15

“I’m a Character! I’m Colorful”

The interrogation of Oswald began soon after homicide captain Will Fritz arrived at the police station. Oswald was taken to the third floor, to a ten-by-fourteen-foot room with glass windows covered by blinds. There, he was questioned at length, at least five separate times, for a total of approximately twelve hours, between 2:30 P.M. on the day of the assassination, Friday, November 22, until just after 11:00 A.M. on Sunday, November 24. None of the interviews were recorded, nor were any transcripts made. Accounts of the questions and answers come from the more than twenty-five participants, including Dallas police detectives, FBI and Secret Service agents, postal inspectors, and assistant Dallas district attorneys.*

The first priority in the interrogations was to discover whether Oswald had accomplices. “We wanted to know if there was anyone else we should be looking for,” recalls assistant district attorney Bill Alexander, an aggressive trial attorney who was at the center of the weekend’s activities. He sat in on several hours of questioning. “I had been part of the group that searched his room at the boardinghouse at 1026 North Beckley, and when we first found that Communist propaganda, I thought we might have stumbled across something with international repercussions, a spy ring or something like that… .”*

“But even though he didn’t tell us much,” Alexander told the author, “we felt pretty comfortable, soon after we started questioning him, that there was no one else involved. I still thought we should have thrown Marina into a cell and shaken her down some, and also looked a little harder at the Paines, but no one else agreed with me.”¹ Marina and Ruth Paine were brought to the police station. Everyone around Oswald was initially under suspicion.² Robert Oswald arrived later that evening, as did his mother, Marguerite.

All those who assisted in questioning Oswald described him as composed and unruffled (except when FBI agent Hosty arrived and identified himself).³ Detective Richard Sims said, “He was calm and wasn’t nervous. … He had control of himself.”4 “He was strung very tight,” recalls Alexander, “but he was definitely under control, almost arrogant and cocky. He answered almost every question with another question, and never gave that much information. We were very careful not to mistreat him in any way. The world’s press was just outside [Captain] Fritz’s door, and when we walked him through the hallways, he would have been the first to yell if we had done something to him. But he was so smug in the way he dealt with the questions, at times I had to walk out of the room, because in another few minutes I was going to beat the shit out of him myself.”⁵ “He struck me as a man who enjoyed the situation immensely,” remembered postal inspector Harry Holmes, “and was enjoying the publicity and everything that was coming his way.”⁶ Detective Jim Leavelle recalls, “I never saw him raise his voice, and he seemed to answer questions easily. He had a smile a lot of the time, kind of a smirk, really, sort of like he knew something you didn’t.” The description of Oswald at the jail sounds remarkably like the one Carlos Bringuier gave of him after his arrest for the street demonstration in New Orleans some three months earlier: “He was really cold-blooded … he was not nervous, he was not out of control, he was confident.”

When Marina visited him, however, she felt his eyes betrayed his guilt.⁷ She knew that if he had been innocent, he would have demanded his immediate freedom and complained to the highest officials. His compliance, coupled with his assurance that he was not being mistreated, added to her feeling he had committed the crime.* Michael Paine decided not to visit Oswald at the jail, “because when I watched him on television, I was surprised at his chutzpah and was too angry to visit him as I would have antagonized him at that point. But I knew him well enough to see he looked like the Cheshire cat that had just swallowed the canary. He had the smug satisfaction of knowing that he had struck a bold stroke for his cause. He had thrown a definite monkey wrench in the wheels of the capitalist cabal.”8

Although Oswald disclosed little useful information during the interrogations, he managed to lie about almost every subject. Among other things, he denied owning a rifle,⁹ and asserted he had never used an alias at his rooming house and had no knowledge of the name Hidell.¹⁰ He said he had not taken a trip to Mexico City,¹¹ was not involved in Fair Play for Cuba, and had not been undesirably discharged from the Marines.¹² According to Oswald, he never told Frazier he had curtain rods in any package he carried into the Depository.¹³ He lied about how he obtained his pistol and denied ever using post-office boxes or living at Neely Street in Dallas, posing for backyard photos at that address, or making the markings on a map found on him when he was arrested.¹⁴

When pressed in the interrogations, Oswald remained firm and even dismissed the seriousness of what had happened. “At one time I told him,” recalled Captain Will Fritz, “I said, ‘You know you have killed the President, and this is a very serious charge.’ He denied it and said he hadn’t killed the President. I said he had been killed. He said people will forget within a few days and there would be another President.”¹⁵

On Friday, November 22, Oswald sat through four different questioning sessions, interrupted only when police took him for lineups before the Tippit witnesses and Howard Brennan from Dealey Plaza. Late in the first session, he raised the issue of legal counsel. He said he did not want to be represented by any Dallas attorney and asked for John Abt, a New York lawyer prominent in left-wing causes. “When he said he wanted Abt,” recalls Alexander, “I was vaguely aware of him, and my first thought was ‘Hey, this s.o.b. really is a Communist.’”16*

By 7:00 P.M. on Friday, Alexander had drafted the murder indictment for Tippit. “We were not an international police force,” says Alexander. “We had two murders on our hands and wanted to solve them. I drew up the Tippit charge first because there was no doubt what to write up on that one. We had a good case and had Oswald cold. I said to Captain Fritz, ‘Let’s go ahead and file because we don’t know when the Civil Liberties Union or John Abt or the Communist network is going to run someone in here and find a weak judge who might set a bond, or somebody might come in with a writ.’ At that time, any district judge in Texas could grant a writ of habeas corpus [an emergency court order] for any prisoner in the entire state. My fear was that once you were playing with an ideology like Communism, you didn’t know what was going to crawl out of the cracks. So I said, ‘Let’s nail him down so no one can get him away from us.’ And by that I also meant the federals, with whom we did not have a good relationship.”¹⁷

