One of America’s greatest mysteries is why the man accused of assassinating President John F Kennedy was himself gunned down.
What could have driven local strip-club owner Jack Ruby to shoot Lee Harvey Oswald as JFK’s assassin was led through the basement of the Dallas police station live on national TV?
The Warren Commission, the government task force established to investigate the killing, concluded that Ruby, like Oswald, had been no more than a deranged loner – and that’s been the official verdict ever since.
Yet now a remarkable letter disclosed in an upcoming book by author Damon West suggests a different and more disturbing answer.
Published here for the very first time, the handwritten document provides chilling testimony that Ruby, a known mafia associate, was ordered to carry out the murder by Chicago don Frank Costello.
Running to many thousands of words of detailed recollection, the letter was written by mobster Jerry Thomas ‘JT’ Goad – a prominent figure in the Dallas underworld in the early 1960s – and handed to West, himself a former crime boss.
The two men met behind bars at the Mark Stiles Unit, a maximum-security prison in Texas.
Ruby (right) shot Oswald (center), the suspect in the assassination of President Kennedy, at the Dallas police precinct in 1963.
Ruby (pictured) was arrested for the killing of Oswald.
One of the most interesting characters I met in prison before I turned my life around was a mobster from Dallas named Jerry Thomas ‘JT’ Goad.
JT was old, bald and small in stature. He wore those caramel-colored, tinted glasses you see from 1970s-era casino mobster movies.
He walked with a limp yet had a cool stride that you only see in the most confident of men in prison.
I once heard him tell a gaggle of Crips and Bloods who were about to fight to go sit down and shut up, that they didn’t even know what being a real gangster meant.
Witty, funny, scary, JT went around professing the healing power of Christ. He was vastly different than the guy who started out in the early 60s, ‘running girls, guns, and drugs for the mob,’ as he described it.
JT took an interest in me, initially, because I was an organized crime guy from Dallas. He told me, ‘Guys like us gotta stick together.’
And according to JT, the mob killed JFK, specifically, the New York-Chicago mob.
As he and I grew closer, he began telling me stories of his days of dealings with mob-connected thugs, who had no fear of law enforcement.
‘So many cops were on the take back then that the mob ran around with impunity. We owned the streets of Dallas,’ JT said.
One story he told was about Officer JD Tippit, the policeman who was, infamously, shot and killed by Lee Harvey Oswald in the Oak Cliff neighborhood on November 22, 1963, about 45 minutes after President John F Kennedy was gunned down in Dallas.
JT said, ‘Tippit was one of our best cops. We could count on him for anything.’
And that included clearing up other people’s mess.
‘Tippit was sent to kill Oswald that day to tie up the loose end,’ JT revealed to me. But, he said, things did not go to plan.
Confronted by Officer Tippet on a suburban Dallas street, Oswald shot his would-be killer dead.
That couldn’t have been worse for the mob, because Oswald then got arrested and started telling the world ‘I’m just a patsy’ for the real killers.
Here’s where JT’s letter comes in. He told me why Jack Ruby killed Lee Harvey Oswald. It was a story that I had never heard anywhere else, so I asked him to write it all down.
As JT tells it in the letter, it all begins in the hours following the assassination of Kennedy when a woman named Sue Love, arrived at his apartment desperate for help.
Shaking with fear, Sue told JT that her friend Sandy, a dancer at Ruby’s Carousel Club, was in trouble.
He recounted her panicked story – in her own words – in his letter, parts of which I’ve reproduced below (with edits for clarity):
Ruby (center) poses for a photo with unidentified women who were part of a burlesque act at his Carousel Club.
The handwritten document provides chilling testimony that Ruby (center) was ordered to carry out the murder by Chicago don Frank Costello.
Sue: All the strippers have to be out of the building at Ruby’s club by 1am during the week and 2am on Saturday night. Ruby really gets upset if you don’t have your stuff together and be gone.
The girls say that he conducts all his business after hours. You know, out-of-town mafia associates, the heroin thing with [mobster and narcotics trader] Joe Civello, stuff like that.
But Sandy was fixing to marry this older guy, an airline pilot and quit the burlesque stage, so she stayed over the time limit [at the club] by quite some time trying to get all her costumes, dresses etc. together and packed up.
She said she looked at her watch and said, ‘never is it that late.’ So, she just grabbed her overnight bag and decided to slip out.
But as Sandy steps out of the changing room, she can hear Ruby talking to someone in his upstairs office. The door was ‘cracked open’ 18 inches.
Sue: Sandy knew if she could get by Ruby’s office, she could sneak out, catch a cab. So, she eased up to Ruby’s office.
She said Ruby’s voice was very loud and the other person raised his even louder, talking back to Ruby in anger. The other person was Frank Costello (a New York and Chicago mafia boss).
Sue told JT that Sandy overheard Costello ordering Ruby to shoot Lee Harvey Oswald, the man charged with assassinating the president. Here’s the alleged conversation:
Costello: Jack, you will do this.
Rudy: I already told you, get someone else.
Costello: You have no choice, Jack. The mob has been taking care of you for 25 years so you will do it, or we will kill everything close to you, even that little mutt of a weanie dog you have and [are] so proud of. And you don’t even want to know what we will do to you before we kill you.
Sue picks up the story once again, telling JT:
Sue: Sandy eased by the door but a shadow or noise gave her away. She bolted down the stairs, ran out on the street. About 100 feet away there was a cab at the corner with inside light on and the cabbie reading a paper.
She jumped in the front and screamed for him to take off. He did but Ruby and Costello were pulling guns, running trying to catch her.
Sandy has not gone back to her apartment or anywhere else. But, there has been a couple of strangers asking the girls at every strip joint in town asking if they have seen Sandy.
Sandy says she just wants to lie low for a couple of months then go to Atlanta, Georgia, with a new identity. Please help her.
Unfortunately for Sandy, she needed more than JT’s help. A short time later, Sandy was arrested by Dallas police and taken to the city jail.
It was there, as JT puts it, that ‘she supposedly hung [sic] herself, using her stretch pants to do so.’
Six Dimes and a Nickel: Life Lessons to Empower Change by Damon West is published by Post Hill Press.
A former Dallas crime boss, West famously turned his life around, becoming a best-selling author, a professor of criminal justice and an internationally known motivational speaker