Clarence Darrow: Attorney for the Damned (39 page)

“My God, you left a trail behind you a mile wide!” he told James McNamara.
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D
ARROW TRIED TO
turn the state’s star witness—Ortie McManigal—via a trick he had employed in the Haywood case. With an
appeal to working-class solidarity, and wads of cash, Darrow persuaded Ortie’s wife and uncle to try to get him to repudiate the confession. They visited the jail and browbeat McManigal, and his wife threatened to take the children and leave him. He weakened, but ultimately refused to flip. “My wife has sold herself for a few thousand dollars of union money,” he told a
Times
reporter, between sobs. “The union’s attorneys in their efforts to save the necks of the McNamaras have broken up my home.” The bomber cut a deal worthy of Harry Orchard. In return for testifying, McManigal was freed, given employment by the state, and awarded “quite a substantial sum of money” by the grateful steel industry.
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Harrington and Sullivan were sent to San Francisco to buy off witnesses. And Ruby’s brother Bert was called in to help, and given the task of spiriting
Kurt Diekelman—a hotel clerk who could testify that James McNamara was in Los Angeles at the time of the bombing—to Chicago. Yet the Burns detectives frustrated Darrow’s agents in almost every instance. And Judge
Walter Bordwell allowed District Attorney John Fredericks to deploy the grand jury to intimidate the defense. McManigal’s wife and uncle were subpoenaed and threatened with contempt of court, and Harrington was interrogated. Even square Joe Scott grew furious at the state’s tactics. He waved his fist in a detective’s face and threatened to beat his damned head off.

Burns was no stranger to intrigue—a few months later, the U.S. Justice Department would charge that the detective had stacked the jury lists in a federal case in Oregon. “Weed out the sons of bitches who will not vote for a conviction,” Burns had told his agents. “No man’s name goes into the box unless we know that he will convict.” His operatives now sought jobs in Darrow’s offices. Detective
Guy Biddinger met Darrow in the bar of the Alexandria Hotel and agreed—for $5,000—to inform on the prosecution. Some of the information he funneled Darrow was true, other bits were false: all was tailored to sow discord. Darrow’s offices were “filled with detectives in our employ,” city detective
Sam Browne bragged later. Darrow was too “close-fisted” with his staff, and they happily agreed to spy for the prosecution. “When a man needs to pull off crooked deals, it pays to be liberal,” Browne said. “Several of Darrow’s supposedly trusted men came to me for money. I slipped them some.”

Soon, Darrow was seeing traitors everywhere. “We are having a fierce time,” he wrote Gompers. “Burns’s whole force utterly regardless of personal
rights is everywhere in evidence intimidating, hounding, bulldozing—the grand jury kept constantly in session to awe every one who comes as our witness.” Money was an issue. “There is no way to try this case with a chance of winning without a great deal of money,” Darrow told Gompers in July. “The other side are spending it in every direction. Then they have all the organized channels of society—the state’s attorney—grand jury—police force, mayor, manufacturers association. Every one is afraid of the line up and there is little light anywhere.…

“You know I never wanted to come. It is filled only with trouble for me,” Darrow said. “If the necessary things can not be done I must know that … I am very sorry to put any extra trouble on you—but what can we do? We all seem to think that organized labor must make this fight and I suppose it must.”

Plans were made to launch a national fundraising campaign—docking each union worker in the country 25 cents for the McNamara defense fund. McNamara stamps and buttons were sold, and a motion picture was produced to raise money in working-class communities. But later that summer Darrow wrote to Tvietmoe, saying that of a promised $350,000 only $170,000 had been raised. He insisted that he needed $20,000 a month, and threatened to “quit the game” unless the AFL met its financial commitments. “I am simply not going to kill myself with this case and then worry over money and not know what to do,” Darrow said. Tvietmoe wired Gompers: “Darrow is anxious … Start machine. Keep flame burning.”

Gompers responded. He pressed union leaders to raise money, and put his own prestige on the line. In the fall, he traveled to Los Angeles to meet and have his photograph taken with the brothers. James was a “jovial and yet deep-thinking, studious fellow,” Gompers told reporters, and John was “bright, intelligent … firm in his convictions, and yet as gentle as the gentlest woman.”

