JFK The Enduring Secret

We have a new  wander to go on together.  After a massive 70-plus episode run through the J.D. Tippit shooting, the 28-part Jack Ruby saga, and the mysterious death of Dorothy Kilgallen, we  return  to tell the story of South Florida, the CIA and the secret war that they waged, along with the anti-Castro Cubans,  against Fidel Castro.  The new  miniseries is  named Ground Zero: JM WAVE and the Cuban Question. For me personally, it  brings back some of my own childhood memories. Memories that came about from growing up in South Florida during the 1960s and beyond.  I experien...

In this dramatic finale to our Jack Ruby miniseries and six-part Dorothy Kilgallen investigation, we dissect the chilling aftermath, timeline cover-ups, and forensic revelations surrounding the November 8, 1965 death of syndicated columnist Dorothy Kilgallen. We expose the glaring four-to-six-hour delay between the early morning discovery of her body by her butler and hairdresser and the official notification of the police at 1:00 p.m., contrasting her husband Richard Kollmar’s false statement—that she came home and was in bed by 11:30 p.m.—with verified phone records and eyewitness accounts placing her at PJ Clarke's, the Regency Hotel lounge, and making Wester...

In this gripping  part five of our miniseries on the  Dorothy Kilgallen investigation, we retrace the final hours of syndicated columnist and television star Dorothy Kilgallen leading up to her mysterious death on November 8, 1965. On Sunday evening, November 7, a composed and sharp 52-year-old Kilgallen took her regular seat on CBS’s What’s My Line?, correctly guessing that a contestant sold industrial dynamite before heading out to PJ Clarke’s and later stepping into the Regency Hotel lounge around 1:00 a.m. to meet an unidentified "mystery man" in a dark booth. Less than fifteen hours after her live broadcast, Kilgalle...

In this gripping fourth installment of our Dorothy Kilgallen miniseries, we follow the relentless syndicated columnist as she escalates her independent investigation into the JFK assassination following her standoff with the FBI. Just two days after refusing to surrender her source for Jack Ruby's sealed testimony, Kilgallen published the Dallas Police Department radio logs from November 22, 1963, exposing that Police Chief Jesse Curry's very first order after shots rang out was to send officers to the triple overpass, railroad yard, and grassy knoll—not the Texas School Book Depository. We reveal how FBI files unsealed under FOIA show Director J. Ed...

In this part three of our Dorothy Kilgallen deep dive, we reach the high-stakes intersection where America's most famous female journalist took on the official narrative of the JFK assassination. Following the live TV shooting of Lee Harvey Oswald by Dallas nightclub owner Jack Ruby on November 24, 1963, syndicated columnist Dorothy Kilgallen vowed to her butler James Clement: "If it is the last thing I do, I'm going to break this case." Driven by a deeply personal connection to John F. Kennedy—who had played charades in her Manhattan home and personally presented her young son Kerry with a PT-109 pi...

In this captivating launch of our Dorothy Kilgallen miniseries, we pivot from the Jack Ruby trial to investigate the life, investigative crusade, and mysterious death of one of the twentieth century's most formidable journalists. On November 8, 1965, Dorothy Kilgallen—a syndicated columnist read by twenty million people and star panelist on CBS's What's My Line?—was found dead inside her Manhattan townhouse at age 52, just hours after appearing on live television. While official records ruled her death as acute ethanol and barbiturate intoxication under undetermined circumstances, the physical scene in her third-floor master bedroom appeared strikingly staged. Discovered propped up in b...

In this captivating 2nd installment of the Dorothy Kilgallen miniseries, we trace how a 1938 Broadway gossip columnist transformed herself into one of the most formidable investigative figures in Cold War America. We examine her meteoric media empire—spanning her nationally syndicated The Voice of Broadway column read by 20 million people across 146 newspapers, her daily radio show with husband Richard Kollmar, and her iconic Sunday night seat on CBS's What's My Line?. We explore her public feuds, including her bitter clash with Frank Sinatra, as well as her complex personal life inside her five-story East 68th Street Manhattan townhouse.

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In this gripping twenty-eighth installment of our Jack Ruby miniseries, we finish out the two part story tell of Jolly West. We revisit the infamous late-night meeting on Saturday, November 23, 1963, at Simon's Garage between Jack Ruby, off-duty Dallas patrolman Harry Olsen, and Carousel stripper Kathy Kay (K. Helen Coleman). We contrast Jack Ruby’s later jailhouse claims—that Olsen explicitly prompted him to kill Oswald to save the Kennedy family further grief—with Olsen and Kay's flat denials and convenient claims of amnesia. We trace how defense attorney Melvin Belli later seized upon this parking garage caucus to argue police...

