Episode 345 Jack Ruby Miniseries Part 21

0:00Welcome to JFK in the Enduring Secret. I'm your host, Jeff Crudell. Hello everyone and welcome back to the podcast. Today's episode is Episode 345 and it's Part 21 of the Jack Ruby miniseries. I know you probably thought this story just ended when you fired that very famous shot in the basement. Well, of course you know there was more because Jack Ruby went on trial and he himself died a few years later. There's so much more in between all of that, of course. And so in some ways we're just getting started. Today we're going to study in a little bit more detail some of those telephone calls and the implications of all of the telephone

1:01activity that occurred in his recent months leading up to the assassination. It's a revealing story. And so without further ado let's listen to Episode 345 of JFK, the Enduring Secret. Lee Harvey Oswald is dead and what most assuredly would have been the trial of the century will never be. It truly opens the door for a suppression around one of the most incredible assassination stories in American history and certainly perhaps in the history of the world. One person Jack Ruby was single-handedly responsible for taking out the one person the government pointed their finger at. And while the rest of the world shook their head in complete dismay wondering whether

2:02or not Ruby was part of a conspiracy because that was the obvious thing to ask a killer killing the alleged killer. Well, it simply re-emphasized the core question of everything we've been talking about. And that is who was Jack Ruby? Really? Well, of course the Warren Commission had a theory on it. They said he was alone patriotic nut, a cook. He was a hyperactive, erratic club owner who loved the police and that he acted on a sudden tragic impulse. But not everybody at the Warren Commission felt that way. In the summer of 1964, two commission attorneys both Leon Hubert Griffin wanted to test that theory and in doing so, they drafted an urgent memorandum to General Counsel J. Lee Rankin. They requested, as part of all of it, a systematic audit of Jack Ruby's long-distance telephone records. And they urged Rankin to have commission chairman Earl Warren

3:05write directly to the phone companies. They wanted to preserve the paper trail before it was destroyed. But Rankin vetoed the request. He said it was, well, it was just too far reaching. He called a full telephone audit to burdensome. The commission chose to ignore the telephone records. But 15 years later, congressional investigators at the HSCA did what the Warren Commission refused to do. They got a hold of those telephone records. And they placed them in a much larger database that included other telephone records of persons of interest. And when they analyzed those telephone records, well, it's very interesting what they found. Because they didn't find a pattern of a lonely, simple club owner. Oh no, it was a much different pattern. And today, we're going to analyze those telephone records. We'll follow the call volume. We'll map the syndicate network that received many of those calls. And in general, we're just

4:10going to let the Southwestern bell telephone records speak for themselves. You know, to understand Jack Ruby's movements, you have to look at his phone lines. Ruby had access actually to five separate business and home telephones. Remember, there were no cell phones in those days. He had a phone at the Carousel Club, the Vegas Club. He had one of his private home at the Ewing Street Department. He could use his sister Eva Grant's telephone at Herollins Street Department. And then, of course, his brother Sam, who had a home line. Five and all. You know, for a long time, his long distance habits were, well, they were average, I guess you might say. And remember, local calls didn't appear on phone records back in the day. From May through September of 1963,

5:10Ruby's monthly long distance calls were a pretty consistent number. They ran an average of about 25 to 35 calls a month or about one a day. But in October of 1963, well, long distance lines started to light up. His long distance volume suddenly jumps. It goes from an average of some 25 to 35 calls a month to approximately 75 calls in a single month. And in November, well, in just the three and a half weeks of November, the call volume increases sharply. He places approximately 96 long distance calls in that timeframe. And that's a sharp increase. Some records have Ruby making up to 115 calls. Either way, it's a sharp increase. And it's an unprecedented sudden jump from how many he was engaging in prior to that time. Why was a small time, Dallas club owner suddenly placing somebody long distance calls? Well, Jack Ruby had an alibi,

