Infamous America - BOMBINGS Ep. 1 | “L.A. Times, Part 1: Midnight Assassins”

Episode Date: January 15, 2025

In the early 1900s, a new phase starts in the ongoing battle between unions and big businesses. Some union organizers begin using bombs to try to force employers to negotiate. In 1910, the powerful Iron Workers union launches a nationwide bombing campaign against ruthless business owners. On October 1, 1910, notorious bomber J.B. McNamara targets the Los Angeles Times building in one of the worst attacks in American history. For the full story of the L.A. Times bombing, check out the fantastic book “Deadly Times” by Lew Irwin. Join Black Barrel+ for ad-free episodes and bingeable seasons: blackbarrel.supportingcast.fm/join   Apple users join Black Barrel+ for ad-free episodes, bingeable seasons and bonus episodes. Click the Black Barrel+ banner on Apple to get started with a 3-day free trial.   On YouTube, subscribe to INFAMOUS+ for ad-free episodes and bingeable seasons: hit “Join” on the Legends YouTube homepage.   For more details, please visit www.blackbarrelmedia.com. Our social media pages are: @blackbarrelmedia on Facebook and Instagram, and @bbarrelmedia on Twitter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On September 30th, 1910, a skinny mustachioed man sat in his hotel room in downtown Los Angeles. He carefully soldered small alarm clocks, small pieces of brass, dry batteries, and small boards, and he used special wire to connect them. He went through the process three times to make three contraptions. Lastly, he attached 16 sticks of dynamite to each bomb. He wrapped each bomb in newspaper and slid them into small leather satchels. He placed the three small satchels into a large suitcase. The man grabbed a second large suitcase and stood up to go for a walk.

His name was James Barnabas McNamara, better known as J.B. He was 28 years old, but he looked a lot older thanks to his heavy use of cigarettes and whiskey. At about 3 o'clock in the afternoon, McNamara left his hotel, on Fifth Street with his two suitcases. One was stuffed with his personal belongings, and he put that suitcase in a storage locker at the nearby train station. Then he started off again with the other suitcase. He walked to the stately home of businessman Felix Zalandalar,

and he placed the first device on the ground underneath a bedroom window. McNamara then walked about 10 blocks to the estate of Harrison Otis, owner of the Los Angeles Times newspaper. McNamara placed a second device in a flower bed under a bay window of Otis's mansion. McNamara turned around and began to walk to his final target. At about 5.30 p.m., he arrived at his destination. There in front of him was the three-story brick-and-granate building that was the home of the Los Angeles Times newspaper. McNamara slipped into Inc. Alley, a publicly accessible passageway at street level.

In ink alley, the newspaper stored barrels of highly flammable petroleum-based printers ink. McNamara placed the third satchel next to one of the barrels. Instead of leaving immediately, he navigated his way down to the basement level. Using a set of pliers, McNamara wrenched open the dials to the building's natural gas pipes. After he heard the telltale hissing sound, he walked back out onto the street and into the encroaching night. It seems likely that McNamara returned to his hotel and spent an anxious night just five blocks from the L.A. Times building. If so, he would have heard and probably felt the result of his effort. It was the worst bomb attack in Los Angeles history and the fourth most destructive bombing

in American history. To catch him and his co-conspirators, the authorities would turn to the most high-profile detective of the era, and the case would be one of several to be called the crime of the century. From Black Barrel Media, this is infamous America. I'm your host, Chris Wimmer, and this season we're telling the stories of the LA Times bombing of 1910, the mad bomber of the 1950s,

and the crazy case of the Harvey's Casino bombing in Nevada in 1980. This is episode one, L.A. Times bombing Part 1, Midnight Assassins. J.B. McNamara loved to blow things up. His older brother, John Joseph, better known as JJ or just John, love to organize. The McNamara brothers were Irish-American trade unionists, and they considered themselves soldiers in a nationwide conflict between labor and employers. By 1910, the conflict already had a long and complicated history, interconnected with other cities like Chicago, St. Louis, Denver, and San Francisco.

