Fourth Reich Archaeology - The Warren Commission Decided 13, Pt. 1 - Side A: You Don’t Know Jack (Ruby)

Episode Date: May 23, 2025

The Warren Commission Decided Series is back from an extended hiatus with our newest series within a series within a series. This time our object of study is Jack Ruby. We’ve teased it a few times over the past several months, and it’s finally here. And not only that, but we are joined on this journey by a very special guest, Max Arvo. Max is a writer, researcher, musician, poet, and more, and you can find all of his work at his website here: https://maxarvo.com. We all have Max to thank for one of the most substantial original contributions to JFK research in a generation - namely, the degree to which CIA psychiatrist and MKULTRA heavyweight Louis Jolyon West became involved in the “treatment” and handling of Jack Ruby. Max has been in the Jolly West archives, he has stared into the abyss, and he has agreed to guide us like Dante’s Virgil through the hellscape of Jack Ruby’s life. His series of articles is brilliant; they’re all available for free, and you really should read them here: https://www.kennedysandking.com/content/author/415-maxarvo.In this first part - the entirety of which is up on Patreon and side A of which is up for free - we lay the foundation for our excavation into the Ruby mines. We start with our first-ever Fourth Reich Archaeology cold open, reading straight from Jack’s Warren Commission testimony where he gives good reason to question any simplistic narrative about his choice to kill Lee Harvey Oswald on November 24, 1963, in the basement of the Dallas Police building amidst dozens of cops. Then, we cover Jack’s biography through the 1950s, and begin to introduce some of the recurring cast of characters in Ruby’s mobbed up world. From his immigrant upbringing in Chicago’s ethnic ghetto in the shadow of the Chicago outfit, to his trip out West. From his unremarkable service as a mechanic stateside in WWII, to his riding a southerly wave of mafia migration to Dallas, to his neurotic struggle to stay afloat in Dallas’s club scene. And we end off with his “Cuban exploits” (free listeners will need to wait for this bit!). You will not want to miss it.Hear the whole thing on Patreon here: Patreon.com/fourthreicharchaeology.

On June 7th, 1964, some 85 days after he was convicted of the premeditated murder of Lee Harvey Oswald and sentenced to death, Jack Ruby sat for his first interview with the Warren Commission. After a lengthy discussion spanning approximately eight pages of testimony transcript, Warren commissioned staff attorney Arlen Specter entered the room. Abruptly breaking the narrative he had begun to weave, Ruby changed the subject. Is there any way to get me to Washington? I beg your pardon.

Is there any way of you getting me to Washington? I don't know of any. I will be glad to talk to you. counsel about what the situation is, Mr. Ruby, when we get an opportunity to talk. I don't think I will get fair representation with my counsel, Joe Tonnehill. I don't think so. I would like to request that I go to Washington and you take all the tests that I have to take. It is very important. But Jack, will you tell him why you don't think you get a fair representation?

Because I have been over this for the longest time to get the lie detender test, somebody has been holding it back from me. Mr. Ruby, I might say to you that the lateness of this thing is not due to your counsel. He wrote me, I think, close to two months ago, and told me that you would be glad to testify and take it. I believe he said any test. I'm not sure of that, but he said you would be. be glad to testify before the commission and I thanked him for the letter. But we have been so busy that this is the first time we have had an opportunity to do it. But there has been no delay, as far as I know, on the part of Mr. Tonnhill, in bringing about this meeting. It was our delay due to the pressures we had on us at the time.

What state are you from, Congressman, Michigan, Grand Rapids, Michigan. I will be glad to talk that over if we can. You might right, go ahead if you wish, with the rest of your statement. Ruby then continued, haltingly, to narrate his activities on Friday, November 22nd, 1963, the day that President Kennedy was killed. But after just one more page worth of testimony, Ruby again returned to the subject of relocation to Washington. Gentlemen, unless you get me to Washington,

you can't get a fair shake out of me. If you understand my way of talking, you have got to bring me to Washington to get the tests. Do I sound dramatic? Of the beam? No. You are speaking very, very rationally, and I am really surprised that you can remember as much as you have remembered up to the present time.