6:14of course. And he claimed he was embroiled in the labor dispute. You've heard it so often in these earlier episodes, the fight with the entertainer's union, the American Guild of Variety artists or AGVA. He was furious with his competitors, the Weinstein brothers. And he claimed that they were using amateur nights to bypass union wages and hire non-union strippers. It was a real dispute. No one denies that. But congressional investigators decided to test the alibi against the timing and the volume of the telephone logs. They isolated the November increase. Out of the 115 long distance calls that Jack Ruby placed in those three weeks, how many of them were actually related to the union dispute? Well, the answer is exactly 10. 10 calls. Less than 10% of the entire call volume. You see, the AGVA labor dispute was a genuine business issue. But logically, it does not explain the other 90% of the calls.

7:18So who was on the other end of these calls? When we map the recipients, the simple police buff, routine, while it disappears. And the pattern of underworld context begins to take its place. The Southwestern Bell telephone records show that on October 26, 1963, at exactly 12.07 pm, just around noon, Jack Ruby placed an outbound call from his Dallas line to Chicago. This call lasted exactly 12 minutes. The recipient was Irwin S. Weiner. In the files of federal law enforcement, Irwin Weiner was a prominent underworld monster. He was a key financial functionary, bridging the Chicago mob and teamsters president Jimmy Hoffa. He handled transactions,

8:20connecting corrupt union pension funds to real estate controlled by the syndicate. When the FBI questioned Weiner on November 28, 1963, that was just four days after Ruby shot Oswald, well, Weiner flatly refused to answer their questions. In 1978, the House Select Committee on Assassinations brought Weiner in, any attended and executive session under oath. Weiner admitted the call took place, but he insisted on the standard union explanation. He swore that Ruby called him out of the blue, and he claimed that Ruby wanted to get an injunction against the Weinstein brothers, and that Ruby asked him to write a legal bond for the lawsuit. Now Weiner testified that he told Ruby no and that he immediately hung up. But look at the timing of the telephone call. The call lasted 12 minutes. If a prominent Chicago underworld bondsman receives a cold call from

9:26a stranger, does he remain on the line for 12 minutes to discuss a routine legal bond in Texas? Even worse, the files revealed that Weiner told an associate that he actually knew Jack Ruby. In early 1978, a congressional investigator interviewed Weiner privately. Weiner admitted to the investigator that the call had absolutely nothing to do with labor problems, or the AGVA, or even a bond. He admitted that he and Ruby were old friends, who had spoken in person and by phone many times. But when the committee confronted Weiner under oath with his own private statements, Weiner shrugged it off. He said this, My amount of told those investigators anything. That wasn't under oath, and I always lied to reporters. We don't have a wiretap here. We don't know if Jack Ruby was simply rambling to a polite listener who couldn't get off the phone,

10:29or if they were discussing something far deeper. What we do have though is a stark contradiction in the record, a private admission of friendship on the one hand, and then a formal claim of a cold call rejection on the other. One of them can't be true. And either one of them has got to spacule your problems if you're the witness telling that as your story. 4 Days After Diling the Chicago Mob's Chief Bondsman, Jack Ruby reaches for his telephone again. It's now October 30th, and it's 9.13 in the evening. Ruby places a long distance call to New Orleans. Any dials, Cherry? 25431. This was the private, unlisted office line of the tropical court tourist park. It was a trailer park in New Orleans. The owner of that park, who ran his entire operation from a desk on the premises,

11:36was Nafio J. Pacora. Now, Nafio Pacora was a convicted heroine smuggler. He was known to federal narcotics agents as a frontline associate, a Louisiana Mofia boss, Carlos Marcella. Now, Pacora's family was in constant contact with the Marcella family. And the HSCA computer database records reveal an extraordinary connection. On June 24th, 1963, just four months before Jack Ruby placed his call to Pacora, Carlos Marcella himself placed a long distance call to that exact same one desk trailer office. All these calls are in the database. When congressional investigators finally tracked Pacora down in 1978, he refused to answer their questions. When he finally agreed to testify, and it was under pressure, and it happened in September of that year, Pacora claims to Lamnesia.

