Crossfire

by Jim Marrs

  About two months after this meeting, Mash had a falling-out with Ruby. She explained:

  He accused me of bringing the vice squad to the club but I didn’t. But he wouldn’t listen to me. He cussed me out. It upset me, so I left. Also, it was real strange, but I had a very bad feeling, a premonition, that I had better get away from Dallas. So I moved to Euless and got a job in a restaurant, then later moved to Phoenix. I was not even in Dallas the day of the assassination. I did not pay much attention to the news after the assassination. But then on Sunday morning, my children were watching TV when they were showing them moving Oswald. Ruby shot him and I screamed, “Oh, my god!” I couldn’t believe my eyes. I thought, “That’s the weird little man who was at that secret meeting with Jack and those Mafia types.” I saw that grin on Oswald’s face on TV the day Jack shot him. He was smiling because Jack was his friend. I didn’t want to be involved, so I kept quiet. But now I have a blood clot on the right side of my brain as a result of a car accident. I’ve already lived longer than I am supposed to. That’s the reason I’m telling you this now. Somebody needs to know this before I die.

  But an even more damning story concerning Ruby and Oswald comes from Carroll Jarnagin, a credible, if eccentric, attorney. Jarnagin explained to this author that he visited Ruby’s Carousel Club on October 4, 1963, to discuss a legal case with one of Ruby’s strippers. While seated in a booth at the club, Jarnagin overheard Jack Ruby—whom he knew well—talking with another man. Jarnagin heard the man tell Ruby, “Don’t use my real name. I’m going by the name of O. H. Lee.” This, of course, was the name Lee Harvey Oswald used to rent a room on North Beckley in Oak Cliff.

  Jarnagin described this meeting:

  These men were talking about plans to kill the governor of Texas. Ruby explained, “He [Governor Connally] won’t work with us on paroles. With a few of the right boys out we could really open up this state, with a little cooperation from the governor.” Then Ruby offered Lee a drug franchise. Ruby also said that the boys really wanted to kill Robert Kennedy. Lee offered to go to Washington to do the job. They then discussed using public lockers and pay telephones as part of hiding their plot. Ruby assured Lee that he could shoot Connally from a window in the Carousel Club and then escape out a back door. Lee was asking for money. He wanted half of the money in advance, but Ruby told him he would get one lump sum after the job was done.

  One thing that sets Jarnagin’s story apart from the others is that he contacted authorities with his information prior to the assassination. The day after hearing Ruby’s conversation, Jarnagin telephoned the Texas Department of Public Safety. Nothing came of this.

  Jarnagin stated, “[After Ruby shot Oswald] I definitely realized that the picture in the November 23, 1963, Dallas Times Herald of Lee Harvey Oswald was a picture of the man using the name O. H. Lee, whose conversation with Jack Ruby I had overheard back on October 4, 1963.”

  After the assassination, Jarnagin again contacted the authorities, this time the Dallas police and the FBI. He was interviewed but his startling account of a Ruby-Oswald plot was buried deep in the volumes of the Warren Commission and never mentioned in its report.

  In fact, the Warren Commission quickly dismissed rumors circulating throughout Dallas in 1963–1964 that Ruby and Oswald knew each other by stating, “All assertions that Oswald was seen in the company of Ruby or anyone else at the Carousel Club have been investigated. None of them merits any credence.”

  Jarnagin said when he tried to tell the FBI what he knew, agents accused him of having hallucinations. The attorney huffed, “It was clearly abuse of a witness.”

  His tale of an Oswald-Ruby plot finally garnered headlines, this time in 2008. It seems district attorney Henry Wade revamped Jarnagin’s account, turning it into a script of Ruby and Oswald plotting, not against Governor Connally, but against President Kennedy. His script adaptation was found in an old safe in the district attorney’s office.

  The media as well as Gary Mack, by then Sixth Floor Museum curator, laughed off the find as simply an attempt at making a “bad B movie.” No mention was made of the fact that the Ruby-Oswald plot was a genuine report to authorities Jarnagin made prior to the assassination.

  The disparate meeting times given in these reports—Mash said late spring 1963, Weston indicated about mid-October, and Jarnagin pinpointed October 4, 1963—and the people involved indicate the possibility that more than one meeting involving Ruby and Oswald occurred.

