Oddly, I can’t think of too many mob hits that were knowingly done in front of a couple dozen cameramen.
On a Tuesday with a police escort, etc.?
The mob do murder people in public. The American Mafia - Who Was Who: Colombo, Joseph (1923-1978)
And done by a hitman who barely arrives in time (Ruby would have missed Oswald completely if Oswald hadn’t decided to change his shirt) and leaves a beloved dog in the car to an unknown fate.
…and is known by pretty much every cop there, because Ruby liked to pal around with cops. We all know how much the mob loves guys who are chatty with police.
Really? Casn you point to an official statement from the FBI that makes that claim?
I have often seen various people who hated J. Edgar Hoover make the claim that he used to say there was no Mafia, (without ever citing the time or place where he is supposed to have said it), but I do not recall ever seeing a quote by Hoover, himself, making that claim.
My view of Hoover is that over time he went from being an earnest if overzealous agent of the law to a power mad little king who wanted to control far too many aspects of American life, but I would still prefer to see evidence of this claim rather than simply accepting it because it is a common belief.
And Ruby’s mafia connections: Jack Ruby - Wikipedia
It is plausible to me that Ruby was mafia connected. He ran a strip club. It is also plausible, but less likely in my opinion, that he was clean of mafia connections. But he was a sleazy guy who murdered someone. He really isn’t credible.
Law & Order Courthouse step murders are always scripted. Oswald’s killing has always looked to me like insurance to shut him up.
Probably because when you’re taping an hour-long show every week, you don’t have the time to let the actors do a lot of improv.
Methinks I see someone backtracking. (And the comments about the FBI are strawmanning.) The evidence, including the timing, the dog, and Ruby’s bank receipt, indicate he made what was basically an impulse decision to shoot Oswald. Professional hitmen don’t leave their success to chance.
Yes, the evidence is not clear on Ruby’s motives. I don’t think there is any doubt he was mob affiliated. He knew lots of mobsters. He ran a strip club. Was he a made man? No evidence of that. But he was “a friend” in my opinion. The dog is utterly dismissible. The receipt indicates he was at the bank at a certain time. But it doesn’t mean he wasn’t available to shoot Oswald. He was. What evidence do I have of that? He shot Oswald. He might not have been the only person available to shoot Oswald and who was there to shoot Oswald. There could have been any number of other people there to shoot Oswald at the first opportunity and do the same thing and just walk away when someone else got him. Had I been planning as the mastermind and Ruby was an asset, I would have had everyone else there to covering other possibilities. I wouldn’t have relied on or expected Ruby to be the guy. The others would have just faded away.
As for the FBI, I wasn’t going for a straw man, I was attacking their credibility in general and their general denial of such a thing as the mafia. That is called ad hominem. However, it isn’t a fallacy in a formal sense when their position until 1957 was that there was no such thing as a mafia and they continued to downplay it until the mid-60s. They are not trustworthy on the issue of mafia during this time. Nor are they trustworthy when their reputation is on the line. As it was here.
Hoover did accept that there was Italian-American run organized crime-but he always denied the existence of the Mafia. This was (I believe) for two reasons:
-he wanted “his” FBI to be “clean”-he felt that tangling with the Mafia, “his” FBI agents would be subjected to bribery (of course, this did happen)
-Hoover was personally corrupt-he gambled (horse tracks were his favorite), and may well have been blackmailed by the Mb (he was widely considered to be a closet transvestite and homosexual).
The FBI’s record with organized crime is mixed-the Mafia flourished in the 1940’s, 50’s, and 60’s-when the FBI was supposed to have been at its most effective.Las Vegas was almost totally under Mob control, until the State of Nevada cleaned it up in the 1970’s.
As a matter of fact, that claim is very dubious and your own Wikipedia entry discusses that isue. Of course you may be using your own definition of “affiliated,” but in terms of real affiliation with organized crime, you’re wrong.
