Last Podcast On The Left - Episode 403: JFK / Lee Harvey Oswald Part IV - OSWALD!

Episode Date: March 7, 2020

On episode four of our series, we cover the death of Lee Harvey Oswald himself at the hands of nightclub owner and self-described "colorful character" Jack Ruby. 

Hey everyone, Ben Kissel here, letting you know I'm hitting the road, showing my documentary Hail Yourself America. March 9th, I'll be in Syracuse at the Funny Bone. In March 10th, I'll be in Albany at the Funny Bone. March 11th, I'm going to be in Hartford, Connecticut, so come on out for that show. March 15th, I'll be in Orlando, Florida, March 22nd, Columbus, Ohio, and March 29th, Kansas City, Missouri. So I cannot wait to see you all there, super excited to spend the evening with you, get

your tickets, and we can all hang out as one big happy family. Alright everyone, Hail Yourselves! You know, on this day, March 6th, 1975 was the first time that the Zaprooder film was shown to all of America. Really? Yes. It was the beginning of the funniest ending to a presidential television series that I've ever seen.

That's amazing. It's so crazy the way his brain explodes, and then it goes to black, and then it's amazing. You can't do that on TV. Hey everyone, welcome to the last podcast on the left, I am Ben Sterrette, Marcus, and looking at Henry over there in Los Angeles. Henry, you are looking good buddy, you're feeling good. This whole week, I had a JFK week, and I understand what struggle is like, because I'm wearing my full velour suit today.

Yeah, you are, it's all red, it's beautiful. And on the outside it looks incredible, right? Like the Italian wealthy mom that I am. Yeah, incredible. You look like a giant drunk plushie bear. But what you don't know is on the inside I've lost a string. Oh, to the pants, which is crucial. That's crucial.

Did you pull it out in a series of rage, did you pull it out thinking you're some big giant, handsy lawnmower? I don't know what happened to it, so the struggle is real, we're all JFK this week, and life is hard. That's your JFK week. JFK got his dicks up by Marilyn Monroe. Literally though, you know that she was horrible at it. I mean seriously.

Because she's just, first of all, she was hopped up on Kway Lutz. First of all, she's so hot and so rich, I guarantee you she was just like, no, that's it. And then he's like, oh, thank you, Marilyn, thank you. I refuse to let you malign dick-sucking abilities of Marilyn Monroe. I fully believe that she would give a humdinger of a lick lick. Anyway, we're on to a very serious topic here. Let's talk JFK.

So immediately after the fatal shot that took the life of the president, Lee Harvey Oswald hit his rifle between two stacks of boxes, left three spent shell casings behind, and started down the stairs from the sixth floor of the book depository. Quotations. No, not quotations at all. No, I know. I don't know. But it's fun to do for our audience that does that anyway throughout all of any bit of information

about John F. Kennedy or his assassination or Lee Harvey Oswald or Jack Ruby. It's always important to just put potential quotations around any hinging fact. Strangely, he stopped at the second floor, ducked into the lunch room, and bought himself a Coke from the machine. No way. Yep, thirsty. That is a strange Coca-Cola advertising. Hey, you guys, I can't believe they filled the Coke machine up.

That's incredible. Do you guys hear this? There's a kind of firecracker parade going on outside. Oh, I love it when tiny things explode. But by accounts of people who saw him, he was eerily calm in that moment, even as everyone else was going into panic mode. I mean, it's like he knew something that everyone else didn't, because everyone else was in an absolute panic.

Three shots had just been fired at the president right outside of their office. Right. He's literally walking around. He's like, can you even believe that they replaced the lead guy from My Dream of Jeannie? And everybody's like, the president is dead. The president is dead. And he thinks that he's like, no, if I'm cool, everybody's going to be cool too. They'll see.

Right. I'm a cool guy. Yeah, I'm small potatoes. But honestly, what I really am today, cool as a cucumber. I'm very long cucumbers. Suddenly though, Oswald was faced with a police officer who had instinctively gone into the book depository following the assassination. With his gun drawn, the cop asked Oswald's boss, Roy Truly, if Oswald worked there.

Roy Truly confirmed it. The officer left and kept searching for a gunman. Hmm. That's all he was doing. He was going through the book depository with the boss going, does that person work here? Does that person work here? And for some reason, it never crossed his mind that maybe someone who worked at the book

depository was the guy who shot the president. No, no, no way would a shut in incel who works at a bookstore ever commit a crime. No way. He wasn't an incel. He was married. No idea. It was your wife. There's nothing more incel about it.

Sometimes your wife makes you make love and it's really nice. Oh my. It was at this point that Oswald figured the best course of action would probably be to leave. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So he walked down the stairs to the first floor lobby and was headed to the front exit

on Elm Street when he was stopped again. This time it was reporter Robert McNeil, who was only asking where the nearest telephone was. He called gave directions and walked away. It's about two rifle shots down the street. I mean, it's about two blocks down the street. I'm sorry. What was that with the rifle shots?

It's about two. It's about two different illicit rifle shots to the back of the head of the telephone down the street. Are you, do you work at the book depository or? You want a Coke? We actually just filled the machine where I killed the president. I mean, where I took my candy. Yeah, I'll have a Coke.

Thank you. Now, when asked later by police why he left work following what would arguably be the most interesting thing in the world to a politics junkie like Oswald, he said he just assumed everyone was going to have a half day at work because of the assassination. So he just left. He's really not. He's not wrong. That is, it's looking at the bright side of life, I guess.

I've said it. How many times did I watch the New York Morning News just praying for a terrorist attack so that I didn't have to go deliver the expense reports that I did not do that morning for my boss? It's at this point that it seems as if the weight of what he'd done truly started to settle on Oswald. He walked seven blocks down Elm and flagged on a bus and who should be on that bus but is former landlady.

She said that when she saw Oswald walk through the bus door, he looked like a maniac. His shirt was undone, he was dirty, and his face seemed to be distorted as if something was very wrong with Lee Harvey Oswald. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, there's nothing wrong with me. No, I don't turn war with me. I'm just, I'm actually, I'm in a play about a grown-up orphan. Yeah? Yeah, I'm a newspaper boy, but I'm 40.

Well, Lee, I've been your landlord. I was your landlord for a few years. I had no idea you were an actor. Where's the playhouse? Here, look, I'll show you. Oh, the playhouse is about three or four rifle shots down the street if you actually go and you make a corn on, what did I say? Yeah, you said rifle shots.

I am playing an orphan in a film on stage. Okay, okay. Well, I can absolutely see this. I mean, he immediately, after he shoots the president, he's cool and he's calm. You know, it's that adrenaline's still going and he's like, it's not quite hidden what he's done, but in those seven blocks between the book depository and grabbing the bus, he's starting to see the consequences of his actions. He's starting to see the absolute chaos that's going on around him and it's really starting

to hit him. Oh, fuck, I just shot the president. Right. Or in an explanation that makes much more sense, Doug Meade, his Manchurian candidate training is wearing off. Once the command has been issued by a man flashing a flashlight two times in his eyes, he shot the president in a fugue state, came out of it, now he's very confused as to where he is.

See? That's fucking tupple way tight. Well, the problem with that bus though is that the president's assassination had caused a bit of a traffic jam. And anyway, the bus was actually heading back towards the book depository. So Oswald got off and found a taxi. The man just could not avoid going to work that day. Isn't that hard?

Like, what do you have to do to get a half day in Dallas? So this is one of those hinge points, right? Every time you go through this fucking story, you will see hinge points where conspiracy theory gets jammed in there. Right. Lee Harvey Oswald said that the man who picked him up the taxi was a man by the name of Daryl Klick. So people went to go look for this so-called Daryl Klick who was a taxi driver in Dallas

and they found out, according to the Dallas Taxi and Limousine Commission, whatever their version of the TLC, they said, well, we've never had a Daryl Klick working for us. So they're saying, haha, that's where we got him. Lee Harvey Oswald's contact with the CIA was named Daryl fucking Klick. You know what? Everything you've just said, I can't dispute. Isn't that interesting how conspiracy theory works? That's the best part.

You just can't say shit and then you're forced to listen. I heard that the CIA was a taxi and they are transporters. I don't know how it works. That will be. Well, that's also the old conspiracy theory thing is picking and choosing. It's cherry picking what you're going to believe from certain people. It's like you believe Lee Harvey Oswald when he says that his taxi driver's name was Daryl Klick but you don't believe Lee Harvey Oswald when he says any number of other things.

It's like how Alex Jones will rail about the mainstream media and then quote a story from ABC News and say, and this is how you know it's real. Really. I also, I've never gotten the last name of any of my Uber drivers or taxi drivers. It's first name basis at best. Usually it's just buddy. No, I do full, I do full introductions. You do.

And we each name a thing that we find interesting about ourselves. Like I say, I'm a host for the coronavirus and what that does is it gets a fun fact about me. Right. And what that does is it stops the conversation. There it is. So the taxi took Oswald back towards his boarding house in the nearby neighborhood of Oak Cliff. Once he got there, he silently walked to his room and grabbed a jacket and his revolver

and filled his pockets with bullets. At around this same time, a deputy sheriff discovered the spent shells at Oswald's sniper's nest. And 10 minutes later, the gun was found as well. Now it has been said for decades that Oswald's prints were not on the rifle, but this claim has since found to be false. 30 years after the assassination, a fingerprint expert named Vincent Scalise put together all the photographs of the partial prints from the rifle using enhancement.

Oh, enhancement. Enhancement. And he proved that the prints were indeed Oswald's. You'll notice the smudgy stains here from someone who just ate a hostess. We'll count those out because that's the researcher, what we call, research cake. So after the gun was found, police did a roll call of every employee that was supposed to be at the book depository. And the only one missing was Lee Harvey Oswald.

So a physical description was sent out. He's got big head, bigger than it should be, he looks weird, tiny eyeballs. He will probably be talking about potatoes or talking about how he can't go into a Mexican restaurant because they forced dessert on you. All right, so we're looking for someone with a big head, little eyes talking about potatoes can't go into a Mexican restaurant. You've just described everyone in Dallas, sir. Can you please narrow this down?

We're all guilty for the president's death. Meanwhile, Oswald had left his boarding house with no idea where to go or what to do, knowing full well that his absence had probably been noted at the depository and the cops were most likely on their way. I'm a little bit shocked that everyone stayed as long as they did. I guess it's a crime scene. At the book depository? Yeah.

Oh, it's absolutely a crime scene. Yeah. I would have taken the opportunity to clock out and just I would have just gone. I would have left. I will. I feel like people are in a crazy amount of shock. We've seen that area of Dallas. It's actually very small and so I can imagine there's total pandemonium from what people

are talking about. I was listening to a speech by Hugh Ainslie who was a Dallas reporter at the time that talked about just the total chaos that was going on in that area and how reporters were just going from person to person, being like, what did you see? What did you see? And everyone's just like, I saw an octopus emerge from a grate. I knew it was his anti-seafood legislation is what allowed the octopus. He gave it the motive to kill the president.

And so it seemed like people were kind of a part of this circus. And why would you leave? And maybe they weren't letting anybody leave. That is one of the great ironies of journalism when it comes to misinformation. Sometimes get the story right before you get it fast. Yeah. And it was absolute chaos down there. It really was.

