LEFTIST ACCUSED Figure in a Pro‐Castro Group Is Charged— Policeman SlainDALLAS, Saturday, Nov. 23 —Lee Harvey Oswald, a 24‐ year‐old warehouse worker who once lived in the Soviet Union, was charged late last night with assassinating President Kennedy.
Oswald was arrested at 2:15 yesterday afternoon, nearly two hours after the assassination of the President, as the suspected killer of a policeman on the street in the Oak Cliff district, three miles from where the President was shot.
Chief of Police Jesse Curry announced that Oswald had been formally arraigned at 1:40 A.M., Central standard time, today on a charge of murder in the President's death. The arraignment was made before a justice of the peace in the homicide bureau at Police Headquarters.
Capt. Will Fritz, head of the homicide bureau, identified Oswald as an adherent of the left‐wing “Fair Play for Cuba Committee.” But there were also reports that Oswald, apparently politically erratic, had once tried to join anti‐Castro forces.
Worked in Warehouse
Oswald was employed in the Texas School Book Depository, the warehouse from which the fatal shots were fired at the President's car.
The police said at least six witnesses placed Oswald in the building at the time of the assassination.
One was quoted as saying that Oswald had stayed behind on an upper floor when other employes went down to the street to see Mr. Kennedy pass by.
The defendant's only comment, shouted at reporters as he was led handcuffed through a police building corridor to be questioned, was “I haven't shot anybody.” “He has not con fessed,” Chief Curry said. “Physical evidence is the main thing we have.”
He murmured seeming assent to a suggestion that such evidence included the assassination gun.
Fingerprint experts had been conspicuous in the procession of officers into and out of the homicide bureau during the afternoon and evening. They included agents of the Secret Service and the Federal Bureau of Investigation, who collaborated with city, county and state law enforcement officers investigating the crime.
Three and a half hours before Chief Curry's announcement, Oswald had been arraigned on a charge of murder in the death of the policeman, J. D. Tippitt
textNovember 23 1963
imageFidel Castro
Widow Says Oswald Changed On Return From Soviet in 1962; Found Him 'Normal' When They Married — Can't Give Reason for AssassinationMrs. Lee H. Oswald said today her husband “changed” after having returned from the Soviet Union with her in 1962.
“I don't know why,” she said. explained:
She regarded him as “normal” when she met and married him in the Soviet Union, the Russian‐born widow of the accused slayer of President Kennedy told a news conference.
“Looking back over the events of the past few months, do you have any idea now why your husband might have shot President Kennedy ?” Mrs. Oswald was asked.
“I am sorry, but I do not know why,” she said.
In halting English she recalled that Oswald had practiced shooting with a rifle, but not often, months before the assassination last Nov. 22.
textSource: The Mob Museum
Jack Ruby kills Lee Harvey OswaldOn November 24, Oswald was brought to the basement of the Dallas police headquarters on his way to a more secure county jail. A crowd of police and press with live television cameras rolling gathered to witness his departure. As Oswald came into the room, Jack Ruby emerged from the crowd and fatally wounded him with a single shot from a concealed .38 revolver. Ruby, who was immediately detained, claimed that rage at Kennedy’s murder was the motive for his action. Some called him a hero, but he was nonetheless charged with first-degree murder.
textFebruary 09, 2010
textJan. 4, 1967
Jack Ruby and telephone calls to Mobsters: Evidence of a JFK conspiracy?Jack Ruby’s long-distance telephone activity jumped significantly during the months before JFK was assassinated. Some people cite it as evidence that Ruby was involved in a Mafia conspiracy to kill the president (this despite the fact that most of the calls were made before the President’s trip to Dallas was publicly announced and long before the motorcade route was set). In fact, the calls marked Ruby’s failed efforts resolve a dispute with the American Guild of Variety Artists (AGVA), the union responsible for the strippers at his Dallas nightclub. Ruby was trying to convince AGVA to intervene to stop his competitors, Abe and Barney Weinstein, from introducing amateur strip teasers not covered by the union.
Were any of Ruby’s calls evidence of a Mob plot to kill JFK?
The House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA) in the late 1970s did an extensive computer analysis of Ruby’s five home and business telephone numbers for 1963. The HSCA checked each number Ruby telephoned, as well as the records of every person he called, and concluded that most of the increases in his long-distance bill were due solely to his AGVA problems.
But three of those calls, said the HSCA, were of possible significance to the Kennedy case. However, my own investigation reveals the calls were not as mysterious as the Select Committee assumed.
The first was to Chicago bail bondsman Irwin Weiner who often represented Mob figures. The HSCA feared he might have been a link for Ruby to crime bosses. Adding to suspicions, Weiner refused to cooperate with the FBI in its Warren Commission investigation.
“I gave Irwin Weiner’s number to my brother,” Earl Ruby told me in 1992. “I had gone to school with Weiner; we graduated high school together. I used to see him on visits to California. He was a big bondsman for everyone, and he handled the Mafia. It was in the newspapers—you could read about it. I thought he might be able to help Jack with the union. Jack didn’t even know Weiner, for God’s sake.”
Weiner later admitted that Ruby called him once, about his AGVA problem; however, Weiner admitted he did not offer Ruby any help.
