Reclaiming History

by Vincent Bugliosi

  Though this is a more subtle point, since a Mafia connection with Ruby in the killing of Oswald necessarily bespeaks premeditation, if the Warren Commission were trying to protect the mob (which is a thought unworthy of even being considered), anything that showed a lack of premeditation on Ruby’s part would of course help them. Yet, although the Warren Report adequately shows Ruby’s propensity for violence, it negligently fails (though the Commission’s volumes don’t) to focus in on the spontaneity of that violence and Ruby’s extreme volatility, which would tend to be supportive of an unpremeditated act, and hence, away from the conclusion that Ruby was a part of any conspiracy to kill Oswald.

  †Although several of Ruby’s friends and acquaintances noted that he engaged in playing cards and attended the horse races, Ruby did not consider himself to be a gambler (CE 1536, 23 H 27; CE 1559, 23 H 48; CE 1742, 23 H 351; 5 H 201, WCT Jack L. Ruby). Jack’s longtime girlfriend of nine years plus, Alice Nichols, stated that he gambled on occasion, but that she did not believe Jack gambled with any large amounts of money,

  and that he confined his gambling to card games (Nichols [Alice R.] Exhibit No. 5355, 20 H 673, 679). Another acquaintance, though, remembers Jack as betting “heavily” with frequent telephone bets on horse races and basketball games (CE 1505, 22 H 924).

  *Particularly Sinatra, who much evidence shows was very friendly with leading mob figures like Lucky Luciano and Sam Giancana for years (e.g., see Summers and Swan, Sinatra, pp.130–133, 252–255).

  *Three tourists from Chicago told the FBI they saw Ruby at the Tropicana during Labor Day Weekend. However, the FBI was unable to verify their story through a search of records at the hotel in Miami Beach they said they stayed at before leaving for Cuba. The airline they said they flew on from Key West to Havana was no longer in existence and the location of the airline records was unknown. (CE 1765–1774, 23 H 375–379, 381–382)

  *“Was Jack concerned about baldness?” Warren Commission counsel asked George Senator, Ruby’s roommate. “Oh, you should only know. He used to drive me crazy.” Senator went on to tell of Ruby’s going somewhere for “treatments” for his growing baldness and “the stuff” Ruby would “rub into his head.” (14 H 288)

  *Ruby’s brother Sam was the only other sibling who lived in Dallas, but except for seeing him on Jewish holidays and speaking over the phone occasionally, he was not close to him. All his other siblings lived in Chicago or Detroit. (WR, p.803)

  *Barney Weinstein, one of Ruby’s competitors with his nearby Theatre Lounge, nonetheless had a soft spot for Jack and knew him well. He would later say, “Jack had to be there, even when he wasn’t wanted.” Weinstein said he once put on a benefit for a performer of his who died and Jack offered to sell ten tickets. “But he never let well enough alone. He met people as they came in that night and tried to get them to buy more tickets. I said, ‘Jack, leave them alone. They already bought their tickets.’ So then he wanted to sell special tickets for the best seats; he wanted to be my usher; he wanted to help, and he only got in the way. Once he dropped by when my houseman had not come in. He said, ‘Don’t worry, I’ll stay and take care of any trouble.’ I told him, ‘I don’t want you to, Jack.’ You know, he doesn’t stop trouble, he starts it…Jack had seven fights a week. I’ve had three fights in thirty years…But he stayed anyway. He had a wonderful heart. When he hardly knew me, he read about my mother’s funeral in the newspapers and came to it. He just had to get into everything, including the excitement of that weekend Kennedy died.” (Wills and Demaris, Jack Ruby, pp.13–14)

  †Just the previous day, Ruby approached Joseph P. Rossi, who was engaged in the real estate business and had known Jack for eleven years. Shortly after Oswald’s murder Rossi told the FBI that Ruby had discussed opening a new club and wanted Rossi to invest money in the club and perhaps help in management of the venture. Ruby talked of future plans in a manner that indicated he did not anticipate getting into any kind of trouble. (FBI Record 124-10062-10290, January 13, 1964, pp.1–2; see also 15 H 237, WCT Joseph Rossi)

  *In his torrent of words, Ruby obviously misspoke here, from the context probably meaning that prior to this thought of killing Oswald on Sunday morning he had no previous thought to kill him. This likelihood is further increased by Ruby’s being notorious for misusing words. Malicious doesn’t mean an intent to kill, but malice aforethought, a term most lay people have heard, does, and this could have been the source of Ruby’s incorrect selection of the word malicious. Of course, there is also the possibility that Ruby wasn’t confused at all, and in his mind, the further back in time his hatred for Oswald and decision to kill him commenced (i.e., Friday afternoon), the more likely he’d get the death penalty because of the longer premeditation.

