Crossfire

by Jim Marrs

  In his Warren Commission testimony, Ruby made no secret of his closeness to McWillie, stating, “I called him frequently. . . . I idolized McWillie.”

  Despite Ruby’s accolades, Commission members declined to follow through on a staff recommendation to call McWillie to testify about his relationship with Ruby and Mafia figures. The Warren Report made no mention of McWillie’s mob ties or of McWillie’s FBI record, No. 4404064, which gives a list of aliases and characterizes him as a gangland killer.

  While the Warren Commission took Ruby’s and McWillie’s word that the 1959 trips to Cuba were “purely social,” the House Select Committee on Assassinations did not. After listing a number of visits to Cuba based on visas, airline tickets, and even a postcard, chief counsel Blakey wrote:

  We established beyond reasonable doubt that Ruby lied repeatedly and willfully to the FBI and the Warren Commission about the number of trips he made to Cuba and their duration. . . . It was clear, for example, that the trips were not social jaunts; their purpose, we were persuaded, was to courier something, probably money, into or out of Cuba. . . . The evidence indicated strongly that an association (with Trafficante) existed and that Ruby’s trip was related to Trafficante’s detention and release. We came to believe that Ruby’s trips to Cuba were, in fact, organized-crime activities.

  Lewis J. McWillie was born May 4, 1908, in Kansas City, Missouri. From 1940 until 1958 he lived in Dallas, where he managed several gambling operations, including the Four Deuces Club in nearby Fort Worth owned by gentleman gambler W. C. Kirkwood. Recall it was his son, Pat Kirkwood, who hosted Kennedy’s Secret Service agents the night before the assassination.

  In the summer of 1958, McWillie relocated to Havana, Cuba, where he worked for Norman Rothman as a pit boss in Trafficante’s Sans Souci casino. It was during this time that Ruby was encountered in the Florida Keys involved in gunrunning schemes run by Rothman.

  By September 1958, McWillie was manager of the Tropicana Hotel’s luxurious casino, then styled as “the largest nightclub in the world.” It was here that McWillie became a close associate of some of the mob’s most powerful leaders.

  Yet over the years, McWillie maintained that he knew these men only “casually,” but did admit an acquaintanceship with Dallas crime figures R. D. Matthews and Joseph Civello.

  It is interesting to note that both McWillie and Matthews were connected to Dallas gambling operations during the 1950s; both went to work gambling in Havana, Cuba, in 1958–1959; and in later years, both were employed at Benny Binion’s Horseshoe Club in Las Vegas.

  When Castro closed the Tropicana, McWillie became pit boss at the Capri Hotel’s casino, another Trafficante property. The Capri was then run by Charlie “The Blade” Tourine, whose mistress later confirmed that she was assisting Frank Sturgis in an attempt to poison Castro.

  McWillie finally left Cuba in January 1961. According to Ruby and others, he was one of the last American mobsters to leave the island.

  It should be pointed out that during the first half of 1961 McWillie was in Miami, the site of the CIA-Mafia assassination meetings involving Trafficante, Giancana, and Roselli. After that time, McWillie worked at a number of Nevada gambling casinos.

  In early 1959, McWillie’s boss Trafficante was arrested and jailed in the Trescornia Camp outside Havana. Within days of this incident, Jack Ruby contacted convicted Texas gunrunner Robert Ray McKeown, who in 1958 had received a two-year suspended sentence and five years on probation when convicted by US authorities of conspiring to smuggle arms to Castro. His gunrunning activities brought McKeown into close contact with two notable Cubans—one of whom was Fidel Castro. McKeown was photographed with the bearded leader during a visit to Houston in April 1959. He was also close to Carlos Prio Socarras, former president of Cuba, who quickly turned against Castro and became a leader of the anti-Castro Cubans in the United States.

  It was due to this closeness to Cuban leaders that McKeown was contacted by telephone by a man who identified himself as “Jack Rubenstein of Dallas.” The caller said he had obtained McKeown’s phone number through a member of the Houston County Sheriff’s Office and had thought his name was “Davis.”

