Tom Mooney Trial: 1917

Swanson knew Mooney had been acquitted of possessing dynamite in a strike against PG&E. Swanson also implicated Warren K. Billings, another labor activist who had been convicted of transporting dynamite.

Billings, Mooney, his wife Rena and their friend Israel Weinberg, a taxi driver, were arrested immediately without warrants. Rena Mooney and Weinberg were charged with complicity; Billings and Mooney with murder.

Billings was tried first, convicted, and sentenced to life imprisonment—mainly on the testimony of John McDonald, who said he had seen Billings and Tom Mooney at the scene just before the bomb went off.

On January 3, 1917, opening the Mooney trial for the prosecution, Prosecutor Edward Cunha reviewed Mooney's earlier association with an organization called "The Blasters." Their stated goal was an uprising of California's workers, who would seize property and destroy the government. Their revolution called for violence, even the assassination of the president. For a week, Cunha presented circumstantial evidence, most of which had been seen or heard in the Billings trial.