  *This was not the first time Ruby said he acted alone in killing Oswald. He told the FBI on the very day he killed Oswald that he was not involved in any conspiracy with anyone, that no one asked him or suggested to him that he shoot Oswald (Hall [C. Ray] Exhibit No. 2, 20 H 44). On December 21, 1963, he told the FBI, “I told no one I was going to kill him. No one knew I was going to shoot him. I didn’t discuss anything with anyone about shooting him” (Hall [C. Ray] Exhibit No. 3, 20 H 57).

  *Before the test was administered to Ruby, his lawyer, Joe Tonahill, said on the record that “when I entered the defense of Jack Ruby back in December of 1963 with Mr. Belli, at that time we insisted before undertaking his defense that he agree to a polygraph test and truth serum test or any other scientific test that would reflect whether or not there was a connection between him and Lee Harvey Oswald or in any respect a conspiracy. He agreed and insisted at that time that there was no such conspiracy…[and] he did not know Lee Harvey Oswald and there was no connection between them and that he would undertake any type of a scientific test that we could have made available for him. Jack Ruby has insisted on those tests ever since. We have from time to time proposed to the FBI…that a lie detector test be given Mr. Ruby. We have filed motions to obtain scientific tests” (14 H 507, WCT Jack L. Ruby).

  *Though he did not personally know Ruby, Ralph Salerno, the chief consultant to the HSCA on organized crime who spent twenty years with the New York Police Department investigating the Mafia, told the HSCA, “Jack Ruby cannot be characterized as an organized crime figure in any way in my estimation. Jack Ruby would not have made a pimple on the back of the neck of a real organized crime figure” (5 HSCA 464).

  *At the trial, I had no time to go into the issue of whether Kantor was confusing seeing Ruby at Parkland with his seeing him elsewhere. Moreover, I was in no position to prove Kantor was wrong, so my questions assumed that Kantor had seen Ruby at Parkland.

  †The ramming of his head against the wall on April 26, 1964, was not a little game Ruby was playing. He was knocked unconscious and had to be hospitalized. (HSCA Record 180-10113-10493, May 29, 1964) Ruby’s conviction for Oswald’s murder thrust him into great despair, triggering a hastening of the mental degenerative process and causing him to lose all hope for a successful appeal and to not cooperate with his lawyers, who were seeking to reverse his conviction on appeal. To protect Ruby from himself, Sheriff Decker assigned two round-the-clock guards to watch over Ruby, who slept on a mattress on the bare floor, lights always shining directly on him. When his sister Eva would visit him, he would urge her to do away with herself because he said his whole family was in jeopardy. His visions of his brother Earl and his children being dismembered were so clear that Eva said that since she wasn’t in daily contact with the rest of the family, she had “to sort of tell real lies, that I just got through talking” with them “and everything was okay.” He also told her that “25 million Jews have been slaughtered” and sometimes he could hear planes overhead bombing the Jews, and also saw Jews being boiled in oil. (Belli with Carroll, Dallas Justice, pp.261–264; 14 H 471, WCT Eva Grant; Kantor, Ruby Cover-Up, pp.316–319)

  Not everyone was convinced of the sincerity of Ruby’s delusions. When he’d sometimes put his ear to t
he wall and say to his guards, “Shhh. Do you hear the screams? They are torturing the Jews again down in the basement,” they would tell him, “O.K., Jack, cut the crap or we won’t play cards with you anymore.” (Wills and Demaris, Jack Ruby, pp. 255–256)

  After Ruby’s sentence of death, Ruby’s lawyers had a psychiatrist, Dr. Louis Jolyon West, examine Ruby for them, and the judge, Judge Brown, assigned another psychiatrist (R. L. Stubblefield) to examine Ruby for the court. West’s conclusion was that Ruby was “obviously psychotic” and “completely preoccupied with his delusions of persecution of the Jews,” believing that “all the Jews in America were now being slaughtered” because “the president’s assassination and its aftermath were now being blamed on him,” a Jew. West was convinced Ruby was not feigning psychosis, giving several reasons, among which were that West doubted “that someone unfamiliar with technical psychiatry could play the part of a paranoid delusional psychotic person with such accuracy, consistency, and typical detail.” Also, he said Ruby doesn’t want “to go to a mental hospital…and violently rejects the idea that he is mentally ill,” whereas “the true malingerer usually grasps eagerly” at such a diagnosis. Stubblefield agreed that Ruby had “an acute psychiatric illness” and also did not believe that he was feigning mental illness. (HSCA Record 180-10113-10493, May 29, 1964)

