American Lightning: Terror, Mystery, the Birth of Hollywood, and the Crime of the Century (22 page)

Ortie McManigal had been an active participant in the nationwide terror-ist attacks. But after he was caught, he testified against the McNamaras. Here he’s explaining to jurors how “the machine” used in more than a hundred bombings, including that of the
Times
Building, worked.
Los Angeles Times Company Records, The Huntington Library, San Marino, CA

Lincoln Steffens, the muckraking journalist, arrived in Los Angeles championing an argument for “justifiable dynamiting.” Steffens hoped it would make him “the McNamara of my profession.” He’d “blow-up” the trial.
Courtesy Brown Brothers USA

Juror Robert Bain chases away an inquisitive reporter with a broom. But Bain hadn’t run off the member of the Darrow team who had offered him $4,000 to vote for acquittal. He took the money.
Los Angeles Times Company Records, The Huntington Library, San Marino, CA

“And this is the truth,” Jim McNamara wrote in his confession, “. . . I placed in Ink Alley, a portion of the
Times
Building, a suitcase containing sixteen sticks of 80 per cent dynamite . . .” When the brothers changed their pleas to “guilty,” pandemonium filled the courtroom.
Courtesy Archives & Rare Books Library, University of Cincinnati

Darrow was tried twice for bribing jurors in the McNamara case. He escaped conviction each time. “I know my life,” Darrow told the jury in an emo-tional summation at the first trial. “I know what I have done. My life has not been perfect. It has been human, too human.”
Herald Examiner Collection, Los Angeles Public Library

Frank Wolfe, a member of the McNamara defense team and a student of D.W.’s films, directed a commercially successful epic inspired by the case. Darrow, an instinctive actor, played himself—and stole the movie.
The Moving Picture World (20 September 1913: volume 17, issue 12)

Energized by the politics swirling around him, Griffith looked back into history and created his master-piece,
The Birth of a Nation. Birth
was history as melodrama, flawed, and yet as Woodrow Wilson observed, “written with lightning.”

And so for over an hour things came to a halt. After all the charging about, the sudden inactivity seemed strange, even a bit absurd. But no one left. The crowd remained in the cellar, milling about in the dim light as if during the intermission of a play. Impatiently, they waited for the next act.

Around two
A.M.
the superintendent returned with the warrant. On Billy’s command, the heavy vault doors were pried down. The officers stood back, and Billy stepped into the vault. He shined his flashlight about the deep dark space and at once felt as elated as any archaeologist discovering a priceless hidden tomb. Seven packages of dynamite lay on the shelves—nearly two hundred pounds of explosives. He also found percussion caps and large coils of fuses. Even more incriminating, there was a box of fourteen alarm clocks. The clocks were identical to the ones recovered in Los Angeles and the Peoria train yard.

But the detective was not finished. As the first light of dawn broke outside, Billy’s relentless search continued into the new day. The locksmith had arrived. Still accompanied by a tired but not weary crowd, Billy hurried upstairs to the union offices.

Only now there was a new problem. The locksmith refused to drill the safe. It was quite possible that there was dynamite inside. If the drill bit nudged a stick, the explosion would be devastating.

Billy turned to Ryan and demanded the combination.

“McNamara is the only one who knows it,” the union president said. “And you’ve carried him off, God knows where.”

But Billy would not walk away. The night had been filled with too many victories for him to let it end in a defeat. Beside, he still had his audience.

“Well, the safe’s got to come open,” he announced. “I guess I’ll have to tackle it myself.”

On his knees in front of the safe, Billy aligned the drill with the lock.

He paused for a moment and looked up to see if the spectators were safely hidden behind a shield of desks and bookcases.

Satisfied, he started. The grinding noise of the drill was the only sound in the room. Each moment was unique, a lifetime. Then Billy stopped. Had his nerve slipped? Or did he feel a tension in the drill? Had it touched something? Billy bit his mustache, and then with a new resolve, he continued.

At last he could hear the tumblers fall back. He rose to his feet. With a single emphatic tug, he opened the safe door.

A tall pile of ledgers was revealed.

Billy nodded, and police officers began to carry away the union books.

“Have we no rights?” Rappaport, the union lawyer shouted.

“Not under the circumstance,” Billy shot back.

The lawyer was enraged. He charged at Billy but was blocked by an indignant lawyer from the National Erectors’ Association who had been observing the night’s activities. Rappaport swung at him, and the other lawyer retaliated with a powerful roundhouse. The two lawyers were still going at it, the police trying with some difficulty to pull them apart, as Billy, taking advantage of the confusion, quietly left the union office.

Billy raced downstairs. Raymond had been waiting in a car outside the American Central Life Building, and as the sun came up, they drove quickly west. If all had gone according to his plan, earlier that morning at 1:45 J.J. McNamara and his armed guards had arrived in Terre Haute. They had boarded the
Pennsylvania Flyer.
In St. Louis, Billy had instructed the guards to lead McNamara off the train.

Let people see what you’re up to, the detective had told the guards. Make sure you breakfast in a very public spot. Then make a big production of buying tickets on the Missouri Pacific. Destination—Pueblo, Colorado. We want any union men who might have followed you to know where you’re heading.

At least, let ’em think they know, he had continued. They were to sneak back onto the
Pennsylvania Flyer
and get off at Holsington, Kansas. There’d be a car waiting. They’d take a quick ride over rutted dirt roads to Great Bend, Kansas, then a local train to Dodge City. They were to hole up in a hotel until the
California Limited
pulled into town. Then they’d dash on board—guns blazing, if necessary. Jim McNamara and Ortie McManigal, if Billy’s plan and luck held, would’ve gotten on in Joliet, Illinois. And Billy, too, would’ve caught up with the
Limited
as it crossed Missouri.

It was a complicated plan, filled with many details that could go wrong. A car could get a flat tire or even crash. A train could be delayed. And—Billy’s great fear—there could be an attack. Once the press published the news of McManigal’s confession, the union, he believed, would be determined to kill the rat. And they’d try at any cost to free the McNamaras. It was crucial, Billy believed, that the union not know the route his three prisoners would take to Los Angeles.

Now the plan was beyond Billy’s control. He had given the orders, and all he could do was hope they would be carried out. Raymond drove. Although exhausted to the point of despair, Billy was too tense to sleep. He wanted desperately to know where McManigal and the McNamara brothers were, but communication with his men was impossible. The frantic, high-speed ride could not go fast enough for Billy.

Finally, in Missouri, Raymond caught up with the
Limited.
Waving his derby like a madman, Billy flagged it down. On board Billy was greeted by his men. They led him to Jim McNamara and Ortie McManigal, both shackled and manacled. “This train will either be wrecked or blown up before we reach Los Angeles,” Jim snarled at the detective. “I have eluded my captors enough to get word to my friends to see that we do not get to the coast alive.”

Billy tried to ignore him. A small army of armed guards roamed the train. Nevertheless the detective could not help worrying that men with rifles would be ineffective if cars were attacked with dynamite. More distressing, he had still not heard from Guy Biddinger, the police officer in charge of transporting J.J. Had they arrived in Dodge City? Or had they been stopped?