JFK The Enduring Secret

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 prese...

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 tr...

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 o...

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....

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 ...

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 f...

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 ai...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 str...

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,...

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 ...

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...

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 J...

On June 5, 1963, President John F. Kennedy and Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson made a highly orchestrated visit to White Sands Missile Range. While the official itinerary claimed the 139-minute stop was merely to witness a missile demonstration and inspect an unpaved desert runway known as the Northrup Strip, the reality was far more secretive. The trip—which required nine months of meticulous preparation—was actually ...

In the summer of 1976, an Illinois oilman named Ed Atkins received a tape containing an explosive conversation: former President Lyndon B. Johnson admitting to moving stolen gold from White Sands Missile Range to his ranch in Mexico. Discussing the heist with Fred Drolte, LBJ explicitly detailed using a big plane—later identified as a B-24 Liberator bomber—to transport the gold, cementing the tape as a "smoking gun" of ...

Even though I am technically in the middle of the Noss Gold Treasure epiodes, I felt the need to go on a  "wander"  and produce a new episode for our core journey here at JFK The Enduring Secret. In Episode 323, we begin to explore one of the most intense backdrops of the Kennedy administration: the Cuba Project. Following the disastrous and public failure of the Bay of Pigs invasion in April 1961, President John F. Kenne...

In this special update episode of JFK The Enduring Secret,  Andrew Isler and Mark Adamczyk and myself  recap our recent trip to Washington, D.C., for a highly anticipated meeting with Congresswoman Anna Paulina Luna. After a chaotic day of travel, we secured nearly an hour with the Congresswoman and her staff to discuss the ongoing issues and lack of compliance surrounding the 1992 JFK Records Act.

The conversation highlig...