The Hidden History of the JFK Assassination (15 page)

Ruby had many associates in common with Trafficante, but the most likely person to have taken Ruby to see Trafficante was gambling supervisor Lewis McWillie, whom Ruby described as “high class.” Even after the Revolution, McWillie was one of many mobsters still operating in Cuba. While most people think that Fidel Castro shut all the Mafia casinos when he took over, that’s only partially true. For economic reasons, they were quickly reopened. Frank Fiorini (who later renamed himself Frank Sturgis), a Trafficante hoodlum who’d fought alongside Fidel, was made the liaison between the Cuban government and the mob bosses who still ran—even if they no longer owned—the casinos. The former mob casinos would remain open until the fall of 1961.

Jack Ruby admitted frequently that Lewis McWillie was his “idol,” someone he almost worshipped as the personification of mob power and high-level access that Ruby could only dream of. Many years later, when interviewed under oath by the House Select Committee on Assassinations, McWillie prevaricated when asked if Ruby had accompanied him on his visits to Trafficante in prison. McWillie said, “It’s possible he could have . . . I don’t recall it, but he could have. I don’t know for sure . . . I went out there with someone but I don’t recall who
it was. It may have been Ruby. I don’t think so. He could have been.” McWillie testified shortly after the murders of numerous Marcello and Trafficante associates and government witnesses—Giancana, Rosselli, Hoffa, Nicoletti, and others. Since Marcello and Trafficante were still alive and in power when McWillie testified—and he was still working at casinos—his equivocation is as close to a “Yes, Ruby went with me” as the Committee could possibly expect.

As
Rolling Stone
noted in a major investigative article, “In August 1959 Ruby visited Havana at the invitation of Lewis McWillie, the Syndicate’s manager at the Tropicana casino and a man Ruby said he ‘idolized.’ A friend of Ruby’s recently told House investigators that the former errand boy had been summoned to help arrange freedom for Santo Trafficante.”

Official US and Cuban records show a confusing array of several trips by Ruby to Cuba in the late summer of 1959, with unexplained gaps in the travel records indicating that some of his entrances and exits were surreptitious. On August 6, 1959, Ruby met with his FBI handler again. Two days later, on August 8, Ruby flew to Cuba from New Orleans, listing the Capri Hotel and Casino (mostly owned by Trafficante) as his destination. Ten days later, Trafficante was released from detention. Trafficante’s attorney, Frank Ragano, wrote that Trafficante told him he had met with “Raul Castro (Fidel’s brother). ‘We worked out an arrangement,’ he said cryptically.” Ragano said that “most probably the meeting with Raul was decisive in getting him released” but that “nevertheless, there had to be a bribe at some point in the chain of events that led to his freedom.” Ruby may well have helped with that bribe, and/or its aftermath, as his mysterious trips to Cuba continued into September. After his Cuba visits ended, Ruby ceased being an FBI informant on October 2, 1959.

Ruby had one more unusual role to play in Cuba, in early 1960. The Hoffa-brokered plots between the CIA and the Mafia to kill Fidel that began in 1959 were continuing in the early months of 1960, though neither Trafficante nor Ruby’s boss Marcello had any documented role in those plots. However, former Cuban mob powerhouse Meyer Lansky had reportedly placed a million-dollar bounty on killing Fidel Castro, since, unlike Trafficante, Lansky had been unable to reach an accommodation with the Castro brothers.

In January 1960, Tropicana casino manager Lewis McWillie asked Jack Ruby to legally buy four Colt Cobra revolvers in Dallas and bring them to Havana. Jack Ruby was then the manager of two small Dallas nightclubs, including one he fronted for Carlos Marcello’s organization. Because so much gunrunning to Cuba had been going on, the Colt revolvers could have been easily obtained by a gangster like McWillie in Havana. Likewise, Ruby—a career criminal—could have easily obtained such weapons illegally in Dallas. But for some reason McWillie needed these pistols to be easily traced back to a legal purchase in Dallas so that it was clear they weren’t linked to organized crime or any illegal—or CIA—gunrunning operation.

On that occasion, Jack Ruby for some reason balked at McWillie’s request to go to Cuba even though he had visited Cuba several times the previous summer. After Ruby’s refusal, the Tropicana’s McWillie asked Ruby to ship the four pistols to him in Havana. Records and testimony are murky about what happened next and whether or not some of the guns were shipped to Cuba. What is known definitively is that Ruby purchased at least one Colt Cobra.

