Excerpt From My New Book "JFK and the End of America": How Ruby Was Able to Kill Oswald with Such Exquisite Timing

From chapter 5:

Time was of the essence; the longer Oswald lived, the greater the chances he would reveal too much. Having missed several opportunities to kill Oswald in the immediate aftermath of the assassination, the plotters’ choices were limited once Oswald was taken into custody. Few criminals die while in police protection. Killing Oswald in his jail cell deep in the bowels of the Dallas police headquarters would have been too suspicious. The cops would have been blamed, and talk of their complicity would have been rampant. It would have been one thing to kill an armed and dangerous Oswald fleeing from the Tippit murder or hiding in the Texas Theatre. Those incidents could have been explained away as self-defense; the cops would have been hailed as heroes. But it would have been quite another thing to murder a jailed and unarmed Oswald. The cops would have had a lot of explaining to do. No, an outsider, ostensibly unconnected to Oswald, needed to do the job. And it needed to be done in a very public way so that Americans could see for themselves who was responsible. The solution was a sleazy strip-joint owner who acted on his own.
Ruby was able to gain access to the city jail because he was well-known to the cops. For years he had plied them with free food and booze, and he had treated them as VIPs when they visited his strip club. Cops knew if they wanted to get laid, make a bet, or sip a free beer, Ruby was their guy. Many of Ruby’s strippers ended up as wives or girlfriends of Dallas policemen. So Ruby’s face was a familiar one at the city jail, and no one batted an eye when he showed up for Oswald viewings over the long weekend.

Still, Ruby was not the perfect choice; his Mafia connections were conspicuous, and it would take little effort to connect him to Santos Trafficante in Cuba in 1959 and H.L. Hunt in Dallas just the day before the assassination. But who else could they find on short notice? And who would be willing to do it? Perhaps Ruby was the back-up plan all along, and when Oswald made it to the jailhouse alive, Ruby started building his cover story. He told several people he didn’t want poor Jackie Kennedy to have to make the trip to Dallas for a trial.

The slightest peek into Ruby’s past indicates he was beholden to gangsters most of his life. In the year prior to the assassination he made phone calls to at least seven organized crime members who had been prosecuted by Bobby Kennedy and the Justice Department. A Ruby stripper with a stage name of Gail Raven told Jefferson Morley in August 2016 that “Ruby had no choice but to kill Oswald,” implying that he was ordered to do so by his superiors in organized crime. Oh, and that “saving Jackie a trip to Dallas” story? An absolute lie, said Raven.207

Ruby’s phone records also reveal that he made several calls to his friend Breck Wall on November 23. Wall, at the time, was in Galveston, Texas, with David Ferrie, CIA recruiter and puppet master in the Louisiana Civil Air Patrol.208 Ferrie also worked as the private pilot of New Orleans mob king, Carlos Marcello. Dallas was part of Marcello’s territory, and all organized crime activity conducted by Ruby or anyone other hood in Dallas came under Marcello’s control. Ruby’s calls on November 23 might have been an attempt to receive instructions from Marcello, relayed through Ferrie and Wall, on how and where to eliminate Oswald.

Marcello, one of the most powerful gangsters in the country, had a special hatred for the Kennedys. In April 1961 he was apprehended by agents of Robert Kennedy’s Justice Department, flown to Guatemala, and unceremoniously dumped there. He had been deported without warning and without having the chance to pack or notify his family. He was not a man to suffer these indignities meekly. For the next two years he groused angrily about getting revenge. He likened the Kennedys to a “stone in his shoe,” and, referring to JFK’s assassination, he remarked that if you cut off a dog’s head (Jack’s), the tail (Bobby) stops wagging.

