Jack Ruby - Alleged Links To Organized Crime

Alleged Links To Organized Crime

Ruby was known to have been acquainted with both the police and the Mafia. The House Select Committee on Assassinations said that Ruby had known restaurateurs Sam (1920–1970) and Joseph Campisi (1918–1990) since 1947, and had been seen with them on many occasions. After an investigation of Joe Campisi, the HSCA found:

While Campisi's technical characterization in federal law enforcement records as an organized crime member has ranged from definite to suspected to negative, it is clear that he was an associate or friend of many Dallas-based organized crime members, particularly Joseph Civello, during the time he was the head of the Dallas organization. There was no indication that Campisi had engaged in any specific organized crime-related activities. —

Similarly, a PBS Frontline investigation into the connections between Ruby and Dallas organized crime figures reported the following:

In 1963, Sam and Joe Campisi were leading figures in the Dallas underworld. Jack knew the Campisis and had been seen with them on many occasions. The Campisis were lieutenants of Carlos Marcello, the Mafia boss who had reportedly talked of killing the President. —

A day before Kennedy was assassinated, Ruby went to Joe Campisi's restaurant. At the time of the Kennedy assassination, Ruby was close enough to the Campisis to ask them to come see him after he was arrested for shooting Lee Oswald.

In his memoir Bound by Honor: A Mafioso's Story, Bill Bonanno, son of New York Mafia boss Joseph Bonanno, explains that several Mafia families had longstanding ties with the anti-Castro Cubans through the Havana casinos operated by the Mafia before the Cuban Revolution. Many Cuban exiles and Mafia bosses disliked Kennedy, blaming him for the failed Bay of Pigs Invasion. They also disliked his brother, the young and idealistic Attorney General Robert Kennedy, who had conducted an unprecedented legal assault on organized crime.

The Mafia were experts in assassination, and Bonanno reported that he recognized the high degree of involvement of other Mafia families when Ruby killed Oswald, since Bonanno was aware that Ruby was an associate of Chicago mobster Sam Giancana.

Howard P. Willens, third highest official in the Department of Justice and assistant counsel to J. Lee Rankin designed the organizational structure of the Warren Commission, outlined its investigative priorities, and terminated the investigation of Ruby's Cuban related activities. An FBI report states that Willens's father was Tony Accardo's next door neighbor since 1958. Some sources report that in 1946, Tony Accardo allegedly asked Jack Ruby to go with Pat Manno, Romie Nappi and several other Mafia associates down to Texas in order to make sure local sheriff Steve Gutherie was copasetic with the Mafia’s expansion into Dallas.

Four years prior to the assassination of President Kennedy, Ruby went to see a man named Lewis McWillie in Cuba. Ruby considered McWillie, who had previously run illegal gambling establishments in Texas, to be one of his closest friends. At the time Ruby visited him, in August 1959, McWillie was supervising gambling activities at Havana's Tropicana Club. Ruby told the Warren Commission that his August trip to Cuba was merely a social visit at the invitation of McWillie. The House Select Committee on Assassinations would later conclude that Ruby "…most likely was serving as a courier for gambling interests." The committee also found "circumstantial," but not conclusive, evidence that "…Ruby met with Santo Trafficante in Cuba sometime in 1959."

About an hour after President Kennedy was shot, White House correspondent Seth Kantor (who was a passenger in the motorcade) arrived at Parkland Hospital where Kennedy was receiving medical care. As Kantor was entering the hospital through a stairway, he felt a tug on his coat. He turned around to see Ruby who called him by his first name and shook his hand. (Kantor had become acquainted with Ruby when Kantor was a reporter for the Dallas Times Herald newspaper.) Ruby asked Kantor if he thought that it would be a good idea for him to close his nightclubs for the next three nights because of the tragedy and Kantor responded that he thought that doing so would be a good idea. It has been suggested that Ruby might have been involved in tampering with evidence while at the hospital. Ruby would later deny he had been at Parkland Hospital and the Warren Commission decided to believe Ruby rather than Kantor. (In 1979, the House Select Committee on Assassinations reversed the Warren Commission's judgement, stating: "While the Warren Commission concluded that Kantor was mistaken, the Committee determined he probably was not.")

Goaded by the Warren Commission's dismissal of his testimony, Seth Kantor researched the Ruby case for years. In a later published book Who Was Jack Ruby?, Kantor wrote:

The mob was Ruby's "friend." And Ruby could well have been paying off an IOU the day he was used to kill Lee Harvey Oswald. Remember: "I have been used for a purpose," the way Ruby expressed it to Chief Justice Warren in their June 7, 1964 session. It would not have been hard for the mob to maneuver Ruby through the ranks of a few negotiable police . —

Witness Wilma Tice also said that she saw Jack Ruby at Parkland Hospital during the time Kennedy was being treated there. Called to testify before the Warren Commission, Tice said that she received an anonymous phone call from a man telling her "…that it would pay me to keep my mouth shut."

Within hours of Ruby's arrest for shooting Oswald, a telegram was received at the Dallas city jail in support of Ruby, under the names of Hal and Pauline Collins. In one of the Warren Commissions exhibits, Hal Collins is listed as a character reference by Ruby on a Texas liquor license application. Hal Collin's sister was married to Robert Clark, the brother of then-sitting U.S. Supreme Court Justice, Tom C. Clark. Tom C. Clark advised newspaper columnist Drew Pearson that financier Henry Crown and the Hilton Hotel chain had financial interests in syndicated racketeering activities in Chicago. Tom C. Clark also recommended that the Warren Commission appoint Henry Crown's attorney, Albert E. Jenner, Jr., to serve as assistant counsel to the commission.