When One Man Created Organized Crime Fighting

Welcome to Strange History, where we explore the weird and the wonderful history that

has shaped the world into what it is today. Strange History is proudly part

of the dark Cast podcast network hosted on Spreaker. Today we delve into the

strange history of the birth of law enforcement in the United States. Long before

there was the FBI or the CIA, there was the Pinkerton National Detective Agency.

The Pinkerton National Detective Agency helped to usher in the modern era of law

enforcement. Its founder became a detective by accident. Born in Glasgow, Scotland,

in eighteen nineteen, Alan Pinkerton had grown up poor, helping to support

his family as a laborer after his father, who was a policeman, died

in the line of duty. As a young man, Pinkerton spoke out for

democratic reform in Great Britain and was persecuted for his radicalism. In eighteen forty

two, politics forced Pinkerton and his wife Joan to emigrate to the United States.

Eighteen forty two, Alan Pinkerton immigrated to the Chicago area and he opened

up a barrel making business. His detective career began just five years later when

he stumbled upon a band of counterfeiters while scrounging for lumber on an island in

the Fox River. The Scotsman conducted informal surveillance of the gang and was hailed

as a local hero after he helped police make arrests. The affair was in

everybody's mouth, he later wrote, and I suddenly found myself called upon from

every quarter to undertake matters requiring detective skills. Pinkerton soon won a gig as

a small town sheriff. He went on to work as Chicago's first police detective

and as an agent for the US Post Office. Around eighteen fifty, he

opened the private investigation firm that became the Pinkerton National Detective Agency. The Pinkerton's

inspired the term private eye. The Pinkerton Agency first made its name in the

late eighteen fifties for hunting down outlaws and providing private security for railroads. As

the company's profile grew, its iconic logo, a large unblinking eye accompanied by

the slogan we Never Sleep, gave rise to the term private eye as a

nickname for detectives. They hired the nation's first female detective in eighteen fifty six.

Twenty three year old widow, Kate Warren walked into the Pinkerton Chicago office

and requested a job as a detective. Alan Pinkerton was hesitant to hire a

female investigator, but he gave in after Warren convinced him that she could worm

out secrets in many places to which it was impossible for male detectives to gain

access. True to her word, Warren proved to be an expert at working

undercover, once busting a thief by posing up to his wife and convincing her

to reveal the location of the loop. During another case, she got a

suspect to feed her crucial information by disguising herself as a fortune teller. Pinkerton

would later list Warren as one of the best investigators he ever hired. Following

her death in eighteen sixty eight, he even had her buried in his family

plot. The Pinkerton's may have foiled an assassination attempt on Abraham Lincoln shortly before

Abraham Lincoln's first inauguration. In March eighteen sixty one, Alan Pinkerton traveled to

Baltimore on a mission for a railroad company. The detective was investigating rumors that

Southern sympathizers might sabotage the rail lines to Washington, d c. But while

gathering undercover intelligence, he learned that a secret cabal also planned to assassinate Lincoln

as he switched trains in Baltimore on his way to the capitol. Pinkerton immediately

tracked down the president elect and informed him of the alleged plot. With the

help of Kate Warren and several other agents, he then arranged for Lincoln to

secretly board an overnight train and passed through Baltimore several hours ahead of his published

schedule. Pinkerton operatives also cut telegraph lines to ensure the conspirators couldn't communicate with

one another, and Warren had Lincoln posed as her invalid brother to cover up

his identity. The President elect arrived safely in Washington the next morning, but

his decision to skirt through Baltimore saw him lampooned and labeled as a coward in

the press. Meanwhile, none of the would be assassins were ever arrested,

leading some historians to conclude that the threat may have been exaggerated or even invented

by Pinkerton. They spied for the Union Army during the Civil War. Alan

Pinkerton was a staunch abolitionist and union man, and during the Civil War he

organized the secret intelligence service for General B. McClellan's Army of the Potomac.

Operating under the name E. J. Allen. Pinkerton set up a spy

ring behind enemy lines and infiltrated Southern sympathizer groups in the North. He even,

at agent's interview, escaped slaves to glean information about the Confederacy. The

operation produced loads of intelligence, but not all of it proved accurate. Famous

misstep came during eighteen sixty two an Insula campaign, when Pinkerton reported that the

Confederate forces around Richmond were more than twice their actual size. McClellan believed the

faulty intel, and despite outnumbering the rebels by a large margin, he delayed

his advance and made repeated calls for reinforcements. The Pinkertons created one of the

world's earliest criminal databases. One of the many ways the Pinkerton's revolutionized law enforcement

was their so called rogues Gallery, a collection of mug shots and case histories

that the agencies used to research and keep track of wanted men, along with

noting suspects distinguishing marks and scars. Agents also collected newspaper clippings and generated rap

sheets detailing their previous arrests, known associates, and areas of expertise. A

more sophisticated criminal library wouldn't be assembled until the early twentieth century and the birth

of the FBI. The Pinkerton's warred with Jesse James and his gang. During

the era of frontier expansion, Express companies and railroads often employed the Pinkertons as

Wild West bounty hunters. The agency famously infiltrated the Reno Gang, perpetrators of

the nation's first train robbery, and later chased after Butch Cassidy in his Wild

Bunch. The Pinkertons usually got their man, but in the eighteen seventies they

spent months engaged in a fruitless hunt for the bank robbers Jesse and Frank James.

