by Nathan Ward
After kicking through some bushes, Riddle learned about a burlap bag full of seven dead chickens found 150 feet west of where Rice had died. Examining the bag, he noticed a copper band on a hen’s leg from the coop of one of Rice’s neighbors.
The discovery of the dead chickens led the Pinkertons to theorize that the killers were a group of Italian laborers who had been out grabbing hens for the upcoming Festival of San Giuseppe when they were discovered by Rice, which led to a fatal struggle. Operatives took the burlap bag around to Italian dry goods stores to trace its ownership. But to some people, given Rice’s wealth and impressive collection of enemies, the chicken-thief theory seemed too random and squalid a death, especially to Rice’s family. When it came out at the inquest that another of his neighbors, John Hartness Brown, had appeared at the crime scene moments after the killing and unceremoniously helped get Rice’s body into the doctor’s car, he became a more fitting suspect.
Brown’s rivalry and business grievances with Rice were gossiped about, and so, two weeks after the crime, on the night of Saturday, August 20, 1910, Pinkerton operative J. V. O’Neill shadowed Brown, a thickset, red-faced man about forty-five years old and six feet tall, on an overnight train from Cleveland to Boston:
During the night I kept close watch on Mr. Brown’s berth in anticipation of his leaving the train. However, I did not see him until after the train had left Albany, N.Y. He then arose, made his toilet, and had his breakfast in the dining car … I interviewed the conductor with a view of learning for a certainty Mr. Brown’s destination.”10
At Springfield, Brown sent a telegram advising someone when he’d arrive in Boston. Operative O’Neill learned from the porter that Brown had begun a separate telegram announcing he’d be at the Hotel Touraine, and then substituted the other message. When the train stopped at Worcester, Massachusetts, two other Pinkertons boarded the car, instructed to look for a florid-faced man wearing spectacles and a split straw hat. O’Neill pointed out their subject, and operative C. B. Patterson started his watch:
The train arrived in Boston at 11.50 A.M. and Brown, carrying a black suit case, a black bag and a tan leather extension bag like a steamer trunk, boarded a taxicab at the South Station, rode to Hotel Touraine, and registered at 12.05 P.M.11
After ordering some liquor to be sent to Rockland, Maine, Brown returned to his hotel with another man in a straw hat and gray suit, then began a complex series of maneuvers, as if aware of his shadow, before leaving Boston on the night train to Rockland. The investigation moved back to the chicken thieves.
A murder weapon eventually was found in the Rice case—the softness of the recovered bullet had suggested a foreign make—and over the coming months, through constant shadowing of the suspects’ wives, two Cleveland men, Vincenzo Pelato and Pietro Tomasello, were traced to Brooklyn, New York, and Black Diamond, California.
Pelato broke first, placing the blame for the shooting on Tomasello, who was interrogated for eight hours in February 1912 in the Columbus, Ohio, penitentiary. Having countered the suspect’s every denial, at 5:00 P.M. Francis Dimaio, the arresting Pinkerton superintendent who spent two years working the Rice case, produced the big foreign pistol that had shot William Rice. “When was the last time you saw this?” Dimaio asked Tomasello, who collapsed into “hysterics,” according to witnesses, until the prison doctor had to calm him with a “sleeping potion.”
The men were convicted of robbery before murder charges could be brought. Whether Rice’s neighbor William Hartness Brown had hired the killers or Rice just died confronting a gang of chicken thieves was never proven in court.† (Brown survived public suspicion and moved to England.) But Dimaio cleared it up late in his life, nearing ninety when he wrote to his old agency colleagues about the real shooter:
[County Detective]Doran and I traced the [chicken] bag … to a feed store in East Cleveland who told us that the bag in question had been sent to the Sciarabba brothers … When we went to find them, I secured from an Italian informant, a neighbor of the Sciarabba brothers, that they were the actual murderers of Attorney Rice, but had left town and were then in Brazil.”12
One of the Sciarabbas had fired as Rice wrestled and traded knife slashes with his first attacker. But having no extradition treaty with Brazil, they prosecuted the two witnesses to the murder (Pelato and Tomasello), who were eventually released despite their confession.
