Oswald and Ruby Phone Records – RFK, Jr. Got It Right
By William E. Kelly, Jr.
Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. set off a firestorm of media and
critical reaction after being interviewed in a public program at the Winspear
Opera House in Dallas by saying
that neither he nor his father believed that a “lone-gunman” killed President
Kennedy.
Interviewed by Charlie Rose, Kennedy was also quoted as
saying, “…When they examined Jack Ruby and Lee Harvey Oswald’s phone records,…they
saw…an inventory of the Mafia leaders that they had been investigating…”
A former aide to Robert F. Kennedy, Paul Schrade, who was
wounded in the same barrage of bullets that killed RFK, asked if the tape will
be aired or a transcript of it released and they said they are waiting for
permission from Kennedy and Charlie Rose. In the meantime, we are left with the quotes attributed to
those who were there in the audience. Rodger Jones, an editorial writer for the
Dallas News, in an apparent attempt to put the complete interview in context, wrote:
“RFK Jr.’s assassination narrative began with an anecdote
about his dad seeing New Orleans DA Jim Garrison’s photo on a newsstand and
asking an aide if there was anything to Garrison’s theories about the CIA ,
Cuba and Mafia
in his brother’s killing. RFK Jr. said his dad was told that Garrison was on to
something, but ‘the specifics of Garrison’s investigation went on the wrong
track, but he thought there was a link …’ Kennedy said his dad put
investigators on it. When they examined Jack Ruby and Lee Harvey Oswald’s phone
records,… they saw what was essentially ‘an inventory of the Mafia leaders that
they had been investigating for the past two years at the Justice Department.”
In response Jean Davison, and others, including Gary Mack
and John McAdams, have questioned Kennedy’s facts, evidence and reasoning. While
Mack said he believes that Betsy Lewis’ condescending version of the Opera
House event is better (See: Dallas Observer, Jan. 12; “Not Even Charlie Rose
Could Rein in RFK, Jr. in Dallas Last Night.”) and McAdams calls Kennedy a
“crackpot” for his silly beliefs on other subjects, Davison gives a more reasoned
response. As the author of the book “Oswald’s
Game,” which attempts to portray Oswald as the lone assassin, she is known
as a meticulous researcher and accurate writer, but one who comes to an
unpopular and wrong conclusion concerning Oswald’s singular guilt.
Davison correctly notes: “This stood out to me: ‘...phone
records of Oswald ... 'were like an inventory' of mafia leaders...’ Of course,…Oswald
had no phone records since he never had a phone. Anyone can believe in a
conspiracy, but where is the evidence? If Robert Kennedy ‘had investigators do
research into the assassination,’ are Ruby's phone records (or Oswald's
nonexistent ones) really the best they could come up with?...belief isn't
evidence, is it?”
Belief isn’t evidence, but telephone records are evidence,
hard evidence that can be introduced in a court of law, and the fact that there are
no telephone records of the alleged assassin of the President certainly
supports the contention that the Warren Commission investigation was, in
Kennedy’s words, “a shoddy piece of craftsmanship.”
While the phone records aren’t the best evidence of
conspiracy and Oswald may not have had his own telephone, he certainly did make
telephone calls, including suspicious calls worthy of further examination, and
there is substantial documentation to support this.
And we do have Jack Ruby’s extensive telephone records that
clearly show in the weeks leading up to the assassination he had telephone conversations with a number of mobsters who were being actively investigated by
Robert F. Kennedy’s Justice Department.
As for Oswald, in late April 1963, Ruth Paine drove him to
the Dallas bus terminal where he
caught a bus to his hometown, New Orleans .
Once there, Oswald called his uncle Charles “Dutz” Murret, who lent him money
and offered to assist him in relocating his family.
According to the House Select Committee on Assassinations
(HSCA), “Oswald's uncle, Charles Murret (commonly known as
"Dutz") had for some time been involved in the New
Orleans gambling circles. The committee established
that he was associated with organized crime figures there, having worked for
years in an underworld gambling syndicate affiliated with the Carlos Marcello
crime family….the committee first received information relating to Charles
Murret's underworld involvement from a former prosecution witness against
Teamster leader James R. Hoffa,…”
At the time both Carlos Marcello and Jimmy Hoffa were
subjects of RFK’s Justice Department investigations and both were prosecuted in
Federal courts.
