American Lightning: Terror, Mystery, the Birth of Hollywood, and the Crime of the Century (19 page)

Billy went to Madame Q, the fortune-teller, and rehearsed a new script he had written. “Tell Mrs. McManigal,” he directed, “that your crystal ball shows two men—brothers whose names begin with the letter M—who are in great trouble and who are going to be arrested one of these days. Get her to warn her husband not to trust these brothers. They are plotting against him and are going to throw all the blame on him when they are arrested.”

When the detective was satisfied with her performance, he left and contacted Raymond. Tonight, he ordered, McManigal would be allowed to phone his wife.

The next morning Billy arrived at the house in the Chicago suburbs.

Billy stared at Ortie McManigal. He did not speak. His gaze remained fixed and appraising for what must have seemed an eternity to McManigal. He faced, he would say, “a man of medium height, rather dark complexioned, powerfully built and a type of citizen most men would hesitate to anger.” But Billy had no intention of provoking McManigal’s temper. He wanted to scare him.

“I am not an officer of any kind,” Billy began. “Merely a private detective.” His tone was polite and conversational. “My name is William J. Burns. I suppose you know who I am.”

McManigal did not respond. He tried to be defiant.

Billy ignored the silence and continued. “We expect to put you on trial for murder in the first degree and try you for that,” he said.

McManigal betrayed no emotion. Quite possibly he believed the detective was bluffing. The authorities possessed nothing more tangible than suspicions. “You don’t know anything about me,” McManigal finally shot back.

“Why, I even know where you bought the shoes you’ve got on,” Billy said.

“Where?”

“At No. 117 State Street, Chicago. They are Walkover shoes, and you bought them on April eighth.”

All at once McManigal slouched low in his chair; it was as if he were actually deflating, confidence rushing out of him. Billy, however, was relentless.

“I can even tell you what your wife dreamed the night before you left home.”

McManigal studied the detective quizzically.

“She dreamed,” said Billy, “that the police were after you, that you had drawn your pistol, and that you had shot yourself.” He was repeating what Madame Q had told him, but he didn’t divulge his source. Instead he acted as if it were simply reasonable and natural that William J. Burns, the great detective, knew someone’s dreams.

Billy pulled a chair close to McManigal and sat opposite him. The two men were face to face. In his calm, businesslike way, Billy began to detail the case his men had built. He reviewed McManigal’s purchase of the dynamite used in the Peoria train yard. He went through the time McManigal had spent in the Wisconsin woods. He revealed that McManigal had been followed to the Orpheum Theater in Indianapolis and that his house on Sangamon Street was under constant surveillance. He let McManigal understand that the Burns men knew every move that he had made.

McManigal cradled his head in his hands. He was too defeated to fight back. But Billy was not finished. “Perhaps you feel,” Billy continued, “that because you did not accompany J.B. McNamara to Los Angeles, you are not responsible for his act?” With a lawyer’s ruthless precision, Billy outlined the conspiracy statute. “You will find that you were equally responsible,” he said with a certainty that was meant to leave no room for doubt in McManigal’s mind.

The hangman’s hemp noose might just as well have already been placed around McManigal’s neck. Yet Billy, full of Christian kindness, offered him a reprieve. If McManigal felt he wanted to right the wrong he had committed, the detective would be glad to hear his statement.

Without hesitation, McManigal responded. He would be willing to make a full confession.

Still, Billy had the instinct and the discipline to refuse to listen. “Don’t answer me offhand,” he admonished. “Think it over. It’s a serious matter and will be a serious matter to you.” Call my office, if you want to talk, he said.

Without another word, Billy rose from his chair and left the room. Returning to his office in Chicago, he wondered if he had overplayed his hand. Billy wanted McManigal to live with the fear that he had planted. He wanted this fear to spread like a virus into the pores of McManigal’s entire being. He wanted McManigal to be too desperate, too afraid, to tell anything but the whole and complete story.

But an hour passed, and McManigal had not called. Billy felt like a gambler who had recklessly wagered all his chips on a single roll of the wheel and lost. At last, a telephone message was brought to him: “McManigal wants to see you, and it’s very urgent.”