Regardless of who gave the order to kill Oswald, Ruby could not have accomplished his task without inside help from the Dallas police. Ruby said as much himself—“…who else could have timed it so perfectly by seconds?...someone in the police department is guilty of giving the information as to when Lee Harvey Oswald was coming down.”209 Testifying to the Warren Commission, Ruby admitted that it was “…a million and one shot, that I should happen to be down there at that particular second when this man comes out of whatever it was—an elevator or whatever it was—all these things—plus the fact…that they saw us [Ruby and Oswald] together at the club...”210

Ruby’s rambling, and sometimes incoherent, statements offered stark contradictions and a hodgepodge of tangential names and dates. Mixed in were conspiracy innuendos, alternating with his insistence that he was not part of any conspiracy. Taken as a whole, Ruby’s words seem a desperate plea to Earl Warren, implying that his family was in danger and that he could only tell the truth in Washington under the protection of the federal government. When he was denied that protection, he reverted to his ludicrous cover story—he acted out of pity for Mrs. Kennedy, and killed Oswald without any forethought or malice. Ruby, perhaps tricked into believing that a plea of extreme emotional distress would get him off, laid the groundwork for his defense by telling many acquaintances of being overly distraught before he shot Oswald. He even went so far as to approach local broadcaster Wes Wise to pre-establish his phony rationale; Ruby lamented that it would be “terrible for that little lady [Jackie]” to have to come to Dallas for a trial. Sure enough, Wise was called as a defense witness at Ruby’s trial to testify about the accused’s extreme emotional state before he gunned down Oswald.211

Still in all, Ruby was doomed as soon as he pulled the trigger in the city jail on Sunday morning. He couldn’t refuse the plotters’ orders, and once he had done it he knew he was in a terrible spot. If he divulged his real reason for killing Oswald, he knew he and his family could be harmed by the plotters. He was trying to save his own neck, but didn’t know quite how to do it. He must have been wondering how high in the government the plot went, and was testing the waters with Warren. “I have been used for a purpose…you have a lost cause, Earl Warren. You don't stand a chance,” he told the head of the commission.212

Ruby’s other lame attempt at proving that his shooting of Oswald was impulsive, emotional and unconnected to a larger plot was the money wire he sent to one of his strippers just minutes before the assassination. Ruby shot Oswald at precisely 11:21 a.m.; just four minutes prior to that, he stopped at the Western Union office about a block from the Dallas jail, to wire $25 to Karen “Little Lynn” Carlin, one of his nightclub performers. Supposedly Carlin called Ruby earlier that morning and said she needed a quick loan for rent and food. This was meant to provide Ruby a reason to be in the area of the Oswald transfer. But according to Dallas reporter Bob Huffaker, Ruby told Carlin that he was headed downtown anyway.213 Why was Ruby headed downtown anyway? The only plausible answer, given his penchant for being everywhere the action was that weekend, is to be in the city jail basement for the Oswald transfer.

By informing Carlin that he was going to be downtown that Sunday morning anyway, Ruby proved that his entrance into the jail at the exact moment Oswald appeared was not simply a weird coincidence. His admission of pre-planning destroys the lone-nutters’ argument that if Ruby had pre-planned the killing of Oswald, he would not have risked stopping at a Western Union office for a transaction that could have held him up for several minutes, thus missing Oswald’s transfer and the opportunity to kill him. In fact, Ruby’s admission compels us to look at the timing of the Ruby-Oswald confrontation in quite a different way, one which is much more in line with the weekend’s other events: namely, there were just too many coincidences to explain away. If the circumstances of Oswald’s transfer from the city jail to the county jail were a set-up, arranged so that Ruby could silence Oswald once and for all, then it didn’t really matter if Ruby arrived at 11:20 a.m. or 11:30 a.m. or midnight. Oswald’s transfer was detained until Ruby was in place to shoot the prisoner in the Dallas police basement. In other words, it is much more logical and likely that the exquisite timing of the Ruby-Oswald confrontation was a product of planning than it was coincidence; because if it wasn’t, then all we are left with are fortuitous happenstances to account for the timing, and that is one more overstuffed coincidence that is just too big to swallow. One Dallas officer, Elmer “Sonny” Boyd, later conceded that Ruby could not possibly have planned the murder by himself. 214

The Warren Commission would have us believe that Ruby just happened to show up at the Western Union office on Main street, a short distance from the Dallas jail, just minutes before Oswald was moved; that Ruby just happened to be carrying his revolver in his jacket pocket, something he normally did not do; that Ruby, after sending his wire, a transaction which luckily did not last too long, just happened to wander down the street to the Dallas jail and easily find a way into the supposedly heavily guarded basement; that Ruby just happened to walk right into the perfect position to murder Oswald, whose transfer had fortunately been delayed just long enough for Ruby to appear on the scene; and that Oswald’s bodyguards just happened to be inept and distracted. It is a ludicrous narrative, full of flukes and accidents. It makes sense only as the product of scrupulous pre-planning. Ruby’s actions were purposeful, and Oswald was being held until his killer arrived.

