American Lightning: Terror, Mystery, the Birth of Hollywood, and the Crime of the Century (23 page)

As soon as the
Limited
pulled into the Dodge City station, Billy hurried from the train. He looked around the platform, but there was no sign of J.J. McNamara. Then he saw Biddinger. Followed by McNamara. He was handcuffed, but he walked with his head held high. The other officer followed, a rifle cradled in his arms. It was with an immense feeling of relief that Billy joined the small procession and, taking the lead, directed his prisoner up the steps and into the train.

TWENTY-NINE

______________________

A
S THE
LIMITED
sped to California, the arrest of the three men and McManigal’s confession were announced in banner headlines. The nation was startled.

The
Los Angeles Times
’s front page declared: “Dynamiters of the Times Building Caught. Crimes Traced Directly to High Union Officials. Red-Handed Union Chiefs Implicated in Conspiracy.” An editorial congratulated “Detective Burns who has unearthed the most tremendous criminal conspiracy in the history of America.”

Eugene Debs rushed to issue a statement: “Sound the alarm to the working class! There is to be a repetition of the Moyer-Haywood-Pettibone outrage upon the labor movement. The secret arrest of John McNamara, by a corporation detective agency, has all the earmarks of another conspiracy to fasten the crime of murder on the labor union officials to discredit and destroy organized labor in the United States.”

Samuel Gompers, head of the conservative American Federation of Labor, sent a telegram to his executive committee: “We know that these men have been arrested on charges that are absolutely false. I have investigated the whole case. Burns has lied!”

The announcement of the arrests had little effect on people’s notions of the truth. Facts, an excited America discovered, could be twisted and wedged to fit into any preconceived theory, the intrigue of any conspiracy.

On board the
Limited
the mood was tense. At each new town crowds gathered to catch a glimpse of the prisoners. They were charged with committing the crime of the century—but notoriety, the nation also discovered, carried its own intractable celebrity. In other circumstances Billy would have appreciated the attention, but now he could only worry. He scanned the faces lining the tracks looking for a sign, a telltale gesture, a warning that a bomb was about to be hurled, the train suddenly stormed.

As a precaution, McManigal and Jim were kept in one car, J.J. in another. The brothers, in fact, did not even know that they were traveling on the same train.

The trip seemed to calm J.J. His dress remained that of a gentlemen—black derby, brown suit, black shoes, wing collar, and a wellpressed white shirt. Guy Biddinger remained at his side, and despite all his instincts, his admiration for the union man grew throughout the journey. “He was a model prisoner,” Biddinger said. “And it would have been hard to find a better companion.”

Billy, mindful both of the nation’s curiosity about the accused and of the opportunity to get his own name into the papers, had shrewdly agreed to allow one reporter onto the
Limited.
The
Los Angeles Examiner
’s John Alexander Gray was picked, and he turned out candid portraits, compelling in their contrasts, of the two brothers.

J.J., the reporter wrote about the union official, “may be the most amazing criminal of the age, or a just and unjustly accused man. He has a splendid, upright physique and a clarity of complexion that indicate perfect health and habits that know no excess.”

He found the younger brother, Jim, an entirely different and far less attractive sort. He was gaunt, a dingy, anemic-looking man whose fingertips were singed yellow by cigarette smoke. His eyes glared at his interviewer with “a light of amusement mixed with insolence.” Only twenty-nine, he appeared downtrodden, and at least a hard-lived decade older.

Throughout the interview Jim lay stretched out on his seat, a deck of cards nearby. He had been playing solitaire.

The reporter asked, “Can you beat it?”

“No,” said Jim flatly. “It’s been my experience that you can’t beat any game in this life.”

For three days the train continued west, crossing America. Billy stared out the window as the
Limited
’s big iron wheels clanked against tracks laid over prairies, deserts, and mountain passes. At night, unable to sleep, still on guard, Billy imagined the locomotive’s front light shining into the darkness like a beacon lighting the way to the Pacific. He felt deep in his heart that he was a passenger on a remarkable journey. With the arrival of the
Limited
in California, a new chapter in the nation’s history would be written. His manhunt had put an end to the terrorists’ war.

