Not in Your Lifetime: The Defining Book on the J.F.K. Assassination (38 page)

Veciana may well have told the truth. A former associate who worked with Veciana when he was chief of sabotage for the People’s Revolutionary Movement in Havana said, “Veciana was the straightest, absolutely trustworthy, most honest person I ever met. I would trust him implicitly.”
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The Assassinations Committee investigator’s report on him stated that “Generally, Veciana’s reputation for honesty and integrity was excellent. He appeared credible to this author in the course of many contacts, and important information he provided checked out.”

“Bishop,” Veciana said, “did work for an intelligence agency of this country, and I am convinced that it was the CIA… . The impression I have is that the Mexico City episode was a device. By using it, Maurice Bishop wanted to lay the blame for President Kennedy’s death fairly and squarely on Castro and the Cuban government.”

If that was the ploy, it came close to succeeding. Even today, some still think
Castro was behind the Kennedy assassination.
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In the late 1970s, the author interviewed the son of the late Mario García Kohly Sr., a prominent activist and for a time self-styled president-in-exile of Cuba. An extreme rightist bitterly opposed to President Kennedy’s policy, he had, by 1963, long since broken with the mainstream exile movement. On hearing the news that Kennedy had been killed, Mario Kohly Jr. said, he called his father—after opening a celebratory bottle of champagne.

“My father,” he told the author, “seemed elated and quite relieved. He seemed more pleased, I would say, than surprised. I am sure he had knowledge of what really happened in Dealey Plaza.” The younger Kohly would not say who he believed killed Kennedy. “Let’s just say,” he responded,” it is very possible the assassination was done by the anti-Castro movement in the hopes of making it look like Castro had done it. If they could blame the assassination of President Kennedy on Fidel Castro and arouse enough indignation among the American people, this would have helped the movement to get the support we needed to regain our country. In other words, they either would have supported a new invasion against Castro or might have invaded Cuba themselves.”

It never happened, of course. As the months went by, it became apparent that Washington had put aside plans for intervention in Cuba. Even as the exiles’ military plans were consigned to the political trash can, so too was talk of reaching an accommodation with Fidel
Castro. Three days after the assassination, when U.S. diplomat William Attwood received formal confirmation that Havana wished to proceed with talks, President Johnson was briefed on the contacts of recent weeks. The new President, preoccupied as he was with the accelerating U.S. involvement in Vietnam, evinced no interest. Word came back,” Attwood recalled, “that this was to be put on ice for the time being, and ‘the time being’ has been ever since.”

The Kennedy era was over, its promise vanishing into mythology as surely as the flame on the President’s grave flickered in the wind. With Lee Oswald dead, the Warren Commission made little of the inconsistencies of the case—the Silvia Odio incident, the suspect scenario in Mexico City, and the indications that there may have been more than one gunman. Late in the inquiry, faced with the imponderables of the Odio evidence, Chief Counsel Rankin spoke volumes when he said wearily, “At this stage, we are supposed to be closing doors, not opening them.”

Behind one of the doors stood the surviving principal in the case, Jack Ruby. That door, too, was better left closed.

The Good Ole Boy

“The
pattern of contacts did show that individuals who had the motive to kill the President also had knowledge of a man who could be used to get access to Oswald in the custody of the Dallas police.”

—House Select Committee on Assassinations
Report, 1979

S
even months after the assassination, in a nondescript room at Dallas County Jail, the Chief Justice of the United States presided over a vital interrogation. Earl Warren, accompanied by then Congressman Gerald Ford and a pack of lawyers, was going through the motions of questioning Jack Ruby.
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The man who had silenced Lee Oswald sat shifting uneasily, chewing his lower lip, sometimes drying up altogether. If he was afraid the Warren Commission would prove hard to handle, Ruby worried unnecessarily. The interrogators listened with equanimity to the well-rehearsed story of why he murdered the accused assassin.