In this chilling twenty-seventh installment of our Jack Ruby miniseries, we step inside Cell 6F2 of the Dallas County Jail on Sunday, April 26, 1964, just six weeks after Jack Ruby was sentenced to die in the electric chair. Following a frantic, desperate suicide attempt the previous night where Ruby smashed his head into his cell wall and tried to fashion a noose, a renowned psychiatrist arrived to conduct a series of closed-door examinations. That psychiatrist was Dr. Lewis Jolyon "Jolly" West. Brought in by appeal attorney Hubert Winston Smith—who initially sought to use hypnosis and sodium pentothal to unlock Ru...

Sorry for this weeks delay. I am getting over a cold and wanted to give you a bit of an update.  Episodes coming on Sunday (I hope). Enjoy! Jeff

In this twenty-sixth installment of our Jack Ruby miniseries, we step inside the legal pressure cooker following the November 24 shooting of Lee Harvey Oswald and dissect the clash of defense strategies that defined Jack Ruby’s capital murder trial. We trace the initial strategy devised by local Dallas attorney Tom Howard, who aimed for a "murder without malice" defense under Texas law—an approach that framed Ruby as a grief-stricken, volatile nightclub owner acting out of sudden passion to spare Jacqueline Kennedy, carrying a prison sentence of two to five years rather than the electric chair. However, fearing that a lo...

In this compelling twenty-fifth installment of our Jack Ruby miniseries, we step inside Apartment 207 at the Marsalis Place Apartments on South Ewing Street during the turbulent afternoon and evening of Sunday, November 24, 1963. Hours after Jack Ruby executed Lee Harvey Oswald live on national television, Dallas detectives searched the residence under warrant, discovering over $3,100 in cash scattered between bedroom cloth sacks, living room closets, Ruby's pockets, and his white Oldsmobile trunk, along with an address book and personal papers. But the true mystery begins after police locked the doors: a secret, unrecorded Sunday night meeting took place inside the apartment...

In this  twenty-fourth installment of our Jack Ruby miniseries, we reconstruct the immediate, chaotic aftermath of Sunday morning, November 24, 1963, when Jack Ruby stepped from a crowd of journalists in the Dallas Police Department basement and shot Lee Harvey Oswald live on national television. We explore the instant, bitter fracture in public perception: while hundreds of sympathetic citizens sent telegrams and defense contributions praising Ruby as a grief-stricken patriot who spared Jacqueline Kennedy the agony of returning to Dallas for a trial, international news outlets and domestic critics immediately recognized the possibility that this was a mob-orchestrated execution designed to s...

In this  twenty-third installment of our Jack Ruby miniseries, we revisit Jack Ruby’s infamous summer 1959 trip to Cuba and unravel the paper trail that shatters sixty years of official cover stories. For decades, the Warren Commission portrayed Ruby's presence in Havana as an innocent, week-long vacation, backed by a single postcard sent to his girlfriend Alice Nichols from the FOCSA  building. However, official Cuban immigration tourist cards and federal archives expose a massive physical contradiction: while his immigration card registered a continuous 34-day stay from August 8 to September 11, 1959, Dallas bank deposit logs and FBI contact reports place him phys...

In this gripping twenty-second installment of our Jack Ruby miniseries, we look past the convenient post-assassination caricature of Jack Ruby as a pathetic, lonely "police buff" who brought free pizza to headquarters. Instead, we peel back the layers of the Dallas Police Department and FBI files to expose a highly calculating, double-shielded operator who survived on the very edge of the law for sixteen years. We reconstruct the shadowy 1953-1955 gambling hustle Jack ran alongside swindler Harry Hall (alias Harry Sinclair Jr.), beating local gamblers out of nearly $80,000 while boasting of his extensive "juice" with Dallas law enforcement—a tr...

With Lee Harvey Oswald  assassinated in the  basement of City Hall, the grand trial of the century evaporated in a single flash of gunfire, leaving a paralyzed nation to wonder whether Jack Ruby’s bullet was an act of spontaneous, patriotic grief or a calculated underworld silencer’s strike. In this revealing twenty-first installment, we look past the smoking gun to explore who Jack Ruby really was, starting with a fierce internal struggle inside the Warren Commission itself. In the summer of 1964, commission attorneys Leon Hubert and Bert Griffin drafted an urgent memorandum demanding a systematic audit of Ruby’s long-d...