In the first years of the 1900s, employers used labor spies, private detective agencies like the Pinkertons, and strike breakers to bust unions or to keep them from forming at all. Local, state, and federal law enforcement agencies often cooperated in the campaign by beating and arresting those who went on strike or tried to strike. In response, desperate union officials started to embrace the philosophy of fight violence with violence. The McNamara brothers were active members of the International Association of Bridge and Structural Ironworkers, usually called the IW. The goal of the IW was to keep union contracts in place and wages fair. For the most part, the IW was a peaceful advocate for labor's right to negotiate with employers, mostly in manufacturing and mining enterprises.

But in 1905, in response to increased resistance to high, wages and unions in general, the IW elected a militant president, and it elected John McNamara as its secretary-treasurer. Beginning in late 1906, the IW launched a dynamiting campaign. The goal was to bring companies to the bargaining table, not to completely destroy structures or to kill people. Over the course of four years in the early 1900s, the group was allegedly behind more than 60 dynamite attacks across the United States. The explosions were aimed at anti-union businesses, and they were typically designed to go off when people were not around. Technology was evolving, and bombers were learning how to set more accurate timers so they could give themselves a head start to get out of the

building or get out of the way, and also to reduce the potential for loss of life. The bombs were scare tactics. They were supposed to force employers to negotiate with employees, not to kill the employees. For the most part, the early bombings were crude and ugly. They did very little damage and no one died until 1910. In Los Angeles, employers had been successfully resisting unionization for nearly half a century. But that summer, the city witnessed a series of labor strikes as workers tried yet again to organize. One of labor's fiercest opponents was Harrison Gray Otis, the owner publisher, and editor-in-chief of the Los Angeles Times newspaper. In 1896, Otis gained control over the local merchants and manufacturers association,

better known as the M&M. Otis and the M&M launched a campaign to remove the remaining unions from the city, and he used his newspaper as his mouthpiece. Business Titan Felix Zalandalar was a close ally of Otis and served as the M&M board's secretary. Those two and some others conspired with the L.A. City Council to prohibit picketing. Despite the power of the M&M and the best efforts of Otis, Zalandolar, and others, unions in the city only grew in popularity.

At the L.A. Times, typesetters soon had allies among other American Federation of Labor signatories, launderers, brewers, bakers, and butchers. Otis knew who was backing the effort, labor bosses in San Francisco. Unionization in the Bay Area had always been strong, and it had increased the wages of skilled tradesmen 30% above those in Los Angeles. In 1907, the AFL considered Otis the single largest obstacle to unionization in America. It secretly passed a resolution for a war fund for use in attacking the Los Angeles Times. For the McNamaras and their colleagues, the resolution was a green light for violence.

Otis and others secured a no-picketing ordinance in the summer of 1910, and the Los Angeles Police Department received the authority to arrest picketers and protesters. The LAPD promptly arrested hundreds of labor activists. John McNamara, Secretary-Treasurer of the IW and other labor leaders were furious. They felt they had been making headway in Los Angeles, until the new law was passed. John McNamara sent his brother, J.B., and another dynamite expert, named Ordy McManigal, to Los Angeles to address the matter. Ordy McManigle and J.B. McNamara became associates in late 1909. They were introduced by John McNamara, J.B.'s older brother, and Herbert

Hawken, a high-ranking member of the Iron Workers Executive Committee. McManigel was in his mid-30s and lived in Illinois. For years, he'd been working at a rock quarry, which meant he had significant experience with explosives. At McManagall's place of employment, Herbert Hawken had been trying to recruit workers to join the IW. One day in 1908, Hawkins approached McManigal about doing some work for extra cash. At first, McManigal turned down Hawkins' offer. McManigal was not a violent man, and he certainly didn't want to go to jail. But in addition to a healthy cash incentive, Hawkins said that if McManagle didn't do the jobs,

he would be blacklisted from IW job sites everywhere. Within weeks, McManigal had dynamited a non-union construction site in Detroit, and Hawken gave him a huge bonus. McManigle was terrified and he didn't want to continue, so Hawken raised the threat. If McManigle did not keep doing the jobs, Hawkin would turn him into the authorities, and McManigle's family would be destitute when he was arrested. Over the next year, McManigle bombed sites all over the Midwest and the East Coast.