Everybody had something different to say about where the shots came from, how many shots that were fired. It's part of why there's so much confusion today because eyewitness testimony is notoriously unreliable. I mean, to bring up the Titanic one more time, the survivors weren't even in agreement that the fucking boat snapped in half. And we know that it did, but the people who were watching it that were actually there couldn't even agree that the thing had actually snapped in half.

I'm still mad at the end with the woman with the boobs. She killed the man. She killed Leonardo DiCaprio. There's plenty of room on that fucking thing. Yeah. She had plenty of room. This is a controversy that has been, you know, this has been, you know, that has been weighed.

We talked about it. She killed that poor, poor man. Well, as Oswald was wandering around Oak Cliff, police officer JD Tippett spotted him on the street and then decided from the physical description circulating that this weird headed idiot was worth checking out. Tippett had been speaking to Oswald for less than a minute before Oswald lost his nerve, pulled out his revolver and shot Tippett three times in the chest. Oswald then walked over to Tippett as he lay dying on the ground and fired a single shot

into Tippett's head before walking away. Damn. So he's just in, this is as close to a berserker mode, right? Yeah. Oh yes. As an assassin can get, I guess. He is deeply flailing at the moment. Yeah.

Right. And as he left the body, he was heard to say, quote, poor dumb cop. Or did he? I don't, I mean, poor dumb cop. Yeah. Okay. So he's gone off the rails. Off the rails.

But even without knowing that this was the president's assassin, regular neighborhood folks started chasing after Oswald. And in a panic, Oswald dumped all the spent shells from his revolver right near Tippett's body and ran away while reloading. Or did he? He did. He absolutely did that. That's that.

That he did do. That he did do. I mean, he left a dump of bullets as if he was, he was a cow who ate a bunch of bullets and shot them out. But this is one of these big moments, right? Marcus. It's another big moment. I mean, this is naturally another point of contention.

It's also crazy to be someone who is being chased by a group of people because they saw you kill a cop and just be like, turns out that's not the worst thing I did today. Despite two witnesses picking Oswald out of a lineup and despite the casings, matching the revolver later found in Oswald's possession, a few witnesses in the neighborhood said, that wasn't Oswald. Who was it? Someone else. Some other weird headed guy.

Some other guy. And of course, conspiracy theorists believed what points towards conspiracy. Some say Tippett was having an affair with a married woman and that it was actually his wife's lover who killed him. Some say Oswald wasn't even there. Whoa. He'd never existed. He could have been a double.

He could have been a double. Yeah. And other books just gloss over the murder completely. One of the books that said that the mafia did it, they just said, Tippett was killed by someone, perhaps Oswald. And then just fuck it. And that's the only mention in the entire book of officer Tippett's murder. Damn.

They said, perhaps Oswald. I like the concept that JD Tippett, he might have been Badge Man. Badge Man. Badge Man. Oh, buddy. These next week's episodes, after today's episodes, are going to be filled with some of the more delightful Disney-like characters that are trapped inside of the world of the JFK assassination conspiracy.

Disney-like characters. Welcome to Oswald World. Welcome to Oswald World. This is the Umbrella Man. Say hello to him and his wife, the babushka lady. Whoa. I am just a simple babushka lady or am I a CIA assassin? What?

Am I an umbrella man with a professional and wonderful array of umbrellas or am I a CIA assassin? Whoa. But Badge Man was a man in a, there is a photograph, I believe they call it, I believe it's the more photograph. Don't test me on this. I'm not exactly sure. But it's a photograph of the grass, you know, they believe that if you enhance it, you see

a little flash, right? And then if you do a bunch of color shit to the enhancement of this very, very old picture, you see what maybe sort of looks like a flash with the man with a sponge on him. It sort of looks like a badge. And there's some people that think that J.D.Tippet was in fact this Badge Man and that he was doing was coming around and he was trying to kill Oswald because Oswald was the very last loose end in the CIA plan to kill JFK and J.D.Tippet, he just got the gun jumped on him.

Yeah, he fucked up. So much for Badge Man. Well that makes, that's a lot more complicated than it could be. But you know what I'm going to say on these next two episodes a lot? Big if true. Big if true. And there was others that say that, you know, Tippet was supposed to help Oswald get away, but Tippet had to change her heart at the last minute and decided to try and arrest

Oswald or kill him and Oswald got the jump on him. It does seem like Oswald could have gotten away. Why is he just circling the area? Well, I mean, this proves just how fucking desperate and reckless he was at this point in the day. Where's he going to go? What's he going to do? Like, he can't.

Des Moines! You can go anywhere. But Dallas downtown! He had no follow-up plan. Yes. I don't think that, I think that it was almost, I'm going to say he's in shock by his own actions. He is possibly vaguely suicidal because it seems that was the way he left it.

Like we left his ring. He left a bunch of money. He left a note. Like he, he was kind of preparing and had the idea in his head that he might not survive what he's about to do or the other possibility, which we've talked about a little bit last episode where he said he wasn't even trying to kill the president, he was trying to kill the governor. And then he shocked the president in the fucking head, right?

If all of the lone gut, of all the lone nuts stuff is true, that's a possibility. And now he's like, oh man, wow, I should have thought about this shit. And now he's just roaming around. Can you imagine anything sadder than a communist's inheritance? Just like, I wonder what we get. Oh, it's a saltine cracker. Thank you, Lee. Well, I've been thinking a lot over the last week about the question of motive when it

comes to Lee Harvey Oswald. And what I'm kind of settling on is that I think that Lee Harvey Oswald, when he heard the JFK was coming to town and when he saw that the parade was going right by the book depository where he worked, I think he saw this as fate. I think Lee Harvey Oswald always thought of himself as an important person. His mother always told him that he was an important person and this was finally his chance to gum up the wheels of the capitalist machine. It was coming right in front of him and he just fucking took it.

And remember, he only thought about this for a day and a half before he actually did it. So it's no wonder that he had no plan. It's no wonder that he's just wandering around the neighborhood. And at the first sign of resistance, he fucking lashed out and killed someone. There might even be a unconscious magical motive that we'll get into probably around episode six for all of this. But predictably, though, this murder actually brought the police down on Oswald's head even faster.

Had he not drawn attention to himself by murdering a police officer on the street in broad daylight, who fucking knows how long it would have taken for the Dallas police to actually find him? Now Oswald managed to shake the small posse that had started chasing him after the murder of Officer Tippett and he made it to West Jefferson Boulevard. When he heard sirens, though, he turned his back to the street and pretended to be interested in a window display at a shoe store called Hardee's. Oh, look at this. Look at this.

What is all the clogs are in there? Oh, that's so nice. It's nice to have your heels out as a man means most people, they criticize a man with his feet out. But I say a man with his feet out as a man with one foot above the rest of society. Am I right, folks? Am I right? So in order to look not suspicious, he did the only thing that makes him look suspicious,

which is the day the president is shot. He went window shopping. Yep. He's outside his shoe store, hands and pockets going like flipping a coin, asking people being like, do you think that we should have horses as pets like dogs? Why are there more horses as just pets? One of the ironies is in this case to act normal, he should have just ran around screaming. Yeah.

One of the things, the manager of the shoe store, this guy named Johnny Brewer, that's exactly what he thought. There's all this chaos going around, the president's been killed, a police officer has been murdered a few blocks away, and there's this guy pretending to window shop. Do you guys do aga-cleaning here? Or he was waiting around for his CIA plant job to be done. And they had it. I'm getting because he had a thing implanted in his brain.

Big if true. So when Oswald walked away, Brewer followed him, and when Oswald snuck past a distracted employee and ducked into the Texas theater, where we did a show a few years ago, Brewer convinced the employee to call the police, call the police, call the police. What was that? What's that? That's Rembrandt and Stibbler, that was Rembrandt and Stibbler. Yeah, no, there weren't a whole lot of people there for the matinee showing of war as hell.

So Oswald settled into the sea of empty seats in the back of the Texas theater. But since the police were already on high alert because of the assassination, the murder of one of their own only increased the urgency. He just knows it's a matter of fucking time. They are clamping down so hard on him so fast, and I don't think, you know, I bet you at this point, he wonders if he even did kill the president. I wonder if he saw the full scope of what happened through his scope, literally. I wonder if he saw the damage that he did, and instead of just dropping the gun and running,

and now he's starting to realize, wow, I am criminal number one. Right, and how does the movie end? Turns out war is hell. How much time are we talking here? 45 minutes an hour? I think it's about, I bet he was arrested at like what, one? Somewhere on there? I think it's about 1 p.m.

It's about an hour, yeah. Well, when the cops got a call about a suspicious character ducking into a movie theater just minutes after and blocks away from the murder of Officer Tippett, police descended on the Texas theater to arrest the suspect, which was Lee Harvey Oswald. Because at this moment, they're just trying to arrest the guy that killed the cop. They're not thinking that this is the president's fucking assassin. With any luck, they'll just find Fred Willard and they're jerking off. And I think he should be allowed to do that, it was a jerk off theater.

I think to apologize to Fred Willard, we should send sex workers to his home. Yes, whatever he wants. When he addresses us to his home, we should send as many sex workers as we can to his home with his family and let them, let them suck him, so they didn't have to leave his home to do that. I agree. So the cops came in, the lights went up, Brewer identified Oswald as the man he followed, and the officers rushed Oswald from either side as he shouted, quote, this is it.

He punched one cop in the face and even managed to get a hand on a cop's pistol. But the cops overwhelmed him, knocked Oswald in the head with a shotgun and placed him under arrest. That's a pretty fun arrest. While they were dragging him away, Oswald shouted, quote, don't hit me anymore. Don't hit me anymore. I'm not resisting arrest. I'm not resisting arrest.

I protest for the police brutality. This is police brutality. But you're in Dallas. You are very lucky that you are not currently in a coma. Help. This hurts. This really hurts. Honestly, I did not expect getting arrested or hurt this much.

When they got him outside, all he could pathetically say was, quote, why are you doing this to me? I just wanted to see war as hell. And when Marina heard the news about what had happened with the president, especially when she heard the shots likely came from the book depository, she had, to say the least, a bad feeling about it. Yeah. Yeah. I think so.

But Marina, it's very interesting to see how many authors blame Lee Harvey Oswald shooting at JFK on Marina. How often they keep saying, well, if she had only taken him in that night, he wouldn't have killed the president. She had no reason to take him in. He constantly beat the shit out of her. No, this was not her fault in any way. I mean, it's a definite what if, but it's not her fault.

You guys are in very serious committed relationships. I think it's called marriage. And I feel like you guys know if you're significant others having a rough day or if something's going on. It's just like instinctively. I just wonder what that feeling is like when it goes off in your heart that your husband has killed the president. It's just got to be like, what do you do?

Do you make dinner? How does that make you feel? Well, I've told Natalie, you just need to have an outline of a book ready to go and sell it. Yeah. If I ever go off the handle, take every interview and again, sell the story, position yourself in the story. We can do a whole redemptive arc where you come to me in jail.

We can make money off of this. We can make this a thing. Okay. But when Marina walked out to Ruth Payne's garage to see if Oswald's rifle was still there, she saw that the blanket Oswald had wrapped his rifle in, looked untouched. So she thought the rifle was still there and she didn't bother to check if the rifle was still inside. I went to go check on the rifle and it was still asleep.

