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, please subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever else you get your podcasts. This podcast was produced by Dead to Me Productions and the brainchild of Amy Domestica. Thank you Spreaker for being such a great podcasting platform. Love you guys. Yay

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