Alexander, Captain Fritz, and justice of the peace David Johnston took Oswald into a side room. “A lot of people claimed to be there,” Alexander says. “If they were all there, you would have had to rent a convention center. And when David Johnston started to read him the charge, Oswald said, ‘This isn’t an arraignment. This isn’t a court. How do I know this is a judge? And who are you?’ And I told him in no uncertain terms to shut his mouth, and he was quiet after that. He seemed astonished, like he had gotten off in the wrong territory.”18*

After the Tippit arraignment, nearly nine hours after the assassination, the police took paraffin casts of Oswald’s hands and his right cheek. The theory of the test is that gunpowder residue will react with the paraffin and turn blue on the cast. Oswald’s hands proved positive; his cheek, however, was negative,¹⁹ which raised doubts about whether he had fired the rifle earlier that day.²⁰ Yet paraffin reacts to many items besides gunpowder—including tobacco, cosmetics, pharmaceuticals, soil fertilizer, and various kinds of food. Even the positive result on Oswald’s hands was not credible evidence against him, since so many oxidizing agents might have caused the reaction. Law enforcement seldom used paraffin tests in 1963, and the FBI considered them “practically worthless.”²¹† As for the negative result on Oswald’s cheek, the FBI did reconstruction tests where a shooter fired Oswald’s Carcano rifle and there was never a positive result from any paraffin cast taken of the right cheek.22 The Dallas police had never before even conducted a paraffin test on a shooter’s cheek.²³ “I was ordered to take it … by Captain Fritz,” remembered policeman W. E. Barnes. “I didn’t ask the questions why he wanted it.… Common sense will tell you that a man firing a rifle has got very little chance of getting powder residue on his cheek.”²⁴

Following the paraffin test, Captain Fritz spoke to police chief Jesse Curry and district attorney Henry Wade to determine whether they should make Oswald available briefly to the press. More than three hundred reporters had camped out on the third floor of the jail, with cameras, cables, and wires forming a tangled mess.²⁵ Whenever a witness appeared for a lineup or Oswald was escorted through the hallway, the journalists surged forward, shouting questions and snapping photos. The Dallas police department had never had such a notorious case and was not certain how to handle the press rush.²⁶ Chief Curry described the scene as “total confusion,” while FBI agent James Hosty said it was “very chaotic.”²⁷ When Henry Wade arrived after 11:00 P.M. on Friday, the third floor was so crowded that he had difficulty getting inside.²⁸

Chief Curry decided to make Oswald available for a press conference in a small basement assembly room. Shortly after midnight he was brought into the room, which was packed with one hundred police and press.²⁹ Although Chief Curry had warned the press to maintain strict order, when Oswald arrived they became frantic, and according to Curry, “immediately they began to shoot questions at him and shove microphones into his face.”³⁰ Curry, fearful that the press was about “to overrun him,” took Oswald from the room after a few moments.³¹ District attorney Wade remained to answer reporters’ questions. In answer to one, Wade said that Oswald belonged to the “Free Cuba Committee.” A few reporters corrected Wade, pointing out that early press reports said it was Fair Play for Cuba.32 Yet one person who spoke from the back row was not even a reporter, but instead a Dallas nightclub owner who had sneaked into the press conference. His name was Jack Ruby.

Ruby was born Jacob Rubenstein, into an Orthodox Jewish home, the fifth of eight children, on March 25, 1911, in Chicago.³³* The family was very poor and had moved four times by the time Jack was five, always into lower-class, street-tough Jewish ghettos.³⁴ His father, Joseph, was a heavy drinker who beat his mother, Fanny. Joseph was often arrested on assault-and-battery and disorderly conduct charges, sometimes filed by Fanny.³⁵ When Jack was ten years old his parents separated.³⁶

At school, he had trouble making friends and thought his classmates often picked on him.³⁷ He frequently skipped classes to stay on the streets, and as a result flunked the third grade. Although he later claimed to have finished the eighth grade, records show he completed only the sixth.³⁸ By the age of ten, he was scalping sporting tickets and hustling anything he could sell for a few dollars.³⁹ According to his brother Earl, Jack grew up fast on the streets and was proud of his reputation as “the toughest kid his age.”⁴⁰

His mother was high-strung, and though she often beat him, she was incapable of controlling him. By the time he was eleven, in 1922, his mother referred him—because of “truancy and [the fact he was] incorrigible at home”—to the Institute for Juvenile Research of the Jewish Social Service Bureau.⁴¹ A psychiatric report found Jack boastful that “he could lick everyone and anybody in anything,” suffered from a hair-trigger temper, was egocentric, and was consumed by dual obsessions with sex and street gangs.⁴² An IQ test showed a slightly below normal rating of 94.⁴³ The report also said that “it is apparent that she [Jack’s mother] has no insight into his problem, and she is thoroughly inadequate in the further training of this boy.” It concluded that the household atmosphere was so dreadful that his mother must have a “disturbance. She might have been an emotionally and materially grossly deprived individual suffering from a severe character disorder—by the same token she could have been of low intellectual endowment (mentally deficient?) or grossly disturbed emotionally to the point of being psychotic” (remarks in parentheses in original).44

The following year, 1923, a juvenile court determined that Jack and two younger brothers and a sister were not receiving proper parental care, and they were placed into a foster home, where they remained for eighteen months.⁴⁵* When they were reunited with their mother, she was still unable to deal with them. Jack continued to run unchecked, with a reputation as an adept street fighter with a flash temper.⁴⁶ Nicknamed Sparky because of his volatile nature, he sometimes carried a stick that he used to beat opponents in fights.⁴⁷ “He was stronger than any professional fighter,” recalls his brother Earl. “And he had the worst temper in the family. But after he exploded and got into a fight, he would be over it in a minute, and often sorry that he had lost his temper.”⁴⁸ During his teenage years, Ruby was feared in the local neighborhood. He continued scraping a living from the streets, and while the police took note of him, he avoided any major legal problems. However, several of his friends were well on their way to becoming full-time criminals.⁴⁹