So I knew he would never wake up rifle without making breakfast, body burst. Right after though, when cops showed up asking if Oswald owned any guns, Marina thought she was about to just fucking completely clear her husband a wrongdoing. She was about to take him into the garage, show him the rifle and they would say like, Oh, well, he wasn't his rifle, it wasn't his rifles here. So he couldn't have shot the president. Uh-oh. This is a bad magic trick.

No, I got checked. No, the rifle is sleeping in his room and he's got the baseball today so he could not possibly be outside with his father. Okay, wake up briefly. Wake up. Please stand, wake up. Police officers want to say, Oh no. Yeah, when the cops opened the blanket and found nothing there, she just, she knew like,

Okay, my husband has killed the president. Damn. Not good. Very bad. Meanwhile, the president's body was in a precarious position. She according to Texas law, when someone is murdered in Texas, the autopsy must be performed in the state so as to not break the chain of evidence. That meant that even though he was the president, JFK's autopsy should have been conducted in

Texas by Texan medical examiners. Woo, yeah. You should have done it. Woo. Come on. Get the kids up. No, it wouldn't have been like that. It would have been more like, Yeah, you're about to die.

You're about ready. Get done with this. All right. I guess we all get to it. Well, yeah. We got to get the chest cutters on this one because we're going to shoot brains on it. With any luck, we can shoot the brains back in his head. But the secret service and Lyndon Johnson wanted to take the president's body and leave Dallas

as soon as possible. But when they tried taking the body after hospital staff had washed it and wrapped the head in towels so blood wouldn't leak out into the coffin, the secret service was stopped by Dallas County medical examiner, Earl Rose. Earl told him that what they had here was a homicide and the fact that it was the president didn't mean shit. Didn't mean shit. And once again, as I said in episode one, it was a suicide.

But Roy Kellerman, head of the secret service, told him, fuck you. This is the president and we're taking him back to Washington, DC. Whoa. Eventually, a justice of the peace showed up and sided with Earl Rose, saying, as far as we're concerned, this is just another homicide. And this shit's going to be taken care of like every other homicide in Texas. But they said it legitimately resulted in a tug of war between the secret service and the medical people of the Parkland Hospital, literally pulling back and forth as they're

going like, no, president's coming with us. Boy, what about we taking him? We doing the cut. And you're like, we're taking them to cut. We're bringing them back home. We're bringing them to DC, pulling them back and forth as his brains just slide back and forth on the, it was apparently, if it wasn't so tragic, it would have been a very dark comedic moment.

Sure. Yeah. But finally, a doctor at Parkland decided, yes, this is the president. So he signed off on the release and the body was taken to Air Force One. They actually had to break the handles off of the coffin to fit it into the door. I actually got a good reach out from a listener named S that is a funeral director that was told it got some information about JFK's casket. And apparently they upsold the secret service on the casket in order to get it.

It was a model called the Promethean. It was an all bronze casket. And apparently it cost something like 30 grand, right? It's like, it's a very, very expensive thing, but it was all full of blood and shit. So apparently they did not like the look of it. So they ended up doing it after getting the autopsy done in Washington, DC. They drilled holes in the bottom of it and sunk it in the ocean. Government waste.

Government waste. So by six o'clock, JFK's body was back in Washington, DC, and it was soon taken to Bethesda Naval Hospital for the autopsy. Now there are a few conflicting stories as to why and how all this went down. The official story is that all this was done at the request of First Lady Jackie Kennedy, who wanted out of Dallas as soon as possible and wanted the autopsy done at Bethesda because JFK had been a naval officer in World War II and Bethesda was a naval hospital. What's probably closer to the truth is that LBJ wanted to get the fuck out of Dallas and

get to the job of being president. And since Jackie refused to leave her husband's body, Lyndon Johnson ordered the Secret Service to just take the goddamn thing. It speaks to his character. And the person that most benefited from all of this was LBJ because he got to be president. And apparently the attitude on Air Force One was next to Jovial in a vaguely celebratory meetup he had with all the Secret Service afterwards being like, congratulations, Mr. President. They were already calling a Mr. President at the hospital with the corpse of JFK like

underneath them, like at waist level. They're calling him Mr. President. So he's super excited to get back and pick out all new dishes, he can wash all the calm off all the surfaces in there. He's excited to escalate the war in Vietnam, all sorts of things, all the things you do when you move into a new house. Absolutely. You kill a bunch of people.

Brian Cranston did a great job playing him, though, in all the way, the LBJ play. I would have loved to have seen that. You went to a play? I go to a lot of plays. Oh, no. I don't think pumps is a theater. I haven't been to pumps in years, should go back though. But this whole thing, this was not out of concern for Jackie.

This was about optics because LBJ didn't want to be seen as the cold hearted bastard who would leave a beautiful widow behind because that's exactly who LBJ was. Right. Yeah, he was a president. They don't have feelings. All I know is he had a hog and there are many stories about LBJ's penis. He used that penis to political advantage many a time. It was a different time.

And it's not like on women either, LBJ used that to intimidate other men. Yes, he did. And, you know, we talk about modern times, you know, whatever, presidential politics. LBJ used to piss on the White House lawn, well-talking to reporters. That's true. Absolutely. Yeah, that's why, you know, I use for political gain and to intimidate people is my butthole. I think it's really important to know that my butthole is just underneath my jeans.

And at any point, it can be released on any government aid. Henry the Funnel, Zabrowski. Now, concerning the autopsy itself, there's quite a bit to say on that subject in particular. Yeah. But that will be discussed in depth on the last episode in this series when we finally get to which theory we subscribe to. And it's an interesting because my main theory, which is that JFK was filled with many holes so that he could be played like an ocarina.

Isn't that strange? So while the president's body was being sliced and diced in DC, Lee Harvey Oswald was being interrogated in Dallas. Oswald was questioned five times for a total of 12 hours between his arrest on Friday and his murder on Sunday. But in what's probably the biggest black hole of verifiable information in this whole story, not a single bit of those interrogations were recorded or even transcribed. And nobody can give a satisfying answer on why this happened.

Yeah. And I think that this would be something they would want to have in the anals of history. It seems like the atmosphere in Dallas was one of intense panic. Yes. And the only way to describe it, and I feel like I'm not trying to be racist against your people, dog meat, but it does feel that it felt like an old West style of grabbing Lee Harvey Oswald and bringing him in front of the town like literally like, we got him. We got him.

And they just kind of jostled him back and forth and just put him back in there because they were ready to fucking, they were already ready to convict this man immediately. You know what? I can't argue with that in any way whatsoever. I mean, I was about to say that I was about, I was about to, but then, no, I cannot. That actually is a pretty good explanation for it. And Henry, that's very nice. You said you do want to be racist against Marcus's people.

Of course, those are the bone people and we have to be very sensitive to all bone people out there. I don't want to make any necromancer upset at me. I don't want to make any living skeleton offended with me. This is, these are, what is what our show is for? It's for them. Absolutely. I want to make sure that they feel included.

Totally. Well, I mean, Dallas was in, they were in panic. They were in total shock. People didn't really know what the fuck to do. I mean, but on the other hand, I do kind of find it hard to believe that that's why they just kind of forgot to record the interrogations or they forgot to transcribe the fuck. The fucking interrogations. They were beating the living shit out of him, is what I mean.

Yeah, most likely. They were beating the shit out of him. They were, he was not, he, he was not having a lot of civil rights being enacted for him in this time period. No. I think that he was, they were ready to hang him right then. They were openly talking about which one was going to get to murder him immediately. Like he, he got epestined pretty fast.

Where in the constitution does it say that you can't give a titty twister to a suspect of a murder? I think it's actually directly in the constitution that you can't give a titty twister. Well, about all we have here is the testimony of the people who questioned Oswald. So take that as you will. One interrogator was a local detective named Captain John Fritz. While the other was FBI agent James Hostey, who was the man who investigated Oswald just a few months prior and cleared him as a harmless nut.

From what they say, Oswald never once even came close to admitting to the murders of the president or officer tippet and said over and over that the only thing he'd been guilty of was bringing a loaded gun into a movie theater. Which was encouraged at the time. Now this is actually pretty common among murderers. Very few who end up confessing do so immediately upon coming in. And Oswald was probably starting to very much regret the things he'd done that day. Right.

But they also said that he had the face of a cat that ate the canary. That was the term that they used. That he said he looked smug and he was smiling and he enjoyed the attention of all of these people wanting to know his thoughts and wanting to know why, why, why. Right. And he kept believing like, I've yet to be charged with these crimes, I've never yet to be charged with these crimes. Most people are just saying I brought my son, my son, which was my gun, my son Harvey the

gun. And I brought him with a movie theater with me, but to me that just makes me a good father. Yeah. I mean the only thing he's guilty of in the eyes of the law is watching a shitty movie when the president was shot. Well Oswald at one point actually tried shuffling the blame on others. At one point he tried implicating his boss in the assassination saying that he'd seen Roy truly handling a rifle in the depository just a couple days before JFK was killed.

Now one bookstore employee will go without blame. No man, I learned that in borders, always pass the buck. And even though Oswald's story about the day of the assassination kept changing, they caught him in a ton of different lies as to where he was when the president was shot. It was said that he spent every interrogation calm, arrogant and disdainful of every authority figure he came in contact with. But besides just the snafu and not recording anything, the Dallas police fucked up in other ways as well, either because they were incompetent or as we said because they were just so fucking

shocked by the whole situation. It was discovered hours after Oswald was arrested that he'd just been walking around in custody with 538 caliber bullets in his pocket because nobody had thoroughly searched him when he was brought in. Then, the Dallas police trotted Lee Harvey Oswald out in the middle of the interrogation to talk to a room full of reporters because the Dallas police were trying to curry favor with the press. Here's a clip from that press conference.

It is strange how calm he is and just sort of like, man, that's really, I mean, I guess when it comes to conspiracy theory, you just listened to the way that he reacted to the question did you kill the president, most people would say no, but then he's just like I haven't been charged with that yet, it's really interesting. Well, it might be a little soft to hear, but after he gives his answer, one of the reporters says you have been charged with killing the president and the look on his face is one of oh, no, oh, they know, oh, they know now, but he, I think that there's got to be almost a fatalism that kind of comes up on you at some point.

You've been manhandled by the police, you know, you're not going anywhere. I think it's very interesting that they let him without a lawyer or anything go and just stand in front of a bunch of reporters, just like be pulled from one room out into a bunch of reporters that are all scurrymen at him. And so he's now he's center stage and he's kind of feeling it. He's feeling himself. He feels the role in history immediately. I think that he had an eye for it, which is the, the weird things about all of the, all

of the shit attached to the JFK assassination. What kind of feels like people stepped into roles that were prepared for them. The one, the most bungly one of all, Mr. Jack Ruby, who's going to come into this story very, very soon, who's another man that just seems to be born for the spotlight. Like he's ready. I do not think Jack Ruby was born for the spotlight. He's my favorite. I think he was born for very low light in the back, in the back of a very dingy bar.

But he is my favorite. He is my favorite. Oh, he's incredible. Yeah. No, I'm sorry. I mean, he's not incredible. He's a director. On Sunday, Oswald was set to be transferred from police headquarters to the county jail.

