Reclaiming History

by Vincent Bugliosi

  28. Part of a criminal’s invariable preparation for any premeditated crime is to contemplate how to pull it off without being caught. Although Oswald may have been disoriented enough not to have considered this part of the venture, we can be more than 100 percent certain that a group like the CIA, mob, or military-industrial complex would have. Since we know this to be true, if a group was behind Oswald’s act, it is absolutely inconceivable that it wouldn’t have done everything possible to avoid having its hit man captured and interrogated by the authorities, which carried the enormous danger of his cracking and implicating the group. No matter how far removed the group personally may have been from his act, he would have to have sufficient knowledge to incriminate whoever approached him to do the job, that person could in turn put the hat on the person or persons above him, and so on up to the architects of the assassination themselves. Since they would know this, at a very minimum they would have tried to provide for Oswald’s escape. But much more probably, a car would have been waiting for him at a prearranged place after he left the Depository Building, not to help him escape, but to drive him to his death.* Yet here we have Oswald, right after the assassination, leaving the Depository Building, completely alone and wandering out on the streets, trying to get back to his home by catching a bus, then deciding to get off and find a cab. This fact alone, and all by itself, tells any sensible person that Oswald acted alone, that there was no conspiracy in the assassination to kill Kennedy.

  And as indicated, when Oswald was arrested he only had $13.87 on his person,76 not enough to get him far away from Dallas, which, in the unlikely event the mob or CIA didn’t arrange for his immediate death, they would have wanted him to be.

  Even if we make the completely unreasonable assumption that a group behind Oswald’s killing Kennedy would not have made every effort to help Oswald escape or kill him after he left the Book Depository Building to ensure he wasn’t captured and interrogated (i.e., apparently the group wanted him to be grilled for hours on end before it killed him), and accept the assumption made by so very many that it decided, instead, to have Ruby silence Oswald for it, let’s see where that takes us. There are two realities to consider. First, by the time Ruby shot Oswald, Oswald had already been interrogated for twelve hours over a three-day period (Friday, Saturday, and Sunday) by investigators from the Dallas Police Department, FBI, and Secret Service, as well as by the U.S. Post Office inspector and U.S. marshall in Dallas.77 Second, if it was the group’s plan to get someone to silence Oswald after Oswald killed Kennedy, all rational minds have to agree that the group surely would not have waited until after Oswald killed Kennedy before it started looking for someone to silence Oswald. This would all be worked out, of course, well in advance.

  In view of these two realities, the evidence that Ruby did not silence Oswald for any group such as the mob is that if he had been chosen to kill Oswald, he would have done so the first opportunity he had, rather than give the authorities two more days to interrogate Oswald, and that was on Friday evening at the Dallas Police Department. That evening, while Oswald was being grilled in the Homicide and Robbery office by Captain Fritz and others, Ruby, we know, was right outside Fritz’s office talking to reporters. At one point, Fritz brought Oswald out of the office and Oswald walked right past Ruby, coming within two to three feet of him.78 And Ruby admitted to the FBI that he had his revolver, the one he used to kill Oswald two days later, in his right front trouser pocket because he had a lot of money from his nightclub on his person.79 Ruby’s own attorney, Tom Howard, said Ruby was armed with his revolver that Friday night.80* Presumably at the request of his lawyers, Ruby wrote his version of the events that led up to his shooting of Oswald on 3 × 5 inch cards, and the cards were given to his lawyers. Some were prepared before his trial, others in advance of a motion for a new trial. On one of the cards, he wrote in his handwriting, “Had I wanted to get him [Oswald] I could have reached in and shot [him] when either Fritz [or] Curry brought him out in the hall, when they told the press that they would bring him down in the basement.”81

  In addition to the fact that if Ruby killed Oswald for the mob (or any other group) he would have done so on Friday night to prevent further interrogation of Oswald, there is another reason why Ruby would have killed Oswald Friday night. The mob and Ruby would necessarily have to believe that Oswald would be extremely well protected by Dallas law enforcement, so Ruby would have no choice but to kill him the first opportunity he had since he would have had no way of knowing that he would ever have another opportunity to do so.

