Mr. Griffin. So, it is your suggestion that this kind of talk had something to do with it?
Mr. Rossi. People had a fixed idea in their mind about this—that this was all planned, premeditated, and communistic inspired.
After the border was opened between Mexico and the United States, when I crossed over to the Mexican side at Matamoris, I know one or two of the merchants there and in discussing the fact or the incident with this particular merchant, I told him that I knew Jack and I didn’t think that it was Communist inspired or through Cuba or anything and I spoke to him for about 20 minutes, generally speaking, but I could not make that man believe it. The man’s comments to me were, “I don’t care if you slept with the man or anything, as far as I am concerned, I know this was all brought about through Cuba and the Communists and everything.”
He says, “You might know the man, but you may not know him close enough. He may have been a Communist all of his life.”
I says, “Well, he could have been, but just from what I know and when I knew him, I never would have suspected or even thought of it and I still don’t.”
Now, in the newspapers here locally, when I came back to Dallas, there was quite a bit of feeling of animosity about Jack Ruby, so I never made any comments to anybody about my knowing anything or knowing him personally. In other words, I just kept it to myself, and when the trial was going on, I could have gone ahead and offered some testimony on Ruby’s behalf, or on just the general behalf of what I knew, but I stayed away, then, because just as Judge Sarah Hughes said, there is a lot more behind all of this and Dallas was guilty of part of it, but that I didn’t want to stick my neck out and have the people jumping on me, because it would have hurt me businesswise, and what have you.
Emotionally, they were all still quite upset and it wasn’t because of what Jack did. I believe it was because Jack had denied them the privilege of knowing just why Harvey Lee Oswald did it.
Mr. Griffin. Now, this, of course, is something that is not within our province to speculate about here.
Mr. Rossi. Right.
Mr. Griffin. Our job is to find out what the facts are, and as to who did what and where and when, and then try to arrive at some conclusions.