  *It is not 100 percent certain that the incident described by Cox took place on the afternoon of the assassination, although a situation similar to the one Cox describes (absent Ruby’s crying) may have taken place at some previous time. The citation Kantor gives for this incident is an interview he had with Cox in Dallas on August 3, 1976, thirteen years after the assassination. But a very detailed chronology and reconstruction by the HSCA of all of Ruby’s known movements on the afternoon of the assassination, anchored by many witnesses and phone records, does not show any visit by Ruby to any bank on that afternoon (9 HSCA 1099–1100, 1102–1105).

  Indeed, it’s not certain that this incident (like countless other incidents in the case) ever took place. To me, it doesn’t have a ring of truth to it. For starters, since Cox apparently never told Kantor that he asked Ruby, or that Ruby volunteered the information, how would Cox know the exact or even approximate amount of currency Ruby was holding in his hands? And why would Ruby be holding all this currency in his hands in the first place, particularly since he didn’t deposit any of it? Moreover, what was Ruby doing in line in the first place? Merchants State Bank records showed that the only activity on the Carousel Club’s account that day was a $31.87 withdrawal by check to pay a city water bill. (Dallas Morning News, October 12, 1978, p.16A)

  *I had Rabbi Hillel Silverman waiting in the wings in London to call as a rebuttal witness, if needed. But he wasn’t, and I wanted to save time so we’d have more time for our final summations. The rabbi took his not being called to the stand graciously.

  †The “Four Days in November” section covered in a fair amount of detail Ruby’s conduct and activities on the three days leading up to his killing of Oswald, on the premise that, as the Warren Commission said, “if Jack Ruby were involved in a conspiracy, his activities and associations during this period would, in some way, have reflected the conspiratorial relationship” (WR, p.333). Not just with his sandwiches, but with everything else he said and did, it couldn’t be more clear that Ruby wasn’t involved with organized crime or anyone else in his killing of Oswald. Indeed, as previously indicated, on the afternoon of the assassination he was so distraught that he wanted to fly back to Chicago that night to be with his sister, Eileen Kaminsky, but she talked him out of it, telling him that their infirm sister, Eva, needed him in Dallas (15 H 283, WCT Eileen Kaminsky).

  *The latest Gallup Poll (November 10–12, 2003) showed that 37 percent of Americans believed the Mafia was involved in Kennedy’s assassination, and 34 percent believed the CIA was. Among other leading people or entities believed to be involved in the assassination were Lyndon Johnson, 18 percent; Castro’s Cuba, 15 percent; and the Soviet Union, 15 percent. The reason these numbers add up to more than 100 percent is that many people believed that more than one of these persons or groups were involved in the assassination. As noted earlier in the book, the Gallup Poll showed that 75 percent of all Americans believed there was a conspiracy in the assassination, only 19 percent believed that the assassin acted alone, and 6 percent had no opinion.

  †The letters refer to an old Sicilian death slogan, Morte Alla Francia Italia Anala—“Death to the French Is Italy’s Cry”—which arose out of the French invasion of Sicily in 1282, although the word Mafia would later come to mean “manly” in Sicily.

  *Capone rose to power in Chicago through gang wars with his rivals, during which upwards of five hundred murders took place in the last half of the 1920s, the most famous being the Saint Valentine’s Day massacre in 1929, when Capone’s killers, dressed as policemen, lined seven members of rival Bugsy Moran’s North Side gang up against a garage wall and machine-gunned them down.

  *Other cardinal commandments of the Mafia have come to light through the years, two of which are that “a mafioso must obey implicitly the orders of a council of brothers senior to him,” and “a mafioso may never, under any circumstances, appeal to the police, the courts, or any other governmental authority for redress” (Sondern, Brotherhood of Evil, p.54).

