Crossfire: The Plot That Killed Kennedy (82 page)

According to this FBI report, only partially reported by the Warren
Commission in Document 86 (the FBI first page containing the information about Ruby's gambling activities was inexplicably missing from the
Commission document), Abadie stated:

... it was obvious [to me] that to operate gambling in the manner that
he [Ruby] did, that he must have racketeering connections with other
individuals in the City of Dallas, as well as Fort Worth, Texas .. .
[This] applied also to police connections with the two cities.

In fact, Abadie told agents that he had observed policemen coming and
going while acting as a bookie in a Ruby establishment.

Another gambler, Jack Hardee, who was also interviewed by the FBI in
December 1963, said when he tried to set up a numbers game in Dallas in
1962, he was told it would be necessary to obtain the approval of Jack
Ruby since any "fix" with local authorities had to come through Ruby.

Harry Hall, yet another gambler who had participated in a scheme to
bilk wealthy Texans including Dallas oil billionaire H. L. Hunt in the early
1950s, went on to become a credible informant for the Treasury Department and the FBI. He told the Secret Service that he once made a trip with
Ruby through Oklahoma and Louisiana. Hall said Ruby had "good connections in gambling circles" there.

Hall, like Ruby, was from the same general Chicago neighborhood and
had close connections with Teamster racketeers. He also was connected
with mobster Johnny Rosselli, Eugene Hale Brading, and the La Costa
Country Club.

According to Hall, he once won a large amount of money from H. L.
Hunt after being introduced to the oilman by his friend Ruby.

According to Ester Ann Mash, a former employee who dated Ruby
during the spring of 1963, Ruby was no stranger at the homes of some
prominent Dallasities. She told this author:

Several times he took me to big nice homes where there were important
people in town, including District Attorney Henry Wade. I think he only
took me so he didn't have to go alone. Once we got there, I never saw
Jack. He would be off gambling.

There is simply no question of Ruby's connections to gambling and to
gamblers, both local and national. In 1959 a Dallas gambler named Harry
Siedband was arrested in Oklahoma City. On Siedband was a list of the
top professional gamblers in the Dallas-Fort Worth area-including Jack
Ruby.

Not so clear is Ruby's connection to drugs. As mentioned earlier, both Ruby and his brother Hyman were questioned extensively by police following the arrest of one of Paul Jones's lieutenants on charges of smuggling hard narcotics.

In a later case, a drug offender named James Breen traveled to Dallas
where he made contact with "a large narcotics setup operating between
Mexico, Texas, and the East," according to Breen's female companion
Eileen Curry. Curry told the FBI that Breen's contact with this drug ring
was Jack Ruby.

After Ruby killed Oswald, Curry again was contacted by the FBI. She
repeated her earlier contentions that Ruby and Breen had been mixed up in
a narcotics smuggling ring.

There is also an abundance of evidence that Ruby was involved in other
criminal activities, such as prostitution, pornography, and bribery.

And the fact that Ruby was a pivotal contact man for criminal activity in
Dallas seems affirmed by his lack of prosecution by Dallas authorities.

Ruby's Dallas rap sheet showed he was arrested nine times in sixteen
years-on charges ranging from operating his club after legal hours to
using a gun to slug an off-duty Dallas policeman in a fight outside the
Carousel Club-yet the toughest conviction shown in his criminal record
was a thirty-five-dollar fine for ignoring a traffic summons.

Jack Ruby's criminal activity reached a peak in 1959, when he became
even more closely connected to the mob and the Feds through their
common interest in Cuba.

The year 1959 was a busy time for Jack Ruby.

He made at least two trips to Cuba, which had just been taken over by
Fidel Castro; he began making contact with gun runners who had been
arming Castro but were beginning to turn against the bearded leader, and
he began serving as an informant for the FBI.

Just prior to Castro's takeover, American mobsters had helped supply the
revolutionary with arms for his fight with Batista. While the dictator
Batista was friends with the mob, the gangsters were playing both sides of
the fence, believing that if they helped Castro, they would be allowed to
remain in Cuba should he succeed in his revolution.

The smuggling of arms to Castro was overseen by Norman "Roughhouse" Rothman, a burly associate of Miami mob boss Santos Trafficante
who managed Trafficante's Sans Souci Casino in Havana. At the same
time Rothman reportedly was splitting Havana slot machine revenues with
Batista's brother-in-law.

After the assassination, the sister of a Cuban gun runner gave informa tion indicating that Ruby was part of the Rothman operation. Mrs. Mary
Thompson said she and her daughter traveled to the Florida Keys during
June 1958, where her brother introduced them to a man named "Jack."
The women were told that Jack owned a nightclub in Dallas and was a
member of "the syndicate" who was running some guns to Cuba.

The women's story, which was reported to the FBI after the assassination, was later corroborated by Bureau informant Blaney Mack Johnson,
who stated that in the early 1950s, Ruby had an interest in a notorious
nightclub and gambling house in Hallandale, Florida, along with Meyer
and Jake Lansky and other prominent mobsters. Johnson said Ruby was
active in arranging illegal flights of weapons to Castro forces and named
Edward Browder as one of the pilots operating for Ruby.

