Ruby & The Terrell Arms Robbery

Sat 01 Oct 2016, 7:28 pm

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Ruby & The Terrell Arms Robbery ?siteId=87372064&memberId=54136632&size=small&930339

Greg
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Posts: 2049

The informant's name in the Terrell case was kept secret.

The person who delivered the guns to Whitter & Miller was allowed to drive off by the cops and FBI who watched the exchange. Was this because he was the informant? And was this person Ruby? Robert Charles-Dunne convinced me this was a big possibility.

Someone identified as possibly Ruby was seen handing over a rifle to a younger man in a car park near the TSBD on the afternoon of Nov 19. The FBI wrote this off as a sighting of Warren Caster, but that simply was not possible. Caster purchased his rifles on Nov 20 and looked nothing like Ruby. Four of the Terrell rifles were never recovered. Was this one of them?

Harold Weisberg glommed onto Elrod before the La Fontaynes (sp?) in identifying the man with the smashed up face paraded in front of Elrod and his cell-mate as Larry Miller who had sustained some facial injuries in the crash which ended the police pursuit of he and Donnell Whitter. Weisberg additionally identidied Whitter as the person who serviced Ruby's car.

Wiesberg then quotes from the FBI report on Elrod:

"Shortly after the assassination of the President, Elrod, who had been about two and one half miles from the scene of the assassination at Lemon and Oaklawn Streets in Dallas, was arrested by the Dallas Police Department and placed in the City Jail.... At the City Jail in Dallas, he was placed in Cell 10 on the fifth floor, and at that time his cellmate was a man whose identity he could not recall. An individual,whose face was smashed up, was brought into the hallway of the jail where Elrod and his cellmate could observe him. At that time the unknown cellmate made some mention that he had known this man with the injured face as a result of meeting him at a motel. The cellmate stated that five men had met at a motel, and they had been advanced some money under some type contract. One of these men was reported to have received $5,000. The man with the injured face had received some money, and he was reported to have been driving a Thunderbird automobile with a large quantity of guns contained therein. Elrod advised he was confined in the Dallas City Jail for a period of 72 hours, and he was confused at this time concerning the events which occured. He stated he could not recall whether Jack Ruby's name had been mentioned prior to the time of the killing of Lee Harvey Oswald, but that this cellmate at some time had told him that one of the men who had been at the motel referred tc above, name and location unknown, had been Jack Ruby.This was all the information Elrod could recall."

Weisberg did not make the mistake of claiming Elrod's cell-mate was Lee Harvey Oswald. The only reason the police would have for parading Miller in from of Eldrod and his cell-mate is if they thought the cell-mate had some connection to Miller-Witter case, or was an informant himself. We know that John Mason was supposed to resemble Oswald and we know he had been investigated by the same inter-agency team looking into Terrell and was under arrest at City Hall at the time. I propose it was Mason who was the cell-mate.

Where I believe Weisberg takes a wrong turn is paying any attention to Penn Jones. He quotes the following from Jones' Forgive My Grief III

"In a storeroom reserved for Jack Ruby at his apartment house, the police found a case of hand gernades, several M-16 rifles, a Browning automatic rifle and several thousand rounds of ammunition."

Weisberg then states that the Dallas detectives who searched Ruby's apartment were Guy F. Rose, H.M. Moore, and J.P. Adamcik. Mrs. (Curtis L.) Doris Warner was the apartment manager on the day of the search. ( CE 2292)" Which is true. However, CE 2292 makes no mention of either a store-room, nor any weapons found in the search. If such a report showing those weapsons existed in a store-room reserved for Jack Ruby, it would be absolutely sensational. It appears however, that Penn Jones is the person to have ever seen it.

The appeal case did say that 10 weapons had been stolen. It does not say how many were recovered. In any event, there were other thefts prior to this one.

One other thing the appeal judge noted is of great interest to us in relation to Tippit...

The police department of a large metropolis does not and can not operate on a segmented basis with each officer acting separately and independently of each other and detached from the central headquarters. There must be cooperation, co-ordination and direction, with some central control and exchange of information.

i believe R-CD may be right- that Ruby was the informant - and the person handing the weapons over to Miller & Whitter. As tempting as it is to accept Jones' on face value to support the case against Ruby, I cannot - mainly on the basis of a number of other errors not minor in nature, made by Jones. However, I have not read Forgive My Grief III. Is there a source for the claim other than CE 2292?

What I do rely on (apart from Elrod and Ruby's known past gun-runnng and informant status) is this:

On December 1, 1963, DPD prisoner, Robert (also referred to in documents as Richard) Borchgardt was released on a tempo after contacting Det Anderton claiming to have information on Ruby. Borchgardt told Anderton that his friends, Elvis Dalrymple, Lawrence Miller, Perry Hydell (referred to in Anderton’s report also as “Rydell” and Marvin Fraizer all worked for a man named Fred (AKA “The Goose” and “The Big Dago” who in turn worked for a gang out of Chicago. This “work” involved running stolen cars and guns to Mexico and bringing back narcotics. Borchgardt then dropped his bombshell. According to the gang members, Ruby had agreed to kill Oswald in return for having a $40,000 debt to “bookies” wiped. Can it be by shear coincidence that this was, in round figures, the sum owed by Ruby to the IRS? Borchgardt however, was given short shrift by the apparently laid-back Anderton, who indicated that he thought Borchgardt was fabricating the story in order to do a deal on the charges he himself faced in Houston. (DPD JFK Files) The January 23rd, 1964 issue of the Chicago Tribune however, confirmed that such a racket (presumably using “The Circuit” had been operating. Under the headline, Juice Racket is Linked to Hot Car Ring, the Tribune reported “Police have established a link between the crime syndicate's loan shark (juice) racket and the stolen auto rings operating in Chicago, the Tribune learned yesterday. Details of the mob's complex connections were pieced together by police after the arrests on Jan. 12 of Eugene Berman, 38, and John Danihel, 22, both of 5433 S. Cicero ave., in a stolen car in Summit. Berman was charged with possession of stolen property and Danihel with receiving stolen property… Their attempted flight to Mexico is viewed by investigators as partly confirming reports that cars stolen in Chicago have been driven to Mexico and peddled by crime syndicate henchmen.” One must ask, under the circumstances, if Ruby himself had been both the delivery boy of the weapons to Whitter and Miller, and the informant against them; playing both sides, after all, was a Ruby forté (this question was first raised in “Ruby Talked – A Radical Reappraisal” by Robert Charles-Dunne). The need of course, for his services to rid the planet of Oswald was not an issue for almost another week.

I think Ruby told those guys that he owed $40,000 to bookies to hide any suggestion that Treasury people might have something over him. There are plenty of examples of minor mob figures owing much smaller amounts and either going to jail or having all their worldly goods sold to recover the debt. But not Ruby.

The judge in the Miller appeal at one point stated 'It appears that Inspector Calhoon,* for reasons not appearing in the record, suspected that appellant was connected in some way with these narcotics violations.'

So we can see there was a drugs angle with Miller and Whitter as well as gun-running which may also fit into the larger scheme of things...

November 22, 2014 at 7:15 PM

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