From: pcollac@pyrnova.mis.pyramid.com (Paul Collacchi)
Newsgroups: alt.conspiracy.jfk
Subject: The Garrison Probe (part IV)
Keywords: William W. Turner article in RAMPARTS magazine
Date: 25 Aug 92 19:20:10 GMT
Reply-To: pcollac@pyrnova.mis.pyramid.com (Paul Collacchi)
Distribution: usa
Organization: Pyramid Technologies, Mt. View, California.

This is part IV of "The Garrison Commission on the Assassination of
President Kennedy" by William W. Turner.  It appeared in the January 1968
edition of Ramparts magazine.


Paul Collacchi

_______

_
[THE ELIMINATION OF A PATSY]

"/---\ DIDN'T KILL ANYBODY ... I'm just a patsy," Oswald shouted to newsmen
   |   while in police custody.  A marked patsy contends Garrison --
   |   one who was not supposed to have lived long enough to utter his
   |   cry of innocence.  But something had misfired, and Oswald fell
 \---/ not into the hands of his would-be executioners, but into the
comparative safety of the Dallas jail.  The denouement presented
a crisis that the conspirators could solve only by pressing police buff
Jack Ruby into service.
	Although the Warren Commission concluded that Oswald ducked into
his Oak Cliff rooming house to pick up the .38 revolver, later
confiscated from him in the Texas Theater, it did not explain why, if he
had gone to work at the School book Depository that morning intending to
kill the President and escape, he did not take the revolver with him.
That he made a beeline to his rooming house for the sole purpose of
getting the revolver speaks of a man who desperately wanted to protect
himself from treacherous comrades rather than from the police.
Notwithstanding the mild resistance he put up in his refuge in the Texas
Theater, Oswald's demeanor in custody gave every indication that he
would resolve the great riddle -- given the time.
	Oswald does not appear to be the only double-cross victim of that
bloody afternoon:  the evidence is persuasive that someone other than
the accused assassin killed Officer J.D. Tippit, a friend of Jack Ruby,
whose patrol area included the Harlandale Street section headquarters of
the Free Cuba group.  The Commission's star witness in fingering Oswald
was Mrs. Helen Markham, a billing that precipitated strong dissent among
some staff members, notably Wesley Liebeler who called her testimony
"contradictory" and "worthless" (Inquest, p.109)  Although ballistics
tests could not positively match the bullets in the dead officer's body
with Oswald's revolver, they did determine that three bullets were of
one manufacture, the fourth of another, while the four recovered shell
casings were evenly divided between the two manufacturers.  The
Commission wriggled out of this dilemma by wildly speculating that five
shots were fired, one completely missing (Report, p. 172).
	Moreover, the police radio logs describe a killer other than
Oswald.  Sergeant Gerald Hill alerted all cars that "Shells at the scene
indicate the suspect is armed with an automatic .38 rather than a
pistol" (presumably, Hill noted the distinctive marks made by the
ejector of an automatic).  In the same vein, Patrolman H.L. Summers
announced, "He's apparently armed with a .32 dark finish automatic
pistol..." First flashes had the killer with "black wavy hair" and a
"white shirt," certainly not a description of Oswald that day (Sawyer
Exhibit No. A, pp. 396-397).  And the best placed eyewitness, Domingo
Benavides, described a killer quite different from Oswald:  "I remember
the back of his head seemed like his hairline sort of went square
instead of tapered off -- it kind of went down and squared off and made
his head look flat in back."
	Garrison posits that the real killer hid in a cavernous building at
the corner of Tenth and Crawford which in 1963 was known as the Abundant
Life Temple.  In an aerial view of the area, the Commission traced the
killer's escape path from the scene near Tenth and Patton to Jefferson
Boulevard one block south, thence to the Texaco service station one
block west at Jefferson and Crawford.  A "white jacket" was found at the
rear of the station, which the Commission said was Oswald's.
Consequently, it had the killer reverse his path so as to bring him back
onto Jefferson and proceeding in a westerly direction toward the theater
(CE 1968).
	Rejecting this arbitrary reconstruction, Garrison points out that
the killer could have proceeded straight ahead from the rear of the
Texaco station, across an alley and into the rear door of the Abundant
Life Temple.  This view is corroborated by police radio logs.  Shortly
after 1:40 p.m., Sergeant Hill came on the air: "A witness reports that
he last was seen in the Abundant Life Temple about the 400 block.  We are
fixing to go in and shake it down."  On an alternate channel, Car 95
ordered, "Send me another squad over here to Tenth and Crawford to check
out this church basement."
