Jack Ruby
Net Worth 2024, Height, Wiki, Age, Bio

Early life and family - Jack Ruby was born Jacob Leon Rubenstein in Chicago and was the son of Joseph Rubenstein and Fannie Turek Rutkowski, both Polish-born Orthodox Jews from Sokołów.
Ruby was the fifth of his parents' 10 surviving children.
While he was growing up, his parents were often violent towards each other and regularly separated.
Ruby's mother was eventually committed to a mental hospital.
His troubled childhood and adolescence was marked by juvenile delinquency with time being spent in foster homes.

Business career - He opened The Carousel Club in 1954 and kept ownership until he went to jail in 1963.

Illegal activities - There was evidence indicating Jack Ruby had been involved in the underworld activities of illegal gambling, narcotics, and prostitution.
It's believed Ruby was active in arranging illegal flights of weapons from Miami to pro-Castro forces in Cuba in the early 1950s.

Trivia - Ruby earned the nickname "Sparky" due to his famous violent temper.

Ties with the police - He built up a friendly relationship with the Dallas police chiefly because he was running an establishment that they could easily close down, one of the reasons being Ruby's alleged ties to organized crime figures.
This relationship allowed him access to come and go at police headquarters and is how he was able to have access to the garage on the day he murdered Lee Harvey Oswald.

Oswald's murder - Ruby fatally shot Lee Harvey Oswald on November 24, 1963, while Oswald was in police custody after being charged with assassinating United States President John F. Kennedy and murdering Dallas policeman J. D. Tippit about an hour later.
Being taken into custody after shooting Lee Harvey Oswald, he was taken to the same cell that Oswald occupied while at the Dallas jail.

Motive - At his trial he claimed that he killed Lee Harvey Oswald to spare Jacqueline Kennedy the anguish of having to testify at her husband's murder trial.
Later he recanted the statement, saying that his lawyer had put him up to it.
When the Warren Commission came to Dallas, Ruby asked on eight occasions to be taken to Washington to testify, to no avail.

Legal charges - A Dallas jury found him guilty of murdering Oswald.
On March 14, 1964, Ruby was convicted of murder with malice and was sentenced to death.
After his conviction in 1964, he was kept in a prison cell that overlooked Dealey Plaza, where President Kennedy was shot.

Official investigations - In September 1964, the Warren Commission concluded that Ruby acted alone in killing Oswald.
Various groups believed Ruby was involved with major figures in organized crime and that he killed Oswald as part of an overall plot surrounding the assassination of Kennedy.

New trial - Ruby's conviction was later appealed, and on October 5, 1966 he was granted a new trial.

Death - However, as the date for his new trial was being set, Ruby became ill in prison and died of a pulmonary embolism from lung cancer on January 3, 1967.
He died in the same hospital, where President Kennedy and Lee Harvey Oswald died.