You have given it to us in detail. Unless you can get me to Washington, and I am not a crackpot. I have all my senses. I don't want to evade any crime I am guilty of. But, Mr. Moore, have I spoken this way when we talked? Moore back and forth follows, some three and half pages of it. And then Ruby once again opens a vista into his warped psyche, begging the question, whether he's insane or merely torn past the breaking point. between his competing, conflicting goals of protesting his innocence, revealing some larger conspiracy,

and keeping secrets that, if revealed, could get him and his entire family brutally killed. Colonialism or imperialism, as the slave system of the West is called, is not something that's just confined to England or France or the United States. Every nation, in every region, now has a decision to make. So it's one huge complex or combine. Either you are with us or you are with the terrorists. And this international power structure is used to suppress the masses of dark-skinned people all over the world and exploit them of their natural resources. We found no evidence of conspiracy, foreign or domestic, the Warren Commission, the science.

I'll never apologize for the United States of America, ever. I don't care what the facts are. In 1945, we began to require information, which showed that there were two wars going. His job, he said, was to protect the Western way of life. The primitive simplicity of their minds vendors the more easy victims of a big lie than a small one. For example, we're the CIA. He has a mile. He knows so long as is denied. Freedom can never be secure.

It usually takes a national crisis. Freedom can never be secure. never been secure at Pearl Harbor. A lot of killers. We've got a lot of killers. Why you think our country's so innocent? This is a guy. I'm not. This is for Thrike archaeology. I'm Dick. And I'm Don. Welcome back. And thank you very much. for tuning in. We are returning this week to our series within a series, The Warren Commission Decided, which is our exploration into the assassination of President John F. Kennedy and the ensuing cover-up in the days, weeks, and months thereafter. Before we get started, as always,

we want to give a shout out to every single one of you who has supported the post. thus far. Thank you very much for liking, for subscribing, for spreading the word, the good word about what we are doing here at Fourth Reich Archaeology. We will once again ask that if you are able to, please consider donating a little scratch our way on our Patreon. And as a friendly reminder, we are actively and openly receiving mail. You can write us at Fourth Reichpod at gmail.com. You can also follow us on social media. We're on Instagram and Twitter at Fourth Reich Pod. All right. We are joined for our excavation into Jack Ruby by the great Max Arvo, author, researcher, musician,

filmmaker and overall Renaissance Man, or as he might say it, Renaissance Man. Max has written an in-depth and a fascinating series of articles on the Kennedys and King blog, which is of course curated by Jim de Eugenio about Jack Ruby. his series is especially focused on compiling and weaving together a great deal of new information along with the well-trod ground on Ruby, focused on the involvement of a number of CIA psychiatrists, including everybody's favorite CIA psychiatrist, the infamous Louis Jollyon Jolly West and you may recall this series came up in the interview that I did with Jeffrey Kay earlier on in the Warren Commission Decided series and now it's time to take that

plunge and we are so thankful so thrilled that Max has agreed to join us in so doing so Max, welcome to Fourth Reich Archaeology. Thank you for being here with us. Thank you, guys. It's a real pleasure, big fan. And yeah, I'm excited to talk, talk about it all. Before we dig in to the subject of this episode or perhaps set of episodes, I thought it would be interesting if you could tell us and our listeners a little bit about how you, you know, in case it's not clear to the listeners by now, Max hails from the other side of the pond. What got you into JFK assassination? Yeah, and I live in Texas now, so it's all a long way from home. Easy adjustment in accents. Right. Yeah, there's nowhere to hide here. They

catch me out in a second. Yeah, I've wondered that a lot. How did I get into all this? And I mean, I'll try and keep it quick, but I guess partly it was rooted in political concerns, and I guess I've always been of the left, and then in teenage years kind of finding Tromsky and things like that, and realizing there's a whole other side of truth, I guess you could say, or a different history out there. And then also just for whatever reason, a personal itch that I've always tried to scratch of just trying to figure out why things are the way they are, and particularly why things are pretty bad, at least in a lot of ways the way I see them, because they don't have to be. But they are. So yeah, that was, I guess, what first meant that my mind was already open to the idea that something like

the Kennedy story or the assassination was not the official story. And I'm really mindful of this whenever I write about this or talk about any of this. I definitely had that initial socially constructed bias, I guess, in my head. You know, the final rail or the third rail that you really can't touch is things like the Kennedy assassination or anything like that. And appropriately, for a discussion about Ruby and Jolly Western folk, you know, that the whole pressure from society is kind of, you'll be crazy if you go there. You know, it's a bridge too far, but I felt myself just realizing sort of slowly and slightly reluctantly, part of me was lent into it and part of me resisted it. You know, I'm realizing that I believe the people who were writing well about it all, presenting an alternative story, which I think is the story.

