Who • Jack Ru Was
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WHO WAS • JACK RUBY? by Gary Cartwright How a small-time strip joint operator ushered in America's age of violence. All I know about the best man in my a sign accusing Lyndon Johnson of wedding is he didn't exist. being a traitor, went on television to de- Five days before John F. Kennedy nounce the Peace Corps as "welfare was assassinated in Dallas, I got married socialism and godless materialism, all for the second time. It was a Sunday, at the expense of capitalism and basic the day after I'd covered the SMU- U.S. spiritual and moral values." Arkansas game at the Cotton Bowl, and Zealots from the National Indignation Jo and I—who had known each other Committee picketed a UN Day speech a good three weeks—were convinced by by Ambassador Adlai Stevenson; they this romantic con man who called him- called him Addle-Eye and booed and self Richard Noble that we should drive spat on him and hit him on the head to Durant, Oklahoma, and get married. with a picket sign. When a hundred Richard Noble personally drove us in civic leaders wired strong and sincere his air-conditioned convertible. He paid apologies to the ambassador, General for the blood tests and license. We used Edwin Walker, who had been cashiered his 1949 Stanford class ring in the by the Pentagon for force-feeding his ceremony, and we drank a quart of his troops right-wing propaganda, flew the scotch and sang "Hey, Look Me Over" American flag upside down in front ("Remember when you're down and of his military-gray mansion on Turtle out, the only way is up!") on the way Creek. There were pro-Castro cabals back to Dallas. and anti-Castro cabals that overlapped There was no such person as Richard and enough clandestine commerce to Noble, and the Stanford class ring was fill a dozen Bogart movies. Drugs, arms, bought in a hock shop. Whoever the muscle, propaganda: the piety of the man was who called himself Richard Dallas business climate was the perfect Noble had set up a bogus sales office cover. A friend of mine in banking in a North Dallas apartment complex in- operated a fleet of trucks in Bogota as habited mainly by airline stews and in- a sideline. Airline stewardesses brought domitable seekers and had managed to in sugar-coated cookies of black Turkish ingratiate himself with his personality, hash without having the slightest notion credit cards, liquor supply, and national of what they were carrying. WATS line. A month or so after the Jack Ruby was having one of his assassination, which I assume he had customary feuds with an employee of nothing to do with, Richard Noble his Carousel Club, but this one was vanished in the night. The FBI came serious. His star attraction Jada claimed around asking questions, and that was that she feared for her life and placed the last I heard. Ruby under peace bond. Newspaper ads A lot of bizarre people were doing for the Carousel Club during the week some very strange things in Dallas in the of November 22 featured Bill Demar, fall of 1963, and Richard Noble was a comic ventriloquist—hardly Ruby's only one of them. Madame Nhu bought style, but the best he could do. a dozen shower caps at Neiman-Marcus And someone took a pot shot at Gen- and tried to drum up support for the eral Walker in his own home. People Diem regime in Saigon. even while her said later it was Lee Harvey Oswald. host in the U.S., the CIA, laid plans to assassinate Diem himself. Members of If there is a tear left, shed it for Jack the American Nazi Party danced Ruby. He didn't make history; he only around a man in an ape suit in front stepped in front of it. When he emerged of the Times Herald building. Congress- from obscurity into that inextricable man Bruce Alger, who had once carried freeze-frame that joins all of our minds 82 TEXAS MONTHLY Illustrated by Greg King/SketchPad Studio 500 Club in New Orleans so that the Carousel could compete with the much classier Colony Club (where Chris Colt was stripping) or Barney Weinstein's Theatre Lounge around the corner, where you could catch Nikki Joy. Ruby was childishly jealous of the Weinsteins, who drove Cadillacs and Jaguars and took frequent trips to Las Vegas; and he assuaged his envy by drafting com- plaints to the stripper's union, the Liquor Control Board, and the IRS, accusing the Weinsteins of whatever. Even the FBI, to its sorrow, knew of Ruby's antipathy for the Weinsteins. Of all