100 years ago, bombing claimed 9 police lives
Attack largest loss of police life in U.S. history until 9/11
An 11-year-old girl spotted the package first.
She tugged on the arm of her mother, who was cleaning the Italian Evangelical Mission Church, a Protestant church in Milwaukee’s heavily Sicilian Third Ward.
Her mother looked at the package and alerted a church organist, who found it suspicious and called police. The church’s pastor had been the subject of earlier controversy.
After at least two hours of waiting for officers, the organist asked another church member, Sam Mazzone, to carry the package to the Central Police Station downtown.
For a city steeped in history, relatively few in Milwaukee know about the Central Police Station bombing or the swirl of circumstances surrounding it: anarchists, nativism and corruption, to name a few.
That evening, Nov. 24, 1917, the package exploded at the station, killing nine police department members and one civilian.
It was the largest single loss of police life in U.S. history until the terror attacks on Sept. 11, 2001.
“In the blood-spattered chamber detectives pored over the pieces of broken glass and clothing and all the terrible debris of the explosion, in a search for some of the personal effects of their companions.” — Milwaukee Journal
For a city steeped in history, relatively few in Milwaukee know about the Central Police Station bombing or the swirl of circumstances surrounding it: anarchists, nativism and corruption, to name a few.
“We Americans forget our history pretty quickly,” said Dean Strang, a prominent attorney and author of “Worse than the Devil: Anarchists, Clarence Darrow, and Justice in a Time of Terror,” a book about the bombing and its aftermath.
“We’re very forward-looking and we tend to have a gauzy, very general memory of our past,” he said.
But the lessons of the bombing have current resonance: a terror attack; an ethnic minority despised for its ideology; and a justice system — and wider community — looking at all members of a group as the same, rather than as individuals.
In 1992, Bobby Tanzilo, then a reporter for the Milwaukee Sentinel, wrote a piece for the 75th anniversary. He later authored the book, “The Milwaukee Police Station Bomb of 1917.”
“It was so rooted in Milwaukee and these places I knew,” said Tanzilo, who now writes for OnMilwaukee.com.
“When you’re younger and read history, it always seems like the story of them over there,” he said.
“It never feels like the story of us right here.”
“Here one day and in eternity the next. Life’s chance, and a detective’s chance. It is terrible. Our loss is big but the loss to the families of the men is a far greater one.” — Milwaukee Police Capt. John T. Sullivan
News reports at the time immediately linked the bombing with a riot in Bay View two months earlier. The events shared a common figure: Pastor August Giuliani of the Italian Evangelical Mission.
Giuliani sought to extend his mission to a second Italian enclave, Bay View, and set up on street corners there, preaching patriotism in the midst of World War I. He said he was met by a small group of anarchists who told him they did not believe in government or religion.
Giuliani requested a Milwaukee police presence for his third meeting, on Sept. 9, 1917. The anarchists returned. A police officer later testified he saw “guns coming out of their pockets,” heard shots coming from the crowd and he opened fire. Other detectives said they saw two members in the crowd fire multiple shots.
Two Italians were killed, two others wounded and two Milwaukee detectives suffered graze wounds in the incident.
Eleven Italians were arrested and charged in the riot. Despite an obvious conflict of interest, Giuliani served as a translator for some of them when they gave statements to police.
One week before their trial, the bomb exploded.
It was never meant for the police station; it was meant for Giuliani and his congregation. Even though Giuliani was out of town that weekend, historians say the bomb achieved its purpose.
“It did what terrorism is meant to do: scare people,” Tanzilo said. “The police immediately went into lockdown and any Italian was arrested.”
“On the hooks that lined the walls of the assembly room could be seen pieces of clothing and pieces of flesh. In the ceiling was a hole left by that portion of the bomb that had risen and burst through the floor above.” — Milwaukee Journal
Mazzone, the church member, arrived at the Central Police Station a little before 7:30 p.m. as the night shift was starting and detectives were gathering for roll call.
Mazzone believed the 20-plus pound package was a bomb and told the desk sergeant so.
Another police supervisor said to get the package out of the station, which was at the corner of Broadway and what is now Wells St.
But no one did, and no one thought to soak it in water — considered the safest way to deal with dynamite bombs of the time.
“It was packed with screws, bolts, heavy sharp-edged pieces of metal, designed to shred human bodies, and it did,” Strang said.
The blast killed police operator Edward Spindler, Sgt. Henry Deckert and detectives Charles Seehawer, Stephen Stecker, Frank Caswin, Albert Templin, Paul Weiler, David O’Brien and Frederick Kaiser.
Also killed was 36-year-old Catherine Ruby Walker, a resident who had come to the police station to file a report against a man who was harassing her.
Police at the time had little capacity for investigating the bomb after the fact, Strang said.
There was no crime lab — a chemist from Allis-Chalmers analyzed remnants of the bomb — and only one federal agent in the region.
“It seems like 1,000 years ago instead of 100,” Strang said.
“In a mass of debris in the southeast corner of the building, a wedding ring was found. It was twisted and broken. ‘D. O’B’ were the initials on it. ‘That ring belonged to Dave O’Brien,’ said the officer who found it. It was turned over to the coroner.” — Milwaukee Sentinel
John O’Brien grew up with a portrait of his grandfather hanging above the mantle of his family’s home in Whitefish Bay.
In the photo, David O’Brien has a thick black mustache and wears a straw hat — the detective is dressed in his plainclothes.
A widower for 20 years, he had remarried just a few weeks before he was killed in the bomb blast. He was 52.
Nine years after the 1917 explosion, his grandson, John O’Brien, was born.
“We’re certainly proud of Grandpa and we’ve tried to honor him, to pray for him,” John O’Brien, now 91, said in a recent interview.
O’Brien’s own father rarely discussed the blast.
“He had to go over and identify his father’s body at the morgue because the other police officers couldn’t definitively identify him,” he said. “The bodies were just shattered.”
His grandfather’s billy club and pistol were found in the rubble and given to the family. The heirlooms have been passed on to O’Brien’s son, who was named after his grandfather.
Of his descendants, none went into law enforcement, but five are attorneys. John O’Brien sold safety clothes and equipment to factories and other employers for more than two decades.
When he reflects on his grandfather’s death, he thinks of service, sacrifice and how the bombing changed police protocol for handling suspicious packages.
“I like to try to think that it saved more lives rather than going off at the church,” he said.
“I wish this tragedy had never happened. I know the Italians are condemning and have condemned such diabolical plots. I believe all efforts should be made to bring the guilty ones to justice.” — Angelo Cerminara, an attorney who served as Italian consul in Milwaukee.
Less than two weeks after the bombing, the trial for the 11 people charged in the Bay View riot began in Milwaukee, despite defense requests for a change of venue.
On Dec. 20, 1917, it took a jury 17 minutes to find all 11 guilty of “assault with intent to kill and murder.” Each was sentenced to 25 years in the state prison at Waupun.
The case received national attention and renowned Chicago attorney Clarence Darrow took up their appeal. Darrow later served as the defense attorney in the famous Scopes Monkey trial.
The Wisconsin Supreme Court overturned all but two of the convictions. It also recommended two of those with overturned convictions get a new trial, but Milwaukee officials apparently never pursued that.
No one was ever charged in the bombing.
It remains unsolved.