American Lightning: Terror, Mystery, the Birth of Hollywood, and the Crime of the Century (28 page)

Both these issues were the matches that ignited the Socialist campaign, and support spread like a raging fire throughout the city. Then in early August the Socialists further improved their chances for victory in the October primary. They selected Job Harriman as their mayoral candidate and Frank Wolfe for the city council.

With the selection of these highly visible members of the McNamara defense team, the Socialists tacitly articulated another issue in the election. They were clearly identifying their ticket with the fate of the McNamaras.

J.J. quickly spoke up from his jail cell, endorsing Harriman: “There is but one way for the working class to get justice. Elect its own representatives to office.” Bill Haywood came to the city and urged a wildly cheering crowd to elect Harriman, “candidate of the people.” Gompers spoke at an overflowing rally in the Shrine Auditorium. “Let your watchword be ‘Harriman and Labor,’ ” he shouted. A vote for socialism would be a vote to acquit the two brothers. In fact, after the election the trial would no doubt come to a halt. Mayor Job Harriman, it was generally agreed, would dismiss the charges against the McNamaras.

As the intensity of the campaign built, Frank Wolfe, Socialist candidate and trial publicist, had an idea. He had seen many of D.W. Griffith’s films, and the director’s stories about the poor and the workers had stayed strong in his mind. Then the release of
A Martyr to His Cause
gave his thoughts a further clarity and momentum. And now he conceived a plan that would encourage “workers to use your nickels as your weapon.”

“Socialist propagandists who have seen the maze of people flocking to the nickel pantomime shows and who have later gone into sparsely peopled halls to deliver the message of Socialism have asked me for the answer to the situation,” he would explain. “I think I have found it.”

Wolfe decided to “take Socialism before the people of the world on the rising tide of movie popularity.”

In September he joined with a group of promoters to open the Socialist Movie Theater on Fifth Street in downtown Los Angeles. It would show only films “depicting the real life and ideals of the working class.”

The theater was an immediate success. And as it turned out, it was only Wolfe’s first small step into the moving-picture business.

_____

On another front, although the trial and the election were both still months away, Darrow’s aggressive give-as-good-as-you-get strategy had already reaped one reward. On June 16 an Indianapolis grand jury indicted William J. Burns. The charge—kidnapping J.J. McNamara. Billy was furious as he scrambled to raise the money to cover the $10,000 bond. Then he took off to Europe on a business trip. With the arrest of the McNamaras, the detective had become an international celebrity. If there was an unsolvable mystery anywhere in the world, the cry went out, Get Burns!

So it happened that three weeks later Billy was in Paris. He spent the evening dining with an old friend, the journalist Lincoln Steffens. Steffens had years earlier filed several admiring reports on Billy’s successful work in the San Francisco corruption cases. But tonight in Paris all Steffens seemed to want to talk about was the McNamaras. He didn’t doubt their guilt, but at the same time he argued that Billy didn’t appreciate the circumstances that had prompted their actions. Billy listened politely, then told Steffens that he didn’t feel like arguing. Why ruin a delicious meal? If Steffens wanted, he could come by Billy’s hotel any afternoon this week when, without the distractions of food or bottles of wine, the detective would lay out all the condemning evidence against the two heartless brothers. Agreed, said Steffens, as the sommelier was summoned and another bottle ordered.

But that evening when Billy returned to his hotel, he found a telegram waiting for him. It was from Raymond. His son wrote that he had to return to Indianapolis immediately to deal with the kidnapping charge. If Billy didn’t, the $10,000 bond would be forfeited.

By the time Steffens came by the hotel later in the week, Billy had checked out. Steffens was sorry he had missed him, but he also suspected he would soon be seeing the detective again. His dinner with Billy had gotten him thinking. Steffens had made up his mind to come to Los Angeles. He would cover the trial of the McNamara brothers.

Mary Field was another journalist determined to report on the trial. She ignored all of Darrow’s harsh letters to stay in New York. Instead, she came to Los Angeles.

Darrow took Mary out to dinner the night she arrived. He sat across the table from her and reached for her hand. He said he was glad she had not paid any attention to his foolish advice. He was happy to see her.