12:42Imagine that. You know, he saw he had no memory of Jack Ruby, and he didn't believe he ever took a message from him. Mainstream historians claim that Ruby was actually trying to reach a tenant at Pacora's trailer court. And you know this story, you've heard it before. It was a New Orleans nightclub manager named Harold Tannenbaum. And indeed, Ruby was in regular contact with Tannenbaum that summer. He placed 18 calls to him that year. And the files show that Tannenbaum called Ruby's office back exactly one hour after Ruby dialed Pacora's desk. So the committee accepted this relay theory as being plausible. And maybe it was. Yet even if the relay theory explains the destination, it still is a troubling question on the table. Why did a Dallas club owner use the private unlisted office line of a Marcello lieutenant to reach a tenant at the trailer park? And why did Nafio Pacora decline to

13:46answer investigators questions until he was legally cornered? I know where all that goes in my mind. How about yours? Let's fast forward just a few weeks before the assassination. On November 7th, 1963, a long distance collect call is accepted at the Carousel Club. The call lasts for some 17 minutes. The caller. Well, he's Robert G. Barney Baker. Now, Barney Baker was a former professional boxer and an ex-convict. But maybe more importantly, you'd recognize him as Jimmy Hoffas primary enforcer. That's right folks. Jimmy Hoffas primary enforcer. Now, during the late 1950s, the Senate McClellan committee, led by Chief Counsel Robert F. Kennedy, spent weeks investigating

14:52Baker. They documented Baker's role as Hoffas personally azzon to key figures in the syndicate. Robert Kennedy wrote that sometimes the mere threat of his presence in a room was enough to silence the men who would otherwise have opposed Hoffas reign. Pretty frightening. And Baker had just been released from federal prison in June of 1963. When the FBI interviewed Baker on January 3rd, 1964, well, he tried to downplay the call. He claimed that Jack Ruby was a complete stranger. He would call his house earlier that day. Baker swore that Ruby didn't even use his real name. That he had left a message with Baker's wife instructing him to call the Carousel Club and asked for a man named Lou. Baker claimed he only called back well out of curiosity. And he told Lou he couldn't help him with his

15:57union dispute. Imagine that. It sounds like a firm rejection on the surface, doesn't it? But let's look at the physical sequence of the very next day, November 8th. On November 8th, at 4.47 pm, Jack Ruby places a long distance call to the Eden Rock Hotel in Miami. He's calling a guy named Murray Dusty Miller. Miller is the head of the teamster's southern conference. And he's a known associate of multiple mob bosses. Now, according to Miller's own deposition, Jack Ruby opened the conversation with a revealing reference. Marty Baker gave me your number. He told me that maybe you can help me out with my union problems. Well, according to Miller, Miller himself got terrified of a federal wire tap. And he cut the conversation short. The entire call lasted barely four minutes.

17:03And then comes an important documented omission in the record. You see at exactly 5.22 pm, precisely 31 minutes after hanging up with Miami, Jack Ruby dials Marty Baker back in Chicago. And this second call? Well, it lasts for 14 minutes. Yet when Marty Baker was questioned under oath by the FBI and by Congress, he completely denied this second call ever happened. He swore he had had only one single contact with Jack Ruby in his entire life. And that was the call that happened the day before on November 7. He completely erased the 14 minute follow-up call on November 8. Why? Well, perhaps Baker was simply protecting himself from federal probation violations.

18:06That's a possibility. Or perhaps he genuinely forgot a 14 minute long distance conversation. But is that logical? Erasing a 14 minute call with the man who would shoot Lee Harvey Oswald two weeks later, taking a second call makes little sense and staying on for 14 more minutes makes even less sense. And all of it together, well, it just remains a major gap in the record. Because a single random call from a stranger, well, that's a coincidence. But three rapid fire long distance calls connecting Miami, Chicago, and Dallas, all happening in barely 26 hours. And the second call back to Baker. Well, that raises the serious logical question of a coordinated effort. My lovely father might have put it back in the day. That whole scenario stinks. And I don't care what you say.