	At this point Car 223 burst in excitedly, "He's in the library on
Jefferson east 500 block... I'm going around back, get somebody around
the front, get them here fast."  The dispatcher complied, and Car 19
soon affirmed, "We're all at the library."  There was no suspect at the
library, but the Abundant Life Temple had been spared a shakedown.
	The grave problem, of course, was how to eliminate Oswald, who knew
too much.  This was where Jack Ruby came in.  Although the Warren
Commission pictured Ruby as a blustery night club operator with a soft
spot in his heart for dogs and dames, who killed Oswald on an impulse of
one-man justice, the real Ruby was no buffoon.  The fiction that he
executed Oswald out of compassion for the Kennedy family was conjured up
by his first attorney, the late Tom Howard.  "Joe, you should know this,"
Ruby scribbled to a succeeding attorney, Joe Tonahill.  "Tom Howard
told me to say that I shot Oswald so that Caroline and Mrs. Kennedy
wouldn't have to come to Dallas to testify.  OK?"
	In a memorandum dealing with his background, Ruby specialists on
the Commission compiled a list of persons seemingly "the most promising
sources of contact between Ruby and politically motivated groups
interested in securing the assassination of President Kennedy" (CE
2980).  Included were Ruby's sister, Eva Grant, and a brother, Earl, of
Detroit, who sent "a telegram of undisclosed nature to Havana, Cuba,
April 1, 1962" and made "calls to Welsh [sic] Candy Company" in Belmont,
Massachusetts, then owned by Birch Society founder Robert Welch.  Also
listed by the Commission was Thomas Hill, an "official of the John Birch
Society" in Belmont whose name was in Jack Ruby's notebook, and Lamar
Hunt, the son of H.L. Hunt, who subsequently denied knowing Ruby.
	Ruby was an admirer of General Edwin A. Walker.  He told former
Oklahoma City police detective Cliff Roberts, who had been hired by
Walker to investigate the potshot taken at Walker in April 1963, that
Walker was "100 per cent right" about Castro's Cuba and it should be
"blown out of the ocean."  William McEwan Duff, who served as the
retired general's "Batman" from late 1962 to early 1963, advised the
Secret Service that Ruby, who was addressed only as "Jack," visited
Walker "on the basis of about once a month, each time in the company of
two unidentified white males" (CE 2389).
	A cross-section of Ruby's acquaintances can be found in the list
of 66 persons he favored with permanent passes to the Carousel Club.
There is of course a passel of local businessmen.  But there is also
W.F. (Bill) Alexander, the hardbitten Dallas assistand DA, and three men
pegged by a Garrison investigator as Dallas Minutemen.  Since no facet
of the investigation seems compolete without a strange coincidence, it
can be noted that when Carousel Club passholder Sue Blake vacated her
apartment, 10746D Lake Gardens, the next occupant was Sergio Arcacha
Smith, formerly of 544 Camp Street, New Orleans.
	Also on the pass list is H.H. (Andy ) Anderson, at the time manager
of the Adolphus Hotel.  Last May, Garrison sought to explain the legal
materiality of Clay Shaw's notebook in terms of an entry, "Lee Odom, PO
Box 19106, Dallas, Tex."  He pointed out that it corresponded to "PO
19106" in Oswald's address book, and theorized that it might be a coded
version of Ruby's unlisted telephone number.  Within a few days a Lee
Odom came forth in Dallas to explain away the coincidence.  In 1966, he
was in New Orleans "trying to promote a bull fight" and asked the
manager of the Roosevelt Hotel who might put him in contact with the
right people.  "He suggested Mr. Shaw," said Odom, "so I called him --
or the manager called him... He came over to the hotel and we talked."
The manager of the Roosevelt was Anderson, who had moved from Dallas.
In subsequent versions fo the story, including the one told to a
national audience on CBS television, Odom left Anderson completely out
of it and maintained he and Shaw had introduced themselves at a bar.
