Fourth Reich Archaeology - You Don’t Know Jack (Ruby) pt. 2

Episode Date: June 6, 2025

Welcome back for Part 2 of our excavation into Jack Ruby with Max Arvo! In Part 1, we dug up the surface layer of Ruby’s biography and followed his life trajectory from Chicago’s Southwest side (b. 1911) to Dallas’s club scene in the early 60s. In this episode, rather than going broader, we go deeper. This episode is really about adding some much-needed nuance to the often simplistic picture of American Organized Crime, and how it fits into the nexus between the business and intelligence networks that fueled the rise of the postwar American Empire.We put the City of Chicago in the broader context of postwar America and trace the mob’s westward and southerly expansion from hubs in Chicago and New York. We also examine some of Ruby’s oldest and closest friends from the school of hard knocks - guys like Lenny Patrick, Dave and Sam Yaras, and the hulking Barney Baker. These were street toughs who grew up alongside the Rubenstein kids in the ghetto gauntlet of Capone’s town, and they’d serendipitously pop back up in Jack Ruby’s life in Fall 1963. We also take roll call on Jack’s other bosom pals he met along the way from Chicago to Dallas and beyond - brainier guys like Paul Roland Jones and Lewis McWillie.All of these characters have direct lines to mob royalty: whether it’s Patrick & Yaras’s wet work for Sam Giancana, Baker’s muscle work for Jimmy Hoffa, or McWillie’s work running casinos for Meyer Lansky. They constituted a layer between the higher-ups in the Cosa Nostra and disposable dummies like Ruby.We do our best to really flesh out these connections and go beyond the corkboard, so that we (and you, listener!) can really understand just how “the men who put [Jack Ruby] in the position [he was] in” did so. With this episode the stage is set to pick back up next time in 1963 and go deep on the factual narrative of the Oswald hit. Enjoy!Sign up for our Patreon here: Patreon.com/fourthreicharchaeology.Read Max’s investigative series on Ruby here: https://www.kennedysandking.com/content/author/415-maxarvo.And find Max’s other work here: https://maxarvo.com.

When we last left Jack Ruby amidst his Warren Commission testimony, he was growing increasingly desperate as Chief Justice Earl Warren rebuffed his continued and escalating pleas to take him to Washington where he could speak freely. As it began to dawn on Ruby that perhaps he would never get out from under the surveillance of the Dallas police whom he had once made such good friends of in his Carousel Club days, his very psyche seemed to unravel as he slipped in and out of character, all the while fearing for his life and the life of his family. I tell you, gentlemen, my whole family is in your family is in your life.

jeopardy, my sisters as to their lives. Yes. Naturally, I am a foregone conclusion. My sisters, Eva, Eileen, and Mary, I lost my sisters. My brothers, Sam, Earl, Hyman, and myself, naturally, my in-laws, Harold Kaminsky, Marge Ruby, the wife of Earl, and Phyllis. the wife of Sam Ruby, they are in jeopardy of the loss of their lives, yet they have just because they are blood-related to myself, does that sound serious enough to you, Chief Justice Warren?

Nothing could be more serious if that is the fact, but your sister. I don't know whether it was your sister Eva or your other sister. Eileen wrote you a letter. wrote the letter to me and told us that you would like to testify, and that is one of the reasons we came down here. But unfortunately, when did you get the letter, Chief Justice Warren? It was a long time ago, I admit. I think it was, let's say, roughly between two and three months ago. Yes.

I think it was, yes. At that time, when you got the letter and I was begging Joe Tonnell and the other lawyers, To know the truth about me, certain things that are happening now wouldn't be happening at this particular time. Yes. Because then they would have known the truth about Jack Ruby and his emotional breakdown. Yes.

Of why that Sunday morning, that thought never entered my mind prior to that Sunday morning when I took it upon myself to try to be a mark. or some screwball, you might say, but I felt very emotional and very carried away for Mrs. Kennedy that with all the strife she had gone through, I had been following it pretty well,

that someone owed it to our beloved president that she shouldn't be expected to come back to face the trial of this heinous crime. And I never had the chance to tell that, to back it up to prove it. Consequently, right, at this moment, I am being victimized as part of a plot in the world's worst tragedy and crime at this moment.

Months back, I had been given a chance. I take that back. Some time back, a police officer of the Dallas Police Department wanted to know how I got into the district, building. And I don't know whether I requested a lie detector test or not, but my attorney wasn't available. When you're a defendant in the case, you say, speak to your attorney, you know, but that was a different time. It was after the trial whenever it happened. At this moment, Lee Harvey Oswald isn't guilty of committing the crime of the assassinating President Kennedy

Jack Rupy is. How can I fight that, Chief Justice Warren? Well, now, I want to say, Mr. Ruby, that as far as this commission is concerned, there is no implication of that in what we are doing. All right, there is a certain organization here. That, I can assure you. There is an organization here, Chief Justice Warren,

if it takes my life at this moment to say it. And Bill Decker said, be a man and say it. There is a John Birch society right now inactivity. And Edwin Walker is one of the top men of this organization. Take it for what it is worth, Chief Justice Warren. Unfortunately for me, for me giving the people the opportunity to get in power because of the act I committed has put a lot of people in jeopardy with their lives. don't register with you, does it?

No, I don't understand that. Would you rather I just delete what I said and just pretend that nothing is going on? I would not indeed. I am only interested in what you want to tell this commission. That is all I am interested in. Well, I said my life, I won't be living long now. I know that.

My family's lives will be gone. when I left my apartment that morning. What morning? Sunday morning. Sunday morning. Let's go back. Saturday, I watched Rabbi Seligman. Any of you watched that Saturday morning?

No, I didn't happen to hear it. He went ahead and eulogized that here is a man that fought in every battle, went to every country, and had to come back to his own country to be shot in the back. I must be a great actor, I tell you. It's 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 decides. I'll never apologize for the United States of America. Ever. I don't care what the facts are. In 1945, we began to acquire 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 renders the more easy victims of a big lie than a small. For example, we're the CIA. See there's so long as... It usually takes a national crisis. Freedom can never be secure. Freedom can never be secure.

Pearl Harbor. A lot of killers. We've got a lot of killers. Why you think our country's so innocent? Not a model with the CIA. I have a problem. This is Fourth Reich is coming. This is Fourth Reich.