A few journalists have asked if Jack Ruby was “supplying the pistols to McWillie so they could be [used in an assassination] plot against Castro.” Some evidence does indicate that the episode could
have been part of the continuing plots to kill Fidel brokered by Hoffa between the CIA and the Mafia. Gangster Lewis McWillie had been part of Ruby’s Cuban venture with Hoffa associate Dominick Bartone the previous year, and government files show that McWillie had solid Mafia connections to Meyer Lansky, who also wanted Castro killed. When Ruby bought the pistol for McWillie, Ruby was accompanied by an ex-boxer, possibly close Hoffa associate Barney Baker, described by Robert Kennedy as one of Jimmy Hoffa’s “roving emissaries of violence.” Cuban authorities arrested a “gangster” and his associates for attempting to kill Fidel later in 1960, and among the weapons photographed was a pistol resembling the Colt Cobras McWillie pressed Ruby to buy.

One Colt Cobra definitely purchased by Jack Ruby in January 1960 would find greater infamy more than three years later. It was the pistol Ruby used to shoot accused assassin Lee Oswald on live television on November 24, 1963. Ruby’s notorious gun at the very least came out of his involvement with the Mafia and possibly from the mob’s early work with the CIA to kill Fidel.

Another important factor in Ruby’s character and in JFK’s assassination—the Carousel strip club that Ruby managed in Dallas, across from the posh Adolphus Hotel—also began in 1960. New information for the first time shows that Carlos Marcello and his organization actually controlled the Carousel Club, not Jack Ruby. Ruby was only the club’s manager, but the timing indicates that being allowed to manage the Carousel—and to present himself as its owner—might have been Marcello’s reward to Ruby for his activities in Cuba with Trafficante.

Ruby ran a string of failed clubs before the Carousel, and for decades it was assumed by authorities and historians that Ruby had at
least one investor, his good friend Ralph Paul, who kept lending Ruby huge sums of money for his money-losing ventures. Ruby also owed large sums to the IRS throughout the early 1960s, first approaching $20,000 and by 1963 $40,000. In today’s dollars, that’s $240,000. Yet the House Select Committee on Assassinations found that Paul repeatedly loaned Ruby money, “which eventually may have totaled $15,000” plus an additional “larger sum of money (allegedly $15,000 to $17,000) to assist Ruby” with his taxes. In today’s dollars, that’s at least $180,000. Yet Ralph Paul was only the owner of a relatively small restaurant in Dallas, the Bull-Pen Drive-In, and it’s impossible to imagine he could have come up with those sums let alone continue to loan money to a man who owed the IRS so much money.

Even more bizarre, despite the best efforts of the FBI and the Warren Commission, no one could ever determine who owned the other 50 percent of the Carousel Club. More unusual still, after Ruby became famous for shooting Oswald and the Carousel Club became known nationwide, Ralph Paul simply gave up his 50 percent ownership in the club. Instead of profiting from what could have been a must-see tourist stop (even if Dallas had pulled the club’s liquor license), Ralph Paul simply walked away from his 50 percent ownership of the club and the $180,000 (in today’s dollars) he’d sunk into the club and Jack Ruby. It all makes no sense.

We now know from Carlos Marcello’s admission to Jack Van Laningham during CAMTEX that Marcello’s organization controlled the Carousel Club. One of Marcello’s underbosses in Dallas—most likely Joe Campisi Sr.—funneled the money to Ralph Paul to launder the funds for the Carousel. House Select Committee investigators were confused when Joe Campisi said in an FBI interview that “Ralph Paul [was] his partner.” Campisi’s Egyptian Restaurant was large and
popular, and Campisi was powerful, so he certainly didn’t need Ralph Paul as a partner. However, Joe Campisi’s comment makes perfect sense if he was funneling Marcello money to Paul as part of Paul’s fronting ownership of the Carousel for the mobsters.
*

Still, by the later part of 1960, Ruby got to call the shots at the Carousel and act like a club owner, even though in reality he was simply taking a small percentage of the club’s revenues as a kind of salary for managing the club on behalf of Carlos Marcello. However, this arrangement would have huge ramifications for Marcello less than three years later, when it gave the godfather leverage to get Ruby to risk his life for the godfather after JFK’s murder.