	Ruby's affinity for Cuba is well-documented.  The Warren Report
advises that in January 1959, just after Castro took power, "Ruby made
preliminary inquiries, as a middleman, concerning the possible sale to
Cuba of some surplus jeeps located in Shreveport, La., and asked about
the possible release of prisoners from A Cuban prison" (p. 369).  Ruby
had telephoned a Houston man named Robert Ray McKeown, known throughout
Texas as a friend of Castro, offering a total of $15,000 to use his
influence to obtain the release of three Americans held in Havana.  The
money, Ruby told McKeown, would come from a Las Vegas, Nevada source (CE
1689).
	McKeown heard nothing more about the prisoner deal, which may be
explained by the news report on January 6, 1961 that three Americans had
made their way out of jail and back to the United States.  But a few
weeks after the telephone call, Ruby contacted McKeown in person, this
time offering him $25,000 for a letter of introduction to Castro.
According to McKeown, Ruby "Had an option on a great number of jeeps
which were in Shreveport, Louisiana, and he desired to sell them to
Castro at a very profitable figure."  McKeown agreed to arrange the
introduction, but once again Ruby failed to follow through.  The reason
may have been that Maurice Brooks Gatlin of the New Orleans-based
Anti-Communism League of the Caribbean scotched the deal.  Minutemen
defector Jerry Brooks discloses that the minute Gatlin found out that
Ruby proposed to sell Castro 100 jeeps, he warned the venturesome night
club owner to call it off.  Gatlin may have detected signs that the new
Cuban Premier was about to surface as a communist.
	The Warren Report observes that during the period of the jeep
negotiations, gambler Russell D. Matthews, described as a "passing
acquaintance" of Ruby's returned to Dallas from Havana, then several
months later went back to the Cuban capital for a year.  It also makes
the correlation that Matthews' ex-wife in Shreveport received a lengthy
telephone call from Ruby's Carousel Club on October 3, 1963.  But with a
denial from Matthews that he knew anything about the "jeep deal," and an
inability on the part of Mrs. Matthews to remember the long distance
call, the Commission ran out of curiosity.  Matthews is no lightweight:
in the heyday of the Dallas rackets a couple of decades ago he ran with
a crowd whose luminary was Benny (Cowboy) Binion, who moved to Las Vegas
and founded the Horseshoe Club.
	The account given by Ruby of his trip to Cuba in September 1959
also strains credulity.  "Ruby traveled to Havana as guest of a close
friend and known gambler, Lewis J. McWillie," the Report declares (p.
370).  "Both Ruby and McWillie state the trip was purely social."  Ruby
gulled the Commission with a story that he stuck close to the hotel, got
bored stiff, and left within a week.  But Thayer Waldo, an old Latin
hand with sources inside Cuba, reports that Ruby boasted to at least two
Americans that he was "in with both sides" while sitting in Castro's
domain.  Among the Cuban exiles he claimed to be close to was Rolando
Masferrer, a former Batista official who had headed "The Tigers," a
dreaded private army during the dictator's regime.
	One of the many Dallas police officers who frequented the Carousel
Club has told Garrison that in mid-1962 Ruby left on a two-week trip,
saying he was going to New Orleans and then to Cuba "to pick up an act
for the club."  When he returned he was uncharacteristically
tight-lipped about his trip -- and without an act.  Whether Ruby
circumvented the travel ban and got to Cuba is a moot question.
However, there remains Earl Ruby's unexplained telegram to Havana on
April 1, 1962.  And word that circulated through Cuban emigre circles in
1963 had Ruby visiting Havana via Mexico Cit that year (e.g. CE3055).
	If Ruby did go to Cuba in 1962, it may have been on narcotics
business.  As long ago as 1956, a woman named Eileen Curry told the FBI
that her paramour, James Breen, had become cozy with Ruby and had
"accompanied RUBY to an unnamed location, where he had been shown moving
pictures of various border guards, both Mexican and American."  Curry
said that Breen "was enthused over what he considered an extremely
efficient operation in connection with narcotics traffic."  Curry went
to the FBI after Breen failed to return from a trip to Mexico, and
repeated her story in 1963 after the assassination (CE1761, 1762).
