Lawyers: The Ruby Scorecard

It was getting hard to tell Jack Ruby’s lawyers without a scorecard. Only a few days after Melvin Belli was fired, Houston’s wealthy Criminal Lawyer Percy Foreman, hired to replace Belli, got annoyed with family kibitzers and quit. To replace Foreman, Ruby’s brothers and sister hired Professor Hubert Winston Smith, 56, head of the University of Texas law school’s Law-Science Institute. Smith said he would charge no fee. His first pronouncement was that he would ask the court to permit a new series of medical and mental tests on Jack Ruby.

But even as Smith took over, any notion that Belli was finally finished with Jack Ruby and the City of Dallas was quickly dispelled. Word got out that during the trial an organization named B.T.G. Inc. Productions had inconspicuously shot some four hours of movie footage, showing Belli and his teammates preparing the defense. A joint enterprise of Belli, Texas Lawyer Joe Tonahill and California Film Pro ducer Sam Gallu, B.T.G. plans to turn the footage into a documentary movie.

Gallu, said Belli, is “working like a pregnant beaver” editing the film. “I’ve got some awfully goddam good stuff,” said Gallu. “There’s the hotel suite where the defense lawyers stayed. It became a Kafka room. It was a weird kind of a thing, like you’re in some body’s mind. I got Belli naked in a steam bath, Belli and Tonahill looking out of the window where the shot was fired, Judge Brown talking during a re cess. Once when the court was not in session, I put the camera in the judge’s chair — the camera is the judge.”

B.T.G. expects the completed film to be exhibited in movie houses. Further more, Belli thinks the movie ought to be shown in law schools as an example of how to prepare a defense.