How Shaka Sankofa Passed Time Before Meeting the Extraction Team

     

            The first urge when you're reading an execution log is believing that the condemned prisoner's actions in his or her last hours of life were a reflection of guilt or innocence. Those last hours when someone knows that he or she is going to die and not of old age or incurable illness, but after too much pentobarbital administered by the State of Texas, has a reality all its own and has nothing to do with what came before.

           Second, you must forgive the guards who may be challenged by the English language but are there, basically, not to observe but to watch, something altogether different. They are there not to describe behavior but to avoid it, to make sure the condemned doesn’t “act out” or “go off on staff” or try to commit suicide. 

           Finally don’t always believe that use of brand name products connotes product endorsement. If a condemned inmate was eating a Reese's Peanut Butter Cup a few hours before execution that doesn't necessarily mean Reese’s is the bomb, so good that every condemned man or woman would choose it over M&Ms or Snickers for a final taste of sugar. It just means that’s what was available in the commissary. As with everything else in an information-glutted society we’re now getting more details on state-sponsored death and unlike drone strikes or assassinations, this release is completely authorized. The Texas Department of Criminal Justice revised its Death Row procedure manual this summer and Attorney General Greg Abbott ruled the document is a public record. That's important because as always the state prison system headquartered in Huntsville, in East Texas, remains the go-to institution on all issues execution-related. After the recent update there’s even been a new warning to guards that “Staff must not accept a stay of execution from the offender’s attorney.” Well yeah. That makes a certain sense. Nothing else does. Any keep-on-person medication must also now be turned over and administered by medical staff, to avoid the obvious. A few years ago a condemned Texas inmate managed to swallow a potentially-lethal dose of medication and was rushed to intensive care, nursed back to health—and then killed. 

There’s much much more information now and it’s yours to read, thanks to General Abbott. “The Mountain View Unit Warden shall," for example, "ensure that a female offender brings personal hygiene and gender-specific items to the Huntsville Unit," containing the holding cells and execution chamber, "as appropriate.” That also makes a certain sense. The offender—inmates in Texas are universally called “offender,” as opposed to “prisoner,” which might have an unwanted political connotation. He or she fills out a religious orientation statement, decides whether his or her body will be donated, writes out a list of last visitors, and a record of his or her past commissary purchases is provided to staff, reason unknown, although presumably in order to assure last minute availability for purchase. “On the morning of the day of execution prior to final visitation, all of the offender’s personal property shall be packed and inventoried.” The inmate does that his or herself. This step is often missed in movies that imitate the final days of the condemned. On Texas’ Death Row you have to tidy up after yourself.

These written execution summaries also detail the prisoner’s last hours, it’s actually something the condemned spend a lot of precious time doing, sorting and re-sorting limited belongings and deciding who gets what when the present owner is gone. The same decision must be made about the inmate’s prison trust fund, basically his or her spending money, usually provided by family: it’s unclear if those who are about to die can bequeath to others who will die later. What's most interesting to us on the outside is the beginning of the “Execution Summary Log,” seven days out, with observations and notes on the prisoner’s behavior, first every 30 minutes and, as the needle gets closer, every fifteen. Reading how the condemned spend their last hours you get an idea of the sense of unease as if no one knows how to use remaining minutes—so they try to do everything, or nothing at all. Shooting hoops in the exercise yard. . . listening to Metallica . . . eating Reese's . . . that’s how Cameron Todd Willingham passed the hours, among other activities, back in ‘04. Most everyone devoted time to rearranging worldly goods. There was a lot of writing but less reading than you would expect: No mention of the Bible for example. A good analogy about time-use might actually be financial, it’s like having a lot of bills coming due at the same time and very little money and not knowing exactly where to spend it, because there’s not enough to go around. So you waste instead. 

            The four inmates whose execution logs have been released include three men and one woman. Two Caucasians and two blacks. Two who were put to death more than a decade ago after a thumbs-down by Governor Bush, and two by incumbent Governor Rick Perry. One admitted her crime, one was widely believed to have been guilty and relied unsuccessfully on other means to escape death, and two were very probably innocent. 