He also found a supplier with a rich and effective nitroglycerin. So he became the group's go-to person for sourcing both dynamite and jars of nitroglycerin. Nitroglycerin was a lot less stable, but it was easier to find in high quantities. And soon, J.B. McNamara and Ordi McManigal were planting bombs together, but McManigal grew increasingly worried about his partner. When their bosses decided to bomb the LA Times, McManigle realized that this was no regular construction site, nor simply an empty boiler at a foundry.

The LA Times building was nicknamed the Fortress. It was a three-story brick-and-granted miniature castle in the center of downtown Los Angeles. And the plan for the first time potentially included murder, because the bombers were ordered to plant devices at the homes of Harrison Otis and Felix Zalander. McManigal was supposed to lead the bombing mission, but fate intervened on his behalf. The head of the West Coast IW wanted a union member from St. Louis to carry out the bombing, but the union member said no. He wanted nothing to do with it. John McNamara and the head of the West Coast operation

decided McManigal would continue to do his work in the Midwest, and that John's younger brother, J.B., would do the L.A. Times bombing. J.B. was happy to oblige. McManigal and J.B. McNamara boarded the same train in Indianapolis and headed west. McManigal got off in Omaha, Nebraska. He went about his destructive business, business, dynamiting open shop sites in Omaha, and then Milwaukee, Duluth, Kansas City, and more. Sometimes his suitcases literally dripped with nitroglycerin, which was insanely dangerous.

Nitroglycerin is notoriously unstable and has to be transported with incredible care. On September 3, 1910, McManigel arrived in Peoria, Illinois with several jars of nitroglycerin and other supplies. And as usual, he signed into a hotel under an alias. That night it started to rain. When it stopped, McManigal placed two bombs in a rail yard and then headed to his second target, a foundry. He scrambled over some fences, placed two bombs, set them for 10.30 that night, and then

raced back to his hotel room. McManagall may not have been happy about being blackmailed into being a bomber for the IW, But he was proud of his devices. He built them expertly, and his wiring was as neat as a pin. All the components were commonly found at hardware stores across the country, as was the children's toy clock used to time their detonation. The only unique component was a can of nitroglycerin, which he had purchased from a company in Indiana.

That night, McManigel lay awake in the dark, waiting for the four explosions to commence. At 10.30, he heard two at the foundry and ticked those off in his head as completed. A few minutes later, he heard one go off at the rail yard. And then, nothing. He panicked. He wondered if the alarm mechanism had jammed, or if the weather might have shorted it. Whatever the problem was with the bomb, he now had a bigger problem. He caught a train home to Chicago and read in the newspaper that the night watchman at the rail yard had turned over the fourth bomb. the unexploded device to investigators. As the days passed, McManigal and his wife continued to scan the newspapers.

Coverage of the Peoria bombing and its investigation waned, but unknown to McManigal, a plan was taking shape in San Francisco that would lead to a bombing in Los Angeles. That bombing would become connected to the Peoria bombing, and it would lead investigators straight to his doorstep. A couple days before McManigel placed his bomb, in Peoria, Illinois, J.B. McNamara arrived in San Francisco. He met with union leaders and told them how he planned to bomb the L.A. Times building. McNamara also said he wanted to bomb the homes

of Harrison Otis, the owner of the Times, and Felix Zalandalar, who worked closely with Otis in the anti-union effort. The head of the I.W. Union on the West Coast was Eugene Clancy. Clancy and his colleagues thought J.B. McNamara was a sociopath, an unstable, but on the whole, he would be perfect to lead the Los Angeles bombing campaign. Anti-union activity heated up in that first week of September 1910. Men of all trades were being denied work anywhere, the Merchants and Manufactures Association, controlled by Otis and Zalandalar, held sway. Workers were being turned down if they were even suspected of having