I'm Don, and we are back with the great Max Arvo to continue our excavation into the man, the myth, the legend, Jacob Rubinstein, a.k.a. Jack Ruby. Unfortunately, Dick has been temporarily detained in Triscornia prison on the island of Cuba, and will be unable to join us this installment, but Max and I will plow on ahead in his absence, and we're hoping that our emissary that we have sent to get him out of the clink will, like Jack Ruby did, way back in 1959, be able to work his magic. In part one, to quickly recap, we really spent the bulk of our time looking at the biogrammed, background of Jack Ruby, and we kind of started at the end of his bizarre tale by recounting some of his most enigmatic passages from his Warren Commission testimony, this so-called

Get Me to Washington diatribe, where Ruby pled to Chief Justice Warren to get him out of Dallas so that he could tell the real truth about what had happened. And that never happened. He presumably never did tell that whole truth. And so here we are to pick up the pieces. And with that teaser, we dove all the way back. We wound the clock back to Ruby's childhood in Gangland, Chicago, the Chicago of Al Capone and company,

and we discussed his upbringing and maturation into what my Yiddish-speaking relatives would call both a shlomil and a shlamazel. And Jack Ruby was indeed both of those things. But he was so, so much more. We'd spent a little time. covering the organized crime milieu into which Jack Ruby grew up and where he really made his living throughout his life. But there's so much to that picture and it is so foundational to understanding the Jack Ruby angle and Jack Ruby's role in the unfolding events in Dallas in the Great Coup of 1963, that we thought we would start today's episode

by really giving a more dense, a more succinct recapitulation and panorama, if you will, of the organized crime world, the Mafia Mundo, if you will. of Jack Ruby. So with that, let's dig right in. Yesterday began on a numbing note of horror with millions of Americans as spectators. It built to a moment of intense grief and heart-tugging emotion

and continued on a high emotional note throughout the evening in the morning hours of today, Monday. It began with the fatal shooting of Lee Harvey Oswald, the accused assassin of John Kennedy, by Jack Ruby, the Dallas nightclub owner in the basement of Dallas Police Headquarters.

Here's how it looked and sounded on live nationwide television. There is Lee Oswald. He's been shot. He's been shot. Lee Oswald has been shot. Everything pertainning 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 that have so much to gain and have such a material motive for putting me in a position I'm in. We'll never let the true facts come aboard to the world. Now these people are in very high positions, yes.

Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes. So as we kind of discussed at great length last time, Ruby did grow up right in the heart of one of the classic petri dishes for American organized crime. This is the ethnic enclave in Chicago's southwest side where the economy was largely informal, where gang. ran rampant where community bonds were built on ethnicity, on ties to the old countries, and on rackets, really. Some reports even have the young Jack Ruby carrying envelopes for Al Capone. Max, do you have a view on that? Do you think that it's real or just kind of legend? I mean, it's possible. One thing I've been realizing recently is that we, I think we've mentioned a couple of names that show up in 1963 of mob figures that we'll get to again, I'm sure.

And as I've been looking into them all recently, you know, his best friends from childhood ended up as senior mob figures. I mean, one of them was an out-on-hour hitman. And, you know, others were involved in mob syndicate stuff, you know, throw. out their lives so uh and and that started young so i think it's totally possible and yeah that's something i've realized as well is that well one thing is that i don't think you can underestimate or understate the the importance of chicago to as you were just saying the whole syndicate organized crime picture i mean maybe we think of miami and la and Vegas and new york or the east coast, Jersey and stuff, but Chicago was a huge, huge deal. And I mean, this is what I'm

sort of finding myself getting settled on at the moment is that everyone he was around was connected to, and was close to, was connected to it from a young age. So yeah, it's, I think, entirely possible. Yeah, and it's interesting to note that Chicago was a mob hub. and was playing such an outsized role in organized crime for the exact same reasons why Chicago was such an industrial hub, why it became America's second city. And that has to do with its geographic position, smack dab sort of in between the east and west coasts,

and it became a transportation hub. So everything that came in or out of the East Coast that wanted to get into the interior of the United States was largely going through Chicago. And the same goes for the waterways, even through the St. Lawrence Seaway in the Great Lakes down Lake Michigan, you know, during Prohibition, the bootleggers were running boats up the Great Lakes. in and out of Canada to run booze. And I'd also note just how drastically the prohibition period impacted the development of this gangster morality that came to define the streets. And there's this clip that I want to play

that I've seen some links that say this clip is actually Al Capone's voice and other, that it's reading an actual quote of Al Capone by a voice actor that consulted with his niece to master the dialect. But I think he puts a fine point on the way in which breaking the law becomes morally justifiable in the minds of these people. And I think even if there was some legitimacy to their position during prohibition, obviously, as the rackets grow, as the influence of organized crime grows, that begins to spiral a little bit out of control. I came to Chicago with $40 in my pocket. My son is now 12. I'm still married, and I love my wife

dearly. We had to make a living. I was younger than I am now and thought I needed more. I didn't believe in prohibiting people from getting the things they wanted. I thought prohibition was an unjust law, and I still do. This will become relevant later because of the whole impetus for the mafia move in a southerly direction, which is a wave that Jack Ruby rides later in his life. Right. I actually recently, it's funny you mention just cities in general as a factor in all this and the geographical significance.

In the last couple of weeks, I can't remember why, but I found myself looking up how big were certain cities back then relative to what they were, you know, at the end of his life or by the 60s and 70s. And I hadn't realized just the extent to which the location, of power and significance and population as well. Geographically in the US was so different. I mean, when Jack Ruby was born, Chicago, New York, particularly northern, Midwestern, East Coast cities,

all the huge cities were there. And even the West Coast, there weren't so many hugely popular cities. at least compared to the east, northeast, Midwest. And something I found that was interesting is Ruby, it was a couple of months after Ruby was born that Vegas was technically first incorporated as a city. Oh, wow. Yeah, and I think the total number of votes

were something, it was around 270 people voted. That was the size of the population. and of course by the time he he dies everything's changed and the south as well I mean the southwest everything I mean there was New Orleans as well that was one thing that that city was always huge and always significant and it sounds like for the similar reasons as Chicago I mean obviously it's around the water there you got Gulf of Mexico you close to Caribbean and Mississippi and everything so that was always huge but during his life maybe these stats are boring but I found them

I'm so just startling to finally realize, like, Texas had no cities in the top, I think, even 50 most populous in the US when Ruby was born. And, well, now it's got more than any other state. And that was just very clarifying to me to realize how much changed during this entire period we're talking about. Like when we're talking about his childhood, he was in, as he said, well, America's second city, one of these, one of the handful of biggest cities. And during his lifetime, when I was looking at the maps of, you know, what cities were most populous over time, you can kind of, it's almost like the map gets filled in kind of to the west and the southwest and everything. And his journey kind of reflects that. And yeah, that was clarifying to me. The main point, I guess, is Chicago, in the east and the northeast, rather,

but where it was all out, and it wasn't, relatively speaking, that much going on, just in terms of significance and a number of people and everything. And, yeah, it just tracks. His life trajectory kind of follows that explosion, I guess, yeah. Yeah, that's a great point. And if you think about the mafia as a kind of internal imperial power within the United States, you could see the mob bosses. You know, it seems almost quaint or cartoonish now.