In this climactic twentieth installment of our Jack Ruby miniseries, we explore the jaw-dropping chronology of Sunday morning, November 24, 1963, when Jack Ruby stepped out of the shadows of the Dallas Police basement to execute Lee Harvey Oswald on live television. We begin by highlighting the ultimate chronological paradox: at 10:00 a.m.—the exact hour the police had publicly scheduled the transfer—Ruby was still fast asleep in his South Ewing Street apartment, completely unhurried. We dismantle the official myth of a miraculous, split-second coincidence, demonstrating that Ruby's mathematically perfect 11:21 a.m. timing was set in motion by a two-step dela...

In this gripping nineteenth installment of our Jack Ruby miniseries, we take a seat at the table during one of the most mysterious and heavily obscured meetings of the assassination weekend: Jack Ruby’s Saturday night dinner on November 23, 1963, at the glittering, mob-financed Dallas Cabana Motor Hotel. Ostensibly a playground for mid-century celebrities, the Cabana was built using millions from Jimmy Hoffa’s Teamsters pension fund and was managed by close associates of organized crime. Though the Warren Commission initially brushed past this critical evening as a simple, fleeting telephone call, congressional investigators later exposed the sworn testimony of Chic...

In this gripping eighteenth installment of the Jack Ruby miniseries, we peel back the layers of the fateful weekend of November 22-23, 1963, to examine the suspicious, hour-by-hour movements of Dallas’s most volatile nightclub owner. We begin by dismantling the sixty-year-old alibi surrounding the late-night "Jackson Street rendezvous" between Jack, off-duty patrolman Harry Olsen, and Carousel stripper Kathy Kay. Although the Warren Commission accepted the story that the trio bumped into each other by pure chance as Kay left her Friday night shift, the physical reality tells a far darker story: both of Ruby's clubs were closed that night, me...

Step inside the quiet, graveyard shift of the KLIF newsroom during the early hours of Saturday, November 23, 1963, where Jack Ruby stands at the locked glass doors clutching a cardboard box of cold corned beef sandwiches. Having just spent the midnight hours brokering an exclusive interview with District Attorney Henry Wade, Jack returns to collect his reward—access to the inner broadcast sanctum. But as we pull back the curtain on this midnight visit, a bizarre series of eyewitness contradictions emerges, with three different newsmen all claiming they were the one to unlock the door for Jack. Once inside, the fr...

Settle into the early morning hours of Saturday, November 23, 1963, at the corner of Jackson and Field Streets in downtown Dallas. Outside the exit of Simon's Garage, off-duty patrolman Harry Olsen and Carousel Club stripper Kathy Kay run into Jack Ruby, culminating in an intense, highly suspicious meeting in the dark that lasted for over an hour. In this episode, we reconstruct this crucial parking lot caucus and explore the conflicting testimonies of how it began—was it a chance street collision, or was Jack walking toward a specific, pre-planned destination?

We trace the dramatic aftermath of this me...

It is midnight in Dallas on Friday, November 22, 1963, and the weekend of tragedy is bleeding into Saturday morning. Inside the limestone walls of the Dallas Police and Courts building, the air is thick with tobacco smoke, sweat, and cheap coffee as hundreds of international journalists clamor for a glimpse of the prime suspect. Fearing that prolonged silence behind closed doors will spark rumors of police brutality, police chiefs and prosecutors make the fateful decision to show Lee Harvey Oswald to the world. But as Captain Fritz attempts a brief showing in the cramped third-floor hallway, the corridor explodes into...

Step inside the sweltering, smoke-filled basement assembly room of the Dallas Police Headquarters at 12:30 a.m. on Saturday, November 23, 1963, as District Attorney Henry Wade addresses a packed room of over one hundred global journalists. Looking to deliver the first formal summary of the murder charges against Lee Harvey Oswald, the exhausted prosecutor makes a staggering, cold-war slip of the tongue—accidentally declaring to the world that Oswald was a member of the anti-Castro "Free Cuba movement" rather than the pro-Castro "Fair Play for Cuba Committee." Before the error can fully scramble the public's understanding of the suspect's political alignment, a...

Step into the heavy, suffocating silence that fell over Dallas on the evening of Friday, November 22, 1963. Inside the local police headquarters at City Hall, a chaotic media gauntlet was rapidly taking shape on the third floor, as over three hundred out-of-town journalists, photographers, and television crews shoved shoulder-to-shoulder in the smoke-filled corridors. In this episode, we follow the frantic, hour-by-hour movements of Jack Ruby during this critical three-hour window, examining how a local strip club owner managed to bypass strict security checkpoints, navigate police barricades, and position himself directly at the center of the crime scene of the century.<...

