Episode 343 Jack Ruby Miniseries Part 19

0:00Welcome to JFK, the Enduring Secret. I'm your host, Jeff Crudell. Hello everyone and welcome back to the podcast. Today's episode is episode 343 and it's part of the Jack Ruby miniseries. You wouldn't happen to be hungry, would you? Well, just in case you are, I've got a dinner treat for you. We're going to go out to eat tonight at the Cabana Motel. And so, without further ado, let's listen to episode 343 of JFK, the Enduring Secret. It's Saturday night, November 23rd, 1963. The country is paralyzed by shock. Families are glued to their television sets, but down in the stem and expressway, there is a different kind of energy.

1:22Our focus tonight is on the Dallas Cabana Motor Hotel. On the surface, the Cabana was gorgeous. It was a glittering mid-century palace of concrete and blue tile. Celebrities stayed there and so did sports teams and politicians. But when you peel back the veneer, a dark picture emerges. Documents reveal that the Cabana was a magnet for the mob. The motel was not built with ordinary bank loans. It was financed using millions of dollars from the Teamsters pension fund. That was Jimmy Hoff as personal piggy bank. Local cops knew the syndicate controlled the place. In fact, the motel's financing was handled by saw shorts. Shorts was a Chicago associate who worked closely with Irwin Winer. Winer, of course, was Jimmy Hoff as chief financial fixer. He was the exact same mob fixer that Jack Ruby was frantically calling just weeks before the assassination.

2:28And on this very cold Saturday night, Jack Ruby is sitting in the Cabana's crowded restaurant. In our last episode, we pulled back the rug on patrolman Harry Olson and Kathy Kay. We exposed the physical impossibility of their late night garage alibi. And tonight, we carried that exact same investigative approach right into the Cabana lobby. Another set of accepted official cover stories is about to look like a piece of Swiss cheese. For years, the official record hid Jack Ruby's visit to the Cabana. Yes, hid the visit. The Warren Commission treated it as a brief minor phone call. It was anything but they wanted you to believe Jack simply viled a number, had a quick chat, and then went about his night.

3:29But they were covering up the truth. And in 1978, congressional investigators revealed the sworn testimony of Lawrence Myers. Myers was a Chicago sporting goods manager, or at least so it seemed on the surface. And at first, Myers lied to the FBI. He told agents that he only spoke to Ruby on the telephone at 10.30 p.m. that night. He made it sound brief, distant. But later, under the pressure of being under oath, Myers decided, I guess, to tell the truth. They didn't just talk on the phone. Jack Ruby was actually Myers personal guest for a long intense dinner in the Cabana restaurant that night. And Myers testimony describes the energy of that evening. Jack was my guest for dinner there at the Cabana. That's an absolute fact. And we certainly discussed the assassination at the dinner. Hell, there was nothing else to talk about.

4:31According to Myers, Ruby wasn't paralyzed by national grief. Instead, it was consumed by a bitter commercial resentment. Ruby had closed both of his strip clubs. It was losing thousands of dollars in weekend revenue. But his chief business competitors, the Weinstein brothers, kept their clubs wide open. The colony club and the theater lounge were packed to the doors. They were cashing in on the tragedy. And in Jack's overly active mind, this was a financial threat and a personal insult. He leaned across the table and he muttered a line that Myers would never forget. What do you think of this awful thing? My clubs are closed, but the Weinstein's are still open. I've got to do something about this. Well, years later, Myers would say that those swords really stuck with him. He couldn't say for certain if Jack was talking about a union complaint or perhaps was referring to the assassination itself.

5:35Regardless, though, they finished their coffee at the meal and they made tentative plans to meet again Sunday night for dinner. But of course, it was a dinner that they would never have. And less than 15 hours later, Jack Ruby would walk down the police basement ramp and shoot Lee Harvey Oswald. But who was Lawrence Myers? In the official report, he is just a sporting good salesman, a harmless friend of Jack's. But all the documents show that Myers was a direct link to Jack's mom idol, Louis McWillie. McWillie was a high-level gambler, as you know. Many ran syndicate casino operations in Havana, Cuba. And Myers was a close friend of his. In fact, McWillie testified that back in 1959, he bought free-plane tickets for both Jack Ruby and Lawrence Myers. He wanted them to fly to Havana to visit him at the Tropicana Casino. You heard that story before.

6:45Of course, Myers had to cancel, but Ruby went. Imagine that. So the man sitting across the table from Jack on Saturday night, missing just a casual friend. He's the guy who shares Jack's direct line to the Havana underworld. And that 1959 Cuba trip, think back to that, well, that really was and should have been a massive red flag. And Ruby always told the Warren Commission it was a harmless one-week vacation to see his friend. I don't think so. And of course, we know that the documents support numerous Cuban tourist cards and flight logs, which tell a different story. They show Ruby made at least three separate trips to Havana in late 1959. And one of those trips was a single day trip, a flight from Miami to Havana and back.

