American Lightning: Terror, Mystery, the Birth of Hollywood, and the Crime of the Century (18 page)

In the first decade of the century, movies had become integrated into American life, a natural part of the national consciousness. They were “the academy of the working man,” a writer observed in 1911. Films offered escape, entertainment, and education. By 1920 half the country’s population would be going to movie shows at least once a week.

At that moment, as the two men sat in a Toledo theater, D.W. was working in Los Angeles. He had a new studio on a two-and-a-half-acre lot on Georgia Street and Pico Boulevard. He was earning a remarkable $3,000 a week, an artist proud of his material success and his growing recognition. But even D.W. hadn’t yet realized the power in the shadowy mix of beauty and intellect that he had tapped into, and how it would change the way Americans looked at and lived in the world.

Just before five the next morning in Toledo, Raymond arrived to take charge. On his father’s instructions, he was accompanied by two Chicago police detective sergeants. The Chicago cops had often worked with the agency in the past; they provided muscle and would, Billy knew from experience, follow Raymond’s orders. And while the plan was to avoid arrests, if it became necessary the presence of the officers would make it official.

Raymond had all the exits of the Meyerhof covered, and from a third-floor room in an adjacent hotel his men had a perfect view into the lobby. It would be impossible for the subjects to leave unobserved. He had made that promise to his father, and he was determined to honor it.

At 8:45 that morning the two men wandered down from their rooms and found rockers in the lobby. They sat and talked, their chairs rocking back and forth in a leisurely rhythm. From his post across the street, Raymond studied the two men and felt that his father had exaggerated the danger. McManigal and McNamara acted as if they did not have a single pressing concern. Raymond could imagine the two friends sitting in their rockers, chatting the day away aimlessly. But by ten o’clock they were once again on the move.

They took a train from the Union Depot. McManigal, the watchers noted, had his suitcase. And now McNamara had a valise, too; apparently he had checked it the day before at the station. They arrived in Detroit at 12:52 and registered at the Oxford Hotel, this time using the aliases of Foster and Caldwell.

They did not go immediately up to their rooms. Instead, they left their suitcases with the bellman.

At that moment Raymond knew: They did not want the cases in their rooms, close to them. Because the suitcases contained bombs.

His father’s instructions were to avoid arrests if possible. The plan was to let the plotters move forward and implicate themselves more deeply. But Raymond was convinced that two suitcases packed with dynamite were now stored in the lobby of a crowded downtown Detroit hotel. If they exploded—whether by accident or design, the cause did not matter—the destruction would be enormous. And if McManigal and McNamara escaped in the confusion, they might never be caught.

Raymond’s mind was set. The two men were at the elevator about to go to their rooms. He signaled to Detective Sergeants Biddinger and Reed. “Let’s take ’em down,” he ordered.

Raymond had his revolver out as he crossed the lobby. The two men’s backs were to him; they stood waiting for the elevator to descend. In a single fluid motion, Raymond jammed the revolver into McManigal’s back and at the same time used his free hand to twist him around. The two Chicago officers grabbed McNamara.

“You’re under arrest!” Raymond announced as handcuffs were tightened around the two men.

“What for?” Jim McNamara demanded with indignation.

Raymond paused before answering. “Safe blowing. You two pulled a job in Chicago last Saturday night,” he lied.

TWENTY-SIX

______________________

I
N BILLY’S WORLD
, there was no rejoicing. Instead, with the arrests a sense of resignation descended. He did not doubt that Raymond had acted prudently. In fact, when the Detroit police opened the two men’s suitcases, they found, along with several guns, twelve clock devices similar to the one that had been recovered in Los Angeles. Nevertheless, Billy could not help but be disappointed that his case had not been allowed to develop further. He now would have to arrest J.J. McNamara before the union leader learned that his brother and McManigal had been grabbed. If Billy delayed, the danger was that J.J. would start destroying evidence or even perhaps go to ground.