Friday, November 22, 1963. While the nation was shattered by the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, Jack Ruby's day began in a remarkably ordinary way. Sitting at a free desk in the second-floor retail advertising department of the Dallas Morning News, the 52-year-old nightclub owner spent his morning writing out longhand copy for his weekend advertisements, completely oblivious to the fateful motorcade scheduled to pass just blocks away. When employees from the newspaper  burst into the room with the devastating news that shots had been fired, Ruby sat holding the morning paper in stunned disbelief. He was pale, ashen, and s...

Step into the summer of 1963, when Jack Ruby took a fateful scouting trip to New Orleans and returned with his ultimate, red-carpet feature attraction: a fiery, red-haired headliner named Jada. Born Janet Adams Mole, Jada possessed the perfect storm of expensive clothes, a flashy Cadillac, and a commanding salary that instantly turned heads at the Carousel Club. But while her signature tiger-skin routine and provocative stage presence promised to bring "class" to Jack's walk-up club, she quickly transformed into his most expensive and uncontrollable nightmare. Their relationship rapidly devolved into legendary spotlight battles—with an increasingly paranoid, puritanical Jack si...

On August 8, 1959, Jack Ruby boarded a plane to Havana, embarking on what he would spend the rest of his life claiming was a simple, eight-day vacation to visit his close friend, syndicate gambler Lewis McWillie. But official Cuban immigration cards, flight manifests, bank records, and the memories of eye-witnesses at the famous Tropicana casino paint a far more complex and troubling picture. Jack wasn't just on vacation; he was traveling back and forth to the island, even making a mysterious, unexplained one-day round trip to Miami. Decades later, congressional investigators would look at this erratic, secret itinerary and draw...

Step inside the red spotlights of the 1300 block of Commerce Street, where the neon glow of the Carousel Club promised a world of "classy" burlesque, live jazz, and high society glamour. But behind the red velvet curtains and the cheap, overpriced champagne lay a business built on pure financial desperation, high-interest loans, and an intense, green-eyed envy of Jack's chief competitors. In this episode, we pull back the curtain on the daily operations of Dallas's most famous clip joint, exploring how a failed private club was rebranded into a lucrative runway stage, and how Jack deployed "champagne girls" and "...

In Episode 332, we dive into the fascinating, complex double life of Jack Ruby during his golden years in Dallas—a decade defined by manic showbiz dreams that went nowhere and explosive, bone-breaking violence. To the public, Jack desperately wanted to be seen as a sophisticated entertainment mogul, a Dallas "somebody" who constantly dropped the names of the mayor, the police chief, and oil tycoons to anyone who would listen. From his passionate, short-lived stint managing a 12-year-old song-and-dance prodigy named Little Daddy Nelson to his bizarre prudishness—which saw him furiously throw a teenage Gabe Kaplan out of an audi...

In February 1946, thirty-four-year-old World War II veteran Jacob Rubenstein stepped off the train onto the freezing platforms of Chicago, carrying a good conduct medal on his chest and hoping his honorable service had finally cleansed him of his chaotic childhood. Instead, his return plunged him straight into a toxic family business feud. Joining forces with his brothers Sam, Earl, and Hyman at Earl Products, Jacob took charge of sales for their lucrative gray-market punchboard operation. But his volatile temper, refusal to travel to secure regional accounts, and constant screaming matches with his brothers soon pushed the partnership to its...

In the mid-1950s, Jack Ruby was the self-appointed king of the Dallas strip, strutting through his nightclubs in immaculate double-breasted suits and a cocked fedora. Shaking hands, dropping names, and paying rent for struggling waiters, he projected the image of a flashy, generous showman. Yet, beneath this polished exterior lurked a terrifying, volatile thug. With a hair-trigger temper that his lawyers would later describe as a fugue state, Ruby acted as his own brutal bouncer, savage enough to smash a full bottle of whiskey against a drunk's ribcage, kick a musician in the groin, or beat an unruly...

We often think of Jack Ruby as a creature of the dark, of smoky, neon-lit walkups, back-alley brawls, and shady financial deals. But for nearly three years during the height of the Second World War, Jacob Rubenstein proudly wore the olive drab uniform of the United States Army Air Forces. Stationed at various air bases across the American South, Private First Class Rubenstein served with an unblemished record as a highly skilled aircraft mechanic. In the military, Jacob found something he had been chasing his entire life: structure, respect, and a patriotic cause far bigger than himself.