Union sympathies. Eugene Clancy and John McNamara, as two of the leaders of the I.W. Union believed Harrison Otis had declared war, and it was time to fight back. J.B. McNamara said he would need a small crew to help him pull off the bombings in Los Angeles, so Eugene Clancy assigned him two men, David Kaplan and Matthew Schmidt. The crew turned out to be as volatile as nitroglycerin, and they were terrible at keeping a low-profile. J.B. McNamara and Matthew Schmidt hated each other the second they met. J.B. and David Kaplan got along fine, but it was clear that the planning stages at the very

least were going to be messy. Union leaders Eugene Clancy and John McNamara seemed to be okay with planting bombs at the homes of Harrison Otis and Felix Zalandalar. But at the moment, no one could agree on which bombers would do which jobs during the mission. Finally, the group agreed that Kaplan and Schmidt would go to L.A. and help J.B. scout the job, and they would just have to figure out later who would actually plant the devices. Sometime in early September, the crew traveled from San Francisco down to Los Angeles and walked into the L.A. Times building for the first time. Presumably, they also scouted the homes of Otis and Zalandalar, but that was never confirmed for the record. Luckily, for all involved, the trip was peaceful.

McNamara and Schmidt were able to put aside their mutual hatred while they were working, and they returned to San Francisco with no problems. But that blessed peace didn't last long when they were back at their home base. Schmidt browbeat McNamara until McNamara agreed to move out of his low-key hotel room where he was mostly anonymous. McNamara agreed to move into a boarding house that was run by Schmidt's girlfriend. But when McNamara showed up, The girlfriend said she didn't have any rooms available.

She directed McNamara to a different boarding house where he successfully found a room. The woman who ran the second boarding house answered all the incoming phone calls and placed all the outgoing phone calls, and she could listen in on every conversation. She heard Schmidt and McNamara planning details of an upcoming trip to Los Angeles. And the walls of her boarding house were paper thin, so she could hear conversations that took place in McNamara's room. And then McNamara started a romantic relationship with the woman. One morning when he woke up in bed next to her,

he told her about a wild dream he had had, that the Los Angeles Times building blew up and the explosion killed its owner, Harrison Otis. In hindsight, it was pretty amazing. The genius bombers were leaving a trail that any detective could follow, and it was about to become even more comical. As September ended, McNamara, Schmidt, and Kaplan fine-tuned their plans. The last step was to buy a lot of a very special kind of dynamite.

Their request was eye-opening and about as memorable as it could be. Nitroglycerin was created by an Italian chemist in 1846. It was an oily liquid that was highly unstable and could easily explode under a range of conditions. But it was Alfred Nobel, the namesake of the Nobel Prize, who perfected the mixture and used it as the foundational element for his new invention, dynamite. Nobel experimented with nitroglycerin until he was able to turn the liquid into a paste that could be molded and shaped. Then he created a blasting cap, which was a wooden plug that contained black powder. Lastly, he added a fuse. The nitroglycerin was shaped into a cylinder.

The blasting cap was fitted to the top of the cylinder, and the fuse was attached to the blasting cap. When you lit the fuse, it burned down and sparked the black powder. The black powder ignited the nitroglycerin and created an explosion. The size and strength of the blast was determined by how much nitroglycerin was in the mixture. By the early 1900s, a stick of dynamite usually contained between 20 and 60, percent nitroglycerin. So, when Matthew Schmidt called the giant powder company outside San Francisco and asked for a batch of dynamite that was 99% nitroglycerin, the sales clerk immediately became

suspicious. The clerk told Schmidt they did carry it, but the request was highly unusual. The next day, when Schmidt and J.B. showed up to try to buy the supply, the clerk made sure to meet them in person. The clerk asked Schmidt and J.J.J.E. who both used fake names, what they needed it for. Schmidt told them they needed it for blowing up tree stumps, which was a fairly common practice as land was cleared for housing developments and farming. But the clerk was still suspicious. He said most people only needed a mixture of 20% nitro to blow up tree stumps. Schmidt insisted that the tree stubs they were trying to destroy were extra tough. Still, the clerk refused to sell them a batch of 99% nitro.