            The four: Karla Faye Tucker, executed in 1998 for her part in a gruesome murder she admitted helping to commit; Shaka Sankofa, aka Gary Graham, executed by the State of Texas in 2000 for a robbery-homicide in a Houston parking lot which he may not have done; Cameron Willingham, who has become the poster boy for anti-death penalty activists, executed for an arson that killed his own three daughters, following an investigation and trial that are now considered discredited; and Marvin Wilson, lethally-injected in August 2012 for the murder of a police informant, a crime he did not convincingly deny, basing his appeal instead on a low IQ. Although Texas prisoners are specifically exempted from the state’s stringent open records laws, Attorney General Abbott recently ruled the execution logs can be released. Like his predecessors Abbott seems to have been moved by the state’s strong adherence, surprisingly, to transparency—one of the few issues that both parties in Austin have seemed to agree on in the past. So, too, there is the need to satisfy the public’s fascination about executions. There does seem to be a certain public bloodlust at work but that's common in Texas. And then there’s the Lone Star mentality, period. To many Texans there are only two kinds of people, good ‘uns and bad ‘uns and the bad ‘uns who kill need to get the needle. The Texas public wants a couple of pounds of flesh, wants to see payback so, politically, release of these logs was a good decision, eventually leading perhaps to the hoped-for televised spectacle that polls have shown the public really desires, perhaps with sponsors like Hershey's chocolates. Either that or gladiator games.

            While praising General Abbott, however, we should note that the value of these logs, which could be a rich resource for research and investigation of both man and the state’s baser instincts, was already diminished the moment Abbott made his decision. The inmates whose last hours have already been chronicled by the state were presumably unaware that their final movements would be made public. In the future—once the grapevine activates and the condemned know that their final days will be publicized—that knowledge will doubtless influence how they spend their last moments. Like final statements and final meal requests, future logs of these last moments may be tainted by self-awareness, by playing to the audience which is us.

     

            Entries written by Shaka Sankofa's guards described him like a caged tiger, as trite as that may sound. This isn’t soul on ice, it’s fire instead: sleeping fitfully, pacing back and forth across his cell like the captured big cat he was, there was no coming to terms with his fate. It was Sankofa’s seventh trip to the Death House and he seemed to know it would be his last, with a bloody-minded born-again Christian governor in office. George W. Bush would eventually okay the executions of 153 out of 154 condemned inmates on his watch and this was a death foretold. The scenes in the cell make for a pretty impressive one-man show, worthy of Denzel but starring Shaka instead.
            There’s not much dialogue—“pacing in cell” and “laying in bed awake,” this was, like the death of the born-again Christian Karla Faye Tucker, a celebrity execution. Sankofa was visited by Bianca Jagger and Reverend Al Sharpton and both the Klan and the Panthers demonstrated outside the prison with Texas Rangers present in case the groups mixed. Before being strapped down on the gurney, according to the log, Sankofa had even taken a goodbye call from his Congresswoman. In the execution chamber Sankofa went into a long rap as his final statement, still proclaiming innocence, rather eloquently one must say, and putting his “murder” in revolutionary perspective. Long before her death Karla Faye was visited in her cell by Governor Bush’s general counsel and future United States Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, apparently carrying the news that she would die. Among the last visitors who stood outside her holding cell and talked to her, per the guards, was the head of the Texas prison system, a Republican lawyer and criminal justice fixer from San Antonio named Polunsky. In both cases what was discussed is known only by the lawyers themselves, who aren’t talking. Sankofa’s death was almost public, attended by much media—family and friends of both the condemned and victim. 

            Like the others who were put to death, his time in the cell was not public until now and arguably more poignant for that fact. He paced, as has been noted. He went through his things. He read the newspaper, apparently following his own case in the media. He did what we all do, multi-tasking because he was pressed for time. “Offender sitting on toilet, also brushing his teeth.” Didn’t get much rest even when he could close his eyes: “Offender was waken from sleep by Officer Duff for count purposes.” He talked to himself and to the inmate in the cell beside him. He made his bed (everybody makes his or her bed, perhaps with the hope he or she will return to it) and got a clean jumpsuit. The pre-execution routine seems relentless. Those early morning prisoner counts even in the final hours. Sankofa refused a physical. And then came the explosion. Filmgoers are used to the long walk with clergy and warden, a la The Green Mile, or something with Jimmy Cagney, made popular through the years by Hollywood. Sankofa hadn’t seen the movie. He fought instead. That’s when the Extraction Team appeared, a group of well-padded guards, described by those who know as kind of looking like RoboCops, whose responsibility is to take dissenting inmates to their deaths. One of the last notations in the long log has Sankofa sitting of the floor of the van on the way to the execution chamber after he lost the fight. A USA Today reporter who witnessed the execution said later that Shaka was fighting again as he was strapped down to start the IV. While the attorney general has released these logs, as valuable as they are, the state has been more hesitant about film. Video of at least part of Sankofa’s encounter with the Extraction Team was taken but General Abbott’s predecessor as attorney general, incumbent U.S. Senator John Cornyn, denied all requests for its release years ago. Don't hold your breath.

