Michael Digby

Sleuthing the ‘Crime of the Century,’ the 1910 Bombing of the Los Angeles Times: A Bomb Detective’s Perspective

In the late afternoon of September 30, 1910, James Barnabus (JB) McNamara left his downtown Los Angeles hotel on a mission to plant bombs. It was supposed to be just another night of bombings. Carrying a suitcase holding three time-delay bombs, or “infernal devices,” he walked through downtown streets to the Los Angeles Times, and his one of the bombs in Ink Alley, and set the timer for 1am. He then hid identical bombs outside the homes of Los Angeles Times publisher General Harrison Gray Otis, and Felix Zeehandelaar, a close ally of General Otis. The bombings were part of a years-long, nationwide campaign of industrial sabotage and terror, spearheaded by radical and conspiratorial elements within the national labor movement. Their goal was to wage war on union-resistant Los Angeles. Confident that the three bombs would explode long after he had left the city, he boarded an evening train to San Francisco. Shortly after 1am, October 1, 1910, with his train traveling north, a powerful explosion, and inferno which ripped through the Los Angeles Times building, destroying much of the building, killing twenty-one employees, and causing scores of injuries. Thanks to some determined, and often fractured investigative work, a year-long nationwide manhunt resulted in the arrest, trial and conviction of dozens of bombing co-conspirators — including senior executives within the labor movement. In this presentation, Mike Digby, a 43-year veteran bomb detective, will discuss the so-called National Dynamite Plot from its origins to its demise, focusing on the bombers, the conspirators, the bombs, and the investigators, examining why this case became known as “The Trial of the Century.”