Ruby testified:

No one … requested me to do anything. I never spoke to anyone about attempting to do anything… . No underworld person made any effort to contact me. It all happened that Sunday morning… . The last thing I read was that Mrs. Kennedy may have to come back to Dallas for a trial for Lee Harvey Oswald and I don’t know what bug got hold of me… . Suddenly, the feeling, the
emotional feeling came within me, that someone owed this debt to our beloved President to save her the ordeal of coming back. I had the gun in my right hip pocket, and impulsively, if that is the correct word here, I saw him [Oswald] and that is all I can say… . I think I used the words, “You killed my President, you rat.”

Ruby presented himself as the misguided exponent of his own brand of sentimental patriotism, and the Warren Commission saw no need to probe further.

A month earlier, the two lawyers charged with the Ruby investigation, Leon Hubert and Burt Griffin, had fired off a long memorandum to Chief Counsel Lee Rankin. It laid out, in precise detail, areas they felt had been inadequately investigated, emphasizing that the Commission had yet to disprove that “Ruby killed Oswald at the suggestion of others.” Their recommendations were followed up only in a halfhearted sort of way, for—as Griffin put it—“They were in a different ball game than we were… . They really thought that ours was crazy and that we were incompetent.” Hubert resigned, on the understanding that he would still be present at the forthcoming interview with Ruby. The promise was not kept. Warren, Ford, and Lee Rankin departed for Dallas without informing Hubert. The Commission’s specialists on Ruby, the two men most qualified for the job, were excluded from questioning the man who perhaps held the key to unsolved areas of the assassination.

The Commissioners who did talk to Ruby found it a tedious chore.
Ruby rambled on for hours, often irrelevantly, about his activities before the murder. He prattled about his Jewish origins and how Jews would be killed in vast numbers because of what he had done. He seemed frightened, so much so that Chief Justice Warren apparently dismissed him as a psychiatric case. That was insufficient justification for what happened before the interview ended.

Ruby had been doodling on a notepad. Then he cried: “Gentlemen, unless you get me to Washington, you can’t get a fair shake out of me… . I am not a crackpot, I have all my senses—I don’t want to avoid any crime I am guilty of.” Eight times in all, Oswald’s murderer begged the Chief Justice to arrange his transfer to the capital for further questioning and lie-detector tests. Warren told him it could not be done. In the Warren Report, published a few months later, Ruby was characterized as merely “moody and unstable,” one lone nut who had killed another. His background and activities, the Report said, “yielded no evidence that Ruby conspired with anyone in planning or executing the killing of Lee Harvey Oswald.”

Fifteen years later, the House Assassinations Committee replaced the Commission’s certainty with a cobweb of suspicion. Along with its finding that the assassination evidence pointed to conspiracy, the Committee portrayed a Ruby who had, for years, been involved with some of the people most motivated to kill the President. They found that vital matters had been glossed over in the original inquiry and that Ruby probably received “assistance” in gaining access to the police station basement where he shot Oswald.

The most startling revelations about Oswald’s killer concerned his involvement with organized crime and with Cuba. The Warren inquiry had declared there was “no significant link between
Ruby and organized crime,” dismissing what it called “rumors linking Ruby with pro- or anti-Castro activities.” Given the material the Warren staff possessed even then, it is hard to believe the Report’s authors expected to be taken seriously. Ruby’s life story is the dossier of a sort of gangsters’ groupie.

It began in Chicago. Jacob Rubenstein—Ruby’s name at birth—came into the world in 1911, the fifth of eight children born to Polish immigrant parents, a drunkard father and a slightly crazed mother. All eight offspring ended up in foster homes. Jacob never made it past the eighth grade. By the age of sixteen he was known as Sparky to his pals, a tough, street-smart kid roaming Chicago’s West Side who earned the occasional dollar by running errands—for a boss whose name is synonymous with violent crime, Al Capone.