I mean, not to say that we know the whole story and there's no argument, but, you know, that at least, not the official one. And from there, it just kind of, you know, it snowballed. Then at that point, I realized, oh, God, there's so much that I don't know of all this. And I couldn't just read one book and leave it at that, because there's just any book or anything on any of this stuff. It throws up a million things that, you know, when you're first encountering it, you realize, God, I don't know that, I don't know that, who's that? What does that mean? So yeah, yeah, then I just kept trying to satisfy the bit in my head that couldn't shake it. And I guess I got to Ruby through, well, I think it was particularly chaos,

Tom O'Neill's book and other things regarding MK Ultra. Well, West was one of those people that if you were writing a book or a film, you'd hope you could write someone that good, that compelling. And so, and, you know, Tom in the book presents him in that way as this kind of catches that. So on the one hand, there's that mystery. of West. And then in the book, Tom suggests that there were, and lays out some convincing, you know, credible pieces of the puzzle that suggest something really nefarious happened, happened to Ruby during, well, after he shot Oswald and in that time where there's the trial

and the legal prison system and all that are at play. And then I think what clinched it was I, a couple years back, maybe three, a while back, I was on a road trip helping a friend move all the way cross-country from Austin to Portland. And on the way back, this was a fateful decision and I don't know. I just figured I'll drive through LA and stop at the West archives, because I realized that some of the citations that were really, had the really juicy stuff in chaos were from those archives. And I was just fascinated and I figured, why not? So I said, stopped there and spent a day looking at basically all the ruby stuff a couple of boxes of the high ash brew stuff because west was involved in a project of some sort in the height during

the summer of love and that's very interesting in itself and that's where the manson thing ties in and then anyway so i looked at all that took photos of all the pages and then left and kind of set it aside in the moment realizing that there was a lot of interesting stuff there but also that there was a huge amount of detail and it would be a lot to dive into it all so I kind of kept it at arm's length for a bit and then one day I just started diving into it again and I was particularly interested in, well, in the court documents I think that the first appearance of West

is in his report on, if I can remember this right, basically April 26th written supposedly just after he first examined Ruby and found him to be completely insane late in a full psychotic episode. as far as I can tell for the first time in his life but then it was

but then Tom also lays out some things that suggest that West was involved earlier but he kind of had it loosely that could only pin it down to kind of probably by the end of 63 so in those last well that last month

and a week or so and as I was looking I found letters that meant that we could prove that West was involved by particular dates and I found a couple that pinned his involvement down

to as early as November 29th. And then I was, I got in touch with Tom just to check a couple of citation things and he's very generous with his time. So we were really in touch of it and then I ran those past him and he said, yeah, that's new. So at that point I realized I had something

and I guess I had to write it up. So I sort of, from there, just started writing it. And then that leads to what led to all the research into just filling in all the gaps I possibly could because I also knew in the back of my mind that where it was headed was... I mean, the core of it is basically arguing

that the evidence shows, not just making up out of thin air, but that... I mean, talk about, you know, resisting the pressures from society to get into things that they'll say, make you crazy. I mean, it wasn't just the Kennedy assassination,

but there was this CIA guy who seems to him. have induced a temporary psychosis in this guy with LSD and all this other stuff and then that gets into MK Ultra and I knew in the back of my mind like I'm getting into some wild territory in terms of what I'm claiming so I just wanted to be as sure as I could and that was just yeah that was basically it just trying to fill in all the details as much as possible partly to see for myself what I could find like I think that's why I kept digging so much was just I needed to know for myself

what I really thought so yeah anyway and then that was the clincher I think was that realizing he was involved as early as the 29th which is seven days after Kennedy's shot and only five after Ruby shoots Oswald

that's very early you know it's the same day that the Warren Commission was created by executive order oh was it I didn't even realize that was the exact date well that's very interesting in itself I mean

yeah so and I'm still at the point where I don't know if there's an explanation for how he could have been involved so early and why and in the way that he was and with all the things

