Part 5

This wasn’t the first time that Swanson had used Mooney’s name in vain. Three years earlier, when the linemen of the Pacific Gas & Electric Company in neighboring Contra Costa County had gone on strike, the detective had been hired to find out who was dynamiting the utility’s property. He had accused Mooney, who was leading the strike, of possessing explosives, and the union organizer was tried three times before he was eventually acquitted. Swanson had been more successful with Billings who was sentenced to two years at Folsom Penitentiary for carrying dynamite.

On June 10, 1916, Mooney, as a representative of the Amalgamated Association of Street and Electric Railway Employees of America, called an organization meeting of the carmen of the United Railroads, San Francisco’s trolley lines, at Woodsman’s Hall. Early the next morning, three of the carrier’s transmission towers near San Bruno were slightly damaged by dynamite. According to Weinberg and Billings, Swanson went all out to pin this bombing on Mooney. On July 17th, he hailed Weinberg’s taxi and offered the cabbie $5000.00 to swear that he had driven Mooney to San Bruno after the meeting at Woodsman’s Hall. When he repeated the offer two days later, Weinberg told him that he had no information to sell.

On July 18th, Swanson met Billings at the office of the Pacific Gas & Electric Company, where the latter had gone to pay a bill. The detective promised him a machinist’s job with the utility as well as five thousand dollars if he would help connect Mooney with the San Bruno explosion. Billings was as uncooperative as Weinberg had been, and Swanson soon gave him up as a bad job. He later admitted that he had spoken to both men about Mooney’s part in the bombing of the transmission towers, but denied that he had offered any money to either one.

When Billings, Weinberg, Nolan and the Mooneys were arrested, they were held incommunicado until the Grand Jury met on the evening of August 1. Meanwhile, San Francisco was staging mass meetings at which speaker after speaker urged that all radicals, anarchists and liberals be run out of town. The Law and Order Committee of the Chamber of Commerce raised more than $400,000 for the avowed purpose of ridding the city of its “anarchistic” elements. All of the newspapers embarked on an orgy of speculation, openly inspired by the District Attorney’s office, in which no effort was made to separate fact from fancy. As far as the _Examiner_, the _Call_, the _Chronicle_ and the _Bulletin_ were concerned, Fickert had an open-and-shut case against all the suspects, and it made little difference what they printed under their banner headlines.

The first witness before the Grand Jury was Henry Kneese, the City Marshal of South San Francisco, who said that he had found a suitcase containing forty sticks of dynamite on the state highway leading to San Bruno on June 10th. Apparently, Fickert wasn’t above some titillating irrelevancies to soften up a jury. Kneese was followed by Dr. David E. Stafford, the physician who had performed the autopsies on Hetta Knapp and the seven other persons killed in the July 22nd blast. Dr. Stafford stated that he had removed small pieces of .22- and .32-caliber shells and particles of iron pipe from their bodies. After Will George M. Hon, the foreman of the Cadillac Garage, testified that, when Billings was discharged from his mechanic’s job in June, he had owned a brown suitcase, Captain Matheson and Lieutenant Bunner described the scene at Steuart and Market Streets following the blast

Earl R. Moore, a policeman, was the first witness to place any of the defendants on Market Street before the explosion. He had been ordered to clear the parade route of all traffic. Shortly after one p.m., he had noticed an old Ford jitney with a broken horn and a torn rear cushion parked in front of 721 Market Street, a two-story building directly across the street from the offices of the Preparedness Day Parade Committee. While he was standing near the automobile, waiting for its owner to show up, he had observed a man loitering on the sidewalk a few feet away. When Moore asked him if he knew who owned the vehicle, the man had answered, “Oh, he’ll be here in a minute.” The policeman “went on down toward 4th Street and I came back in about ten minutes again and the machine was gone.” Four days later, he identified Billings as the man who had spoken to him that afternoon.

