Broker, Trader, Lawyer, Spy - Eamon Javers [143]
*That seems like a fine point, but it is a distinction with a difference. “Lobbying” expenses are required by law to be disclosed publicly. “Consulting” fees can remain private. There are many in Washington’s lobbying community who argue that as much as 50 percent of all influence-peddling fees are hidden from public disclosure through the use of this loophole. If so, that would make Washington’s lobbying business a nearly $6 billion industry.
*His tale is expertly told in James Mackay, Allan Pinkerton: The First Private Eye (Edinburgh: Mainstream, 1996). Mackay’s account is the most comprehensive of the many biographies of Pinkerton, and it is relied on extensively here.
*A little more than a decade earlier, the new town of Chicago had elected its first trustees at a meeting held in the same hotel.
*The seeds of the FBI would be sown in 1908, when President Theodore Roosevelt authorized the creation of a small corps of special agents, under the auspices of the attorney general. The new agency was named the Bureau of Investigation.
*Journalists, too, were seduced by the temptation to cheat via telegraph. In his book The Eavesdroppers (1959), Sam Dash wrote that reporters at the San Francisco Call in 1899 alleged that rivals at the San Francisco Examiner were tapping telephone lines to steal scoops.
*Pinkerton wrote more than fifteen books, including memoirs of his own exploits and pulp-style detective novels. He is said to have employed a squad of ghostwriters to churn out these books, which also served as publicity for the Pinkerton image. In his books, detectives were typically heroic, criminals nefarious, and clients innocent victims. They had titles like Strikers, Communists, Tramps, and Detectives (1878), The Spy of the Rebellion (1884), and Cornered at Last: A Detective Story (1892).
†The author Dashiell Hammett was a Pinkerton agent from 1915 to 1921, and he relied on his experiences in the agency to create the legendary fictional private detective Sam Spade in the novel The Maltese Falcon. Spade became the ultimate celluloid detective when he was played by Humphrey Bogart in the famous film version of The Maltese Falcon, but the character had his roots in genuine Pinkerton exploits. Hammett didn’t stay with the Pinkertons long. He grew disillusioned with what he saw as the Pinkertons’ antilabor strikebreaking efforts and quit the agency.
*Rumors have long circulated that Warne—an attractive widow—and Pinkerton were romantically involved. There seems to be no proof of this except that Warne was the first female detective Pinkerton hired, and she traveled the country with him for years while his wife and children stayed home in Chicago. Pinkerton praised her as one of his best detectives, saying, “Mrs. Warne never let me down.” When she died, Pinkerton buried her in his family plot. His own grave is close by.
*The security contract for Lincoln was not to last long. The Pinkertons were not on duty the night he was assassinated.
*After the war, Allan Pinkerton had Webster’s body removed from its grave in Richmond and reburied in northern soil. He also erected a monument to Webster in his own family cemetery.
*Frick’s partnership with Carnegie, though severed after the Homestead strike, was lucrative. The union-breaking industrialist built an enormous mansion on Fifth Avenue in New York City, which is now the home of the Frick Collection, a museum dedicated to old masters including Rembrandt, Goya, and Titian.
*The sons weren’t as liberal as their father in at least one respect: they discontinued the use of female detectives.
*Dash would go on to fame as the co–chief counsel of the Senate Watergate committee nearly two decades later.
*Merger talks between the two airlines would continue in one form or