he was apparently preoccupied by this apparent injustice because Ruby wasn't in his right mind or was like legally insane at the time of the shooting I still don't know how you can, maybe there is a good argument for it, but to me it doesn't, it doesn't quite track that a, I think early 30s psychiatrists in Oklahoma immediately started laboring very, very,

very hard to get expert psychiatrists involved when there was barely even any public statement or discussion about the question of his sanity. The only thing there was was his lawyer, Tom Howard, I think the day of the shooting or the day after had hinted that he'd be pursuing an insanity defense. But like the legal defense wasn't even in place, the fund the later team and all this stuff. So I still don't think you can, I mean, that in itself doesn't prove anything, but that's something I'm still hung up on as kind of a bottom line. Like how and why was he involved so soon? Well now, Max, wait a minute. He shot Oswald using his middle finger. as the trigger finger.

Only a crazy person would do that. Oh, true. Oh, right. You're right. I knew I'd miss something. Yeah, all right. But yeah, I mean, it's like, well, that's a... You have to cut me off because I may at any time

because I can just start rambling about any aspect of this. But, I mean, I really... I sort of almost want to ask anyone who's... curious about this, can you think of a good, you know, a good reason that explains how he was so involved? To me, it's just, it's bizarre to be involved that early and to have, be getting other very, very senior national people involved, all about the question of his sanity when there wasn't really any discussion of it. And the only thing there was was from Howard opting for a sanity defense, which is, if you're in that situation where you're

client has on live TV shot someone and has then charged for doing that about the only possible thing you could try is a sanity defence so that in itself just because he's pursuing that that doesn't mean that it's an emphatic statement that the guy was completely insane it's just practically the only card they had to play or that Howard had to play so anyway yeah that's my context with West was just like realizing That's so early, and the guy has so many sinister connections. And then when he shows up in April for the very first time, lo and behold, Ruby has a psychotic break,

which he was, West was an expert in, well, he'd studied so much of it with various MK Ultra things, you know, inducing, I think they called it abnormal, the induction of abnormal states of mind, which is, well, yeah, it certainly looks like at first glance that it was, the timing was so convenient and given who he was, it's, you know, even if you don't want to go there and start saying something that sounds that outlandish, it's hard not to look at it, I think, and think something, uh, something untoward happen.

Yes, indeed. And hopefully that is enough of a preview to whet the listeners appetite because I think for now we're going to put all of the involvement of the CIA shrinks Jolly West and his other cohorts, which we've not even named yet. I'm going to put all of that off to one side because that will form a big part of the back end of this overall discussion and before we get there though i think in the classic fourth rike archaeology methodology we will begin this dig on the ground floor as it were and the three of us are going to grab our pickaxes our hard hard hats and really get right down to the bottom of who jack ruby nay jacobion rubinstein really was and how he found

himself in the dallas police building on november 24th pistol in hand middle finger as you noted Dick, on the trigger, putting the fatal shot into Lee Oswald's guts. Jacob Leon Rubenstein. Don't let you trigger a finger rich. Made you an offer that you can't decline, but you could never be a snitch. Brought them 20,000 sandwiches The cops drink in your bars for free They'll probably make you a movie star They're going to put you on TV

And in big lights on the marquee You'll see Jerry Jack Ruby You see Jack Ruby Jack Ruby Jack Ruby

Better get your man So for me I'll start this discussion off by pointing out that both Max's writings and just the more that I have dug in

to Jack Ruby overall, my understanding of him as a person and his role in the overall picture of the JFK assassination and its cover-up has evolved quite substantially over time. And I think now I'm probably left with even more questions than clear answers because Ruby is really an enigmatic figure. So maybe we can march our way through a little bit of the official narrative, the official conspiracy narrative, and then get down to brass tacks on who Ruby was and what his role was so of course the official narrative as you intimated max is really just that ruby like oswald was a lone nut a crazy guy who pulled the trigger out of some impulsive desire whether that be to

spare Jackie Kennedy and the children, the trauma and pain of going through a trial, which was what he said at the time, or what his lawyers had said at the time, or the official conspiracy theory narrative, perhaps what we might call the oversimplified conspiracy theory narrative that in fact jack ruby was just a hitman for the mob a sort of classic trigger man thug who was put in place with a very specific objective and carried out instructions like so many mob hitmen have done on so many different occasions. And I think we, all three of us, agree that the real story is a little bit more complicated than that, right? Oh, yeah, just a little, just a little more complicated.

