So when he testified at the HSCA many years after the phone call, Weiner adopted the same line Barney Baker used--he testified Ruby called to ask him to write a bond that Ruby needed to bring an injunction against the American Guild of Variety Artists, and Weiner told him he didn’t want to get involved in a Texas matter, far from his Chicago office. That alibi was so unbelievable that Members of the Congress on the committee took turns telling Weiner they didn’t believe him. Were there no insurance agencies in Dallas to write a routine bond in a very small legal matter? Did Ruby never do business with insurance agencies in Dallas during many years of operating night clubs and occasionally suffering misdemeanor arrests of his own? Did it take Weiner 12 minutes to tell Ruby he couldn’t get involved? Ruby was calling Weiner in Chicago for the first time in years, and it was all about a minor problem easily handled in Dallas ? Jack Ruby’s toll calls in the weeks and months before the assassination of the President, to the people who hated the Kennedys the most, were mostly ignored by the FBI following the death of the President, and later by the Warren Commission—all of it a terrible stain on the history of the assassination of a President.

Another of the suspicious phone calls was to Irwin Weiner, a notorious money man for the Teamsters and the Mob. Weiner wrote bonds for huge loans from the Central States Conference of Teamsters (Hoffa) to mob-connections in Florida and Las Vegas . He was a boyhood friend and close associate of Paul Dorfman, Hoffa’s partner in crime. Long after, in 1983, Paul Dorfman’s stepson Allen Dorfman was gunned down by two hit men who pumped seven bullets into him. He and Weiner were walking to lunch in a Chicago hotel but the gunmen weren’t interested in killing Weiner. All seven shots were aimed at Allen Dorfman. Weiner was a Chicago-based bail bondsman, with a long record of posting bail and writing bonds for individuals and entities that walked on the wrong side of the law. But he hit the jackpot when he teamed up with the Dorfmans and Hoffa. He was a boyhood friend of Earl Ruby, and knew his brother Jack, but to a lesser extent. The October 26, 1963 phone call from Jack Ruby lasted 12 minutes, and when Weiner was grilled by the House committee 14 years after the assassination, he had the same protection against a perjury rap enjoyed by Barney Baker because Jack Ruby was long dead. Weiner was closely tied to Paul and Allen Dorfman in lucrative business deals with the Teamsters union and mob figures in Chicago , Florida , New Orleans and Las Vegas , and anywhere in between.

Baker was under oath, but he had a comfort level against a possible perjury charge--when he was interviewed by the HSCA in 1978 Ruby had been dead for 1l years. But that brings us to how the Warren Commission handled the same telephone log information 14 years earlier, when Ruby was in custody and still alive. Baker wasn’t interviewed by the FBI until January 3, 1964 , six weeks after the President was murdered. Whatever he told the FBI, there is no record the FBI passed the information along to the Warren Commission. The HSCA addressed this God-awful lapse bluntly: “Baker had been under prior investigation by the FBI and was considered a hoodlum with organized crime and Teamster connections. The FBI and the Warren Commission failed to investigate any possible connections between Baker’s associates and associates of Jack Ruby.”

Barney Baker called Jack Ruby from Chicago on November 7, 1963 . The call lasted 17 minutes. One day later, on November 8, Ruby called him back and the second call lasted 14 minutes. In a deposition taken by the HSCA on May 23, 1978 , Baker swore he never heard of Jack Ruby until Ruby called him. Baker testified Ruby left a message with his wife and his November 7 call to Ruby was a returned call. But no record could be found by the House Committee of an initial call by Ruby. As for the two long conversations, Baker testified he never asked Ruby for anything, Ruby merely wanted his assistance in “settling a union dispute” Ruby was having with his dancers, who were members of the American Guild of Variety Artists (AGVA). But Baker said he was on probation for five years following a federal conviction and jail time, and he couldn’t get involved in labor-management disputes. As for the call from Ruby that lasted 14 minutes the next day, Baker said Ruby asked him for names of people Baker knew who might be of help to him in Dallas. Baker said he told Ruby he didn’t have any names for him. You be the judge. The first call lasted 17 minutes and the second call lasted 14 minutes. Baker said neither man knew each other before the calls. He said Ruby was asking him for help but he couldn’t help him. Baker said that was the sum and substance of two calls that totaled more than a half hour. And both calls were two weeks in advance of the President’s trip to Dallas .