Beyond the collective failure of all those hardworking Pinkertons, it is interesting how familiar such reports sound from the Hammett style they later inspired: hopping streetcars, watching houses, quizzing neighbors, blind turns taken that nevertheless seem to add momentum, investigative failures that lend realism. Before he could write his fictional Op stories, Hammett read and submitted scores of such memos on the job. “Thanks to my ability to write pleasing and convincing reports,” he said, “my reputation was always a little more than I deserved.”13
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* Shorter accounts often give this honor to Jesse James, but the authoritative biography by T. J. Stiles, Jesse James: Last Rebel of the Civil War, (New York: Vintage, 2005), gives it to the Youngers, pp. 255–56.
** Documents were returned if the client was a private individual, an archivist who worked on the collection told me. The stated company policy was to return documents to the client once the case was closed.
† When the Cleveland Plain Dealer revisited the infamous case in 1941, the writer offered the theory that Rice had been killed because he was changing his will, as well as a possibility that he’d been mistaken for neighbor Brown, the alleged true target of the Italian assassins.
Chapter III
$5,000 BLOOD MONEY
I dug out my card case and ran through the collection of credentials I had picked up here and there by one means or another. The red card was the one I wanted. It identified me as Henry F. Neill, A.B. seaman, member in good standing of the Industrial Workers of the World. There wasn’t a word of truth in it.
—RED HARVEST (1929)
It’s nearly four miles from the train depot, where Frank Little arrived in Butte, Montana in July 1917, up Main Street to the hilltop cemetery where he was buried less than three weeks later. Much of it is steep going, along an incline that builds to a heady view of the copper pits and disused headframes and the magnificence of the surrounding Rockies. It was dusty and hot in the summer of 1917, with a low haze hanging over the town and an escalating tension between Butte’s striking mine workers and the Anaconda Copper Mining Company. This tinderish state of affairs had caught Frank Little’s imagination.
Little entered town on crutches. A professional bringer of chaos, he wore his Stetson angled and proudly called himself a “half-breed.” At five foot ten, he had dark hair, one working eye, and a blunt face whose mouth curled up on one side in a defiant smirk. At thirty-eight, he was a well-worn and unlikable veteran of many campaigns for the International Workers of the World, for whom he’d been stomped, kidnapped, often jailed, and very nearly hanged. He’d recently broken his ankle in a car accident while agitating in Minnesota, then spent the last few weeks on a strike in Bisbee, Arizona, which ended with hundreds of workers being deported by cattle car into the New Mexican desert. He often boasted of his willingness to face a firing squad, and for inspiration, he carried a small pouch of ashes of the recently martyred Wobbly organizer Joe Hill.
Volatility long preceded Little’s arrival in Butte. A union hall had been dynamited and federal troops summoned there during labor violence three years before, and in early June 1917, the town saw draft riots, followed days later by the largest hard-rock mining disaster in American history. An underground fire began on June 8 in the Granite Mountain shaft and eventually left 163 men dead. Fifteen thousand surviving miners went out on strike as scores of Pinkerton and Brown detectives roamed the town, spying and intimidating on behalf of the mining company, along with other well-armed guards.1 One Pinkerton who later recalled wandering Butte that summer was a young operative from the Balti
more office named Sam Hammett. He often told the story of being there in 1917 and how he was offered five thousand dollars to kill the Wobbly agitator Frank Little.
When Little reached Butte during the latest strike in mid-July, the new miners’ union was still unrecognized and unaffiliated. He hoped to make turmoil out of the standoff and deliver the strikers to the IWW. Though hobbled and half-blind, Little was considered a dangerous man when he checked into a boardinghouse near Finlander Hall, where he was to speak next day. He did not disappoint, denouncing the American war effort as a capitalist slaughterfest and calling doughboys on their way to Europe “Uncle Sam’s scabs in uniform.” His comments were seized on by reporters for Butte’s company-owned newspapers, whom he came to address as the “prostitutes of the press.” Over the coming days he continued to inspire and inflame, stumping for worldwide revolution and bringing calls for him to be muzzled under the new wartime Espionage Act. Montana’s federal district attorney, Burton K. Wheeler, an independent-minded son of eastern Quaker parents, determined that Little’s rantings against the war may have been distasteful but he could not legally stop him. In the early hours of August 1, a black Cadillac carrying six masked men came for Little instead.