Letting the wheel spin again, risking all his hard-fought winnings, Billy ignored the call. With a calm that was all disguise, he waited in his crowded office until three similar messages were received. Then satisfied at last, accompanied by a stenographer, he returned full of confidence to the house in the suburbs.

TWENTY-SEVEN

______________________

T
HE THREE OF
them—McManigal, Billy, and the stenographer—sat around a table in the kitchen. They might have been friends sharing a pot of coffee. McManigal spoke with a sense of detachment that struck Billy as odd. He seemed to be talking about someone else. But as he went on, the detective realized McManigal
was
talking about another man. With this confession, his life as he had known it was over, and his future was uncertain.

“I was born thirty-seven years ago in Bloomsville, Ohio, near the town of Tiflin,” McManigal had begun as if telling a bedtime story. He went on to talk about his service in the Spanish-American War. But after this small sentimental preamble, he quickly got into the heart of the matter.

Nearly two years ago, when he was working on a construction job in Detroit, Herbert Hockin, a member of the executive board of the International Bridge and Structural Iron Workers, had recruited him. McManigal described the terms of the job as though it were a commonplace business transaction: He’d be paid seventy-five dollars to blow up an office building that was being constructed by a nonunion crew. McManigal carried out the assignment successfully and quickly began doing “dynamite jobs” at nonunion sites throughout the Midwest, often several in a single month. Then, in an unrelated matter, he got arrested for stealing tools.

After his release from jail in June 1910 Hockin came by his house to introduce him to a man who had “a new invention.” Jim McNamara had wired an alarm clock and battery together so that a circuit could be formed. When the alarm went off, McNamara proudly demonstrated, a spark traveled to the explosive cap, which ignited the dynamite.

A few days after this demonstration McManigal received a telegram instructing him to go to Indianapolis. There he met Jim’s brother, J.J., the union’s secretary-treasurer. It was J.J. McNamara, he learned and observed, who chose the targets and directed the operation. At this meeting, McManigal was given a raise to two hundred dollars per job and assigned a new target—the Peoria train yard. That was the first time McManigal had used Jim’s invention, “the machine, as he called it.” He had not participated in the
Los Angeles Times
job. Two anarchists, Caplan and Schmitty, had been recruited in San Francisco to help procure the dynamite and fabricate the bombs, but they never went to Los Angeles. Jim alone had planted that “machine” in the alleyway of the
Times
Building.

The deaths had not been anticipated; they were a shock and a surprise to everyone involved, McManigal explained. Still, the deaths did not put a halt to the operation. J.J. McNamara sent him to the West Coast, and on Christmas Day 1910 he planted the bomb that did $25,000 in damages to the anti-union Llewellyn Iron Works in Los Angeles. Throughout that winter (as his own operatives had been lurking around the Home Colony, Billy sourly noted), McManigal and McNamara had kept busy. They hit targets in the East and the Midwest. During the month of March alone the pair had set off explosions at nonunion sites in Springfield, Illinois; Milwaukee, Wisconsin; French Lick, Indiana; Omaha, Nebraska; and Columbus, Ohio.

Prodded by Billy’s questions, McManigal told an impressively detailed and convincing story. He revealed that Jim McNamara had hidden some “soup”—his shorthand for the 80 percent nitro—in a barn on the west side of Indianapolis. There was another reserve of “soup” in J.J. McNamara’s safe on the fifth floor of the American Central Life Building. Billy shuddered at the thought of a large quantity of dynamite stored in downtown Indianapolis. But what truly amazed him was the size and scope of the operation McManigal had detailed. Between the summer of 1905 and McManigal’s arrest in Detroit, the union had planted, he estimated, more than one hundred bombs. Billy realized that his men would have to investigate each explosion. He would have to build cases against all the union officials involved. It had been, a stunned Billy now understood for the first time, an all-out war. Between three and four hundred quarts of nitroglycerin and more than two thousand pounds of dynamite had been used. The damage had run to well over one million dollars. And twenty-one lives.