Karla Faye Tucker also made a video sent to Governor Bush apparently pleading for mercy, which the State of Texas has also refused to make public. Still, we do see something of the condemned here if only through words, a few sentences here and there written by people who were interested in security not history or sociology. 

            Karla Faye Tucker the day before her death: “Sitting on bunk talking to officers about her busy day and how worried she was due to the amount of stress her being at the unit has put on the staff.” “Stated she was writing an outline for Chairman Polunsky on inmate rehabilitation to submit to the Board for future reference.” “Lying on bunk looking at wall.” There does seem to be an effort by the guards to put final moments in their best light, to skew the image of the people we as a society have decided to separate from. To make it look like they were more accepting of their fate than they actually were. Again in the case of Tucker, the last entry on her last day reads: “Standing at cell door with a smile on her face talking with Warden Dessie Cherry.” That was shortly before the end. It’s probably safe to say she expressed other emotions as well, which weren’t recorded. 

That same emphasis on the positive is apparent in the notations on Marvin Wilson, a more recent execution. “Talking with grand kids with a smile on his face.” Several notations mention him smiling in his last hours. He may have been a cheerful guy, but maybe he had other feelings as well? Like: This is bullshit? Or, this is fucked up? Back in the day, twenty years earlier, down in Beaumont he's supposed to have capped a brother who ratted him out in a drug deal. So far, so bad. Then he told someone about it, which is a recurring theme on Death Row, talking about it after the fact. A potentially fatal mistake, in this state. Fast forward. In contrast to Shaka Sankofa who took photos with his family (what's that caption in the family album?) Marvin Wilson combed his hair before his last family visit, got an insulin injection and was for a while on his final day playing chess in his cell, which might belie his argument that his intellect was too low to understand the charges against him. Tucker wore, the guards noted, “prison whites, personal shoes” in the Death House. What does one wear to one’s own execution? Sensible shoes. Karla Faye refused meal trays (“Sitting on bunk writing. Stated she [is] fasting and was at peace”), refused a shower, and “declined to watch television when asked if she wanted to watch the news.” The only news she needed to know she already heard.

            Guards noted Willingham chatting with a neighboring inmate, Bobby Ray Hopkins, a former bull rider and drug dealer who was condemned to die for knifing two women. But nothing about what they said to each other. We’re not asking here for Socratic meditations, the meaning of good and evil or even final thoughts about the meaning of life. But a few words about the last roundup might be enlightening. Hopkins was apparently reticent generally. On the gurney, before the poison started to flow, he told the warden that he had no statement, “at this time.” The most pitiful of the four seems to be Willingham, in the good sense of the word pity. Although not mentioned in his execution log the rumor is that as he was strapped to the gurney Willingham used his free hand and last minutes of life to try to give his ex-wife—who campaigned for his death—the middle finger. 

            Ultimately it’s still Shaka Sankofa who most attracts our attention, both in the cell and outside. Even liberals in Texas argued that then-Gary Graham’s history of bad acting on the streets of Houston had been so extensive that the death penalty was not acceptable but still understandable. If that was true he was being executed, in Texas terms, as a bad ‘un despite limited and contradictory evidence. One condemned man who was housed in a cell near Sankofa, a Latino from Ft. Worth who followed him to the gurney, took time in his final statement to praise Allah. Shaka Sankofa was an earlier wave of this same polemic. 

            Missing in the recent death penalty debate—you may have noticed—is Barack Obama. Not surprisingly for a president who doesn’t court controversy, no federal prisoner has been scheduled for execution so far during his time in office. There are 58 men and women on the federal government’s death row, 35 of them minorities, the highest number from—you guessed it—Texas, according to a reliable death penalty website. Presumably the issue will come up eventually. It’s a good bet that President Obama, like Bill Clinton, will come down on selective use of the needle in those cases where the public is most demanding and the facts are clearest. As he is not opposed to all wars, only dumb wars, one supposes that he is only opposed to dumb executions. His work in the Illinois Senate limiting use of the death penalty is not much to go by, the issue is different for a president who must enforce the law than for a senator who has to write it. And we still owe Attorney General Abbott a debt of gratitude for taking away some of the mystery of our last hours. 