*
Reportedly, Marcello had a hidden interest in many clubs in Dallas, including some or all of the city’s five gay nightclubs (a surprising number for conservative Dallas in the early 1960s and probably possible only if they were operating with Mafia protection).

CHAPTER 6

CIA vs. Castro, and The Kennedys vs. Carlos Marcello

B
Y AUGUST OF 1960 a major development that would have a huge impact on JFK’s murder three years later was in the works for Carlos Marcello and Santo Trafficante: new, greatly expanded plots between the CIA and the Mafia to assassinate Fidel Castro. These new CIA–Mafia plots involving Trafficante and Marcello were the dark secret in the covert war the United States was waging against Cuba. Most of those involved in JFK’s assassination had some role in these new plots, so it’s important to see how they originated.

In 1960 John F. Kennedy was running for President, having announced his candidacy in the same Senate hearing room where Carlos Marcello had been grilled the previous year. His opponent was the two-term Vice President, Richard Nixon. One of the few areas where President Eisenhower allowed Nixon major input on US policy was Cuba. Eisenhower had left Washington the previous year when Fidel Castro had come to the United States, leaving it to Nixon to meet with the new Cuban leader. Instead of offering US financial aid as Castro had hoped (since the former US-backed dictator, Fulgencio Batista—a friend of Nixon—had fled with much of the Cuban treasury), Nixon had lectured Castro and offered no help. Nixon had
also confided to others that he felt Castro was dangerous, and soon after that the CIA began working with Jimmy Hoffa to have the three northeastern mob leaders kill Fidel. Those plots had not worked, and now the 1960 election was rapidly approaching.

Vice President Nixon apparently thought that if Castro was killed before the election, and US troops had to be sent into Cuba to protect Americans and American interests, the voting public would chose the eight-year veteran Vice President over the young and relatively inexperienced Senator Kennedy. Nixon told “a press aide [that] the toppling of Castro would be ‘a real trump card’” for the election, according to Anthony Summers.

As Eisenhower, the former General in command of America’s D-Day forces and now elder statesman, prepared to end his last term as President, he was cautious about Cuba. He clearly didn’t want to leave office in the middle of a war with the island nation, but he delegated some aspects of Cuba policy to his Vice President, Nixon. According to many sources—including President Eisenhower—the March 1960 meeting of the National Security Council authorized neither a huge Bay of Pigs invasion force nor the CIA–Mafia plots to kill Fidel. Instead, its general resolution involved support for anti-Castro operations and the creation of a US-backed coalition of exile groups. Among those helping to coordinate that coalition were two veterans of the CIA’s 1954 Guatemala coup, friends E. Howard Hunt and David Atlee Phillips.

Nixon, however, seemed to press for more direct action, and the CIA met with him dozens of times about the Cuban problem, conferences for which the notes have never been released. Even so, we do know the result of those meetings. The original CIA–Mafia plots, which began in 1959, were so cautiously structured at arm’s length,
using Hoffa as a cutout, that they hadn’t been effective. It’s also likely that President Eisenhower didn’t even know about them.

Nixon apparently believed that more direct action was needed, and soon. He ordered his National Security Aide, General Robert Cushman, to meet with Hunt. Later Hunt admitted that he had written one of the first CIA memos calling for the assassination of Fidel Castro, though it—like so much other CIA information about Hunt—was withheld from Congressional investigators and has still not been released. Hunt later wrote that “Cushman had urged me to inform him of any project difficulties the Vice President might be able to resolve. For Nixon was, Cushman told me, determined that the effort should not fail.” Cushman told Hunt that Nixon was the “chief architect . . . the honcho” of the US effort to topple Fidel. That was confirmed years later when President Nixon told a White House aide that he had been “deeply involved” in the Cuban operation.

E. Howard Hunt later “confirmed that his proposal that Castro be killed had been discussed at his June [1960] meeting with Nixon’s aide General Cushman.” Anthony Summers points out “that Cushman would have passed the information on to Nixon; it was after all his responsibility to do so.” Given Hunt’s positive previous meetings with Nixon and Hunt’s key role in the successful Guatemala coup, it’s logical that Nixon would have viewed Hunt—and his proposal—favorably. Nixon also probably knew that the United States had been trying without success to assassinate Fidel, as Hunt wanted, since the previous year. If Hunt wasn’t involved in helping plan Fidel’s assassination before his meeting with Nixon’s aide, he almost certainly was after it.