But even as the train rumbled into California, the detective was still careful. Precautions, he insisted, must be observed. It had been announced that the train would arrive in Los Angeles with the prisoners at three o’clock on the afternoon of April 25. But all along Billy had been making other plans.

When the
Limited
stopped at Pasadena at 2:05, two of Billy’s men hurried McManigal to a car parked by the station. Moments later guards emerged with Jim McNamara. Another car was waiting, but they did not rush him. Oddly, they seemed to be taking their time. It was as if they were parading him along the station platform.

Which was precisely what Billy had instructed. Seated in a sheriff’s car parked adjacent to the platform was a woman, her face covered by a long veil. As an unsuspecting Jim approached, she abruptly lifted her veil. She took a long look at the prisoner.

“That’s Bryce!” shouted Lena Ingersoll. She was the owner of the San Francisco boardinghouse where, using the alias J. B. Bryce, Jim had finalized the plans with Caplan and Schmitty.

Instinctively Jim turned when he heard her shout. His recognition was immediate, too. He covered his face with his hands and hurried to the car that would take him to Los Angeles.

J.J., with little formal ceremony or even precaution, came off the train a stop later accompanied by Raymond. Reporter John Gray was an awed witness: “His manner was so dignified and impressive that the officers were at pain to assure him that the exigencies of the situation compelled the sort of treatment they were giving him. Nothing more strange, more amazing has ever been known since there was law and the ability of the law to conjure force to execute its dictates, for here, practically unguarded and treated with all courtesy, was the man accused of having told his brother to bomb the Los Angeles
Times.
”

By five that afternoon, all three of the men were in separate cells in the Los Angeles County Jail.

PART III

______________________

“THE LAST BIG FIGHT”

THIRTY

______________________

B
ILLY’S BOLD PLAN
had worked. He had succeeded in making his way across the country without incident. He had feared writs and ambushes, but now his three prisoners were safely locked in the Los Angeles County Jail. His job was finished. His pride of accomplishment swelled further when he found waiting for him at the Alexandria Hotel a wire from former president Theodore Roosevelt:
ALL GOOD AMERICAN CITIZENS FEEL THAT THEY OWE YOU A DEBT OF GRATITUDE FOR YOUR SIGNAL SERVICE TO AMERICAN CITIZENSHIP
. He went to his room looking forward to a night’s sleep in a comfortable bed rather than a narrow, rolling train berth and, in the new morning, a leisurely breakfast in the Alex’s dining room. It would take a few days to tie up the bureaucratic loose ends necessary to collect the much-needed reward money; then he’d be on his way back to Chicago. And on to his next investigation.

But the reward money was not forthcoming, and even his victory was short-lived. In the clutter of the days that followed, any sense of having come to the conclusion of his efforts, any lightness of heart, any swagger, quickly vanished. Billy realized that the case had entered a new, more combative stage. The arrests had not resolved the mystery but rather had provided two living symbols to polarize the nation further; doubts and suspicions about the circumstances that had led to the apprehension of the McNamara brothers now dueled with the incriminating logic of their guilt. A courtroom in Los Angeles would be the republic’s next—possibly final—battleground in the fierce war between labor and capital.

And after all the front-page headlines, the dramatic accounts of his uncovering caches of dynamite and the furtive train journey, Billy, too, had become a symbol. When Ortie McManigal’s confession was published in a pamphlet as a first-person account of “the national dynamite plot,” it was a stern photograph of Billy, not the narrator, that greeted the readers. The detective had become as famous as the mystery he had solved.

For labor and its supporters, Billy replaced Otis as the personification of the enemy. They had no doubts about why he had been hired. The cocky, publicity-seeking detective was the unscrupulous agent of the deep-pocketed capitalists. In the Haywood case, the ruthless Pinkertons had manufactured evidence and kidnapped union officials. Four years later the McNamaras were the unfortunate victims of another corrupt private detective, another bought-and-paid-for thug willing to do whatever his masters ordered to help destroy the labor movement.