I’m focusing on Jack Ruby’s phone calls to Barney Baker shortly before the assassination of President Kennedy (two of dozens of such calls Ruby made to known racketeer enemies of the Kennedy brothers) because those lengthy conversations between Baker and Ruby two weeks before the President was murdered should have set off loud alarms in law enforcement circles immediately. For emphasis--Immediately. Repeat--Right Now, Stupid.

Hoffa took the witness stand immediately following Baker’s appearance, and after saying Barney Baker “works under my direct orders,” Hoffa was asked if Baker’s testimony that he associated with killers, gangsters, gamblers, racketeers, traffickers in narcotics and human flesh bothered him at all. The response was typical Jimmy Hoffa.

For good measure, Baker testified he knew a number of other underworld luminaries, such as Joe Adonis, Meyer Lansky, Bugsy Siegel, Trigger Mike Coppola and Vincent Alo, (also known as Jimmy Blue Eyes) who was identified as a close friend of Cockeye Dunn at the trial. Ten years or so after the Hintz murder, when I was a young reporter at the Journal-American, a veteran NYPD detective told me Vincent Alo was the new Boss of Bosses in New York City .. That would be circa 1958. Shortly thereafter, when Barney Baker’s testimony before the McClellan Committee included Jimmy Blue Eyes in his galaxy of underworld associates, that got my attention.

Mr. Baker: I don’t know where he could be now—excuse me. I believe he was implicated in a certain case in New York . He must be in jail.

District Attorney Hogan was later on top of a gangland attempt by Hoffa to gain control of the New York metropolitan area of the Teamsters Joint Council. Some of the most notorious New York racketeers were issued phantom Teamster Local Union charters to cast enough votes to remove the incumbents and replace them with Hoffa supporters. Hogan’s expose opened the door for Senator McClellan and his Committee to set up shop in the Federal Courthouse in New York City and splash that outrage all over newspapers across the country. District Attorney Hogan assisted Chief Counsel Robert Kennedy every step of the way. Why is that important to note here? It was District Attorney Frank Hogan’s findings that led to my assignment to cover the McClellan Committee.. But here is that memorable exchange between Kennedy and Barney Baker:

Suspicious? How about stunningly suspicious? Many of Ruby’s frenetic phone calls were to associates of Organized Crime chieftains Santo Trafficante and Carlos Marcello, and ultimately to a very close associate of Jimmy Hoffa--two such calls in November were to Robert “Barney” Baker, Hoffa’s notorious strong-arm man for many years. At one point in testimony before the HSCA, Baker said there was “nobody closer to Jimmy Hoffa” than himself. Baker was a 320-pound gorilla whose dearest friends were ruthless killers. He appeared before the McClellan Committee in 1958 and an exchange with Chief Counsel Robert Kennedy says all you need to know about Barney Baker. He was asked about the killing of Anthony Hintz, a famous New York gangland murder case in 1947. How famous was it? After the legendary District Attorney Frank Hogan won convictions in the case, corruption on the New York City piers captured the attention of a Pulitzer Prize winning reporter for the World Telegram and the writers and producers of the Academy Award winning movie, “On the Waterfront.”