I never expected you’d change your mind, she lied convincingly.

But she had a difficult time trying to act surprised when he insisted on walking her back to the apartment she had rented. Or when he asked if he could come upstairs for a cup of coffee.

THIRTY-SIX

______________________

T
HE DICTAPHONE HAD
, for all practical purposes, been invented in 1881. Alexander Graham Bell, his cousin, and another scientist had been working on the problem of recording telephone conversations. They came up with a device with a steel stylus that etched sounds as grooves onto a wax-coated rotating cylinder. It wasn’t until 1907, when Bell sold his patent to the American Graphophone Company, that the machine began to be widely manufactured for business recordings and the name
Dictaphone
was trademarked. But it was Billy who hit upon another use for the device. He invented the first “bug.”

Simply, quite effectively, and without any moral or legal quibbles, Billy had bugged the Los Angeles County Jail. A metal “ear”—the Dictaphone’s rudimentary, shell-shaped microphone—was hidden in the attorneys’ conference room. Every discussion by the McNamara defense team was picked up by this “ear,” then traveled through an artfully concealed, snaking rubber hose to the Dictaphone in the adjoining room. Within hours of Darrow’s jailhouse strategy sessions with his clients, a typed transcript of the entire discussion would be prepared for Billy’s attentive reading.

Another “ear” was planted in Ortie McManigal’s cell. This time a lengthier coil of rubber hose was required. It ran out the narrow window of the third-floor cell, then crawled up the side of the prison and into a fourth-floor room where it connected to the Dictaphone. It, too, worked perfectly. The machine recorded every word.

As the trial approached, both the prosecution and the defense were struggling to find an advantage. Theirs was a dirty little war. And it was fought on many fronts.

Ortie McManigal was the object of much intrigue. In Chicago, Billy had gotten the detailed confession that was central to the prosecution’s case. And in return for turning state’s evidence, McManigal had received a generous deal: He would escape prosecution. But Darrow was undeterred. If he could get McManigal to recant, to say that the confession had been coerced by Burns and his thugs, the case against the McNamaras would crumble. So with well-practiced cunning, Darrow went to work.

Billy had expected the attorney to try to undermine McManigal’s confession; that tactic, after all, had succeeded in the Haywood case. But still Billy was fooled. Emma McManigal, he was forced to admit, “trimmed us and trimmed her husband.”

Billy had previously used a fortune-teller to manipulate the unsuspecting and vulnerable Emma. But now it was Emma’s turn for mischief. With a cool nerve, she set in motion her plan to play the famous detective. First she went to the Burns office in Chicago and asked for a fifty-dollar ticket to Los Angeles so that she and her two children could visit her husband in jail. Burns readily agreed. His operative Malcolm MacLaren, who on Billy’s instructions had been visiting McManigal daily, had passed on reports about the “half crazy” letters that the prisoner was writing to his wife, desperate appeals to see her and the children. Billy reasoned that fifty dollars was a small sum to pay to win the gratitude of the McManigal family. But when Emma arrived on theWest Coast, she was met by Job Harriman, just as had been arranged from the start. When the two waiting Burns detectives approached, Emmapointedly refused to speak to them. She went directly to a rooming house owned by Harriman.

The next day she arrived at the jail and set to work on the second part of her—and Darrow’s—plan. “Mrs. McManigal,” Billy fumed, “managed to get into her husband’s cell with him alone and begin her task of winning him away from us.”

She did not hesitate. One small kiss of greeting for her husband, and then she announced, “I want you to sign a note to Clarence Darrow. Place yourself in the hands of the union’s attorneys.”

She followed this up with, first, the enticing carrot: The lawyer had promised to provide for the whole family for life. There would be a cash gift, and McManigal would also get a lucrative job once he was freed.

Then she swung the heavy stick: If he didn’t sign a note requesting that Darrow represent him, he’d never see her again.

McManigal, already driven to despair by his predicament, was now pushed into an even deeper hopelessness. Desperate, he attempted to explain what would happen if he were convicted.

Emma put her fingers in her ears.

“Please,” her husband begged.

“Shut up,” she ordered.

And finally, McManigal, sobbing, signed the note.

