American Lightning: Terror, Mystery, the Birth of Hollywood, and the Crime of the Century (6 page)

A firestorm shot up from the basement. Columns of intense red heat pierced floorboards, ignited ink barrels, and devoured huge rolls of newsprint paper. In less than four minutes the building had become a cauldron of smoke, heat, and flames.

At the time of the first blast, about one hundred people had been at work. On the upper floors, a thin late-night editorial and composing crew was hurrying to put the paper “to bed.” Down below in the pressroom, the printers prepared the machinery; the first edition would have rolled off the presses at four
A.M.
Now they were all trapped. And escape would be a battle.

The first person to rush to the scene was a man wearing a woman’s floral dress and a blond wig. Los Angeles police detective Eddie King had been working an undercover detail that night trying to catch the Boyle Heights rapist. Throughout the summer the rapist had been targeting women in the Boyle Heights neighborhood, and the police, with no clues and conflicting descriptions of the assailant, had decided to bait a trap with a decoy. But King, a hulking six-footer crammed into a tentlike dress and wearing a garish straw blond wig that barely covered his thick neck, had attracted only incredulous stares. Frustrated, his mood worked raw by the snide teasing that the backup officers had aimed at him throughout the night, King had been returning at one
A.M.
to the First Street police station. As he crossed Spring Street, the ground seemed to give way beneath his feet. He steadied himself, and all at once a catastrophic boom broke through the nighttime quiet. In the distance the sky lit up with a diffused glow. An earthquake, King decided. He ran full speed toward the eerie, unnatural light.

The
Times
Building was an inferno. King was overwhelmed. Instinctively he rushed toward the structure with the vague plan of saving someone. But the flames and the heat quickly stopped his advance; it was as if he were held back by an impenetrable wall. He had no choice but to remain on the street. He could stare at the galloping, uncontrolled fire, feel the scalding intensity of its heat, and listen to the miserable screams, the keening wails, of the people trapped inside. But there was nothing he could do. They were beyond his help.

Alerted by shouts, he looked upward. A crowd of confused, desperate faces appeared at the third-floor windows. The flames were moving toward them, getting closer. The heat was unbearable. So people started to jump.

It was a long way down. King watched men land on the hard concrete sidewalk. How must it feel, he thought, to have your entire existence come down to a single impossible choice: either you burn or you jump to your death. Tears in his eyes, he picked up one inert body after another and carried it across the street. He thought the corpses should be removed as far as possible from the fire’s path. He didn’t want them to be burned beyond recognition. He wanted relatives to be able to recognize their loved ones. He wanted families to be reunited one last time. He stacked the corpses in a pile like firewood. It was all he could do.

Inside, the exit doors had jammed. Perhaps the heat had melted the locks. Perhaps the doors had not functioned for years. Whatever the cause, there seemed to be no way out. Still, a group of engravers on the sixth floor refused to give up. There was nowhere else to go, so they headed for the roof. It was rough going, a journey through smoke and flames, but they kept at it and in time succeeded in reaching the rooftop. Only now they were trapped.

Opposite the roof, across an alley, was a rooming house. They could see the adjacent building’s roof, but it was too far to jump. The engravers yelled for help. They hoped someone would hear them and rescue them before the fire climbed higher.

They yelled, their voices shrill pleas above the noise and tumult and confusion of the blaze. And finally they were heard. Residents at the rooming house hurried to the roof. But they didn’t know what to do. They stared across at the men trapped on the other side. They could feel the heat of the fire, and their eyes burned from the smoke. They saw what it was like to be in the
Times
Building. But they had no way of helping the engravers. All they could do was look at the trapped men across the alleyway.

At last, a ladder was found. It was carried to the rooming-house roof. Only it was too short. It almost reached across the alleyway but not quite. So one man lay down on the rooming-house roof and leaned over the edge, his arms dangling in the air as he grasped the ladder. Behind him several men held his legs in place. The ladder now stretched across the alleyway. The man holding the ladder had powerful forearms, but it still required all his will, all his concentration, to keep the ladder steady. It seemed impossible that he would be able to hold the ladder in place for long. But there was no alternative. It was the only way.

