greetings with him. Moreover, Kantor doesn’t expressly say in his book, as nearly all conspiracists who believe the mob was behind Kennedy’s murder do, that Ruby definitely killed Oswald for the mob, although he comes very close: “the mob would have had no problem finding itself a Jack Ruby to silence Oswald. Ruby had been preparing most of his life for the job,” and “the mob was Ruby’s ‘friend.’ Ruby could well have been paying off an IOU the day he was used to kill Lee Harvey Oswald.”542

  The only example Kantor gives to show that Ruby had affirmatively done something for the mob and on its behalf is to say that Ruby had been “running errands for the mob one way or another since he was the 16 year old Chicago street fighter who delivered sealed envelopes for the Capone people and kept his mouth shut about it.”543 (What? He “kept his mouth shut about it”? This is clearly very loose writing.) So in Kantor’s mind, if Ruby delivered a few sealed envelopes for the mob when he was a Chicago teenager, and kept his mouth shut about it, this one piece of “evidence” is enough to meet the burden of proof that Ruby may have murdered Oswald for the mob as just a normal progression? That, of course, is ridiculous, even if the sealed-envelope story is true. But we can’t be sure of that either. How the story got started was when the former world boxing champion Barney Ross told the FBI in 1964 that in the mid-1920s he associated w
ith a group of around twelve youths, among whom was Ruby, at the Kit Howard Gymnasium in Chicago. At the time, Ross said, Capone hadn’t become famous and the kids didn’t know he was a racketeer. Before they learned he was, which was around 1927, Capone, who would come by the gymnasium on occasion, would sometimes give one of the youths “a dollar to deliver an envelope to someone in the downtown section of Chicago.” He said he believed Capone did this to make the youths think they were earning a dollar “in order to keep them from hanging around the streets.” Ross said that whenever he ran such an errand for Capone, the envelope he carried “did not appear to contain anything”—that is, Capone had them delivering empty envelopes—and this stopped when the group learned that Capone was a big mobster. Moreover, he said that Ruby “might” have seen Capone at the gym and “might” have run, like him, errands for Capone, but he didn’t know.544

  And this is the support, the only support, Kantor gives for saying Ruby may have killed Oswald for the mob because he “had been preparing most of his life for the job.”

  But even if we consider Kantor to be an exception to the assertion that only those who did not know Ruby think he killed Oswald for the mob, let’s look at how Kantor stood up on cross-examination at the London trial. Called by Gerry Spence as a defense witness who was supposedly the leading expert on Ruby, one who would connect Ruby to organized crime, Kantor gave testimony regurgitating all the old assertions about Ruby’s mob contacts, phone calls to them on the days before the assassination, and so on. Because of time constraints, my questions to Kantor were necessarily abbreviated and rapid-fire. But by the end of it, most trial observers were asking whether Kantor was really a defense witness. A good portion of my cross-examination, omitting most transitional as well as preliminary questions, follows:

  Q: Jack Ruby died January 3, 1967, from natural causes while in custody?

  A: That’s correct.

  Q: You agree there was no evidence Jack Ruby and Lee Oswald knew each other?

  A: I’m aware of that.

  Q: [Assuming Kantor did, in fact, see Ruby at Parkland Hospital after the assassination, which Kantor maintained but the Warren Commission disputed, I asked this question.] At the hospital Ruby was in a state of emotional shock, is that correct?

  A: That’s correct.

  Q: And did you learn that after the assassination Ruby was going from place to place, as his lawyer said, like a wild man?

  A: Absolutely, sir.

  Q: And when you saw Ruby at Parkland Hospital you thought it was perfectly normal to see him there because you described him as a goer to events, a man about town?*

  A: Yes.

  Q: And you wrote this about Ruby in your book, did you not: “When he liked you, he wanted to do anything and everything he could to help you. If he didn’t like someone, he could curse them and fight them. He had a few arrests because of the passionate way he had expressed his feelings of dislike for people?”

  A: Yes, I did.

  Q: You also wrote Ruby was a very emotional man.

  A: That’s correct.

  Q: Dr. Beavers, a psychiatrist appointed by the trial judge at Ruby’s trial to examine Ruby, reported back to the judge that he found Ruby to be “acutely mentally ill,” is that correct?

  A: Yes.

  Q: You are also aware that at Ruby’s trial there was medical testimony that his electroencephalograms, to measure the electric activity of the brain, showed that he had organic brain damage?

  A: Yes, I remember that.

  Q: So you would agree, would you not, that Mr. Ruby was not a well man?

  A: He might not fall within the pattern of the norm.