19:15You know, during her sworn testimony to the Warren Commission, Jack Existor, Eva Grant, she let slip a highly sensitive detail. She testified that during the late summer of 1963, Jack was acting frantically. She swore under oath that he spent days trying to locate the personal unlisted phone number of a man in Chicago. It was a man named Lenny Patrick. Lenny Patrick was identified by the FBI and the Chicago Crime Commission as a key figure in the Capone syndicate. Maybe more importantly, he was an executioner linked to over a dozen contract killings who had risen to become a lieutenant for Chicago mob boss, Sam Giancana. Now, Eva Grant testified that Jack eventually found the number. He dialed it. And he had an intense conversation. When the HSCA confronted Lenny Patrick about this call in 1978, he flatly denied

20:20that it never occurred. But he himself admitted to a striking fact. He admitted that he had known Jack Ruby personally when they were young. Two boys growing up together on the west side of Chicago. They even attended Shepherd Grammar School together. Oh my, what a small world it is. The Warren Commission chose not to look for the telephone records for the Patrick call. And they quietly dropped the lead. Imagine that. There are other calls to Frank Karitchie. He was a mid-level Marcello gambling operative in New Orleans. It recalls to Pete Marcello himself. That's Carlos Marcello's own brother. I mean, all of these connections beg the most obvious of questions. At the very least, they likely document his known connections to mob figures. And of course,

21:24many researchers think it goes deeper than that. But to be completely fair, many of Ruby's calls were, they were routine. He called Richard Walker concerning abortion information for a friend. He called plasticite engineering at Fort Worth to discuss his plastic exercise to a sports scheme. He called talent agencies. He called his family. But the sheer volume, the massive sudden jump in the late fall, and then the unlisted lines of mob bondsmen of smugglers and hitmen. All of that remains a profound historical question. Every single survivor of that telephone sheet told investigators the exact same story. They swore the calls were only about that union dispute, or amateur strip tea's nights, or talent bookings. Nothing else. Imagine that. Well, of course, admitting anything else would have connected them directly to the silence

22:28of we are the Oswald. In the underground world of the syndicate, in many a connection to Jack Ruby in late 1963 was a high stakes risk at best. So they stuck to the story of amateur nights. But you just have to look at the call volume. You look at the unlisted numbers. And you decide for yourself, if this was a completely innocent increase in volume, routine calls made by a simple business owner, or was it a connected underworld asset doing something much more nefarious. Now, before we close the book on Jack Ruby's telephone records, we have to address a major logical question, one that I'm sure you all are asking. It's a question of scale. Congressional investigators tracked approximately 200 plus long distance calls over the three months

23:34leading up to the assassination. They documented a sharp uptick. You heard that. It went from an average of 30 or so calls a month to 75 in October and then exploding to 115 in just the first three weeks of November. But here's the catch. If only 10 of those November calls were directly linked to as AVGA labor dispute. And if we only highlight a handful of highly suspicious calls to mob figures like Marney Baker and Dusty Miller, well, what about the other 100 calls on his November sheet? If we're going to be completely honest with the evidence, we cannot ignore the rest of the paper trail. Because when you look at the overall picture of his telephone records, the vast majority of Jack Ruby's long distance calling volume was actually spent, well, on things routine and on some of the fridding details of his daily life. Let's look at where the bulk of those minutes actually went. First, his business partner and closest friend Ralph Paul. Paul was the owner of the bullpen drive