Still, when he reviewed the case against J.J., Billy had to concede it came up short. He was certain he had solved “the crime of the century,” but he also questioned whether a jury could agree without a reasonable doubt. He blamed himself. If only he had found Caplan and Schmitty. If only he had gotten the two anarchists to confess. He needed eyewitness testimony against J.J. and his union cohorts. It wasn’t enough to theorize that they had given the orders, selected the targets, and financed the operation. He needed proof. As soon as the arrests in Detroit became known, a swarm of canny union lawyers would take charge of the defense. They’d make sure that no one would talk. There’d be no possibility of any confessions.

Unless—Billy had a sudden idea.

He would keep the arrests secret. It was Raymond’s reluctance to reveal to McManigal and McNamara the true reason for their being picked up that inspired Billy’s strategy. The subjects were convinced they were being charged with a safe job, and that the arresting officers believed their names were Foster and Caldwell. They did not know their suitcases had been opened and inventoried. If any inquisitive reporters got hold of the story, they’d write a small article about two fleeing Chicago safecrackers—yeggmen, in common parlance—doggedly tracked down by detectives who had trailed them from the Windy City to Detroit.

As long as the L.A. bombing could not be connected to the arrests of Foster and Caldwell, he had no reason, Billy decided, to rush to arrest J.J. He could continue to work in his methodical, quiet way, hoping to move the case forward on several fronts.

There remained, he told himself, “three vastly important things to be accomplished.” First, and most pressing, he would try to obtain a confession from Ortie McManigal; Jim McNamara, he felt, would never cooperate. Second, he’d finally inform Mayor Alexander, get the Los Angeles authorities to issue writs of extradition, and no less essential, keep the existence of the legal papers a secret. And three, he’d need to arrest J.J. McNamara and get him and the two others swiftly to the coast—before any of the states on the way to California could issue habeas corpus writs challenging the extradition.

Of course, Billy understood, to accomplish his three goals, he’d need to manipulate and possibly even disregard habeas corpus, kidnapping, and coercion statutes. The right of habeas corpus was clear: The court had to establish the right to hold a prisoner, or else he must be released from custody. But Billy felt he could act with his own natural authority. His interpretation of the law was not so much broad as it was self-serving: as long as his actions ultimately facilitated justice
—his
concept of justice—then it was proper. The letter of the law was an irrelevance, a nuisance. His only responsibility was to bring to trial the three men whose actions he was certain had resulted in twenty-one deaths.

Secrecy was vital. Billy was determined, as he put it, “not to show my hand.” Following his instructions, the Detroit police charged the two men with safecracking. The suspects were told that if they’d sign waivers, they’d be sent back to Chicago to be arraigned. McManigal and McNamara quickly agreed; they didn’t want the Detroit police looking into their suitcases and realizing what they really were up to.

On the train, Raymond sat next to Jim McNamara. At first McNamara kept a careful, cautious silence, but as the train picked up speed, his defenses began to fall apart. It was as if the steady clacking of the wheels on the metal rails were also pounding against his confidence, breaking it down. He grew volatile and, as the train neared Chicago, desperate.

“You fellows don’t want me for safe blowing,” he erupted. “Why, I never cracked a safe in my life. You men are making a mistake.”

Raymond tried to draw him out, but McNamara refused to answer his questions. Finally he blurted: “You men have a price. How much do you want?”

McNamara offered $10,000. Then $20,000. And finally $30,000. All the officers had to do was take him and his friend off the train. “If you take me to Chicago it will be too late.” He wanted thirty-six hours to contact “the men higher up,” and the officers would get the money.

Raymond silently observed that Jim McNamara still hadn’t been told that he was going to be charged with the Los Angeles bombing. What, Raymond wondered, would he offer then?

_____

Billy was also busy. He sent a wire to Mayor Alexander in Los Angeles: “We have under arrest and hidden away here Bryce and John Doe . . . Have police department proceed immediately to Sacramento, get requisition papers on Illinois, and come here as quick as possible. We won’t let arrest be known here until officers arrive with the papers or they would spend a hundred thousand dollars on habeas corpus proceedings, and all sorts of trouble . . . It is of utmost importance you carry out this exactly as I suggest.”