Herbert C. Wade, the principal of a Hawaiian school, had been in no mood to watch the Preparedness Day Parade. Bothered by a bad toothache, he had been heading for his dentist’s office in 721 Market Street. As he walked toward the entrance to the building, Billings passed him “and went up the steps into the dental office. He had a suitcase or something of the sort with him.” A few minutes later, the witness saw a man and woman but he was unable to say that they had been Mr. and Mrs. Mooney. “It was somewhere around one o’clock when I saw Billings,” he told the jurors, “ten minutes to one or ten minutes after.”

The dentist’s receptionist, Estelle G. Smith, had been waiting for the parade to start when Billings entered the office. He had a suitcase in his hand and told her that he was a motion picture cameraman for the _San Francisco Chronicle_. When he asked for permission to photograph the parade from the roof, she told him that he would have to wait until the dentist returned from lunch. Because she thought he was “sick from the heat,” she had decided to let him go up to the roof at once. She had asked a friend, Louis Rominger to “Please show this man to the roof” while she returned to the window to watch the parade, which had just started. When Mayor Rolph passed by in the street below, she had waved a towel at him and shouted, “Hello, Mayor Rolph!” According to photographs taken by the International Film Company, the Mayor had passed 721 Market Street at 1:50 P.M.

At “half after one or so,” a tall “very repulsive looking man, long mustache,” who looked like “a Russian Jew,” burst into the dental office and attempted to push by Miss Smith who was standing in front of the stairway. When she threatened to call the police, a woman ran up the first-floor steps and persuaded the man to leave the building. Five minutes later, a “very agitated” Billings came down from the roof and, after thanking the receptionist for her kindness, hurriedly departed. She was sure that the woman had been Rena Mooney.

Alice Kidwell, Miss Smith’s mother, had been seated at the window in the dentist’s reception room when she saw the Mooneys talking to two men on the sidewalk outside the building. Mrs. Mooney left the group for a moment and, when she returned, “I saw her with her hand waving it up this way, beckoning to someone on the roof.” A few minutes later, the young man who had been taking pictures on the roof left the building. Mrs. Kidwell remembered saying, “Good gracious, he couldn’t have taken very many because he was up there just a short time.” She last saw the Mooneys walking west on Market Street.

A tramp waiter by the name of John McDonald was the only witness before the Grand Jury who testified to seeing both Mooney and Billings at Steuart and Market Streets. He had been standing on the east side of Steuart, some fifteen feet south of Market, when he noticed a “young fellow coming down carrying a grip in his hand.” Because the man appeared so nervous, McDonald kept his eye on him as he walked down Steuart Street. Just before he reached the corner, he “transferred the suitcase over to his left hand and set it down near the wall.” Then, the young man walked to a saloon at the comer of Steuart and Market where he was joined by another man who had been inside. He identified the youth who had been carrying the suitcase as Billings and the man who had emerged from the bar as Mooney.

McDonald watched the two men talk together for a few minutes and then he saw Mooney take out a pocket watch and check it with the clock in the Ferry Building tower. Seconds later, Billings “took a cut right through the parade toward the other side of Market Street as though he were going back to the Ferry Building.” After waiting a few minutes, Mooney also crossed Market Street “as though he was going across to Drum Street,” one block west of the Embarcadero. By this time, the witness had lost interest in both men and decided to walk up Market Street. He had reached the Alameda Cafe, some 150 feet from where he had been standing, when the explosion occurred.

Mrs. Mooney, who was known professionally as Rena Herman, had been teaching music in a fifth-floor studio in the Eilers Building at 975 Market Street for almost eight years. On the day of the parade, she had watched the spectacle from the roof of her building with her husband and two relatives. When they arrived on the roof, “the parade hadn’t started then. Everybody was yelling it was starting. We hurried to get up there. We didn’t leave the roof until after the parade passed.” Neither she nor Tom had been at 721 Market Street on July 22nd; in fact, they hadn’t left the Eilers Building until five o’clock that evening.