Consider the blizzard of long-distance telephone calls unleashed by Ruby in the three weeks prior to the assassination. Blakey and his House Committee found a Dallas newspaper item dated April 24. 1963 that quoted Vice President Johnson saying President Kennedy might visit Dallas and other major Texas cities that summer. The House Committee pieced together all of Ruby’s toll calls from his apartment and five office phones in his two night clubs, and a pattern emerged: Ruby’s long-distance calls increased significantly in the months leading up to the assassination—from less than 10 calls in March (before the alert that Texas might be the place to strike) to 25 to 35 calls a month in May, June, July, August and September. The Presidential trip to Texas was officially confirmed by the White House in September and Ruby’s long-distance calls reached 75 in October and 96 toll calls in the first three weeks of November. In his book “ Fatal Hour ,” Chief Counsel Blakey wrote, “It was perhaps more significant that we discovered a pattern of telephone calls to individuals with criminal affiliations, calls that could only be described as suspicious.”

On the plane from New York to Dallas , I thought I would come upon a beehive of law enforcement activity in Dallas . I knew immediately what Attorney General Robert Kennedy must have been thinking. He had to be looking at the Paul Dorfman/Jack Ruby connection. He put in years of his life chasing down Hoffa. I imagined law enforcement was turning Jack Ruby upside down, inside out and every way but loose on his connections to Hoffa, Dorfman and the Chicago mob. I’m still stunned by how little interest J. Edgar Hoover had in following leads or suspicions President Kennedy had been killed by his most hate-driven enemies in Organized Crime.

Now in 1963, several years after he experienced and then wrote those words, Bob Kennedy was burying his brother, but across Washington at the Teamster Headquarters Building the American flag was still flying at full staff. Everywhere else in the nation the flags had been lowered to half staff, but Hoffa ordered the flag atop the Teamster building should not be lowered to honor the dead President.

“During the 1958 hearings, from time to time, he directed the same shriveling look at my brother. And now and then, after a protracted, particularly evil glower, he did a most peculiar thing: he would wink at me. I can’t explain it. Maybe a psychiatrist would recognize the symptoms.”

“In the most remarkable of all my exchanges with Jimmy Hoffa,” Kennedy wrote, “not a word was said. I called it ‘the look.’ It was to occur fairly often, but the first time I observed it was on the last day of the 1957 hearings. During the afternoon I noticed that he was glaring at me across the counsel table with a deep, strange, penetrating expression of intense hatred. I suppose it must have dawned on him about that time that he was going to be a subject of a continuing probe—that we were not playing games. It was the look of a man obsessed by his enmity, and it came particularly from his eyes. There were times when his face seemed completely transfixed with this stare of absolute evilness. It might last for five minutes—as if he thought that by staring long enough and hard enough he could destroy me. Sometimes he seemed to be concentrating so hard that I had to smile, and occasionally I would speak of it to an assistant counsel sitting behind me. It must have been obvious to him that we were discussing it, but his expression would not change by a flicker.

Teamster leader James R. Hoffa despised Bob Kennedy, which was well known at the time. Hoffa also hated John F. Kennedy, who sat in on the McClellan Committee hearings as a Senator from Massachusetts .. How deep did the hatred go? Bob Kennedy wrote a book (The Enemy Within) about his experiences in that long investigation, and here is his own account:

As chief counsel to the McClellan Committee, Kennedy relentlessly pursued both Jimmy Hoffa and Paul Dorfman, and the sweetheart deal they had reached. Dorfman gave Hoffa the Mob Muscle he needed to consolidate his growing power in the Teamster hierarchy, and in return Dorfman’s stepson Allen was given control of investments by the massive pension funds of the Central States Conference of Teamsters. The Dorfmans, father and stepson, made millions on the arrangement, and to this day no one knows how much of that money was shared with their partners in crime. Paul Dorfman, remember, ran the Chicago racket union where Jack Ruby served his apprenticeship. Dorfman’s own apprenticeship was served with the notorious Al Capone. And with Capone gone, Paul Dorfman was still hand-in-glove with the new bosses of the Chicago Mob. If anyone was wondering where Hoffa’s Mob Muscle came from, it came from way back in America’s most corrupt city, then and now--Chicago.