As far as I know, he knew a couple of mobsters, not “lots,” and that’s not particularly surprising for a guy who ran a nightclub. If he’d been a librarian it would have been a little more unusual.
You must be kidding. Ruby was non-Italian and Jewish. Of course he wasn’t a made man.
I bet you can’t identify a single assassination of this kind that was ever attempted, and that’s because it’s a ridiculous idea. Hiring five assassins quintuples your risk that one of them gets caught, and if more than one of them starts shooting it begins to look very obvious that there was a conspiracy.
It was a straw man since I hadn’t mentioned the FBI in the first place. I said there was no evidence of Ruby being involved in any plot, and there actually is no evidence.
What I love about all these silly conspiracies is that nobody ever dies of natural causes.
They’re all “silenced”.
You keep saying this as if its evidence of something. I can assure you being the owner of or running a strip club does not grant one membership in the mafia.
It’s irrelevant to the JFK assassination, but being non-Italian and Jewish isn’t a complete bar to being a made man, as the likes of Meyer Lansky and Bugsy Siegel could’ve attested.
I don’t think that’s true. They were major figures in organized crime, but I don’t think they were made guys. My understanding is that if you are not full-blooded Sicilian, you may have extensive ties to the Mafia but you will never be a member.
In response to a request for evidence that Hoover ever claimed the Mafia never existed, you provide a link to a newspaper article in which his minions actively, (if illegally and immorally), attacked the Mafia and a thread on this board in which there is a little bit of discussion that he may have believed that the Mafia was more localized than it was, but with neither link providing any reference to Hoover claiming that the Mafia did not exist.
I think Hoover, particularly as he built his FBI kingdom, was a horrible blot on the U.S., but I still have never seen genuine evidence that he ever claimed that there was no Mafia. If there was a point where he said it, it would seem to have been prior to 1957 with plenty of time for him to reverse his position, (which, based on FBI activities, he seems to have done).
Neither of them were “made men.”
He killed Oswald. His story was a very weak motive. He wanted to save Mrs. Kennedy from a trial and prove a Jew had guts? Bull puckey. But other than the evidence that he wanted Oswald, a man claiming he was a patsy, dead, and actually killing him, and having a weak explanation, other than that, what have the Romans ever done for us! If there was a secret plot there would only be hints. It seems you are saying that there cannot be a secret plot unless there is evidence of it.
The idea that there could not possibly have been other people participating because there would be public evidence ignores what looks like an assassination conspiracy. Ruby shut Oswald up. It is the simpler explanation. The excuses that Ruby shot Oswald was just a lucky coincidence is, in my mind, remotely possible. To me it looks like it was to take care of Oswald as a loose end.
As was mentioned upthread, read Posner’s Case Closed. It makes these conspiracy theories look silly.
One chapter documents Ruby’s moves that weekend. It’s been a while, and I forget all of the details. Many people saw him angry and crying. He voluntarily shut down his strip clubs in honor of Kennedy. He was across town and got a call from one of his former strippers begging for money, so he drove across town to the Western Union office to wire her money, and brought his dog along.
There’s a time stamp on the wire. Oswald should have been in transit to the county jail at that time because there was a delay in arranging transit. They changed the location at the last minute. Ruby happened to be wandering by at the time. He was well known around police headquarters, so nobody said anything when he walked right into the parking garage.
So much of that makes a conspiracy where Ruby kills Oswald to shut him up look silly. First, why would the plan allow Oswald three days in which to sing like a canary? Have someone behind him at the book depository to plug him after he kills the President.
Why take the chance of shooting him on national TV when a million things could have gone wrong?
And one of the things that delayed the transfer was Oswald demanding to change shirts. So apparently, Oswald deliberately held up his transfer so Ruby’s appearance could look like a coincidence. Although if Oswald was going to put in that much effort, you think he could’ve just hanged himself in his cell and saved the other conspirators the bother of offing him.
Apparently made man doesn’t equal big cheese in the Mafia. Fair enough.