  The fact that Ruby did not kill Oswald on Friday night, when it would have been so easy for him to have done so, is virtually conclusive evidence, all by itself, that he didn’t kill Oswald on Sunday for anyone but himself, which in turn is just further evidence that there was nothing inside of Oswald to silence because he too acted alone.

  29. One other indication that Oswald’s decision to kill the president was essentially spontaneous (and therefore, devoid of any conspiracy with others) and formed sometime after the route of the president’s motorcade in front of Oswald’s workplace first became public only three days before the assassination, is his lack of planning to ensure his survival. Although Oswald wanted to survive—he tried to escape, and also physically resisted arrest, striking the arresting officer and drawing his revolver before it was wrenched away from him—he apparently never thought out his escape, even to the obvious point of bringing his revolver to work with him so that he would have it to defend and extricate himself from any possible confrontation with the authorities after his attempt on the president’s life the next day. Instead, he admitted during his interrogation by Captain Fritz of the Dallas Police Department that after he left the Book Depository Building following the assassination, he went back to his room at 1026 North Beckley in Dallas and got his revolver.82

  30. If Oswald had conspired with others to murder Kennedy, why would he not have explored the possibility with the authorities of saving his own life by implicating them? This would be particularly true if, as the conspiracy theorists allege, he was “set up” by co-conspirators to take the blame, that he was “the designated fall guy.” In fact, they cite his statement in custody that he was just a “patsy” as support for this proposition. But if, indeed, Oswald’s co-conspirators set him up, he’d have all the more reason to implicate them, having no reason at that point to feel any loyalty toward those who had betrayed him. Yet Oswald, throughout his twelve hours of interrogation, never suggested in any way that he was part of any conspiracy to kill Kennedy. Because Oswald knew that there was so much evidence against him, including his ownership of the murder weapon, and that a sentence of death was going to be automatic, to save his life he most likely would have implicated others if there were any to implicate (an extremely common occurrence in criminal cases, i.e., “turning state’s evidence”), yet he said nothing. This fact is circumstantial evidence that there simply were no co-conspirators for him to implicate.*

  And what about Ruby? As we have seen, it is scripture among conspiracy theorists that “Jack Ruby silenced Oswald for the mob.” But they don’t ask themselves, “Who was supposed to silence Jack Ruby?” Ruby, we know, lived more than three long years (1,154 days) after killing Oswald before passing away on January 3, 1967, and never once suggested that he killed Oswald for someone else. But if mobsters were behind Ruby’s act, they could never know if Ruby would talk someday. Yet there is no evidence that the mob or anyone else tried to silence Ruby. We’ve observed that the emotionally erratic and unreliable Oswald would have been one of the last people in the world the mob (or any other group of alleged conspirators) would have relied on to carry out its biggest murder ever. But Ruby was equally unreliable. Why would the mob choose someone to silence Oswald who was a notorious blabbermouth, had a volcanic temper, and was so emotionally unstable? The notion that the mob (or anyone else) got the goofy Oswald, of all people, to kill Kennedy and then got the even goofier Jack Ruby, of all peop
le, to silence Oswald is downright laughable. I told the jury in London that the mob could just as well have “gone down to Disneyland and gotten Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck to do their bidding for them.”83

