Jack Ruby

• 1. Introduction

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  At 11:21 on Sunday morning, the 24th of November 1963, Jack Ruby stepped out of a crowd of reporters in the basement of Dallas Police Headquarters. Ruby, a Dallas nightclub owner, was holding a revolver. A few feet away stood Lee Harvey Oswald, the assassin of President John F. Kennedy, who had been killed two days earlier. Within seconds Oswald lay mortally wounded and Ruby was under arrest, all of it on live television that millions of people were watching.

  The man who fired had run clubs in Dallas for years, yet almost nobody outside the city knew his name. Who was he? Why would a club owner with heavy debts and a hair-trigger temper kill Oswald before Oswald could stand trial? And did Ruby act alone, as one official investigation concluded, or did someone help put him in that basement?

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• 2. Chicago Streets

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  Jacob Rubenstein was born around the 25th of March 1911 in the Maxwell Street area of Chicago, Illinois. His parents were Joseph Rubenstein, a carpenter, and Fannie Turek Rutkowski (or Rokowsky), both Polish-born Orthodox Jews. Jacob was the fifth of their 10 surviving children. The household was violent. His parents often fought and separated, and his mother was eventually committed to a psychiatric hospital. Juvenile delinquency and time in foster care marked his youth, and he was arrested for truancy at the age of 11.

  Barney Ross, who grew up to be a boxer, was a boyhood friend. The two boys ran innocuous errands handed to them by the gangster Al Capone. Friends also gave Jacob the nickname Sparky. His sister Eva Grant said it came from a slow-moving horse named Spark Plug, or Sparky, in the comic strip Barney Google. Other accounts say it came from his quick temper. Grant added that he disliked the name and was quick to fight anyone who used it.

  Ruby left school at 16 and earned money by scalping tickets and selling horse race tip sheets. Around 1937 he became an organizer in Local 20467 of the Scrap Iron and Junk Handlers Union. In 1939 the union's president, Leon Cooke, was murdered. Cooke was Ruby's friend, and Ruby was investigated as a suspect before being cleared. He took Leon as his middle name in tribute. Paul Dorfman replaced Cooke, and Ruby stayed on for two more months before leaving the union.

  In 1941 Ruby and Harry Epstein organized the Spartan Novelty Co. The small firm sold little cedar chests holding candy, along with punchboards. Ruby also designed plaques commemorating the Day of Infamy, but his perfectionism delayed production.

  The draft caught up with him in 1943. He served in the United States Army Air Forces during World War II as an aircraft mechanic at US bases, with an honorable record and a promotion to private first class. He was discharged in 1946 and went back to Chicago, but he would leave it for Texas the following year.

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• 3. Dallas Nightclub Owner

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  In 1947 Ruby moved to Dallas, purportedly because merchandise deals had failed in Chicago and to help operate his sister's nightclub. Soon afterward he and his brothers shortened their surname from Rubenstein to Ruby. The stated reason was that Rubenstein was too long and that he was already "well known" as Jack Ruby. Over the years he managed nightclubs, strip clubs, and dance halls in the city.

  Dallas police officers frequented those clubs, and Ruby cultivated them with free liquor, prostitutes, and other favors. The country singer Buck Owens was another visitor. At one of Ruby's clubs he discovered Lulu Roman, then working as bawdy comic relief, and hired her for the cast of Hee Haw. The singer Jewel Brown performed for Ruby after James Henry Dolan introduced them. She left after about a year, following a falling out.

  Money was a constant problem. Ruby borrowed from friends, family, and business associates, and he clashed often with the Internal Revenue Service. At one point he owed six years of back taxes. Even so, in 1959 he joined the Dallas Chamber of Commerce with the help of Judge Joe B. Brown. Brown would later serve as the judge at Ruby's trial for murdering Lee Harvey Oswald.

  The Warren Commission heard that Ruby beat customers on at least 25 occasions. He acted as bouncer at his own club and often ended fights by throwing his victims down the stairs. In one brawl a man bit his left index finger so badly that doctors amputated it. People interviewed by investigators described a man desperate for attention. He knew a great many people in Dallas but had only a few friends.

  Stories of his eccentric behavior were just as vivid. At social gatherings he sometimes took off his shirt or other clothes, then either pounded his chest like a gorilla or rolled around on the floor. He could change the subject in mid-sentence. One night he might welcome a guest to his club, and the next night forbid the same guest to enter. Acquaintances called him "a kook", "totally unpredictable", and "a psycho". From 1949 until the murder of Oswald, he faced nine criminal charges, ranging from assault to violating state liquor law.

