Dave Yaras was born in
Chicago. As a young man he became friendly
with Jack
Ruby.
Yaras later worked as a hit man for Mafia boss Sam
Giancana. Yaras was also a close associate of Jimmy
Hoffa,
president
of the Teamsters Union and helped establish Teamster Local 320 in
Miami.
After the Second
World War Yaras worked for the Mafia in Cuba.
According to a federal narcotics officer, Yaras "ran a number
of gambling operations on the island". After the fall of Fulgencio
Batista, Yaras was the "Chicago mob's liaison to the Cuban
exile community".
Yaras, considered to be
the prime suspect in several gangland killings, was arrested 14 times
by the police. In 1947 he was arrested for the murder of James Ragen,
the national manager of the Continental Press, an organization that
was in conflict with Mafia leader, Carlos
Marcello.
After one witness was murdered and another disappeared, Yaras was
released and no charges were ever brought against him for the killing.
The night before the assassination
of President John
F. Kennedy,
Yaras telephoned another hit man, Barney Baker. A few days earlier,
Jack
Ruby also
called Baker. Yaras was interviewed by the Federal
Bureau of Investigation about these conversations but he refused
to give any information on the matter.
Dave Yaras was murdered
in 1974.
Open
Debate on the Kennedy Assassination
(1)
Peter
Dale Scott, Deep Politics and the Death of JFK (1993)
FBI documents
released in 1979 show other instances in which key information was
either altered before it reached the Warren Commission, or else
withheld altogether. For example, judging from Warren Commission
records, the FBI covered up Jack Ruby's connections to organized
crime. The Commission did not receive an important interview with
Luis Kutner, a Chicago lawyer who had just told the press (correctly)
about Ruby's connections to Chicago mobsters Lennie Patrick and
Dave Yaras. All the FBI transmitted was a meaningless follow-up
interview in which Kutner merely said he had no additional information.
Apparently
the FBI also failed to transmit a teletype revealing that Yaras,
a national hit man for the Chicago syndicate who had grown up with
Ruby, and who had been telephoned by one of Ruby's Teamster contacts
on the eve of the assassination, was about to attend a "hoodlum
meeting" of top East and West Coast syndicate representatives,
including some from the "family" of the former Havana
crime lord Santos Trafficante.
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