Broker, Trader, Lawyer, Spy by Eamon Javers Page A

man, now served as the head of Pinkerton’s Denver office, deploying newer agents in undercover operations against labor. McParland ran the entire western division of the Pinkerton agency, but his critics claim that he conducted a cynical operation, positioning his spies in leadership positions in the regional mining unions, where he could both obtain intelligence on the labor activists, and, some said, evenorder provocative union actions that in turn generated ever more lucrative business from the mining concerns.
    In an era of easier transatlantic travel, made possible by the introduction of the steamship, the Pinkerton brothers also became global operators, hunting down suspects for clients in London, in Paris, and across Europe. Robert’s son Allan Pinkerton II served in World War I and then took over the company from his father in 1923. Allan II’s son, Robert Pinkerton, took over in turn in 1930, renounced antiunion work entirely after yet another series of bruising hearings on Capitol Hill in the 1930s, and took the company public in 1965. He died on October 11, 1965, and was replaced by the first non–family member since the company’s founding more than 100 years earlier.
    Throughout most of the twentieth century, the Pinkerton Agency receded from its dominant position in the national consciousness. Several competitors, including the Thiel Detective Service Agency, formed by a former Pinkerton detective, George H. Thiel, began to obtain market share. The Pinkertons never forgave Thiel for launching a competing firm. Another up-and-coming competitor was the William Burns International Detective Agency. All the firms dabbled in strikebreaking to some degree, but that work began to wane after the 1930s.
    In 1999, the company Allan Pinkerton founded was sold to Stockholm, Sweden-based Securitas AB, a 250,000-employee security services company based in Stockholm, Sweden, with offices around the world. Pinkerton’s operates today as a subsidiary of this Swedish conglomerate; it is now called Pinkerton Consulting & Investigations.
    It’s a long way from Bogus Island.

C HAPTER T HREE
For the Money
    At the dawn of the twentieth century, the Department of Justice had no investigators of its own. Humiliatingly, it had to borrow agents from the Secret Service every time it needed to conduct an investigation. There was no national police force, and early efforts to create a federal bureau of investigation were mired in controversy. The government’s impotence created the market filled by the Pinkertons. Congress, for the most part, was happy with this state of affairs: in the early 1900s, the nation’s politicians were suspicious of the “secret services,” or what they called “black cabinets,” that governments around the world used to conduct espionage on their own citizens.
    The conduct of the actual Secret Service didn’t help matters. In one famous case, the federal agents conducted surveillance on a Navy midshipman who’d run away with a married woman. That set off howls of protest on Capitol Hill, where lawmakers resented the idea of federal investigators’ being used as a kind of morality police.
    The debate began to change in 1906. Attorney General Charles Bonaparte decided he needed a police force of his own, as the situation was becoming intolerable. In 1906, he had to borrow sixty agents from the Secret Service. The next year, he’d borrow sixty-five. This borrowing was getting expensive, and Bonaparte resentedthe fact that he didn’t have control over the investigators working for him. In a missive to Congress, he alerted the legislators to “the anomaly that the Department of Justice has no…permanent detective force under its immediate control.”
    President Theodore Roosevelt, eager to expand his executive authority, leaped into the debate. He dismissed the worries of the civil libertarians in Congress, writing, “There is no more foolish outcry than this against ‘spies’ only criminals