Browder, a flamboyant Miami arms dealer, was a central figure in
Rothman's gun-running operation, according to federal court documents.
Another soldier of fortune operating with Browder during this time was
Frank Sturgis, who would much later be caught burglarizing the Watergate
building along with men connected to the Nixon White House.

Although the FBI file on Browder reportedly contains more than a
thousand pages, the Bureau only gave three small, innocuous reports to the
Warren Commission.

And while there are reports that documents confirming Ruby's gunrunning activities surfaced in both the State Department and Army intelligence files during the 1963-64 assassination investigations, these documents
are said to be missing today.

Jack Ruby, like many other Americans who helped Castro seize power,
lived to regret his actions. After Castro closed the mob's casinos and
imprisoned gangsters, including Santos Trafficante, he quickly became
persona non grata.

While awaiting a new trial shortly before his death, Ruby told his
lawyers and a doctor that he feared people would find out about his Cuban
activities and think him unpatriotic. He is quoted as saying: "They're
going to find out about my trips to Cuba . . . and the guns and everything. "

In another incident recorded in a letter smuggled out of the Dallas
County Jail, Ruby wrote:

They have found a means and ways to frame me, by deception, etc. and
they have succeeded in same. My lawyers . . . were in on it. Now this
is how they did it. They had a guard with me constantly . . . and he
started to work on me with the Bible routine, and on his person
unbeknownst to me he had one of these wireless speakers, which is very
small and he kept it in his trousers pocket . . . I was very low and
crying, and the guard knew I was at my lowest . . . I came to where he
was sitting and I fell to the floor and broke down and said that I had sent
guns to Cuba .. .

In an effort to repair this slip of the tongue, Ruby hastened to add that
he had never really sent guns to Cuba but only had relayed a message from
his friend Lewis McWillie to a Dallas gun store owner that McWillie
wanted four pistols for personal protection.

However, this same lament was echoed to one of Ruby's employees not
long after his murder conviction in 1964. According to Wally Weston, the
Carousel Club's emcee who visited his former employer in the Dallas
County Jail, Ruby said: ". . . Wally, you know what's going to happen
now? They're going to find out about my trips to Cuba and my trips to
New Orleans and the guns and everything."

In mid-1959, the Rothman gun-running operation was rocked when its
chief was arrested in connection with an $8.5 million Canadian bank
burglary. Federal authorities linked the bank job with a large theft of arms
from an Ohio National Guard armory through a $6,000 airplane rental
agreement by Rothman. Authorities agreed it appeared to all be part of a
massive gun-running operation to Cuba.

And it was during this time that Ruby's travels to Cuba increased
significantly, thanks to Ruby's mob idol, Lewis J. McWillie.

McWillie-potentially a key central character in this swirl of gun runners, drug smugglers, mob hitmen, CIA-Mafia assassination plots and
Texas gamblers-has received scant attention from the two major government assassination investigations.

Yet, according to Elaine Mynier, who dated McWillie during his days in
Dallas, the gambler and Ruby were close friends. In a December 5, 1963
FBI interview, she said McWillie was: ". . . a big-time gambler, who has
always been in the big money and operated top gambling establishments in
the United States and Cuba. He always had a torpedo [a bodyguard] living
with him for protection." Mynier went on to say that Jack Ruby was: ". . . a
small-time character who would do anything for McWillie, who was in
the habit of being surrounded by people he could use."

In his Warren Commission testimony, Ruby made no secret of his
closeness to McWillie. He said: "I called him frequently . . . I idolized
McWillie. He is a pretty nice boy and I happened to be idolizing
him... . I always thought a lot of him . . . I have a great fondness
for him... ...

Despite Ruby's accolades, Commission members declined to follow
through on a staff recommendation to call McWillie to testify about his
relationship with Ruby and Mafia figures. The Warren Report mentioned
McWillie only briefly, regarding Ruby's 1959 visit to Cuba, and concluded:

The Commission has found no evidence that McWillie has engaged in
any activities since leaving Cuba that are related to pro- or anti-Castro
political movements or that he was involved in Ruby's abortive jeep
transaction.

As can be seen, there was no mention of Mc Willie's alleged mob ties or
to McWillie's FBI record, No. 4404064, which gives a list of aliases and
characterizes him as a gangland killer.

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

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

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

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

By September 1958, McWillie was manager of the Tropicana Hotel's
luxurious casino, then styled as "the largest nightclub in the world." It
was here that McWillie became a close associate of some of the mob's
most powerful leaders. According to a March 26, 1964, FBI memo
prepared for the Warren Commission:

... it would appear McWillie solidified his Syndicate connections
through his association in Havana with Santos Trafficante, well-known
Syndicate member, for Tampa, Florida; Meyer and Jake Lansky; Dino
Cellini and others who were members of or associates of "the Syndicate."

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