And this was done so in the basement parking lot amongst a gaggle of reporters. As to why the press was given so much access to Oswald, remember that the city of Dallas had taken a bit of a black eye because the president had just been gunned down in the street. And Dallas already had a reputation as a hateful city. I mean, remember like people like General Edwin Walker, like people associated Dallas with those types of people. As such, I wouldn't be surprised at all if the Dallas police got word from on high to be as cooperative and friendly as humanly possible with the press, to ensure that when they eventually left Dallas, they'd have nothing but the nicest things to write and say about the city.

But I think this is the most human explanation as to why the press was given so much access to Lee Harvey Oswald. They're just a dog with their tail between the legs just being like, we're sorry. Here's the consolation prize. You get to talk to the person who killed him. It's PR. Right. It's also, we're doing our jobs. Look, we got him that fast. We got him and we're doing it old style. I think there's a little bit about the vibe, too, of straight up being like, we'll lynch him right now. We'll listen. We'll lynch him right now. And you basically, the audience is all so excited. Everybody, because now you have like a mixture of it's Dallas notables are also in this crowd, right?

It's not just reporters. It's also the people in the know of the various levels of politics in the city that are all there kind of being a part of this weird moment in history. Yeah, watching this strange play unfold in front of their eyes. But this concern for the city's image became a hole for the seed that would eventually grow into the mainstream conspiracy culture that's slowly been tearing our country apart for the last 60 odd years. We're talking, of course, about one of the great bumbling fuckheads of American history. He was the man who put a bullet in Lee Harvey Oswald and his name was Jack Ruby. There's a lot of people that said that I would not be a capable member of this life. But now you see, I am incredibly, incredibly important. Jack Ruby was born in 1911 as Jacob Rubenstein to a poor Orthodox Jewish family comprised of half a dozen other kids, a violent alcoholic father and a mentally ill mother. Ruby flunked the third grade and never made it past the sixth, although he often told people that he had made it as far as the eighth grade.

I used to go to eighth grade recess. They let us allow me in there, but mostly just because I wasn't afraid to go catch all the basketballs and bring them back to the court. So that's kind of, I feel the purpose there as well. Oh, Jack, you help out so much around the playground. You know you're 30 years old, right? Really, you should not be hanging around the playground anymore around eighth graders. His kids need a referee. By the age of 10, Jack Ruby was scalping tickets for local sporting events in Chicago and hustling stolen goods. Right in the mix, buddy. Yeah. A psychiatric report done by Jewish social services when Ruby was 11 said that he was an egocentric with a hair trigger temper consumed by sex and street gangs.

And Ruby claimed he could quote, Lick everyone and anybody and anything. I'm sorry you're going to do what? I can lick everyone and anybody and any single thing. It means beat. Does it? With my mouth. In the ensuing investigation by Jewish social services into Jack Ruby's home life when he was a boy, it was found that Ruby's mother was suffering from a severe character disorder, which would later be diagnosed as schizophrenia. Alcoholic dad, schizophrenic mom, five other siblings. Yeah, I mean he was placed in foster care after that for a little while. He had a rough go of it. Really rough childhood.

By the time Jack was a teenager, he developed a reputation in Chicago as a bludgeon carrying street fighter with a temper so short that people started calling him sparky. And I will give him some credit for the fact that he did really beat the fuck out of a lot of people. He really was aggressive. Yeah. And because his whole thing is that he never wanted to be downtrodden for being Jewish. He felt that a lot of people were always coming at him for being Jewish and he used to fight for in the defense of people all the time and also was just a straight up maniac. Sparky's a cute nickname for someone who would go on to murder. It is. But juvenile delinquency didn't add up to a living. So in 1933, Ruby moved to San Francisco and tried going straight by selling newspapers and tip sheets for horse races and even tried working as a singing waiter in Los Angeles.

Do you want bread? Do you want noodles? You can have them, sir. You can have them. I'm making up my own songs. The name is Rubenstein. And never forget it, my pasta poisoned friend. Four beans for the pussy who can't have bread. That is very rude, sir. After four years in California, though, Jack moved back to Chicago following his mother's commitment to a mental institution for, quote, a psycho neuroses with a marked anxiety state. I've been there. Again, Jack tried going straight aside from a little side hustling and got involved with the Scrap Iron and Junk Handlers Union.

Oh yeah, he's definitely going straight. He's with the Scrap Handlers and Junk Union now. There's no way corruption could ever be around him. I don't want any union being involved between me and my junk. I can handle my own junk and I don't need my own private health care. There you go. Remember those college hunks moving junk? I'm going to get them over to my place and they're going to be so surprised when they realize I have nothing. And they'll be like, what are we supposed to move? And I'll say, you move. That's all. That's the thing is that when Jack joined this union, like it was on the up and up, but the mobs soon took over the union as they took over many unions and they forced Jack out. Never, ever mess with the garbage. Never mess with sanitation. No, never, ever, ever, ever. Absolutely not. I'm a union man. I'm with SAG, so thank you. Thank you for your union service.

Well, after that, Jack, his brother, Earl, and two... I'm for hire. I wait. Why are you still laughing? I'm a hire. I'm a union man. I'm a union man. Yeah, but you're not really union men are supposed to have like calluses on their hands and they're supposed to say, I got to get up at six o'clock in the morning. Well, it's a good thing I've been drunk since midnight. Like you're supposed to live a harder life than an actor's life. Yeah, you can be in a union, but you can't call yourself a union man. I'm a union man as much as the man that drives the truck on Superstore that I saw that basically he sits. And his job is to make sure this one truck doesn't move.

Literally, that's all he does. Make sure nobody gets in out of it. And he explained to me, he's like, hey, you know, like a lot of people say I'm fat, right? He was very, he was very large. And I was just like, nah, you're not fat. And he's just like, but it's because I've been doing exercises in the truck. And he showed me how he had two jumper cables with handles on it tied to the back of his driver seat. He's like, see, there's like a do more chest exercises. My chest exercises. And I was like, your chest is big. Your chest is actually big. You don't need to pump up the chest.

You need to work on the rest of it. But he's like, yeah, you know, hey, see, that's a union man, Henry. That's a union man, a man who gets paid not to drive a truck. Well, after being forced out of the union, Jack, his brother, Earl and two friends started the Spartan novelty company. Now, I was hopeful this is going to be like the fun kind of novelties like fake vomit and shit like that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Cigarettes that blow up. Yeah, no, they just sold like commemorative plaques of Pearl Harbor and busts of Franklin Roosevelt. And the business didn't last long. No shit.

I'm not really interested in the busts of Franklin Roosevelt, but I'd be kind of fun to have bronze version of his noodley legs. Yeah, why not? Maybe something with Eleanor. In 1943, Ruby was drafted into the Air Force, where he mercilessly beat a sergeant for calling him, quote, a Jew bastard. You're going to get your ass kicked for that. Yeah. Other than that, though, Ruby had no real problems in the Air Force and was overall well liked. Because that was the thing. Everyone liked Jack Ruby. Jack Ruby, he had something about him. He had a sparkle. Yeah, but a part of when he went to volunteer for the army is that he straight up, he was one of those who's like, I want to fight Hitler now.

You're like, I know, Mr. Ruby, Mr. Rubenstein, you're so excited to fight Hitler directly. But how about if you fight Hitler by being a janitor for the army? Oh, man, he's got to play Wolfenstein. He really wants to fight Hitler. You can slap him in that. He did services for the US Army. He did do that. He did go and he wasn't fighting a lot of people. No. Three years later, though, Ruby returned to Chicago and became a partner in another novelty company with his brother called Earl Products. Oh, who doesn't love Earl Products? But he was bought out for $14,000 after he and his brother just couldn't get along.

Well, that was when Jack Ruby decided to go to Dallas. His sister Eva had moved there in 1947 and opened a nightclub called the Singapore Supper Club and Jack moved to help her manage it. Scuttlebutt among conspiracy theorists is that Jack Ruby was sent to Dallas by the Chicago Mafia to look after their interests in Texas. But Jack Ruby was never referenced once in any of the 22 surveillance records available from Dallas police on organized crime. And what I've read, I was also reading a book, two different books that have more extensive chapters on Ruby. One is Rush to Judgment by Mark Lane has a whole thing on Jack Ruby. And there's another book called Who Was Jack Ruby by Seth Cantor, which is out of print. From my estimation, as I read it, he mostly really got involved with the mafia vaguely when he started getting into the nightclub business.

It wasn't before. I think that before there really is no real evidence to say that he was working for the mafia before coming to Dallas or having any connection to it whatsoever. But it just seems to be that the nightclub industry and the mafia were very closely related, no matter where you go, especially in this time period. Sure. And furthermore, the guy who was in charge of the FBI investigation into the Mafia in Chicago so that they had thousands of hours of tape recordings of the top mobsters in Chicago. And Ruby was never mentioned once, before or after. Yeah, and they weren't saying Sparky and they didn't say like the little funny guy. They didn't say any of that shit, which you think might allude to Jack Ruby. It was just hours of guys going, hey, you do that thing for a guy.

Yep. If I was in the mafia, you know what I'd say? It said, remember it. Instead of forget about it. You get it. You get it. Where's the door? But with a new town came a new name and Jacob Rubinstein officially changed his name to Jack Leon Ruby in December of 1947 and began a long career in Dallas as a fixture in the Dallas nightclub scene. He gave himself a middle name. He gave himself Leon as well. Yeah.

Okay. It's a pretty cool name. It is cool. It's a very Texas name. Yeah. All right. And for the most part, Jack Ruby was really fucking bad at running nightclubs. What?

Yeah. He was bad at running them, but he wasn't bad at wanting to run them. He loved the nightlife. He loved Boogie. He liked all of the trappings of the nightlife. He loved the connections and the lights and the glitter. And I think most of all, honestly, he loved the boobies. Yes.

He loved having access to the burlesque girls. They had, he was both a charmer and also a person that they were very scared of at the same time. Right. Because he did have this fucking wild temper. We talked about very often, but he didn't like somebody. He would take a stub nose little revolver, stick it in your face and make you walk out of his bar on your hands and knees like a dog. That seems like something Marcus would do. What? No. Just because I took a guy's shoes for breaking my favorite bong once.

No. You don't even have guns in this house. But Henry, what you did fail to mention when it comes to Jack Ruby and his nightclub love, inventory. You got to do inventory. That's another very important thing. It looks like he had all the accoutrements of a nightclub owner, but he didn't remember to do anything that was actually practical. He legitimately was what I would be if I owned a nightclub. Right.

So it's been like, just get me on stage. And it's like, we have people on stage already. So like, no, let me on stage. I mean, like, no, you got to run the Quicken program. Like, you need to like start counting receipts and shit and we're running out of booze. Well, during Jack's 16 years in the business, he owned interests in six nightclubs and lost money on all of them, apart from a strip club called the Carousel. And the Carousel was what he was running when JFK was killed.

Is the Carousel still there? I don't think so. I remember Dimebag Darrell had a strip club in Dallas called the 19th Hole. Oh my goodness. How did he get that? Lord Dimebag. All right, Pete, the 19th Hole is the worst name I've ever heard for a strip club in my life. It was golf themed. I got that. It definitely wasn't based on orifices.

