Ruby left his apartment shortly before 11:00 a.m., his pockets stuffed with more than two thousand dollars in cash—and his gun. Having parked his car downtown, he walked to Western Union—along the street from the police station—to send, as promised, twenty-five dollars to the stripper who had called earlier. The time stamp on the transaction read 11:17 a.m. The timing was important—it contributed to the argument that Ruby’s actions just minutes later would be a crime of passion, not a planned execution.
Rapidly, Ruby made his way into the heavily guarded police station basement, penetrating an area that was supposedly accessible only to policemen and reporters. Two minutes later, handcuffed to a detective, the prisoner was brought down to the basement by elevator. A lawyer named Tom Howard peered into the basement jail office, said, “That’s all I wanted to see,” and walked away. Seconds later, Oswald was led out of the office into the glare of television lights, on his way to the car waiting to convey him to the county jail. He never reached it.
One of the police officers, Detective Billy Combest, saw Ruby stride swiftly forward. “He was bootlegging the pistol like a quarterback with a football… . I knew what he was going to do … but I couldn’t get at him.” Ruby fired one destructive bullet into Oswald’s abdomen. It ruptured two main veins carrying blood to the heart and tore through the spleen, the pancreas, the liver, and the right kidney. Oswald never spoke another word, and died soon after at Parkland Hospital.
One of the first officers to talk to Ruby under arrest quoted him as saying, “Well, I intended to shoot him three times.” The man who was to be his first attorney was Tom Howard, the man who had looked through the jail-office window seconds before Oswald was shot. Howard, a maverick local lawyer with a police record of his own, had six minutes with Ruby that afternoon. It was he whom Jack Ruby would identify, months later, as having originated the claim that he shot Oswald to save the President’s widow the trauma of returning to Dallas to testify in court. “It was not my idea,” he was to write in a note to another of his attorneys, “to say I shot Oswald to keep Jackie Kennedy from coming back here to testify. I did it because Tom Howard told me to [say so].”
The world would never know what Ruby’s motive really was. Nor would it ever be known for sure how—with split-second timing—he managed to get into position to do it. A police report would state that he got into the basement because of a “series of unfortunate coincidences which caused a momentary breakdown in the security measures.” The Warren Commission decided he was just plain lucky, that he got in by slipping past a policeman guarding the car ramp that gave entry to the building from Main Street. It suggested that the officer in question, Roy Vaughn, had been distracted by a police car leaving the basement.
This ignored Vaughn’s own testimony and that of several others. Vaughn knew Ruby, and said no one could have got past him unobserved. All three of the senior police officers in the car, two of whom also knew Ruby, were sure no one had been on the ramp as they drove out. Another officer, Sergeant Don Flusche, said he was sure “beyond any doubt in his mind that Jack Ruby, whom he had known for many years, did not walk down Main Street anywhere near the ramp.” Corroboration came from a cabdriver who had been watching the ramp closely—he had been hired to pick up an enterprising journalist who planned to follow the Oswald transfer car. Another reporter, who stationed himself in the middle of the ramp inside the basement, was sure no one walked past him in the five minutes before Oswald was killed.
According to the notes of the Secret Service agent who first questioned Ruby, Forrest Sorrels, Ruby at that point said nothing about how he had gotten into the basement. FBI agent Ray Hall, who interrogated him later, noted that he “did not wish to say how he got into the basement or at what time he entered.” Ruby was to hold to that position for twelve days. Only a month later was he to say he had entered via the Main Street ramp.
Several policemen present at the initial interrogations wrote reports consistent with Sorrels’ and Hall’s accounts, indicating that Ruby had refused to respond to questions about that. Sergeant Patrick Dean, however, who had been in charge of basement security at the time, claimed in a second report—written the following day—that Ruby had “stated to me in the presence of Mr. Sorrels [author’s emphasis] that he had entered the basement through the ramp entering on Main Street.” Three other officers, who had also been present during Sorrels’ or Hall’s questioning, backed up Dean’s version.17
The Secret Service’s Sorrels, who had taken careful notes, was astonished by the claim he had missed such an important point, and Warren Commission counsel Burt Griffin did not believe he had. Griffin called one of the officers a “damned liar” to his face. So sure was he that Dean had lied that he broke off in the middle of taking the sergeant’s testimony, sent the stenographer out of the room, told Dean he did not believe him, and asked him to reconsider. Dean reacted with righteous indignation, and the story leaked to the press. Griffin was recalled to Washington, DC, and the Warren Commission chose to use Dean’s account.