This leads to the question, which Dallas officers aided Ruby? Researchers have zeroed in on several suspicious circumstances. Sergeant Patrick Dean was a close acquaintance of Ruby, and he was in charge of security for Oswald’s transfer.215 Dean could have quietly let Ruby in via an alley entrance in order to avoid Officer Roy Vaughn who was stationed at the main ramp. To his dying day, Vaughn swore that Ruby did not pass by him that day. If Vaughn told the truth, it is almost certain that Ruby was ushered into a side entrance by someone in the Dallas police department. Dean vehemently denied doing this; however, no less than Warren Commission counsel Burt Griffin doubted Dean’s story. Griffin accused Dean of lying when Dean testified that Ruby had walked down the Main street ramp past Vaughn.216

If it’s true that the Oswald transfer was delayed until Ruby’s arrival, who was responsible for this and how was it justified? Chief Jesse Curry’s actions may provide some clues. The timeline of the transfer was given flexibility by Curry; he told reporters that it would not happen before 10 a.m., but gave no specifics beyond that. Curry also rejected Sheriff Bill Decker’s suggestion that they “abort the public transfer” and move Oswald early in the morning when no press would be there.217 Ultimately the transfer of the prisoner was delayed when Curry received a phone call from Dallas mayor Earle Cabell.218 If Curry had taken Decker’s suggestions, or refused to linger on the phone with Cabell, the Ruby-Oswald confrontation would not have occurred as it did. A 2017 release of long-suppressed ARRB documents verifies that Earle Cabell, like his brother Charles (fired by JFK in 1962), was a CIA agent. He had a 201 personality file, and he signed his CIA secrecy agreement in October of 1956; for unknown reasons, these documents were considered irrelevant by ARRB overseer John Tunheim. Having now been outed, Cabell’s activities on the weekend of the assassination warrant closer scrutiny. He oversaw some of the motorcade arrangements; he greeted the President at Love Field, and Cabell’s wife presented Jackie with red flowers, not the customary Texas yellow roses which would have been garishly smeared by the bloody massacre Cabell knew was coming; and he distracted Chief Curry just long enough to allow Ruby time to plug the patsy in the basement of the Dallas jail. Were these his duties as a CIA operative on the weekend of 11/22/63? He certainly had motive, means and opportunity to aid and abet the plotters. And he was intricately intertwined with the other suspicious characters in Dallas.

But Ruby needed even more inside help to accomplish his mission. Even the HSCA stated that it was unlikely Ruby entered the basement without police help. In the minutes before Ruby’s arrival, security guards were removed from the area where it is suspected Ruby entered the garage. There were also unlocked doors along that side of the building. The Dallas police withheld this information from the Warren Commission.

Getting Ruby to the kill zone at the exact right moment was only half the challenge. He needed an opening, and he got it from the casual formation arranged around the accused presidential assassin. Dallas police officers did not surround their prisoner as they should have. Officers James Leavelle and L.C. Graves, who escorted the prisoner, made no attempt to stop Ruby. Leavelle, in particular, gazing in another direction and positioning himself away from the crowd of people to Oswald’s left, seemed to be unconcerned with his prisoner’s safety until it was too late. Prior to escorting Oswald, Leavelle joked with his prisoner that he hoped any assassin would be a good shot. Minutes later, Oswald was shot. Was this just a spooky premonition? Leavelle used the copious TV cameras and photographers’ flashes as his excuse; he was temporarily blinded by the light. Fair enough, but why were news reporters and cameramen allowed in the basement in the first place? Dallas police should have restricted the area to law enforcement only; as it was, the people who were permitted in were not required to show identification.