  Ruby never married and had no children. When Kennedy was killed, he was living with George Senator, who called Ruby "my boyfriend" in Warren Commission testimony while denying that the two were homosexual lovers. Commission lawyer Burt Griffin later told the author Gerald Posner that he was not sure Senator had been honest. "People did not advertise their homosexuality in 1963," Griffin said. Senator's account of Ruby's last morning would become one of the contested details of the case.

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• 4. Days Before the Shot

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  On the 21st of November 1963, Ruby walked into the office of Assistant District Attorney Ben Ellis, where a number of Dallas police officers were meeting. He handed out business cards advertising a performance by Jada, a stripper at his Carousel Club on Commerce Street. According to reports, he told Ellis: "You probably don't know me now, but you will." The Warren Commission traced his evening between the Carousel and his Vegas Club in the Oak Lawn district.

  The next day, the 22nd of November, Ruby was in the advertising offices of The Dallas Morning News, five blocks from the Texas School Book Depository, placing his weekly nightclub ads. He learned of the assassination around 12:45 p.m., and witnesses said he was visibly shaken. He phoned his assistant at the Carousel and his sister. A newspaper employee estimated that he left at 1:30 p.m., though other testimony suggested he left earlier. Shortly before 1:45 p.m. he reached the Carousel to tell employees the club would close that evening.

  An advertisement in that same newspaper had upset him. John Newnam, who worked in the paper's advertising department, testified that the anti-Kennedy ad was signed "The American Fact-Finding Committee, Bernard Weissman, Chairman." Ruby was sensitive to antisemitism and was distressed that the signer had a "Jewish name." Early the next morning he noticed a billboard in block letters reading "IMPEACH EARL WARREN." His sister Eva testified that he linked the ad and the sign. He believed they were a plot by a "gentile" to blame the assassination on the Jews.

  Ruby also turned up at the Dallas Police Headquarters several times after Oswald's arrest for the murder of policeman J. D. Tippit. He attended an arranged press conference with Oswald and later told the FBI that his .38 Colt Cobra revolver was in his right pocket at the time. That night, newsreel footage from WFAA-TV and NBC shows him posing as a newspaper reporter at a press conference held by District Attorney Henry Wade. Wade said Oswald belonged to the anti-Castro Free Cuba Committee. Ruby was among several people who corrected him: "Henry, that's the Fair Play for Cuba Committee." The group was pro-Castro. Two nights later Ruby would be back in the same building.

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• 5. The Basement

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  Detectives Jim Leavelle and L. C. Graves were escorting Oswald through the police basement toward an armored car bound for the county jail. William Harrison saw a gun in the crowd and began to reach out his hand. Detective Billy Combest described Ruby's face as wearing a "determined look or grimace." Ruby fired a single shot into Oswald's abdomen at point-blank range. Combest exclaimed, "Jack, you son of a bitch!"

  Graves grabbed for the gun and Harrison seized Ruby's shoulder. The armored car, already rolling down the ramp, clipped Ruby's leg and nearly knocked him off balance as police subdued him. Ruby was handcuffed and taken up in an elevator. Oswald was placed in an ambulance and driven to Parkland Memorial Hospital, the same hospital where Kennedy had died two days before.

  Surgeons at Parkland found that the bullet had entered the front of Oswald's left abdomen. It had badly damaged his spleen, stomach, aorta, vena cava, kidney, liver, diaphragm, and eleventh rib before stopping on his right side. Oswald died at 1:07 p.m.

  A network pool camera had been broadcasting the transfer, and within minutes the footage was on other networks. Photographers captured the instant Ruby pulled the trigger. In 1964 Robert H. Jackson of the Dallas Times Herald won the Pulitzer Prize for Photography for his image, titled Jack Ruby Shoots Lee Harvey Oswald.

  Former vice president Richard Nixon, when asked about the killing, said: "The man who was guilty of murdering the President of the United States deserved to die, but under our legal system, he was also entitled to a trial … two wrongs don't make a right." Many Americans felt the shooting had robbed the nation of information, and it deepened suspicions of a larger plot. Others cheered. The crowd outside headquarters applauded when word spread that Oswald had been shot, and some citizens saw Ruby as a hero. In jail, Ruby received many letters from the public, often praising what he had done.

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• 6. Trial and Final Months

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  "Saving Mrs. Kennedy the discomfiture of coming back to trial" was one reason Ruby gave after his arrest. He also said he wanted to help Dallas "redeem" itself in the public eye. He claimed he had shot Oswald on the spur of the moment, and that grief over the assassination had "reached the point of insanity." He said he had been taking phenmetrazine, a stimulant sold as Preludin. Later he told his brother Earl that he never wanted Oswald to die.