Although Mooney, Billings and Nolan refused to testify because they had not been permitted to talk to their lawyers, Weinberg stated that “I am willing to answer every question you wish to ask me.” He denied that his taxi had been parked in front of 721 Market Street on the afternoon of the explosion or that he had been in the vicinity of Steuart and Market around two o’clock. Although he swore that his jitney was in perfect working condition, he admitted that “the machine in the back is torn, the thread.” At one p.m. on the 22nd, he was driving a passenger to Fillmore and Sutter. Then he had gone to the office of the gas company and paid his bill which was two months overdue. Because the parade was disrupting all traffic, he had decided to call it a day and go home. “I went to the butcher shop,” he said, “and got some meat and went home about three or a little after three.” He had remained home until “five or a little after.”

When Mooney was arrested on the San Francisco train, the police who searched him found the key to Nolan’s basement apartment at 82 Angelica Street in his pocket. Officer Peter J. Hughes, who had been a member of the squad which ransacked the apartment, testified that he had found plaster of Paris, a box containing saltpetre and another bag that contained what “looked like black powder.” A motorcycle belonging to Mooney, twenty pounds of epsom salts, a bag of flour, and a small quantity of flashlight powder were also uncovered. According to Hughes, “We asked him [Nolan] several times before we went down in the basement if there was anything in the basement. He said ‘no.’”

On August 2nd, the Grand Jury returned a true bill, charging all five suspects with the murders of the eight people who had been killed in the explosion. Fickert, whose first act after having been elected District Attorney in 1909 had been to obtain the dismissal of graft indictments against officers of the United Railroads, looked forward to the Mooney trial with a relish that was undisguisable. However, he decided that it might be more expedient to try second offender Billings first and the latter’s trial began on September 11, 1916, in the Superior Court of San Francisco, before Judge Frank H. Dunne.

The prosecution called most of the witnesses who had testified before the Grand Jury. McDonald repeated his story of seeing Billings at Steuart and Market just before the explosion. “As near as I can remember it must have been eight or ten minutes to two when I first discovered him.” After describing the meeting of Billings and Mooney in front of the saloon, the witness said that he “went down to the restaurant on the Embarcadero, 34 was the number, and got a glass of buttermilk.” It was while he was there and not, as he had told the Grand Jury, in front of the Alameda Cafe, that the explosion took place. Also, he now said that he had lost both men in the crowd after their meeting at the corner of Market and Steuart.

Fickert had found a new witness to support McDonald’s story. John M. Crowley was an automobile mechanic who worked on the corner of Steuart and Mission. He was positive that he had seen Billings at 1:55, “standing about three feet from where I was.” He saw him again at the same place immediately after the explosion and he remembered that the defendant had refused to take off his hat when the band was playing “The Colors.” But he was certain that Billings had not been carrying anything in his hands at either time.

Estelle Smith and Herbert Wade swore that they had seen Billings at 721 Market Street at approximately one p.m. on July 22nd. Peter Vidovich, an eccentric patient who had decided not to wait for the tardy dentist, was just descending the steps to the street when he saw Billings struggling up the narrow stairway with a suitcase. “I backed up and stood behind the banister on the top of the stairway and give him a chance to come up.” The suitcase was, he remembered, “kind of pale color like, rather deeper that the ordinary suitcase ... pale color of chocolate or wine color. It was a kind of funny suitcase, it was kind of different.”

Mellie Edeau and her daughter, Sadie, had come from Oakland to see the parade. Although neither woman had been called before the Grand Jury, they both swore that they had seen Billings on the roof of 721 Market Street. Shortly before one p.m., they had been standing in front of the Kamm Building which was next door to 721. Sadie Edeau testified that “when I first saw Billings he was on the roof of 721 Market, leaning over the edge of the building. He had a suitcase in his hand.” Her mother said she had noticed him “on top of the roof ... with a suitcase and he was talking to someone on the street below him.”