By the time the telegram arrived in Los Angeles, the two prisoners had been hidden away. They were not taken to police headquarters or to the Cook County Jail. They were not allowed to contact lawyers. The Chicago district attorney’s office did not know about their arrest. In fact, they had not been formally charged with any crime. On Billy’s instructions, they had been taken to a house in the suburbs. It was the home of Detective William Reed, one of the Chicago officers sent to Detroit to participate in the arrests. It would be their jail until the Los Angeles extradition papers arrived and could be presented to a Chicago judge. The fact that they were being held in a secret prison without being formally charged with a crime did not concern Billy. The nation, he believed, was “fighting a war against terrorists” who were determined to destroy “the established form of government of this country.” The conflict “was masked under the cause of Labor,” but the true purpose of “the war with dynamite” was more fundamental. The terrorists wanted to destroy the Republic. To defend the nation, Billy refused to be bound by a squeamish, impractical interpretation of the law. He had no qualms about taking liberties with the Constitution. This was war. And he knew he was on the side of patriotism and justice.

Jim McNamara, however, was led into the house in the Chicago suburbs and quickly saw his predicament from another perspective. “I’ve been kidnapped,” he screamed.

_____

“History repeats itself,” Darrow was fond of saying. “That’s one of the things that’s wrong with history.” Four years earlier in the Bill Haywood murder trial, he had fought against the injustice of what he had called “political kidnappings.” Pinkerton detectives had grabbed three mine worker union officials—Haywood, Moyer, and Pettibone—at gunpoint in Colorado and then transported them to Idaho to stand trial. Darrow had been enraged. It wasn’t just that these three men’s constitutional rights had been violated. The state of Idaho, he argued, was establishing a dangerous precedent in allowing citizens to be kidnapped to stand trial by “partisan groups temporarily in charge of the state’s legal machinery.” Judge James F. Ailshie of the Idaho Supreme Court shot back that Darrow was “an enemy of the people.” In his decision, the judge wrote that “the fact that a wrong has been committed against a prisoner . . . can constitute no legal or just reason why he should not answer the charge against him when brought before the proper tribunal.”

Darrow saw the events differently. An improper arrest meant that a fair trial was impossible. A “kidnapping” poisoned the entire judicial process. He refused to give up and took the issue to the Supreme Court. The justices, however, voted eight to one that Idaho had acted properly. Justice McKenna, the lone dissenter, sided with Darrow. The Constitution, he agreed, granted every prisoner an irrevocable guarantee of habeas corpus. “But how is it,” the justice agonized, “when the law becomes the kidnaper, when the officers of the law . . . become the abductors?”

Darrow did not put much faith in confessions obtained by the police and private detectives. A confession had been central to the Haywood case, too. Harry Orchard had sworn that the three union men had hired him to murder former governor Frank Steunenberg. After Darrow’s probing and persistent attack, the jury had seen through Orchard.

But Darrow was also dismissive of even the most heartfelt confessions. It wasn’t simply that, as his courtroom experiences had taught him, “the truth” was often deliberately coerced by unscrupulous police or shaped by prosecutors eager for a conviction. Rather, Darrow believed that in criminal cases concepts such as “guilt” and “truth” were imperfect moralistic simplifications of the actual reasons motivating the actions of men. In his assessment, “man is a product of heredity and environment,” and as a “biological machine,” his actions are often beyond both his self-knowledge and his self-control. Darrow was by nature a cynic, but he could also be compassionate, a man filled with a deep-hearted sympathy for the foibles of his fellow man. How, Darrow ardently challenged, can someone confess his guilt to a crime he could not prevent himself from committing?

But of course, Darrow did not know at the time that William J. Burns had, as the detective would later boast, “Jim McNamara and McManigal safely tucked away in a corner of Chicago’s suburbs.” Anyway, the lawyer was busy. History might repeat itself, but Darrow had pragmatically moved on. At the time of the arrests, he was in Kankakee, Illinois, defending a manufacturing company accused of fraud.

Billy, meanwhile, focused his attention on Ortie McManigal. The detective had identified him as the weakest link in the chain of conspirators. McManigal was not a committed union man; his allegiance to the McNamaras wouldn’t run deep. And he had a wife and children. He certainly had the most to lose. But before Billy confronted him, he decided the time had come to play one of the cards he had been holding.