how Darrow had given him $700, and discussed ways to hijack evidence. McManigal’s uncle related his efforts to get Ortie to retract his confession. Kurt Diekelman, the hotel clerk, gave his account of how Ruby’s brother had spirited him to Chicago. And when Johannsen denied that the McNamara defense had conspired to get David Caplan’s wife out of the state, he was confronted with coded telegrams he had sent updating Darrow’s team on Flora Caplan’s flight. Several talesmen from the McNamara trial were called to the stand, and told how they were offered bribes by Franklin. Witnesses traced the path of a $10,000 check from the AFL that Darrow and Tvietmoe had cashed in San Francisco for mysterious purposes. And the debonair Detective Browne, in his soft Southern accent, described his encounter with Darrow after Franklin’s arrest.
“Browne, this is terrible, for God’s sake,” Darrow told him. “Can’t you do anything for us?”
“You ought to have known better than to employ a man like Franklin; he is always drunk,” Browne replied.
“Do the best you can and I will take care of you,” Darrow had promised. It was, said the state, another attempt at bribery.
To cap its case, in late June, the prosecution called Harrington to the stand. Filling the witness chair with his bulk, Harrington told how the previous September, as they talked on the porch at the Bonnie Brae house, Darrow had pulled a roll of bills from his pocket, said it was $10,000, and vowed to use it to “reach” a couple of jurymen. “He said he had the check cashed in Tvietmoe’s bank in San Francisco so that the money could not be traced,” Harrington testified. “I told Darrow not to attempt such a thing, it would be his ruin.”
“I guess you are right,” Darrow had told him. “I won’t do it.” But on the day that Franklin was arrested, said Harrington, he recalled the incident and asked if Darrow had cause for worry. “Yes,” Darrow told him. “My God, if he speaks I am ruined.”
Darrow prepared his loved ones for the worst. “I am afraid there is no way to win,” he wrote Paul. In court, Darrow was “increasingly glum and grim; he felt mortified and resentful, heartbroken and trapped,” said Baillie. “He told me he thought that even Rogers believed him guilty.”22
Rogers parried, once again, with mischief and disruption. Harrington was an attorney and knew what made a good witness. During the cross-examination, instead of looking at Rogers, he addressed his answers directly, and earnestly, to the jury. Rogers “padded about the courtroom with the stealthy tread of a panther,” trying to break Harrington’s gaze, the Examiner reported. He urged Darrow, who was also up and wandering the room, to “make him look you in the eye.”
Inexplicably, Fredericks lost it. “May it please the court,” he told the judge. “We would like to have Mr. Darrow keep his seat.”
Why? “We maintain that Mr. Darrow is attempting to use hypnotism on this witness,” Fredericks said.
Hypnotism? “At the mention of the mystic Svengali art,” the Examiner reported, “a shout of laughter” went up from the spectators and the jurors. In moments of high tension, humor can trigger hysterics. Even the Times conceded that “the laughter and applause … exceeded anything” that longtime court employees could recall. The judge was forced to call a recess.
Fredericks was still smarting three days later, when Rogers and his co-counsel, Horace Appel, ganged up on him in an effort to obtain the transcripts of the dictograph recordings.
“Darrow never told me outright in words that he had anything to do with the bribing of jurors,” Harrington had conceded, when asked about their exchanges.
“If he had four or five conversations with Mr. Darrow … and Mr. Darrow told him that he had nothing to do with the bribery,” said Rogers, then the jury should see the transcripts.
Transcriptions were the confidential property of the state, Assistant District Attorney Ford replied, and “the public interests would suffer by disclosure of it at this time.”
“There is no such thing in a criminal case,” Appel argued. “The public interests will suffer, Your Honor, if an innocent man is convicted by suppression of the evidence.”
“There won’t be any innocent man convicted,” said Fredericks, unable to stay still. “It will come out at the right time.”
“Yes, it will come out as you are coming out,” said Appel, “and your conduct of the case.”
Fredericks had no use for Appel, a brilliant but crazed individual (he would end his days in an asylum)