According to four employees of Uhl Brothers, there had been a cameraman with a suitcase on the roof of 721 Market Street on Parade Day. Alphonse De Caccia had seen a young man with “a kodak, a kodak grip--a black grip about two feet long and a foot wide” sitting in a corner. This man, he said, had been there when DeCaccia left “about 4:15.” Tracy F. Barrett had observed a “man sitting in the west corner [with a] camera very similar to a newspaper reporter’s camera,” while William B. Crump was sure that this man was still there at “about ten minutes after two” when the witness left the roof. Henry Pincus had seen a man “sitting on the firewall” when he arrived on the roof just as Crump was leaving.

On the day of the blast, Billings had left his house at 1:30 p.m. As he headed for Market and Kearney, he had noticed “a large battleship gray Hudson automobile” on Union Square Avenue. He ended up at Market and Sixth where he “bought an extra with an account of the explosion.” Then he had helped a friend of his who was running a jitney bus between the Ferry and uptown. At no time during the day had he been “at Steuart and Market or 721 Market. I didn’t see Mrs. Kidwell, Estelle Smith, or Rominger, and I had no suitcase.”

On September 23rd, the young machinist was convicted of murder in the first degree, but the jury fixed his punishment at life imprisonment. Now, with Billings on his way back to Folsom, Fickert could concentrate on the man whom he had once described as “a direct action anarchist.” On January 3, 1917, Mooney’s trial began before Judge Franklin A. Griffin and twelve Bay area citizens. Fickert, who had let one of his assistants handle the Billings prosecution, had had enough of the sidelines and showed up with Edward A. Cunha and James M. Brennan, two stalwarts from his office. Mooney was defended by W. Bourke Cockran, Maxwell McNutt and John Lawlor. It took two weeks to select a jury from the 177 talesman who were called and sworn and it was not until January 18th that Ed Cunha was able to begin the state’s campaign to convince Foreman William V. MacNevin and his eleven San Francisco County colleagues that the bombing had been the opening gambit in a Wobbly-inspired campaign to overthrow the State of California.

After six physicians had testified to the wounds and causes of death, Fickert called a whole battery of witnesses who described the cartridges, pieces of metal, ball-bearings and bits of imitation leather that were scattered all over the area after the explosion. Then Frederick H. Colburn, Captain Matheson and Lieutenant Bunner were put through their paces as to what they had seen and done after the blast. With these preliminaries behind him, Fickert finally got around to his star witness, talkative John McDonald, who had already told the Grand Jury and the Billings panel that he had seen Mooney and Billings at the corner of Market and Steuart Streets just before the bomb went off.

McDonald had been found wandering around the Hall of Justice two days after the explosion, claiming that he had seen the men who planted the lethal suitcase. Prior to his sudden prominence, he had been a waiter at a number of cheap San Francisco restaurants. Just a week before the parade, he had been released from the hospital where he had spent several months recuperating from a serious stomach operation. The doctors had told him that he would not be able to work for some time and he had just about run through his meager savings when he walked into Fickert’s office with his story. By July 24th, rewards totalling more than $14,000.00 had been reported by the _Chronicle_ “for the arrest and conviction of the criminals who perpetrated the bomb outrage on Saturday.”

It had been “about 1:40” when the witness arrived at the corner of Steuart and Market. He had gone to Steuart Street “because I thought there would not be such a crowd there.” After watching the parade for a few minutes, he had “moved up ten or fifteen feet on Steuart.” When he first saw Billings, the machinist was coming down Steuart Street from the direction of Mission Street. He had had a suitcase in his hand.

Q. Would you describe more in detail to the jury his actions when you saw him coming walking along Steuart Street with a suitcase?

A. Well, he was carrying the suitcase, and his head was working on a pivot, and he looked all excited as if he was worrying about something. That is what called my attention to him first.

Q. You at that time then noticed the cellar doors, the iron doors there?

A. Yes.

Q. Did he put the suitcase down before he got to the iron doors or afterwards?

A. No, before he got to the iron doors.

Q. He put it against the wall?

A. Let it down by the side of the wall.

Then he had watched Billings walk to the saloon at the corner of Steuart and Market where, just as he pushed the swinging door open, “right on the second, that man there, Mooney, he came out of the saloon.” As the two men were talking, Mooney kept checking his watch with the clock on the Ferry Building on the Embarcadero Plaza. When the brief conversation ended, Billings “started out in the crowd and I lost sight of him and my attention was drawn to this other man.”