But at the time, they really were kind of looking at these blank spots on the map and divvying up territory and vying for experience. mansion into these uncharted regions of the country. Right. I mean, if you just think alone of the two big, well, I guess West Coast as well, with the mob, but, you know, Vegas and Florida, the way it looked to me was that you can kind of mark when they start to expand dramatically and become just much more nationally and internationally influential, it lines up with, I'm sure there are other reasons as well,

but with when the mob started paying attention and started prioritising. I mean, I do see Vegas now as being a creation really of Lansky and Siegel. He sent Segal out there to be his lead on the whole thing. But some of these places, you know, can just see it exactly as you said, when their attention went, you know, locked onto a certain place in a couple decades, it was completely changed and there was a hell of a lot more money and a hell of a lot more people than, um, than, uh, than there was before. Yeah.

And to bring it back to the Jack Ruby mob world, that also gives an insight into just how optimistic and imaginative these hustlers really were right we're talking about people who by and large on the whole had been in the country for at most one and a half generations their families right so ruby of course both of his parents to reiterate were both born in poland and the same goes for this cohort of kids that he grew up with and so you know maybe now it makes sense to just take a little roll call of some of these friends that ruby had from a very young age and in this atmosphere right they're not being supervised by their parents they may or may not be engaged in formal education. These are basically street kids that from a very young age are hustling to get by

and competing and collaborating amongst themselves to get ahead and to make a name for themselves in the streets. And in that dynamic, Jack Ruby, I think the impression that I get at least is that he was always this hype man type of a figure, not the most handsome guy, not the most intelligent guy, not the most athletic guy, but he could be really loyal to his cohorts, and he had a capacity for selecting friends who would be of use to him

in a jam, namely, you know, big guys and brawlers, and he was a bit of a brawler himself. But let's kind of take the roll call. So, you know, among his friends that I think you probably had in mind when you alluded to them earlier, a couple of names that pop into my mind, at least, are Dave Yaris and Lenny Patrick, right? Those were a couple of his Chicago buddies. Chicago, Chicago, that toddled in town Chicago, Chicago, I will show you around Yeah, those are the two that I think There's no doubt about them

They were childed friends, I think, in some ways, oldest friends And his siblings knew him as well And they were the real deal I mean, Patrick particularly seems to have been definitely a hitman like you know a killer you know i was curious about lenny patrick hanging out with jack ruby if patrick you know it sounds like an irish name but i looked it up and sure enough his real name was actually Leonard levin so he was like jack ruby a jewish kid from chicago as well. And Yaris, too, I was digging into the whole, that whole crowd of people that showed up in

Dallas and when Ruby headed down there and then I moved in. And it's a small crowd. I mean, of these, I guess kind of in the intelligence world, it's the difference between operators and leadership in D.C. Like, there's the, there's the people who get it done. And there's the people who determine what you know they they need to go out and get done and it's that crowd that ruby seems to have been in and they all seem to have grown up together and of course if you're all heading into the same setting down the same path it's a lot a lot less likely that any of you will take a different one you know so you can see that there would be that kind of pressure excitement of getting into this whole thing together and and there's no doubt about it that the people

with the longest history with Ruby ended up as big figures in the mob and they're people who he turns to in 63 right before it all it all happens so yeah Patrick and Yarris and oh and that was another thing I was going to say is that they also show up as people in a kind of crowd working working with this another name but not someone from Chicago but I think we mentioned in Paul Roland Jones who was another guy who kind of spearheaded that initial move to Dallas and I was looking in all newspapers and you see that it's the same kind of crowd going around it there were stories of crowd of like in in miami getting arrested that included jones and a yaris or maybe both of the

yarris's and then yeah and you make a good point too so there's the friendship ties and there's also family ties and like you mentioned yeah i think dave yarris had a brother sam who was also kind of in the same click and is also in this recurring cast of characters around Jack Ruby. And Jack Ruby, as we mentioned in the last part, he had many, I think, 10 siblings in total. I don't think all of them are necessarily close to him, and they were split up at certain points in time during their childhood, at least the homes that they were living in. But nevertheless, both Jack Ruby, as well as his older brother, I think the oldest one, Hyman. And he's got two other brothers, Sam and Earl. Yeah, I mean, I was actually, I recommend it to

anyone if you're trying to dig into someone from this kind of era, going to some ancestry sites. to just see like where were people when and who was there and sometimes it's clarifying and I was looking at the some of the early censuses and yeah there's something like 10 kids a hell of a lot of them one little detail as well just emphasize how recent the the context of their immigrant story was for them is that I think his dad came over before the rest of the family and started getting set up and then three of his siblings had been born abroad, I think, in Germany. So they immigrated as well once the dad had come over.

And then Jack and several other siblings were born in the US. But yeah, the main siblings who stay in the picture in a big way throughout his life were Earl, Sam, Eva, who ends up mostly being referred to as Eva Grant. That's her name she got at marriage and Hyman as well. And so those, I mean, maybe there's some crucial siblings I'm not wherever yet, but, yeah, Earl Sam, I'm evenheim. Yeah, his sister Eileen comes up a few times. Oh, right, right, right. But I get the sense that she's more of like a phone contact, not somebody who's usually mixed up in the business.

Yeah, well, maybe this is a good time to, I mean, I guess you've already, you've already started to say it, but it's not just those. childhood friends who became mob figures but the siblings involvement over the years not just the friends but the siblings with jack's underworld endeavors what it seems like to me is that either i think for sure and probably sam and earl as well um were also involved in underworld activities over the years And you see that over the years, over the decades again. Again, like these friends, it's, yeah, it's the family connection, and it's the friends. And they all get, I think, anyone can just see how it would happen, you know. It's just immigrant kids trying to hustle, hustle their way through,

and everyone going in a certain direction. And it's a way to, you know, everything else is less, you know, who knows if you're going to, where you're going to be able to earn a buck from. But this whole milieu you're in, well, you get a certain kind of security and you can earn some money. And I think that's what happened with the friends he made when he was very young and with some of the siblings. So, yeah.

Yeah. And the institutional actors that were involved in these rackets that the Rubenstein kids, the Yaris's and Lenny Patrick were mixed up in, The big one on the scene, there's really two. One is in the light of day, so to speak, and that is the organized labor scene in Chicago. The Teamsters connected junk handlers and scrap workers unions, especially that Ruby, and I believe some of these other characters as well,

get kind of day jobs working for the unions and their work is very, I'd say, in a legally liminal space. Right. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, for sure. It's the, it's that whole kind of, there's always that tension between organized crime and, you know, legitimate business. And they were definitely involved in things.

things that were right on that edge. You're the union business, and then that connects to like wire services across the country which connect to gambling, and then so gambling, racketeering, trafficking of substances and all those kind of things are sort of happening around them. Yeah. Yeah, the other institutional actor on the scene that I was going to name is of course, and you just described it, but the what's called the Chicago Outfield. And to situate it in time, this is the same time that the famous Sam Giancana is on his way up the ladder within that organization.