One by one the engravers crawled on their hands and knees across the ladder. They tried not to rush. They tried not to panic as the smoke intensified. When the ladder started to shake, they kept going. They knew they could not stop. There was no other escape. All six men made it across the alleyway to the rooming house.

Harry Chandler was also fortunate. The assistant publisher had left the building only moments before the first explosion. His father-in-law, Harrison Gray Otis, had not been in the building either. He was in Mexico, sent by President William Howard Taft to represent the United States at the Centennial of American Independence.

Churchill Harvey-Elder was the last man to jump from the building. Recently promoted to assistant night editor, he had earlier returned from dinner at Tony’s Spanish Kitchen on North Broadway to find his mother in the newsroom. Proud of her son, she wanted to see him working at his new, important job. She watched him with a beaming pride for a while, and then he walked her to the door.

Nearly two hours later he was in the city room when the explosion occurred. He tried to escape down a flight of stairs, but the flames pushed him back. In just an instant the flesh was seared from his arms and chest. He retreated, moving back from the fire until he was up against the windows on the First Street side of the building. There nowhere else to go, so he crawled out onto the ledge. It was hot to his touch. He was three stories above the ground. The fire was moving toward him. Smoke attacked him. His burns were incredibly painful. He did not know what to do. He had run out of options.

Then he heard shouts coming from the street. He looked down and saw two fireman and a policeman holding a net. From this height, the net looked very small. But they were yelling at him, pleading with him, to jump. Harvey-Elder realized it was his only chance. He jumped.

He missed the net. He landed on the concrete. But he was still alive when they carried his body to the ambulance. He hung on to life at Clara Barton Hospital for a few more hours, and then at seven-thirty that morning he died. Harvey-Elder’s was the final death.

In all, twenty-one people died. They were editors, linotype operators, printers, pressmen, compositors, telegraph operators, and Harry Chandler’s secretary, who had decided to linger in the office for a few minutes after his boss had left. Sixteen of the dead men left behind widows and children. Seventeen people were injured. The building was a ruin.

But there still was a paper to get out. Eyes brimming with tears, Harry Chandler addressed the survivors. He assembled them on a street within view of the smoldering building. The air was heavy with a noxious, charred smell. The ambulances, bells clanging, continued to take away the dead, their colleagues.

The publisher, Chandler explained, had been fearful that the paper would be attacked. As a contingency, he had months earlier set up an auxiliary newsroom and composition plant. It was just a few blocks away on College Street. The owners of the
Los Angeles Herald
had agreed that the plates could be run off their presses. They had two hours to get the first edition out.

As Harvey-Elder lay dying at Clara Barton Hospital, a one-page special edition of the
Los Angeles Times
ran off the borrowed presses. An eight-column streamer stretched across the entire page:
UNIONIST BOMBS WRECK THE TIMES
.

The front page also carried “A Plain Statement” signed by Harry E. Andrews, the paper’s managing editor. It read:

The
Times
building was destroyed this morning by the enemies of industrial freedom by dynamite bombs and fire.

Numerous threats to this dastardly deed had been received.

The
Times
itself cannot be destroyed. It will be issued every day and will fight its battles to the end.

The elements that conspired to perpetrate this horror must not be permitted to pursue their awful campaign of intimidation and terror. Never will the
Times
cease its warfare against them . . .

They can kill our men and can wreck our buildings, but by the God above they cannot kill the
Times.

Even on that first day, as the story was told in headlines across a shocked nation, not everyone was as certain as the
Times
editors about what had caused the explosion. Many people had the suspicion—and some had the firm belief—that the obvious cause was too obvious.