In 1933, just before he turned twenty-two, Ruby moved to California with several of his Chicago friends, hoping to make more money.⁵⁰ He first went to Los Angeles and then to San Francisco. His sister Eva joined him there the following year, after her divorce from her first husband.⁵¹ In both cities, Ruby still had difficulty making a living—selling tip sheets for horse races at the local tracks, working as a singing waiter in Los Angeles, and selling newspaper subscriptions in San Francisco.⁵²

By 1937 his new start in California had fizzled, and he returned to Chicago.53 In July, his mother, who had suffered from “a psychoneurosis with a marked anxiety state” for more than ten years, was committed by a court to a mental institution.⁵⁴ She was released three months later, and then readmitted at her family’s request in January 1938.⁵⁵

Ruby, soon after his return, resumed ticket scalping and hustling small merchandise that he could quickly sell for a profit.⁵⁶ He also became involved in the Scrap Iron and Junk Handlers Union, Local 20467, working as a union organizer.⁵⁷ His friend and union financial secretary Leon Cooke was shot by another Ruby associate, union president John Martin, in December 1939. Cooke died of his wounds a month later.* “The mob came in and took over the union after Cooke was killed,” says Earl Ruby. “It was a legitimate union when Jack was involved, but the mob was pressuring the union all the time, and then they eventually grabbed control and forced Jack out.”⁵⁸ “We checked him and the union out,” says Bill Roemer, the Chicago FBI agent who spearheaded the federal government’s drive against organized crime in that city. “Ruby was a nothing in that union. The mob came in and took it over later.”⁵⁹

Ruby continued to struggle financially. In 1941, he started the Spartan Novelty Company with his brother Earl and two friends. Operating out of inexpensive hotels, they sold everything from punchboards to commemorative plaques of Pearl Harbor and busts of Franklin Roosevelt.⁶⁰ The business quickly floundered, and from late 1942 to 1943, he worked as a salesman for Globe Auto Glass and Universal Sales Co.⁶¹†

During this period, he became a habitué of the Lawndale Poolroom, as well as a South Side gym where his friend, boxer Barney Ross, trained.62 As part of a group of local toughs, Ruby and his friends also frequently crashed and disrupted rallies of the pro-Nazi German-American Bund.⁶³ An incessant talker, Ruby bragged that he could hit harder than prizefighter Joe Louis. He exercised at several gyms, and although not a big man (five feet nine inches and 175 pounds), he maintained a reputation as one of the South Side’s toughest street brawlers.⁶⁴

Pearl Harbor and the war did not affect his life at first. He originally received a deferment in 1941, but in 1943 he was re-classified 1-A and drafted into the Army Air Force. At the age of thirty-two, he was the oldest in his unit, and he ran some dice and card games, as well as peddling everything from chocolates to cigarettes.⁶⁵ Once, when a sergeant called him a “Jew bastard,” Ruby beat him mercilessly.⁶⁶* But the men who served with Ruby liked him. He had no disciplinary trouble while in the Army, achieved the rank of private first class, and was honorably discharged on February 21, 1946.⁶⁷

He returned to Chicago but stayed there for just another year and a half, becoming a partner in Earl Products, a company started by his brothers. Again, Jack was selling punchboards, key chains, bottle openers, light tools, and salt and pepper shakers.⁶⁸ But he quarreled with his brothers, and they eventually bought out his share for $14,000.⁶⁹ He decided to follow his sister Eva to Dallas. She had gone there in 1947 and, with money borrowed from her brothers, opened the Singapore Supper Club, which she ran as a nightclub. When Jack moved to Dallas by late 1947, he helped her manage the club.

Was Ruby brought to Dallas by the Chicago mafia in order to run its operations in Texas? Paul Roland Jones, who represented a group of Chicago criminals, had tried to bribe the Dallas sheriff, Steve Guthrie, in 1946. Guthrie later claimed that Ruby’s name had come up in conversations with Jones a number of times. However, a Dallas policeman present during some of the conversations contradicted Guthrie’s account and said he never heard Ruby’s name mentioned. Ruby is not referred to in twenty-two of the surveillance recordings still available, and Jones described the man he intended to bring to Dallas as someone who looks like a “preacher, not a dago, not a Jew.”70 Bill Alexander, the assistant district attorney who knew Ruby and later successfully prosecuted him for killing Oswald, told the author: “There is no way the Chicago mob would have allowed Ruby to be their representative in Dallas. Just no way. He was not the type of person they would trust with their business.”⁷¹ Bill Roemer, the FBI agent who investigated the mafia in Chicago, agreed and also told the author, “Ruby was absolutely nothing in terms of the Chicago mob. We had thousands and thousands of hours of tape recordings of the top mobsters in Chicago, including Sam Giancana [the city’s godfather], and Ruby just didn’t exist as far as they were concerned. We talked to every hoodlum in Chicago after the assassination, and some of the top guys in the mob, my informants, I had close relationships with them—they didn’t even know who Ruby was. He was not a front for them in Dallas.”⁷²

On December 30, 1947, he legally changed his name to Jack Leon Ruby. During the next sixteen years in Dallas, he owned interests in six nightclubs, losing money in each venture, until he finally managed to turn a small profit at his last one, the Carousel, a strip club.⁷³ In 1952, however, his financial woes were so great that he had a mental breakdown and had to recuperate for several months.⁷⁴ He spoke alternately of killing one of his partners or ending his own life. For a while he thought of returning to Chicago, but decided finally to remain in Dallas. His money problems stayed with him, and by the mid-1950s Ruby had an excise-tax delinquency with the federal government and had to borrow $5,500 from his brother Sam to pay the debt.⁷⁵

Besides his nightclubs, he tried other businesses, ranging from selling sewing machine attachments to costume jewelry.⁷⁶ He became the manager for a black youngster dubbed “Little Daddy Nelson” and spent whatever money he had promoting the act.77 At various times, he sold pizza crusts to Dallas restaurants, anti-arthritis preparations, twistboards, liquid vitamins, and English stainless steel razor blades.⁷⁸ He provided entertainment to Dallas hotels, promoted music records, tried to build and sell log cabins at a Texas lake resort, and even looked into selling jeeps to Cuba.⁷⁹ All his business ventures were unsuccessful.