7:48Why would a struggling Dallas club owner fly to Cuba and back in 24 hours? Well, the House Select Committee on Assassinations came to a stark conclusion. They believed that Jack Ruby was acting as an underworld courier. He was smuggling cash and documents for legendary mob bosses, Meyer Lansky and Santo Trafaconte. And Jack's loyalty to McWillie never faded. Just six months before the assassination on May 10, 1963, Ruby walked into Ray's hardware in Dallas. And guess what he did? He bought a 38 caliber revolver. And he tried to mail it to McWillie in Las Vegas. McWillie apparently refused the package. But look at the hardware store. Ray's hardware and it's the exact same shot, or Jack Ruby would later buy the cold cobra revolver. That was the gun that he used to kill the Harvey Oswald. Now, maybe that's just a coincidence and maybe it really doesn't mean anything. I think we're still trying to put the parts together on that one. I know that feels like a random connection.

8:59There are a lot of circles that are overlapping here. What they mean, well, I think we're still all trying to figure that out. But dinner is just the first layer of the cabana mystery. Look at the guest list for Thursday, November 21st. While Ruby was running his clubs, a man checked into room 132. His name was Eugene Hale Brading. Brading was a notorious figure. He was an ex-convict in a high-level mafia career. He was right at that moment on federal parole out of Los Angeles. He had close ties to Sam Giancana and Contract Killer Johnny Roselli. And just two months earlier, he legally changed his name to Jim Brading. Under his parole, Brading was forbidden from leaving California. Yet, here he was, staying at the mob-funded Dallas Cabana.

10:14And where was this mafia career when the shots rang out in Deely Plaza on Friday afternoon? Well, I think you know from earlier episodes. Minutes after the assassination, police rushed to seal the area. They didn't just search the book depository. They also ran into the adjacent Dow Tech's building at 501 Elm Street. And on the third floor of the Dow Tech's building, officers spotted a man who was acting strangely near the windows. They detained him and they took him to the station. It was Eugene Hale Brading. Now, he claimed he was an oil man looking for a telephone. He showed his clean ID under his new name Jim Brading. And the police, they let him walk right out of custody. Weeks later, a fingerprint check revealed his true identity. They had caught and released a major mafia career staying in room 132 of the Dallas Cabana.

11:17Brading and Ruby denied ever meeting. They swore they were complete strangers. But there is at least one FBI report that suggests a deeper connection. To see how deeply connected some of this was, you can take a look at an extraordinary FBI report. It was filed just days after the assassination. On November 26th, an Australian singer named Adrian Holt walked into the cabana. Holtz wanted to pitch a movie project. He met there with a local Dallas producer named Clint Stevens. And he did so in his motel room. But Stevens was in the middle of a frantic long distance call to New York. So Holtz sat there waiting. And that gave him a chance to listen closely to what was going on on Clint Stevens phone call.

12:22What he overheard was shocking. And he went straight to the FBI with it. According to Holtz statement, Stevens told his New York contact that Oswald and Ruby knew each other. He said they had taken a road trip to Mexico together that summer. Now keep in mind this is coming out of an FBI report that was dated November 26th, just four days after the assassination itself. And then Stevens talked about the lobby. He said that on Thursday night he saw Jack Ruby downstairs. But guess what? Ruby wasn't alone. Stevens reported that Ruby was flanked by several and I quote rough looking boys. He said they were roaming the lobby and they were causing a disruptive scene. What on earth could that have been all about? And why did Stevens claim that Ruby and Oswald went to Mexico? And who were the rough boys with Ruby?

13:26Obviously this whole situation spawned a lot of questions. And the FBI never resolved those questions. But the report stands as a chilling window into the rumors and the secrets that were swirling through the cabana lobby that weekend. And it brings us to a bizarre surreal contrast. Because we know exactly what Jack Ruby was doing in that lobby on Thursday night. At midnight Jack met Lawrence Myers and his brother Edward in the lobby. And you know what? Oh folks you just can't write this stuff. Jack was carrying a plastic wrapped twist board exercise toy. For nearly an hour Jack stood on the board swiveling his hips. It was desperately trying to sell the product to Edward. Think about these scenes happening at basically the same time. On the one hand you have the silly clown swiveling on a toy.

14:26And on the other hand you have a connected operator roaming the lobby with mob rough guys. That's the ultimate paradox of Jack Ruby if it happened. The clown in the career. All in the exact same place. The lobby of the cabana motor hotel. And Jack Ruby left the cabana late Saturday night. He climbed into his white holes mobile and he drove aimlessly through the dark streets of Dallas. And around midnight he stopped briefly in front of an all night diner. He chatted calmly with a talent agent about hiring a piano player. And at least his demeanor at that moment seemed to be completely normal for that kind of activity at midnight. And then he did something highly significant. He drove back to the central police station. He slipped past the doors and he hovered on the third floor. He stood in the press room listening to the tired reporters and off duty officers that were talking.

15:32And it was there that he absorbed the ambient shatter here the quiet consensus of the room that the highly publicized 10 o'clock AM Sunday transfer schedule was already dead. The logistics had slipped the move was going to be delayed. This was the final piece of the puzzle for Jack. He had his gun and now he knew the schedule. So he drove home to the Ewing Street apartment. Perhaps the trap was already set. But as the calendar flips from Saturday to Sunday, one thing is for sure. The news that Jack was in was beginning to tighten. And on our next episode, we followed Jack Ruby into the final fateful hours of Sunday morning. We'll track the morning call from Caricell stripper little Lynn begging for rent money. And we'll watch Ruby load into his own old mobile pocket is gun and drive to the Western Union office. A drive that would place him exactly four minutes away from the police basement ramp. And all of that is next time on JFK, the enduring secret.

16:44Thank you for listening to episode 343 of JFK, the enduring secret.