SOUTHFIELD, Mich.- Forty years later, he sprawls in a comfortable chair in his suite in the assisted-living center, looking blearily across the room at a framed collage of family pictures, several showing his famous brother and himself together.

Earl knows, without asking, that I saw his brother commit murder. So did millions of other people. He wasn't there. He had just left his dry cleaning plant on Livernois when word came on the radio that Lee Harvey Oswald had been shot.

“And they said the fellow that did the shooting is Jack Ruby, owner of the Carousel Night Club in Dallas, and I immediately knew it was my brother because that was the name of the club he owned,” Earl Ruby, now 88, told the Warren Commission.

What he didn't tell them was that Jack called him later that day, from the Dallas jail. “I was surprised he could call me. I thought you only got one call,” he rasped, a tube in his nose slightly affecting his speech.

What did he say? The answer seems startling. “Earl, I think we're going to get a lot of good publicity out of this,” Jack said. Which is exactly what Earl thought, too. He thought they'd book his brother, and that he would be released as a hero. “I was naive; we were naive,” he said.

There have been a lot of books speculating about Dallas' second most famous murder ever. Some believe Jack Ruby was ordered by the Mafia to wipe out the president's assassin. Others think he was tied to other conspiracies.

Earl Ruby is sure he knows. After all, he knew his brother better than anyone else. “We did everything we could together. We were the closest in the family,” he says in an old smoker's voice. “I loved him. He owed me $16,000, you know. When the FBI asked why I gave him the money, I said I loved Jack. I didn't care if I got it back.”

One feels that he is telling the truth. They had grown up in Chicago, in rough neighborhoods. Earl bought a dry cleaning business in Detroit in 1960. Jack went to Dallas, to join a sister and open some nightclubs.

He was, by all accounts, emotional, flamboyant, and occasionally violent. And everyone said he became unhinged by the assassination.

“Jack just did it on impulse,” Earl says, closing his eyes. “He loved President Kennedy. He said he felt worse when he was shot than he did when our parents died.”

What happened that day, he said, was that Jack, who owned two seedy nightclubs, went to Western Union to wire some money to one of his strippers who needed rent money. He saw a fuss over at the police department, and walked over and went in. He wasn't supposed to be there, but he knew all the cops.

They came into his nightclubs; Jack, a notorious street brawler, not long before helped a couple cops out of a jam with his fists. Besides, he liked cops and liked to hang around the police station. Nobody questioned his being there … until he blasted a shot into Oswald's abdomen, ripping apart his internal organs from his stomach to his spleen, killing him within an hour. “You killed my president, you rat!” Ruby screamed before he was hustled off to a cell of his own.

“Jack never meant to kill Oswald,” Earl said. “He just wanted to make him suffer.” The historical record, however, doesn't bear that out. Ruby told the Dallas police immediately afterwards that he hoped Oswald died, and that he wanted to spare Jackie Kennedy the horror of having to testify during any trial.

Instead, Jack Ruby fired a shot that gave birth, and eternal life, to a million conspiracy theories. Earl Ruby hired famous attorney Melvin Belli to defend him. “He was a bum. I despised him in the end,” Earl says. Most experts, indeed, feel that Mr. Belli did a terrible job, and should have gotten a second-degree murder conviction.

Instead, it was murder one, and the chair. But Jack Ruby never reached it. His body and mind quickly deteriorated. His jailers gave him Pepto-Bismol, until they belatedly discovered he was full of cancer.

Barely three years after he killed Oswald, Jack Ruby died, with the faithful Earl at his side.

Now, his brother doesn't have much time. He has been negotiating with an author who wants to write a book called “My Brother and Me,” but Earl wants money, and the proposed author wants all his papers first.

What does he want the book to say? “To tell the story of the real Jack Ruby, and me, how we grew up together, and that he was not a rotten guy.”

Never will be, not to an old man whose life itself has been defined by a single bullet.

By the way, does it bother Earl that he will forever be remembered as the brother of the man who …?

Not at all.

One part of Jack's prediction the day he shot Oswald was true. “It was good for business. People came in to see me because of it, came in to my place so they could talk to me.”

Pause. “Like you are doing now.”

Read more at http://www.toledoblade.com/JackLessenberry/2003/09/28/Earl-Ruby-s-life-defined-by-his-impulsive-brother.html#3ICfRT0xWIiGl81H.99

Earl Ruby (1915)