They parked before number 316 North Wyoming Street, an address that is today the low-slung Capri Inn, on the western edge of the city. One of the men watched the street, while the other five entered the building and stove in the door of room number 30, which was empty. This woke the landlady, sleeping in the room next door, to whom one of the strangers explained, “We are officers and we are after Frank Little.”2 When she told them they had the wrong room, they broke in the door to number 32, where they found the agitator asleep in his leg cast and underwear. Before Little could reach his crutches propped against the bed they had seized him, gagged his mouth with a towel, and hauled him from the house. The landlady called the police station to explain that masked officers had just carried off the man they meant to “deport.” The policeman on the phone did not know of any department business with Little and dispatched three men to check on the matter.
By this time, Little had been tied to the rear bumper of his abductors’ car and dragged behind it for a block, scraping off much of his kneecaps (as photos would ghoulishly show). The men then pulled him up to be hanged from the Milwaukee railroad trestle on the southern outskirts, near the Centennial Brewery. Either before or after Little died, the killers pinned a message written in red lettering to his underwear:
OTHERS TAKE
NOTICE!
FIRST AND LAST
WARNING!
3-7-77
The numbers 3-7-77, possibly designating the standard dimensions for a grave, were a well-known vigilante symbol of Montana frontier justice, a coffin notice painted on a man’s door as a warning to leave town. (They appear on official Montana State Trooper patches to this day.3) The letters at the bottom of the message were broadly interpreted as standing for the names of strike leaders marked for removal, with the L for “Little” definitively circled.
On August 5, three thousand people walked Frank Little’s casket up to Mountain Meadow Cemetery. Ten days after the murder, federal troops again entered Butte (as they had in 1914). The strike collapsed that fall, and troops remained until the end of the war, guarding the production of copper. The killers, popularly suspected as hired by the Anaconda Mining Company, were never found.
The story of Frank Little and the deadly bribe became a favorite of Hammett’s, usually drawing the aghast reaction he was after. Lillian Hellman first heard it not long after meeting Hammett in Hollywood in 1930 and recorded the story years later in her memoir Scoundrel Time:
I remember sitting on a bed next to him in the first months we met, listening to him tell me about his Pinkerton days when an officer of Anaconda Copper Company had offered him five thousand dollars to kill Frank Little, the labor union organizer. I didn’t know Hammett well enough to hear the anger under the calm voice, the bitterness under the laughter, so I said, “He couldn’t have made such an offer unless you had been strike-breaking for Pinkerton.”
“That’s about right,” he said.
The idea that he had been a strikebreaker seemed to offend Hellman at least as much as the deadly import of the bribe, but “through the years,” she wrote, “he was to repeat that bribe offer so many times that I came to believe, knowing him now, that it was a kind of key to his life. He had given a man the right to think he would murder.”4 Not only was the story true, she decided, it had stamped him permanently. “I think I can date Hammett’s belief that he was living in a corrupt society from Little’s murder.”5
Although he had seen plenty of corruption, chances are Hammett never laid eyes on Frank Little, living or dead, beyond the autopsy picture and death mask that ran in newspapers that fatal week.* On the face of it, a relatively recent hire out of the Baltimore office would seem an unlikely choice for the assassination of a Wobbly leader; Pinkerton’s secret operatives in Butte were assigned primarily out of its Denver and Spokane offices; and the money (five thousand dollars) seems suspiciously high, even if Hammett was offered the job solo. Little had already survived one attempted lynching, and Anaconda had its pick of dozens of more qualified hired thugs to kill him that summer. The only person who offered the job to Hammett seems to have been Hammett himself, in a bar tale that showed the hallmarks of his writing craft—inserting himself just far enough to be plausible, not claiming he’d been a full party to the killing but elegantly cloaking his story in its atmosphere.