After Oswald was arrested in New
Orleans for getting into a street scuffle with
anti-Castro Cuban members of the Student Revolutionary Directorate (DRE ),
he called his uncle Dutz and was bailed out by Emile Bruneau, an associate
of Nofilo Pecora, one of the mobsters who had telephone conversations with Jack Ruby.
Oswald also made other telephone calls that were of
investigative interest.
Oswald reportedly called New York City
radio talk show host Long John Nebel and a Florida
radio program, to talk about Cuban matters.
On September 25,
1963 , after leaving New Orleans ,
ostensibly for Mexico City , Oswald
placed a phone call to Horace Twiford, a longshoreman and official of the Texas
Socialist Labor Party in Houston .
Later that week someone impersonating Oswald twice called the Russian Embassy inMexico
City , but tape recordings of that call, which later
disappeared, were heard by FBI agents familiar with Oswald’s voice and they
claimed it wasn’t him.
Later that week someone impersonating Oswald twice called the Russian Embassy in
Back in Dallas ,
Oswald lived for a week at the home of Mary Bledsoe, whose telephone we know he
used because she complained that she didn’t like the fact “Oswald talked on the
phone in a foreign language.”
On November 17,
1963 Ruth Paine called Oswald’s rooming house in Oak Cliff and a
few days later Oswald called Marina
at Mrs. Paine’s home from the rooming house, but you will not find any phone
records of Mrs. Bledsoe’s home or the Oak Cliff rooming house among the records
of the Warren Commission.
After Oswald began working at the Texas School Book
Depository (TSBD) a secretary there said that Oswald once received a long
distance person to person phone call and that he often asked for change to make
phone calls from the pay phone on the first floor. TSBD foreman William Shelley
said he saw Oswald between 11:50 and
12 noon on November 22, standing next
to that telephone, as if waiting for a call.
Once arrested, from the Dallas City Jail, Oswald made a number
of telephone calls, at least two to Mrs. Paine’s home in Irving, one to New
York attorney John Abt, and a call that lasted a long
time to a yet unidentified party. He also tried to call a mysterious John Hurt
of North Carolina , but did not
get through to him.
The Warren Commission, despite conducting a shoddy
investigation, did collect Jack Ruby’s telephone records as well as the phone
records of some of his associates, which proved to be of investigative
significance.
The HSCA reviewed Ruby’s phone records more closely and
investigators noticed a pronounced spike in the increase in Ruby’s calls in the
days and weeks leading up to the assassination. “A chronological consolidation
of the telephone calls made by Ruby from the five separate business and home telephones he used
uncovered a significant increase in the number of calls made in October and November
1963. The average number lept from around 25 to 35 in the months of May
through September to approximately 75 in October and approximately 96 during the
first 3 1/2 weeks of November.”
Many of these calls were to or received from known mobsters
and union racketeers, some of whom were being investigated by RFK’s Justice
Department, including Barney Barker,
Dusty Miller, Lenny Patrick, Dave Yaras, Lewis McWillie, Irwin S. Weiner
and Nofio Pecora.
Barney Barker was a boxer, ex-convict and “one of Hoffa’s
best known associates during the McClellan Committee investigation,” when RFK
was the chief counsel to that committee which “detailed Baker’s role as Hoffa’s
personal liaison to various Mafia figures, as well as to a number of well-known
syndicate executioners.” As counsel to
the committee RFK noted that, “sometimes the mere threat of [Baker’s] presence
in a room was enough to silence the men who would otherwise have opposed
Hoffa’s reign.”
Dusty Miller was another Hoffa assistant and head of the
Teamster’s southern conference, while Lenny Patrick was “one of the Chicago
Mafia’s leading assassins and was responsible, according to Federal and State
law enforcement files, for the murders of over a dozen victims of the mob.” Patrick
was a capo under Chicago mob boss
Sam Giancana.
Dave Yaras, like Patrick, was a childhood friend of Ruby from his old Chicago neighborhood, and “was overheard in a 1962 electronic surveillance discussing various underworld murder contracts he had carried out and one he had only recently been assigned.”
Lewis McWillie moved from
Irwin Weiner was a Chicago
bail bondsman and close associate of Hoffa and Giancana and was described by
Jack Anderson as “the underworld’s major financial figure in the Midwest .”
Pecora was a Carlos Marcello associate whose friend Emile
Bruneau bailed Oswald out of jail when he was arrested with the Cubans.
So Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. was correct in stating that both
Oswald and Ruby, - especially Ruby, did make telephone calls of investigative
significance to mobsters that Robert F. Kennedy, as Attorney General, would
have recognized as suspects under investigation.
In reporting on RFK Jr.’s remarks about the assassination,
ABC News quoted historian Robert Dallek as saying the assassination has been “investigated,
re-investigated, investigated again and again and no one’s ever come up with
highly credible evidence” to contradict the theory that Oswald acted alone.
Well there certainly is highly credible evidence that Oswald
did not act alone, whatever it is you believe he did, and the telephone records
of both Oswald and Ruby do indicate that both men were connected, at least by
telephone, to mobsters who were being investigated by RFK’s Justice Department,
just as Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. said in Dallas .
This is not to say that organized crime and these mobsters
were responsible for murdering the president. As Kennedy is also quoted as
saying, “I think my father was fairly convinced at the end of that that there
had been involvement by somebody …”
When Rose interrupted him to ask, “Organized crime, Cubans …?”
Kennedy responded, “Or rogue CIA. ”
What is significant is that despite the JFK Act of 1992, which ordered the release of all the government records, the CIA
has continued to withhold many assassination records for reasons of national
security, belying the contention that the murder of the president is ancient
history or no longer relevant.
It isn’t a matter of debating who killed the president, or
blaming anyone, credible evidence indicates Oswald alone was not responsible for the assassination, outstanding questions have yet to be answered, many records are still
secret, the case is not closed, and the law enforcement system should at least make
the attempt to answer those questions and bring legal resolution to an unsolved
homicide.
[William E. Kelly, Jr. is a freelance journalist from Browns
Mills, New Jersey , who writes
JFKcountercoup.blogspot.com. He can be reached at Bkjfk3@yahoo.com ]
7 comments:
Still after fifty years the conspiracy murder is being covered up. Unbelievable.
I you really do believe that there was a conspiracy to murder JFK. To pull it off the big guys organizing the show, in that conspiracy, could not nor, would they allow or trust a lone gun nut to carry out an act like the lone gunner scenario that the Warren Commission calls for.
There had to be 3,4 or 5 gunners or more to pull off the biggest hit in history. I also believe strongly, that is the way it went down. Repeat after me, can we all stand and say "Carlos?"
Ditto to previous comments.The fingerprints of direct Mob involvement have been all over the case from day one too many dots that have ovrr time been connected.The CIA which we now know worked with the mob aided by disgruntled Cuban operatives conspired with the assistance of Johnson who pulled the strings in Dallas and who was in the loop from an early stage.He had the most important job the coverup which had to be instigated immediately with the conivance of Hoover. Johnsons reward wss the presidency which he would never hsve attained in his own right. The proposition by Barr Mclellend that it was Johnsons plan and that he was the main player is not credible and in fact not backed by evidence although associates of his did play a part and it was Johnson who organised the route through Dallas and there is a suspicion that Johnson interfered with Kennedys security during the motorcade although this has not been proven but Johnson was in a SS vehicle fitted with communication facilities to the command vehicle supervisor Emory Roberts.
Did you just delete my comment?
No mention of The Mossad. Others have pointed the finger at them. Meyer Lansky was a confirmed Zionist and Kennedy said that Israel would get nuclear capabilities over his dead body. Which in the end they did.
Have a look at Mossad too.
The Crown-Conrad Hilton mob in Chicago also had Mossad connections.Lester Crown, son of the late Henry, has been a huge Obama backer since 2003, the year before Obamas run for the U.S. Senate. The Pritzer family, of Chicago, have also been a money asset for the President. Penny Pritzker, was recenty confirmed as Obamas Commerce Secretary. Rahm Emmanual, now Mayor of Chicago, and formerly the Presidents Chief of Staff fought in the IDF and his father was a member of "thw Stern Gang."
Oh, Pablo Jeuenesse, how muddled your mind.
So Mossad killed Kennedy to get nukes? And the getting of the nukes was accomplished how, exactly? The Jewish Tooth Fairy materialized them in the Knesset on Nov 23rd?
Even idiots have to flesh out the connectivity between Point One and Point B. Was it that el BJ gave Israel bombs for the great job they did in Dallas? Kinda suspicious act on his part to do so, no? Any trace of such a shipment? You've got to have that, or something that links assassination to the acquisition of nukes, and it has to be logical, before you spout off on your imbecilic anti-semitic proto-theory.
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