And these failures played hell with Ruby's mental state. Five years after arriving in Dallas, he had a complete mental breakdown and even talked about killing himself. But eventually he decided to stick to Dallas. Well, besides nightclubs, Ruby had a myriad of other careers that he tried as well. He sold sewing machines, costume jewelry, liquid vitamins, English razor blades, anti-arthritis medications, twist boards, and pizza crusts. I know one of those things. I know pizza crusts. What is an English razor? It's English stainless steel razors. They were razors that were made in England because the English apparently make it better than we do. Okay.

It's the beginning of the brainwashing of our country that the English are smarter and better than us because they got fancy accents. Okay. And twist boards were like things that you stood on to do the twist. Like, come on, baby. That dance. I thought that we were at the peak of laziness now. I didn't realize that people actually had a board to shake. They actually sell twist boards now to office workers for standing desks. It's almost like we weren't supposed to spend our entire lives staring at a screen sitting down at a desk.

It's very bizarre that we've done that to people. No, I think it's really great that there is now an official diagnosis of a thing called gamer neck where people are developing an actual physical deformity from hunching over phones. Yeah. Well, a strange scheme by far was investing in managing in a nightclub act named Little Daddy Nelson. Little Daddy. But that failed as well. Little Daddy Nelson was a five-year-old. His job was what his, what his act.

I found this little note. His act was that he did jigs and he did dances and he did funny little voices. He was five? He was five. And Jack Ruby tried to manage him as a little dancer boy. They'd go up there and be like, hey, you guys, this is what Asians sound like. This is what Spanish people sound like. He did what I did for years.

This little boy had the same skill set that I've had for many, many years. And then he just didn't make it. I don't even watch MasterChef Junior. I think it's disgusting. Why would anyone, an adult at a bar, drinking booze, want to stare at a five-year-old performing? It was actually fairly common in the nightclub circuit back in the day for decades to have child performers come out on stage. I guess everyone loved it for some reason. I wonder why.

It'd be 10 p.m., 11 p.m. and all of a sudden, between the strippers, you'd have a child come out and tap dance for a while. That's so weird. Honestly, it tampons the boners. It's nice to have a pallet cleanser in there because then the boy comes up and then you don't, like, if you're hard, you're getting unhard. But unless, if you stay hard, then I guess you can be arrested, but they weren't checking for that at the time. I don't know if that's a great, it's not, so children were the ginger and the wasabi was the stripper? Yes. Bob Fosse, he was a child nightclub act.

He's great. Buster Keaton. Yeah. All right, okay. I didn't realize it was so common. If I was there, I'd be like, get the kid to bed. I gotta go. This is disgusting, but okay.

Unless that kid has tits, I don't want to see him dancing. Sometimes the kid's Bob Fosse, sometimes the kid's little daddy Nelson. Okay. By the time Ruby killed Oswald, he was $16,000 in debt, which is the equivalent of $135,000 today. Ruby's main business, however, was always nightclubs. He would carry around passes to his clubs and give them to everyone he met, saying, hi, I'm Jack Ruby, as if everybody was supposed to know who the fuck Jack Ruby was. Hey man, that's Kissel fucking grabbing Uber driver's phones and just putting the podcast in there.

That is about grassroots campaign one fan at a time. It really is. I still hustle last podcast to this day to anybody who will listen. Yeah. Every time. It's the only thing that I have. It's what I have to do. An entertainment reporter from the Dallas Morning News named Tony Zappi, who knew Ruby well,

said that Jack was a born loser. He said Ruby used to call him up and say, quote, Tony, I run a real classy joint, a classy joint all the way. Ah, don't I have class? Don't I have class? Damn. Come on. I made, I look, yeah, Meryl was kind of pissing the pants a little bit once she was dating

and that's why what I did was that I took a bunch of napkins and balled them up and I stuck it inside of them. Oh, wow. That's pretty classy, Mr. Ruby. Nothing but class. Nothing but class. According to a star dancer at Carousel, a woman named Janet Conforto, a.k.a. Jada, Ruby would do anything to attract attention to himself. While he knew a ton of people in Dallas, he didn't have any real friends to speak of

because he was fantastically insecure. I identify and I feel how he feels. You feel how Jack Ruby feels? You have so many friends. Yeah, you're talking to your friends. You make a living talking to your friends. Don't I have class? No, you don't have class.

You're wearing a pumpkin head shirt. It's a nice pumpkin head shirt, though. Well, defending his behavior, Ruby used to say, quote, I'm a character. I'm colorful. That'll get you out of a lot, but it's not going to get you out of homicide. Yeah, I'm fucking a chicken. I'm a character.

You know, there was some truth to his claim that he was a character. I mean, he had a little Datsun named Shiba that he would carry around everywhere and he'd refer to his little weenie dog. He'd say, this is my wife. This is my wife right here. I tell you what, she won't let me consummate. Yeah, nothing sad about that. Also, I still haven't found the string in my velour pants.

It's bothering me. Ruby was also the type of guy who would use big words in conversation to make himself sound smart, but he never used them correctly. That's the opposite of what happens. He'd say shit like this. It's been a lovely precarious evening. Truly, it sounds like a sitcom character. But there was definitely a dark side to Jack Ruby.

The people who worked for him at the carousel said that while everyone liked Jack okay, he had one hell of a temper that could explode into violence at any second. He beat one employee with brass knuckles, beat another with a blackjack, knocked another's teeth out, and put a handyman in the hospital. But in one fight with an employee, the victim gave as good as he got and bit the tip of Ruby's index finger. They got into a fight, Kissel. Think about this shit.

They got into a fight and the dude clamped onto his index finger with his teeth and they were struggling to the point where it ripped all the meat off the top of his fucking finger and the guy just spit the tip out on the fucking floor. That's intense. Very like Ronnie Lott, the former Oakland Raider man. Lost his finger. That's a hell of a fight and a good technique, man. If you get your fingers close to somebody's mouth in a fight, that's fair game.

Always fair game. Sure. A W is a W. And I guess once you take, if you spit an amount of flesh out of your mouth from the person you're fighting, I think you win. Hey, Mike Tyson didn't. Yeah, that was a disqualification, but he still won the psychological war. Yes, he won in America's hearts.

He won. Ruby also once threatened to throw one of his club's cigarette girls down the stairs unless she backed off on the claim that he owed her 50 bucks. He didn't do it though. And he threatened a comedian after the comedian told some inoffensive Jewish jokes on stage at the carousel and afterwards banned all Jewish remarks in the club. He has a line and that comedian crossed it and that comedian went on to be Bill Hicks. Isn't that amazing?

He was very good to the Jews, but he had a couple of Jew jokes and then he flipped out. He was very sensitive about the Jewish stuff. And Ruby was a dirty fighter as well. Dad. He'd attack people from behind and he wasn't above giving a guy a kick to the balls. Got to. And once the dude was on the floor, Ruby would repeatedly kick him in the face. Gotta make sure these motherfuckers are down.

Trying to come into my nightclub? Tell me I don't have class? You relate to some of the worst characters that we talk about. It's not all of them. I've said this before on the show, my dad said there's no such thing as cheating in a fight. Yes. That's why he was a cop, which is always important to remember. I'll agree to that.

There's no such thing. Fight to fight. There is still cheating in a fight. You're not supposed to kick the nuts. You're not supposed to gouge the eyes. We're not. It's not Krav Maga. Krav Maga.

Krav Maga. It depends on if it's a fight for honor or a fight for survival. Fight for survival, you can do whatever the fuck you want. Fight for honor, I think the best move always, the blind side to do with the steel, the stool to the head, to me is the best way to start the fight. You gotta hit first and hit hardest to end the fight. Okay. But as we said, Jack Ruby was actually tough.

Once, when a guy pulled a gun in his club, Ruby took it away, beat the guy within an inch of his life, put the gun back in the guy's pocket and threw him down the stairs. And on another occasion, he severely beat a professional boxer. Damn. No, he has got, there's something about him because he is a, he just had a lot of rage that would spike. There's a lot of people that say that he might have been bipolar. Yeah. He had a lot of shit going on where he would spike and then something in that rage allowed him to really fight outside of his class quite a bit.

Yeah, I believe it. If you look at a picture of Jack Ruby, he does have a head that looks thick. Yeah. Looks like it would be a difficult dude to knock out. Now Jack Ruby wasn't necessarily a small guy. He was about five nine, you know, pretty average. What? What kind of world are we living in?

Five nine is extremely average. Five nine is very average. Five nine is the average height. First of all, I don't know what kind of world you guys live in, but no, that's not true. Five nine is average height for a man. No, five, five 10 is average height for a man. You have gone mad. I think it's because of your clots.

No, that's not true. Actually, do you know what the average height of an American man? Okay, an American man. Thank you. Five 10. The average height of an American man is five 10. Five foot nine. Wow.

So he's just below average. All right. I don't know who we're letting into the country, but you're very offended by bringing Jack Ruby being five foot nine. I'm fine with it. I think it's a great size. It's good. If you sneak up, you can yell Oswald and then shoot someone real fast. I get it.

But according to dancer Patricia Birch, aka Penny Dollar, Ruby was very proud of his own physical fitness. Yeah. He was known to wander into the women's dressing room shirtless and thump his chest like a gorilla, asking the dancers if they liked his body. One time, Jack stripped off all his clothes at a party and rolled around on the floor naked. He's funny. He's a funny guy. I'm a character.

I'm colorful. But the harassment of the dancers didn't end with walking into the dressing room unannounced. Ruby would spend his nights calling them up to read obscene poetry, and those recitals were usually coupled with detailed descriptions of Jack Ruby's genitals. Oh, and if only you could see my balls. You'd see just how weirdly gray they are. They got hairs kind of coming off the very back of them, kind of like a wizard's mane. And oh, my penis is something that, oh, you would shake your head at it and say,

did somebody smuggle in a gecko in here? Gray balls, huh? Yikes. But Ruby showed other signs of mental instability besides just his hair trigger temper. He'd flip on people, welcoming them to the club one minute and banning them the next. And sometimes he'd switch topics of conversation in mid-sentence without explanation. It's all very manic behavior, right? But honestly, some of my favorite bars I've ever been to have bartenders and owners that act like this.

There's something about having the unstable kind of weird element of like, is Randy gonna start punching the mailman today that kind of makes a bar fun? The show within the show. And remember that bar that we went to in Berlin with that guy that was extremely unstable? Which one? Yes. That's been the entire time bothering us. Well, we didn't know if he was being threatening or friendly because he couldn't speak English

and he'd just point at the women in the group and go, ah. And then do like weird others and we were having a language barrier but then he kept bringing us nachos. No, that man was. But that was fun. Very high on cocaine. Yes. Very high on cocaine. Well, collectively, people in Dallas describe Jack Ruby as an insane, unpredictable, overly emotional

kook who only got worse as the years went by. You mean an important figure in history. But like a lot of people who are horribly insecure that we've covered on this show, Jack Ruby was a police officer groupie. And he'd offer free drinks and reduced rates to cops because he just loved having him around. That's not to say, though, that Ruby was a law-abiding citizen. Although he was never arrested for anything big, he went down nine times in 14 years for mostly hooligan crimes like disturbing the peace, assault, and carrying a concealed weapon.