And one quick thought that, as you were saying, that occurred to me is often told that the official story, is somehow that makes most sense or is the simplest. And I guess in one way it is that you're just saying, there's one guy shot the president, another guy shot the guy who shot the president, that's it. In some ways, that's really simple. On the other hand, I think it's just, I mean, I guess it just depends how you're inclined,

but my thought is that's so strange and so easy that to me it, it, it, reads as less believable right i mean especially spoiler alert but jack ruby did repudiate himself the whole idea that he did it for the benefit of the kennedy widow and children uh the house select committee uncovered communications that he had had wherein he said yeah my lawyer told me to say that right yeah you understand i just made it up because my lawyer said i should say that yeah i think he said that it was um to one of the others maybe tonnehill or burleson that it was howard who told him to say that and um that's another one of these details i encountered them so often

with all this stuff i sort of think well how how can that just be out there and we all move on as if you know, as if it's not significant, but... Well, that's the old Alan Dulles line, staying relevant, where Alan Dulles famously said, nobody's going to really care about the details, nobody's going to read the evidence, except for maybe a few academics, and they're just going to agree with us anyways

because of their institutional affiliations. And to this day, it's just seeing the degree of everyone from your Gerald Posner's to even, you know, purportedly left-wing accounts on Twitter that go out there and say, come on, don't you think it's a little too complicated, a little too much involvement of too important of people for the kids? conspiracy theory to be true and of course as soon as you scratch the surface on 90% of those people they reveal just an utter lack of familiarity with the factual record yeah yeah it's consistent pretty consistent that way so speaking of the factual record it perhaps dick do you want to pick up with a little biographical sketch of our friend young Jacob? Yeah, sure. So Ruby was born Jacob Leon Rubinstein in Chicago in, was it 1911, to an orthodox Jewish family, and he was the fifth of ten children. Both of his parents were born in, was

in Poland, and they had migrated to the U.S. They sort of had that classic immigrant experience, sort of rife with trauma and mental toll, and I think this is what informed, it must have informed Ruby's personality as an adult, right? You'd mentioned, like, the initial perspective on Ruby is he's sort of this mobbed-up guy, right? he's like a nightclub owner who frequents the sort of standard mob hangouts but he was really like an eccentric guy right he he he was neither because he also hung out with the cop so he was

neither mobster nor cop he was sort of this in-betweener right like um not accepted by either and all around the kind of a weird guy right and that and the really and the really roots for that profile are right there in his upbringing, I think. You know, we think a lot about the up-and-coming immigrant mafia narrative. It's been done so many times in Hollywood that it's almost a cliche. You think about movies like Once Upon a Time in America. or the Godfather Part 2 with the whole Vito Corleone storyline.

This was sort of the Jack Ruby storyline, albeit more on the Once Upon a Time in America side within a Jewish context, but it's important to point out that in Chicago of the time, the organized crime syndicates were very intertwined between the Italians, the Jews, to an extent, the Irish as well. All of these recent working class immigrants really banded together. They formed these communities, and oftentimes, by, necessity or by practicality relied on criminal economic activity to make their way up the social ladder. And Jacob Rubinstein was no exception.

You know, his parents were both kind of suffering the trauma of the trauma of the migration experience. His dad was a carpenter who, by all accounts, was a drunk and an abuser, who, you know, beat the shit out of all of the kids. And his mom was, by all accounts, a mentally unstable woman. I believe she was institutionalized on at least one occasion. The kids were sent to foster care, you know, it was a really rough upbringing. Not that different if I want to get at least cryptically biographical, autobiographical, not that different from the way that my Jewish ancestors came into the country around the same generation from the Russian Empire as well, you know, fleeing pogromes under the Tsarist regime and arriving to a totally alien land here

in the industrializing, urbanizing, gritty United States of the 19 teens. Right. I've recently been doing some digging into Maya Lansky and some of some of the other big syndicate folk and Lanski's story is what's funny you just mentioned what you did his was of his family i think he was alive when they left leaving um poland Belarus or a country that was not then what it is now but leaving fleeing pogroms and ending up going from that to the lower east side of manhattan which is yeah talk about a um culture shock that must have been quite um well a lot to deal within. And yeah, in similar kind of stories.