And so maybe you could say a word or two about the degree to which Ruby, as a younger man, would have been aware of Giancana's rise. as an organizational kind of mastermind on the scene? I mean, I would guess so. It would be hard not to be. It definitely came to the, I guess, the criminology side of this whole story later than I did the side of it. It's more, you know, intelligence and state and everything. And it took me a while to realize that, you know,

Capone, Giancana, and so many people who ended up being the foundational figures of Vegas, were from Chicago. and as the mob becomes syndicated and spreads it seems like the leaders of who syndicated it were from New York particularly in a Siegel

Lucky Luciano and Lansky but the names that keep cropping up over decades into the 70s the majority of the big names even if they maybe weren't always the absolute top of the pile were from Chicago and from this whole million

and so you've got Kapai as well, which is so early days of it, and a lot of these people were lieutenants of Capone. And so that, you know, he's part of the whole story as well. And, yeah, once I think by the 30s things get syndicated, like, well, actually, this is way of, your question was, would he have known Giancana? But, but yes to say yes. I think, I'm sure he would have. Yeah, I mean, we were just talking about Capone. And of course, Giancana kind of fills that void that's left in the wake of Al Capone eventually in Chicago. And he's kind of the boss of

Chicago. And it's well recorded that Jack Ruby's buddies, Lenny Patrick, and Dave Yaros were directly working under Giancana and basically controlling the Jewish neighborhoods and gambling. and also, you know, killing people when they had to on his behalf. Yeah, it was a, that's another thing, I guess, thinking of just how, you know, how much changed over these decades. It's relatively a small world, I think, you know. It's a big country, but there were way fewer people, obviously, back then, and things were something else.

of sort of clicked recently as just how much was kind of in its infancy and being established in those pre-war years and then kind of spread its wings in the post-war years. And so it would have been a small crowd. And that's really the upshot of why I wanted us to start out here, because it's not just about Jack Ruby's in the room with Sam Giancana. That is almost irrelevant of whether the two guys were on a first name basis or whether they were in the same room together at any given time. The point is to establish the mental rolodex that a hustler like Jack Ruby carried around over his shoulders everywhere that he went and the mental map of the country that he would have had.

And you could think of, if you know anybody or maybe you, the listener, are a small town person in a big city or a big city person in a small town or whatever. But you could just think of, you know, the powerful person from your childhood. That's a name that you know. So if some stranger were to come up to you and say, oh, yeah, I'm, you know, I work with Sam Giancana. that would have been meaningful to a Jack Ruby, regardless of whether he actually was high up enough in the ranking to interact directly with Momo, as Giancana was affectionately known. Yeah, exactly. Couldn't say it better.

Yeah, and then I guess there's also the thing of trust, you know, if you've got the long-lasting connections, and also if people have simply just stuck with things and not started talking or not try to just abandon it all and everything. If they stuck around for a few, well, decades, you're going to turn to them because it's a kind of thing where you need to, if you're going to ask someone to do something, you need to be able to trust them. And so, yeah, I think it's small world and people readily turning to each other throughout the years. And just one other quick point.

I think with the syndicate and underworld stuff, particularly, my sense is it's a lot looser than other institutions that we might all be perhaps more familiar with if we're into all this stuff, which is like intelligence. You know, if there's a chief of station or a chief of base somewhere and then there's the deputies and there's, you know, or in the military as well, you know, anything like that. Or in government, it's all, it is all a lot more, you know,

localized and if people are in certain positions or assigned certain places, then if you can prove that, then that does tell a lot of the story. But it's not the same. It's taken me some rewiring as I've been trying to understand the crime side of it to get that. I mean, it's a simple point really, but it's, you know, we talk about there's the Chicago outfit or there's the Miami mob and then there's the New Orleans mob and then there ends up being the LA and then there's New York and Cleveland and all this and yeah it was it's not like people were specifically chief of chief of base or whatever in a certain city it's um it's it's looser and um it seems like you know people turn to whoever they seems like they can help and whoever they trust

and wherever they are really um so yeah that's i guess to say what i mean is it's not so much about if they were definitely, as you were saying, if they were definitely in the same room at a certain time, or if they definitely had, you know, certain records of their pledging allegiance to each other or anything like that. It's, or being given orders. It's, yeah, it's looser and more diffuse than that. Yeah, and I think in part it depends also on the levels. Like Doug Valentine has a book, the CIA as organized crime, which tracks how, of the upper echelons replicate this more diffuse structure that's more common to the mafia and outside of the normal reporting lines of the bureaucracy, too.

Yeah. There was just one more character from Chicago that I wanted to introduce before we follow our man, Jack, down south. I'll give you the opportunity to cover any loose ends. that we missed but the one guy that I wanted to be sure to put him on the radar at this point in the story is Barney Baker he was huge guy right like a mountain of a man yeah six foot and several inches I can't remember how huge and and and broad as well yeah I mean very very big and he and again I think I mean Leonard Patrick with his childhood friend was

definitely, you know, a hitman, but Barney was in that kind of a category. And he brings in another side of the story, which I am less clued in on, but is certainly important, which is he was a Hoffer's, Jimmy Hoffer's primary enforcer in later years, and known as ruthless. And he is another one who Ruby calls in the days before the assassination. And yeah, and so again, it's just the circle kind of gets gets smaller and smaller. It's, I mean, like, right there, you've got a major

hofer connection, you've got syndicate hitman, you've got enforcers and, you know, strategists who end up working across the country, and yeah, I mean, you've got it all, you know, and once you've got the Hoffer angle, it's, you kind of got everything

right there. So, yeah. Off to the races. Or, right? guess in this case off to the south right yeah so ruby moves down to Dallas in the late 40s after world war two and as we already kind of laid out this is a time in the history of Texas when urbanism and city life are just getting their start. So Dallas is fertile territory for the mob, not only given the massive amounts of building that are going on,

and of course the construction trades are always a big one for organized crime syndicates to put their fingers in, but also, obviously, Texas is also on the border with Mexico, and the post-war period was a time when narcotics roots were in flux as well. So you have new flows opening up through Mexico. particularly for opium and also for marijuana and now that all the boys are back from the front the demand is bigger than ever and so there's a kind of a gold rush of mobsters down to not only Dallas, but certainly Dallas was a prime destination. So Ruby goes down there and some of these other guys there. And it's not always settlement, right? It's not always they move from one city

to another. They are kind of nomadic in some respects bouncing around from city to city. but maybe Max you want to talk a little bit about Paul Roland Jones a name that you mentioned and kind of the process whereby Ruby and the mob make themselves at home and avail themselves of that famous Texas hospitality right so yeah as you said it's it's in the 40s attention starts going south and before it just before I get to Roland Jones, you picked up on the narcotics angle as well, and that's something I've been getting more clarity on recently, the importance of that. My understanding at the moment is that it was in the 40s once things were properly syndicated and the war was over, that

