Broker, Trader, Lawyer, Spy - Eamon Javers [26]
Told that a local priest had fingered him as a detective, he went to the church and confronted the priest. Still, he noticed that he was regularly being tailed by armed Mollies, and he heard a rumor that leaders had ordered his killing. McParland decided he couldn’t bluff his way out any longer. On March 7, 1876, he boarded a train heading north, with a Pinkerton captain keeping watch over his train car. McParland’s run as an undercover Molly was done, almost two years after he’d been sworn into the murderous secret society.
But McParland’s role in breaking the Mollies wasn’t done: Pinkerton asked him to take the witness stand in court. That would expose his real name and identity, and possibly subject him to retaliatory violence from the Mollies. McParland agreed—after some persuasion—to testify in public. During the trial for the murder of Yost, McParland made his first appearance on the witness stand—giving the Mollies the first indication of how badly their organization had been penetrated. Here was a man they knew as a drunken brawler, transformed into a clean-shaven, articulate, well-dressed detective. One contemporary newspaper account described the astonishment of the Mollies as they realized what had happened. “Carroll was as if struck by lightning. Boyle shook like an aspen as the prosecutor announced, ‘We will produce to you the full and complete confession of James Carroll and Hugh McGehan of their part in this murder made to James McKenna, a detective.’”
Eventually, twenty Mollies would hang for their crimes, with McParland’s testimony serving as the crucial evidence to break the gang’s back.
McParland lived a long life, and went on to become one of the Pinkerton Agency’s most legendary detectives. He was still solving cases of mine-related violence in Idaho as late as 1906. But Franklin Gowen, who had started the whole Molly case, met a much different fate. The railroad company came close to failure, and Gowen was pushed out of its management. He became a private lawyer, and in 1889 he was summoned to Washington, D.C., as part of a case against Standard Oil. There, in his room at Wormsley’s Hotel, he shot himself.
The Pinkertons thought his death might not be suicide at all, and investigated it as a possible hit by the Mollies. But despite their suspicions and a thorough investigation, they came up with no evidence that it had been anything other than a sad man alone in a hotel room, far from home, with a gun.
THE PINKERTONS HAD their share of casualties in their ongoing war against the enemies of their clients. The Adams Express Company hired the agency to track down a group of outlaws known as the Jesse James gang: former Confederates who had been robbing trains and banks across the middle of the country. In 1874, two Pinkerton detectives—Louis Lull and Joseph Wicher—were killed by the Jesse James gang. These brutal, execution-style killings seem to have unhinged Allan Pinkerton. He wrote to his deputy, “I know that the James Youngers [The Youngers were four brothers who made up the core of the James gang, along with Jesse’s brother, Frank] are desperate men, and that when we meet it, it must be the death of one or both of us…. My blood was spilt, and they must repay, there is no use talking, they must die.”
The Pinkertons deployed their private army against the James gang, tracking them to their family farm in Missouri. They surrounded the place, nicknamed “Castle James” by the locals, and prepared for battle. What they didn’t know was that their own heavily armed band had attracted notice. The James brothers had skipped town, leaving their mother, Zerelda; her husband (who was not the James boys’ father); and the couple’s two children, who were half siblings of the James brothers.
Someone from the Pinkerton side—exactly who was