L'Enfant Plaza

            The first car that passed was an unmarked Ford, searchlight on the driver’s side, a beefy-looking white guy at the wheel. There were some flak jackets and automatic weapons on the Metro, too.

             Down the way from my hotel was this market, a convenience store really, bigger, with a good selection of fresh fruit. The hotel served plastic pastry for breakfast so my idea was to pick up some bananas for the second morning in D.C. To reach the market you had to cross a busy intersection and then the neighborhood got low-rent pretty quick: some working-class Latinos and blacks hanging out on doorsteps, everybody looking a little hungry, spiritually not biologically, like the American Dream hadn’t quite arrived here yet despite the close proximity of Capitol Hill.

            A brother in a wheelchair was entering the store at the same time as me that evening. It was hard for the guy in the chair to roll his wheels and hold the door open simultaneously—and he thanked me for my help. Five minutes later we met again at the door, leaving.

           On the sidewalk he pointed at my Low Tops and mentioned, by way of casual conversation, that he bought the same shoe in 1964 for $8.
           Ain’t that a bitch?
           We agreed that eight dollars doesn’t buy a whole lot of shoe anymore.
           We were just making conversation, passing the time, unhurried, unscheduled the way only people of color can be in the middle of rush hour in the white man's world. You couldn’t help but notice that this nigger had a great deal of decorative silver in his mouth. To describe him, he was a little older than me, his legs didn’t look spindly like he had never walked but more like he had been able to walk at one time and got shot or was in an accident or met with some kind of Act of God. Maybe he was a veteran but he didn’t have that proud sacrificial aura that vets get, no see-what-I-gave-up-for-you-motherfucker attitude. He was just a brother on the streets of the nation’s capital who couldn’t walk.

            Being in a wheelchair he probably hadn’t come far, this was his neighborhood. He might, it seemed to me, be able to point in the right direction to hook a brother up. Pussy—weed—a weapon—it's always best to buy local. That’s been my experience anyway.
            In order to do that you have to talk to the locals and not just ask directions.

            We were still in front of the store. A blue-and-white police car passed by, white officer at the wheel, didn’t even look in our direction. Good thing about Osama he was keeping The White Man busy.

            The day was cool but pretty. Felt good to be outside.

            “Do you mind if I ask you a question?”

            “Sure.”

            “Is this the kind of neighborhood where I could find something to smoke?”

            He looked around at traffic, both cars and on foot, people talking on the sidewalk or just coming home from work, none of them looking exactly poor but definitely lesser means, yeah, but what you expect a mile from the damn Gates of Hell that is the US Congress? Then—out of nowhere—a couple of dressed-for-success white people, briefcases and brisk walks like they were headed to testify before a subcommittee.
            Looking at the white couple this guy in the chair confirmed my guess. “It’s that kind of neighborhood,” he said.
            He said that down the block, around the corner, there were young dudes with various pharmaceuticals for sale. But it would be difficult to make a buy, he explained, “Because they don’t know you.”
            Could he introduce me? Could he speak for my character and for my need?
            No he could not, he said. He had seen people get jammed up doing that. He mentioned he had a friend, also in a wheelchair, who facilitated a transaction involving a little “medicinal herb”—for what aches you—and got busted for it.

            There were some starts and stops in the conversation after that. The dude in the chair was offended by an offer of money if he would help me score. His head turned to the side as he listened politely to my denials of employment, officially or on a contract basis, by the District of Columbia Police. We parted ways but he called me right back. A little airlock plastic baggie was now cupped in his hand. It must have come from under his coat. A change had transformed him and he smiled all silver again.

            “I copped the dime for you.” 

            He was the neighborhood connection and somehow we just hooked up.
            Life can be good that way sometimes. You get just what you’re looking for, when you need it.
            At the right price.

            The brother parked his wheelchair to give me time to run back into the store and get change. Korean dude behind the counter wouldn’t break a fifty without a purchase, so in exchange for the herb the brother in the WC got my sincere thanks, $10 and an Eskimo pie.

            First rule of any streetcorner transaction is check out the goods ASAP.
            If you been burned before you don’t wanna get burned again and it’s not like you can complain to the Department of Consumer Affairs. Pulling apart the ziplock was enough. Out came the smell of mountains, Michoacan or Guerrero, Sinaloa or Nayarit, southern Colombia maybe—sierra somewhere—Senior Valdez tending his plants in the cool lush air, a DEA plane lost in the clouds overhead.

            My nostrils widened. There was just a hint of paraquat for authenticity and enough in the bag for two maybe three good-sized joints.