For Billy, prideful and vain, the personal attacks were a torment. He could not find the coldbloodedness to ignore the impugning of his honor, to dismiss the wild slurs as simply a strategy. He had spent seven difficult months building his case, painstakingly collecting his evidence. It had been a time of hardship and sacrifice. How could anyone believe that the results
—his triumph—
were a fabrication? Each new accusation about his conduct served only to solidify his determination to see the McNamaras hanged. Their execution would be his own vindication. He made up his mind to do whatever was necessary to ensure their convictions. A battler, Billy closed his heavy fists, dropped his shoulders, and prepared to fight back.

The reality, he silently complained, was that by both instinct and principle, he had always been sympathetic to organized labor. The immigrant tailor’s son still believed that unions offered workers their best chance to achieve a fair wage. He was a detective for hire, but he was no toady of the rich and powerful. Hadn’t he proved that in the Oregon land graft investigation and in the San Francisco corruption cases? Each new charge that he was antilabor was mystifying and tapped at the same sore spot. His resentment hardened.

The threats were another matter: a real danger. Bags of letters, signed and anonymous, postmarked from cities all over the country, arrived at his office in the months after the arrests. Most contained pledges to kill the man who had framed the McNamaras. He tried to ignore them, but then the police discovered a plot to place a suitcase filled with nitro in the room next to his at the Alex. And when Billy read that labor leaders in San Francisco routinely told crowds that “only the withdrawal of Burns could save the accused men,” he had no doubts. Their words might just as well have been a command: Get rid of Burns. He knew he had to respond.

Billy sent his men to San Francisco to deliver a message to the union heads:
If anything happens to Burns, then the same thing will happen to you.

“But my God!” protested one of the union men. “Some crank might kill him! I would not be responsible.”

When this response was reported to Billy, he hesitated for only a moment. Then he sent his operative back to San Francisco with another message.

“Mr. Burns asks me to tell you,” the detective matter-of-factly explained, “that if he is killed by a crank, another crank will kill you.”

After that, Billy noted with a measure of relief, there was no more fiery talk at rallies about the benefits of the detective’s sudden “withdrawal” from the case.

Still, Billy understood that he couldn’t be too careful. As a precaution, he had duplicates made of all the McNamara files, all the investigators’ surveillance and evidence reports, and he arranged for them to be delivered in secret to an address in Pueblo, Colorado. Frank Heney, the prosecutor who had been shot in the San Francisco courtroom, had retired to a ranch in that mountain town. Heney was instructed that should Billy die, whether by assassination or as the result of an accident or an illness, he was immediately to bring the files to the Los Angeles district attorney. The case against the McNamaras, Billy made certain, would continue even if he was no longer alive.

So in the months before trial Billy labored on.With a measure of resignation, he came to accept that only “the detective story of fiction would end with the arrests of the guilty men in the case.” Instead, Billy entered what was, he would decide, “the hardest stretch.”

It was a busy time. Billy was determined to bolster the prosecutors’ case against the McNamaras. And he also had a new agenda. McManigal’s confession had left him stunned. He had not previously grasped either the number or the scope of the dynamite attacks. This was not, he now understood, a “one-man conspiracy.” There had been more than one hundred bombings at nonunion sites on both coasts and throughout the Midwest. It was inconceivable that J.J. McNamara could have single-handedly conceived, financed, and orchestrated such a long-running nationwide campaign. Union officials from across the country had undoubtedly suggested targets, and then given their approval to the strategy of terror. To Billy’s mind, they were all culpable. They all must be brought to justice. A search warrant was secured, and his operatives swarmed through the McNamara house on Quarry Street in Cincinnati. In a dresser drawer a pile of letters was discovered. Written by J.J. to his brother Jim, they were handwritten orders to attack sites throughout the nation. Many of the letters also contained thinly veiled references to the union’s executive committee. Billy saw this as proof the union officials were intricately involved in the plot. The union’s record books taken on the night of the arrests also confirmed their complicity: The executive committee had approved J.J.’s receiving a thousand dollars each month to finance the bombing campaign.