“Jack was always in some kind of debt,” says Earl. “He always was owing some money to the government on taxes. By the time he was arrested for shooting Oswald, he owed me over sixteen thousand dollars. He always had some business idea in the works, some new project he had hatched, but just never seemed to make any money at any of them.”⁸⁰

Ruby, anxious to be accepted in Dallas, was frustrated by his repeated business failures. Tony Zoppi was a prominent entertainment reporter for the Dallas Morning News and knew Ruby well.* “He was a born loser, a real low-level loser,” says Zoppi. “He didn’t have twenty cents to his name. I knew dozens of guys like him back in New Jersey and in New York. They were fellows always trying to make a name for themselves, always hustling something. He was a hanger-on who was very impressed by famous people, impressed by ‘class,’ and with anybody that he thought had it. He used to call me up and say, ‘Hey, Tony, I run a real classy joint, class all the way, huh? Don’t I have class?’ But the people that knew him knew that Ruby was a zero. He used to give out passes for his club to everyone he met. He would announce: ‘Hi, I’m Jack Ruby,’ like it was supposed to mean something. People used to say to me, ‘How can you tolerate that guy?’”⁸¹

“He would do anything to attract attention to himself,” said Janet Conforto, his star dancer, also known as Jada. “He craved attention. He really wanted to be somebody, but didn’t have it in him. He hung around police headquarters. He was a nuisance around newspaper offices. He knew a tremendous number of people in Dallas, but he didn’t have many friends. Oh, he wanted friends, but he didn’t have the capacity to make and hold them. He was insecure … and often remarked, ‘I’m a character! I’m colorful.’”82 Bill Willis, a drummer at the Carousel, remembered that Ruby tried to impress people by using large words in his conversations: “They always came out wrong,” recalled Willis. “He’d say things like, ‘It’s been a lovely precarious evening.’ Or he’d tell a girl, ‘You make me feel very irascible.’”⁸³

“He tried too hard to be accepted,” says district attorney Bill Alexander. “He had several strikes against him in Dallas. He was a nightclub owner, a Yankee, and a Jew. And no matter how hard he tried—and he did try hard to have people like him—he just wasn’t going to get very far in Dallas. He was just a little guy trying to make it here.”⁸⁴*

Ruby’s inability to launch a successful business was not the only trait that remained constant from his Chicago days. His penchant for violence and fights also carried over. Although his employees generally liked him and found him generous if they were in need, they readily acknowledged he had a volatile and vicious temper.⁸⁵ “You could not reason with him when he lost his temper,” recalls Zoppi.⁸⁶ “He was erratic and hotheaded,” said Harry Olsen, a Dallas policeman who knew him. “He would just fly off the handle about anything.… Sometimes he would get so mad that he would shake.”⁸⁷ Ruby often resorted to violence with his employees, and lost the tip of his left index finger when one bit it off during a scuffle.⁸⁸ He beat one of his musicians with brass knuckles, cracked another’s head with a black-jack, knocked another’s teeth out, and put the club’s handyman in the hospital with a severe beating.89 To avoid paying the club’s cigarette girl $50 in back wages, he threatened to throw her down the stairs unless she relented in her claim.⁹⁰ He threatened a stand-upcomedian, Robert McEwan, after McEwan had told several “inoffensive Jewish jokes” in his act, and thereafter enforced a strict ban on any Jewish remarks.⁹¹*

Not only was Ruby rough with his workers, but he acted as the unofficial bouncer for his clubs, constantly fighting with customers. On at least twenty-five occasions he badly beat them using either his fists or a blackjack, or else pistol whipped them.⁹² He often ended his fights by throwing the victim down the Carousel’s stairs.⁹³ He was not above attacking people from behind, kicking men in the groin or face once he had knocked them to the floor, or even striking women.⁹⁴ Sometimes the fights were justified. Once when a patron pulled a gun on him, Ruby disarmed him, beat him almost to death, put the gun back into the man’s pocket, and then hurled him down the stairs.⁹⁵ On other occasions, there was little provocation, but he wanted to prove how tough he was, as when he severely beat a professional boxer.⁹⁶ Sometimes the attacks were completely unexpected. Once, a cabdriver came into the club and asked where a patron was who had refused to pay the taxi fare. Ruby punched the cabdriver in the face.⁹⁷ He was often malicious, forcing beaten victims to crawl out of the club on hands and knees.⁹⁸ Twice he used his gun to chase people from the club. Once he ran after another nightclub owner, Joe Bonds, through a nearby alleyway, shooting at him several times but missing.⁹⁹†

Beyond Ruby’s volatile temper, he also displayed eccentric qualities that made those who knew him sometimes question his stability. Patricia Birch, who had danced for him under the stage name Penny Dollar, recalled he was a fitness fanatic who frequently came into the girls’ dressing room without his shirt, hit his chest like a gorilla, and asked if they thought he had a good build. At a party, she witnessed him take off his clothes and roll around the floor naked.100 Ruby occasionally telephoned some of his dancers and read them obscene poetry or described in detail his private parts.¹⁰¹ Sometimes, he warmly welcomed guests to his club, and on other nights, for no apparent reason, told the same guests they were not wanted and could not enter the club.¹⁰² During conversations, he sometimes switched in the middle of a sentence to a completely different topic, with no explanation.¹⁰³*

According to his star dancer, Jada, Ruby was “impossible, totally unpredictable. … He is completely emotional. One minute he is nice, and the next minute he goes berserk. … I don’t think he is sane.”¹⁰⁴ Wynn Warner, a musician who had worked for him, thought he was a split personality.¹⁰⁵ Edward Pullman, whose wife worked for Ruby, decided he “was insane. He was a psycho. … He was not right.”¹⁰⁶ Johnnie Hayden, an official of AGVA (American Guild of Variety Artists), said that most of those who knew him felt Ruby was a “kook” because of his unpredictable, emotional outbursts.107 William Serur knew Ruby for over ten years and watched him change for the worse. “In the last few years I thought that he might have been suffering from some form of disturbance, mental disturbance, by the way he acted.”¹⁰⁸