One of their agents was murdered while trying to infiltrate the brothers Missouri based

gang, and two more died in a shootout. The hunt came to a

bloody end in eighteen seventy five, when the Pinkertons launched a raid on the

James brothers mother's house in Clay County, Missouri. Frank and Jesse were nowhere

to be found. They'd been tipped off, but the Pinkertons got into an

argument with their mother, Zelda Samuel. During the standoff, a member of

the detective posse tossed an incendiary device through Samuel's window, blowing part of her

arm walk and killing the James brothers eight year old half brother. The botched

Raide turned public opinion against the Pinkertons. After seeing his detectives denounced as murderers

in the papers, Alan Pinkerton reluctantly called off his war against the James gang.

Jesse would go on to elude the authorities for another seven years before being

killed by an assassin's bullet in eighteen eighty two. They played a role in

the eighteen ninety two infamous Homestead Mill strike. Along with their exploits in the

wild West, the Pinkertons also had a more sinister reputation as the parliamentary wing

of big business industrialists used them to spy on unions or act as guards and

strike breakers, and detectives clashed with workers on several occasions. During an eighteen

ninety two strike by the Amalgamated Association of Iron and Steelworkers. The Carnegie Steel

Company paid some three hundred Pinkertons to act as security at its mill in Homestead,

Pennsylvania. After arriving at the plant on the River Barges, the agents

squared off with thousands of strike workers in an all day battle waged with guns,

bricks, and even dynamite. By the time they outnumbered Pinkerton's finally surrendered,

at least a dozen people were dead several more wounded. The fallout from

the melee crippled to steal union, but many also branded the Pinkertons as hired

thugs, leading several states to pass laws banning the use of outside guards in

labor disputes. In eighteen seventy three, the Pinkerton National Detective Agency started to

figure out their niche when they were hired by Franklin B. Gowan, president

of the Philadelphia and Reading Railroad, to infiltrate the striking Irish immigrant miners.

One of their first investigations found the Molly mcguires, a secret society in Ireland

that fought for workers' rights, was responsible for violence during the strikes. A

Pinkerton detective named James McParland, a native Irishman, claimed to have infiltrated the

molly mcguires with his help. Police arrested sixty miners under the accusation and they

were part of the molly mcguires, and with the arrests, the strike was

defeated. However, despite the strike ending, the men were still forced by

the mine owners to stand trial between eighteen seventy five to eighteen seventy seven in

order to uncover alleged crimes committed by the molly mcguires. Despite the fact that

there was no evidence linking the men to the molly mcguires and the trials provided

no evidence that such a secret society even existed in the United States, twenty

men were still sentenced to death by hanging. Public opinion was also heavily swayed

against do molly mcguires, and before their death, the condemned men were excommunicated

by Philadelphia Bishop James Frederick Woods. As a result, they were denied a

Christian burial. The trials against the molly mcguires fueled discrimination against the Irish Americans

and suspicion of the trade union movement, both of which lingered for decades.

The Pinkertons were once larger than the US Army. After Alan Pinkerton died in

eighteen eighty four, or control of his agency fell to his two sons,

Robert and William. The company continued to grow under their watch, and by

the eighteen nineties it boasted two thousand detectives and thirty thousand reserves, more men

than the standing Army of the United States. Fearful that the agency could be

hired as a private mercenary army, the state of Ohio later outlawed the Pinkerton's

altogether. The agency still exists today. By the early twentieth century, the

Pinkerton's crime fighting duties had largely been absorbed by the local police forces and the

agencies like the FBI. The company lived on as a private security firm and

guard service, however, and still operates today under the shortened named Pinkerton.

The detective agency gave its files on such bandits as Jesse James and Butch Cassidy

to the Library of Congress. Good detectives don't like to show their hand,

but after fifty years, the Pinkerton Agency finally revealed what it had on the

outlaws. Such is Jesse James and Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. The

records that were released date from the company's foundings in eighteen fifty to nineteen thirty

eight and the gangster era. The material includes the only known photo of Etta

Place, the accomplice of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, one ninety five

criminal investigation binders, and photographs of President Abraham Lincoln made by the Pinkerton family.

There are wanted posters, mug shots and rap sheets route laws such as

Jesse James. There were also daily detective reports, pictures of burglar tools,

and an eighteen ninety five book on safecracking written for the agency by an international

bank robber, Max Shinburn. The collection has been appraised at five hundred thousand

dollars, and had it gone to auction, it would have likely fetched much

more, but Pinker didn't decided to donate it rather than to sell it.

This has been another episode of Strange History. If you enjoy this podcast,

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This podcast was produced by Dead to Me Productions and the brainchild of Amy

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