Jack Ruby
Jacob Leon Rubenstein, who in December 1947 changed his name and was known as Jack Leon Ruby (March 25?, 1911 - January 3, 1967), a Dallas nightclub owner, shot and killed Lee Harvey Oswald on November 24, 1963, two days after Oswald was arrested for the assassination of President 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 parents were Polish immigrants and their religious beliefs were Orthodox Jewish.
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 early during his service. Later Joseph was reportedly 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. They settled on Chicago's West Side in 1904.
Various conflicting birth dates for Jacob Rubenstein, from March to June of 1911, are quoted in various sources and were 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 worked selling horse-racing tip sheets and various other novelties, then acted a business agent for a local refuse collector's union which 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 soon cleared of any wrongdoing. In memory of Cooke, Ruby later adopted "Leon" as his middle name.
Organized Crime Links
He also had links to organized crime while working for Al Capone's Mafia organization. During the 1930s, he had frequented horse racing tracks in Illinois and in California. He'd been drafted into the United States Army in 1943 during World War II without seeing combat or even leaving the United States. After being discharged in 1946 he returned to Chicago and, a year later, moved to Dallas (for reasons which remain unclear) where he and his brothers soon afterward shortened their surnames from Rubenstein to Ruby. Their stated reason for changing their surnames had been that Jack and his brothers had opened up a mail order business and feared that some Americans would not do business with Jews. He later went on managing various nightclubs, strip clubs, and dancehalls, and also working as manager for entertainers and procuring prostitutes for various mobsters and local politicians. He also was close friends with many Dallas police officers who also had frequented his nightclubs, and Ruby often gave them large quantities of free liquor and other favors. Ruby went to Cuba in 1959 on one of his gun-running ventures and to visit a mafia-connected friend, 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 (a.k.a. "Sparky", reportedly because of his short temper) often carried a handgun and witnesses saw him with a handgun in the halls of the Dallas police headquarters on several occasions after November 22, 1963. In addition, it is known for certain that Jack Ruby impersonated a newspaper reporter and was at the police station on the night of November 22, though the reason he did this is unknown. The publicity-obsessed Ruby suddenly came to international attention when he shot and fatally wounded Lee Harvey Oswald on November 24, 1963 at 11:21 AM CST while Oswald was being transferred via car to a nearby jail.
Ruby later claimed he shot Oswald on the spur of the moment when the opportunity presented itself, even though, when Ruby was first arrested, 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 Oswald's death would spare Jacqueline Kennedy the ordeal of appearing at Oswald's court trial. Millions of viewers saw the shooting of Lee Harvey Oswald on live television. It was the first time in television history that a homicide was broadcast live and in reaction, the public had initially been overwhelmingly in support of Ruby's deed. The weapon used by Ruby was a Colt Cobra .38 Special, snub-nosed revolver, serial number 2744 LW.
The route that Ruby took to get down into the basement of the Dallas police headquarters and jail has been disputed. Some routes would have suggested that Ruby had to have had help from authorities inside the building, though plenty of journalists entered the building that day without having their credentials properly checked. Ruby stated he entered the jail that day via the entrance ramp and a former policeman, 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 had commented, revealingly, "He (Ruby) practically lived at the (police) station, and they (the police) lived at his place" (nightclub.)
In a later polygraph test he insisted on taking, one of several questions Ruby showed signs of lying about was when he answered "no" to whether he'd ever known or met Oswald before the assassination. Several other witnesses have alleged Oswald and Ruby were acquainted prior to the assassination of President Kennedy; some had reported seeing Oswald and Ruby together in Ruby's Dallas nightclub, The Carousel, in the several months preceding the assassination.
Motivation
There has been debate about Ruby's motives. Some people believe that Ruby carried out mafia orders with a mafia "hit", and/or that he was part of the conspiracy to assassinate the president and so Ruby had silenced Oswald to prevent Oswald from testifying at his upcoming trial. Much suspicion was aroused by the fact that he was able to freely enter a supposedly secure area, armed with a loaded, concealed revolver. Other persons have suggested that Ruby was an emotionally unstable man and a Democrat who revered Kennedy and was seeking vengeance on his own. Shortly before his death (of a stroke, although by the fall of 1966 he was suffering from rapidly spreading lung cancer as well, with which he believed he had been deliberately infected despite such a thing being medically impossible) in jail, when a friend insisted that he should tell the truth before he dies, Jack Ruby said: "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."
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 in an acquittal or in gaining 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" and later 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 Eva wrote letters to the Warren Commission (and after her writing the 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 others finally came 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 and cryptically claiming among other things that "a whole new form of government is going to take over this country, and I know won't live to see you another time." Warren refused. Interestingly, the record of Ruby's testimony shows Warren claiming that the Commission would have no way of providing protection to him, at one point exclaiming 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).
After 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 "the most who had to gain from all of this {the Kennedy assassination) 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, and so Ruby's conviction and death sentence were overturned. While awaiting a new trial, Ruby died of a pulmonary embolism in Parkland Hospital on January 3, 1967. Ruby died, legally, an innocent man while he was awaiting his new trial which some believe that if he had survived to appear, would probably have had his sentence commuted to "time served" which would have left him a free man. He is buried in the Westlawn Cemetery in Chicago, Illinois.
Film portrayals
Ruby's shooting of Oswald and his many mysterious connections and actions before and after the Kennedy assassination have been the topic for two films, a 1978 made-for-television movie, "Ruby & Oswald", which 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 personal and political motivations; among them being that he had been well-known by 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, he had been an occasional FBI informant--all these playing a role in propelling him into shooting Oswald.