I mean, there's lots of reasons to distrust various stories as those people get older, but I kind of, there's not really a reason I don't think to distrust much of the early days of someone like Blansky. And it sounds like, yeah, it was kids growing up in poor areas where there was a lot of, I mean, in Blansky's case he talked about just seeing street gambling all over and I'm realizing, then also noticing that there would be guys showing up in suits to collect their money, the scheme, I guess, that kind of thing, and that he wanted to be like them. And yeah, then meeting Luciano and Bugsy Siegel as they're all growing up, and because they respected him so much, they kind of, you know, bridged or set aside the, you know, the ethnic kind of racial resentments and intentions. but yeah it's it's a similar kind of story to rubies of that yeah the alienated kind of

working class immigrant experience and yeah just everything you said it's in hollywood in some ways but it's also there's there's truth to it you know at least in those early days of people just it's what was around what was right around them you know for sure and while there was this suppression of the ethnic strife it was also not absent from the daily life. So in Ruby's case, it's reported that he would get into a lot of scrapes in the neighborhood with goyasha kids who would maybe make anti-Semitic comments to him or call him a dirty Jew or whatever.

And, you know, probably the Jewish kids were clapping back. with other ethnic slurs to the Italians and what have you. But the takeaway is that there was a lot of fisticuffs. There was plenty of fighting, plenty of physical altercation, and solving problems through violence as the default conflict resolution mechanism in the neighborhoods. Yeah, and just to step back to Lansky again, though it's a bit of a digression, but it was only, from what I understand, it was only

he could only work with people like Luciano and Siegel because they, in his particular case, had so much respect for him. Apparently he was just smart enough and a Machiavellian enough to clearly be of someone to work with. But in all the other cases, you know, that wasn't something that came easily to that crowd. You know, there was resistance because of just purely you know we're italian they're jewish vice versa yeah and dick maybe you can pick it back up i don't think that jack ruby had the same reputation for maccavillian thinking and capacity for organization right yeah are you getting into like his juvenile delinquency his tendency to get into scraps is um yeah overall instability yeah i was going to say he he was a street fighter and

he also had a survivalist tendency to attach himself to other street fighters and one of his good buddies in his childhood would later go on to be a famous boxer and So he was kind of even from a young age riding the coattails of the biggest kids on the block and hyping them up and taking on that role of the hype man, the toadie, so to speak, who was getting into the fights, but who always wanted to make sure that he was in the good graces of the best fighters. if it came to blows so that he wouldn't be on the receiving end. And later on, where he really gets his entree into the criminal underworld, not atypical of other similarly situated kids in the southwest side of Chicago at the time, according to Ruby himself he was carrying envelopes for no less a figure than Al Capone and that translated into his becoming kind of an errand boy he gets a job in a mob-controlled union

that was connected with the Teamsters I think it was like the the junk collector's union or something like that, had some very funny name that I don't think they call unions that anymore. Oh, right. Yeah, junk handlers, I think. Yeah, junk handlers. Well, yeah, it's tricky to pin down the early days or the early years of him, and there's not much out there. But he knew prize fighters, and he also knew a couple of future big syndicate names, Leonard or Lenny Patrick, and Well, there were two brothers called Yarris. He definitely knew one of them, perhaps both, I think Dave Yarris, and they first got to know each other when they were young growing up.

And those two, Patrick and Yarris, became more Pittman in later years. And he definitely called Patrick a few days before the Kennedy assassination, and I think maybe Yaros too. So it ends up all kind of circling back around. but yeah and one detail that is never really talked about and I'm not sure if there's much well there's I think there's some significance to it he in the 30s he heads to L.A. and San Francisco for a few years with a few people from Chicago they all move over at the same time and it's unclear exactly what they got up to but it involved partly kind of selling

newspaper subscriptions for one of the Hearst papers and he also seems to have seems to be true that he worked at the Santa Anita racetrack. It was owned by I think Rosselli, the same one that Sirhan Serhan ended up working at. Wow. Yeah. Yeah. And there were various connections there to in that area and that crowd to Mickey Cohen who was running things for the Lanski-Luchiano syndicate on the west coast so and then and then he goes back to Chicago and and and yeah that that whole part of the story kicks off but yeah it's I only realize that whole west coast 30s angle recently and I think it's just another piece of the puzzle sort of when you layered all out makes it pretty I think you can see pretty easily without having to make too