The record of Jacob’s early life is one of an apprenticeship in petty crime—ticket scalper, racetrack tip-sheet vendor, dealer in contraband music sheets, and nightclub bouncer. He had some minor brushes with the law and earned a reputation for senseless violence. In 1937, he took a real job of sorts—as what he later liked to call “organizer” for a local branch of the Scrap Iron and Junk Handlers Union. The union leadership had been commandeered by stooges for Chicago’s leading racketeers, and Ruby was a bagman for the new president, John Martin. He once pulled a gun while trying to recruit members in a scrap-paper plant. When Martin shot down his predecessor, Ruby was pulled in for questioning.

Years later, the Warren Commission would accept his claim to have “left the union when I found out the notorious organization had moved in there.” In fact, Ruby stayed on for some time. The Warren Commission ignored, too, an FBI interview with a Chicago crime figure who said Ruby had been “accepted and to a certain
extent his business operations controlled by the syndicate.” After a wartime spell in the U.S. Air Force, Ruby left Chicago for Dallas and the nightclub business.

By his own account, reportedly, the move was at the direction of his Mob associates. A Dallas businessman who knew Ruby well, Giles Miller, told the author Ruby would “discuss how he was sent down here by ‘them’—he always referred to ‘them’—meaning the syndicate. He always complained that if he had to be exiled, why couldn’t he have been exiled to California or to Florida? Why to this hellhole Dallas?” According to Luis Kutner, a former attorney on the Kefauver Committee—the 1950 Senate probe into organized crime—the staff learned that Ruby was “a syndicate lieutenant who had been sent to Dallas to serve as a liaison for Chicago mobsters.”

A Mob emissary, Paul Jones, tried in 1946 to bribe the Dallas District Attorney and Sheriff to let the syndicate operate in the city.
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Decades later, when Ruby shot Oswald, former Sheriff Steve Guthrie came forward to say Ruby had been the man named by Jones to run the proposed operation—a gambling joint fronting as a restaurant and nightclub. The Chicago contacts who introduced Jones to Ruby, Paul “Needle Nose” Labriola and Jimmy Weinberg, were close to the man who at the time ran organized crime in Chicago, Sam Giancana. Giancana, as noted earlier, would in the distant future play a prominent role in the CIA-Mafia plots to kill Fidel Castro.

In Dallas, Ruby made a sort of career for himself as the proprietor of shady nightspots known for after-hours drinking and violent brawling. He beat up those who crossed him, but escaped serious trouble by being careful to dispense favors to policemen. Underworld sources said Ruby was “the payoff man for the Dallas Police Department,” a man who “had the fix with the county authorities.” Further afield,
Ruby apparently played more dangerous games.

In 1956, he was named by an FBI informant as the man who “gave the okay to operate” in part of a major drug-smuggling scheme. Enter, soon after, Ruby the gunrunner to Cuba. His Cuba connection would appear to link him to Santo Trafficante, the Mafia chieftain who was reportedly later to prophesy that President Kennedy “was going to be hit.” Ruby’s apparent connections led to the core of the most enduring suspicions as to who really killed Kennedy.

So far as could later be established, Ruby’s interest in Cuba began six years before the assassination. According to James Beard, a former associate, he stored guns and ammunition at a house on Texas’s southern coast, prior to ferrying the weaponry into Cuba. Beard said he saw “many boxes of new guns, including automatic rifles and handguns” loaded aboard a military-surplus vessel, and that “each time the boat left with guns and ammunition, Jack Ruby was on it.” The shipments were destined for Fidel Castro’s revolutionaries, then still fighting to topple Batista. In the years before the revolution, Castro was supplied and supported from the United States, not least by the leaders of organized crime—currying favor against the possibility that Castro were to prove victorious.

According to Texas gunrunner Robert McKeown, whom the author interviewed, Ruby continued to ship in military supplies after Castro did seize power.
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By the spring of 1959, moreover, he was pursuing another project. He “wanted to talk about getting some people out of Cuba” on behalf of “a man in Las Vegas.” After the assassination, when it emerged that Ruby had been in Havana in 1959, he said he had merely taken an eight-day vacation in Cuba at the invitation of a man named McWillie.

