Broker, Trader, Lawyer, Spy - Eamon Javers [19]
OVER TIME, ALLAN Pinkerton became an expert in every type of crime that afflicted his corporate and individual clients. His book Thirty Years a Detective (1884)* is divided into chapters detailing the criminals he saw, including “the society thief,” “hotel thieves,” “steamboat operators,” “confidence and blackmail,” and something he called “the Boodle Game,” in which con men sent anonymous letters enticing their targets to engage in financial shenanigans.† The boodle game seems to have been a forerunner of the Nigerian e-mail scams of today. People who’d been suckered into losing money on the schemes were often so embarrassed that they didn’t report the crime to the police.
The Pinkerton Agency battled corporate thieves, stalked bank robbers, and chased Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and the Jesse James gang across the Wild West. During the Civil War, Pinkerton agents foiled an early attempt to assassinate President Lincoln and sent spies into the Confederacy to monitor its military strength and political developments. One of Pinkerton’s agents, Timothy Webster, was hanged in Richmond in 1862 as a Union spy. He was the first American executed for espionage in nearly 100 years.
Pinkerton was already at the height of his powers in the 1850s when he sent undercover agents to nail Nathan Maroney, manager of the Montgomery, Alabama, office of the Adams Express Company, which transported goods by railcar. In 1855, Pinkerton received a strange letter from Edward Sanford, an executive at Adams. Sanford told Pinkerton that $40,000 had been stolen from a company pouch somewhere between Montgomery, Alabama, and Augusta, Georgia. Sanford’s letter included key details of the company’s own internal investigation, including that the leather bag containing the money had been locked when the cash went missing. With nothing to go on but the details contained in the letter, Pinkerton made an educated guess that the thief was Maroney, who would have had access to Adams’s pouch keys. He mailed back his hunch.
Sanford summoned Pinkerton to Alabama and told the detective that he’d already had Maroney arrested and charged with theft. But the company had nothing other than circumstantial evidence against him, and the arrest caused an uproar among the leading citizens of Montgomery, who supported Maroney. After all, Adams Express was a Yankee company and this was the eve of the Civil War. Maroney was a local man, and he had local support. He got out on bail. The situation was verging on disaster for Adams Express.
Pinkerton brought in a five-person team, including Kate Warne, who is widely credited with being the nation’s first woman detective.* The group suspected that Maroney had stashed the money in a safe place until the heat blew over. They needed to figure out where the money was and prove that Maroney had stolen it. They tailed Maroney’s wife as she dropped off a letter to Philadelphia, which tipped them off that she had relatives in that area. When she relocated to the outskirts of Philadelphia, Pinkerton dispatched agents to Jenkintown, Pennsylvania. One operative set up a watch-repair shop in the village as a cover operation and began gathering information on the Maroney family’s activities.
Pinkerton sent in Kate Warne, posing as a society wife. Supplied with a lavish wardrobe, she played her part to the hilt, and wangled an introduction to Mrs. Maroney. Over the course of their chats, Warne pretended to confide in her, claiming that her own husband had gotten rich as a counterfeiter.
Meanwhile, Pinkerton maneuvered to have authorities rearrest Maroney, and when they did, Pinkerton placed an operative, John White, undercover in the same jail cell, ostensibly charged with forgery. Pinkerton then unleashed an elaborate scheme of psychological warfare against the hapless, imprisoned Maroney. An undercover agent was assigned to court Mrs. Maroney