Jack Ruby
Jacob Leon Rubenstein (March 25, 1911 – January 3, 1967) changed his name to Jack Leon Ruby in December 1947. A Dallas nightclub owner, he murdered Lee Harvey Oswald on November 24, 1963, two days after Oswald was arrested for the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.
Family and early life
Jack Ruby was born Jacob Rubenstein to Joseph Rubenstein (1871 -1958) and Fannie Turek Rutkowski or Rokowsky in Chicago, Illinois, in 1911. His Polish-born parents were Orthodox Jews.
Joseph Rubenstein was born in the town of Sokolov, located near Warsaw, Poland, then part of Imperial Russia. He was a carpenter as was his father. He joined the Russian army in 1893, serving in the artillery. He married while in military service. Joseph later was assigned to forces positioned in China, Korea and Siberia. He grew to detest army life and reportedly "walked away" from it in 1898. The Rubensteins left the Russian Empire about four years later. They briefly lived in the United Kingdom and then Canada. They entered the United States in 1903, and the following year they settled in the heavily Jewish 24th Ward on Chicago's West Side.
Conflicting birth dates for Jacob Rubenstein, from March to June of 1911, were quoted by various sources and given by Ruby at various times. The fifth of his parents' eight living children, he had a troubled childhood and adolescence, marked by juvenile delinquency and time spent in foster homes. Young Ruby sold horse-racing tip sheets and various other novelties, then acted as business agent for a local refuse collectors union that later became part of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters. Ruby briefly came to public attention in December 1939 when he was implicated in the fatal shooting of the union's president, attorney Leon Cooke, but was cleared of any wrongdoing. In memory of Cooke, Ruby later adopted "Leon" as his middle name.
Organized crime links
As a youngster, Ruby ran errands for Al Capone's Mafia organization. During the 1930s, he frequented race tracks in Illinois and California. Ruby was drafted in 1943 and served in the Army Air Forces during World War II, working as an aircraft mechanic at bases in the US until 1946. Upon discharge, Ruby returned to Chicago.
In 1947, Ruby moved to Dallas, where he and his brothers soon afterward shortened their surnames from Rubenstein to Ruby. The stated reason for changing the family name had been that Jack and his brothers had opened up a mail order business and feared that some customers would refuse to do business with Jews. Jack later went on to manage various nightclubs, strip clubs, and dancehalls. Among the strippers Ruby befriended was Candy Barr. He developed close ties to many Dallas police officers, who frequented his nightclubs where Ruby showered them with large quantities of liquor and other favors. Ruby went to Cuba in 1959 on one of his gun-running ventures and to visit a Mafia-connected friend, influential Dallas gambler Lewis McWillie, whom Fidel Castro had briefly imprisoned. McWillie was also connected to leading mobsters Meyer Lansky, Carlos Marcello and Santo Trafficante Jr.
Public assassination
Ruby (also known as "Sparky," reportedly because of his short temper) frequently carried a handgun, and witnesses saw him with a handgun in the halls of the Dallas police headquarters on several occasions after President Kennedy's assasination and arrest of Lee Harvey Oswald on November 22, 1963. In addition, it is known that Ruby impersonated a newspaper reporter and was at the police station on the night of November 22, though the reason he went there is unknown.
The publicity-obsessed Ruby, who at the time owned the Carousel nightclub in Dallas, came to international attention when he shot and fatally wounded the 24-year-old Oswald on Sunday, November 24, 1963, at 11:21 AM CST while authorities were preparing to transfer Oswald by car from police headquarters to a nearby jail. Millions of viewers saw the shooting on television. It marked the first live broadcast of a homicide in television history.
When Ruby was arrested immediately after the shooting, he stated to several witnesses that his killing of Oswald would show the world that "Jews have guts," that he helped the city of Dallas "redeem" itself in the eyes of the public, and that Oswald's death would spare Jacqueline Kennedy the ordeal of appearing at Oswald's court trial. Later, however, he claimed he shot Oswald on the spur of the moment when the opportunity presented itself, without considering any reason for doing so. The weapon used by Ruby was a snub-nosed Colt Cobra .38 with the serial number 2744 LW.
The route that Ruby took to get into the basement of the Dallas police headquarters and prisoner holding area has been disputed. Some potential routes suggested that Ruby had to have received help from authorities inside the building, though many journalists entered the building that Sunday without having their credentials properly checked. Ruby stated he entered the jail via the entrance ramp, and a former Dallas police officer, Napoleon Daniels, stated he saw Ruby use the ramp. Others dispute this claim, arguing that Ruby had in truth entered the basement from inside police headquarters itself. One friend of Ruby commented, revealingly: "He (Ruby) practically lived at the (police) station, and they (the police) lived at his place" (the Carousel Club).