I think it was Lanski who took the lead strategically on establishing the narcotics connection from Mexico into the US, and folk he used to make that happen where he turned to Marcelo in New Orleans, Carlos Mosello, and folk on the West Coast, Mickey Cohen and some of his associates and senior people. And I think the Dallas move in 46-47 by the mob, which was a, I think clearly a part of a national kind of strategy to move down to Texas and establish operations there in a way that they hadn't been over the years

compared to somewhere like New Orleans or anything. I think it was part of that. it tied to that the narcotics angle so yeah in 46 47 Paul Roland Jones who seems to have been less of a kind of enforcer than these other types than like Yarris and Patrick and people like that and more of a kind of someone who seems to have been trusted to handle things that were more needed a bit more of a managerial brain you know some financial house and um yeah, could kind of, well, so yeah, he led it, and he went in with a bunch of people from Chicago to try and take over. And they, it's really amusing when you go back and read how brazen it was, but they just arranged a meeting with the sheriff and sat down and discussed how they were going to, it's kind of, okay, so we'll pay you this, and then we're going to, so we're going to have these operations and they're going to be fronts, and then through that we'll be, you know, doing all this other stuff in the back rooms.

and so, you know, it was like they thought they were just going to go in and, well, I mean, this is basically what happened in the end, a couple of hiccups, but treated it as like, okay, so, so hey cops, let's just figure out the fine print, the details, you know, all this kind of stuff, and yeah, so there was a sting there by a new sheriff of Dallas, who only lasted in the job for a couple of years, and Jones and others got charged, but that doesn't seem to have stopped things. You know, the mob did, move in at that time. Ruby came down there. I was checking some things earlier and it sounds like Eva and maybe I think also one of the brothers, Samuel Earl, were already down there and Ruby took a few visits before we moved down and what's in the details of that whole Paul Roland Jones staying in the plan to take over supposedly this would take too long to get into but they were definitely going to be clubs that would be fronts for operations would be their kind of way into establishing things. And Ruby, and I would guess a couple of the siblings, maybe to a lesser extent, would be the ones fronting those. And so you get a kind of a wing of the Rubinstein family

moving down to Dallas at the time this is all happening and at the time the mob takes over. And they do exactly what, I mean that they run clubs, either definitely ran clubs, to an extent unlike any of the other siblings, except Jack, she was a part of that scene. And, yeah, and so it's 46-47 as this crucial, crucial narcotics connections being established from Mexico into the U.S. They all, you know, a good amount of the family show up right at that time. Yeah, I don't know, Max, are you familiar with the Dr. Seuss book, The Lorax? I am. It's been a while. the animated musical version of it but there's like the scene where all the oncelers you know the

onceler calls up all of his cousins to come and take advantage of this market and his his factory that he's setting up in the you know the land of the truffula trees sounds yeah that's really like Dallas in the 40s for the mob yes no that sounds uncannily like it now I'd reach the stage where the potential was known. This business was too big for one Wensler alone, so promptly I built me a radio phone. I called my brothers and uncles and ants and I said, listen here, here's a wonderful chance for the whole Wonsler family to get mighty rich. Get over here fast, take the road to North Nitch, turn left at Wehawk and sharp right at south stitch. Yeah, they were going down to establish themselves, you know, and in a place that, unlike Chicago, where there's a lot of, there were a lot

more, you know, a lot of people much more well established, you know, I guess it's kind of like gold rush or oil rush and stuff like that, where it's kind of, you hear about a spot that's got good prospects and everyone swarms in trying to get as much as they can, as quick as they can, and beat everyone else to it. And it does seem like that. And, you know, but, you know, Dallas, again, population starts expanding a hell of a lot and becomes a lot more important and yeah they're right there on the ground floor yeah i wanted to share some anecdotals here for one i think that eva grant eva rubinstein she seems to me to be a savier one of the siblings so i think she actually was the first sibling to establish a club in dallas and she's kind of the

anchor before Jack comes down in a more permanent way and during this time period as I understand it Earl and Sam were just giving some money and doing deals and traveling back and forth but I think that Earl didn't permanently relocate till after Jack so it was Eva Jack Earl and I don't know if Sam actually did move down or not. yeah i right i don't think he did i think i remember that yeah no he had businesses i think it was a cleaners maybe called cobo cleaners cobo cleaners in uh detroit but they the brothers and either would they would all yeah uh help with um funds for various things and it does sound like jack was the one who if he got some money it very quickly left his pocket and um was always uh owing his siblings and

other siblings having to bail him out for what he owed another sibling things like that and yeah and um as you said i think yeah either was savier but jack does seem to have been the one who my sense is throughout this whole time and over the years after 46 one season dallas is the one who seems to have had the developed the um well more than any of the other siblings there are a lot more connections to very specific mob figures throughout jack's life But I still don't think you should overlook the role, however large it was, that some of these siblings played. And yeah, as you said, Eva was there first. And I think they did go to, again, some of the siblings and a bunch of the Chicago friends in the 30s went to the West Coast when Mickey Cohen and Siegel and everyone were out there.

And those connections ended up being important. And I think, again, Eva was, may have been there a bit before. So, yeah, well, she was definitely a significant part of Jack's life throughout. And she's there on the ground, right involved at the heart of everything. You know, once he shoots Oswald, she's a huge presence for the next few years. I mean, I think sometime in 63 they got in, I think, an actually fist fight over money or something. So they were both close, but also. So it was turbulent, but, yeah, Eva's a big part of it.

And, yeah, was first, though. It seems to me, based on the way that she recounts her biography, and I'd encourage the listener, if you want to, it's a very entertaining read to check out any of the Eva Grant testimony, the Warren Commission. But it seems like probably she was actually prostituted as a young woman, like as a teenager in that Chicago milieu that we described earlier and was really hardened to the world from a young age.

And Jack, on the other hand, his personality was very hyperactive. So I think that that dynamic makes a lot of sense that she's kind of making some of these connections in the first instance, but then Jack, he hits the ground running. So like Paul Roland Jones, as the story goes, was introduced to Jack by Eva because, and I just couldn't, I just couldn't help but tell this little tale that the way that they allegedly get to know each other was that Eva and Hyman bring Jack into a business deal with. with Paul Jones for the shipment of metal pipes.

Right. Mm-hmm. Yeah. And in her Warren Commission testimony, Eva kind of accidentally confesses that they were being used to smuggle drugs inside the pipes. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. They're a lot of the siblings, well, all of them seem to have had a hard time.

They knew they needed to lie. lie and obscure things, but they didn't do it that well. I mean, I, Sam Ruby, no, Earl Ruby rather, who was the one who, skipping ahead, but takes a trip to California and a couple of days after Ruby shoots Oswald, and that's important. So he's got a big testimony in the one commission. He's, he'll just contradict himself, you know, one sentence to the next. Not that it mattered. It wasn't called out on anything, but I would say that that, that story of the pipes, you know, tracks with the whole narcotics side of things. I think, you know, if you see them as all of them having slightly different roles,

but as kind of operating fronts for various things, parts of the underworld operations, and if you understand that there's this crucial narcotics connection across the border right below, then yeah, it tracks. And there's another story later on incredible accounts saying that Ruby was a kind of guy, someone people had to get the sign off from to um get involved in narcotics deals in the in the region in later years and so um yeah it just that story is um i think yeah it it captures a lot personalities of these people and also just the the kind of day-to-day and yeah just one last thing i think it it shows also kind of the level of things that they were they were at um it's it's not

it's not Jinkana and Traficanti and Lanski around a table deciding what part of the country they're going to develop next. It's kind of drugs in pipes. Yeah. And very pragmatic. Like there's an ingenuity to this whole crew that is both entertaining and fascinating. And, you know, it's so classically American too in a way that really, really just trying to make their way up the socioeconomic ladder, maybe my favorite Paul Roland Jones, drug smuggling side gig that I came across over the last couple of days was egg dehydration. Of course.