24:40and restaurant in Arlington. And he was a primary financier of the Carousel Club. As the autumn of 1963 progressed, Jack Ruby's calls to Ralph Paul did not just increase. They became, well, a daily obsession. He dialed Paul's home and business lines constantly, sometimes five or more times in a single day. They were short rapid fire check ins as far as we can tell. They were about club receipts. They were about payroll and well, just daily management of the club. The second group, I'll highlight our calls to his family. Despite his underworld associations, Jack Ruby was a deeply family-oriented man who maintained regular contact with the siblings. During his November calling spike, a significant portion of those long distance calls to Southfield, Michigan. He was dialing his brother, Earl Ruby. And to Chicago, checking in on his other brother, Hyman Rubenstein,

25:43the third group I'll just refer to as the talent pipeline. Obviously operating a second floor braless club meant constantly managing acts. And Ruby's November activity is loaded with outbound calls to theatrical booking agencies. He dialed the Wayne Keller Agency in St. Louis. He called Dave Rappkin, who was the owner of the Mulan Rouge in San Francisco. These calls were about booking comedians and novelty acts and strippers. And they were all to keep the Carousel of Float. And then the fourth category that I might call out is his side hustles. Jack was a perpetual promoter. Always looking for a get rich quick scheme. And in the weeks before the assassination, well, he placed multiple calls to plasticite engineering and for worth. And yeah, that's for you guessed it. He was desperately trying to market that new product, the plastic exercise twist board, on which he himself was doing some twisting in those last couple of days.

26:45And fifth, well, there were some personal favors going on. He placed calls to an associate named Richard Walker. He was frantically seeking medical and abortion information for one of the club employees who was pregnant. She was in trouble. So that's the actual composition of Jack Ruby's telephone records. 90% of those calls were composed of family or less bookings, plastic exercise board calls, and an endless train of calls to Ralph Ball himself. So what does this tell us? Well, to begin with, it reveals a fascinating chronological reality. The most famous, highly publicized mob contacts in Jack Ruby's telephone records, well, they don't even occur in the month of November during that big spike. Well, what about his seven outbound calls to mob gambler Lewis McWillie at the Thunderbird Casino in Las Vegas? Well, those occurred between June and late

27:46August. None were in November. His 12-minute call to Chicago Fixer Irwin Winer, well, that occurred on October 26th. His call to narcotics smuggler Nafil Pacora in New Orleans, well, that occurred on October 30th. During the actual three-week November spike itself, the only major documented contact with organized crime was the brief Teemster Enforcer Loop with Barney Baker and Dusty Miller. Now, I don't want to discount these two calls because they went about as far up in the syndicate hierarchy as you could go without talking to the top mob officials themselves. So if you were doing something nefarious, it's really not about quantity here. It's about who. But for sake of argument, we have to point them out in terms of the chronological. And the other aspect of that is that these are the two that came closest to the assassination. So does this factual

28:47breakdown validate the Warren Commission's lung coop theory? Does it prove that Jack was just a routine business owner whose telephone spike was entirely harmless? I don't know, perhaps. But in the world of organized crime and professional intelligence, investigators look at this exact same data and see a very different pattern. They point out that a low-level syndicate asset or informant does not spend their days constantly calling mob bosses on tapped lines. They live a highly routine mundane life. They call their brother. They book a comedian. They try to sell plastic exercise boards. Their phone records look 90% normal. But when a specific high stakes operational crisis occurs, they selectively reach out to a high-level person. And in this case, it was a syndicate financial fixer where they receive a 17-minute call from a teamster enforcer.

29:48The pure volume of calls masks what might have really been going on here. And the juxtaposition of some of these calls, even though there weren't very many of them, well, it's telling. Now, we don't have the recordings. We only have the clock. Analysts have calls themselves. So you have to make some choice here as a member of the jury. Was Jack Ruby just a small time owner drowning in daily trivia? Or was he a syndicate asset whose routine lines were selectively used for some of the most dangerous transactions that this country has ever seen? Thank you for listening to episode 345 of JFK, the Enduring Secrets.