This in spite of the fact that Dean failed a lie detector test—even though he was allowed to write the questions himself. “I was nervous and hypertensive,” he said, “so I flunked it. Or rather it was inconclusive.” The written record of the test was nowhere to be found when the Assassinations Committee looked for it in the 1970s. “You have to suspect the possibility,” a former Warren Commission attorney was to say, “that Dean, at a minimum, had seen Ruby enter the basement and had failed to do his duty.” This begged a further question. If police officers lied, did they do so merely to cover up bungled security? Or did they cover up a more sinister truth, that one or more policemen actively conspired with Ruby in the murder of Oswald?
A Dallas police inquiry concluded that Ruby knew up to fifty officers personally. Sergeant Dean had known him since the early 1950s, and admitted that Ruby gave him and other favored officers bottles of whiskey for Christmas. Did Ruby’s generosity to the police pay off when he needed to get at Oswald? A report of an interview with Ruby states that he “became very emotional … almost to the point of hysteria in his efforts to protect any police officer from being implicated in his entrance into the basement of City Hall.”
The controversy over precisely how and why Ruby got into the basement aside, there remains the matter of his timing? Was it just luck that he arrived at precisely the right moment, or was he tipped off? If Ruby had stalked Oswald for thirty-six hours, as the evidence indicates, why had he not shown up at 10:00 a.m. on the Sunday morning—the time Chief Curry had publicly suggested Oswald’s transfer was likely to take place? How did Ruby, who was at home in the early part of the morning, know that the transfer had been delayed?
It was at 9:00 a.m. on Sunday that senior officers had begun issuing the detailed orders for Oswald’s actual transfer. Though the projected 10:00 a.m. move was deferred, it was agreed that Oswald would be moved within hours. For the first time, too, it was decided that Oswald would be taken out through the basement. Of the officers who learned that key information, three names came under most scrutiny.
Television videotape of the moment before Oswald was shot showed Ruby seemingly sheltering behind the ample form of Officer William “Blackie” Harrison. Harrison denied having had any contact with Ruby that morning. When he took a lie detector test, having prepared by taking tranquilizers, the results were reportedly “not conclusive.”18
Officer Harrison, who had known Ruby for eleven years, was twice away from his colleagues in the hours before Oswald was shot. He and Detective L. D. Miller had been at a diner on a coffee break when summoned back to take part in the basement security operation. Miller, for his part, at first refused to give a sworn deposition. Then, when he did testify, he acknowledged that Harrison had received a telephone call from “an unknown person” while at the diner. Harrison claimed the call had been the one ordering them back to headquarters. At the station, when members of Harrison’s u
nit trooped down to the basement at 11:10 a.m., they encountered Harrison on his way up from the sub-basement. He had been down there, he said, getting cigars. It may be relevant that there were four telephones on the way to the machine that dispensed cigars.
Another officer detailed to the basement operation, Lieutenant George Butler, had known Ruby since the 1940s.19 Butler had been calm and controlled in the thirty-six hours following the assassination, according to a reporter. Before Oswald’s transfer, however, his poise “appeared to have deserted him completely … so nervous that … I noticed his lips trembling.”
Finally there was Sergeant Dean, with his dubious claim about what Ruby had said of his means of entry. Dean had reportedly been on good terms with Joe Civello, the Dallas Mafia figure who—insiders accepted—represented Mob boss Carlos Marcello in Texas. Civello had invited Sergeant Dean to dinner as far back as 1957. It was a disturbing association to find in the background of the policeman who was in charge of security in the police station basement at the time Oswald was killed.20
Delinquent though it was in following up Ruby’s links to organized crime and to Cuba-related activity, the Warren Commission did ask the CIA for any available information on ties between Ruby and a number of individuals and groups. Many weeks later, the CIA responded that “an examination of Central Intelligence Agency files has produced no information on Jack Ruby or his activities.”