Who wouldn't think to do that? Right, yeah. He would buy up these little egg farms and then I guess, suck the liquid out of the eggs and fill it with opium or something yeah yeah no i mean that's um yeah it tracks and i um with jones as well um when i was working on the research for this for the ruby articles and um there was a time last summer where i was just digging into everything and um particularly browsing around a lot of newspaper archives just plugging in names seeing where they occur And Jones showed up, again, in that kind of hustle, hustler mindset of involved in certain deals with,

there's one with like an oil man and another guy who becomes, is one of the big investors or at least the people who held the shares in a bunch of casinos for them. You know, he was involved in this kind of chain of articles describing a bunch of companies that got established, I think starting in California, and they all sign on. and then one company gets wound up within a few months and then to be brought up by another company that was also founded by all of them and it seems like just a kind of money laundering thing by just a few of them that EU was also roped in where they just hustles here and there

and kind of taking the opportunities you can. And yeah, I think it's that classic American story and I think also definitely with the rubies. I do think that more and more that the immigrant side of things is, you know, a real part of probably how that, you know, what shape their mindsets, that sense of, you know, back up against the wall, there's not constantly kind of got to keep proving yourself and got to work hard to get to a place where you feel secure.

And, yeah, it's just, yeah, it's just exactly what you're saying. It's just kind of shut through all of this, is doing what they can. Yeah. And the freedom to remake yourself in the new world, you know, not. Not that Jack, I mean, that generation, they were all born here, but they were not emulating much about their parents. Like, we can't really stress enough how much their parents, to the extent they were in the picture as an influence, it was unequivocally a negative influence.

Like, the dad was a drunk and abusive. The mom was in and out of psychiatric care. it was not a nurturing home environment so they're forced to write their own story and and this is you nailed it I mean it's just it can't be overstated how central this aspect of their identity really was to the role that this whole generation played in history yeah exactly and I mean just I think I mentioned in the last episode but um just quickly the Everything we've been describing sounds a lot like the story of Lanski, Luciano and Siegel in New York when they were kids. And there's a biography of Lanski that is practically authorized.

And he, well, yeah, it was. And he contributed to it a lot. And I think, you know, there's things, more reason to be wary of what's claimed in chapters about later years. But the childhood story sounds, there's no reason why it would be lied about. And it sounds like what I imagine the whole, the Ruby family and all their friends, or the Ruby kids and their friends going through is that immigrants feeling very dislocated. I mean, Lansky moved over. He wasn't born in the US. And he was, I think, old enough to have some memory of moving over.

And it's, yeah, it's like kids bumping into each other in the street. There's gambling going on all around him. In that story, it's like Luciano's hot-headed. Siegel is completely out of control and Lanski is the guy who they all become friends and they get each other out of various scrapes and hustle their way through until suddenly you know they're on top of the world but um yeah all immigrants all rooted in specific you know um ethnicities and divisions as well you know and yeah i just mentioned that because yeah it sounded very similar though they ended up at different or as the Alanski story ends up at a much more higher level of

things. But yeah, it's exactly what you're saying. I think it's yeah. Yeah. I mean, I can even speak from personal observation. Really, this is kind of my grandfather's generation. It was also, you know, Jewish on one side of my family, both of my grandparents had a very similar timeline, similar story although you know avoided the organized crime trap thankfully because I think there was a little bit more stability on the part of the generation that came over on the boat from the old country that was able to you know foster a more nurturing and healthy environment to come up in, but definitely the stories, the misas, as they called it in Yiddish, of my grandfather's environment growing up and kind of the community that he was surrounded

by the Jewish immigrant community, among other ethnic enclaves, very much a similar story and met a lot of these types of figures and, you know, plenty of them were also mobbed up to one degree or another. And so I think that especially reflecting on it in hindsight now, I think about how the, as you said, loose, right? It's not like they got a business card that says the mafia, right? It could be somebody who transition from owning a grocery, grocery store to owning a bar to selling magazines to what like just odd jobs which may or may not have some degree of involvement from some dirty money somewhere in the chain right yeah exactly and um i think it's also you know if someone's uh say an employee of the a cia you know they're in completely

and it's it's everything but um I think you know I mean you can see it and watch the sopranos or anything you know the it's there are the people who are absolutely you know running the show and at the heart of it and then there will be people who have connections in that world and they are they own a business or they want to start a business and you know folk with the underworld connections and with some money they can help out you know the person who's not not fully in their in the underworld side of things. It never gets fully into it,

but then they get, you know, financially involved. Folk in the syndicate side of things might ask them for favours to help out here and there. So like with Eva, I can't, my sense is it's probably with her, it's something like that where it's kind of, she's doing her thing and is also at a lot of points helpful

to syndicate folk. And they can help her too. And so it's not necessarily all, in like sworn an oath of loyalty or anything but it's uh you know there's points where you know her business is her club is a front for things yeah and on that point i want to just hammer something that we've alluded to but maybe not stated straight on and that is that the big role the big assist that especially jack was able to provide to these underworld contacts in Dallas

was his ins with the cops, right, especially. And Earl Ruby tells a story about how Jack ingratiated himself with the cops that I would be remiss not to include. This is from his testimony to the House Select Committee on Assassinations. Or why did it seem so easy for Jack to enter to jail? Why was he so friendly with so many policemen? Well, I would like to relate an incident, and I think it's in the Warren Commission. At one time, two officers of the Dallas police force were being attacked by several hoodlums.

Jack went to the aid of the policemen and helped them subdue these hoodlums. And in that fight, one of the hoodlums actually bit off one part of one of Jack's fingers. And a statement from one of the officers involved later on said that Jack actually fought like a tiger to help them. Those were his words. This is why or how Jack developed such a friendly relationship with Dallas police force. Like you mentioned there was the bribery sting, but it didn't derail by any means the ability of the mob to buy off the local authorities down there. And that was really became, I think, Jack Ruby's bread and butter to pay off the cops, to serve the cops in various ways. like his clubs were as you mentioned they were definitely being used for fronts certainly for gambling

I think it's not clear that they were actually used for prostitution the clubs themselves right yeah I haven't seen that either although I think maybe some of the girls who danced or worked at the clubs may have been available for dates to paint customers outside the clubs. As far as I could tell, it seems to be that Jack was strict about preventing his clubs from turning into brothels. Yeah, that's my understanding too. It's the kind of thing where you can see that there'd be what they were used as fronts for or what was moving through. I'm sure, change over time. I'm sure, you know, frequently and it was unpredictable. There was something there to be um that could be used in various ways as needed i just want to read a little

bit from a book that is i really recommend um it's called double cross and it's a biography of jincahna by two of his uh one of his brothers and then a couple of i think a nephew and um it's it's it's one of those where because it's a mob biography i can see why people would say well it's not the most credible source but it's I've read a couple of mob biographies that are just what you'd expect from that but this is so it's wildly kind of on point so many things and there's this passage I actually found earlier today that just I mean I won't say it's the absolute truth but it lines up with everything and exactly stuff we've been talking about and so I'll just read it exactly as it's written about this whole story um so the sheriff refused that page

off with the Jones thing and blew the whistle, resulting in Jones being charged with bribery. It put a crimp in all their plans. And this is their quote, the language, quote, but we got another card to play, Jin Kana told his brother, Chuck. I'm sending a due friend of Dave Yaros's and Lenny Patrick's Jack Ruby. Jin Kana's brother learned that Jack Ruby was expected to move slowly at first, opening a seedy night spot that the Chicago syndicate would slowly transform into a jumping strip joint, offering clientele everything from bookmaking to prostitutes.

