Today is the fiftieth anniversary of the JFK assassination. It was the Crime Of The Century, the 20th Century. The crime of the 21st Century, thus far, was whatever happened in '08, or maybe 9/11 if you don't view that as a form of modern warfare.
It's been fifty years and we still haven't solved the JFK case. At this point it seems pretty likely it was a mob hit. I say that because of the few facts we really know about the case we do know this; Jack Ruby killed Lee Harvey Oswald and Jack Ruby was a mobster. Ruby ran several nightclubs and strip joints which were owned by the Mob.
What we know now that we didn't know then was that the mob hated JFK and that a low level mobster like Ruby would never do anything to draw attention to himself or the Mob without their ordering him to do it and even if Ruby did like JFK he certainly would not want his employers to know that.
One of the reasons some people give for Ruby not being a Mob assassin was that he was too "low level". First of all, he was high ranking enough to be put in charge of running Mob businesses and secondly, a hit man would be a "low level" employee. He had to be deemed expendable as he was going to live the rest of his life in prison, or be killed. A Mob boss doesn't pull the trigger, he has a "low level" associate do it for him. And as for Ruby's reason for killing Oswald; he loved JFK so much he wanted to avenge his death and save Jackie the pain of an Oswald trial, even if that was true he must have known his bosses hated JFK and RFK and to so publicly involve himself would have assured their wrath, and his death.
The Mob was powerful enough to intimidate Ruby into giving up his own life. Maybe he had no choice. Maybe he had to do it to protect his family. Whatever happened to his family? How did they support themselves after Ruby's imprisonment and death from cancer four years later? Did Ruby even have a family? Did he already have cancer before he pulled the trigger? Did he really die of cancer in prison and if he did could he have been "given" cancer while there? Why didn't anyone ever seriously interview Ruby in the four years he was in prison? The only reporter he was planned on granting an interview to, to whom he said he would explain it all committed suicide just before the interview was to take place. Why would a famous reporter kill herself on the eve of the biggest story of her career?
Who could have orchestrated all of this? The government? Really, the government? The government can barely get my mail delivered in time. They couldn't kill Fidel Castro or win a war in Viet Nam. Why do people think the government is behind everything when they can barely do what we've voted them in to do? No, this conspiracy stuff is a full time job. This is right up the Mob's alley.
One question some people have is since it's now common knowledge that JFK's father, a former bootlegger, called in some favors from the Mob to help his son get elected in 1960, why did JFK turn his brother, Robert Kennedy, the Attorney General, on them so viciously? Why would the Kennedys, who actually knew the mob existed while J. Edgar Hoover kept insisting it was a myth, attack the hand that fed them?
The answer to that question is clear when we realize that our perception of the mob is incorrect. We always refer to the mob as "Thee MOB", as in there is ONE MOB. There is not one Mob but many Mobs. If there was only one Mob or Mafia then "mob wars" would never have been created. The Kennedys were supported by one particular Mob whom they defended and protected while in office and the Mob they attacked was a rival organization. The Kennedy Assassination was a classic Mob hit. It wasn't so much, in their eyes, the Mob killing the President of the United States as much as it was hitting rival gang members.
Some people like to say that the Kennedy Assassination was not a typical Mob hit. A typical Mob hit is done at close range with a handgun, like the way Ruby shot Oswald, a classic Mob hit. But it was the Mob in the 1920s that made famous the "drive-by shooting" and Benjamin "Bugsy" Siegel, the Mobster and Father of Las Vegas, was shot from a distance using a hunting rifle. There is no "Mob way" except to get the job done.
One last point; Lee Harvey Oswald is the only political assassin in the history of political assassins from Brutus and Cassius to John Wilkes Booth to the Worm who shot John Lennon that denied having done the killing. Assassins throughout history have felt their deed was a calling and that they were heroes for having done it. They wanted to change history and were proud of their place in it. Oswald steadfastly denied killing Kennedy and called himself "a patsy" which is someone who's been set up to take the blame.
Fifty years later and we still don't know the truth. I guess whoever killed President John F. Kennedy was "too big to fail".
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