Speaking Ill of the Dead by Randy Stapilus

Author:Randy Stapilus
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781493017331
Publisher: TwoDot

CHAPTER 9

James McParland

He was the Great Detective. That was his nickname, and so he was widely regarded, to the point that an homage to him appeared—in a thinly disguised form—in the last Sherlock Holmes novel.

James McParland probably was the greatest operative the Pinkerton Detective Agency had in its first half-century. He also was a subverter of civil liberties and a breeder of suspicion, distrust, and even terror. In some times and places his activities helped keep the peace. In Idaho the darker side of McParland shot to the surface. For a brief time he almost seemed to take over control of the state, for reasons that often had little to do with enforcing the law, even though his ostensible reason for being in the state was to investigate a murder.

His work in Idaho meant, among other things, that the biggest criminal case in the state’s history, and much of the official machinery of the state as well, was being run by the mine owners of Colorado—who, incredibly, actually had a stake in the outcome.

McParland told others, and may have told himself, that his instructions came from “Divine Providence.” His Idaho critics may have wondered if the source lay in the opposite direction.

A native of Ireland (his last name originally was McParlan), he immigrated at an early age to New York. Before long he had moved to Chicago, where he worked for a time as a night watchman and then set up a liquor business. He did not prosper. Soon after the liquor store’s launch, the great Chicago fire of 1871 wiped McParland out, and he applied for a job with the Pinkerton National Detective Agency. He started at the bottom.

Pinkerton, which had come to national fame during the Civil War by assisting and protecting Abraham Lincoln, was actually going through a hard, cash-lean stretch in the early 1870s. Founder Allan Pinkerton saw an opportunity in hiring out to companies where labor was starting to organize, and in the coming decades Pinkerton became closely allied with many of America’s largest businesses.

Pinkerton used detectives partly as strikebreaker muscle and partly as undercover agents to build cases against activists. The firm was hired to do those things in several Pennsylvania mines owned by the Philadelphia and Reading Railroad, where Irish miners calling themselves the Molly Maguires were engaged in violence and even killed those who opposed them. Pinkerton needed a young, tough Irish Catholic to infiltrate the Maguires, and he sent in McParland. After two and a half years, he was spectacularly successful; his undercover work and later testimony resulted directly in nine death-penalty convictions and indirectly in eleven more.

His methods were questionable, and they were loudly questioned. One defense attorney, arguing as many others did that the undercover detective had fostered and encouraged many of the illegal activities, blasted McParland on the stand with an expense report, noting he had one day bought his fellow miners sixty-seven shots of whiskey. McParland replied, “The kind of criminals I had to deal with were a whiskey-drinking crowd.

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