Over time, if all proceeded according to the plan, Ruby would bypass the sheriff, find the weak link in the area's law enforcement. There always was one, Jenkana said, and begin the long process of bribery and payoffs. So it's not, I mean, it tracks with everything, but it's a source that you can't. Amazing. You can't say. From the horse's mouth. Well, that's definitely, but right? I thought that, I found that earlier.

Yeah, I mean, it's something I believe. And, yeah, that's kind of how I would see Jackson. role maybe being in Dallas as a kind of doing other things around the country and in Cuba and things, but as a kind of guy who got to know the right people so that he could smooth the way for the mob's ambitions. Yeah, just that was a great quote. Yeah. No, that's amazing. I didn't know about that, that there was such a source to put such a fine point on it. Yeah. I know, it's, I mean, it's happened time and again with all this stuff, but I found, that was one of a few books that I found where it seems like it says something, it says it, it just says it, and it seems perfectly credible enough, but it's just not really referenced, or I think it's thought of as like a true crime book, but anyway, that's my understanding of it. The last thing I'll say that I had to say about the club running and,

Dallas was it kind of in connection with the procurement of women that at least one witness also said that Jack Ruby had a massive stockpile of pornography that he supplied to people in the area. And so, you know, just one more thing that has kind of a dual read on it. On the one hand, it's a hustle, right? It's a way for him to make a little extra money. The guys get all horned up looking at the dancers in the club and want to buy something to take home. And on the other hand, it's potential blackmail material for him to generate on anybody, really, customers, models, whatever.

Cops. I mean, yeah, that's exactly what I was going to say. It's another thing I've been learning just in general with all this stuff. I don't think you can underestimate the extent to which blackmail was a tool turned to, I mean, by intelligence, by the mob, you know, by cops, by anyone. And yeah, and it does sound also that over those years, Jack, yeah, he helped. I'm not sure if it's help, I'm not sure what it was, but at least was involved with so many cops. over the years and cops would always be at his clubs and um i guess that's skipping ahead a bit but the number of them that knew him uh on site um was absurd and um including at the absolute

highest levels of the police they all knew him so i think although that's that's part of it he's got that place that um he could i mean i guess it would get associated as kind of a cop bar and um yeah they're all gaining something i guess oh yeah oh yeah um well i think maybe we can spend the rest of this episode looking outside of dallas you know dallas we've been organizing this kind of chronologically and geographically you know origins in chicago the move down to dallas we've established that Dallas is a node between the West Coast, Vegas, New Orleans, Miami, and Cuba. So let's now flesh that out a little bit and see just how Jack's business interests and his mob ties take him to those other nodes on the map. So one person that we mentioned last time was, of course, Lewis McWilley.

And do you know how did Jack Ruby actually get introduced to McWilli in the first place? I think I do. I'm just realizing in the last couple of weeks. McWillie was, he might have been born in Dallas, but he was working in Dallas in the 40s. I only clicked this year in the last couple of weeks. he was a dealer and a gambler himself but a dealer in casinos in Dallas in I think they may have met in 46 47 actually but it was I mean it was the place he would it would make sense that they'd meet and yeah he may have been born born there but worked in I guess maybe they weren't technically casinos not sure if they were allowed but whatever wherever the gambling happened in Dallas at that time he was a a guy, you know, work in the, I think working the tables, maybe managing in some way. Yeah, it might have been in the Vegas Lounge, one of Jack Ruby's clubs back in the 50s.

Incidentally, a club that Eva really ran and supervised and managed was called the Vegas Lounge. And famously, it was, you know, a bar and not a strip club, but a bar with one of these big back rooms that was decked out like a casino right yeah that sounds yeah exactly and i think he met again this is just recent stuff i've read but i think he was um in the 40s before the chicago mob moved in he was working for the guy who preceded the chicago mob and ran the texas underworld uh at one of benny binion's clubs or gambling locations and then binion was ruthus guy who basically vacated the Texas scene and moved to Vegas, clearing the way for the Chicago and kind of international mob. So I think I started off by saying I didn't. I think that's, it would have been

in Dallas, I think on the gambling side of things, sometime late 40s, early 50s, and yeah, definitely in the same world. Yeah. And McWillie, I think we might have already said this. We probably don't need to spend too much more time recapping that but he was like a professional gambler right he was really good at gambling and became kind of an organizer you know came to the attention of the casino guys to the point where he got a job working and managing casinos for the syndicate in most notably in Havana, right? Yeah, exactly. It strikes me as someone who was probably didn't, like Ruby and all that lot,

didn't start off with any particular connections or reason to get into that world. But I think it seems like he was just bright, good at gambling and dealing with numbers. And that more managerial kind of side of things, he became a guy who the people at the highest levels, over the years felt comfortable turning specifically to handle various things. I mean, he knew Lansky and Traffa County and all those people in Havana, and I think was assigned to manage kind of casino floors by them. So he's at that level of significant connection.

And then after that, he ends up going to Vegas and becoming very senior at the Thunderbird casino. So Jinkana personally turns to him to handle Sinatra at the Kalneva Lodge by Lake Tahoe from the border of Nevada and California. So that's McWilley. He's someone that was really trusted to get things done at a bit of a higher level than kind of beating someone up, just to kind of be somewhere for a while and kind of run things smoothly and not screw up. Yeah. And he was also a real icon to the less smooth Jack Ruby. I think Ruby really looked up to him. He cherished their friendship and really wanted to impress McWillie. And that, of course, comes up with all of the Cuba stuff where McWillie, is the conduit between Ruby and the Cuban operations for the mob, as far as I can tell, sending some weapons unclear to me

the amount of weapons traffic that Jack was involved in. I mean, unclear to me too, I think. And I think the various congressional investigations are, I mean, obviously, they wouldn't out and out lay out the most damning case, but I think it's definitely one of those things where the paper trail is harder to pin down. But, yeah, he was definitely connected to that with McWillie. In 1959, were you aware of your brother Jack's taking a trip to Cuba? Yes, I was.