McManigal was neither a deep thinker nor a political person, but he had picked up enough from J.J. and the other union officials to offer up a defense for what he had done. The steel magnates, he lectured, had set up the National Erectors’ Association (NEA) in 1905 to destroy the union. The NEA insisted that only scabs working for cheap wages be hired for construction projects. The union men, who demanded “a fair day’s pay for a fair day’s work,” were turned away at job sites, unable to feed and clothe their families. They were helpless against the wealth and greed of the capitalists. Morally complacent police dispersed their picket lines. Goon squads of private detectives attacked the protesters. In desperation, the union resorted to terror. The intention was to strike an intimidating blow, to destroy property. It was never to cause physical harm. Terror was a political weapon, a symbol of both the union’s frustration and its refusal to yield. Dynamite was the only means the workingman had to fight back against the powerful forces determined to deprive him of his fair, God-given due—the right to work for a decent wage.

Billy heard him out politely, and then moved on. He did not argue, but McManigal’s view of the world struck him as too pat and his rationalizations too easy. For the detective, all the political jargon and catechisms could not hold up against a final judgment that was both practical and moral. Billy did not see how killing twenty-one innocent people would help anyone’s cause.

McManigal’s confession went on for hours, and by the time it was over, Billy felt as if he had joined him on a long, exhausting journey. But Billy also realized that he had reached the end of his own personal mission. It had started six months ago, when he had stood on a street in Los Angeles and looked at the still-smoldering rubble of the
Times
Building. It had taken him to the San Francisco docks, the northwest woods, a Wisconsin camp, an Indianapolis office building, and finally to this kitchen table in the Chicago suburbs. J.J.’s arrest and the task of getting the three conspirators to Los Angeles were still ahead, but Billy at this moment couldn’t help looking at all that remained with a sense of anticlimax. He had his confession. Billy Burns had solved the crime of the century.

In the days that followed, McManigal and McNamara remained hidden away while Billy waited with increasing impatience for the extradition writs from Los Angeles. He tried to convince himself that the delay was unimportant; after all, J.J. still did not know that his brother had been arrested for his role in the
Times
explosion. And the union leader certainly had no idea about McManigal’s confession. But Billy’s artificial calm began to break apart after the Associated Press article appeared.

James Sullivan and Ortie McManigal, the AP reported, had been arrested in Detroit on charges of safe blowing and had then been taken to Chicago. It was only a small story, and fortunately the reporter had not known that “Sullivan” was an alias. Still, it was likely that J.J. McNamara had read the piece with alarm. The union leader had to fear that McManigal would panic and try to work out a deal with the authorities. It wasn’t hard for Billy to imagine J.J. deciding to flee while he still had the opportunity. Perhaps, Billy considered, he should forget about the extradition papers. A delay would be foolish. He should make the arrest immediately. But even as he debated, Billy knew that without the proper legal authorization to move the prisoners from Illinois, a shrewd union lawyer could get the entire case dismissed. So, always resourceful, he came up with a new plan—and a new role to play. He rehearsed this new script in his mind and then picked up the phone and called Emma McManigal, Ortie’s wife.

“You don’t know me,” Billy said into the receiver in what he hoped was a suitably gruff, tough guy’s voice. “But I have just received a letter from a friend of mine in Detroit.”

“Who are you?” Emma demanded.

“I do not care to give my name, but I will read you this letter, and perhaps that will enlighten you,” he answered with a sudden formality. “I’m sure it’s Greek to me. I don’t know anything about it.”

“Very well.”

“ ‘Dear Jack,’ ” he pretended to read. “ ‘Immediately on receipt of this letter, call up and tell the woman there that her husband and his friend were arrested in Detroit for safe blowing. As nothing could be proved, they were discharged and they are now in Windsor, Canada.’ ”

“My God, but I’m so glad to hear that. That’s splendid news.”

“Now listen to the rest of it,” Billy interrupted. “ ‘Tell her to go to a friend of theirs.’ Now it doesn’t say who the friend is.”

“Oh, that’s all right. I know who it is.”

Billy hid his excitement and continued: “ ‘Go to a friend of theirs and tell him to give her five hundred dollars, and for her then to return home and await a further message from her husband.’ Do you understand that?”