Final_Judgment

230 The Errand Boy [169]
a share in a gambling house in Hallandale, Florida along with Meyer and
Jake Lansky, among others, in the early 1950s. 449
There is no doubt that Ruby and Lansky's world of intrigue intersected
in several arenas, as we shall see—whether the two actually ever were
personally acquainted or not.
RUBY AND THE LANSKY DRUG RACKET
Peter Dale Scott has scored G. Robert Blakey and his House
Assassinations Committee for its dismal failure to explore and to expose
Ruby's Lansky connections which are very strong indeed. Scott, who has
studied Jack Ruby's criminal antecedents, has outlined Ruby's critical
positioning in the Lansky syndicate.
According to Scott: "It is certain that Ruby was investigated [in the
mid-1940's] for his role in [an] international drug-trafficking syndicate,
involving corruption of government officials in Mexico City." 450 The top
syndicate representative in Mexico City was one Harold "Happy" Meltzer,
but, in fact, it was Meyer Lansky who was "the key figure in the Meltzer
syndicate.” 451 According to Scott, "Right after World War II this was
probably the biggest drug-smuggling channel into the United States." 452
The House Assassinations Committee, in Scott's judgment, failed to
note that "Ruby was in some way an important figure" 453 in the linkage
between organized crime and the political arena in Dallas and "on a federal
level." 454 Ruby, in short, was no mere mob hanger-on as some have tried
to suggest and he was not, by any stretch of the imagination, part of "the
Mafia" as G. Robert Blakey and some others have suggested.
RUBY WAS NOT 'MAFIA'
According to Scott, the House Committee investigation of Ruby and
his underworld associates chose to focus on what Scott describes as an
"ethnic model of organized crime as 'La Cosa Nostra'" 455 —that is, focusing
on the so-called "Mafia," the popularized media sobriquet for Italian
elements in the organized crime underworld, rather than upon the more
substantially predominant Jewish elements personified by Meyer Lansky and
those in his sphere of influence.
According to Scott, these descriptions of organized crime "are
bureaucratically distorted to the point of falsehood . . . [and that] this
distortion involved systematic distortion of the facts, not just about Ruby,
but about other aspects of the Kennedy assassination." 456
In Scott's assessment, the House Assassinations Committee
investigation of Jack Ruby omitted any reference to what he delicately
d escribes as "the o ngo ing, drug-fueled, intelligence-mo b
connection" 457 —what we, in the pages of Final Judgment, more correctly
and precisely call the Lansky Organized Crime Syndicate.