much up, or make anything up, the kind of trajectory of this kid growing up in Chicago, being around a certain crowd, and then there's also that time in the 30s where there's ample connections and points at which there could have been, you know, relationships established and work done for people on the West Coast. And the same crowd of people, you know, people who ended up mob-affiliated with, went to San Francisco, or the West Coast along, along with him. So you can see it all the way through. It was just clarifying to me to realize that, that it's always there. And so the idea that he was just, I mean, to get back to the official story again, because I always find it clarifying to just sort of shock oneself by remembering

what is supposed to be the case. And it's that, you know, he was just, he happened to know some mob people and he happened to know a bunch of cops, but he was just a guy running a club in Dallas. like it's all the way back throughout his life all these connections to this yeah the underworld really right everybody is pretty much unanimous and when i say everybody i mean all of the ruby relevant witnesses who testified to the warren commission were unanimous in their description of Ruby as a guy whose number one objective at all times was making money. That was what he wanted to do. And I think what you're getting at, Max, is that the modus operandi that he had to pursue that goal of making money was to rely on his social network of

criminal connected figures who to varying degrees straddled the line between underworld economy and the mainstream economy you know it's never all criminal there's always some patina of legitimacy even in a race track right there it's yeah it's the it's the legitimate side of things we're trying to get things legitimate and we all know that from all the mob films and TV and everything you know that trying to get to the point or at least partially where there's you can have clean money or make your money clean and um yeah yeah or even just have a clean outlet where you can launder the dirty money the last anecdote from ruby's upbringing in chicago that I wanted to make sure to cover before we move on to his exodus, is this union, you know,

because it ties into another story that we've told here in the Warren Commission series with respect to Albert Jenner, and that is that in, I think it was 36 or 37, that Ruby was involved as an employee of this union, and again, not because he was actually handling junk, right? He was doing muscle work for the union around town, but around this time there was a contested succession of the leadership of the union of the union. and the union president was murdered. And I recently read that Ruby was actually listed as a witness to this murder on the police reports from Chicago, from way back in the day.

So he was closer to this action, closer to the real deadly violence around the union. mafia nexus than even perhaps is acknowledged because I think the Warren Commission doesn't bring that up and it's not generally floated as one of the main ruby facts but it is corroborated in the documentary record and of course the person who would ultimately succeed to the leadership of the union was Paul Dorfman, who, as we said in the Jenner episode, was the father of Alan Dorfman, the accountant for Hoffa and the Teamsters Union, mobbed up to his eyeballs, whose attorney in connection with the government crackdown on Teamster records, was none other than Warren Commission Senior Council, Albert Jenner.

So these intersections are unbelievable in this world that we're building. It's just, I don't know if it has any significance to Ruby's role in the bigger picture of the JFK assassination, but simply to paint the picture of the broader context, it's a fact that really is too good to leave out. Yeah, no, the Reagan murder is, yeah, I think he was supposedly in the room, as he say, like, right there. And the Reagan murder is, I mean, Peterdale Scott views it this way, and Aaron Good does as well, view it as a, as a,

actually a crucial moment in the history of organized crime in the US because it's part of this whole broader takeover or consolidation of wire services and things like that which Reagan was also affiliated with and was kind of resisting the control of people like Siegel and so he was supposedly a union guy but it's you know mob to the core and And, yeah, that was a big moment. And it seems to have been part of a broader mob kind of national consolidation. Involving the national mob, it's not just a local. It's definitely not a local altercation between a couple of guys in the junk hanglers union,

which got a bit, went a bit too far. It's, yeah, it's part of the bigger picture. It's critical to understand that Ruby was also tied to the Chicago Mafia, which gave Jimmy Hoffa his power. Ruby was born in Chicago and entered the rackets there as a teenager. And among the things he did, according to FBI records, he ran errands for the Capone mob, was paid $1 for every seal. resealed envelope that he was able to transport from one place to another. By 1939, Ruby was helping run a junk handler's union local. Ruby was a suspect in the murder of the local's president

that records of the police investigation have disappeared. Ruby continued at the local under its new mafia-connected boss, Paul Reddorfman. Now you're talking about a very significant figure in the Teamsters history. Reddorfman was a local Chicagoan who handled all of the insurance placed by the Teamstreet pension fund and by their other fund activities. In other words, he was collecting premiums

on millions upon millions of dollars. Well, before we move on, do either of you guys have any other Chicago Early Life notes on Ruby before we see him into his

military service? Well, this is something where I still kind of near the top of my list of things I want to dig into next and clarify. But it's, well, in

