Lamar Hunt
Youngest son of H.L. Hunt's first family and founder of the American Football League, whose Dallas office Jack Ruby drove a job applicant to on November 21, 1963, and whose name was in Ruby's notebook.
Lamar Hunt (August 2, 1932 to December 13, 2006) was the youngest child of the Dallas oil producer H.L. Hunt and Lyda Bunker Hunt. He founded the American Football League in 1959 and owned the Kansas City Chiefs. On November 21, 1963, Jack Ruby drove a young woman to an appointment at his office, and the FBI afterward asked him why his name was in Ruby's notebook. He guaranteed the bank loan that rescued his brothers after the silver collapse of 1980 and was found liable with them in 1988 for conspiring to manipulate the silver market.123
Football
Hunt was born in El Dorado, Arkansas, and took a degree in geology at Southern Methodist University in 1956. A beneficiary with his brothers Bunker and Herbert of the trusts that held Placid Oil and Penrod Drilling, he was refused a National Football League franchise for Dallas and in August 1959 organized a rival league. His Dallas Texans moved to Kansas City in 1963. After General Douglas MacArthur's dismissal in 1951, he and Bunker financed the International Committee for the Defense of Christian Culture, the private intelligence network of MacArthur's former intelligence chief, General Charles Willoughby.14
November 21, 1963
Connie Trammell, a young Dallas woman, told the FBI that about November 20 she telephoned him to say she had an appointment with "Lamar Hunt, a prominent oil man in Dallas," hoping Ruby knew him. She had obtained Hunt's home number and then called his office. Ruby picked her up the next morning at her apartment on Live Oak Street and "drove her down to the office of Lamar Hunt. She was with Ruby from about 11:00 a.m. to 1:00 p.m., and it was on the day before the President was assassinated." Ruby, interviewed in the county jail on December 21 with Melvin Belli present, said that he had an appointment of his own about taxes with his lawyers, who had offices "in the Mercantile Securities Building, Dallas, the same building in which Lamar Hunt has his offices," that Trammell went up to see Hunt, and that he waited at the cigar stand in the lobby and left when she did not come down.25
The same day Eugene Hale Brading, a California parolee with convictions for mail fraud who had told his parole officer he would be in Dallas from November 21 to 25, went to the Hunt offices to see Lamar Hunt about oil business. Brading was detained the next afternoon in the Dal-Tex Building on Dealey Plaza under the name Jim Braden and released. He was staying at the Cabana Motel, which Ruby visited on the night of the 21st.6
An FBI agent interviewed Hunt on December 6, 1963. Hunt "advised that he could not think of any reason why his name would appear in Jack Ruby's personal address" book. The Warren Commission's chronology of Ruby's movements records the drive to Hunt's office and adds: "Hunt says he didn't see Ruby." Bunker Hunt had helped pay for the black-bordered advertisement attacking President Kennedy in the Dallas Morning News of November 22, a copy of which was found in Ruby's car.367
Silver
Hunt held a smaller silver position than his brothers in 1979 and 1980. With them he personally guaranteed the 1.1 billion dollar loan that a group of banks made to Placid Oil after the market broke on March 27, 1980.8 In August 1988 a federal jury in New York found Bunker, Herbert, and Lamar Hunt liable to the Peruvian minerals company Minpeco under the commodities and antitrust laws and for fraud, and found all but Lamar liable for racketeering. Judgment exceeded 132 million dollars. His brothers filed for bankruptcy, and he settled.9
Sources
- Gwynne, S.C. "Bunker Hunt," Texas Monthly, September 2001. https://www.texasmonthly.com/articles/bunker-hunt/ ↩
- Federal Bureau of Investigation, report of interview with Connie Trammell, December 19, 1963, file DL 44-1639, Warren Commission Exhibit 2270. ↩
- Federal Bureau of Investigation, report of interview with Lamar Hunt, December 6, 1963, file DL 44-1639, Warren Commission Exhibit 2400. ↩
- Scott, Peter Dale. Deep Politics and the Death of JFK. University of California Press, 1996, citing Cumings, Bruce. The Origins of the Korean War, vol. 2. Princeton University Press, 1990, p. 105. ↩
- Federal Bureau of Investigation, report of interview with Jack L. Ruby, December 21, 1963, file DL 44-1639, Warren Commission Hall (C. Ray) Exhibit No. 3. ↩
- Marrs, Jim. Crossfire: The Plot That Killed Kennedy. Carroll & Graf, 1989. ↩
- Warren Commission Exhibit 2344, chronology of Jack Ruby's movements, Hearings Before the President's Commission on the Assassination of President Kennedy, vol. 25. ↩
- McFadden, Robert D. "Nelson Bunker Hunt, 88, Oil Tycoon With a Texas-Size Presence, Dies," The New York Times, October 22, 2014. ↩
- Minpeco, S.A. v. Hunt, 718 F. Supp. 168 (S.D.N.Y. 1989). ↩
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