the Ruby rumors that have flour- ished and died through the years—that Ruby fired at Kennedy from the rail- road overpass, that Oswald visited the Carousel Club a few days before the assassination—only the most current one, that Ruby was an informant for the FBI, seems to have much truth to it. Hugh Aynesworth, a Times Herald reporter who knew Ruby well, verified it: "In 1959 the FBI tried eight times to recruit Jack Ruby. They wanted him as an informer on drugs, gambling, and organized crime, but every time they contacted him, Ruby tried to get his This picture of Ruby and his pets hung on the wall of his Carousel Club office. competitors in trouble. '01' Abe over at the Colony Club is cheating on his to Dallas, Jack Ruby, a bald-headed of the joints on The Strip in 1963, but income tax . 01' Barney at the little man who wanted above all else to that wasn't the point. Jack Ruby ran Theatre Lounge is selling booze after make it big, had his back to the camera. what he considered a "decent" place, hours.' After a while the FBI gave up I can tell you about Jack Ruby, and a "high-class" place, a place that Dallas on the idea." The Weinsteins, not sur- about Dallas, and if necessary remind could view with pride. "Punks" and prisingly, considered Ruby a creep. you that human life is sweetly fragile "characters" who wandered in by mis- I first met Jada about a month before and the holy litany of ambition and take were as likely as not to leave with the assassination. Bud Shrake and I success takes as many people to hell as an impression of Jack Ruby's fist where shared an apartment on Cole Avenue it does to heaven. But someone else will their nose used to be. that autumn, and since we were both have to tell you about Oswald, and what Cops and newspapermen, that's who sportswriters, Ruby considered us he was doing in Dallas that November, Ruby wanted in his place. Dallas cops favored customers. He invited us to when Jack Ruby took the play away drank there regularly, and none of them the Carousel one night, and Shrake from Oswald, and from all of us. ever paid for a drink. Any girl caught came home with Jada. We all became Dallas, Oswald, Ruby, Watts, Whit- hooking in his joint would get man- good friends, and when Jo and I got man, Manson, Ray, Sirhan, Bremer, handled and fired on the spot, but Ruby married a few weeks later, Jada gave Viet Nam, Nixon, Watergate, FBI, leaned on his girls to provide sexual us our first wedding gift—a two-pound CIA, Squeaky Fromme, Sara Moore— pleasures for favored clients. Girl Scout cookie tin full of illegal weed the list goes on and on. Who the hell Jack Ruby was a foul-mouthed, she had smuggled across the border in wrote this script, and where will it end? mean-tempered prude who loved chil- her gold Cadillac with the letters JADA A dozen years of violence, shock, dren and hated ethnic jokes. He didn't embossed on the door. Jada cleared treachery, and paranoia, and I date it drink or smoke. He was violently customs with 100 of the two-pound all back to that insane weekend in Dal- opposed to drugs, though he maintained tins in the trunk of her car. She was las and Jack Ruby—the one essential his own high energy level by popping accompanied by a state politician (who link in the chain, the man who Preludin—an upper—and it was rumored knew nothing about the load) and wore changed an isolated act into a trend. that he operated a personal clearing a mink coat, high-heel shoes, and Jack Ruby had come a long way house for mob drug runners. He was nothing else. The first thing she did at from the ghettos of Chicago, or so he involved in shady financial schemes, customs was open the door and fall out, liked to think. He described the Carou- and the IRS was on his back. A swindler revealing more than the customs official sel Club as a "f—ing classy joint" and who called himself Harry Sinclair, Jr., expected. That was one of Jada's great patrons who challenged his opinion told Secret Service agents that Ruby pleasures, driving around Dallas in her sometimes got thrown down the stairs. backed him in a bet-and-run operation. mink coat and high heels, her The Carousel was a dingy, cramped Ruby supplied cash and introduced orange hair piled high and the coat walkup in the 1300 block of Commerce, Sinclair to likely victims. (H. L. Hunt flaring open. It was a better act than right next to Abe Weinstein's Colony was supposed to have been one.) If the one Ruby paid for.