Max Collins - Ask Not

“... The idea was to embarrass the President,” he said. His hands were folded again and he was looking at them. He seemed smaller suddenly. “Embarrass Kennedy with a phony pro-Castro demonstration when he came to Dallas. I think those oil-money Birchers who were in bed with Marcello and the Cubans were afraid that Kennedy was cozying up to the Beard. But that’s just a small-time nightclub owner putting two and two together.”

And he was getting four, all right: Bobby had told me that secret talks between a Kennedy administration rep and Castro himself were under way the day of the assassination.

Flo asked, “Where did Oswald fit in?”

“He was just a little foot soldier,” Ruby said, “like me. He was an FBI informant, too, you know. And maybe more, maybe a spook — they sent him to Russia, huh? And some of those spooks were really pissed off at Kennedy, because of the Bay of Pigs betrayal, and, well, that should have told me something.”

“A phony pro-Castro demonstration,” I said. “Only it was a front for a presidential assassination.”

Ruby nodded. “You’re right, Nate, only I didn’t know that at the time. The plan as presented was that a shooter would take a kind of potshot at the President, with Castroites catching the blame, which would then shut down any peace talk bull and maybe ignite the shooting war in Cuba that everybody wanted, the Birchers, the spooks, the hoods. Why else would Oswald, who was Marcello’s guy — and maybe a spook or both, too — go around pretending to be a pinko?”

“Because he was being set up as a patsy,” I said.

“ I didn’t know that. Believe me, I didn’t try to put any pieces together, Nate, not up front. I just did what they asked, did whatever I was told.”

“By Ferrie?”

“He was one of several. But the day before, that Thursday before, some nasty customers started showing up in town, Nate, from all over, specialized talent, I mean it was a goddamn torpedo convention... and it did start feeling like something else was up. Something big.”

“Who showed up, for instance?”

“Well, for one, our old buddy Chuckie, from back home.”

“Chuckie? You mean Nicoletti?”

Charles “Chuckie” Nicoletti was Sam Giancana’s number one hit man.

Ruby nodded. “Rosselli, too. You know Johnny.”

I knew Johnny.

“But,” Ruby was saying, “he left before the big day, I think — maybe he was just putting things in motion, finishing touches.”

“Who else?”

“Couple of Cuban hard-asses, don’t ask for names, I could never keep track of ’em. Oh, and that creepy guy, Johnson’s hatchet man, used to live here but is out on the West Coast now.”

I exchanged glances with Flo.

I asked, “You mean Mac Wallace?”

Ruby nodded again, even more vigorously. “That freak would give Boris Karloff the heebie-jeebies. And there was this guy, maybe with some Cuban blood, who Oswald didn’t know about but coulda been his brother.”

Flo asked, “A double?”

“Not so close you’d call him an identical twin or anything, but easy enough to mistake for him. Also, some guy from Europe, a Corsican, I think. He was supposed to be a whiz with a rifle, and he was gonna be the one taking the potshot. Needed an expert for that, ’cause it wouldn’t do to accidentally really whack the President, right? So we were told, anyway.”

I asked, “You heard this at a meeting at the Carousel?”

He ignored that. “Why would they need three teams of shooters, Nate? That’s what made it start to smell. If this was just a potshot, if they were just gonna miss the guy and put Castro on the spot... why a military action like that?”

“To guarantee a kill. Triangulation. Snipers from three sides.”

As for the number of teams and the disparate players, that meant each faction within the conspiracy was providing a shooting team, two or three people each. To bind everybody together, to ensure silence by way of shared responsibility.

Or blame.

So you had Nicoletti and Rosselli for the Mob, who maybe also provided the Corsican specialist; the Cubans representing the exile group; Wallace as part of the Big Oil contingent; and other players as yet unnamed. Perhaps never to be named.

“I was in the military like you, Nate. I recognize that kind of thing when I see it. I would never be part of an atrocity such as this. Kill a president ? I don’t care if I didn’t vote for the son of a bitch, I don’t care if his brother is Bobby Kennedy and his father is a senile old bootlegger who betrayed us all, kill a president ? I am not insane. Do I look insane?”

Was that a trick question?

I asked, “Oswald didn’t know?”

Ruby shrugged. “He may have been putting things together like I did, as things came into play. Who can say?”

In Chicago, in late October, the first warning the Secret Service got of a possible assassination attempt set for JFK’s November 2 visit came from an otherwise anonymous caller identifying himself only as “Lee.”

Ruby sat forward. “But I think when that kid realized that Kennedy had been killed, he knew he was being set up. They’d sent him to work that day with a package of posters for the fake demonstration! That package was too small, but everybody uses it to say, Look! He brought a rifle to work! They told him to tell the guy who drove him there that they were curtain rods.”

Curtain rods was what the hitchhiker told that truck driver was in his brown-paper package.

Ruby’s upper lip curled back over his teeth. “Isn’t it strange that Oswald, who hasn’t worked a lick in most of his life, should be fortunate enough to get a job at the book depository two weeks before the President visits Dallas? Now where would a nebbish like Oswald get that information? Where could the people who put him in that building find out when and what the route would be? Only one person could get that information.”

Flo said, “Who?”

He shifted in his metal chair, his expression coy. “Let’s just say if Adlai Stevenson was vice president, there would never have been an assassination.”

“Spell it out, Jack,” I said.

“Well the answer is that that man is in office now.”

“And that man is Lyndon Johnson?”

He was raving, yet keeping his voice soft enough not to be heard across the room. “And that man is Johnson! Who knew weeks in advance what was going to happen, because he is the one who was going to arrange the trip for the President — this had been planned long before the President himself knew about it. The one who gained the most by the shooting of the President was Johnson, and he was in a car in the rear and safe when the shooting took place. What would the Russians, Castro, or anyone else have to gain by eliminating the President? If Johnson was so heartbroken over Kennedy, why didn’t he do something for Robert Kennedy? All he did was snub him.”

I said, “Did you ever meet Madeleine Brown?”

That slammed his brakes on. He blinked. He shrugged. “Uh, sure. Hot little number, in her day. Johnson has a good eye for talent, although that one was too smart for him. Got herself knocked up, milked him like a cow, money, cars, house. Why?”

“Just wondering,” I said. “What did you mean, when you said Oswald was Marcello’s man?”

“The summer before the assassination, he was a runner for a Marcello bookmaker. His uncle Dutz Murret’s a longtime Marcello man. This is all well-known in New Orleans.”

There it was: Oswald tied directly to the Marcello organization.

Flo said, “That still leaves the big question, Jack. Why did you shoot Oswald?”

He swallowed. “Because, Miss Kilgore, I had to. I got a call, and they told me I had to, and so I did, because I had to.”