            A nigger’s freedom, it seems to me, is what he makes of it. Mine hasn’t been limited by this administration, not even in a pretty tight radius of the Bush White House.

   

            

Lucius X       

            

Ruby and the Rangers

   

           In September five years ago a box arrived in my mail from the Texas Rangers. It was their file on the Kennedy assassination or so they said.

           The last of the four principals who rode in the President’s car that day, Nellie Connally, widow of Governor “Big John” Connally had died a few months earlier in a nursing home in Austin and there were all those official promises through the years that all the facts had been revealed. So, like—after payment of $238 for copying costs and “staff overtime”—a little over 1,000 pages, the whole file according to the Texas Department of Public Safety, aka the Texas Rangers—arrived in the mail just like memorabilia from a long-lost aunt.

            There was a copy of Lee Harvey Oswald’s application for work at the Schoolbook Depository, his academic records in Ft. Worth (good at sports, bad at spelling) and a list of everything seized in a search of his home. There were the FBI notes of the interrogation of Jack Ruby as well as transcripts of police radio traffic the day the president was shot and witness statements taken on the street by the Dallas County Sheriff in and around Dealey Plaza. There were even statements by those present when Jack Ruby murdered Lee Oswald. One detective who knew Jack Ruby personally said he shouted out when he first saw the gun, “Jack, you son of a bitch, don’t do it!”

The scope of the documentation was wide—including the duty stations of every one of almost 500 cops working security that day in the Big D. As well as super-detailed, with even a statement from the medical student summoned to the jail to put his finger in the suspect’s ass, in a belated search for weapons. There was a letter a month afterwards from a representative of Oswald’s widow asking that her late husband’s things be returned to her, “the property I speak of includes . . . his rifle, pistol and other personal items.” But what wasn’t in the file was more interesting than what was. Not a single piece of paper written by a Texas Ranger. It was as if the files had been meticulously scrubbed to remove any trace of the Rangers and state troopers who worked security in Dallas that day, waiting at the Trade Mart for the president who would never arrive. No intelligence reports about what took place after the killing either, that first tentative search for “subversives,” maybe Oswald but more likely Ruby who lived and prospered as a law enforcement groupie, giving free cover and drinks in his night club to anyone carrying a badge.
             There weren’t any Texas Ranger reports on a case that involved not just the murder of the President of the United States but the serious wounding of the Governor of Texas followed by an investigation—statewide, national and international—that lasted a year and has never really ended.

So, like, what’s up with that?

 

            When the police searched Oswald’s home they found Russian literature from his time in the Soviet Union and his Marine dog tags and sharpshooter medal—and his library, all the books he owned, which tells us something about the presumed assassin.

            Each page of the inventory was stamped by a Dallas police officer before being turned over to the FBI: something gloomy by Sartre, the anti-government bible 1984 and Revolution Must be a School of Unfettered Thought, by Fidel, along with enough pro-Cuba pamphlets to paper a protest march. Oswald also owned The Spy Who Loved Me and You Only Live Twice by Ian Fleming. Like the president he killed he was a fan of James Bond. The only missing title was From Russia With Love.

            A clerk at the Department of Public Safety noted in a nice letter, in response to my puzzled inquiries, that he was also curious how there could be no documents by the Rangers and he had on his own initiative contacted Rangers Company B, stationed in Garland, that covers Dallas, then as now. The clerk was told there were no files, he said. No one documented anything. That was the Rangers’ story and they were sticking to it. Confronted with this discrepancy, this Texas-sized hole in the Lone Star narrative: a later letter from the same guy in the Department of Public Safety’s legal affairs office explained, in a slightly-less helpful manner, that the Rangers file may have once existed but may have once been given to Texas Christian University—perhaps in 1968, nobody at headquarters was making any promises.

            “The Department does not know,” the gentleman in legal affairs reported the Rangers’ new position, “if these documents did or did not pertain to any investigation into the assassination of President Kennedy. There is no record to indicate that these documents were or were not returned to the Department.”

            Huh?

            A spokeswoman for the State Library said they had files on the Kennedy Assassination. This particular archive just arrived from, you guessed it, the Texas Department of Public Safety, but only like what they sent me—none of the documentation appeared to actually have been produced by the Rangers themselves. Nobody from Company B wrote anything down. Colonel Thomas A. Davis, Director of the Department of Public Safety, and boss of the Rangers, suggested in a letter that the files might have been destroyed as part of a “records retention schedule,” but the State Archivist said his office had never approved the destruction of any records of historical value, much less on the crime of the century. Certainly nothing on the Kennedy assassination, the Archivist said.

