Unlike the Warren Commission and the later House Select Committee on Assassinations, journalist Seth Kantor actually looked into Jack Ruby's background and closely examined his actions over the two days leading up to his murder of Lee Harvey Oswald. Ruby's links to organized crime and anti-Castro organizations is well-documented now -- but that wasn't the case when Kantor originally published his book in 1978. Few private citizens were in a better position to do the research. Not only was Kantor a Washington correspondent for Scripps-Howard, he was traveling with the presidential party in Dallas and was there in Parkland Hospital following the shooting -- and he was in the Dallas jail two days later to witness Ruby's shooting of Oswald first-hand. He also knew Jack Ruby from the time he spent in Dallas before taking the Washington job in 1962.

Kantor was even interviewed by the Warren Commission, testifying to the fact that he spoke to Jack Ruby in Parkland Hospital just moments prior to Malcolm Kilduff's press conference announcing JFK's death. The Warren Commission decided Kantor was mistaken, just as they decided many other witnesses were mistaken about the things they saw and did.

Kantor includes a lot of important information on Ruby in the pages of this book. He follows the evidence linking Ruby to all sorts of underworld criminal figures, going all the way back to Ruby's teenaged years delivering messages for Al Capone; he examines Ruby's several mysterious trips to Havana in the late 1950s and early '60s (including his visit to jailed Florida Mafia kingpin Santo Trafficante in one of Castro's prisons); he talks about deals wherein Ruby helped transfer guns to Cuba; and he asks important questions about Ruby's significant patter of phone calls to Mafia-linked individuals like Lewis McWillie in the seven months leading up to the assassination. He also goes where no government investigator has ever gone, trying to ascertain whether Ruby had help from any local Dallas policemen in setting up his murder of Oswald. Few investigators have really examined this last possibility -- despite the facts that everyone knew that the whole Dallas police force was corrupt, a large number of policemen clearly knew Jack Ruby, and even Warren Commission investigators questioned the testimony of at least one of the policemen overseeing the security of the prisoner transfer that morning.

If nothing else, Kantor proves that there was a cover-up in the highest of places concerning Ruby's real history and possible role in any sort of conspiracy. Hoover's FBI never shared the fact that they had used Ruby as an informant over several months in 1959, while the CIA falsely claimed to have nothing in their files whatsoever on the man. The Ruby investigation also counts as one of the many huge problems with the Warren Commission investigation. Warren actually pulled the original two Ruby staff investigators out of Dallas, told neither one of them about his trip to interview Ruby himself and ignored Ruby's pleas to transfer him to Washington so that he could testify to things he was clearly afraid to mention from within the confines of a Dallas prison.

Kantor could find no solid, non-hearsay evidence indicating Ruby and Oswald knew each other, but he clearly gives the impression that he feels Ruby was ordered to kill Oswald by the Mafia and that he had assistance from one or more Dallas policemen in entering the Dallas police basement just in time to carry out the murder -- and I think he provides compelling evidence to support both of those theories. We may never have the final chapter in Jack Ruby's true story, but Kantor's book makes for a darn good opening chapter.