  Q: You’re aware of the three suicide attempts he made while in custody for the Oswald slaying?

  A: Well, two come to mind.

  Q: In one attempt he stood back about twenty feet, ran as hard as he could and rammed his head against the wall. Also, he tried to hang himself, and then electrocute himself?

  A: I remember those.†

  Q: Mr. Kantor, you would agree that Jack Ruby had a very deep affection for President Kennedy. There was all types of evidence for that?

  A: Yes.

  Q: In fact, Dr. Guttmacher, one of Ruby’s psychiatrists, said that Ruby told him, quote, “I fell for that man,” referring to the president?

  A: That’s correct.

  Q: And Dr. Bromberg said that in talking to Ruby about the president, “Essentially it was the speech of a man in love with another man; it was love that passed beyond a rational appreciation of a great man.” Wasn’t that true?

  A: That was the quote, yes.

  Q: Ruby also told Bromberg he felt like—“This was the end of my life when the president died,” is that correct?

  A: That’s correct.

  Q: He also told Bromberg, “When the president died I felt like a nothing person. I was afraid I would crack up. Such a great man, and then to be snuffed out.” Is that correct?

  A: That’s correct.

  Q: And when you saw Jack Ruby at Parkland Hospital, he had tears in his eyes, is that correct?

  A: Yes. He was obviously under emotional strain, yes.

  Q: And he asked you at Parkland, “Should I close my clubs?” Is that correct? A: Yes, he did.

  Q: And that Saturday night, you actually went by one of his two clubs, the Carousel, and it was closed. Is that correct?

  A: It was closed.

  Q: You interviewed George Senator, who lived with Jack Ruby, shortly after the assassination and he told you that Ruby had been grieving over the president’s death and had been crying and wept quite a bit, is that not true?

  A: Yes.

  Q: An employee of Ruby’s, Andy Armstrong, told you Ruby cried heavily over the president’s death, did he not?

  A: That’s what he said.

  Q: And Ruby’s sister Eva said that on the night of the assassination Ruby cried, and after he ate he went to the bathroom and threw up, is that correct?

  A: That’s right. He ate a lot of food.

  Q: And then he later said he even felt worse than when his mother and father died?

  A: He did.

  Q: Jack Ruby was the type of man who liked to ingratiate himself with other people, is that right? Particularly those in authority, like the police?

  A: Yes.

  Q: He often used the term love to describe his feelings for the Dallas police?

  A: That’s what I understand.

  Q: And many of them would stop by his club for free drinks?

  A: They did.

  Q: Are you aware that during the days after the assassination he brought sandwiches to the police, to the press, and to people at KLIF radio station in Dallas?

  A: Yes, I am. That’s correct.

  Q: With respect to the Friday-night press conference that he was at, during which he stood on the table, he described his feelings to Dr. Bromberg this way: “I am above everybody. They can not move me,” and Bromberg said Ruby “felt like a big guy and had a strong feeling of being in with the police, of being a right guy,” do you recall that?

  A: Yes, I do.

  Q: So in summary you describe Ruby as kind of a town character whom most of the police and townspeople knew?

  A: Yes, I described that.

  Q: On the night of the assassination, at the police department, Ruby, of all things, was even setting up radio interviews for the district attorney, Henry Wade. Is that not true?

  A: He did do that.

  Q: He was also a publicity hound. Is that correct?

  A: He was.

  Q: He also had a bizarre relationship with his dogs, did he not?

  A: I would say so, yes.

  Q: Well, he had as many as ten dogs, one of whom he called Sheba, and Sheba was his wife, and the other nine were his children?

  A: That’s correct.

  Q: And would he take them, particularly Sheba, wherever he went?

  A: Yes, she traveled with him continually.

  Q: In fact, Sheba
waited patiently in his car while he went inside the police station and shot Oswald?

  A: That’s correct.

  Q: Rabbi Silverman, who was Ruby’s rabbi, and who knew him well, tells the story—and it’s in your book—of Ruby suddenly crying over his dogs in the rabbi’s presence and saying he was unmarried and all he had was his dogs, referring to Sheba as his wife and the other dogs as his children? Is that correct?

  A: That is correct.

  Q: Mr. Kantor, you agree, do you not—again I’m citing your book—that the general consensus of those like yourself who have studied Ruby was that Ruby thought he would be a hero to the world for having killed Oswald, a presidential assassin?

  A: I’m certain of it, yes.

  Q: In fact, at least at the beginning there was an outpouring of telegrams to him all praising him for what he had done and all praising him as a hero?