Neither the CIA nor the FBI told the official inquiry what both agencies knew of the report that Ruby had once visited Mafia boss Santo Trafficante in Cuba. John Roselli, senior mobster and key contact man in the CIA-Mafia plots to kill Castro, discussed Ruby before he himself was murdered. Allowing for the self-interest implicit in his main allegations, which implicate Castro in the Kennedy assassination, Roselli’s comments on Oswald’s killer—to the columnist Jack Anderson—remain interesting. “When Oswald was picked up,” Anderson quoted Roselli as saying, “the underworld conspirators feared he would crack and disclose information that might lead to them. This almost certainly would have brought a massive U.S. crackdown on the Mafia. So Jack Ruby was ordered to eliminate Oswald.”
Ruby succumbed to cancer in 1967, still in prison, after the death sentence imposed on him for Oswald’s murder had been overturned on appeal. He left hints behind him, whether true or false, whether sane or the product of a disturbed mind. He had told the Warren Commission members who questioned him that he had been “used for a purpose.” He told a psychiatrist that he had been “framed into killing Oswald” that the assassination had been “an act of overthrowing the government,” and that he knew “who had President Kennedy killed.”
While searching through old videotapes in Dallas, the author found a fragment of a rare television interview with Ruby, one that had not at the time been shown on national television. Slumped in a chair during a recess in his interminable series of court appearances, Ruby had come out with: “The only thing I can say is—everything pertaining to what’s happened has never come to the surface. The world will never know the true facts of what occurred—my motive. In other words, I am the only person in the background to know the truth pertaining to everything relating to my circumstances.”
Others, long gone now as Ruby is gone, did not answer history’s many questions. The statements of key figures associated with the case, however, suggested they had guilty knowledge.
Chapter 24
Hints and Deceptions
“Three may keep a secret, if two of them are dead.”
—Benjamin Franklin
Santo Trafficante, the Florida mafia boss, was forced by subpoena to testify on oath before the Assassinations Committee in 1977. The questions put to him included the following:
* Did you ever discuss with any individual plans to assassinate President Kennedy?
* Prior to November 22, 1963, did you know Jack Ruby?
* While you were in prison in Cuba, were you visited by Jack Ruby?
In response to all four questions, Trafficante responded, “I respectfully refuse to answer pursuant to my constitutional rights under the First, Fourth, Fifth, and Fourteenth Amendments.” “Pleading the Fifth” invokes the constitutional principle that no one can be forced to give evidence that may be self-incriminating.
Trafficante testified again, in secret, having been granted immunity from prosecution arising from what he might say. Then, in late 1978, he appeared at a public hearing to deny having said—in advance of the assassination, as alleged—that President Kennedy was “going to be hit.” Asked whether he had been aware of threats to the President made by his Louisiana counterpart Carlos Marcello, he replied, “No, sir; no, no chance, no way.”
There was also, however, a comment Trafficante made in 1975 on an audiotape recorded during an FBI surveillance operation. “Now only two people are alive,” an FBI microphone had picked up Trafficante saying—in conversation with Marcello—“who know who killed Kennedy.”
What he meant remains unknown and unknowable.1 Trafficante died in 1987, following heart surgery. Teamsters leader Jimmy Hoffa, who had been his friend and who allegedly wanted both Kennedys dead, had vanished twelve years earlier—probably murdered by criminal associates.
Sam Giancana, the Chicago Mob boss who conspired with Trafficante and the CIA to kill Cuba’s Fidel Castro, was also long dead. He had been found in 1975, lying face-up in a puddle of blood, just when the Senate Intelligence Committee was preparing to question him about the Castro plots. He had been shot once in the back of the head and six times—in a neatly stitched circle—around the mouth. It was the Mob’s way, sources said, of warning others not to talk. It was suspected that Trafficante had ordered the hit.