“Things looked very bad,” Billy conceded. “His wife, it seemed, had done the work she was sent to do.” But Billy, who loved a good fight, refused to give up. He ordered MacLaren to come down hard on the prisoner.

Mac, dour and officious, did. It no longer matters if you recant, the operative warned McManigal. Burns himself has gathered the evidence to substantiate every bombing. At the trial you’ll be the fall guy. The defense will put all the blame on you. You’ll hang.

Emma played tough, too. One day she would refuse to visit her husband; the next she would hurl threats about losing her and the children unless he cooperated with Darrow. She continued to reiterate how prosperous the family would become once the trial was over.

Of course, Billy knew what was said during her visits. The Dictaphone recorded every harsh word. And Billy used this intelligence to bolster the sting of Mac’s rebuttals.

The needling went on until McManigal, pulled in opposite directions by his two unyielding opponents, finally broke apart. Day after day he sat hunched in his cell moaning and sobbing.

In the end Billy won. McManigal would listen to MacLaren’s solemn warnings, and after each new lecture he could imagine himself being led one step closer to the gallows. McManigal signed a note repudiating the earlier one. He would not work with the defense.

The wife had failed. So, gamely, Darrow turned to the uncle. Throughout McManigal’s lonely childhood, his uncle, George Behm, was the one person who had offered him any affection. When Darrow discovered this, he quickly brought Behm across the continent to Los Angeles.

McManigal cheered up when he learned Uncle George was coming to visit him. For days he looked forward to the occasion. But the reunion, he quickly discovered, was only one more attempt to persuade him to change sides and sit with the defense. Feeling betrayed and exploited, McManigal sank even lower.

This was the point when the real torture began. It was “worse than any third degree,” said Billy with the authority of a man who had witnessed his share of brass-knuckled persuasion in the back rooms of police stations.

Uncle George took to parading along the street outside the jail. He knew his nephew, who liked to peer out his cell window, would be sure to see him. Pounding on the window’s wire screen, McManigal would shout hysterically, “Oh, Uncle George, here I am. Oh come up and see me, Uncle George.” Behm just kept on walking.

Some days Behm would have his nephew’s five-year-old son accompany him on this stroll. “Hey,” McManigal yelled, “Uncle George! Bring the boy over and let me see him.” Behm held the boy’s hand tight and walked on in stony silence.

Afterward Behm reported to Darrow, “I didn’t take the boy over. I didn’t pay any attention to the hollering.”

Darrow congratulated Behm on his resolve. “That’s right, goddammit,” said the attorney. “Tease him, and he will come across.”

But McManigal didn’t come across. MacLaren told Billy that “Ortie is in a very nervous condition bordering on collapse.” Despite the pressures, though, McManigal grasped the grim, intractable logic in Billy’s argument. If he turned and went with the defense, the jury’s verdict could be easily predicted: death by hanging.

In August both Emma and Uncle George realized the futility of any further attempts. Resigned and disconsolate, they took a train together back to Chicago.

But there were other witnesses for Darrow to have a go at, and he sent his men off in pursuit. Larry Sullivan, the former prizefighter, and John Harrington, the defense’s chief investigator, headed up to San Francisco. Their target: George Phillips, a clerk at the Giant Powder Works, who had sold Jim McNamara—using the alias Bryce—the dynamite for the
Times
bombing. Phillips had announced he was prepared to identify Jim in court.

The approach to Phillips was weirdly oblique. Using the cover name of Kelly, Sullivan went to Michael Gilmore, another clerk at Giant Powder, with a letter purportedly written by a priest. The letter, though, was succinct and compelling:

“My dear Michael:

“I wish you would assist this man in the information which he will need. Help him in every way you can. Mr. L. M. Kelly will explain when he sees you.”

Sullivan—posing as Kelly—gruffly provided the promised explanation. Gilmore must urge his friend Phillips to change his testimony in the McNamara case. The man who bought the dynamite, Phillips should suddenly remember, was someone else. A man missing an index finger.

If he shared this newly recalled memory at the trial, “Phillips can name his own price.” However, if he pointed to Jim, “he will not die a natural death.”