  Dallas attorney Tom Howard took Ruby's case first. Howard asked whether anything could damage the defense, and Ruby warned that a man named "Davis" would be a problem. He described Davis as a gunrunner entangled in anti-Castro efforts. Earl Ruby soon replaced Howard with the prominent San Francisco lawyer Melvin Belli, who worked pro bono, and Joe H. Tonahill joined the team. Belli built an insanity defense. Ruby was uneasy with a strategy in which he would not testify, saying only that "Mr. Belli knows better, I guess."

  What Ruby said as he fired was disputed. He thought he had said, "You killed my President, you rat!" Officer McMillon testified to a different line, though footage showed McMillon looking away from the shooting. Sergeant Patrick Dean testified that Ruby claimed he had considered killing Oswald two nights earlier to show the world that "Jews have guts." Detective Don Archer said Ruby told him he had meant to shoot Oswald three times.

  On the 14th of March 1964, a jury convicted Ruby of murder with malice and sentenced him to death. Ruby and his family fired Belli. Percy Foreman took over for only a few days before quitting over disagreements with the family, and Hubert Winston Smith replaced him. The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals later overturned the conviction. It ruled that an oral confession of premeditation made in police custody should have been excluded, and that the trial should have been moved out of Dallas County.

  In June 1964, after months of Ruby's requests, Chief Justice Earl Warren and Representative Gerald R. Ford of Michigan, among other Commission members, went to Dallas to see him. Ruby begged Warren to take him to Washington, saying: "My life is in danger here." He added: "I want to tell the truth, and I can't tell it here." He named the John Birch Society of Dallas, including Edwin Walker, as people trying to implicate him falsely. Warren refused, explaining that legal barriers were too great and that the Commission had no police powers to protect him.

  The court granted a new trial on the 5th of October 1966, ruling that his motion for a change of venue should have been granted. A second trial was planned for February 1967 in Wichita Falls, Texas. On the 9th of December 1966, however, Ruby entered Parkland Hospital with pneumonia and was found to have cancer in his liver, lungs, and brain. An armed guard stood outside his room. On the 16th of December, Earl Ruby smuggled in a tape recorder hidden in a briefcase and recorded an interview in which Jack again denied knowing Oswald. According to an unnamed Associated Press source, Ruby said on the 19th of December: "There is nothing to hide, there was no one else."

  Ruby died of a pulmonary embolism at Parkland Hospital on the 3rd of January 1967. He is buried beside his parents in Westlawn Cemetery in Norridge, Illinois. Three years before his death, the Warren Commission had already delivered its judgment on whether he belonged to a conspiracy.

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• 7. The Warren Verdict

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  The Warren Report included a detailed biography of Ruby, written to help settle whether he had taken part in a plot against Kennedy. The Commission found no evidence of one. It also looked into rumors that Ruby and Oswald knew each other and that Oswald had been seen at the Carousel Club. It judged the witnesses who linked the two men not credible. It saw no "significant link between Ruby and organized crime" and concluded that he acted independently.

  The Commission's timeline for the final morning began at a Western Union office on Main Street. There Ruby sent an emergency money order to one of his employees, with a time stamp of 11:17 a.m. He had driven into town with his pet dachshund, Sheba. He then walked half a block to police headquarters. The Commission accepted his statement that he came down the Main Street ramp. Supporters of the report ask why he would have left his beloved dog in the car if the killing had been planned.

  Commission investigator David Belin added a point about timing. Postal inspector Harry Holmes arrived unannounced that morning and, at the investigators' invitation, questioned Oswald, which delayed the transfer by half an hour. Had Ruby been part of a plot, Belin argued, he would have been downtown 30 minutes earlier, when the transfer was originally scheduled.

  Ruby's brother Earl and sister Eva insisted he acted alone, upset over Kennedy's death and closing his clubs as a mark of respect. Dallas reporter Tony Zoppi, who knew him well, said that one "would have to be crazy" to entrust Ruby with a plot to kill the President, because he "couldn't keep a secret for five minutes." Former prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi wrote that no conspiracy theorist had ever met Ruby, while those who knew him found the idea of Mafia ties laughable. Bill Alexander, who prosecuted Ruby, mocked the reasoning as "A knew B, and Ruby knew B back in 1950, so he must have known A."

  Earl Ruby also denied that Jack had been involved in racketeering at Chicago nightclubs. Gerald Posner suggested in his book Case Closed that witnesses may have confused him with Harry Rubenstein, a convicted Chicago felon. Zoppi, for his part, dismissed any mob ties and called Ruby a "born loser."