John Roselli had been killed soon after Giancana and Hoffa. What was left of him was found crammed into an oil drum, floating in Miami’s Dumfoundling Bay. He had testified to the Senate Intelligence Committee and was due to appear again. Trafficante was again a suspect. Before Roselli died, it was reported, he had suggested that his former associates in the Castro assassination plots had gone on to kill President Kennedy. Within weeks of his death, the House of Representatives voted by a huge majority to reopen the Kennedy case—a decision that led to the formation of the House Assassinations Committee.
The Committee finding, in 1979, was that “extensive investigation led it to conclude that the most likely family bosses of organized crime to have participated in [planning the President’s assassination] were Carlos Marcello and Santo Trafficante.” While both had had “the motive, means, and opportunity to plan and execute a conspiracy,” though, the Committee was unable to pin anything on them.
Carlos Marcello, the boss of the Mafia in the southeastern United States, had like Trafficante appeared before the Assassinations Committee. His principal business in life, he had earlier had the audacity to tell another committee, was as a tomato salesman earning about $1,600 a month. His answers related to the President’s assassination were no more illuminating.
Asked whether he ever made a physical threat against the President, Marcello replied, “Positively not, never said anything like that.” Trafficante, he said, had never talked with him about assassinating Kennedy. Their contacts had been “strictly social.” He did not know of any discussion with U.S. officials about killing Fidel Castro, had not been to Cuba before or after 1960, never had any interests there. He “never knew” either the alleged assassin, Lee Oswald, or Jack Ruby. He professed ignorance of Cuban exile activities near New Orleans—though he acknowledged having known Guy Banister. He had also known David Ferrie, he said, but not in the context of the assassination.
More, just a little more, emerged from FBI surveillance obtained during a bribery probe in 1979, when microphones planted in Marcello’s home and office again picked up snatches of relevant conversation. It was the year the Assassinations Committee was winding up its work, and—on several occasions—mikes picked up the mobster repeating, as though
he wanted to be overheard, the sort of “No, I never” denials he had made when testifying. Once, however, when a visitor asked his reaction to the Committee’s suspicions as to his role in the assassination, the mobster told the man to shut up. Then there was the sound of a chair being pushed back, of the two men walking out of the room. In the last words picked up, Marcello could be heard telling his companion that this was a subject better discussed outside. Going “outside” to discuss sensitive matters, the record shows, was something Marcello did on more than one occasion.2
An informant the FBI used in that surveillance operation, a man named Joseph Hauser, later claimed he got Marcello to discuss the assassination. According to Hauser, the mobster admitted both that he had known Oswald’s uncle Charles Murret, and that Oswald himself had at one point worked as a runner for the betting operation run for Marcello by Sam Saia. Even more provocative was something that—according to Hauser—Marcello’s brother Joseph said. Edward Kennedy was about to run for the White House, and Hauser raised the subject of the “rough time” the elder Kennedys had given Marcello back in the 1960s. “Don’t worry,” Joseph supposedly replied, “We took care of them, didn’t we?”
Oswald’s uncle Charles had indeed been involved in gambling activity, and he was an associate of Sam Saia. Saia was a powerful figure in bookmaking, and he was reputedly close to Carlos Marcello. What Marcello is said to have confided is thus plausible—but it is not evidence. Of the surveillance tapes thus far released, none show that Marcello made these admissions, or that his brother’s remark about having “taken care” of the Kennedys was made. One wonders, too, whether, if it was made, it was meant seriously.
There is more, similar, material, in this case reflected in FBI records. It dates to the mid-1980s, when the Mob boss had at last been jailed—on charges of racketeering, wire fraud, and conspiracy to bribe a federal judge. It was then that a fellow prison inmate named Jack Van Laningham, who was being used by the FBI in another surveillance operation against Marcello, made a new allegation that the Mob boss had admitted involvement in the Kennedy assassination. The FBI file contains a report on what, according to Van Laningham, Marcello told him and another inmate while they were sitting “outside in the patio” of the prison yard. As originally circulated, with Van Laningham’s name withheld, it reads as follows (see facsimile on next page):3