American Lightning

by Howard Blum

  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

  ______________________

  IN 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 was
n’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.

  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

  ______________________

  THE 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.