The Hidden History of the JFK Assassination (23 page)

According to Carlos Marcello, Ruby found the money he needed by taking it from cash that flowed through the Carousel Club. As Marcello explained to Jack Van Laningham years later, his organization actually controlled the Carousel strip club; Ruby merely managed it. Since the club was across the street from Dallas’s most distinguished hotel, the Adolphus, whenever conventions or company meetings were held at the hotel, business at the Carousel was especially brisk, and Ruby probably figured it would be easy to skim some of the proceeds for his own pressing financial needs. Marcello had hidden ownership of several clubs in Dallas, and his financial operatives would have known what all the clubs should be making at particular times of the year. When the Carousel came up short compared to in previous years or other clubs, it wouldn’t have been hard for Marcello’s people to confirm Jack’s ongoing theft. Marcello would have been furious that a longtime mobster like Ruby would take such action, knowing the deadly consequences if caught.

However, just as in 1959, Jack Ruby was once again the right person in the right situation at the right time to help Carlos Marcello and Santo Trafficante. Beginning in late April 1963, Ruby became of great interest to Marcello, and not just for his skimming. The former director of the House Select Committee on Assassinations wrote that “though the [Warren] Commission apparently believed that press
speculation about the President’s trip [to Dallas] did not begin until September 13, 1963 . . . a story in the
Dallas Times Herald
on April 24, 1963 . . . quoted Vice President Johnson as saying that President Kennedy might ‘visit Dallas and other major Texas cities [that] . . . summer.’” Starting the following month, the HSCA “discovered a pattern of [Ruby] telephone calls to individuals with criminal affiliations, calls that could only be described as suspicious.”

Jack Ruby’s well-documented long-distance phone calls provide a clear record that he was becoming involved in something quite unusual by May 1963. After making fewer than ten long-distance calls in April 1963, Ruby suddenly more than doubled that total to twenty-five in May and more than thirty in June. He continued on that approximate pace through September, but after JFK’s trip to Dallas began firming up for November, Ruby’s total skyrocketed to more than 80 long-distance calls in October 1963 and more than 110 in just the first three weeks of November. Even in those calls, Ruby would have relied on coded words and phrases common in transacting Mafia business, often going through one or more intermediaries to get information to its ultimate destination.

Carlos Marcello gave Jack Van Laningham the godfather’s own unvarnished view of Jack Ruby. According to the FBI file, in talking “about Jack Ruby,” Marcello said he “had met him in Dallas, Texas. He set him up in the bar business there. He said that Ruby was a homo son-of-a-bitch but good to have around to report to him what was happening in town. Marcello told us that all the police were on the take, and as long as he kept the money flowing they let him operate anything in Dallas that he wanted to. Ruby would come to Churchill Farms to report to Marcello, so the little man knew what was happening all the time.”

Marcello’s admission about Ruby goes beyond anything known previously but makes sense in light of information uncovered by Congressional investigators and the FBI. It’s important to remember that Ruby’s ties to the Mafia were completely unknown to the general public until the late 1970s, and even then most writers overlooked Ruby’s connections to several of Marcello’s close associates. Even the landmark biography of Ruby by Seth Kantor, 1978’s
Who Was Jack Ruby?
, doesn’t mention Marcello, though it was the first book to outline Ruby’s ties to numerous other mobsters. Dallas reporter Earl Golz was one of the first to clearly make the connection between Ruby and Marcello’s organization and Marcello’s control of vice in Dallas, a link soon confirmed by the 1979 House Select Committee on Assassinations report. However, it was not until the extensive print and television coverage that accompanied the twenty-fifth anniversary of JFK’s murder in November 1988—and publication of Marcello’s biography by John Davis in January 1989—that the general public really began to learn about Ruby’s ties to the mob. It’s important to note that Van Laningham’s report on Marcello’s remarks about Ruby was written up and in FBI files well before that.

In contrast to the way the FBI presented Ruby to the public and the Warren Commission, the Bureau’s own files—from 1963 and earlier—confirmed Ruby’s close ties to the Mafia. A formerly secret “FBI Damage Control” memo, first published by historian Gerald D. McKnight in 2005, was actually prepared by the Bureau in the late 1970s in case it had to defend “its investigation into the Kennedy assassination.” This was a type of tickler memo, highlighting problems and information the FBI knew it had withheld from the public and press. The FBI Damage Control memo regarding “Jack Ruby” admits that the Bureau had “extensive teletypes and reports on [his] organized
crime connections.” In contrast to that secret, internal admission, the FBI essentially used statements from several of Ruby’s mob associates to claim to the Commission that Ruby had no mob associates.