When he met the boys in jail, Gompers said, John had taken his hand and assured the AFL chief: “Sam, tell the boys I am innocent.”
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A
S IN
B
OISE
,
Darrow’s foes in California included the press, the local establishment, and the president of the United States. And as in Idaho, the local elites were neck deep in corrupt schemes to rob Americans of their natural resources. In Idaho the game was timber; in L.A. it was water.
The dreamers of the golden dream were building harbors and stretching roads and streetcar lines in every direction, but their great aspirations were seemingly capped by the meager local water supply.

William Mulholland, the city’s water superintendent, looked to the Owens River valley, a land of family farms and ranches on the eastern slope of the Sierra Nevada, more than two hundred miles northeast of Los Angeles, as the solution. One of Roosevelt’s legislative accomplishments, the Federal Reclamation Act, was the vehicle. The law was designed to water the arid lands of the West, largely through power and irrigation projects, and the Owens Valley was originally seen as a superb prospect for an agricultural reservoir and canals. But
Fred Eaton, a former Los Angeles mayor, hatched an elaborate scheme to corner the valley’s water rights and build an aqueduct to the coast. As an intimate pal of both Mulholland and
Joseph Lippincott, the regional chief of the new Reclamation Service, the piratical Eaton was well suited for the job. He and Mulholland launched a clandestine campaign (Eaton liked to brag of his “curves” and “Italian work”) to buy up land and water rights, and many landowners were deceived into thinking they were dealing with a federal irrigation project. Eaton then made a fortune selling the water to Los Angeles. Lippincott received a plump consulting contract from the city. Shrugging off the objections made by colleagues over his “illegal, vicious” and “repugnant” actions, Lippincott assured his superiors that “the greatest public necessity” required the divergence of the valley’s water to Los Angeles. The project was approved.

“I got away with it,” Mulholland said.

Not yet. The need to raise funds to build the aqueduct brought the plot to light in 1905. With the enthusiastic support of the
Times
, which had spread Mulholland’s alarms about a city-killing “drought,” the public approved municipal bond sales in the 1905 and 1907 elections. The
Times
forgot its former opposition to municipal ownership of public utilities, and skewered critics of the aqueduct as “freaks and pests.” The rival
Express
revealed why: Otis was an investor in the San Fernando Mission Land Company, a syndicate of the region’s most powerful men, including bankers, utility chiefs, publishers, and the railroad magnates
Henry Huntington and
E. H. Harriman, that was buying up land in the San Fernando Valley. It would soar in value when the aqueduct passed through on the way to Los Angeles.

In the next six years, a group including Otis, his son-in-law
Harry Chandler, water board member
Moses Sherman, and banker
Otto Brant took over the leadership of the syndicate, buying more and more land in the San Fernando Valley.
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The state’s Progressives—who had just elected
Hiram Johnson governor—were seduced as well. With the aqueduct, “we have the assurance of a growth in population, commerce and consequently in land values that will be the wonder of the world,” wrote
Meyer Lissner, the governor’s political lieutenant in Los Angeles. “The man who invests $100,000 here right now with any sort of judgment can take out a million within a few years.” He plotted, with Johnson, to craft a new congressional district that would be dominated by Los Angeles and protect “our aqueduct.”

Only the radicals stood in the way. The aqueduct was a major issue in
Job Harriman’s campaign when he declared his candidacy for mayor that spring. He and his socialist allies vowed to halt the distribution of the Owens Valley water to the Otis-Chandler syndicate and other land speculators. Harriman had to be stopped, and his clients, the McNamaras, discredited and convicted.
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Oscar Lawler, a lawyer working for the M&M in Los Angeles, joined
Walter Drew, the steel industry’s point man on the case, in orchestrating an approach to Washington. Drew was underwriting the costs of the McNamara case and loaning detectives to the prosecutors in Los Angeles and Indiana. His men burglarized the union offices in Indianapolis and installed a dictograph—a crude listening device—to eavesdrop on its president. They illegally acquired John McNamara’s phone and bank records, tailed his former secretary, covertly photographed union correspondence, brawled with union officers, and shadowed newspapermen. He and Lawler feared that Indiana officials would cave to local political pressure and surrender the evidence seized from McNamara’s office. “Strenuous efforts are being made, by bribery and every other means known to guilty persons and corrupt associations, to spirit away witnesses and destroy evidence,” Lawler wrote in an encrypted message that Drew hand-delivered to Attorney General
George Wickersham.