  And neither the FBI nor the Warren Commission ever talked to Rose Cheramie, Beverly Oliver, Ester Mash, Wally Weston, Shari Angel, Billy Willis, C. B. Caldera, or Madeleine Brown.

  There is tantalizing evidence that authorities knew more than they were telling about a relationship between Oswald and Ruby. In 1976, four Dallas deputy constables told the Dallas Morning News that shortly after the assassination they had examined a boxful of handwritten notes and other papers in the Dallas County Courthouse that linked Ruby and Oswald together.

  Deputy Billy Preston said he and constable Robie Love, now deceased, handed the box of documents over to Dallas County district attorney Henry Wade in late 1963 or early 1964. Wade told the paper he didn’t recall receiving the papers.

  Preston, along with deputy constables Mike Callahan and Ben Cash, said the box of papers came from the apartment of a Dallas woman. Preston explained, “She was really scared because she had all that stuff. She wanted me to pick it up for her. And I just wished I had made some more copies now.”

  Preston could not recall the woman’s name other than “Mary,” but then and now he believes she had some connection with Oswald because most of the box’s contents appeared to have been written by him.

  Cash, however, recalled that the box came from the woman’s roommate, who had kept it for a Latin American boyfriend. Cash told reporter Earl Golz, “The impression I got [was that] the papers were from the Latin American because he mentioned Ruby and he mentioned Oswald in the writings. He didn’t mention the third party but he kept referring to a third party. And the third party would have to be him.”

  Among the papers in the box, according to the deputies, were newspaper clippings from Mexico, a photocopy of a press card with the words “Daily Worker” issued to Ruby, a receipt from a motel near New Orleans dated several weeks before the assassination with both the names Ruby and Oswald on it and references to calls to Mexico City, papers pinpointing a landing strip somewhere in Mexico, and references to meetings with “agents” in the border towns of McAllen and Laredo, Texas. There was also a church brochure with markings indicating something about going to Cuba.

  Preston said one handwritten note referred to a plan to assassinate President Kennedy during the dedication of a lake or dam in Wisconsin. Lawmen in Wisconsin had speculated in December 1963 about the existence of just such a plan after discovering what appeared to be Lee Harvey Oswald’s signature on the registry of a restaurant in Hubertus, Wisconsin, dated September 16, 1963. Kennedy indeed had made a speech on September 24, 1963, in Ashland, Wisconsin, as part of a nationwide conservation tour. The FBI rejected the signature as Oswald’s and this subject received little attention outside Wisconsin.

  Deputy Cash explained why the men had not made this story public earlier:

  At that time it was a pretty hot issue, you remember. So we kept quiet and went along with the game. We figured it would be handled on a higher level [than us]. And when it didn’t come out, we thought at that time possibly they [the Warren Commission] thought that kind of information tying it into the Cubans or Russians couldn’t be released at that time because it might put us in World War III.

  Wade finally admitted the incident with the box of documents “might well have happened,” but added, “but I know that whatever they had didn’t amount to nothing.” Whether it did or not may never be known because as far as any official investigation, the box simply never existed.

  It would appear that despite the protestations of the two federal investigations, the evide
nce of an Oswald-Ruby connection is overwhelming.

  Even former Dallas police chief Jesse Curry seems to indicate such a relationship existed in his 1969 book by noting, “Witnesses to the shooting [of Oswald] wondered if there wasn’t a gleam of recognition in Oswald’s eye when Ruby stepped out from the newsmen.”

  Whether it may ever be conclusively proven that Ruby and Oswald were in contact, there is no doubt that Ruby was in touch with associates of mob and Teamster leaders—and that telephone calls with them markedly increased in the days leading up to the assassination.

  In March 1963, Ruby made fewer than ten long-distance calls and from May to September this number averaged monthly between twenty-five and thirty-five. But Ruby’s toll calls climbed to more than seventy in October and almost one hundred in November.

  This surge in phone traffic also intrigued Warren Commission investigators Hubert and Griffin, who asked the FBI to thoroughly examine all calls by Ruby, his family, and his associates. They also requested that the bureau have phone companies in Texas, Nevada, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Chicago, Detroit, Boston, New York, Washington, Miami, and New Orleans freeze all records until Commission staff could study them.