Yet Ruby also could present an apparently normal and jovial side, that of a club owner ready to ensure his patrons had a good time. He went out of his way to encourage Dallas policemen to visit his clubs, giving them reduced rates and free drinks.¹⁰⁹ He befriended dozens of them, attended the funeral of one killed in the line of duty, and staged a benefit for the widow of another.¹¹⁰ Once he jumped in and helped two Dallas policemen who were being beaten by a group of men.¹¹¹* “They dropped by to say hello and screen the crowd,” says Bill Alexander, “and it was better than having a bunch of hoodlums there. Remember, Ruby catered to tourists, and nobody was going to get rolled at his place with the type of police contacts he had. He wasn’t a cop groupie or buff. He genuinely liked the police, and knew it did some good for him by being friendly with them.”¹¹²†

At the same time he cultivated police contacts, he also maintained friendships with an assortment of criminals. One of his earliest Dallas friends was Paul Roland Jones, who was convicted of narcotics trafficking and for attempting to bribe the Dallas sheriff.¹¹³ One of Ruby’s early partners in the Vegas club, Joe Bonds, had a criminal record. He kept close associations to known gamblers, including a good friend, Lewis McWillie.114* “It was the nature of his business,” says Bill Alexander. “Running those types of nightclubs, he came across plenty of unsavory characters.” Although there were rumors Ruby dealt in narcotics or even in prostitution, there is no firm evidence that he did anything more than socialize with some people involved in those vices. Alexander told the author, “The police had a pretty good idea of what happened at Ruby’s club, and there was no dope and he certainly didn’t allow the girls to do anything illegal from the club, because that would have cost him his license. Ruby was a small-time operator on the fringe of everything, but he never crossed over to breaking the law big-time.”¹¹⁵ His brother Earl agrees: “He had a plush strip-tease club, and the mafia used to go to his place when they were in town. They were big spenders, and I’m sure he wasn’t unhappy when they came to his joint to spend their money.”¹¹⁶

Ruby’s solicitation of the Dallas police did not protect him from having legal problems. During fourteen years, he was arrested nine times, for charges ranging from disturbing the peace to assault to carrying concealed weapons.¹¹⁷ The Texas Liquor Control Board also frequently suspended his license for violations, primarily for allowing obscene stage shows or for serving liquor after hours.118

His legal difficulties, and his associations with criminals, have been the basis of much speculation that Ruby was part of the mafia, and in particular that his killing of Oswald was ordered by the mob to silence the President’s assassin. “It is so ludicrous to believe that Ruby was part of the mob,” says Tony Zoppi. “The conspiracy theorists want to believe everybody but those whoreally knew him. People in Dallas, in those circles, knew Ruby was a snitch. The word was on the street that you couldn’t trust him because he was telling the cops everything. He was a real talker, a fellow who would talk your ear off if he had the chance. You have to be crazy to think anybody would have trusted Ruby to be part of the mob. He couldn’t keep a secret for five minutes. He was just a hanger-on, somebody who would have liked some of the action but was never going to get any.”¹¹⁹

“It’s hard to believe,” says Bill Alexander, “that I, who prosecuted Ruby for killing Oswald, am almost in the position of defending his honor. Ruby was not mafia He was not a gangster. We knew who the criminals were in Dallas back then, and to say Ruby was part of organized crime is just bullshit. There’s no way he was connected. It’s guilt by association, that A knew B, and Ruby knew B back in 1950, so he must have known A, and that must be the link to the conspiracy. It’s crap written by people who don’t know the facts.”¹²⁰

Ruby’s lack of influence and power with organized crime is apparent in the problems he had with AGVA, the union responsible for the professional strippers used at his Carousel Club. Ruby’s main competition was from the Theater and Colony clubs, owned by two brothers, Abe and Barney Weinstein. In 1961, they had introduced amateur strip-tease dancing. At first, Ruby tried to compete with the Weinsteins’ amateur nights, but soon he complained to AGVA that the union’s constitution prohibited professional and amateur entertainers from working together, and he demanded the Weinsteins be stopped.¹²¹ The union took no action. AGVA was riddled with corruption and compromised by its mob connections.¹²² Tony Zoppi believes the Weinsteins received preferential treatment because they bribed union officials.¹²³

Ruby’s frustration over the Weinsteins’ use of amateur nights peaked during the summer and fall of 1963. It coincided with a series of AGVA complaints about his Carousel Club as well as a contractual dispute he had with his star stripper, Jada, whom he had signed in New Orleans and brought back to Dallas. They argued incessantly. He had hired her in the summer, hoping she could turn around his diminishing fortunes, but fired her by the end of October.124 In addition to the problems with Jada, he also went through three masters of ceremonies at the same time.¹²⁵ He had a growing tax delinquency totaling more than $40,000.¹²⁶ Frustrated that AGVA refused to enforce any regulations against the Weinsteins, Ruby accelerated his campaign to compel some union action. He had earlier warned an AGVA official, Irvin Mazzei, that he could use “labor connections in Chicago” to pressure the union.¹²⁷ In front of an FBI agent, he physically threatened Vincent Lee, another AGVA official.¹²⁸ He called his brother Earl and asked for names of people who could be helpful. “We all knew it wasn’t a clean union,” recalls Earl. “So I tried to come up with people that might have the right connections, figuring that they could move things along for Jack.”¹²⁹

Ruby’s long-distance telephone activity jumped significantly during the months when he tried to resolve the AGVA dispute, and some of those he telephoned were people connected to organized crime.¹³⁰ Were such calls evidence of a mafia conspiracy to kill JFK? The House Select Committee did an extensive computer analysis of Ruby’s five home and business telephone numbers for all of 1963. The Committee checked each number he telephoned, as well as the records of those he called, and determined that most of the increases in his long-distance bill were due to his AGVA problems.¹³¹

But three of those calls, said the Select Committee, raised the possibility that they might be of significance in the Kennedy case. However, the author’s investigation reveals the calls were not as mysterious as the Select Committee assumed.