Other statements Marcello made to Van Laningham are easily confirmed. Even today, most people are unaware that Jack Ruby was gay (or bisexual), even though such information comes up almost forty times in Warren Commission documents and Ruby’s roommate at the time of JFK’s murder described himself as Ruby’s “boyfriend.”

FBI files also back up Marcello’s remark that in Dallas, “all the police were on the take, and as long as he kept the money flowing they let him operate anything in Dallas that he wanted to.” FBI memos mentioned earlier—and made available to the Warren Commission but not mentioned in its widely published
Report
—say that Ruby “was well acquainted with virtually every officer of the Dallas Police force” and was “the pay-off man for the Dallas Police Department.”

With the FBI holding such information close to its vest, journalists and historians had to ferret out the details of Ruby’s involvement with the mob and Marcello’s men bit by bit. Almost four years after Marcello’s 1985 admission to Jack Van Laningham—which was withheld from the public at the time and for the next twenty years—John H. Davis detailed tantalizing connections between Ruby and several Marcello associates. These included Marcello’s Dallas mob lieutenants Joe Civello and Joe Campisi Sr. Campisi was the first person to visit Ruby in prison after he shot Oswald; he also met with Ruby the night before JFK’s murder. Davis documented that in the months and weeks leading up to JFK’s assassination, Ruby visited or made calls to five people in Marcello’s organization. In addition to those five, Davis writes, “It appears that Jack Ruby knew at least two of Carlos Marcello’s brothers” via the slot machine and strip club businesses.

The most startling admission about Ruby that Carlos Marcello made to Van Laningham concerned a dramatic meeting that Ruby was summoned to, where the godfather confronted Ruby about stealing his money—and made him an offer he couldn’t refuse. Van Laningham is a large man with a deep voice, and he is normally good natured. However, when he first related to me what Marcello told him about that meeting, he took on the menacing tone that Marcello conveyed to Ruby at that meeting.

Marcello confronted Ruby in the old farmhouse in the middle of his sixty-four-hundred-acre Churchill Farms property. Most of it had once been swampland, and some of it still was. Marcello disposed of the bodies of men who crossed him at Churchill Farms, a fact not lost on any member of the godfather’s organization summoned there for a meeting. Recall Marcello’s murder of Thomas Siracusa described in
Chapter Four
; his body, according to the FBI, was “thrown into a tub of lye and after decomposition, the partially liquefied remains were poured into the swamp.”

Ruby, knowing he was stealing money from Marcello, was probably already nervous when he arrived at the isolated farmhouse. One can only imagine his fear and pleading when Marcello confronted him about his thievery, and the fury Marcello unleashed on him.

As Marcello described the scene to Van Laningham, Ruby was trembling and begging, willing to do anything to keep from paying the ultimate price for stealing from the godfather. If it eventually meant going into a crowded police basement full of well-armed cops, pulling out his gun, and shooting a prisoner, Ruby had no choice but to do it. As indicated by Ruby’s later remarks, it was likely not just Ruby’s life that was on the line but those of his family (two brothers, a sister, nieces, and nephews) as well. An undoubtedly grateful Ruby left the
meeting with his life but would become increasingly involved in the dangerous JFK plot. As with any sensitive Mafia operation, Ruby’s participation would be on a need-to-know basis, getting only limited amounts of information about the plot when he needed to know it.

The FBI has released files with Marcello’s remarks about Ruby written in the 1980s, and we also have Jack Van Laningham’s videotaped oral history with additional details about Marcello’s Ruby comments. Marcello’s revelations were also recorded by the FBI’s secret CAMTEX taping system. However, none of the CAMTEX tapes or transcripts have been released as the 1992 JFK Act requires, and they should be so that the public can hear Marcello’s own words about the matter.

Using information compiled by the House Select Committee on Assassinations, it’s possible to pinpoint the likely time of Marcello’s confrontation with Ruby. Committee investigators compiled detailed information on Ruby’s many calls and visits to New Orleans in 1963, usually to people or places connected to Marcello. But they were unable to find out where Ruby stayed during his visit to New Orleans from June 5 to June 8, 1963. One journalist has suggested that Ruby may have stayed at Churchill Farms during that time, which would account for the lack of any record. Ruby had called a Marcello associate several times before that visit, and Ruby called a club run by one of Marcello’s brothers two days after he returned to Dallas.