Q. Thomas J. Mooney?

A. Yes.

Q. What did he do?

A. He took his watch out again and looked down toward the dock in the Ferry building and after he put his watch back in his pocket he drew his shoulders up and put his hand to his face like he was studying and looked alongside the building.

Q. What did he do?

A. He turned around and went through the crowd and I lost sight of him.

McDonald described the suitcase as being “kind of jersey, brownish color,” nineteen inches long, fourteen inches deep and seven inches thick. He was “just as positive as I am sitting in this chair” that Billings and Mooney were the men he had watched that July day. As far as the time was concerned, he thought that he had seen Billings walking up Steuart Street “about five minutes” after he himself had arrived at the corner at 1:40.

Cockran, who had been thumbing through the transcript of McDonald’s testimony at the Billings trial, could hardly wait for Cunha to finish with the witness. He didn’t waste any time getting down to bedrock.

Q. Didn’t you say at the Billings trial that when you saw Billings place that suitcase there it was about two o’clock?

A. Yes, but Mr. Cockran--

Q. Explain your answer. I understood you to say at the last trial ... it was two o’clock, and now you want to add something to your testimony. Am I right?

A. I know that is also the way I also testified in Judge--

Q. Can’t you answer that? Did you say at the last trial it was two o’clock when you saw Billings place that suitcase near those trap doors?

A. Yes, but I also said in Judge Dunne’s court it was eight or ten minutes of two when Billings came at the time with the suitcase.

Q. You repeat now it was eight to ten minutes of two and it wasn’t two o’clock when he put it down?

A. No, sir, I don’t say it was two o’clock when he put it down.

Q. You said it then, didn’t you?

A. Yes.

After Cockran had brought out that it would have been difficult for McDonald, who was standing more than one hundred feet away, to see the five-foot-four Billings through the crowd, the defense attorney came back to the all-important time element.

Q. Wasn’t the parade between you and Billings?

A. They were standing 50 feet off or more on Steuart Street.

Q. They were on the move at the time?

A. No, sir.

Q. Do you mean to say they were not moving at two?

A. I wasn’t there at two.

Q. Where were you at two?

A. Down towards the Alameda Cafe on Market Street or close to it.

Q. Then you were not there looking at him place it there at about two o’clock?

A. I mean about as near as I can tell to two o’clock.

Q. You don’t want to qualify it now?

A. I don’t change it.

In his testimony before the Grand Jury, McDonald had said that, after losing sight of Mooney, he had “started down Market Street and I got as far as the Alameda Cafe when the explosion occurred.” He had repeated this statement, almost word for word, at the Billings trial. Cockran decided to put the question to him once more.

Q. How far did you get when the explosion occurred?

A. Well, I had been standing down in front of the Alameda Cafe looking at the parade go by, and the parade had gone by, and I still stood there awhile and I seen the people pushing up toward Steuart and Market and I thought they were, that it was the units coming out of Steuart Street, and I was standing in front of the Alameda Cafe when the explosion occurred. When I did hear the report, I thought it was a signal for the units to come out of Steuart Street.

If McDonald could be believed (and it was obvious that Cockran was not prepared to accept this thesis), he had walked some 150 feet up Market Street after watching the Mooney-Billings tableau before he heard the blast. Since he had testified that he had first seen Billings at “eight or ten minutes to two,” some “25 to 50 feet” away from the corner, that the machinist had placed the suitcase against the building wall “about two o’clock,” and that he himself had started up Market Street in the direction of the cafe before two, it had taken him more than six minutes to cover the half-block. But the witness had an answer for this: “... when I started down Market I just took my time and walked along slowly. I didn’t walk any faster than a snail crawls almost. It took me a little time to get down to the coffee house.” Didn’t Mr. Cockran realize that he was still a very weak man?