	Texas editor Penn Jones Jr has delved into a story consistent with
Eileen Curry's.  On November 20, 1963, a woman name Rose Chermi was
thrown form a moving automobile near Eunice, Louisiana.  Hospitalized
with injuries and narcotics symptoms, she said she was a Ruby employee
traveling to Florida with two men to pick up a load of narcotics for
Ruby.  She told the attending physician that Kennedy and other officials
were going to be killed on their impending visit to Dallas.  Shown a
news story after the assassination in which Ruby denied knowing Oswald,
Miss Chermi chortled, "They were bed mates."  When his probe got
underway, Garrison attempted to locate her but was too late.  On
September 4, 1965 she was killed by a hit-and-run driver while walking
along a highway near Big Sandy, Texas.
	It is also possible that Ruby's alleged 1962 trip to Cuba concerned
gunrunning.  Nancy Perrin Rich told the Commission that she and her late
husband, who had ties to organized crime, attended a metting Dallas in
1962, in which plans were discussed to smuggle guns into Cuba and
refugees out.  The key planners were Ruby, an Army "light colonel," and
a heavy-set "Cuban or Mexican," and she gathered that Ruby was the "bag
man" who handled the funds.  She said the guns were to be procured
through a Mexican contact (Vol. 14, p. 330ff).  Garrison has additional
evidence of gun-running by Ruby which cannot be divulged at this time.
	The allegations of narcotics trafficking and gun-running should be
put in some perspective.  In 1962, Cuba and Red China reportedly had
entered into a barter agreement in which Cuban sugar would be exchanged
for narcotics, but the narcotics were a white elephant until sold for
U.S. dollars.  This is where buck-hungry organized crime elements came
in, and just possibly Jack Ruby.  In this context his claim that he was
playing both sides of the street may not have been sheer braggadocio.
In the strange accommodations of international intrigue, Ruby may well
have been smuggling narcotics into the United States and guns into the
hands of Cuban insurgents.
	It is fair to say that not much in the way of Caribbean intrigue
went on in those days without the CIA, or at least CIA operatives, having 
a finger in it.  Thus the allegations of Gary Underhill, a weapons
expert and sometime CIA "unperson," may be quite plausible [RAMPARTS,
June 1976].  Immediately after the assassination, a distraught Underhill
told friends that a semi-autonomous CIA clique which had been
profiteering in narcotics and gun-running was implicated in the
assassination.  Several months later, Underhill was found dead of a
bullet would in the head; although police decided it was self-inflicted,
the circumstances indicated otherwise.  When an old friend wrote to
Underhill's widow asking about his demise, the reply came from an
official of a now defunct Washington firm, Falcon Aeronautics, Inc.,
which smacks of having been an ad hoc CIA front.  The official dismissed
Underhill's allegations with the comment that they were "similar to
those flights of his imagination which he had during the last year or
so of his life."
	The question remains whether or not newsmen in the police
basement had flights of imagination when they thought they detected a
flicker of recognition on Oswald's part just before Ruby shot him.  We
have already examined the report of attorney Carroll Jarnagin [RAMPARTS,
November 1966] -- who claims that he eavesdropped on a Ruby-Oswald
conversation in the Carousel Club the night of October 4, 1963, in which
the desire of organized crime to do away with Governor Connally was
discussed -- and the statement of Wilbryn "Bob" Litchfield that he sat
next to Oswald in the Carousel Club office in early November while both
were waiting to see Ruby [RAMPARTS, June 1967].
	In addition, there is the cogent statement of Harvey L. Wade, a
Chattanooga building inspector who dropped into the Carousel Club the
night of November 10, 1963.  Wade said that a club photographer snapped
a shot of a customer and in the background were three men sitting at the
bar.  Ruby strode over to the photographer and "yelled that the
photographs did not turn out."  One of the men in the background was
identified by Wade as Oswald.  He described the others as a young man of
"very fair pale complexion," and an older, stocky Latin man who had
"numerous bumps on his face and was believed to have a one-inch scar in
the eyebrow of his left eye" (CE2370).  The two match the descriptions
of prime suspects in Garrison's investigation, the latter of the
bull-necked Cuban who tagged around after Oswald in New Orleans in the
summer of 1963.
	Further indication of a Ruby-Oswald link appears in the
statement of the Rev. Clyde Johnson which was filed by Garrison in
answer to a Clay Shaw defense motion.  Rev. Johnson, a candidate for
governor of Louisiana in 1962, who ranted against Kennedy in his
campaign, said that he twice attended meetings that fall at which
Oswald, Ruby, Shaw, and an unknown Cuban were present.  The first was in
the Roosevelt Hotel in New Orleans, the second on September 29 in the
Capitol House Hotel in Baton Rouge.  He recalled that Oswald was
introduced as Leon, Ruby as Jack, and Shaw as Alton Bernard.  On the
latter occasion, he said, Shaw passed manila envelopes to Oswald and
Ruby which purportedly contained money.