The investigation by the House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA) was directed by G. Robert Blakey, whose first job in Washington after graduation from law school was with the Justice Department when Robert F. Kennedy was the Attorney General. Blakey was assigned to the Organized Crime unit from 1960 to 1964. Later he came back to Washington as Chief Counsel to the Senate Committee on Labor Racketeering, led by Arkansas Senator John McClellan. Fittingly, his four years with the Attorney General led him to Senator McClellan, whose committee in the late 1950s was driven by Chief Counsel Robert F. Kennedy through years of memorable exposes of union corruption. Before he left that job and moved up and on, Bob Kennedy was a hands-on Chief Counsel, personally attending to many of the most critical moments in the committee’s long inquiry. It was not unusual for him to take a committee staffer with him on a plane to anywhere, walk in on a suspected labor racketeer and begin the questioning before he sat down. And he carried a Congressional subpoena in his pocket if the interview wasn’t going well.

Beginning in late 1977, the House committee pieced together Jack Ruby’s connections to organized crime, something the FBI had brushed off and the Warren Commission simply ignored. Incidentally, Chief Justice Earl Warren made a critical error at the outset of his assignment. He decided the Warren Commission did not need investigators. He assembled a staff of 14 lawyers and relied almost exclusively on the FBI for the investigative work. He and his Commission did this with full knowledge the FBI had already given them a hastily prepared report—written before they even began-- that found no evidence of a conspiracy.

§ “The committee further concluded that the critical early period of the FBI’s investigation was conducted in an atmosphere of considerable haste and pressure from Hoover to conclude the investigation in an unreasonably short period of time.”

§ “The committee established that the FBI’s own Organized Crime and Mafia specialists were not consulted or asked to participate to any significant degree. The Assistant Director who was in charge of the Organized Crime division--the Special Investigations Division--told the House committee, ‘They sure didn’t come to me…We had no part in that that I can recall.’”

§ “The committee concluded that the FBI’s investigation into a conspiracy was deficient in the areas most worthy of suspicion--organized crime, pro- and anti-Castro Cubans, and the possible association of individuals from these areas with Lee Harvey Oswald and Jack Ruby. In those areas in particular, the committee found that the FBI’s investigation was in all likelihood insufficient to have uncovered a conspiracy.”

§ “The former Assistant Director, since deceased, who coordinated the FBI’s investigation characterized the effort in testimony before the Senate Select Committee with Respect to Intelligence Activities as rushed, chaotic and shallow, despite the enormity of paperwork that was generated.”

§ “With an acute awareness of the significance of its finding, the committee concluded that the FBI’s investigation of whether there had been a conspiracy in President Kennedy’s assassination was seriously flawed.”

The Warren Commission, guided by Hoover ’s FBI, deliberately misled the American people. Its conclusion that Oswald was the only person who could have fired off all three shots was demolished early on by Fred Cook, a truly great investigative reporter. His painstakingly detailed reenactment of the series of shots at the Presidential limousine appeared in The Nation in 1966. Cook was the first to identify Warren Commission counsel Arlen Specter as a classic empty barrel. Specter’s Magic Bullet theory that never happened should have disqualified him for any position in government to follow. Fifteen years after the release of the Warren Commission Report a far more thorough investigation by the House Select Committee on Assassinations buried the findings of the Warren Commission forever on a shocking number of crucial points. The House committee was chaired by Rep. Louis Stokes of Ohio , and its 1979 final report included a blistering denunciation of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. A sampling of just some of its conclusions pulled no punches:

But as the years go by, I believe I have an obligation to write some things that I feel strongly about, especially as November 22 approaches each year. Every year since 1963, I’ve been left with (a) major grievances against the highest-ranking people in our own government and (b) a haunting memory of a private interview with a doctor who attended the dying President, and (c) some bits and pieces of information that might help historians to a consensus on what was most likely the case. The official finding that Oswald acted alone is believed by almost no one today.