            So, like, a question came to mind. Not to be suspicious or anything, not to be an amateur detective. But who was more likely to know what really happened in Dallas than the Rangers? Who was more familiar with the figures present, the state’s top political leadership including Vice President Lyndon Johnson and Governor Connally? Who would have known the “atmosphere” in North Texas better than the Rangers stationed in the Big D? If there had been a conspiracy who was more likely to know about it? Again, not to be suspicious or anything.

            After the assassination the Attorney General of Texas decided to look at the bigger picture, the question of conspiracy, just as the Warren Commission was doing in Washington. At the time the Texas Attorney General was a man named Waggoner Carr.

            If General Carr was no legal scholar that’s not what the Attorney General of Texas does but he wasn’t a bad lawyer either. He was a former Speaker of the House of Representatives, a self-described “Connally Democrat,” Carr himself would later be charged by the FBI during the historic Sharpstown scandal and defend himself and be acquitted. He was that kind of guy. For whatever reason—not the least of which may have been publicity—General Carr was not ready to hand over the case to federal prosecutors. Instead he hired two special counsels to help him find out what really happened in Dallas. He called his investigation a “Texas Court of Inquiry.”

             Half a century later, that was a lucky break for me. The files from the Court of Inquiry were released to the State Archives just after my request to the Rangers and Attorney General Carr’s notes, written just after the assassination, offer a different take on the crime of the century, one that makes the silence of the Texas Rangers through the decades so deafening today.

            In an entry dated November 26, four days after the shooting of President Kennedy, Attorney General Carr wrote in his journal, “I talked with Colonel Garrison on the phone”—Colonel Homer Garrison, founding Director of the Texas Department of Pubic Safety, the man who sat in the top cop’s chair in Austin for 30 years and was big daddy of the Rangers—“and asked him to determine who went to Mexico with Oswald at the time he was there from September 26 thru October 3, 1963. He was advised to check all points of entry on the border. Several hours later Colonel Garrison made a preliminary report stating that two blonde women and another man either went from Texas into Mexico with Oswald or came back with him and they would make a more complete report later.” In other words they didn't know shit. But within a week after the assassination the Rangers had checked all passengers on flights in and out of Dallas, per General Carr’s note, determined that the same Jack Rubinstein who had previously been investigated by the Un-American Activities Committee was not the Jack Ruby who owned strip clubs in Dallas-Ft. Worth, and reported, according to Attorney General Carr’s notes, “Oswald did not have a telephone during this period of time and they cannot check his calls. They are still checking Ruby’s calls.” The follow up led to a correction from Colonel Garrison: “Oswald entered Mexico at Laredo crossing on September 26. His transportation is not known and he entered Mexico alone. He returned from Mexico on October 3. He returned by private auto, apparently alone. His visa shows that he just went to the interior—no destination stated.”

            The first special counsel the Texas Attorney General hired was Bob Storey, former dean of the law school in Dallas. Storey’s job was administrative, to keep the notes and do all the bureaucratic tasks that drive investigation like the one of the Kennedy assassination along.

            The second special counsel who General Carr hired was tasked with solving the crime: To look at the witness statements and find the discrepancies and to run the traps that would ultimately answer the question whether Lee Oswald and Jack Ruby each acted alone and, just as important, independently. That man’s name—the second “Texas special counsel”—was Leon Jaworski. Yes, that Leon Jaworski—the man who would one day be chief Watergate prosecutor and took Woodward and Bernstein’s reporting and dismantled a presidency.

             In 1963, two months after the assassination, Jaworski was a lawyer in Houston, a former Army colonel who like Bob Storey made a name for himself prosecuting Nazis. Leon Jaworski was the man picked by Attorney General Carr to break the case—to find out if there was a conspiracy and if yes, what kind. He apparently formed his own ideas about the assassination. You have to read between the lines but Jaworski's preliminary take on the case echoes the suspicions that were already rampant among members of the public. From his office in Houston, on January 27, 1964, two months after President Kennedy's murder Jaworski wrote a letter marked “CONFIDENTIAL” to Attorney General Carr about how to get to the bottom of certain “rumors” they heard about the assassination—rumors which also help explain what may make the Rangers so nervous today.

“In order to keep aftermaths from placing you in a position of possible criticism,” Special Counsel Jaworski wrote to the Attorney General, “[and] to the end of being of the maximum assistance to the Warren Commission,” he suggested that Gen. Carr send a letter to Washington. “Of course, it is to be assumed that the ferreting out of this matter,” Jaworski told his boss, “will be resourcefully and completely done. On the other hand if this is not done and something should show up at a later date, even a year or five years from now, there would be a clamor.”

