A Treasury of Foolishly Forgotten Americans (17 page)

Still, the agitation against Burns mounted as labor and defense attorneys continued to vilify him and aggressively promote the McNamaras' innocence. They financed a film portraying the brothers as martyrs and Burns as a thug hired by ferocious capitalists to destroy them. It was a successful piece of propaganda and only added to the luster of the brothers, who were being championed on buttons and banners in cities across the country. Burns appeared to be losing the public relations war. At one point he was even charged with kidnapping in Indianapolis due to alleged irregularities in John McNamara's arrest and extradition to Los Angeles.

Then, on December 1, 1911, came a stunning development: The McNamara brothers suddenly pleaded guilty. Darrow, who had planned to argue that a faulty gas line was responsible for the
Times
explosion (and even had a scale model of the Fortress made to demonstrate it), realized before the trial was set to begin that it was a hopeless case—even for him. The evidence Burns had accumulated was simply unassailable, especially after a search of John McNamara's office at the Ironworkers union—conducted after President William Howard Taft personally intervened—revealed that every element of Ortie McManigal's confession was true. “My God,” the exasperated lawyer exclaimed to James McNamara, “you left a trail behind you a mile wide!” Darrow knew that if the documentation was ever presented in open court, his clients would surely hang and the union cause might be irreparably damaged. “There was no avoiding [the] step taken today,” he wired Samuel Gompers on the day of the guilty plea. “When I see you I know you will be satisfied that all of us have done everything we had to do to accomplish the best.”

But the plea shocked the labor movement, which had placed tremendous faith both in the McNamaras' innocence and in Darrow's ability to defend them. Now it was left crippled and humiliated. Many blamed the famed lawyer, who later wrote, “If perchance I allow myself to slip back the bolt, with which all mortals seek to lock away some of the sad and unpleasant memories of the past, at once my mind goes straight to the courtroom in Los Angeles on the evening of the plea of ‘Guilty.'”

Things got worse for Darrow when he was indicted for attempting to bribe a juror in the McNamara case. Burns was one of the witnesses for the prosecution and faced a brutal cross-examination by his old nemesis Earl Rogers, who now served as Darrow's defense attorney. “It is doubtful if any witness of the prominence of Burns ever underwent the manhandling that Rogers subjected him to,” wrote one biographer. “Sparks flew almost continuously and both men were frequently on the verge of physical encounters.” During one particularly nasty exchange, Burns said of Rogers, “This man…made a statement in the presence of the jury [at the San Francisco graft trials] that I was a suborner of perjury.” In response, Rogers sprang to his feet, stalked up to Burns with his finger pointed, and dramatically shouted, “I make it again, sir, and do not take it back!”

Darrow was ultimately acquitted, but Burns's reputation was hardly sullied by the episode, as he had feared it would be. He remained a hero—“America's Sherlock Holmes,” as the fictional detective's creator, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, called him. Not only had he snared the McNamaras, who, though spared the noose, were sentenced to long prison terms, he eventually caught the anarchists Caplan and Schmidt. The supersleuth was a now a bona fide superstar. “My name is William J. Burns,” he wrote in his bestselling book
The Masked War
, “and my address is New York, London, Paris, Montreal, Chicago, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Seattle, New Orleans, Boston, Philadelphia, Cleveland, and wherever else a law-abiding citizen may find need of men who know how to go quietly about throwing out of ambush a hidden assassin or drawing from cover career criminals who prey upon those who walk straight.” As it turned out, the great detective was needed in Georgia, where hate and ignorance would nearly consume him.