  †Once nationwide, it is believed that today only one “Outfit” in Chicago and New York City’s five organized-crime families remain. They are “about all that’s left,” says mob historian Selwyn Raab. However, as recently as 2002, federal court records show that the Bonanno family in New York City, still with about one hundred members (about half their traditional strength), was considering whether to induct ten new mob wannabes. Joseph Coffee, who pursued the mob as a New York City police detective for over thirty years, believes the aura and lifestyle of the Mafia will continue to attract new members irrespective of how many mob leaders are convicted and imprisoned. “It’s the high life, the nightclubs, the bimbos, the easy money,” he says. “It’s always been that.” (Richard Willing, “The Sopranos, the Mafia,” USA Today, March 10–12, 2006, pp.1A–2A)

  *According to an obituary on Mario Puzo, the term godfather, the title of his book, which became one of the biggest-selling novels of all time, is not a Mafia term. “In fact, the term ‘godfather’ as a synonym for a Mafia don did not exist before Puzo made it up.” (Obituary of Puzo, Newsday, July 3, 1999, p.A3) However, it apparently was a Mafia term but not a synonym for a Mafia don. Rather, new Mafia members were assigned to someone who was designated as their “godfather,” a person who was “responsible” for the new member and was his “gombah.” (New York Times, October 2, 1963, p.28; Maas, Valachi Papers, p.96)Goombah or compare is also a term for a mobster’s buddy, who isn’t necessarily a mob member (USA Today, March 10, 2006, p.4A).

  *The boss of bosses, Luciano, got his start in major crime by importing narcotics under Arnold (“A. R.”) Rothstein, the most influential figure in the New York underworld before his murder in 1928. Rothstein was famous for fixing the 1919 World Series between the Chicago White Sox and the Cincinnati Reds. Indeed, Luciano’s first criminal arrest was for selling opium to an undercover agent in 1916. (Sciacca, Luciano, pp.7–8, 23, 45)

  †The Bureau of Internal Revenue (later, Internal Revenue Service) estimated Capone’s annual income in the late 1920s, mostly from the sale of alcohol, as being close to $100 million—$50 million from bootlegging, $25 million from gambling, $10 million from organized prostitution, and about the same from narcotics distribution (Sondern, Brotherhood of Evil, pp.76–77). While many Americans know that the still-legendary mob figure (whose name to this day is identified with the Windy City probably more than even Michael Jordan’s) was convicted of federal income tax evasion, effectively ending his criminal career, what most don’t know is that the man who is credited with his downfall, Elliot Ness, had very little to do with it, not even participating in Capone’s trial. Ness, whose greatly exaggerated exp
loits were chronicled in The Untouchables, a book and TV series based thereon, was a federal Prohibition agent in the Department of Justice, and he did, indeed, lead successful (though not debilitating) raids on Capone’s breweries. He was also, by all accounts, honest and incorruptible. But it was the accountants of the Bureau of Internal Revenue of the Treasury Department, led by Frank J. Wilson, an agent in the intelligence unit of the bureau, whose investigation of Capone for not paying taxes on the income derived from his sale of alcohol, who finally brought Capone down. Capone was convicted in 1931 and sentenced to eleven years in the federal penitentiary. He served eight years and was paroled in 1939, suffering from syphilis. Al Capone died from a brain hemorrhage at his Palm Island, Florida, home in 1947 at the age of forty-eight after suffering a stroke followed by a bout of pneumonia. (Bergreen, Capone, pp.44, 272, 484, 486, 571, 604–605)

  *Though never confirmed, it is believed by many that Luciano (together, some say, with Vito Genovese, Luciano’s underling at the time) had a hand in both Maranzano’s and Masseria’s deaths, guiding his then boss, Masseria (whom he was unable to stop fighting with Maranzano), to an Italian restaurant on Coney Island on April 15, 1931, where he was ambushed and murdered by men believed to be from his own gang. Luciano had excused himself to go to the restroom just before the murder took place. When Maranzano, who viewed himself as the new “boss of bosses,” felt that he also could not coexist with Luciano, who had taken over Masseria’s gang, or Vito Genovese, on September 10, 1931, he lured Luciano and Genovese to his office to be murdered by Vincent “Mad Dog” Coll, who at age twenty-two was already a notorious executioner, but Luciano learned what was in store for him, and instead Maranzano was met by four of Meyer Lansky’s gunmen, who shot him to death. (New York Times, October 3, 1963, p.24; Nelli, Business of Crime, pp.203–206) Whether or not Luciano was behind the murders of Masseria and Maranzano, mob historians believe that their deaths marked the end of the dominance of the Mafia by old-time, tradition-beholden mafiosi, to whom the town one came from in Sicily was just as important, or more, than making money, which was the only concern of Luciano and Lansky.