            The letter that Colonel Jaworski was suggesting be sent to Washington referred to a meeting that had just taken place between Washington and Texas prosecutors about the course of the investigation. Regarding “the subject of the discussion of last Friday at which Chief Justice Warren, you, my special counsel and I, [Dallas D.A.] Henry Wade and his assistant, Mr. Alexander, were present, I respectfully suggest that the Commission consider taking the following steps.” Jaworski’s plan was to find any connections the killers might have with others, yes—but the targets of the search that Col. Jaworski was suggesting were not the usual suspects in the deaths of President Kennedy and Lee Harvey Oswald. Not the mob, or right-wing extremists, not Cubans or Communists.
            The suspect was a member or members of Law Enforcement.

            “The ferreting out of this matter,” Jaworski described to the attorney general, required three steps, each in sequence after the other. He already had two suspects in mind.

            First he wrote: “From the director of both agencies involved, there should be obtained the names of every agent and representative in service in the Dallas area between the months of August and December. This information must be complete so that every single representative who acted for these agencies in that area, whether only a few days or for several months, is to be included.” Second: “Each of the men on these two lists should be examined under oath to determine whether he has any knowledge of the subject matter under discussion.” Third: “The director—the number one man of each agency—as well as the district director of each agency, being the district in which Dallas lies, each should similarly be examined to ascertain whether any of them has any knowledge of the matter under inquiry.” The attorney general’s file doesn’t specify the nature of “the matter under inquiry” or who the suspects were by name. But in another letter, on May 12, 1964, from Gen. Carr to Colonel Garrison, the attorney general makes an odd plea.

            Waggoner Carr tells Colonel Garrison that Texas law enforcement has been “most helpful” up to that point but that the Warren Commission needs to know if there’s anything Washington hasn’t seen.

            “’The Commission,’” Carr quotes a communication from Chief Justice Warren, “’would like to know whether any law enforcement agency in the State of Texas possesses any information not hitherto disclosed to this Commission concerning the association of Lee Harvey Oswald or Jack Ruby with any Communist or subversive organizations in the United States or abroad, or with any criminals or criminal groups either in the United States or abroad.” The second part of the letter probes further. “The Commission would also like to know whether any law enforcement agency in the State of Texas possesses any investigatory reports, police records, or other official data not hitherto disclosed to the Commission concerning the assassination of President Kennedy and the death of Lee Harvey Oswald.” In his letter to Waggoner Carr, and the proposed letter to Chief Justice Warren, Colonel Jaworski mentioned two government agencies “rumored” to have been somehow involved in Dallas, possibly running Oswald, or Ruby, as informants or agents, assassins or thugs. The FBI is presumably one. The other, well—conspiracy theorists have always liked the CIA as accomplice in the crime of the century. But there’s a better suspect. The agencies that Jaworski describes in his letter have district offices that cover Dallas. Of course the CIA would be a possibility—if the CIA had a North Texas office. Perhaps they do.

            As it turns out there was a hint at the mystery agency’s identity in the records that came from the Texas Department of Public Safety. In the box was another list of seized evidence—just like the one detailing what was taken from Oswald’s home. Jack Ruby’s car was his office and after his arrest the Dallas cops found the vehicle parked not far from police headquarters. In it was everything Ruby used to run his business and do what he did, whatever that was—the hustling, small-time thuggery, the booze and the girls. The inventory from the car lists more than $1,000 in cash, his clubs’ receipts. There was a pair of brass knuckles, a tool of his trade. The only reason Ruby’s gun wasn’t in the glove compartment where he normally kept it was because he had taken it with him to shoot Oswald.

            In the car there was also a stack of free passes to his shows that Ruby gave out as promotions, and a collection of business cards collected as connections. One card was from a local justice of the piece, asking any police officer to please render assistance to Ruby—a get-out-of-jail-free card, the kind of thing you show to a cop when you get stopped for speeding. But one of the business cards was for a man named “W.M. Naylor,” showing the address P.O. Box 4087 in Austin. That was interesting. If you’ve ever made an open records request of the Texas Rangers, Box 4087 would be familiar. It’s the address of the Texas Department of Public Safety headquarters.