1950 there's the Kofova Committee which is jumping ahead a bit, but and by that time Ruby's in Dallas. but George Hunter White seems to enter the picture of Ruby's life in some way. It's either 46-47 around the time of the Reagan murder or it's for the Kofova Committee in 1950, but I think it's related to the Reagan one. And supposedly he spoke to the cops about things

and everyone else got charged, but he didn't. and everything relating to him kind of just disappeared. And it's basically around then, and Hunter White, of all people, was involved in that whole, the Chicago. He was in Chicago at the time and working on narcotics investigations there. Yeah, maybe just for the bat.

I don't know if he's come up on our pod yet, but in case the listener's not familiar, do you want to just give the short on Hunter White? Yeah, he's one of those figures that, again, is just like asking to be in a movie. He was a brutal guy who was another one of those figures where you may not know the name, but once you start seeing it, once you know it, you see it everywhere. He ended up involved in MK Ultra later on. He was involved in, I just found this recently, in the early OSS truth drug experiments back in 1942,

He was an FBN federal bureau of narcotics guy and he was connected to the highest levels of all the intelligence agencies and definitely missing several things. But he was a very important figure and close to a lot of the senior intelligence heads and involved in those narcotics investigations. And yeah, it's not impossible that he actually was involved with Ruby speaking on some of these things which would track. If it wasn't him directly, it was certainly he was working on everything around then. And then the kind of the context for what I was saying about all of that with Ruby was that it's the way I'm seeing it. And this is something where I want to dig into the details and just see what is actually definitely out there. But I kind of think if there's a point at which he becomes an informant, it's probably around then. Things seem to line up with that.

So that's, maybe there's an earlier point where he gets connected to the law enforcement side of things. But my sense of it now is that that's almost certainly, I put good money on that being a time at which he definitely established that connection as well. Yeah. My favorite image of George Hunter White is in the CIA's Operation Midnight Climax, which was the covert dosing of the customers of prostitutes in San Francisco and in New York, that George Hunter White would watch as these. unwitting Johns, who had been dosed with LSD, engaged in these sexual activities and interrogation activities through a two-sided mirror, and he sat there with a pitcher of martini and in a chair that had a toilet built into it so that he wouldn't have to get up to relieve himself. Yeah, and that's another thing.

These guys, the amount of alcohol they drunk was world beating. But, yeah, ever since I heard that, it's one of those things that it's hard to believe is, I mean, it's such a surreal image. And, yeah, through one-way mirrors or whatever, just, yeah, just watching. I mean, yeah. Incredible.

And, I mean, this is about Hunter White, but occasionally there are some quotes from people, people, from some of these people that are just a kind of startling. And he, right, here it was. This is a quote in a letter to someone. He said of his work, I toiled wholeheartedly in the vineyards because it was fun, fun, fun. Where else could a red-blooded American boy lie, kill, cheat, steal, rape and pillage with the sanction and blessing of the all-highest? So that's charming. and um yeah but yeah that's who he was um and uh anyway yeah he was working and the reason i brought him out was yeah he was he was working the narcotics underworld side of things

in chicago right at the time of the reagan murder when ruby was right at the heart of it so yeah definitely grounds for further research and right My midnight climax, I want to watch you for the glance. All right, folks, that does it for this week's installment of the Warren Commission decided. Tune in next week where we pick right back up with Max Arbo. And if you can't wait until next week, hop on over to patreon.com slash 4th Reich Archaeology. Give us a donation, and you can access the entirety of part two of our exploration into Jacob Rubinstein today. Until next time, on behalf of Dawn, I'm Dick saying farewell and keep digging.

about total control we'll really leave you all your soul and if you really want to know just scratch the surface and we'll show how far we're willing to go.

Oh, how far we're willing to go.