  Apparently this was never done. Griffin later told the House Select Committee on Assassinations that while the bureau did compile some telephone information, it was not the comprehensive check he had asked for and that “no request to freeze records was made to telephone companies.” When the House committee got around to requesting these same records, most had been routinely destroyed.

  Nevertheless, enough information on Ruby’s calls has become available to paint a portrait of a man frantically touching bases across the nation as November 22, 1963, approached. While some of Ruby’s calls could be dismissed as obviously personal or business communications, some—such as frequent calls to Harold Tannenbaum, who ran several New Orleans nightclubs that were owned at least in part by mob boss Carlos Marcello—may have served sinister purposes. Near the end of October, Ruby placed a call to Nofio Pecora, one of Marcello’s closest associates. The House committee developed information that Pecora owned the Tropical Court Tourist Park, a New Orleans trailer court in which Tannenbaum lived.

  Ruby made at least seven traceable calls to his “mentor,” gambler Lewis McWillie, beginning in June 1963. He also was in touch with Irwin S. Weiner, a bondsman and insurance agent connected with Santos Trafficante, Sam Giancana, and several other crime-syndicate figures. He also placed a seventeen-minute call in early November to Robert “Barney” Baker, identified as “Hoffa’s ambassador of violence” by attorney general Robert Kennedy.

  When questioned by House investigators, all of these telephone contacts said the Ruby calls were innocuous and pertained only to some union problems Ruby was having with the American Guild of Variety Artists. The committee concluded, “We were no more satisfied with [this] explanation than we were with McWillie’s, Weiner’s, or Baker’s.”

  Union disagreements were not the only problem Ruby faced in the fall of 1963. His problems with the IRS alone were enough to motivate him to follow orders to kill Oswald.

  According to the Warren Commission:

  In 1960, the government filed tax liens for more than $20,000 [against Ruby]. In November 1962, the government rejected Ruby’s offer to pay $8,000 to compromise the assessed taxes of more than $20,000 because he had not filed returns for other federal taxes and had not paid these taxes as they became due. These other taxes . . . amounted to an additional $20,000.

  Testimony from Ruby’s friends and acquaintances confirmed that he was complaining of his tax debts to anyone who would listen and the House committee determined that Ruby’s tax liability may have been closer to $60,000 than the $40,000 the Warren Commission mentioned.

  One June 6, 1963, Ruby’s attorney, Graham R. E. Koch, informed the Internal Revenue Service that his client would settle his debts “as soon as arrangements can be made to borrow money.” However, an FBI check of more than fifty banking institutions revealed no attempt by Ruby to borrow money legitimately.

  Did Ruby turn to the mob for help? His flurry of phone calls would seem to indicate this as well as a quick trip to Las Vegas two weekends before the assassination.

  Recall that Marguerite Oswald claimed she was fired from her job after her employer, Fort Worth publisher and high-stakes gambler Amon G. Carter Jr., traveled to Las Vegas at the same time Ruby was there. Some have speculated that Carter got word from Vegas sources that Marguerite should be dropped from the family’s employment before her son was named as a presidential assassin. The Warren Commission rejected the idea that Ruby visited America’s gambling capital, but the House committee found “credible evidence” that Ruby was there. Both a cashier and the credit manager of the Stardust Hotel recalled that a man named Ruby, who claimed to own a club in Dallas, attempted to cash a check one weekend in mid-November. The FBI confirmed this trip through “confidential information.”

  Ruby’s lawyer later told newsman Seth Kantor that it was right after this alleged trip that Ruby told him “he had a connection who would supply him with money to settle his long-standing government tax problems.”

  Taking the long view, House committee chief counsel Robert Blakey noted, “Ruby’s business was in deep financial difficulty, complicated by the dispute with AGVA [the American Guild of Variety Artists] over ‘amateur’ strippers and serious tax problems.”

  After pointing out Ruby’s union and tax problems as well as his capacity for violence, his underworld missions to Cuba, and his familiarity with the Dallas police, Blakey concluded, “Whatever else may be inferred from Ruby’s conduct in the summer and fall of 1963, it at least established that he was an available means to effect Oswald’s elimination.”

