Broker, Trader, Lawyer, Spy by Eamon Javers Read Free Book Online Page A

he went undercover again, posing as a mail sorter to help nail a postal worker who had absconded with $3,738 in cash stolen from inside letters. The criminal and his brother turned out to be nephews of none other than the postmaster of Chicago himself. When the news hit the papers, Pinkerton was singled out for high praise as the best detective in the country.
    Press like that can change a career, and that’s what happened to Pinkerton. In 1850, he quit government service and set up a private agency with a lawyer as his partner. They called it the North-Western Detective Agency and opened a small office at the corner of Washington and Dearborn in downtown Chicago. The business began slowly and had its troubles. For one thing, historians believe that Pinkerton ousted his partner, Edward Rucker, within a year of starting the firm. But over time it became successful, and eventually it became a private intelligence juggernaut. By then, it was renamed Pinkerton’s National Detective Agency. The firm wouldno longer bill itself as a creature of Chicago—Allan Pinkerton signaled his national ambitions in the letterhead of his company.
    In the 1850s, laws were enforced locally, county by county. There was no FBI, and the federal government didn’t have much ability to track criminals from one state to another. * With the sprawling western frontier attracting all sorts of rogues and scoundrels, and improvements to transportation making it possible for them to commit crimes in county after county as they moved west, there was a desperate need for a police force. That’s what the Pinkerton agency became.
    But the agency didn’t work for the taxpayers. Pinkerton was an intelligence agency that worked for corporate clients and wealthy individuals. It went after criminals who were causing the most damage to the biggest companies of the day: railroads, mining concerns, telegraph services. Pinkerton wasn’t as concerned about crimes against people as he was concerned about crimes against property. The company’s logo, a human eye above the slogan “We Never Sleep” inspired the term “private eye,” still used today.
     
    P INKERTON SOON LANDED the biggest names in business as his clients. He went to work for the American Express Company, which was beginning to transport packages containing all sorts of valuables on specially designed fast railcars. He worked for the Pennsylvania Railroad, just one of several rail clients whose nationwide scope helped push the Pinkerton name across the continent. And he worked for Western Union, which was establishing a cross-continental communications network of telegraph stations.
    For the express companies, the Pinkertons tracked down stolen packages and the crooks who swiped them. For the railroads, they hunted stickup artists on the western frontier. And for the telegraphcompanies, they busted white-collar criminals who sent bogus information over the wires to Wall Street as part of an elaborate insider trading scheme.
    In 1871, the U.S. Department of Justice outsourced much of its investigative work for the year to the Pinkertons on a $50,000 contract. The firm grew so large and successful that its mission, tactics, and organization ultimately became the inspiration for the U.S. Secret Service and the FBI itself.
    For their time, the Pinkerton detectives aggressively deployed new technology and centralized information-collection techniques. Photography had been invented as recently as 1840, and Pinkerton grasped how the technology could be used in fighting crime. He invented the mug shot, and his agents were clever in getting pictures of crooks across the country. Once, they got a notorious criminal so drunk at a saloon that a bartender on the Pinkerton payroll took his picture as he slumped against the bar and grinned sloppily for the camera. That picture was soon circulated across the country and used to identify the man.
    The Pinkertons understood the edge that the telegraph gave them in