I never knew all these things existed that you have to hire a special investigator, and he wants $10,000. And you have got to have an appeals lawyer like Burleson. That is how he came in. You have got to pay him.
Anyhow, he broke it down, roughly, over the phone he says it may run $50,000. So that is why I started asking any lawyer I talked to, like Bellows, “How much are you going to charge? I have got to know all these things. Give me an idea what we have to raise.”
Then I had all of this information more or less in the back of my mind, how much have we got to raise to get Jack a decent defense counsel. Then I go out to California. They meet me at the airport, Mike Shore and Woodfield. The first thing they say, “Have you got a lawyer yet?” I says, “No.”
I am still talking to Bellows. He is not out yet, you see. He is not out of the picture. Howard is still supposedly trying to contact somebody else that is good. I haven’t been to Dallas yet. In the meantime, as I said, he had contacted Foreman and Charlie Tessmer and Fred Erisman. They were out. Fred Brunner, he didn’t want to get in at the beginning. Those were considered some of the top criminal lawyers in the State of Texas.
So, anyhow, I meet him, they meet me at the plane in Los Angeles, get in the car. The first thing they ask is “Have you got a lawyer?” And I tell them what is going on. I am not sure yet. So they start talking to me about Belli, Melvin Belli. I had never heard of him. And they couldn’t understand it. But I never had. And I told them that, that I had never heard of him, and so they start telling me how great he was, you know, and all that stuff.
And they said, “By coincidence he is in town. He is in L.A.”
Mr. Griffin. How long before you arrived did Shore and Woodfield—how long before you arrived did they know you were coming? In other words, how many days elapsed between your conversation with Shore and your airplane trip out there?
Mr. Ruby. Gee, only a day or so, I think.
Mr. Griffin. Now, had Shore mentioned Belli to you on the telephone in that first conversation?
Mr. Ruby. I think so, but I am not sure—I think so, but I am not sure, because I think in our conversation in the car that we had makes me think they mentioned it before now, because the conversation went like this: I must have mentioned before I haven’t heard of Belli. He says, “I know I haven’t mentioned Belli and I don’t want to push him too much,” but then they started to tell me how good he is, so we must have talked about him on the phone. My remark was, “But Mike, I never heard of him.”