  Several years after I made that remark in London, I read The Last Mafioso, Ovid Demaris’s biography of Los Angeles mob boss Jimmy “The Weasel” Fratiano, the highest-ranking mafioso ever to “turn” on the mob, his testimony for the federal government in the early 1980s sending many of them to prison for life. Fratiano was particularly close to fellow mafioso Johnny Roselli, and Fratiano quotes Roselli as telling him one day while they were driving through the Santa Monica mountains shortly after Roselli’s testimony before the HSCA in Washington, D.C., in 1976, “[They’re] all hot, you know, about who killed Kennedy. Sometimes I’d like to tell them the mob did it, just to see the expression on their stupid faces. You know, we’re supposed to be idiots, right? We hire a psycho like Oswald to kill the President and then we get a blabbermouth, two-bit punk like Ruby to shut him up. We wouldn’t trust those jerks to hit a fucking dog.”84 I don’t know if Roselli told Fratiano this, or Fratiano, for some reason, made it up, but either way, it clearly reflects a mafioso’s view of the preposterous theory that organized crime, even if it made the even more preposterous decision to murder the president of the United States, would hire Oswald and Ruby to do its bidding for them.

  31. I spoke earlier of the virtual impossibility of all the people involved in any conspiracy to kill the president keeping it a secret for even a few days, much less over forty years. But there’s a perhaps even more difficult, and related, reality that the original conspirators would have to overcome. Let’s assume, for example, that the CIA was behind the assassination. After the assassination, how could the CIA have gotten the FBI, Secret Service, Dallas Police Department, the autopsy doctors, indeed, the Warren Commission itself, to go along with the horrendous crime the agency had committed and do the great number of things the conspiracy theorists say these various groups and people did to cover up the CIA’s complicity in Kennedy’s murder? Wouldn’t that be an impossible task?* The only way (there is no other way) that agencies and people like the FBI, autopsy doctors, et cetera, would all agree to cover up the murder of the president of the United States for the CIA (or mob, FBI, military-industrial complex, etc.) would be if they themselves were part of the original conspiracy to kill Kennedy. And again, no rational person can possibly believe that these groups and people all got together to murder the president. The bottom line is that conspiracy musings of the conspiracy theorists are outrageously hallucinatory and bear no relation to reality.

  32. Even though there’s not a lick of evidence that the CIA, mob, FBI, or any other group conspired with Oswald to kill Kennedy, if the conspiracy theorists could at least show that he had an association or connection with any of these groups, they would then have something to talk about. But here, other than explainable contacts (e.g., the FBI interviewing Oswald when he returned to the United States from Russia, and his very limited attempt to infiltrate anti-Castro Cuban exiles), after the most extensive investigation of a single individual ever conducted, no one has ever come up with any evidence of an association, relationship, or contact that Oswald had with any of these groups. The reason there’s no evidence is that no such evidence exists. As I have said before in this book, it’s all just sublime silliness.

  Since we know that Oswald killed Kennedy, and since there is no evidence that Oswald had any relationship with groups like organized crime, the CIA, the military-industrial complex, or any other group, this fact alone removes these groups from any suspicion of being complicit in the assassination.

  After over forty years of the most prodigiously intensive investigation and examination of a murder case in world history, certain powerful facts exist which cannot be challenged: Not one weapon other than Oswald’s Mannlicher-Carcano rifle has ever been found and linked in any way to the assassination. Not one bullet other than the three fired from Oswald’s rifle has ever been found and linked to the assassination. No person other than Oswald has ever been connected by evidence, in any way, to the assassination. No evidence has ever surfaced linking Oswald to any of the major groups suggested by conspiracy theorists of being behind the assassination. And no evidence has ever been found showing that any person or group framed Oswald for the murder they committed. One would think that faced with these stubborn and immutable realities, the critics of the Warren Commission, unable to pay the piper, would finally fold their tent and go home. But instead, undaunted and unfazed, they continue to disgorge even more of what we have had from them for over forty years—wild speculation, theorizing, and shameless dissembling about the facts of the case.

  The purpose of this book has been twofold. One, to educate everyday Americans that Oswald killed Kennedy and acted alone, paying for his own bullets. And two, to expose, as never before, the conspiracy theorists and the abject worthlessness of all their allegations. I believe this book has achieved both of these goals.