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• 8. Doubts and Dissent

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  In 1979 the House Select Committee on Assassinations reached a very different view of how Ruby got into that basement. Its Final Report said the shooting "was not a spontaneous act, in that it involved at least some premeditation." The committee was troubled by apparently unlocked doors along the stairway route and by the removal of security guards from the garage area nearest the stairway shortly before the shooting. It also found evidence that the Dallas police withheld relevant information from the Warren Commission. It suggested Ruby may have reached the basement by a stairway off an alleyway beside the Dallas Municipal Building.

  Seth Kantor, a White House correspondent who rode in Kennedy's motorcade, testified that Ruby had tugged his coat outside Parkland Hospital at about 1:30 p.m. on the day of the assassination. Ruby denied having been there, and the Warren Commission concluded that Kantor was mistaken. The 1979 committee determined that he probably was not. Kantor later argued in his book Who Was Jack Ruby? that the mob could have used Ruby to silence Oswald.

  Several witnesses pointed to calls and visits before the shooting. Garage manager Garrett C. Hallmark said Ruby phoned someone called Ken at 3 p.m. on the 23rd of November to confirm Oswald's transfer time, adding: "You know I'll be there." Dallas dispatcher Lieutenant Billy Grammer said an anonymous caller warned at 3 a.m. on the 24th that unless the plan changed, "we are going to kill him," and he later believed the voice was Ruby's. A declassified memo from J. Edgar Hoover reported that the FBI in Dallas had received a similar warning the night before, and that the Dallas police chief was told twice to keep Oswald safe. Hoover wrote: "however, this was not done."

  Accounts of Ruby's final morning conflict. George Senator testified that Ruby stayed in the apartment until about 10:30 a.m. But Elnora Pitts, his cleaning lady, phoned between 8:30 and 9:00 a.m. and reached a man who claimed to be Ruby yet did not sound like him. WBAP-TV's Johnnie Smith said a man resembling Ruby asked about the transfer at his TV truck outside headquarters. Cameraman Ira Walker and Warren Richey identified Ruby as a man who approached the truck just after 10:30 a.m.

  Questions about his motive grew louder after 1964. Detective Don Archer noted that Ruby turned calm once told Oswald had died, which led him to believe Ruby's life had depended on getting Oswald. Newsman Vic Robertson Jr. saw Ruby at headquarters on Friday night, "happy, jovial, was joking and laughing." Testifying before the Warren Commission, Ruby teared up, recovered, and then remarked: "I must be a great actor, I tell you that." Ruby's friend Paul Jones doubted that he would have killed Oswald on the spur of the moment, believing he would have done it for money. In a note to Joe Tonahill, Ruby wrote that Tom Howard had told him to say he shot Oswald to spare Mrs. Kennedy and Caroline a trip to Dallas. In March 1965 Ruby said "the true facts" would never come to the surface. A reporter asked if the people behind it were in very high positions, and Ruby answered, "Yes." G. Robert Blakey, chief counsel for the House committee, called organized crime the most plausible explanation.

  Ruby's links to the underworld drew the most attention. The 1979 committee said he had "a significant number of associations and direct and indirect contacts with underworld figures" but was not a member of organized crime. It noted that he had known Chicago mobsters Sam Giancana and Joseph Campisi since 1947. In August 1959 Ruby visited his close friend Lewis McWillie, who supervised gambling at Havana's Tropicana Club. The committee concluded that Ruby "most likely was serving as a courier for gambling interests." It found circumstantial evidence that he met Santo Trafficante Jr. in Cuba that year.

  The author David Scheim pointed to a 25-fold increase in out-of-state calls from Ruby to associates of Carlos Marcello, Santo Trafficante Jr., and Jimmy Hoffa in the months before the assassination. Bugliosi countered that both investigations tied those calls to Ruby's labor troubles with the American Guild of Variety Artists. The House committee said most calls concerned those troubles but would not dismiss other topics. Separately, James E. Beaird claimed Ruby smuggled guns from Galveston Bay, Texas, to Fidel Castro's guerrillas in the late 1950s. Ruby had also been approached by FBI agent Charles W. Flynn in March 1959 to become an informant. He was contacted eight times by October 1959 and gave the Bureau nothing.

  Other voices went in an entirely different direction. Greg Parker alleged that Ruby killed Oswald to seek fame, while under immense pressure, deep in debt, and under the influence of methamphetamines. Ruby has since become a fixture of fiction, appearing in James Ellroy's The Cold Six Thousand and in Don DeLillo's 1988 novel Libra.

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