They did say there was sort of a pattern of it was difficult to pin a crime on Jack Ruby or to go and prosecute him for a crime because he did have a lot of friends within the judicial system of Dallas. On the cops, judges, people used to come to his bar because of part of what you do. And, you know, as a good business person, if you're going to serve a legal liquor in your bar, the people you need to serve it to are the cops. Because they then won't flip on you as long as you can keep the atmosphere of said illegal after-hours club kind of on the down low, which every once in a while he had a really big problem doing. Yes, he did.

Yeah, and he did lose his liquor license twice, once for serving alcohol after hours and once for having what they called an obscene stage show. Oh my goodness, and it wasn't the five-year-old, huh? No, it was guess whose butthole is it? It's a very complicated game. They do it in Japan more often than they do it in America. And then you can just see the audience members just be like, Jack, we know it's your butthole. It's always your butthole. That's the best part!

Well, besides, Ruby was known in the crime world as a full-on snitch. And he did consort with a few unsavory characters, but most criminals in Dallas knew not to tell Ruby anything because he told the cops everything. Well, he told everybody everything. So there was a time period where according to who was Jack Ruby by Seth Kantor, there was a time period where it seemed to be he was being profiled, vaguely profiled for a thing called a PCI, a potential criminal informant, where FBI agents were talking to him to sort of kind of see, well, you kind of have your little tiny fingers

in a lot of different holes here in Dallas. Why don't we see what you can come up with because he kind of was a total, like, all offender informant. He would talk about the cops and he'd talk about all the criminals he knew, which is the dangerous place to be at as a human being when you're dealing with both sides of criminality. I don't think it's going to get you not killed. You're like getting the smet boots put on you and you're just like, no, listen, yes, the cops heard what I was saying, but I told everyone. I told everyone. Hey, guys, I told everybody.

And also, I was very friendly and very funny and complimentary to you about how you looked. I actually said that you were very handsome. Well, one Dallas district attorney said you'd have to be crazy to think that anybody would have trusted Ruby to be a part of the mob because Ruby couldn't keep a secret for five fucking minutes. In his estimation, Ruby was nothing more than a hanger on. And the big conspiracy with Jack Ruby was that he was involved with the mob and therefore was a part of the conspiracy to kill the president, partly because Ruby made a lot of long distance phone calls to certain people in organized crime

just before the assassination. And he did. He did. He had a weird connection to Cuba. We're not, I'm not really sure, no one really is sure what it is. He said that he went to vacate, he was on vacation, quote unquote. Well, his connection to Cuba was one of his scams. He tried selling jeeps to Cuba. Well, that's not going to work.

But a part of what they think might have happened is what seems to be a lot in this story is that because there were so many mysterious things going on in and out of Cuba during this time period is that he had his own, what he believed to almost to be an innocent Jeep scam. This is an innocent scam where we sell jeeps. That's all it is. But sometimes people in the middle of all these things would be secret CIA people. They were trying to get friendlies, people that possibly could go and destabilize the government of Castro and Cuba, all of this is real,

to maybe do stuff like stuff a bunch of guns into these jeeps and send them over. So do you think that there might have been some tangential connection of Jack Ruby to some gun running going into Cuba through the southern United States? Dude, that's a fun surprise to find in your brand new Jeep, a bunch of guns. This Jeep is a bonus Jeep. I honestly would rather find a bunch of cocaine. Don't take either. Well, the claim that Jack Ruby was involved with the mob and therefore was a part of the conspiracy

to kill the president, again, works off of assumptions. Yes, Jack Ruby was calling organized crime figures. But the reason why Ruby was making so many calls was because the rival strip clubs in Dallas had started doing amateur nights. And this went against the rules of the nightclub union, the American Guild of Variety Artists. Okay, hear me out, Stu. Hear me out. We got a lot of competition with Jack Ruby's club. Any boobies.

We do the any boobies. You know how the nipples are out? Any boobies. That's incredible. You got tits, you're a dancer now. You got back tits, you're a dancer now. You want any boobies, any nipples. Because all these out nipples, people getting poked in the eye.

Think about this. We're paying all these professional boobies. All we need now is any boobies. So now what we do is we're not paying money to boobies, but we're still getting boobies. Any boobies. God man, I want to be a part of the American Guild of Variety Artists. We could be in that union. I'm definitely with the rack that Henry and I have.

And who should Jack Ruby have been calling the complain to about amateur strippers, but the AVGA? And the AVGA, the American Guild of Variety Artists, was among the dirtiest unions around. No. An entertainment union? That meant that Jack Ruby was indeed calling long distance to organize crime figures, including the infamous Irwin Wiener, but not to discuss the murder of the president. I mean, it came up every once in a while, but it was just fun. They were having fun.

Wow. And Ruby also made a call to a New Orleans organized crime figure. Here's another connection to New Orleans. But again, this just had to do with strippers. Ruby had a friend who lived at a trailer park, and he was making a call to complain about the contractual problems that Ruby was having with his best dancer, Jada. And it just so happened that the office of that trailer park was being used as the legitimate business front for a New Orleans organized crime figure.

And from time to time, that figure took messages for people at the trailer park. The last suspicious call was made to a close associate of criminal union leader, Jimmy Hoffa, who was a known enemy of the Kennedys. But again, this was just Ruby trying to get help in his argument with the AGVA. It was all about amateur strippers. It was weird, because again, we love all strippers, love amateur strippers too. Of course. It is very interesting to see that it does have connections to all the other conspiracy theories.

That's where all of this shit gets all wiggity, because he was vaguely insinuated in the same systems that the CIA was manipulating in order to create fucking homegrown militias against the Cuban government. These things start to dovetail, where he is now, he's kind of in the center of this, but if Jack Ruby hadn't killed Lee Harvey Oswald, all of this shit would have kind of just rolled over. But now that he did kill Lee Harvey Oswald, every one of these little tidbits of information kind of become relevant, especially the safe deposit box. What was in the safe deposit box? A tidbit of information, and it's all about boobies.

This whole thing is about boobies. What about the safe deposit box? He had one. And what was in it? Boobies. I don't know. So he just had a fucking safe deposit box? But every single time he'd go visit the safe deposit box,

every single time he'd go off the phone with the man that was the guy that was grooming him to be a possible potential criminal informant. So what's he doing going back and forth at the safe deposit box? What's in the box? Well, that's a good question we'll have to ask. Who said that he was going to the safety deposit box after every time that he talked to the FBI agent? Did he have an assistant that he told I was just talking to an FBI agent? It was a guy with the thing.

And he did a guy with the guy for his cousin. No, it's all in the book. Just read who was Jack Ruby. Seth Cantner, it tells you it's in there. Okay, I believe it. Now the mob did come to Ruby's club when they came to town from time to time. But the reason why was because mobsters tend to like nightclubs and strip clubs. And Ruby's was one of the best in town.

Now concerning JFK, Jack Ruby had enormous respect for the man. Because Ruby thought that JFK was good for American Jews. Because JFK had put quite a few Jewish men in positions of power in the government. He loved JFK. I would go as far as to say he truly loved JFK. A picture of JFK up at the bar. Can you imagine wanting to be aroused and seeing the president? I wouldn't want to see a picture of the president.

It's pretty common back in those days. Back in the days of JFK, people still had framed pictures of the president up in their house. That was very common. People would have framed pictures of the president at businesses. That was extremely common back in the 60s. Oh yeah, you still see it today every now and again. My grandma had pictures. I mean, we served JFK's president, the Pope, in my grandmother's house.

We had pictures of the Pope everywhere and God, it was great. I love seeing him. JFK was assassinated on my grandmother's birthday. No kidding. That's an important piece of information. Yeah, how was she connected? What does she know? When JFK was assassinated, Jack Ruby was in the offices of the Dallas Morning News placing ads for the carousel.

Meaning Ruby was essentially mainlining information about the assassination as it was coming in. Now, to most people in the United States, the assassination of JFK was to say the least an extremely unpleasant and emotional experience. But to Jack Ruby, who was already mentally unstable and under an enormous amount of financial pressure, the murder of the president was beyond traumatizing. He took it very, very hard. Furthermore, Ruby was also taking an appetite suppressant developed in Germany as a substitute for meth called Preluden. Which meant that at the time of the assassination, Ruby was to say the least agitated. Bit hopped up. Yeah, he was, Sparky was sparked.

Okay. And he was ready to go. I think that the Preluden really put a lot of the gas behind Sparky. Yeah. And his sister said that Jack looked broken following the murder of JFK. And he told her that he actually felt worse about the president's death than the deaths of their own parents. Out of respect, Ruby even closed down the strip club for the night. Oh my God, but that's the only thing JFK would want to go to.

That is very, they should have kept it open. But he kept the, he closed it for the entire weekend. He went, he closed it to mourn. But this begins the mysterious circumstances because the day that president Kennedy was shot, he starts turning it up everywhere, which is mostly out of pure curiosity. But because of the way people knew him, and how familiar he was to the entire Dallas, both reporters and a police department, like, because he used to go hang out at the Dallas. He would just go to hang out by newspaper offices and see what the scoops were. And he would go and hang out with the police officers and shoot shit. So now he's starting to roll into history, being there for every one of these moments for right after JFK being shot.

Since Ruby was a known quantity with the police, he went down to headquarters after Oswald was arrested and said hello to everyone. Started shaking hands, telling them that he was there to do some Yiddish translating for a detective. Okay. But even though Ruby was in mourning, he was still hustling, handing out passes to a strip club to everyone. And by the end of it, Ruby considered himself a deputized reporter, which made Ruby a familiar face to most of the reporters working the story, which will become much more important the next day. Apparently he went as far to have a camera with him. He brought a camera with him to sort of pose as a reporter, mixing in. But several reporters do note that he was armed as of Friday.

So as of Friday, he already had a pistol on him waiting to go as he started going into all these important moments of history. I think he was always armed. I don't think I don't think Friday was the day he decided to start carrying a gun. It sounds like Jack Ruby always carried a gun. My dad was part of my dad dress up as a kid. If the very few times we went out to eat as a kid, my dad went out with two guns on him. Well, you gotta let the world know that yes, you're here for eggs over Miami, but you'll shoot up the place too. On the day before Oswald's murder, Ruby did get a glimpse of his eventual victim.

And Ruby claimed that the smirk on Oswald's face was all he needed to know that Oswald was guilty as sin. And he stewed on that look for the rest of the night. So he loved JFK, he's mourning the death of a father, more than a father. You see that guy smiling? This guy's already bipolar and now he's hopped up on German speed? Oh my goodness. We left the station and went back to the carousel where he had a conversation with an off-duty officer, telling him, quote,

It's too bad a peon could do something like that, that son of a bitch. The officer later said that Ruby was wild eyed and was absolutely... He was power deaning all over his strip club. And Ruby was also incensed that his was the only strip club in town that had closed down for the night after the president's murder. So he was a... No class? No class? No class?

Okay. ...to be planning anything concrete, but he couldn't stop saying between drinks how terrible the whole situation was and how badly he felt for the president's wife and his children. He's right. He is correct, right? Yeah. I think so. This is very cinematic.