  “Davis” was the same name that Ruby mentioned to his attorneys when asked if he knew of anyone who could damage their legal plea of momentary insanity for Ruby. Indeed, a gunrunner named Tommy E. Davis not only was active in Texas at that time but during Ruby’s trial showed up in Dallas and told Ruby’s attorneys that he and Ruby had met several times to discuss the possibility of running arms to Cuba. However, Davis denied that anything came of this planning. Tommy Davis was linked to both US intelligence and crime circles.

  McKeown told the House Select Committee on Assassinations that Ruby told him he represented Las Vegas interests that were seeking the release of three prisoners in Cuba. Ruby offered $5,000 each for help in obtaining release of the prisoners. McKeown told the caller he would accept the offer if money were forthcoming. The caller said he would think about it.

  About three weeks later, McKeown said he was visited by Ruby at his business near Houston. Ruby said he had access to a large number of jeeps in Shreveport, Louisiana, which he was going to sell in Cuba. He offered McKeown $25,000 for a letter of introduction to Castro. Again, McKeown asked for money up front. He later claimed that Ruby “never returned nor did he ever see him again.”

  Of equal interest is McKeown’s claim in later years that just weeks before the assassination, he was contacted by yet another man who wanted to buy weapons, particularly high-powered rifles with scopes. McKeown said this man identified himself as “Lee Oswald.”

  In this story, which has been corroborated by a McKeown friend, Sam Neill, “Lee Oswald” and a man named Hernandez showed up at McKeown’s home in late September or early October 1963, saying they were involved in planning a revolution in El Salvador. McKeown said he refused to sell arms to “Oswald.”

  Both McKeown and his friend Neill independently recognized Oswald on November 22, 1963, as the man who had visited a few weeks earlier. However, both men decided to keep quiet about the Oswald visit, saying later they were “scared” to tell the FBI in 1964 what they knew. Indeed, a January 28, 1964, FBI document pertaining to McKeown’s interview states, “To his knowledge, he has never seen or met Lee Harvey Oswald.”

  Although the House committee pointed to inconsistencies in McKeown’s various accounts of his contact with both Ruby and Oswald, on the whole—especially with the Neill corroboration—his story has gained credence with many researchers.

  Yet another incident occurred in 1961 that indicates that Ruby’s gunrunning activities may not have ceased in 1959. Nancy Perrin Rich worked for Ruby and became involved in Cuban gunrunning activities while married to Robert Perrin in Dallas. In interviews with both the FBI and Warren Commission, she related how her mob-connected husband met with a group of anti-Castro Cubans in a Dallas apartment, presided over by a US Army lieutenant colonel. During this meeting, her husband was offered $10,000 to bring a boatload of Cuban refugees to Miami. The couple demanded a cash retainer.

  A few nights later, the Perrins met again with the Cubans, who promised money was on the way. Rich told the Warren Commission, “I had the shock of my life. . . . A knock comes on the door and who walks in but my little friend Jack Ruby . . . and everybody looks like . . . here comes the Savior.” She detected a bulge in Ruby’s jacket that disappeared quickly, leading her to conclude Ruby was the “bag man” bringing funds to the Cubans.

  Less than a year after this Ruby-Cuban meeting, Robert Perrin was found dead of arsenic poisoning. His death was ruled a suicide.

  On November 26, 1963, long before any in-depth investigation was done on Ruby’s background, British journalist John Wilson informed the American embassy in London that he had been held in the Trescornia Camp outside Havana with Trafficante in the summer of 1959. Wilson said there he met an American gangster called Santos and that “Santos was visited several times by an American
gangster type named Ruby.” Wilson claimed the man named Ruby would come to the prison with people bringing food to Trafficante.

  Although Wilson is now dead, there is considerable corroboration to his story. Gerry Patrick Hemming, a CIA agent who in 1959 was serving with Castro’s forces, saw Ruby in a meeting with Castro leader Captain William Morgan during this time and the talk centered around efforts to release Trafficante from prison. Sources within the Dallas underworld claimed Ruby was the middleman who, acting on McWillie’s orders, bought Trafficante’s freedom from Cuba with the sale of black-market jeeps to Castro.