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In the pre-World War II era of the "Chicago Cowboy," Jacob Rubenstein was a striking figure of manic energy on the West Side. Working out with desperate intensity at local YMCA clubs, he obsessed over his physical conditioning and receding hairline, famously boasting to anyone who would listen that he could "hit harder than Joe Louis." Struggling to stay afloat after the tragic murder of his labor union mentor, Jack teamed up with business associates to launch the Spartan Novelty Company. Operating out of cheap, transient hotel rooms, they chased the cash-heavy flow of "punchboards"—unregulated, highly addictive, gray-market ga...

In the late summer of 1933, with the Great Depression holding Chicago in a frozen grip, twenty-two-year-old Jacob Rubenstein and his sister Eva packed a single suitcase and looked west. Under the sun-drenched palm trees of California, a strange transformation occurred. The volatile, quick-tempered kid from the West Side tenements seemed to vanish, replaced by a well-mannered, meticulously dressed young gentleman who openly admired local beat cops and managed newspaper subscription crews. Yet, the street-hustler DNA remained active underneath his polished veneer as he ran lucrative racetrack tip sheets from Santa Anita to Bay Meadows.

But this fragile...

If you visit Westlawn Cemetery just outside Chicago, you'll find a simple granite headstone for the man who silenced Lee Harvey Oswald on live television. But carved right in the center of that marker is a bracketed childhood nickname: Jack "Sparky" Ruby. In part two of our special miniseries, we rewind the tape to the cobblestones of 1920s Chicago to meet the teenage Jacob Rubenstein long before the strip clubs, the mobsters, and the history-shattering events in Dealey Plaza. This is the story of a boy running wild on Roosevelt Street—a kid who refused to sit at a sc...

On November 24, 1963, Jack Ruby stepped out of the shadows of a crowded Dallas police basement and shot Lee Harvey Oswald live on national television, silencing the accused assassin of President John F. Kennedy forever. In a single moment, Ruby opened a canyon of doubt and conspiracy that has never closed, cementing himself as one of the most mysterious and controversial figures in modern history. To the public, he was a Dallas strip club owner and midnight hustler, a man of wild and irreconcilable contradictions who could beat a patron into the concrete  one moment, and weep over a sad n...

Join us in this prelude episode of  a miniseries  series covering Jack Ruby.  Our podcast coverage  now moves to tell the story of this central character in the assassination.  Jack Ruby was an enigmatic figure that some say was the "cleanest available test of the conspiracy hypothesis". While sixty years of intense debate over Lee Harvey Oswald’s guilt have left questions of ballistics, trajectories, and acoustics in a perpetual draw, what Jack Ruby did is not in dispute—his crime was captured live on national television before millions of stunned viewers. The opening chapter argues that while eve...

In Episode 14 of the Noss Gold Treasure, the investigation shifts to the early 1970s as President Richard Nixon positions himself to gain access to the vast fortune hidden inside Victorio Peak. The episode explores a pivotal July 6, 1970 meeting at Nixon's Western White House in San Clemente, California, where geologist Keith Alexander—representing a coalition of treasure hunters known as the "Filthy 50"—met with Nixon and Domestic Affairs Advisor John Ehrlichman. Alexander revealed secret knowledge of 742 gold bars weighing 40 to 50 pounds each (totaling over 3 million troy ounces) stockpiled at White Sands, seeking executive immunity and an official agreement to m...

In Episode 13 of the Noss Gold Treasure, we delve into one of the most audacious gold smuggling operations in modern history: the post-presidential pipeline orchestrated under Lyndon B. Johnson between 1969 and 1970. Drawing on direct video interviews with vintage WWII B-24 Liberator pilot Fern Hamill, this episode exposes how 130 tons of ancient gold bars stolen from Victorio Peak were covertly transported out of the United States. Weekly shuttle runs using official U.S. government vehicles—bearing White Sands Missile Range stickers on their windshields—hauled 500 to 800 pounds of gold per week directly across the Mexican border to G...

In 1958, Air Force Captain Leonard Fiege, Airman Tom Berlett, and civilian Bill Schriever entered a cave at Victoria Peak, discovering massive, pyramid-shaped stacks of gold bars stamped with Spanish double crosses alongside the remains of 29 human skeletons. Choosing to act honorably and follow proper legal procedures rather than stealing the gold, Fiege and Berlett left the cave untouched. They subsequently hired senior Judge Advocate General (JAG) Corps colonels to form "The Seven Heirs" corporation to legally assert their rights as the discoverers of the treasure.
Seeking official permission to complete their recovery, the airmen presented their...