I think there was a movie about Jack Ruby called Ruby by Danny Aiello was playing Ruby, which is perfect cast honestly. I love Danny Aiello. RIP. Yeah. It is... There's something about this man that has now taken this onto himself because he believes himself he is an adopted son of Dallas. He loves Dallas.

He feels for Dallas. He loves America. He's a true American. He believes that anybody can make themselves of something because you look at just sort of his kind of entrepreneurial energy, the kind of way that he really believed he was going to make something of himself in this life and he kept throwing at it, kept throwing spaghetti at the wall, see what sticks, it never sticks because spaghetti's wet. And so he knows...

Well, that's why it sticks. It's hard. It's hard to make it stay. It is hard to do. Yeah. But you got to get it right. And so now you have this like moment in history where he sees and he's like, I can make something happen. Right.

Maybe. I don't think... At this moment, I don't think he's thinking that. Getting hammered morning in the loss, realizing that he's got a gun and an angry temper. He may have had it crossed through his mind the time or two. Maybe. But he beat up a price fighter. He beat the men twice the size of Lee Harvey Oswald.

He knows that if him and Lee Harvey Oswald, that they could just set it up, if he could just convince a cop to put the two of them in a boxing ring. Right. I think that it must have at least been a thought of being like, just let me fight him one time and show the whole world about how Jews can go and fight the men that assault our president. Like he is ready to do it. Yeah. So on Sunday, November 24th, Ruby was woken up by his housekeeper at 9 AM. Very hungover.

His roommate, George Senator, said that Ruby looked worse than he usually did and he kept mumbling and jabbering about the assassination. Then Ruby got a phone call. He owed one of his dancers money. So she asked him to run down to the Western Union in downtown Dallas right next to the police headquarters to wire her $25 for rent and groceries. Jack agreed and drove through Dealey Plaza on the way. They didn't have it closed off, huh? No. That's weird.

No, no, no, not at that point. It's a pretty main road. Yeah, no it is. Meanwhile, back at police headquarters, death threats against Lee Harvey Oswald had been coming in fast and steady. But even though the police knew that Oswald's life was in very real danger, they didn't make too much of an effort to protect him during the transfer to the county jail. Because again, they were trying to make a good impression on the press or, as Henry said, they might have just wanted someone to kill him. Presenting. Presenting.

But they also, in a way, ignorantly kind of thought that everybody that would be in this would be kind of in the know. Yeah. Right? That anybody that would be in this area are people that we know. We vouch for these people that are here. They are reporters and cops. So we, maybe this is like a safe space for us to bring him out and show him, which is very ignorant. Yeah.

It's very dumb. The plan was to have two armored trucks and use one as a decoy while the other would take Oswald and two guards. But upon the truck's arrival, it was found that one was too small to hold three men and the other was too big to clear the entrance to the parking garage. Was it a Ugo? What? It was too small to hold three men? I don't know why they couldn't check on this beforehand. I don't know why.

They look at the specs, but the reporters also did not buy it. They just thought they were like, that's the fake car that they're going to, they think that we're going to do with like, but we know he's coming out of this back ramp. So it was decided that they'd still use one truck as a decoy while Oswald would be transported in an unmarked car. Now, of course, word spread fast that Oswald was being transferred. So the press gathered in the basement garage so there would be plenty of room for photographers to take Oswald's picture on the perp walk. Like, they chose the garage because they're like, we want there to be plenty of room for all the cameras. Because I think they wanted, there was, I mean, and there were live television crews there to show this happening. Because the Dallas police wanted to show themselves we are doing our jobs.

Look at us do our jobs. Kind of peacocking a little bit. Look at us do it. Well, because at night, they were all up to this, up to that morning, at that night, they're like, let's transfer him right now at night in secret. And they all said, no, we got to do it in the morning and really let everybody know that we're doing it. So they actually told the reporters be here at 10 a.m., we're moving them at 10 a.m. But they were late, which is very interesting. Because at this point, Jack Ruby is still at the, he's still transferring money.

He's at the Western Union. So just after 11 a.m., Oswald was told that he was about to be transferred. But Oswald, who is apparently called natured, wanted a sweater for the trip. Can I have a sweater? I need a sweater. So the police captain sent out for a couple of sweaters and Oswald settled on the black one after he tried on the beige one and decided he didn't like it. It's thinning. Hey, man, you're going to be on TV.

Yeah. And if Lee Harvey Oswald hadn't requested those sweaters and spent so much time being fussy about the color, he would have been long gone to the county jail by the time Jack Ruby finished up at the Western Union. Damn. And once again, the cops showed their incompetence. They did take into consideration that someone might shoot Oswald, but they handcuffed Oswald to a cop, which made it impossible for Lee Harvey Oswald to duck should anyone come out of the crowd with a gun. Also, who was the unlucky cop that got handcuffed to him? That's the thing. It was also dangerous for the cop.

And that's what points more towards incompetence than conspiracy. Right. And the cop even told them, like, right before they walked out, it was like, man, someone shoot you. I hope they're as good a shot as you are, Lee. Good Lord. He's laughing. Yeah, and they all fucking laughed about it. Good God.

That's some Texas humor, I think. That is some Texas humor. It's just, definitely drew the short end of the stick that morning at the old PD department or police department. Now, it had also gotten out to the public that Oswald was being transferred, and when word got to Jack Ruby, the decision to kill him was made almost instantaneously. It was, I know where he is. I've got my gun. I know how to get there. I'm going to go do it.

Well, this is very contentious. This to me is a, it's not about conspiracy. It is about, to me, this is a conspiracy theory that I wonder if it even is that complicated, because he was late. They didn't know that he was going to be transferred at past 11 o'clock. I think that Jack Ruby had somebody in the inside on some level, not telling him, not thinking that he was going to kill him, but literally saying, they're transferring him now, Jack. You want to take a look at him, they're transferring him now. They all know Jack Ruby. Yeah.

To the point where you will see where he screams, you all know me when they're arresting him. To, I don't think that's why it rushed the judgment and who was Jack Ruby put a lot of weight on saying, well, he had inroads with the Dallas PD and so they directed him to kill Lee Harvey Oswald. Well, I think it's more that they did full on tell him, we're transferring him now, and here it is, and let him walk into the basement without being, without checking him, without doing anything, without looking for a gun, because they just wanted to include him because they knew how upset he was about JFK getting murdered. Right. And it was almost like a nice thing. Like, we'll let him see it. Yeah. We trust him.

He was super smart to let the heavily armed, super upset guy run into the person that killed the man that he loved. I think it's very smart and police work. Yeah. Well, what Ruby said he did was he walked to police headquarters, slit past the police barricade, ran down the ramp to the basement parking lot and waited in the crowd of reporters. But he didn't have to wait long. He was there only a few seconds when Oswald walked out the door. Perfect timing. And all of the reporters were like, oh, hey, it's that jack guy. It wasn't like who's this guy's like, oh, yeah, that guy.

I remember that guy. Now, as I said, the whole thing was being broadcast live on television. And what you're about to hear is the sound of the world's first on air murder. There is Leon. He's been shot. He's been shot. The Oswald has been shot. There's the man with a gun.

It's absolutely panic. Absolutely panic. Here in the base of the Dallas police headquarters, the detectives have their guns drawn. Oswald has been shot. There is no question about it. Oswald has been shot. Oh. And thanks to Lyndon Johnson, that wasn't the last time we got to see live death on television.

Because of Vietnam. But it's very interesting to see him cut through the crowd. He jumps right in front because apparently what they, what was supposed to happen, which rushed a judgment kind of painstakingly, almost boringly puts together, is that there was supposed to be a car parked for them to go right into the car as soon as he came around the corner. It was not a far walk. It was a quick walk from the door to the car. But they got the high sign early.

The car wasn't parked. So as they were coming down, they actually had to slow up. They were literally running, essentially, dragging him so everybody can see it, but they were trying to get to the car as fast as possible. But they had to slow up for the car to get into position. In that hesitation was when Jack jumped forward. Damn, perfect storm, huh? Yeah, and when Jack jumped forward, like one of the detectives, like, immediately recognized him,

and right before Jack pulled the trigger, he yelled, Jack, you son of a bitch, don't! Yep. Life is stranger than fiction, isn't it? But nobody was fast enough to stop him. And Ruby shot Oswald in the torso point blank with a 38 snub nose revolver right after he yelled, quote, You killed my president, you rat! Damn.

The bullet bounced around inside Lee Harvey Oswald's innards, ensuring that the shot would be fatal. There's no fucking way he's going to survive that. Right. And as the detectives tackled Ruby, he said, I'm Jack Ruby, you all know me. He didn't think he was going to spend a single night in jail. Really?

Yeah, he was like, they all know me, I'm a hero. It's like he's just, oh, he's just my buddies. I'm just going to take care of this rat. He truly believed that he would not see a day of jail. He thought that he would, this is finally him making good. Right, right. He was going to be a major part of Texas history, and he was. He is, yeah.

But just on the opposite side. Yeah, I mean, he thought everyone would look at him and go, finally, someone did it. Thank God, yeah. Thank God someone did it. I mean, I'd get the drunken hungover logic. But as I was watching, when you watch him do it too, it's so weird because it's so, I don't know why this case is so eerie to me sometimes and actually kind of emotional. Like as I'm watching, maybe it's because there's so much footage of the actual murders of JFK

and then there's the footage of Lee Harvey Oswald getting shot because it's almost like every time I watch it, being like, maybe he'll get away this time and we won't deal with it. I don't know why it's, it's this like hinging point of like, man, these people were kind of paraded in front of each other. The way that they described in JFK, the way they described in JFK shooting, they described that chunk of street as a killing box that they set up this, this place where there were so many areas or a shooting field. There's so many ways that for him to have been murdered that if he had been, if he just

went through it would have been just a lovely convertible ride. But then if you look at it again and been like, no, he was like presented to be murdered. Same thing with Lee Harvey Oswald. He is presented. He has put up in an almost ritualistic fashion of like, here, come get him right now. We're going to, we're putting it to chance. We're rolling dice instead of making sure that he is on lockdown and in the coverage of night, like what they, what they did more successfully with El Chapo, where they just

kind of, you never saw his face ever again. You know what I mean? Like he just got fucking scooped up by a phalanx of police officers, put into a super secret cell and no one could had any possibility of getting at him. We're like, this was just like kind of wondering if we have closed the door, but will history open the window? Immediately Oswald was rushed to Parkland Hospital, the same place JFK had been taken and the same staff who tried to save the president now worked on Oswald.

Although they refused to treat him in the same trauma room where JFK had been. But even though they attempted multiple surgeries, Lee Harvey Oswald died at 2.07 PM on November 24th, 1963, less than 48 hours after he was arrested. Ensuring that the full truth about the assassination of JFK will never be known. And never talked about again. Never once. And it won't be a big deal, which is nice. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Well actually Lee Harvey Oswald tried not making it, like making light of it during his interrogation. He's like, yeah, there's going to be another president in like two days and I won't forget about this. Oh yeah, yeah. No, he nailed it. He nailed a lot of stuff. Of course, after his death, Lee's mother tried removing the blame from her special boy,

saying that her son should be buried in Arlington National Cemetery as the unsung hero of the assassination. She said there's a lot of stuff you people don't know about. And then her other son came into the room and said, mom, shut the fuck up. The safe deposit box! And when they asked Ruby why he'd killed Oswald, he said he wanted to spare Jackie Kennedy the pain of a trial. Adding, quote, I guess I just want to show the world that a Jew had guts.