 

On April 27, 1913, the battered and sodomized body of thirteen-year-old Mary Phagan was discovered in the basement of Atlanta's National Pencil Factory where she worked as a machine operator for ten cents an hour. Georgians shocked by the ghastly deed were soon whipped into an anti-Semitic frenzy when factory superintendent Leo Frank, a Cornell-educated Jew, was charged with the murder of his young employee. Crowds gathered at his trial cheered for the prosecution that painted him as a predatory sexual deviant and chanted to the jury, “Hang the Jew or we'll hang you.” Frank was convicted and sentenced to death, largely on the testimony of a black man named Jim Conley who claimed he had helped the superintendent dispose of the body in the factory basement and then helped him cover up the crime. By the time William J. Burns entered the case, nearly a year after the murder, Frank's appeal had been rejected by the Georgia Supreme Court and his defense attorneys were preparing an extraordinary motion for a new trial.

Burns had been retained by Chicago advertising magnate Albert D. Lasker, one of a number of powerful individuals, including
New York Times
publisher Adolph S. Ochs, who believed Frank had been unfairly tried and convicted in a racially charged circus of lies and intimidation. The celebrity sleuth took Atlanta by storm.

“Just the sight of Burns settling down to breakfast each morning in the fern-filled pink-and-white dining room of the grand Georgian Terrace Hotel suggested that a higher power was now at work,” writes author Steve Oney in his book about the celebrated case,
And the Dead Shall Rise
. “Surrounded by half a dozen reporters, attended by a traveling secretary and assorted subalterns, and invariably clad in a crisp hounds tooth suit that set off his famous red hair and mustache, the detective exuded energy and confidence. This was America's greatest private investigator, and between bites of his soft-boiled eggs and toast, he would regale the table with war stories, pausing to dictate telegrams to clients and operatives in far-flung climes. Then, with the entire retinue in tow, he would stroll down Peachtree Street to his agency's local office, declaiming not just on aspects of the Phagan murder but on his certainty that he would solve it.”

The detective's jaunty confidence remained abundantly evident throughout the early stages of his investigation—almost as a setup for the tragic course of events that was to follow. Burns broadly hinted that he had all but solved the murder and vindicated Leo Frank, even as he tried to give the impression that he was impartial enough to declare his client's guilt should the evidence so warrant. The crime had indeed been committed by a pervert, just as the prosecution had said, Burns told reporters. But, he added, Frank lacked all the qualities of a sexual deviant. Soon enough, he produced a series of obscene letters written by Jim Conley, indicating that the state's star witness
did
have the perverse characteristics needed to be Mary Phagan's murderer. Added to this, a group of physicians Burns had arranged to examine Frank “unanimously agreed that [he] was normal physically and mentally,” reported
The New York Times
. To bolster that finding, Burns offered a $1,000 reward for definite “reports concerning acts of perversion on the part of Leo M. Frank.”

Burns expected no responses to his offer and was therefore surprised when Newport Lanford, detective chief of the Atlanta Police Department, promised to share evidence of Frank's deviant nature. Yet when Burns arrived at police headquarters, Lanford refused to open his files. He cited the upcoming hearing on the motion for a new trial as his reason. Furthermore, he publicly maintained that the police had never accused Frank of perversion in the first place. Armed with that blatant lie, Burns triumphantly wired Adolph Ochs at the
Times
:

Burns seemed mighty pleased with the progress he was making, particularly as a number of prosecution witnesses retracted their testimony and new ones were found to implicate Jim Conley. But the detective failed to recognize the depth of resentment his presence in Georgia generated. To many he represented arrogant northern interests seeking to subvert local justice and free a depraved Jew. One of his most vociferous critics was the populist firebrand Thomas E. Watson, a former U.S. congressman and running mate of William Jennings Bryan in the presidential campaign of 1896. Watson used his publication, the
Jeffersonian,
to relentlessly attack Burns and “the conspiracy of Big Money against the law, against the courts, and against the poor little victim of hellish passion,” Mary Phagan.

“This man Burns richly deserves a coat of tar and feathers, plus a ride on a fence-rail,” roared Watson in the April 23, 1914, edition of the
Jeffersonian
. “He has been engineering a campaign of systematic lies tending to blacken this state and tending to provoke an outbreak of popular indignation. With all the bravado of a shallow bluffer, and with all the insolence of irresponsibility, he has gone to the extreme limit of toleration. There may not be a way by which the law can reach him, but there
is
a way to reach him.”