Leavelle’s post-assassination activities raise alarms about his integrity. He intimidated witnesses and made up strange stories for his own purposes. He showed up one night at the home of assassination witness Victoria Adams and frightened her with his presence. Adams, recall, descended the stairs of the TSBD right after the shots were fired and insisted to the Warren Commission that she heard and saw no one on the steps of the TSBD at the very time Oswald, if he had fired shots from the sixth floor and then run down to the second floor, should have passed her on those steps. Leavelle told Adams that she needed to be re-interviewed because all the original witness statements had been lost in a fire. No report of any such fire exists.219

Later in life, Leavelle, exploiting his dubious role as the man who failed to protect the most important prisoner of the 20th century, became a mini-celebrity and toured the country spreading lies about the assassination. Even in his 90s Leavelle was earning speaker’s fees and signing autographs for the gullible who attended his lectures. Capitalizing on the 50th anniversary of the assassination, Leavelle spoke to an uncritical crowd at Washburn University in 2013 and made these outrageous, unsubstantiated claims that were swallowed whole by the audience: 1) JFK’s body showed no evidence of shots from the front; 2) Only three shots were fired and all three were fired by Oswald from behind; 3) No shots missed their mark.

My first thoughts were: 1) Does anyone teach history at the universities where Leavelle makes his speeches? 2) Who would pay 92-year-old Jim Leavelle, who failed at the most important task he ever had in his life, to spread his preposterous falsehoods? 3) What sort of real college students/journalists would let him get away with it? Leavelle said, "...the first shot struck Kennedy, the second shot struck Texas Governor John Connally, sitting in front of Kennedy, and the third hit Kennedy."220 In other words, no shots missed their targets. This would certainly be news to bystander James Tague who was struck in the face by a piece of pavement dislodged by a shot that completely missed the limousine. And his fellow Dallas detective Roger Craig would have certainly refuted Leavelle’s bullet count. Craig saw fresh metal marks on the Elm Street curb, indicative of a second missed shot. And Leavelle must have overlooked the widespread reports of bullets found by his fellow officers in the grass in Dealey Plaza. Apparently Jim considered himself an expert in medical evidence too. His assertion that there was no entrance wound is refuted by Parkland doctors. Leavelle also claimed that three tramps arrested a few blocks from the Kennedy shooting were just tramps travelling through Dallas. No mention of the fact that two of the tramps were identified as CIA killers Charles Rogers and Charles V. Harrelson. And he ignored the fact that the "policemen" who made the "arrest" let an interloper come between them and their "prisoners." The interloper was positively identified as Edward Lansdale, Air Force general and CIA officer who many believe was the operational manager on the ground in Dealey Plaza.

The bitter irony is that if Leavelle had done his job on November 24, 1963, we might have gotten much closer to the truth much sooner, possibly soon enough to actually round up the culprits. Through his own bungling, Leavelle ensured a long, secure life for himself, albeit one based on lies. When he let Ruby just walk right up and murder Oswald, he furthered the cause of the plotters, and rather than being chastised or punished for his incompetence, he went on to profit from it at the expense of the dead President.

Jack Ruby, the murderer Leavelle failed to see right in front of him, eventually came to understand that, like other dupes in the plot, he was doomed. His sponsors couldn’t prevent his conviction, and Ruby, probably feeling abandoned by them, bitterly spurted the real truth before he died: “Everything pertaining to what’s happening has never come to the surface. The world will never know the true facts, of what occurred, my motives. The people that had so much to gain and had such an ulterior motive for putting me in the position I’m in, will never let the true facts come above board to the world.”221

Asked if these men were in very high positions, Ruby replied, “Yes.”

Ruby appeared to be in good health until late 1966 when he suddenly came down with what was, at first, diagnosed as a common cold and then pneumonia. It turned out to be cancer, and within weeks Ruby was dead. Before he died, Ruby told others that he had been injected with cancer cells.222 JFK researchers have focused their suspicions on Dr. Louis Jolyon West, a CIA psychiatrist who “examined” Ruby while Ruby was incarcerated. West studied the effects of sleep deprivation on brainwashing.223 His work in MK-ULTRA, the super-secret CIA program that dealt with mind control on human subjects, is now a known fact. MK-ULTRA was responsible for the deaths of many innocent subjects. West’s mere presence in Ruby’s cell suggests that the CIA was invested in either brainwashing Ruby or silencing him permanently. Ruby died on January 3, 1967, but not before telling the world that a whole new kind of government was going to take over America. He was referring to a kind of fascist state where our leaders, having learned the lesson of Dallas, would be controlled by the military-intelligence state and a small group of the wealthiest businessmen in oil, finance and the war industry.

Read more at https://www.amazon.com/dp/1948260085