I spent 11 days in Dallas following the murder of President Kennedy, from November 26 to December 6, and I never wrote a word about my time there, mostly because I came home with no proof of anything conclusive about the unanswered questions-- many of which are still unanswered I came home only with a deep, unsettling feeling that I was leaving Dallas too soon.

No one at the Herald Tribune that day could have known that while the paper was assigning its two investigative reporters to Washington and Dallas, the White House and the FBI had already closed the case. One more time--they closed the case on the day the President was buried.. We knew nothing about a top-level, secret pact to close the case prematurely, and that surely was true in newsrooms all over America , and beyond.

The Herald Tribune editors sent Haddad to Washington , where he would be at the nation’s listening post for everything that might break in the days ahead. While Bob Kennedy and I knew each other from his labor racketeering investigation days, Haddad had a close personal relationship with him, and with others in the administration he had only recently left. So it was Haddad to Washington and I would go to Dallas to scratch for any additional information I could find, and for good measure I would be in the right place at the right time if the FBI conducted one of its famous roundups of co-conspirators in the middle of the night.

Already the newspaper stories out of Dallas had identified Jack Ruby as a former organizer for the Waste Paper Handlers union in Chicago . That one little sentence in a newspaper profile of Ruby hit me like a thunderclap because I was familiar with that Chicago union and its history. The Waste Paper Handlers union was owned and operated by Paul Dorfman, Jimmy Hoffa’s partner in crime. And Hoffa despised the Kennedy brothers, both of them.

I was in Dallas as a reporter for the New York Herald Tribune, there to inquire into the unanswered questions surrounding the shocking events of November 22-24. On the morning of Monday, November 25, the Herald Tribune was holding its own high-level conference on what to do with its Investigative Unit--William Haddad, chief of the unit, and myself. Haddad had been the best investigative reporter in New York City in the late 1950s, until he left the New York Post to work in the Kennedy for President campaign in 1960. When John Kennedy was elected, Haddad became the first Inspector General of the Peace Corps. But in September of 1963 he was lured away from government by the Herald Tribune to lead a newly-created Investigative Unit. When the President was killed, I was Haddad’s second man, but I had a background that was a neat fit for this assignment. When I worked at the old New York Journal-American I spent three years tracking a Senate investigation of labor racketeering that was driven by Chief Counsel Robert F. Kennedy.

Shortly after the announcement of the appointment of the Warren Commission the Associated Press sent a story on its national wire, reporting that a high-ranking official of the Justice Department said the murder of President Kennedy was the work of a lone assassin, and no evidence of a conspiracy had been found linking Oswald to Jack Ruby or anyone else. The Associated Press at that time had my respect and admiration. But that was the moment my illusions were forever shattered. The AP was used and abused by the President and the Director of the FBI.

The White House moved swiftly. Within days President Johnson lined up the members of his Blue Ribbon panel, and on November 29 he signed an Executive Order creating the President’s Commission on the Assassination of President Kennedy. Within seven days of the death of John Kennedy and five days of the murder of Lee Oswald, the White House had assembled an impressive group of national leaders headlined by the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, Earl Warren. The panel was charged with “finding the full facts of the case and reporting them, along with appropriate recommendations, to the American people.”

The Johnson/Hoover deal to stifle speculation about the assassination of President Kennedy resulted in the appointment of a Presidential Commission to inquire into everything that happened on that weekend in Dallas . The Blue Ribbon commission would be guided with a hastily prepared report from the FBI that said Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone, and no connection could be established between Oswald and the man who shot and killed him in the basement of Dallas Police Headquarters two days later--Jack Ruby.

And of all the mysteries about the assassination that linger 50 years later, none is more baffling than the decision by Attorney General Robert Kennedy to distance himself and his Justice Department from the feeble inquiry that followed.

The murder of President John F. Kennedy in Dallas , Texas on November 22, 1963 has been the subject of fierce debate ever since. It didn’t have to be that way. Long ago--when it happened--there should have been an exhaustive search for the truth about the assassination of the President, but there was not.