This none-too-subtle call to violence was answered just a week later when Burns and one of his agents, Dan Lehon, found themselves under siege in Mary Phagan's hometown of Marietta, Georgia. They were on their way to interview a potential witness in Cedartown, the road to which ran through Marietta, when their car blew a tire. As they looked for a garage in town, a devotee of Watson's named Robert E. Lee Howell recognized Burns by his distinctive red hair and stormed up to him. “I have promised to beat you if ever came to Marietta,” Howell announced, “and here goes.” With that, he slapped Burns on both cheeks and wildly cursed him.

A large crowd started to gather at the scene, many of them readers of the
Jeffersonian,
and before long a cry of “Lynch him!” was heard. Burns and Lehon quickly recognized the very real peril they faced as the mob of several hundred grew more menacing. Both made a run for it: Burns to an adjacent neighborhood and Lehon to the local sheriff's office. “The great detective ran through several dark alleys as fast as his legs would carry him,” reported one resident, “and those that saw him in action do say that he certainly showed a wonderful burst of speed.” Burns eventually found refuge in a hotel on the outskirts of town, but the mob soon discovered where he was and reassembled outside. It was only when a circuit judge on the scene stepped in to calm the crowd that Burns, amidst a barrage of eggs, was whisked away in the car of a local furniture dealer. Lehon escaped separately.

Although disaster had been narrowly averted in Marietta, Burns still faced a number of troubling developments that boded ill for both him and Leo Frank. One of the worst came when a local pastor, Rev. C. B. Ragsdale, retracted his sworn statement that he had overheard Jim Conley confess to the murder of Mary Phagan. Ragsdale claimed that Burns operatives had bribed him. “They were just handing money out,” he said. Burns dismissed the pastor's allegation as “a cowardly lie by a cowardly liar,” but the damage was done. Tom Watson had a field day, of course, as did Leo Frank's prosecutors, who suggested that Rev. Ragsdale was merely one of many false witnesses assembled by the Burns agency.

The situation grew even bleaker when Burns was called to testify at the hearing for Frank's motion for a new trial. As prosecutors picked apart his investigative methods—challenging, for example, his declaration that Jim Conley was a deviant when he had never met the man, and mocking his failure to interview any witnesses favorable to the prosecution—the detective was frequently evasive or defensive. He distanced himself from some of the best defense evidence when the means of obtaining it was called into question, and was forced to acknowledge some other very suspect practices, such as his decision to send one sworn witness out of town beyond the reach of prosecutors. All in all, it was an unusually dismal performance by the celebrity sleuth.

The defense did their best to mitigate some of the damage, but they knew their case had been gravely compromised. “I regret to advise you that the situation here is desperate,” one of Frank's attorneys wrote to Albert Lasker. “It is the belief of nearly all our friends that Burns's connection with the case has done us irretrievable damage.” That sentiment was confirmed when the motion for a new trial was denied. “I have been disgusted at the farcical methods to which Burns has resorted,” wrote Louis Marshall of the American Jewish Committee to Louis Wiley of
The New York Times
. “Every one of his acts has been a burlesque upon modern detective ideas. It is deplorable that a case so meritorious as that of Frank should have been brought to this point of destruction by such ridiculous methods.”

What Marshall and others failed to realize was that Leo Frank's cause was doomed by a system determined to hang him, not by anything William J. Burns did. Indeed, the detective himself was hammered by that very same system. He was indicted for subornation of perjury in the Ragsdale matter, then had his license revoked by the Atlanta City Council, which forced him to close his local office. America's Sherlock Holmes had been effectively shut out—but not silenced. He continued to proclaim Frank's innocence in the press, while at the same time condemning overeager police and prosecutors, a rabidly anti-Semitic public, and the man he declared to be Mary Phagan's true murderer, Jim Conley.