How did you become aware of that? Jack told me about it. What did he say? He said he was going to visit a good friend of his by the name of Lou McWillie. Did he have any other comments? Was he going there strictly for a vacation? Yes. Now this was in 1959 when you advanced him the $6,000 loan. Did you have any questions in your own mind as to how he was going to finance a trip to Cuba?

trip to Cuba. In other words, at the time, did it strike you as unusual for him to be going to Cuba? No, because I don't think I learned about it until after he had returned. My counsel tells me that the trip was paid for by Lou McWilley. And McWilli had those Havana connections. pretty early on. I mean, I think he was probably out there for years before. He was for years before, you know, Ruby goes over in 59 with him. So would have had an involvement in the various trafficking things that the mob were doing in Cuba. Yeah. And, you know, the more I've thought about it since we discussed the Triscornia prison escape.

or not escape, but the effort to free Santos Traficante from the Cuban prison in 1959 that McWillie and Jack Ruby appear to have been involved in, that maybe that was McWillie doing Jack Ruby a huge favor by giving him FaceTime with the boss. Yeah, I know, I could totally see that. I was just thinking, I feel like the way I view all these people we're talking about, it's kind of, one analogy might be that almost McWillie was kind of Ruby's handler, but that's not quite the right word, but maybe it's like, you know,

you've got your general or your field marshal at the top of things, you know, given the grand plans, and then you've got your captains and handling, a large amount of people in higher level stuff and then there, so they're getting the orders from the top and then the people lower down are then turning to the people that they trust the kind of lieutenants and, well obviously that's words that are always used with the mob, but it seems like it's that kind of thing

where, and I think this is a crucial element of connecting Ruby to the whole bigger picture that Cuba brings in, which it's particularly through Cuba that you you get the direct connections to Cuban exiles, the CIA operations, which are also assassination programs, and those would come from the people at the top, but McWilli could easily, I think, have been a kind of point of someone to pass on orders or information, you know, assignments to someone like Ruby. And yeah, and I think the 59 thing is, it's interesting that it's the

one thing on record it's with some of this stuff you can wonder if everything's intentional but the fact that there was i think he definitely did make other trips ruby did but that's the one that it's his name on the papers and so he was kind of that was the thing that that was hanging over his head as a kind of if that gets out then and that's what he talks about later on when he's in jail it's interesting that there was a trip that i mean anyone you can all you can go to some ancestry site or genealogy research and just find the immigration documents where there's Jack Ruby's name. I actually want to pick this up because I think you're hitting something very interesting,

but finish up. Sorry, I didn't mean interrupt. No, no, no. I mean, I am. It's the McWilli aspect I think I'm seeing as more and more crucial because also understanding that, again, it's another thing that's taken me a second to kind of clue into is that McWillie was throughout that period known to and trusted by the likes of Gene Kana, Traficanti, I think Raselli too. Once you're at that level, Jean Kana, Traficanti, Raselli, they're all, well, definitely, I mean, with the Cuba assassination operations and the exiles and everything, it's, you know, It's Rosselli and Jean-Carner who are the kind of lead mob guys on that.

And, yeah. Oh, yeah. They're the ones in the CIA files. They're the ones that Bob Mayhew, on behalf of first Dick Bissell, I think, and then Bill Harvey at the CIA, they set up a front through Robert Mayhew, and Mayhew brought those three guys. eyes in and they became the core triumvirate in the mafia CIA Cuban assassination plot. Yeah, no, I mean, it's, it's, I really, I don't think that can be, the importance can be overstated in terms of finally connecting Ruby to everything that happens in 63 and then

this whole other side of things that I think it's that that's where there's that the crucial crucial bridge between this whole saga you know there's the intelligence side of thing that Cuban exiles and everything and then there's the organized crime and when you first start looking into this at least my experience was okay so there were a couple of people that there was some liaison with I mean I think the official story is still that there were maybe a few meetings with Again, not reflecting what's actually in the documents, but the official story is that, you know, it was a kind of, as the CIA always do, it's kind of, oh, well, yeah, we tried something, but it didn't really work out, and we didn't really commit to it fully, and there were some people who maybe did commit to it a bit more, but they were a bit rogue, and anyway, we've stopped that, you know? Not included in Castro's catalog was the plot that Robert Mayew finally told in public today after testifying with immunity before the Senate Committee.

Disclosing he'd been on CIA's payroll since 1954, Mayu said that in 60, as part of the Bay of Pigs Planning, he was asked by his project officer to contact Mafia figure John Roselli to help in Castro's removal. With Roselli and Sam John Connor in a Miami Beach hotel, they laid a plan, later aborted, to get a poison, pellet to Havana. Razzelli was fully cooperative. For two and a half hours, he told of plotting with the CIA, starting in 1960 to try to kill Castro, by poison, by rifle, trying to land hit teams by power boat, one of the boat sunk by a Cuban patrol vessel.

Chairman Frank Church found Rosselli's first-hand account vivid but not complete. It's amazing how much they've achieved for a bunch of bumblers. Yeah, no, it's remarkable, you know, impressive. And same with MK Ultra and all this stuff. But what I've been realizing recently is when you get to Rosselli, and Gene Kana, you have directly there, like there is no debate and it is as stronger connection as there could be from them to Bill Harvey, from him to Angleton, and then from Harvey to the likes of Ted Shackley and other names on the CIA front, which I won't start rattling off even more

names, but, you know, the CIA guys who ran the Cuban operations and were very mad that they got the bad end of the stick with bear pigs and it's i think that's really and i think again that's why ruby said to several people after he's in jail immediately oh god they're going to find out about everything they're going to find out about cooper they're going to find you know because it's and i think this is getting weird but i think that's a point where you see all of the threads that are kind of connected to the assassination, all kind of meeting, the CIA side of things and the Dallas side of things and the mob and then the assassination plots and just everything. So, yeah, that's a bigger picture, but it's right there.

Like, yeah. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. It sure is. Well, I think that that's a perfect place to tie this one off, and it teased. us up and sets the stage for our next episode with Max, assuming that he agrees to come back yet again and generously donate his time to Fourth Reich Archaeology to pick up with our chronological narrative. As our longtime listeners will know, the entire project here of historical excavation, we like to start things at the ground floor and really build them up. And so I don't think that you will find Jack Ruby content anywhere else that so deeply and so

thoroughly builds the legend of the man up before putting his conduct in the fall of 1963 and thereafter towards the end of his abruptly truncated life, well, that's going to be fodder for our next few episodes. And if you think that things have been uncanny and weird in the narrative thus far, believe me, listener, and I think Max would agree, it's going to get a lot weirder Oh yeah It doesn't stop

So So On behalf of Dick and on behalf of Max This is Don Saying farewell And keep digging

Jacob Leo Reubenstein Don't let you trigger finger rich Made 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 probably made you in movie star They're gonna put you on TV TV and it'll be lights on the marquee. You'll see Jack Ruby. Jack Ruby. You'll see Jack Ruby. Jack Ruby.