The second call was to a trailer park in New Orleans, to the office of Nofio Pecora, a lieutenant to New Orleans godfather Carlos Marcello. This October 30, 1963, call was of interest to the HSCA since it proved Ruby had contact with a high-ranking aide to Marcello less than a month before the assassination. However, it turns out the call was not even intended for Pecora.
Harold Tannenbaum, a fellow nightclub owner and friend of Ruby’s, lived in that trailer park, the Tropical Court Tourist Park. Tannenbaum had arranged the deal that allowed Ruby to bring one of his top strippers, Jada, from New Orleans to Dallas, and Ruby often called him at both his trailer-park home as well as his French Quarter nightclub to complain about his contractual problems with the temperamental dancer.
In 1978, Pecora told the Select Committee that he did not know Ruby nor did he remember ever speaking to him.
However, Pecora, who ran the trailer park from his one-man office, admitted he occasionally took a message for someone in the park, but did not remember doing so for Ruby. But apparently that is exactly what he did. There is no way to know if Ruby first telephoned Tannenbaum’s home since if no one was there, there would be no toll record. The call to Pecora’s office lasted less than one minute. Within the hour, Tannenbaum apparently received the message from Pecora and returned Ruby’s call, collect, for twenty-one minutes.
The third call that stumped the Select Committee actually comprised three calls, two on November 7, and one on November 8, all to Robert “Barney” Baker, an aide to Teamster boss Jimmy Hoffa. Baker had been released from prison in June 1963. The committee was concerned since Hoffa had such a well-known hatred for both John and Robert Kennedy. However, Baker and Ruby did not know each other before Ruby called him on November 7, 1963.
When the FBI contacted Baker in 1964, he spoke to them openly. He told the agents that on November 7, Ruby had telephoned, but Baker was not in and his wife had taken a return number in Dallas. When Baker got home, he called that number collect. Ruby introduced himself, explained his labor-union problems with his club, and sought Baker’s assistance. Baker did not help, nor did he remember the last call the following day.
What is critical is that at the time Baker spoke to the FBI and talked about Ruby’s AGVA problems, it was independent of knowing that Ruby had also told the police that the conversations were about union problems. Moreover, Baker, who thought the FBI tapped his phone lines (most Hoffa associates assumed the Federal government had them under constant surveillance) reportedly challenged the agents to check their tapes and listen to the conversation if they had any doubts. Unfortunately, there apparently was no surveillance of his line.
Despite Ruby’s intervention with the AGVA board and his pleas to organized crime figures, no one came to his aid. His dispute with AGVA was still unresolved the weekend the President was assassinated.
Finally, even if there was a plot to kill Kennedy and then silence Oswald, it is difficult to imagine that Oswald would have been allowed to get away from the shooting alive. The three days during which he was interrogated were more than enough time for him to expose the conspiracy. If he was really a patsy who did not know anything, there was no reason to kill him. The conspirators could not know where Oswald would be arrested or whether state or Federal authorities would have jurisdiction over him. The only way that Ruby was useful to a conspiracy was to penetrate the police security at the local Dallas jail. But that Oswald would be captured and placed there was only one of many things that could have happened to him. Therefore, conspiring with Ruby in September and October, when Ruby made the calls examined by the HSCA, made no practical sense.
Why inform Ruby about a plot to kill the President when he had no need to know? If he was really given a Mafia assignment to kill Oswald, his telephone activity would have increased from the afternoon of the assassination until the day Oswald was killed. But Ruby’s long-distance calls were all made much earlier, not during the assassination weekend.
@Copyright Gerald Posner, 1993, 2013
imageRifle used to kill JFK
imageRevolver used to kill Lee Harvey Oswald
imageThe bullet that killed JFK
sticky-yellowOswald offered to kill JFK ostensibly for the Cuban revolution 2 months prior to the assassination. Undercover FBI agents in Cuba were told about this event by Fidel Castro himself. The agents reported the conversation to the FBI . The information was given to the Warren Commission, but nothing was done about it. This information wasn't known by the public until the mid 1990s
sticky-yellowUpon hearing the news of JFK's death, Castro reportedly said three times, "This is bad news". He feared that the assassination would be used as a scapegoat by the US government to invade Cuba
imageNikita Khrushchev
imageNikita Khrushchev & Fidel Castro
sticky-yellowKhrushchev had a volatile dynamic with the US President. They clashed over the Berlin Wall and the Cuban Missile Crisis, but their tense diplomacy eventually fostered a policy of "peace coexistence" and the Nuclear Test-Ban Treaty.
sticky-yellowFidel Castro and Nikita Khrushchev shared four primary reactions to John F. Kennedy's assassination: immediate shock and personal grief, the fear of being scapegoated, the belief that right-wing American reactionaries were responsible, and the apprehension that new leadership would adopt an aggressively hardline policy toward them.
sticky-yellowThe relationship between John F. Kennedy and Fidel Castro was one of the most unstable, high-stakes rivalries of the Cold War, defined by covert operations, the disastrous 1961 Bay of Pigs Invasion, and the terrifying 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis.However, prior to JFK's assassination, secret back-channel diplomatic efforts were developing to de-escalate tensions and explore peaceful coexistence.
sticky-yellowThe relationship between Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev and Cuban leader Fidel Castro was a tense, volatile geopolitical alliance defined by ideological solidarity but severely fractured by mutual mistrust during the Cold War. Bound by their shared anti-imperialism and Cuba's reliance on Soviet economic and military backing, they frequently clashed over nuclear strategy.