He finally agreed to sell them 500 pounds of dynamite that was 80% nitroglycerin. That should be more than enough to take out a few tree stumps. Or in the case of the bombers, a three-story building and two houses. And whatever they didn't use would be stored for future West Coast jobs. Schmidt, McNamara, and Kaplan had their dynamite, but they needed to transport it from the powder company to their safe house in San Francisco. They rented a boat in Oakland, and the owner hopped on to show them how to work it. He noticed that Schmidt carefully put on gloves before touching anything on the boat.

And in addition to that notable quirk, Schmidt had a glass eye, which he chose to cover with an eye patch. If he were trying to make himself distinctive and memorable, he was succeeding brilliantly. He wasn't trying to be memorable, of course, but the result was the same. J.B. McNamara did not wear gloves. and he left perfect handprints on the greasy wooden sides of the boat as they chugged out into the San Francisco Bay. And the comedy didn't stop there. They used aluminum letters and old paint to cover up the name of the boat and change it from pastime to peerless. The half-ass job looked awful, and every boat they passed took note of the messy adjustment.

After making an impression on scores of people, the trio finally moved the dynamite through San Francisco. Francisco Harbor and carted it to their rental house. Now it was time for the real work. And then McNamara and Schmidt got into an argument that was so vicious that they both agreed McNamara should go to Los Angeles alone. So, J.B. boarded the Nighttime Express train from San Francisco to L.A. At that point, flying solo, McNamara's movements become more difficult to track. But author Lou Irwin did the best job of recreating the most likely timeline for his book

about the bombing, which was published in 2013. It seems like McNamara arrived in LA in the early morning hours of September 29. His whereabouts for most of the day appear to be unknown, but he checked into the Baltimore Hotel in downtown LA that afternoon. McNamara lugged two heavy suitcases up to his room. One contained his personal items. the other contained 48 sticks of dynamite and the materials to build and conceal three bombs. Sometime around 1 p.m. on the afternoon of September 30th, 1910, J.B. McNamara assembled three bombs

in his hotel room. Each bomb contained 16 sticks of dynamite. Each was fitted with a small alarm clock for a timer and a dry cell battery to power the alarm clock. He wrapped the bombs in newspaper and placed each one in a small leather bag. When he was done with his work, he left the hotel and started the bombing campaign. He walked to Garland Street and placed a bomb under the window of a bedroom at the home of Felix Zalandalar. Then he walked about 10 blocks to the home of Harrison Otis in the MacArthur Park neighborhood. He placed a bomb beneath a bay window. And with the first two bombs done, he headed back downtown for the hardest part of his mission. At about 5.30 p.m., he arrived at the L.A. Times building, nicknamed the Fortress. He made small talk with a night

watchman who led him in to Inc. The long, narrow corridor where the newspaper stored its barrels of highly flammable printers ink. McNamara placed his final bomb next to the barrels, went down to the basement and opened the gas valves and then hustled out of the building. At some point that evening, he returned to the Baltimore Hotel and presumably spent the night there. If so, he was only five blocks from the L.A. Times building when the chaos started at 1 a.m. Within about an hour of the placement of the L.A. Times bomb, most of the employees in the building went home for the day. but about 100 employees arrived at work for the night shift. It was a busy night at the times because the paper had missed its early deadlines,