  While this has not yet been officially confirmed, it is certainly significant that there appears to have been much closer contact between Jack Ruby, Oswald’s slayer, and Santos Trafficante, the mob boss who predicted that Kennedy would be “hit.” The fact that Ruby idolized the stylish, gray-haired McWillie and would do “anything” for his mentor is especially intriguing in light of the close association between McWillie and Trafficante.

  And during those active days in 1959, Ruby made another astonishing contact—the Federal Bureau of Investigation. The Warren Commission was quietly notified in early 1964 that the bureau had contacted Jack Ruby in 1959 as an informant but asked that the Commission keep this explosive fact a secret. The contents of this February 27, 1964, memo from Director Hoover to Warren Commission general counsel J. Lee Rankin was not made public until 1975. The memo, belatedly discovered through “a search of all files in the Dallas [FBI] office wherein references to Jack Ruby appeared,” stated:

  For your information, Ruby was contacted by an Agent of the Dallas Office on March 11, 1959, in view of his position as a nightclub operator who might have knowledge of the criminal element in Dallas. He was advised of the Bureau’s jurisdiction in criminal matters, and he expressed a willingness to furnish information along these lines. He was subsequently contacted on eight occasions between March 11, 1959, and October 2, 1959, but he furnished no information whatever and further contacts with him were discontinued. Ruby was never paid any money, and he was never at any time an informant of this Bureau.

  The Commission not only failed to see the significance of the nine meetings between the FBI and Ruby during the very time he was trying to free mob boss Trafficante, but also did not bother to question the FBI agent who had met with Ruby.

  But many law-enforcement officers, both state and federal, have privately stated that both the frequency and duration of these Ruby contacts suggests there was more to the relationship than Hoover would admit.

  The House Select Committee on Assassinations did interview Charles W. Flynn, the FBI agent who met with Ruby. According to Flynn, Ruby initiated the contacts on March 11, 1959, rather than the bureau as stated in the Hoover memo. Flynn said Ruby told him he wanted to give information on a confidential basis and so Flynn opened a potential criminal informant (PCI) file on Ruby. Flynn said he closed the file on November 6, 1959, because Ruby had not been particularly helpful.

  The House committee staff was intrigued by this connection between Ruby and the FBI at the time Ruby was making trips to Cuba. The committee’s chief counsel later wrote:

  Ruby could, of course, have contacted the FBI with no ulterior motive, and it could have been wholly unrelated to his Cuban activities. . . . We [the committee staff] believed, however, that Ruby’s behavior was consistent with the pattern of seasoned offenders, who often cultivate a relationship with a law enforcement agency during a period when they are engaging in a criminal activity in the hope that, if they are caught, they can use the relationship to secure immunity from prosecution.

  On April 27, 1959, shortly after his first contact with Agent Flynn and the day before their next scheduled meeting, Ruby rented safety deposit box 448 at Merchants State Bank in Dallas, where he maintained a small business checking account.

  Sometime before he rented the bank box, Ruby bought more than $500 worth of tape-recording equipment. The saleswoman, contacted by Secret Service agents shortly after the assassination, recalled that Ruby bought “a wristwatch which held a microphone for the equipment, and also an instrument to bug a telephone . . . [and a] tie clip and attaché case.” An FBI agent also interviewed the saleswoman but filed a meager two-paragraph report, omitting the descriptions of the electronic bugging equipment.

  From the time Ruby acquired the safety deposit box through the fall of 1959, researchers have discerned a pattern—both before and after making a trip to Cuba, Ruby would enter this deposit box and then contact the FBI.

  Flynn denied to the House committee that he and Ruby had discussed the Cuban visits, but in later years Flynn reportedly admitted to news reporters that Ruby may have mentioned one trip to Cuba.

  And apparently Ruby was making no secret of his Cuban sojourns at the time. He sent a postcard from Havana to a girlfriend in Dallas and he was overheard telling one of his employees not to say where he was going “unless it was to the police or some other official agency.”

  It also should be noted that three days after Ruby shot Oswald, authorities in New Orleans received a tip that Jack Ruby had bought some paintings while in that city in the summer of 1959. While this information seemed hardly germane to the assassination, its source points to the involvement of US intelligence, for this bit of art news came from William George Gaudet, the CIA operative who accompanied Oswald to Mexico.