The first was to Chicago bail bondsman Irwin Weiner, who often represented mob figures. The Committee feared he may have been a link for Ruby to crime bosses. Weiner had refused to cooperate with the FBI in its Warren Commission investigation. “I gave Irwin Weiner’s number to my brother,” Earl Ruby told the author. “I had gone to school with Weiner; we graduated high school together. I used to see him on visits to California. He was a big bondsman for everyone, and he handled the mafia. It was in the newspapers—you could read about it. I thought he might be able to help Jack with the union. Jack didn’t even know Weiner, for God’s sake.”132 Weiner later admitted that Ruby called him once, about his AGVA problem; however, Weiner did not offer him any assistance.¹³³

The second call was to a trailer park in New Orleans, to the office of Nofio Pecora, a lieutenant to New Orleans godfather Carlos Marcello. This October 30, 1963, call worried the committee since it appeared to be a Ruby contact with a high-ranking aide to Marcello less than a month before the assassination. However, the call was not even intended for Pecora. Harold Tannenbaum, a fellow nightclub owner and friend of Ruby’s, lived in that trailer park, the Tropical Court Tourist Park. Tannenbaum had arranged the deal that allowed Ruby to bring Jada from New Orleans to Dallas, and Ruby often called him at his trailer-park home and his French Quarter nightclub to complain about his contractual problems with the temperamental dancer. In 1978, Pecora told the Select Committee that he did not know Ruby, nor did he remember ever speaking to him.¹³⁴ However, Pecora, who ran the trailer park from his one-man office, admitted he occasionally took a message for someone in the park, but did not remember doing so for Ruby. But apparently that is exactly what he did. There is no way to know if Ruby first telephoned Tannenbaum’s home, since if no one was there, there would be no toll record. The call to Pecora’s office lasted less than one minute. Within the hour, Tannenbaum had apparently received the message from Pecora and returned Ruby’s call, collect, for twenty-one minutes.¹³⁵

The third call that stumped the Select Committee actually comprised three calls, two on November 7, and one on November 8, all to Robert “Barney” Baker, an aide to Teamster boss Jimmy Hoffa. Baker had only been released from prison in June 1963. The committee was concerned since Hoffa had such a well-known hatred for both John and Robert Kennedy. However, Baker and Ruby did not know each other before Ruby called him on November 7, 1963. When the FBI contacted Baker in 1964, he spoke to them openly. He told the agents that on November 7, Ruby had telephoned, but Baker was not in and his wife had taken a number in Dallas. When Baker got home, he called the number collect. Ruby introduced himself, explained his labor-union problems with his club, and sought Baker’s assistance. Baker did not help, nor did he remember the last call the following day.136 What is critical is that at the time he spoke to the FBI and talked about Ruby’s AGVA problems, it was independent of knowing that Ruby had also told the police that the conversations were about union problems. Moreover, Baker, who thought the FBI tapped his phone lines (most Hoffa associates assumed the federal government had them under constant surveillance) reportedly challenged the agents to check their tapes and listen to the conversation if they had any doubts. Unfortunately, there apparently was no surveillance of his line.¹³⁷*

Despite Ruby’s intervention with the AGVA board and his pleas to organized-crime figures, no one came to his aid. His dispute with AGVA was still unresolved the weekend the President was assassinated.

* Today, the police would videotape the statements of any defendant in such a high-profile case, both for his protection as well as to reduce the likelihood of any police-misconduct charges. However, the Dallas police department’s policy in 1963 was not to record interrogations. The department did not even own a tape recorder (WC Vol. IV, pp. 201, 204). Assistant district attorney Bill Alexander, who handled much of the weekend’s legal work, gave the author another reason why the interrogations were not recorded: “In Texas, at that time, an oral statement under duress was no good. We had Miranda before the Supreme Court handed it down for the rest of the country. We had to inform him that he did not have to make any statement, and that any he did make had to be voluntary, witnessed, reduced to writing, and could be used against him. So our questions for him were strictly to get information, but there was no way they could be used in court. If he had said ‘Yeah, I killed the no-good s.o.b. President,’ it would have been inadmissible in any court. Even if we gave him the proper warning, and then reduced his statement to writing, if he then refused to sign it in the presence of a witness, it was useless. That’s how strict the Texas law was. He could always say the statement was induced by threats, fraud, or coercion. That would have risked reversal on appeal, so why even take that chance since the physical evidence was so strong? That’s why it was not important to record or transcribe the discussions.”

In addition, when Oswald later made telephone calls from the jail or met with Marina, his mother, and brother, the Dallas police had no means to monitor the conversations (WC Vol. IV, pp. 238–39).

* At a subsequent search of the Paine house, the police discovered a miniature Minox camera, often dubbed a spy camera because of its size. Rolls of film were also seized and later developed by the FBI. The photos depicted various international locations. On a later FBI inventory of items taken from the Paine household, the Minox camera was listed as a light meter. Critics charged that the government was covering up evidence of intelligence equipment issued to Oswald. The truth is much simpler: The camera and film belonged to Michael Paine. The author was the first person to ask Paine about the camera and to show him copies of pictures from the film that had been confiscated and developed. “Those are my pictures,” he says. “I remember taking them. And I had that camera since the 1950s.”

* Today, Marina has changed her mind, telling the author, “I think Lee was completely innocent.” She has lived in Texas since the assassination and has been bombarded by the buffs for nearly three decades. “There are just too many things,” she says, “like how he could have fired the shots so fast, and lots of questions I don’t understand.” She admits she has reached her new conclusion about her husband’s innocence based not on what she knows from her own experiences with him but on what others have told her about the case and the “evidence.” Marina has been susceptible in the past to the arguments of conspiracy buffs, even the most bizarre ones. In the summer of 1980 she joined the successful legal effort of British author Michael Eddowes to exhume her husband’s body, under the belief that the man in the grave was actually a Soviet KGB agent who had impersonated the real Oswald, even fooling his mother and brothers. On October 4, 1981, four forensic pathologists at Dallas’s Baylor Medical Center used dental and medical records to confirm the exhumed corpse was that of Lee Oswald.