and night shift employees hurried to make up for it. Also, editors waited impatiently for final news of the Vanderbilt Cup auto race. Along with the editors, there were proofers, machine operators, and telegraph monitors who watched for any late-breaking news. On the second floor, staff set type on massive linotype machines. Everyone smoked cigarettes, despite the combustible environment, as they put the final touches on the next day's edition. For more than seven hours, a small leather satchel sat unnoticed next to barrels of ink

in ink alley as the timer inside ticked and ticked. At 107 in the morning of October 1st, 1910, the clock stopped. stopped ticking as 16 sticks of 80% nitro dynamite detonated. The first explosion was heard 10 miles away. A column of debris and smoke roared into the sky above the Times building. Within seconds, four or five smaller explosions rocked the building as the main explosion ignited other flammable materials. In less than four minutes, all three floors were engulfed in flames.

The composing room of the paper was on the second floor, and that was where most of the employees were. The force of the blast on the ground floor blew a section of the first floor up through the second floor and all the way up to the roof. The men on the second floor flew into the air with all the debris and then crashed back to the ground as machinery rained down on top of them. The first floor and the second floor collapsed into the basement, which might have been the end of the cataclysmic event, except the blast opened the natural gas lines that were located

beneath the bombing site. As one expert described it, rivers of gas gushed out, coursing in all directions, feeding the flames and causing them to burn with a new intensity. A firestorm erupted from the basement. The supercharged heat devoured floorboards, huge rolls of paper, and the remaining barrels of ink, which quickly exploded and added more fire to the catastrophe. In the newsroom on the second floor, the exit doors jammed. A crowd of confused, desperate workers gathered at the windows as the flames rushed toward them. The heat was unbearable. Some people tried to find their way out through the smoke and the darkness, and they plunged to their deaths in an elevator shaft. Witnesses watched in horror as some workers crawled out onto ledges to try to

escape the flames. One after another, the workers jumped, and their bodies landed with brutal cracking sounds on the concrete sidewalk. Other workers managed to climb onto the roof of an adjacent boarding house and escaped the disaster. Firemen raced to the scene, but the task of putting out the blaze was nearly overwhelming. Citizens began to gather in the streets of downtown L.A. to marvel at the destruction. As dawn broke on October 1st, 1910, firemen carefully picked through the smoky rubble where the Los Angeles Times building stood the night before. It would take three days for them to fully extinguish all the embers around the city block. But in the immediate aftermath, they wanted to account for all those who had been inside. When a final tally was made, 21 people died in the bombing,

and another 17 were injured. Harrison Otis, the owner of the Times, would write of the bombers, Oh, you anarchic scum, you leeches upon honest labor, you midnight assassins, you whose hands are dripping with the innocent blood of your victims. The number of dead and wounded were remarkably low,

given the devastation, but only a few people knew that there were still two more bombs in play near downtown Los Angeles. Next time on Infamous America, the most famous detective in the country, William Burns, leads the hunt for the suspects who committed the worst bomb attack in American history. Burns and others piece together clues from across the nation to bring the L.A. Times bombers to justice by any means necessary, even if those means aren't exactly legal. That's next week on Infamous America.

Members of our Black Barrel Plus program don't have to wait week to week for new episodes. They received the entire season to binge all at once with no commercials, and they also receive exclusive bonus episodes. Sign up now through the link in the show notes or on our website, blackbarrelmedia.com. Memberships are just $5 per month. For the full story of the attack on the LA Times, check out the book Deadly Times,

The 1910 bombing of the Los Angeles Times and America's Forgotten Decade of Terror by Lou Irwin. This episode was researched and written by Julia Brickland. Original music by Rob Valier. I'm co-writer, host, and producer, Chris Wimmer. Find us at our website, blackbarrelmedia.com or on our social media channels. We're Black Barrel Media on Facebook and Instagram and B-Barrell Media on Twitter. And you can stream all our episodes on YouTube.

Just search for Infamous America Podcast. Thanks for listening.