ustxtxb_obs_1963_12_13_50_00008-00000_000.pdf

Oswald or Communists. He quoted Ruby : ” ‘I don’t know these people. I have no Communist background. I’ll swear on this Bible that you gave me.’ ” “He was in a terrible emotional state,” Dr. Silverman said. “Every three minutes he would start to cry, and then he would say that he did the patriotic thing. He thought he was doing the American thing . . . this guy has a kind of a . . . hero complex.” He had read a column about him by Victor Reisel in which Reisel discussed some Chicago underground characters. “He said ‘It’s fantastic. I don’t know these people,’ ” Silverman said. RUBY’S RECORD with the Dallas police has been spotty. According to police information, he was accused in 1949 of disturbing the peace; in 1953, of carrying a concealed weapon ; and in 1954, of a technical liquor offense, permitting consumption of beer after hours. No disposition is shown of the 1949 case ; Texas law permits a businessman to carry a gun if he is going home from his place of business with money on him ; the liquor case should not have been filed in the first place, because no one saw anyone consuming the unfinished bottle of Schlitz in question, according to information here. This year he was arrested in connection with a case of simple assault ; nothing came of the matter. “Jack blew in here in 1947,” Alexander says. He ran a couple of lounges “wide open” for a while, but then decided to cooperate with the police while maintaining a tough-guy atmosphere to attract customers, Alexander continued. “You can’t exactly say he was a stool pigeon, but if a character drifted into his place, he would call the police,” Alexander said. Nightly one or two police cars would stop by his place. Alexander thought Ruby had probably “avoided some problems” because of his cooperativeness. Ruby would make a grand entrance at the boxing matches after the preliminaries, when the lights were up, and would invite police and newspapermen to his place for free beer, Alexander said. Alexander confirmed that Ruby was in the hall Friday at a time when Oswald was brought through it. “I saw him,” Alexander said. Thus, had he been of a mind, Ruby could hhve tried to shoot Oswald Friday instead of Sunday, when he did shoot him. How did he get in ? “He’s got a pocketful of credentials,” Alexander speculated. As to Ruby’s motive in shooting Oswald, Alexander, one of his prosecutors, said, “I think he thought he was gonna be a national hero.” The contention Ruby was temporarily insane is “pure baloney” in the judgment of the Dallas prosecutor, who had just spent $25 for two books on psychology. A club operator who has known Ruby for years adopts an attitude as skeptical as Alexander’s toward the construction, of which Dr. Silverman is convinced, that Ruby acted in temporary insanity. The club man asked why, if Ruby so loved Kennedy, 8 The Texas Observer was he placing an ad in the Dallas Morning News at the time of the President’s motorcade in Dallas. This old associate of Ruby’s jeered the interpretation that Ruby could have been actuated by distress about the assassination. “Jack Ruby is for Jack Ruby, he said. John Wilson, an attorney, said he witnessed Ruby beating up another man in a bar in downtown Dallas about a year ago. “A guy ran in and started for the phone. He was followed in by Ruby, who took a couple of pokes at him…. Nobody did anything, and I saw blood begin to splatter, so I went in between them. He had cut him up pretty badly.” Wilson identified the man he said Ruby was hitting as Frank Ferraro, and said Ferraro told him be had been staying with Ruby, and Ruby had been good to him, so he did not want to cause him any trouble. The police who came, Wilson said, gave Ferraro, not Ruby, the hard time, “because they knew Ruby, I guess.” Later Ferraro wrote Wilson from Milwaukee, asking him to help him find counsel in connection with the matter, but Wilson told him this would be difficult withhim so far away, and the matter was dropped. BARNEY WEINSTEIN, proprietor of the Theater Lounge, said Ruby feverishly sought publicity. “He does everything he can to get known. He has no limits to just what he would do to get known,” Weinstein said. Once Ruby complained to the top editor of a Dallas daily, wanting to know “why he couldn’t get more publicity,” according to Weinstein. There is reason to believe, it can be reported from here, that the federal report on the assassination is to state, \(or will have stated, if it has come out by the time this recovered after the shooting came from the rifle that was presumed to be Oswald’s. \(Published leaks say it will report that Nevertheless, three questions. why Sen. Ralph Yarborough, D.-Tex., smelled gunpowder nearly all the way to Parkland Hospital after the President was shot ; how to make allowances for, or discount, certain other things witnesses have told some of us reporters; and where Jack Ruby, Oswald’s killer, was at the time of the shooting of the President, had been causing a little, but not much concern here at the Observer’s press time. Four witnesses who were close by during the shooting, for instance, indicate that they all thought at the time that the first shot came, not from the book depository building where Oswald was, but from someplace closer to the Triple Underpass. Two of them contend that the first shot missed, “He’d beat up people, thinking that would make him a name,” and on one occasion a patron bit a piece of his little finger off. Weinstein said. “I don’t speak to him. I haven’t spoken a word to him in two years,” Weinstein said. He’s “very arrogant. very quick tempered,” and “not my caliber of person.” Weinstein agreed with Alexander’s opinion that Ruby was open-handed with policemen in the hope of getting favors from them, and also out of a genuine liking for policemen. “He did know a lot of police. He knew ’em all. He curried their favor all the time,” said the club operator. Abe Weinstein, proprietor of the Colony Club, where Candy Barr used to writhe, says he does not know Ruby, other than that he ran a club next door to his. Several Dallas people who met Ruby casually said he had made a fairly good impression on them. One said he was not ostentatious; another, that he was almost shy. Yet a third saw him as “a typical Chicago fella down here to run a night club.” In his two clubs here now, the waitresses and bartenders keep a look-out for disguised photographers trying to sneak pictures from under their suit coats, and assure the reporters who make themselves known that Jack Ruby was all broken up over the assassination and had no connection with Oswald. \(Except there was one entertainer who said he saw Oswald in one of between tedious and tiresomely long delays caused by an emcee who makes wisecracks and operates a puppet, stripper ladies display their flesh, except for two bangles and a creeping G-string. and that Kennedy looked around after it, before he was hit by a second shot and began to slump. There has been speculation how the President could have been shot in the front of the neck by a sniper behind his car. However, Dr. Malcolm Perry, the physician who treated the President’s neck wound, says here that the small puncture wound he saw on a midline below the Adam’s apple could have been caused by a bullet entering or by the fragment of a bullet exiting. Dr. Robert Shaw, the physician who treated Gov. Connally, said that the doctors here really cannot say for sure how many bullets were fired. For instance, in Gov. Connally, no metal was found in his most serious wound, only part of a bullet was found in his wrist, and his thigh wound was caused by a sliver of bullet metal. “We can explain all of his wounds by the trajectory of one bullet,” but need to use other information to conclude that all three of his wounds were caused by one bullet, Dr. Shaw said. Dr. Perry mentioned the possibility, not Some Questions