When the Justice Department balked, reluctant to act like an industry tool, Lawler urged Drew to tap “every possible influence among senators and various large business interests.” Otis was assigned to write the White House. “The explosion of the
Times
building was only an incident
in the carrying out of the general purpose to establish a reign of wholesale terrorism and intimidation,” Otis told his friend, President
William Howard Taft. On October 17, the president met with Lawler and Otis in Los Angeles. Lawler, who had worked with Taft in Washington, laid out the arguments. Taft ordered the federal prosecutors in Indianapolis into action, and they began an investigation and secured the evidence that had been seized in the ironworkers’ offices.
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W
ORD OF THE
Taft administration’s decision to intervene reached Darrow within days, adding to his gloom.
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For despite all his efforts, he was losing the battle to select a jury.

The lawyers had begun the arduous task on October 11 in a newly constructed courtroom on the eighth floor of the Hall of Records. It smelled of fresh paint, and workmen still labored outside. In the audience were “a motley crowd” of Wobblies, trade unionists, and socialists. Darrow had requested that the brothers be tried separately, and the state elected to try James McNamara first.

“Darrow … searches the hidden motive in a marvelous way,” Mary’s sister Sara, who had joined her in Los Angeles, told Wood. “Questions which the prosecution object to he puts aside and then asks after a while in another way and in juxtaposition to something else, so that dressed in new words and out of its environment … the prosecution does not recognize it.…

“He gains the confidence of the man he is examining and draws him out by subtle as well as apparent methods that are remarkable to watch. He finds out his religious persuasion … he goes into his heredity and environment,” Sara wrote. “Whatever he is or is not, he is sure good at this work.”

And yet Darrow was frustrated by Judge Bordwell, who consistently declined to recognize bias in potential jurors. He compelled Darrow to use peremptory challenges and threatened him with contempt when he complained. Fredericks, meanwhile, quietly paraded his cast of witnesses through the courtroom, where they could identify James McNamara—and he could see them. It unnerved the defendant, and his lawyers. “They’ve brought that fellow here to identify me,” James would tell Darrow. Then
news arrived that
Frank Eckhoff, a friend of the McNamaras who could corroborate key parts of McManigal’s confession, would testify for the state. Darrow “expects to lose and this fact is nearly crushing him. He is very blue all the time now and really looks ill,” Sara wrote. “Waving all his mistakes and failings aside it is a sad thing for an old fighter to lose his greatest, and possibly his last case.” They had, Darrow told Sara, “not a ghost of a chance” of winning.

Sara was on the scene because Wood had persuaded the editors of two Oregon publications to carry her dispatches from the trial, in part so he and his “hungry little mistress,” as she called herself, could enjoy a tryst. She had no training as a journalist and had never been in a courtroom, but in early October she arrived in Los Angeles, where Mary had rented a typewriter and an apartment on Ingraham Street, about a mile from the courthouse, for $35 a month. It had nice furnishings and fresh linens twice a week, but it was tiny: a single space served as living and dining room and bedroom, with a Murphy bed that folded down from the wall.

Sara was shocked when she learned, on her first evening in town, that Darrow and Mary had resumed their affair.

“You know how CD laid it on thick about how he would be watched … Yet the first thing he does is invite us to a public dinner in a fashionable place and walk way home to our apartment
with his arms around us
most of the way,” Sara wrote Wood. “I don’t enjoy his familiarity at all.”

Darrow angered Sara for the way he played with Mary’s feelings. She grew angrier yet when, after Mary left them alone in the apartment one day, Darrow grabbed Sara in a lecherous embrace. The scene was repeated a few days later when Sara turned up at the Higgins Building to interview a member of the defense team. Darrow lured her into his private office, locked the door, and once more tried to seduce her. In each case, flustered, she managed to extricate herself.