* Abt was the lawyer for the Hall-Davis Defense Committee, representing American Communist party chiefs Gus Hall and Benjamin Davis, to which Oswald had offered his photographic services in 1962. Gregory Olds of the Dallas Civil Liberties Union visited the jail on Friday and checked to see whether Oswald wanted a local attorney and left when he was satisfied that Oswald “had not been deprived of his rights …” (WC Vol. VII, pp. 323–24). The following day, Saturday, November 23, H. Louis Nichols, president of the Dallas Bar Association, also visited Oswald. Again, Oswald declined help from any Dallas lawyer, and asked Nichols if he could help arrange for Abt to represent him (WC Vol. VII, pp. 323, 329). Oswald telephoned Ruth Paine twice on Saturday, November 23. When Ruth answered the phone, “I was shocked since he was calling as though nothing unusual had happened, and I couldn’t believe that he would call me for help after what had taken place” (Interview with Ruth Paine, April 14, 1992). Oswald gave Ruth Abt’s home and office telephone numbers, and asked her to call him over the weekend (WC Vol. III, pp. 85–86). Ruth did call, but Abt was not at home, and thereby missed the opportunity to represent the accused presidential assassin.

*Alexander later drafted the Kennedy murder indictment and held it for district attorney Henry Wade’s signature. Oswald was arraigned on the charge of killing the President at 1:30 A.M. on Saturday. Meanwhile, on Friday, Alexander participated in a midnight raid on the house of J. R. Molina, another worker at the Texas School Book Depository. According to Alexander, Molina was a leftist who was on the Dallas police’s intelligence watch list, and it was originally thought he might be connected to Oswald. “We did a deluxe search job on Molina’s house,” recalls Alexander. “He was polite and very scared. But there was nothing between him and Oswald.” Earlier that night, Alexander decided to “shake things up a bit” and spoke to a friend at the Philadelphia Inquirer, Joe Goulden, and told him that he intended to indict Oswald for killing the President “in furtherance of a Communist conspiracy.” As he told the author, “The Inquirer got 200,000 papers on the street before Wade called me up and screamed ‘What the hell are you trying to do, start World War III?’” (Interview, March 6, 1992). Shortly after the Inquirer incident, Alexander and two local reporters concocted a story that Oswald had been FBI informer S-179 and had been paid $200 a month. Lonnie Hudkins, one of the reporters, printed the story, attributing it to an unidentified source. The fallout was so great that the Warren Commission held a January 22, 1964, executive session to discuss the issue. “I never much liked the federals,” Alexander says. “I figured it was as good a way as any to keep them out of my way by having to run down that phony story.”

† In an experiment to determine the accuracy of paraffin tests, the FBI had seventeen men fire five shots from a .38-caliber revolver. Eight of the men showed negative results on both hands. Three others were negative on the firing hand and positive on the nonfiring hand. Four men were positive on both hands. Only two men were positive on their firing hand and negative on the other. In another test, the FBI took twenty people who had not fired a gun and tested both their hands. All twenty were positive on one or both hands (WC Vol. III, p. 487). Mark Lane said the results of the tests were “consistent with innocence.” He never informed the reader that such results were just as consistent with Oswald’s guilt (Rush to Judgment, pp. 125–26).

* There is considerable confusion about Ruby’s exact birthdate. Birth records were not officially kept in Chicago prior to 1915, and among school records, driver’s licenses, and arrest records, there were six different dates, ranging from March to June 1911. March 25 is used by the author since it is the date most often given by Ruby himself in his adult life.

* Jack Ruby and his sister Eileen said they were in foster homes for four to five years, and Earl Ruby, though placed in a different home, agreed with the longer period. However, the official foster home records show they were released in eighteen months, on November 24, 1924, but under an order that allowed them to be returned to the foster home if Fanny Rubenstein proved unfit to run the household (WR, p. 782).

* Martin was acquitted of murdering Leon Cooke, successfully claiming self-defense at his trial. Ruby was so upset over the death of his friend that he later adopted the middle name Leon.

† Author David Scheim claims Ruby was involved in racketeering in the Chicago nightclub district during this time. “That’s absolutely false,” Earl Ruby told the author. “I worked with Jack during that time, and he never had anything to do with nightclubs in Chicago. When you were actually there and know what went on, it drives you crazy to hear charges like that, which are just completely wrong.” Witnesses might have confused Harry Rubenstein, a convicted felon who ran several clubs in Chicago, with Jack.

* Although not religious, Ruby was always extremely sensitive to anti-Semitism. “There was hardly anything that would get him angrier faster,” Earl Ruby told the author. “Jack was real touchy about anything said bad about Jews, and he would fight with anyone who said it. Once after the war, he returned from downtown Chicago with blood all over one of his good suits. He beat up somebody who called him a dirty Jew. He was always like that.” “Jack has always been a fighter for the Jews,” said his sister Eva (WC Vol. XIV, p. 484). Lawrence Meyers, a friend, said Ruby was “very proud of being a Jew … [and] militantly against anybody bum-rapping Jews” (WC Vol. XV, pp. 634, 636).

* Zoppi’s credibility has been called into question largely over arrangements for a trip he claimed that was planned by Ruby to visit Cuba and over the question of whether he saw Ruby on the morning of the assassination. But Zoppi knew Ruby as well as anyone in Dallas, and his characterizations of the nightclub owner are substantiated by many others.