            “W.M. Naylor,” according to the Department’s own personnel records, was in November 1963 the chief of the DPS narcotics squad—in other words, Texas’s top narc. But Naylor actually transferred to narcotics from the Texas Rangers where—also according to Department of Public Safety records—he was in the “Bureau of Intelligence,” whatever that was. Historically, investigators have always tried to make a connection between Ruby and Oswald, or failing that, Oswald and the FBI. A better connection is Ruby and the Rangers.

            Unfortunately the exact nature of the relationship is unclear because the Rangers report they have no records on the Kennedy assassination. But the month after my request for the Kennedy material, an intelligence analyst in the Texas Department of Public Safety contacted the State Archives about delivering some old files for safekeeping.

            According to an internal email sent soon after by the archivist’s office, “DPS Criminal Intelligence Service has called about records that fall under their series, Criminal Investigation Report . . . . Over the years they've kept reports of cases with historical significance, like JFK's assassination, and Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker. They recently had an open records request for the JFK material and found out how much work goes into reviewing records and making them available . . . . Before they start shredding, they wonder if we have any interest in selecting any cases with perceived historical value for the State Archives. The records include police reports, evidence submitted (objects like money plates in counterfeiting cases), polygraph tests, affidavits, audiotapes of interviews. . . . [Texas Public Information Act] and privacy issues likely abound. The most voluminous case is the JFK assassination files . . .”

            The list provided by DPS included the most famous Ranger cases: Sam Bass, the 1969 University of Texas Tower massacre in Austin and a file called “Corruption in Texas,” which sounds like a possible page-turner. A month later, the promised material still had not been delivered to the Archives, and a Department of Public Safety intelligence analyst named Victoria Sungino, assigned to facilitate the transfer, wrote an email to the State Archives staff that there was a delay in deciding what to send over because, “I am waiting on my commander to view the list first. He said there are some cases that I will just have to shred because of the sensitivity of the case.”

            There's no way to know what pages did not survive the trip from the Rangers headquarters in Austin to the State Library five miles away. But the Kennedy file had obviously been thinned. Originally described by the Department of Public Safety as the largest part of the papers, measured in cubic feet, when the papers arrived at the State Library the file on a murderer named Henry Lee Lucas was the biggest, followed by the University of Texas Tower shootings. The Kennedy file was a distant third which may help answer the question about the second agency under suspicion by Colonel Jaworski. It was the Rangers and they had just cleaned house.

            Not that there's anything wrong with that.

                     

             After his arrest Lee Oswald was given permission to use the telephone.

            He was kept under surveillance by a Lieutenant Lord who was in charge of the Dallas city jail the night after the president was shot, a day or so before Oswald would be very publicly whacked by Jack Ruby. To set the scene. The accused assassin Oswald was actually escorted to the phone by a guard named J.L Popplewell, of the Big D's PD.

            The prisoner’s first try at reaching his party in New York was unsuccessful. Most assassination experts believe that Oswald called John Abt, the general counsel of the Communist Party USA, to ask for legal assistance. Abt testified later to the Warren Commission that he never spoke to Oswald, that in fact he was out of town the night the accused assassin had tried to reach him, which seems highly unlikely. In any case, who Oswald wanted to talk to at first wasn’t home.

            Later that evening Lee Harvey Oswald was taken back to the jail phone to try again. “Popplewell put Oswald in the telephone booth and was standing nearby,” Lt. Lord said in a statement that he gave to the FBI and which is included in the box of Rangers papers that the Department of Public Safety says doesn’t exist but ended up at the State Archives. “I called to Popplewell and told him that Oswald was allowed to make his call privately. Popplewell was advised to keep Oswald in view but to stay back a reasonable distance. Oswald was in the telephone booth about thirty minutes, making his call and then talking to his party. After Oswald completed his call he was returned to his cell by J.L. Popplewell.”

            If that were any time since 9/11, imagine how different the scene would be. Concerns for Lee Oswald’s privacy would be minimal at best. Certainly we would know who Oswald telephoned because the call would be recorded in Dolby. There'd be video too. The telephone operator who connected Mr. Oswald with his party in New York would be followed home and John Abt or whoever Oswald spoke with would be investigated down to the fillings in his teeth. The transfer Oswald was awaiting would be Guantanamo.

            Fast forward. Lt. Lord and Officer J.L. Popplewell. Neither man could find work at the Department of Public Safety today or Dallas police. By the time of the 9-11 their kind of innocence was no longer in demand, due in part to what happened in the Big D so long ago.

            So, like, why is what the Texas Rangers knew still important?

            Because it's the way we were and it’s a way we will never be again.