Lewis
McWillie, one of Ruby’s closest friends, had—in the words of a contemporary FBI report—“consolidated his syndicate connections through his associations in Havana, Cuba, with Santo Trafficante… .” He was in Cuba managing the Tropicana nightclub, in which Trafficante had a major interest. He had organized and paid for a weeklong trip to Havana for Ruby, McWillie was to say, in hopes that Ruby would get friends in the press to promote the club. Other information, however, suggests there was more than one visit—and activity that fit not at all with the story of a freeloading vacation in the Caribbean.
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Cuban immigration files were to show that Ruby arrived in Havana on August 8, 1959, flying in from New Orleans. Far from staying in Havana for just a few days, he was still there a full month later. Three witnesses, two attorneys and an architect, recalled having encountered Ruby at the Tropicana Casino in the first week of September, over Labor Day weekend. On September 8, Ruby mailed a postcard from Havana to a female friend in Dallas, mentioning in passing that “Mac”—presumably McWillie—“says hello.” An exit card showed that he flew out of Havana three days later. His travels, however, were not over.

Within twenty-four hours of leaving Havana, documents showed, Ruby entered Cuba again—this time from Miami—stayed for a night, then left for New Orleans. So Ruby made at least two trips, the first lasting more than a month, followed by a forty-eight hour shuttle that can hardly have been part of the pleasure trip Ruby and McWillie claimed. There were almost certainly other visits.

Elaine Mynier, a mutual friend of Ruby and McWillie who worked at the Dallas airport, said she “frequently” saw Ruby and McWillie coming and going. A Delta Airlines agent at New Orleans spoke of Ruby’s “
numerous flights.” On August 10, two days after his first arrival in Havana, a police report had Ruby in Dallas being interviewed about traffic violations. Bank records for the following week placed him in Dallas accessing his safe-deposit box. On August 31, too, he was apparently in Dallas, and he was there again four days later. The Assassinations Committee would conclude that Ruby made at least three trips to Cuba, perhaps more, and “most likely was serving as a courier for gambling interests.”
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While in Cuba, information strongly suggests, Ruby met not only with Lewis McWillie, but also with Santo Trafficante. In the summer of 1959, as one of the most prominent targets of Castro’s gradual clampdown on Mafia gambling and narcotics operations, Trafficante was confined at the Trescornia detention camp on the outskirts of Havana. A former detainee named John Wilson, who was held in the camp at the same time, was to contact U.S. authorities in 1963 when news broke that Jack Ruby had killed alleged assassin Lee Oswald.
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At Trescornia, he reported, he had known “an American gangster called Santos [
sic
],” and that “Santos” had been “visited several times by an American gangster-type named Ruby” who “would come to prison with [a] person bringing food.”
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Years later, in an appearance before the Assassinations Committee, Trafficante would say carefully, “I never remember meeting Jack Ruby … I don’t remember him visiting me, either… . I never had no contact with him. I don’t see why he was going to come and visit me.” The Committee concluded that there was “considerable evidence” that Ruby did visit Trafficante at the camp. It linked him, too, to Trafficante associates in Dallas. One, an old Cuba hand named Russell Matthews, was described by one of his own attorneys as “probably the closest thing to the Mafia we’ve ever seen in Dallas.” There was also James
Dolan, described as one of Dallas’ “most notorious hoodlums,” a man who committed acts of violence on Trafficante’s behalf, and who was also linked to the Marcello network in New Orleans. The telephone number of a Trafficante associate named Jack Todd was found in Ruby’s car after he shot Oswald.

Once they realized their day in Cuba was over, of course, crime bosses had begun backing the anti-Castro cause. Some, notably Trafficante, would agree to help CIA plans to murder Castro. Ruby, however, may at some stage not have played the Cuban game according to the Mob’s new rules. One of Ruby’s lawyers was to note that Ruby was fearful because “he had tried to arrange some sort of a deal with Cuba after Fidel Castro overthrew the Batista regime.” A psychiatrist who visited Ruby reported that there was, “considerable guilt about the fact that he sent guns to Cuba; he feels he helped the enemy and incriminated himself.” Ruby told the psychiatrist, “They got what they wanted on me.”. He did not say who “they” were.