Despite official denials. Jack Ruby had indeed been a "professional gangster." Furthermore, telephone records and other documents showed extensive contacts between Ruby and underworld figures from across the country in the months before the assassination.

It also emerged, disturbingly, that evidence establishing these criminal ties had been repeatedly suppressed or distorted by the Warren Commission, the government body initially charged to investigate Kennedy's murder. For example, the Commission reported that "virtually all of Ruby's Chicago friends stated he had no close connection with organized crime." But a trace of the Commission's cited references revealed that one of these "friends" was a notorious Mob hit man credited with planning some of its more important executions. More than half of these cited friends, in fact, had some racketeering associations.

The three people are Carlos Marcello, the Mafia boss of New Orleans... The second figure is Santos Trafficante, who was the Mafia boss at Tampa, Florida. The third is Jimmy Hoffa, the Teamsters' boss who was killed... Like Carlos Marcello, each of the other two had spoken openly of assassination plots against the Kennedys, and this all occurred in the summer months of 1962. All three of them were very close friends, and, when we look at Jack Ruby's telephone records, we find an astonishing peak in the number of out-of-state calls in the months before the assassination - it's actually 25-fold greater than in the month of the previous January. Most of those calls are to organized crime figures, in particular to top associates of Marcello, Trafficante, and Hoffa.