  So apparently the CIA was tracking Ruby’s movements in 1959, and after the assassination, Ruby was fearful that his activities in New Orleans—which obviously involved Cuba—would be found out.

  The House Select Committee on Assassinations determined that Ruby may have made as many as six trips to Cuba, but most significantly, this issue was clouded and passed off by both the FBI and the Warren Commission.

  When Warren Commission attorneys Leon Hubert and Burt Griffin—both assigned to the Ruby aspect of the investigation—requested further probing of Ruby’s Cuban connections, they were rebuffed by both the CIA and other Commission staff members. In later years, Warren Commission staffer Howard P. Willens, the liaison with the Department of Justice, explained the commission’s reluctance to probe deeper by telling newsman Seth Kantor, “These Cuban pursuits represented some kind of bottomless pit and our overall investigation had to be wrapped up.”

  Considered all together, the activities of Jack Ruby involving Cuba, Trafficante, McWillie, and the FBI represent a whole new dimension of the assassination—one that has yet to be fully explored.

  But these connections, especially in light of the theory on mob involvement in the assassination, certainly elevate Ruby far above the simple, emotional nightclub owner pictured by the Warren Commission.

  As the day of Kennedy’s assassination approached, Jack Ruby remained in contact with a variety of mob figures both by telephone and in person.

  One of the most intriguing incidents involved Johnny Roselli, the gangster involved with Santos Trafficante and Sam Giancana in the CIA-Mafia assassination plots and the man said to have been flown into Dallas on the morning of November 22, 1963, by “black ops” pilot Tosh Plumlee.

  It has become known that beginning in the summer of 1963 and continuing into November, the FBI had Roselli under surveillance.

  Researchers were surprised in later years that the bureau had monitored two separate meetings between Roselli and Jack Ruby that occurred within two months of Kennedy’s death. Roselli, who later began to speak openly to columnist Jack Anderson, admitted to knowing Ruby, calling him “one of our boys.” What these meetings were about and why they were not reported to the Warren Commission is not known, but to most researchers this is yet another clear example of the FBI’s suppression of evidence.

  The Woman Who Foresaw the Assassination

  One of the most intriguing stories to come out of the assassination case involved a woman who claimed to have worked for Ruby and who is on record with foreknowledge of Kennedy’s death.

  On November 20, 1963, two days before the assassination, Loui
siana State Police lieutenant Francis Fruge journeyed to Eunice, Louisiana, to pick up a woman who had received minor abrasions when she was thrown from a moving car. This scene was depicted at the beginning of the Oliver Stone film but with no identification of the woman or any explanation of its meaning.

  The woman appeared to be under the influence of some drug. She later was driven to the state hospital in Jackson, Louisiana. On the way she told Fruge that she had been traveling with two men “who were Italians or resembled Italians” from Florida to Dallas. When Fruge asked her what she planned to do in Dallas, the woman replied, “Number one, pick up some money, pick up [my] baby and . . . kill Kennedy.”

  Thus began the strange saga of Melba Christine Marcades, better known as Rose Cheramie.

  While at the state hospital, Cheramie told doctors there that Kennedy was to be killed in Dallas. She appeared quite lucid and hospital records studied by the House Select Committee on Assassinations reflect the woman was diagnosed as “without psychosis. However, because of her previous record of drug addiction she may have a mild integrative and pleasure defect.”

  Dr. Victor Weiss told committee investigators that Cheramie said she had worked for Jack Ruby and that her knowledge of the assassination came from “word in the underworld.”

  The day of the assassination, Lieutenant Fruge immediately remembered the woman and her apparent foreknowledge. He returned to the state hospital and took Cheramie into custody. During questioning she said the two men were on their way from Florida to Dallas to kill Kennedy. She said she was to receive $8,000 for her part in this activity and was then to accompany the two men to Houston to complete a drug deal and pick up her young son. She even gave Fruge the name of both a seaman and a ship that were involved in the drug deal and Fruge verified this information through US Customs.