  BOOKENDS

  The Murder Trial of Jack Ruby

  On November 26, 1963, a Dallas County grand jury indicted Jack Ruby (“Jack Rubenstein, alias Jack Ruby”) for the murder of Lee Harvey Oswald. Trial judge Joe B. Brown would be presiding over the case. The affable, bespectacled, fifty-six-year-old was known for running a very loose courtroom and for having modest legal talent—so modest, in fact, that his friend, Dallas district attorney Henry Wade, urged him not to handle the case, telling Brown, “This case is too big for you.”1 Brown, who didn’t make it through high school and graduated from a small Dallas law school that went out of business after a few years, was taken by celebrity and was greatly impressed by the size and composition of the media covering the trial. “Just think,” he told his bailiff, “we’ve got newsmen from all over the world here, and Pulitzer Prize winners and famous columnists and TV commentators right here in my courtroom.”2

  Wade’s office was seeking the death penalty against Ruby, the electric chair at Huntsville state prison, and Wade himself, whose cornball manner concealed a good legal mind, would prosecute the case, make the important decisions, and be the nominal head of the prosecution team,* although the actual lead trial prosecutor would be Wade’s assistant, William Alexander, who conducted “the bulk of the prosecution’s” case.3† Having anticipated prosecuting and devouring Oswald, until Ruby stopped that dream, Alexander had joked to reporters that “you can’t have rabbit stew without a rabbit.”4

  Ruby’s first lawyer was Tom Howard, a veteran criminal defense attorney in Dallas. Howard, though never having handled a big publicity case before, and operating without a secretary or law library out of a small storefront office across the street from the Dallas Police Department, had a reasonably successful record as a criminal defense attorney.*

  Howard had successfully represented Jack a couple of years back on a liquor license dispute over a half bottle of beer found on a table at the Carousel after hours. He had gotten that charge dismissed. It wasn’t going to be as easy getting this one tossed out, but Howard’s plan was to try to convince the jury to convict Ruby of “murder without malice” on the rationale that the killing was in the heat of passion with adequate provocation (Oswald had killed Kennedy), thus negating malice and shielding Ruby from a possible death sentence.

  To elaborate, there were two types of murder in Texas that Ruby could be found guilty of: murder with malice aforethought and murder without malice aforethought. As in all states, the word aforethought is a useless appendage since it does not mean what it sounds like, premeditation. In most states, there is first-degree and second-degree murder, first degree requiring a showing of premeditation and deliberation along with malice. Texas, to this day, has no degrees of murder, and premeditation and deliberation are not elements of murder that have to be proved. So unlike in most states, the Dallas prosecutors did not have to show that Ruby premeditated and deliberated his killing of Oswald. All they had to prove is that he killed with
malice. In Texas, “malice” in a murder case is proved when it can be shown that the killer intended to kill, where there was no legal justification or excuse for his act, and where he was not “under the immediate influence of a sudden passion arising from an adequate cause, by which is meant such cause as would commonly produce a degree of anger, rage, resentment or terror in a person of ordinary temper, sufficient to render the mind incapable of cool reflection.” If it is shown that he was under such influence, the crime is murder without malice. (In most states, it would be voluntary manslaughter.) Even though the prosecution had no legal burden in the Ruby case to show premeditation, premeditation was very relevant since the presence or absence of premeditation could help to prove or disprove malice. If, for instance, Ruby had premeditated the killing of Oswald, it was not the result of a “sudden passion.”

  Murder with malice in Texas carries a punishment of death or imprisonment for more than two years (in Texas, the “more than two years” is usually life). Murder without malice is punishable by a maximum of five years’ imprisonment. That’s what Howard was shooting for.

  To make the jury more comfortable returning a verdict of murder without malice, although Howard had no intention of ultimately trying to convince the jury that Ruby was insane (he didn’t believe he was), he did intend to show, through a psychiatrist or two, as well as Ruby’s friends and associates, that Jack, shall we say, was not quite right, that he was emotionally unstable, something that no one who knew Ruby could possibly quarrel with. As a device to get Ruby’s mental infirmity into the official record, on December 2 Howard requested a pretrial competency (sanity to stand trial) hearing.