	While such eyewitness accounts must be weighed with the credibility of
the witness in mind, there is documentary evidence of a Ruby-Oswald link
as well.  Oswald's address book contains the entry "Midland 2550";
Ruby's has the entry "Newton 2550."  While their significance is unknown
-- Garrison speculates they may be communications signals of some sort
-- the odds against the same four-digit numbers preceded by the names of
Texas cities being in two unrelated person's adress books by sheer
happenstance are astronomical.  It was, in fact, just this kind of
mathematical improbability that was instrumental in the recent
convictions of a mugging team in Los Angeles County.
	And there are other "coincidences" as well.  In his address book,
Oswald twice jotted down the number of a Ft. Worth television station,
PE 8-1951; in June 1963, Ruby twice called that number (CE 1322, p.
517).  On September 24, 1963, David Ferrie's telephone was charged with
a call to Chicago number WH4-4970; on November 20, 1963, this number was
called from Kansas City by Lawrence Meyers, a Chicago businessman and
close friend of Ruby's.  Meyers arrived in Dallas from Kansas City that
same night, and was in touch with Ruby through the traumatic
post-assassination hours (Vol. 25, p. 335).
	The Dallas number FR5-5591 appears twice in the last pages of
Oswald's book, which leads to another correlation.  The number is listed
to Kenneth Cody, a Continental Trailways bus driver on the Shreveport run
and an uncle of Dallas police officer Joe Cody.  A homicide bureau
detective, Cody was the partner of Detective James R. Leavell, one of
the pair of officers escorting Oswald through the police basement when
he was shot by Ruby.
	In an FBI interview, Joseph Cody acknowledged having known Ruby "12
or 13 years."  He met Ruby at one of his clubs during the Korean War,
when Cody was "assigned in the Counter Intelligence Corps" and stationed
for a time in Dallas.  Cody related that he enjoyed ice skating at Fair
Park, as did Ruby, and "there had been at least a half dozen times in
the last two or three years that RUBY had arrived at Fair Park while he,
CODY, had been skating" (CE1736).
	Garrison contends that Ruby's stagey behavior between the
assassination and his slaying of Oswald was a way of disassociating
himself from the plot by "reversing the magnetic field" -- drawing
attention to himself as the opposite of what he actually was.  Andrew
Armstrong, a Carousel employee, told the Commission that his boss was
crying on the afternoon of the 22nd.  In the early morning hours of
Saturday, Ruby rousted a club flunkey, Larry Craford, who watched while
his boss took a Polaroid picture of a Birch Society "Impeach Earl
Warren" billboard.  That afternoon, Ruby displayed the picture in Sol's
Turf Club, his favorite haunt, with suitable expressions of indignation.
He went to the post office with companions, peered at the box receiving
responses to the black-bordered "Wanted for Treason" ad in Friday's
Dallas Morning News, and uttered words of outrage.
	Ruby's survival as a "little big shot" in Aryan Dallas depended
upon his obsequiousness to powerful masters.  Some of those whose boots
he licked were Nazis, and subliminally he became one of them.  As
Garrison put it, "The connecting link at every level of operation, from
the oil-rich sponsors of the assassination down to the Dallas police
department, down through Jack Ruby and including anti-Castro
adventurers, at the operating level were Minutemen, Nazi oriented.  It
was essentially a Nazi operation.
	Ruby's letters, smuggled out of jail by a trusty, reveal that
towards the end, he realized what his masters really were [RAMPARTS,
February 1967].  The letters, sold by the reputable New York document
auctioneer Charles Hamilton, portray a man acutely aware of his
Jewishness who realizes with anguish that he has served not
ultraconservatives but Nazis.  "They are going to come out with a story
that it was the Minutemen who killed the Jews," he wrote, "don't you
believe it, they are using that to cover up for the Nazis....Oh the way
I fucked up this world who would ever dream that the motherfucker was a
Nazi and found me the perfect setup for a frame....I was used to silence
Oswald.  I walked into a trap the moment I walked down that ramp Sunday
morning."

[end of part 4]



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