* Another strike against Ruby in 1963 Dallas was that many people thought he was homosexual, something strongly denied by his brother Earl and his friend Tony Zoppi. The rumors persisted because Ruby never married and did have several male roommates, the last of which was George Senator. Senator referred to Ruby as “my boyfriend,” but said it was only a sign of friendship. Norman Wright, who had worked for Ruby, said in 1964: “He was always conscious of the fact that a lot of people thought he was sort of a gay boy.… One time someone gave him a cigar … and he put it in his mouth and lit it and said to me, ‘I don’t look gay now, do I?’ … He seemed … to go out generally with more men than women …” (WC Vol. XV, p. 246). Warren Commission lawyer Burt Griffin, who researched the Ruby issues for the Commission, told the author, “I’m not sure if Senator was honest with us about his relationship with Ruby. People did not advertise their homosexuality in 1963.”

* Although Ruby continued to bristle at anything he interpreted as anti-Semitism, all those who knew him described him, while patriotic, as remarkably apolitical (CE 2980, WC Vol. XXVI). His Dallas rabbi, Hillel Silverman, said Ruby was very shallow intellectually and that he would not know the difference between a Communist philosophy and a totalitarian regime. However, Rabbi Silverman said Ruby thought the President of the U.S. was the greatest individual in the world, not because of the person, but because of the position and his respect for the government (CE 1485, WC Vol. XXII). He was also impressed with the Kennedys because, as he told friends, they had glamour and seemed like movie stars (Wills and Demaris, “The Avenger,” Esquire, May 1967, p. 86).

†Bonds’s real name was Joe Locurto. Also from Chicago, he had been Ruby’s partner in the Vegas Club in 1953, but their relationship ended when Bonds was sentenced to jail for sodomizing a fifteen-year-old girl. Ruby remained a part owner of the Vegas and considered it his second club. While he ran the Carousel, his sister Eva ran the Vegas.

* Ruby was also the subject of gossip regarding obsessive behavior with his dogs. He had as many as ten at a time and often called them his “children,” his only family (CE 2406, p. 650, WC Vol. XXV). His favorite was a dachshund named Sheba, and he referred to the dog as his “wife.” He took Sheba to work and kept her with him most of the day (CE 1485, WC Vol. XXII; CE 2411, pp. 621–26, WC Vol. XXV). At the club, there were rumors that Ruby had an unnatural relationship with the dogs, something he vehemently denied on several occasions. One of his Chicago friends, Harry Goldbaum, last visited Ruby in August 1963. They spent an hour in the Carousel’s rear office, where Ruby was taking care of three small dogs for a friend. According to Goldbaum, Ruby promised to show him something interesting and began masturbating one of the male dogs, and only stopped when Goldbaum told Ruby it was making him sick (CE 1740, WC Vol. XXIII; CE 2980, p. 5, WC Vol. XXVI). The Warren Commission dealt with his affection for dogs under a separate heading in its final report, but downplayed the more bizarre aspects of the relationship (WR, p. 804).

* Dallas police chief Jesse Curry told the Warren Commission that no more than twenty-five to fifty of the force’s twelve hundred policemen knew Ruby (WC Vol. IV, pp. 167, 191–92). However, statements and interviews with both former Dallas policemen and Ruby’s employees indicate that he was acquainted with several hundred.

† As part of his efforts to ingratiate himself to law enforcement, Ruby contacted the FBI in March 1959 and offered to provide information that came to his attention. Between April to October of that year, he met with Agent Charles Flynn eight times, giving information about thefts and similar offenses. In November, Flynn recommended that no further attempt be made to develop Ruby as a PCI, potential criminal informant, since his information was essentially useless. His FBI file was closed (FBI memo, November 6, 1959; JFK Document 003040; and Executive Session Testimony of Charles W. Flynn, November 16, 1977—JFK Document 014669).

* McWillie managed the Tropicana Hotel in Havana in 1959 and later managed clubs in Las Vegas. Ruby told the Warren Commission he visited McWillie in Havana for one week in August 1959. The House Select Committee found Ruby made at least two, and probably three, trips to Havana, the longest being for a month and the shortest for one day. He bought two pistols for McWillie, and may have acted as a courier to bring some money out of Havana. Ruby always maintained his time in Cuba was for pleasure and not for business. The polygraph he was administered after he killed Oswald showed he was truthful when he said the time in Cuba “was solely for pleasure.” However, a British journalist later claimed that Ruby met Santo Trafficante in 1959, then a prisoner at a Cuban jail. Trafficante, later the mafia don of Tampa, denied under oath that he had ever met Ruby, and no one at the prison confirmed the story.

Robert Ray McKeown, a convicted Texas gun runner, later said that Ruby had contacted him, representing Las Vegas interests that wanted the release of three prisoners in Cuba, including Trafficante, and that Ruby offered $25,000 for a letter of introduction to Castro. McKeown also claimed that Oswald had visited him and offered $10,000 for four high-powered rifles, although he told the FBI in 1964 that he had never met Oswald (CE 1689, p. 23). The Select Committee investigated McKeown’s claims and rejected them, concluding he “did not seem to be credible” (HSCA Rpt., p. 152).

* The Warren Commission allowed the questions over Ruby’s telephone calls to fester, since they did not ask Ruby about some of the people he contacted and did not place those like Weiner, Pecora, and Baker under oath. However, the telephone calls are not evidence of a conspiracy to kill JFK, since most of the calls were made before the President’s trip to Dallas was even announced, much less before the motorcade route was set. Even if there was a plot to kill Kennedy and then silence Oswald, it is difficult to imagine that Oswald would have been allowed to get away from the shooting alive. The three days during which he was interrogated was more than enough time for him to expose the conspiracy. If he was really a patsy who did not know anything, there was no reason to kill him. The conspirators could not know where Oswald would be arrested or whether state or federal authorities would have jurisdiction over him. The only way that Ruby was useful to a conspiracy was to penetrate the police security at the local Dallas jail. But that Oswald would be captured and placed there was only one of many things that could have happened to him. Therefore, conspiring with Ruby in September and October made no practical sense. Why inform Ruby about a plot to kill the President when he had no need to know? If he was really given a mafia assignment to kill Oswald, his telephone activity would likely have increased from the afternoon of the assassination until the day Oswald was killed. But Ruby’s long-distance calls were all made much earlier, not during the assassination weekend.