But Hammett didn’t need to see that particular conflict that summer to experience brutality and corruption as a Pinkerton. He’d already served as a paid combatant in other labor skirmishes, learning from these that even when a client was despicable, the detective’s first loyalty was to the job. Retelling the Little incident doubtless evoked some ugly strikebreaking stints of his own.
While assembling material for her memoir, Dashiell Hammett: A Daughter Remembers (2001), Jo Hammett received several boxes of old family photos, including an uncaptioned group portrait of her father among a tough work crew standing by a railroad siding, one of the men wearing a wide-brimmed hat and brandishing a switch.6 Her guess is that it is probably a group of Pinkerton strikebreakers, possibly taken in the late teens, hired to go to work on someone with these long, cut switches, or “saps,” a small glimpse of the rough tasks the agency dispatched Hammett to perform in these early years.
There is no evidence beyond his own word that he was in Butte in 1917, but it is possible he visited in 1920, when he worked for several months out of the Spokane office and Pinkerton’s was employed in yet another battle between the miners and the Anaconda Company.** Later living in one of America’s most beautiful cities, he would place his first novel in a grimy violent boomtown very much like Butte, “an ugly city … set in an ugly notch between two ugly mountains that had been all dirtied up by mining.”7 In Red Harvest the detective burns down much of the town to free it, using hell-raising techniques cribbed from agitators like Frank Little.
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During his first two years as a Pinkerton, Hammett traveled extensively around the South and Midwest, but was still living with his parents and brother and sister in Baltimore when, on April 2, 1917, Woodrow Wilson asked Congress to declare war on Germany. As a young, unattached man over twenty-one years old, Sam Hammett qualified for the first round of national draft registrations on June 5. The registrar inspecting him in Baltimore may have looked skeptically at the young man’s willowy build (noting his “slender” frame on his draft card), but was reassured by his hardy-sounding work experience as a Maryland “private detective” for Pinkerton’s.† Given his quarrelsome relationship with his father, it is surprising that Hammett had not long since left home, unless a combination of economic necessity and basic loafishness kept him home. But on June 24, 1918, fourteen months after America had joined the war, he took his leave from Pinkerton’s and entered the army.
He w
as twenty-four years old when he reported as a private to Camp Meade, a newly established cantonment outside Baltimore. He was less than twenty miles from his family but leaving home at last. Although there were just five months before the Armistice, Hammett would be as dramatically affected by his months in the military as would Ernest Hemingway, who that spring had suspended his own apprenticeship as a reporter for the Kansas City Star to join the Red Cross ambulance volunteers in Italy. Each man would spend much of his war in a hospital bed. “I contributed practically nothing to the Allied victory,” Hammett assured a reporter. “I came out of my uniform with tuberculosis.”
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* These are today on file at the beautiful Butte–Silver Bow Public Archives, a bright converted fire station building on West Quartz Street, along the uphill route of Little’s funeral procession.
** The strongest argument I’ve come across is the one advanced in a 1982 paper by the Moscow, Idaho, bookstore owner Robert Greene: A detective named Hammett takes part in the death of a suspect in Upton Sinclair’s 1920 protest novel, 100%: The Story of a Patriot. But even if the two men had met in the teens and Sinclair heard it from Hammett’s own lips, it would not prove that he took part in the crime or that he was even in Butte that summer. Still, Greene’s view of Hammett as a writer seeking absolution for his crimes is an interesting one also taken up by the crime writer James Ellroy.
† Hammett’s draft registration card is from June 5, 1917, when he was unattached and well of age at twenty-three, and was not a member of an essential occupation excused from the first round of registration. Unlike the later draft that used the mails, most men registered for the system in person, on designated registration days, and then entered the services after their number was later posted. Hammett’s draft card is one of two legal documents where he names Pinkerton’s as his employer.