Motivation
Ruby's motives have been debated. Some believe that Ruby carried out Mafia orders with a "hit," because he was actually part of a conspiracy to assassinate the president. According to this theory, Ruby silenced Oswald to prevent Oswald from testifying at his upcoming trial. Suspicion was aroused by the fact that Ruby was able to freely enter a supposedly secure area, armed with a loaded, concealed revolver. Others have suggested that Ruby was an emotionally unstable, obsessive publicity-seeker who revered Kennedy and was seeking vengeance on his own. Shortly before Ruby's death from a pulmonary embolism (although by the fall of 1966 Ruby was also suffering from rapidly spreading lung cancer, with which he believed he had been deliberately infected) on January 3, 1967, a friend insisted that Ruby tell the truth before he died. Ruby replied, "Listen, you know me well, and you know I'm a reasonable businessman. I wouldn't have done it if I did not have to do it." In spite of rambling comments that might be interpreted differently, Ruby to the end insisted that he had not been part of any assassination conspiracy. As his mental condition deteriorated, however, Ruby claimed that Jews were being slaughtered as part of a second Holocaust in the building where he was staying while awaiting a new trial.
Prosecution and conviction
Prominent San Francisco defense attorney Melvin Belli agreed to represent Ruby free of charge. Some observers thought that the case could have been disposed of as a "murder without malice" charge (roughly equivalent to manslaughter), with a maximum prison sentence of five years. Ruby himself initially appeared not to be very concerned about the proceedings (which have led some researchers to believe that Ruby thought his Mafia associates would secretly help him win an acquittal or be given a reduced sentence.) Instead, Belli attempted to prove that Ruby was legally insane and had a history of mental illness in his family (the latter being true, as his mother had been committed to a mental hospital years before). On March 14, 1964, Ruby was convicted of "murder with malice," for which he received a death sentence.
Ruby repeatedly asked, verbally and in writing, over the six months following the Kennedy assassination to speak to the members of the Warren Commission. Only after Ruby's sister Eileen wrote letters to the Warren Commission (and after her writing letters to the commission became publicly reported) did the commission agree to talk to Ruby. In June 1964, Chief Justice Earl Warren, then-Representative Gerald R. Ford of Michigan and other commission members went to Dallas. While there, they met with Ruby. Ruby begged Warren several times to take him to Washington D.C., because he feared for his life and that of his family members, claiming among other things that "a whole new form of government is going to take over this country, and I know I won't live to see you another time." Warren refused. The record of Ruby's testimony shows Warren declaring that the Commission would have no way of providing protection to him, saying the Commission had no police powers. Researchers have wondered why Warren would not have ordered that Ruby be taken into federal custody and sequestered in Washington, D.C. (away from Ruby's perceived dangers).
Following Ruby's March 1964 conviction for "murder with malice," in an appeal to the Texas Supreme Court, Ruby's lawyers argued that he could not have received a fair trial in the city of Dallas due to the excessive publicity surrounding the case. A year after his conviction, in March 1965, Ruby conducted a brief televised news conference in which he stated that "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 who 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 aboveboard to the world."
Eventually, the appellate court agreed with Ruby's lawyers for a new trial, and in November 1966 ruled that his motion for a change of venue before the original trial court should have been granted. Ruby's conviction and death sentence were overturned. Arrangements for a new trial in February 1967, in Wichita Falls, Texas, were under way, when, on December 9, 1966, Ruby was admitted to Parkland Hospital in Dallas, apparently suffering from pneumonia. Ruby died of a pulmonary embolism at Parkland Hospital on January 3, 1967. Ironically, Parkland is also the hospital where President Kennedy and Lee Harvey Oswald died.
Ruby died while he was awaiting his new trial, which some believe, had he survived to appear, would probably have had his sentence commuted to "time served," leaving him a free man. He is buried in the Westlawn Cemetery in Chicago.
Film portrayals
Ruby's shooting of Oswald, and the mystery surrounding his behavior both before and after the Kennedy assassination, have been the topic of two films. A 1978 made-for-television movie, Ruby & Oswald, generally supported the Warren Commission conclusions. The other was the 1992 feature film Ruby, which speculated on Jack Ruby's (played by Danny Aiello) more complex motivations. Among the impulses explored by the film that might have propelled Ruby into shooting Oswald were Ruby's reputation among family and friends as an assiduous, emotionally volatile publicity-seeker; the influence of his longtime organized crime and Dallas police connections; and the little-known fact that, over the years, Ruby had been an occasional FBI informant. In the 1991 film JFK, Ruby was portrayed by actor Brian Doyle-Murray.
Books
1. Breach of Trust: How the Warren Commission Failed the Nation and Why (ISBN 0700613900), by Gerald D. McKnight, University of Kansas Press, 2005.
2. Not in Your Lifetime: The Definitive Book on the JFK Assassination (ISBN 1569247390), by Anthony Summers, Marlowe & Com., 1998.
3. The Last Investigation, by Gaeton Fonzi (ISBN 1560250526), Thunder's Mouth Press, 1993.
4. Oswald and the CIA, by John Newman (ISBN 0786701315), Carroll & Graf Publishers, 1995.
5. All American Mafioso, by Charles Rappleye and Ed Becker (ISBN 0385266766), Doubleday, 1991.
6. The Death of a President: November 20-November 25, by William Manchester (ISBN 0883659565), BBS Publishing Corporation, 1967/1996.