  The Shooting of Lee Harvey Oswald

  The Warren Commission—and hence the news media—reported in 1963–1964 that the shooting of Lee Harvey Oswald by Jack Ruby was the spontaneous act of a grief-stricken man who was concerned with the possibility of Mrs. Kennedy having to return to Dallas to testify against Oswald. Today that story, still repeated in the news media, has been shown to be a lie and a legal ploy.

  Less than three hours after shooting Oswald, Ruby was visited by Dallas attorney Tom Howard. Months later during his trial, Ruby scribbled a note to attorney Joe H. Tonahill saying, “Joe, you should know this. Tom Howard told me to say that I shot Oswald so that Caroline and Mrs. Kennedy wouldn’t have to come to Dallas to testify. Okay?”

  Ruby also admitted this ploy to attorney Melvin Belli, as recorded in his book, Dallas Justice. Belli wrote that Ruby told him, “We know I did it for Jackie and the kids. . . . Maybe I ought to forget this silly story that I’m telling, and get on the stand and tell the truth.”

  These confessions coupled with Ruby’s movements during the assassination weekend all portray a man who consciously stalked Oswald—propelled by motives that were not his own—before finally shooting him in the basement of the Dallas police station.

  According to information developed by both the Warren Commission and the House Select Committee on Assassinations, Ruby awoke about 9:30 a.m. on the day of the assassination and drove to the offices of the Dallas Morning News, where he tried to visit entertainment columnist Tony Zoppi. Failing to find Zoppi, Ruby said, he went to the paper’s advertising office and began to compose ad copy for his club.

  Ruby claimed to have remained at the paper from nearly 11 a.m. until well after the assassination and several News employees, such as John Newnam and Wanda Walker, confirmed this. However, all the accounts of Ruby at the newspaper contain gaps when he was out of sight. One reporter told the FBI that Ruby was “missed for a period of about twenty to twenty-five minutes” before reappearing shortly after the assassination.

  According to Ruby, he drove back to the Carousel Club after learning of the assassination at the newspaper. However, club employee Andrew Armstrong later stated that Ruby did not come to the club until nearly 2 p.m. and several witnesses
placed Ruby at Parkland Hospital.

  Ruby made several phone calls from the Carousel Club that afternoon and was visibly upset, according to employees’ accounts.

  He claimed he left the club late in the afternoon, but was seen in the crowded Dallas police headquarters between 4 and 4:30 p.m. Various persons, including a reporter and policemen, placed Ruby at the police station at different places and times between 4 and 7:30 p.m.

  By 9 p.m., according to phone records, Ruby was back at his apartment, and at 10 p.m., he visited a Dallas synagogue.

  Shortly after 11 p.m. Ruby was back at Dallas police headquarters armed with about a dozen sandwiches he had bought to give to officers.

  One officer has even told Texas researchers he saw Ruby enter Captain Fritz’s office while Oswald was undergoing interrogation.

  Ruby was still there shortly after midnight when Oswald was taken to a basement assembly room for a news conference. Mingling with news reporters, Ruby ended up in the rear of the room, where he elbowed his way onto a table past news photographer Tony Record. Record later said he thought Ruby was a fellow newsman but could not understand his insistence on standing on the table when he didn’t carry a camera.

  It was during this news conference that a singular incident occurred that many researchers have pointed to as evidence of Ruby’s intimate knowledge of Oswald and his activities. Dallas County district attorney Henry Wade, in briefing news reporters about Oswald’s background, stated he belonged to the Free Cuba Committee, whereupon Ruby corrected Wade by shouting out, “Henry, that’s the Fair Play for Cuba Committee.”

  While Ruby later claimed to have heard of Oswald’s Fair Play for Cuba Committee affiliation over a local radio station that afternoon, it nevertheless struck researchers as most odd that this nightclub owner with no known politics would note the difference between the anti-Castro Free Cuba Committee and the pro-Castro Fair Play for Cuba Committee. Of course, this knowledge would not seem at all odd if the accounts of a Ruby-Oswald relationship are true.