Yeah, it's so weird. Jack Ruby is a, he is controversial. I don't know. It's very strange. Obviously you can't go killing anyone. No. You can't do it. But in his heart, he really did think he was doing something right.

He did think he was doing something right. And that is actually very nice because that trial would have sucked for Jackie. No, it's not nice at all. No, it's not even close to his mind. Oh, I guess, I guess it's a nice gesture. In his mind, yes. It's like when you, it's like when your cat gives you a dead rat and you're like, thank you.

Thank you. I would have preferred not to have to clean this up. The road to hell, my friend, paved with good intentions. I know what the construction looks like on the road to hell. Well, as far as Jack Ruby's trial went, his defense attorney wanted to lean on mental illness, specifically the history of mental illness in his family. But Ruby, who thought he would be processed and released the same day as the murder, refused. One other, Tana Hill, his defense attorney also had another idea that he tried to put

forward because he tried to say, and I don't know if it's real or not, that Jack Ruby suffered from epilepsy and that he was in an epileptic state for several days and that actually the impulsive decision to pull the gun out of his pocket and shoot Lee Harvey Oswald was a seizure and he had no control over his movements and that I guess that you can be in a fugue state for like a week with epilepsy, but I have it. I don't know. I know. That's crazy.

Well, Ruby said that he wanted to be known as the guy who defended his president rather than someone who just went bonkers one day owing to a mental defect passed along by his mother. And as a result, it took a jury less than an hour to deliver a guilty verdict along with an execution order. Damn. And after that, Jack Ruby's mental problems only got worse. He told his sister that he believed his actions had resulted in the death of 25 million Jews

and those Jews were all being killed in the floor below his prison cell. He claimed that he could hear them being boiled in oil. So he really was extremely mentally very mentally out. Things unraveled more once he was in jail, right? Because he was really going crazy and he truly just did not understand why no one could understand his motives and why he was in jail to begin with. And why was he getting the chair? And Tauna Hill famously joked to him, I'll tell you what, if they gave you the chair,

it's really important to not take it. I love this Texas humor. Do you want to work at my nightclub? Eventually, Ruby tried killing himself several times. Once by pounding his head against the wall over and over again trying to split his skull open. Once by hanging and once by electrocution with a light fixture. Can I give you a fuller description of his suicide attempt by light fixture from Who

Was Jack Ruby by Seth Cantor? Of course. Describing what happened. His jail, basically his jailer said, Ruby appeared to be asleep. Sitting up in his chair at the large enclosure outside his cell where Ruby and his guards could sit at a table and play what Stevenson says is his that Las Vegas game of cards. Gin rummy. Ruby had taught it to him in a kind of cultural exchange wherein Stevenson discourse on the

Bible. Ruby's head was slumped. His eyes closed. Stevenson got up from his chair at that point and went off to get a glass of water. Ruby moved fast. He unscrewed the overhead light bulb, dumped water from his own glass onto the floor as a conduit and then couldn't reach the socket with his finger while standing in the water. Ruby began jumping up and down, fifthfully trying to make foot and finger contact somehow

match. It was something merely comical. Stevenson smiles maliciously. That is so unbelievably sad for Ruby. Okay. And Jack Ruby, you want to hear something sad? Sure. Every single day he kissed a picture of JFK.

Yep. Every single day. I don't know if he deserved the chair necessarily. He appealed. He appealed. Yeah, he didn't make it. And he had a new trial coming. Yeah.

But at the end of 1966, he was rushed to the hospital with pneumonia and doctors found cancer in his liver, lungs and brain, which might have also had something to do with it. But he was everywhere. But he was handled with cancer. Yeah. Damn. And on January 3rd, 1967, just a little over three years since the murder, he died from a blood clot.

Damn. And did he regret killing Oswald? Never. Never regretted. Even though he was like, oh, I'm not a hero in the eyes of the people I'm in prison, like he never took a back. Never. Do you think he would do it again?

Absolutely. Yes. Okay. Interesting. In a second, he would absolutely do it again. Very interesting. As far as what happened to Lee Harvey Oswald's body, he was buried in Fort Worth the day after his assassination.

Aside from his family, no one showed up to the funeral, including the minister. And news reporters there to cover the event acted as his pallbearers. Hugh Ainsworth is very, that's the reporter I mentioned recently. There were so few people there that one of the pallbearers left, like he didn't want to do it. And so they just straight up asked him, because he had been kind of, would you be his pallbearer? And he said, no, I won't do it. I won't touch his casket.

That's where I know Hugh Ainsworth from. He was one of the guys that covered Henry Lee Lucas extensively. Oh, okay. So he's been around. Oh yeah. He is a hardcore Texas reporter. Okay. Now, had Lee Harvey Oswald just gone to trial, it's likely that conspiracy thought in America

would look entirely different than it does today. But while Jack Ruby thought he was the hero, his actions only serve to permanently muddle 20th century American history. It's why we're at. I honestly do believe that his movement, Lee, I almost feel like, because if Lee Harvey Oswald got to trial, we would have seen a lot of the evidence that then was covered kind of more secretly by the Warren Commission, right? Instead of having an in-house investigation from a bunch of the spookiest spooks to ever

exist, some of the most infamous names in American history being on the Warren Commission, you then would have a public hearing. You would hear all of this information come out for the first time. And it might have cut a little bit of what then allowed the shadows that allowed conspiracy theory to sort of grow from the information and the gaps of information. You have witnesses under oath. You have discovery. You have everything laid out from beginning to end, both on the side of the prosecution

and on the side of the defense. It's all laid out in a manner that the American public is familiar with and comfortable with. So I think people would have taken it more as fact. People would have trusted the whole process a little bit more. But because Oswald did not have a trial and because those facts were not laid out clearly and concisely, the government put together its own investigation, which came to be known, of course, as the Warren Commission. And as Henry said, the Warren Commission was filled with spooks and untrustworthy characters.

And the whole thing was, despite being 800 pages at the very end of it, still kind of secretive. And it was a process the American public didn't really understand. And so conspiracy theory took hold hard and fast because the first books about the JFK conspiracy were about the Warren Commission. And it was only about asking questions and those questions blossomed. And that is where we'll start with our conspiracy episodes in two weeks on JFK Parts Five and Six.

Right. There it is. Very interesting story. Jack Ruby, this entire, this is why it's captivated the nation for over half of a century. This is just absolutely captivating stuff. And so this is, we've covered the facts, quote unquote facts, that can be verified by researchers over the years. But these next two episodes, we're really going to get in the weeds in a way that I don't

know if I'm ever going to really recover from. Because I am, I'm already, I'm already just so filled with names, right? But be prepared for the Gemini file. Be prepared for secret space programs. Be prepared for Nazis getting there too, again, Nazis get in there as well. Then you got the fucking Cubans, then you got the fucking whole lot of mafiosos up to the point where there might have been 28 people in Dealey Plaza on the day of JFK's assassin assassination, all in competition to see who would kill him first.

JFK is the most murdered human to ever exist. Man, and you know what, it would have been such a shame if JFK would have decided to put that plastic protective covering over his limo that day. All those plans would have been for naught. Indeed. All, everything. Everything would have been for naught. Don't forget about Badge Man coming out on Fox.

Badge Man! It's going to be a new series. Only the three tramps. The three tramps will be there too. The three tramps will be there, and as you know, when we were saying the Umbrella Man and the Babushka Lady earlier, like those are actual figures in the conspiracy world. But we're going to be getting deep into the conspiracies, we're going to be talking about Jim Garrison's conspiracies, we're going to be talking about Mark Lane, of course we're

going to be talking about the American coup, the CIA, the mafia, the Cubans, fucking everybody on the first episode. And then on the second, we'll be getting into Secret Space Program, more esoteric stuff, and the whole thing's going to end with what we think happened. All right, everyone, I did say it was suicide before, but now you believe JFK died from complications from the gout, so you never know, go get checked, don't eat so much lobster. Don't eat so much lobster. I just wish the CIA didn't have all the motives for killing them.

That's the part that gets really, really confusing, and then the one, the lone nut, like the reasonable storyline, there is no motive. And then for all of the crazy shit, there actually is motive, but there is no, like, this is how it was done from A to Z. It was all just bullshit, plopped on top of actually very strong motives for killing the president. All right, everyone, while speaking of driving around, we are going to be on tour in April. We are super excited. We're going to be in a big old bus.

So finally, I can't sleep on the bus. They only make the beds for people who are six foot four and under. Jack Ruby would have been comfortable as hell with his average height, evidently, of five nine. We are super excited to see everyone in April. If you haven't gotten tickets, get those tickets. It'll be a lot of fun. It'll be a lot of fun.

And one more thing, gigantic thanks to research assistants, Joel McKean, Rachel Shue, and Emily Fusco for their help on these episodes and all of the episodes to come. They've been fucking invaluable, and they're invaluable on every episode that we do. We're on last podcast on the left. So thank you. Very big thank you to our research assistant. And if you look up, there are some great, great documentaries that I've been watching. The Rush to Judgment documentary from 1966 is so interesting to see where these conspiracy

theories first flicking popped up. I've just been, I'm having a field day, and I love it. That's great, buddy. I'm happy for you. And next week, we will be doing, as Marcus mentioned, we will be doing a relaxed fit. And then, yes, we will be on to the conclusion of JFK. And the relaxed fit is still going to be JFK themed. We're still going to be talking JFK stuff.

I'm going to be talking about the murder question mark of Marilyn Monroe. Oh, very interesting. Remember we got, so we're coming to your town, book comes out April 7th. If you pre-order now, and this also includes for everybody who pre-orders, we're going to put up the document for you to go and fill out a form. If you've pre-ordered previously, or you're about to pre-order a book now, you can, you're about to get maybe some free merch. We're going to have it out, t-shirts to lucky buyers, we're going to have it out, posters.

And 10 extremely lucky people, oh man, they're so lucky, are going to get personalized videos from the homes of Ben Marcus and myself. Isn't it amazing, you can get a personal message from a 38 year old man who lives with a dog. Isn't that great, nothing more exciting than that. Also come check out Classy Night Out at the Pac Theater in Los Angeles this coming Wednesday. We do it every second Wednesday of the month in LA at the Pac Theater. It's free. It's hosted by Ed Larsen and myself.

Come on out because those, the seeds get filled and it's wonderful. Absolutely. And don't forget to listen to No Dogs in Space. We just finished our series on suicide. And if suicide's not your cup of tea, I understand if it's not. Starting next week, we are going to be starting our three-part series on UK punk legends, The Damned. Dang it all the hell.

All right, everyone, keep on supporting all the shows here on LPN and never forget, hail yourselves. Hail Satan. Helien. Magustylations. Hail me. Now you've been me asking yourself, what was the deep dark magic ritual that the JFK assassination fulfilled?

I wasn't. We're going to tell you all about it in a way that is going to make you a worse person. Woohoo. This show is made possible by listeners like you. Thanks to our ad sponsors, you can support our shows by supporting them. For more shows like the one you just listened to, go to lastpodcastnetwork.com.