FBI files show that “on June 22, 1963”—two weeks after Ruby’s visit to New Orleans—a horse trainer for one of Carlos Marcello’s brothers said he was in “a bookie joint” in New Orleans, where he worked part-time. The horse trainer told the FBI that another one of Marcello’s brothers came in and spoke to the owner. The trainer overheard Marcello’s brother say, “[T]he word is out to get the Kennedy family.”

In 1963 as in 1959, Jack Ruby was not a major player but had been given an offer he couldn’t refuse because he knew the right people in the right places. Ruby worked in a city controlled by Carlos Marcello, a city that was expected to be visited by JFK. In Cuba, Ruby had met and tried to help Santo Trafficante, and he was familiar with Tampa, having once lived there and sometimes visiting the city while scouting strip acts. Ruby had worked for Johnny Rosselli’s Chicago Mafia and knew that city well. Jimmy Hoffa’s son admits that his father knew Jack Ruby. The mob bosses and Hoffa had more than a dozen associates in common with Ruby, making it easy to communicate with Ruby through intermediaries, as Ruby’s phone records confirm. Ruby was also a small part of Marcello and Trafficante’s drug network, which would also figure into the JFK plot. Finally, Ruby had the connections with the Dallas Police to arrange for anyone blamed for the assassination in Dallas to be quickly killed. If that didn’t happen, Ruby would have to do the job himself, and the same would likely be true if the assassination occurred in a city besides Dallas.

In preparation for Ruby’s help with the JFK plot, and to provide cover for his activities, he may have been given a small role in the CIA–Mafia Castro assassination plots. By the fall of 1963, Jack Ruby would be having face-to-face meetings with Johnny Rosselli in Miami while the CIA–Mafia plots to kill Castro were continuing.

Carlos Marcello had also apparently given Ruby a substantial financial incentive for producing results in his work on the JFK plot. Several months after the Marcello meeting, and shortly before JFK’s trip to Dallas, Ruby began to make plans to move away from the lower-middle-class Oak Cliff neighborhood. He planned for a new home in the most expensive and exclusive part of Dallas, Turtle Creek, where prominent citizens such as General Edwin Walker lived. Also
around that same time, Ruby talked to his tax attorney, claiming “he had a connection who would supply him money to settle his long-standing” and huge IRS debt. In a few months, Ruby had gone from being desperate for money to being afraid of being killed to feeling like he was finally ready to hit the financial big time.

Ruby had one more set of skills that made him valuable to Marcello and Trafficante in their JFK plot: his experience with Cuba and gunrunning. Cuba would provide the godfathers the key they needed to kill JFK in a way that would prevent high US officials from conducting a truly thorough investigation to avoid exposing secrets that could trigger—in the words of one memo—“World War III.”

*
The House Select Committee on Assassinations analyzed both photos and found them to be genuine.

*
The Walker–Ruby connection made by the handyman is interesting because both men were closeted gays, something not known by the public at the time. For Ruby, that fact was shown by numerous FBI memos and for Walker by his later arrest in Dallas for soliciting gay sex from an undercover officer.

*
When Knight heard about the Los Angeles mobster, the man was assumed to be LA mob boss Mickey Cohen, since he was the most famous gangster in America at the time. But Cohen was in prison then, so the LA mobster was likely someone like Johnny Rosselli.

CHAPTER 9

Marcello and Trafficante Infiltrate JFK’s Secret Cuba Plan

B
Y THE SPRING of 1963, Carlos Marcello, Santo Trafficante, and Johnny Rosselli had the motive to assassinate President Kennedy—and in many ways the CIA–Mafia plots to kill Castro provided the means. CIA Deputy Director for Plans Richard Helms was still hiding those plots from John and Robert Kennedy and his own CIA Director. By using people linked to those operations in their still-developing plan to assassinate JFK, the Mafia chiefs could employ people and equipment for what appeared to be CIA operations—but later some would seem to be linked to JFK’s assassination, forcing CIA officials such as Helms to cover up or destroy much crucial information. After all, in 1963 high US government officials could not afford to let the world know they were trying to topple or kill a foreign leader such as Castro only months after the Cuban Missile Crisis—especially using dangerous criminals.