EIGHT

______________________

I
N BILLY BURNS’S
orderly world, tardiness was an unforgivable sin. He would not tolerate it when his agents were late, and his usually genial mood would quickly turn sour and often abusive. He lived his own life, too, by a precisely calibrated timetable; punctuality, he lectured his four sons, was the necessary foundation for a logical mind. So on Saturday morning, October 1, 1910, Billy’s anxieties lifted when his train pulled into Los Angeles station at eight. He was right on schedule. He’d have sufficient time to go to his hotel, freshen up from the journey, get his suit pressed, review his speech one last time, and then head to the American Bankers Association luncheon.

His satisfied mood was reinforced when he looked out the train window and saw Eddie Mills, from his Los Angeles office, waiting on the platform—just as scheduled. Mills would help with the bags and then drive him to the Alexandria Hotel. Perhaps there would even be time for the two of them to catch up over breakfast. Billy loved a good breakfast. “A good day needs a good start” went another of the precepts he repeatedly shared with his sons.

He hurried to the platform to meet his agent. Only then, as he looked into Mills’s somber face, did Billy realize something was not right. Mills handed him the morning papers, and he read the shocking headlines: twenty-one dead, the
Times
Building destroyed.

On the ride to the Alex, Billy could see a column of gray smoke rising high in the downtown sky. The smell of fire, of seared wood and stone, remained strong in the air. Within moments Billy felt as if the awful smell of disaster had become trapped in his lungs. It coursed through him like a plague. He was visiting a ruined city. They drove as close as they were allowed to the scene, and Billy saw people crowding the police lines. He imagined that many were the wives and children of the dead waiting for the bodies to be pulled from the ruins. It was heartbreaking. And futile. His mind raced. Billy thought about Otis. He detested the man. A price had been put on Billy’s head, and Otis and the
Times
had supported—even encouraged—the men who had wanted him murdered.

It was only five years ago when, on secret orders from President Teddy Roosevelt himself, Billy Burns had gone off to San Francisco to make a case against a well-connected group of, as the detective called them, “rich crooks.” He succeeded in getting Abraham Rueff, the city’s political boss, to confess to taking a fortune in bribes. Rueff then testified against Mayor Eugene Schmitz, and he, too, was convicted. But after the indictment for bribery of Patrick Calhoun, the president of the United Railroad, a man whose patrician pedigree and polished demeanor symbolized, in Billy’s prickly immigrant mind, elitism and ruling class arrogance, the campaign against corruption in San Francisco turned dangerous.

The home of the chief witness Billy had recruited was blown up. A prosecutor, Francis Heney, was shot, the bullet slamming through his jaw. The editor of the
San Francisco Bulletin,
Fremont Older, was kidnapped at gunpoint. An assassin was hired to shoot Billy, but the detective learned of the plot and arrested the man.

Calhoun, however, did not in the end need to have anyone killed. He escaped conviction thanks to the indispensable help of Earl Rogers, a bombastic yet clever criminal lawyer. Rogers came up with a malicious strategy: Calhoun would, with his intransigent demands, force the unions to declare a strike against his railroad; then, he’d rush to the paralyzed city’s rescue by breaking the strike. Carrying out the plan required twelve hundred strikebreakers, but in the end Calhoun defeated the union.

Harrison Gray Otis had made sure Calhoun became a hero. The San Francisco papers were pro-union, so Otis had special editions of the
Times
shipped north daily and distributed on the San Francisco streets. Each edition lauded the brave Calhoun and attacked the vindictive strikers. Thanks to Otis’s flattering editorials and disingenuous reporting, Calhoun’s accomplishments grew into legend. And the jury would not convict the man who had seemingly saved the city; the incriminating facts of the bribery case were simply a tedious irrelevancy.

Billy, although personally sympathetic to the workingman, could also understand in principle Otis’s commitment to the antiunion cause. However, the detective was too strong a moralist to believe that Otis’s unscrupulous actions had any justification. The publisher had championed a guilty man, a man who had conspired to have the detective killed. Otis’s actions, Billy was convinced, were driven by a diabolical ethic: He would do whatever was necessary to achieve his ends.