The Napoleon of Crime by Ben Macintyre

Author:Ben Macintyre [Macintyre, Ben]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Biography, True Crime, Non Fiction
ISBN: 9780307886477
Publisher: Random House, Inc.
Published: 2011-04-05T04:00:00+00:00

EIGHTEEN

Bootless Footpads

Worth had successfully escaped the clutches of the law, but the same could not be said of most of his colleagues, thanks, in large measure, to the work of William and Robert Pinkerton, who had all but cornered the market in bank-robbery prevention. The number of U.S. banks was increasing rapidly, from 754 in 1883 to 3,579 in 1893. Nitroglycerine had made it easier to blow open their safes, but the authorities, ably backed by the Pinkertons and improved safe designs, were becoming more efficient at defending their property. As Max Shinburn remarked: “It was nip and tuck between the safe makers and the crooks, as to which should gain the upper hand.” In time, the Pinkertons would found the Protective Association of American Bankers, through which banks would pay for their special protection. It was a worthwhile investment, for Billy Pinkerton, the Big Man, or the Eye, as he was known—a reference to the Pinkertons’ motto—had become a towering figure among detectives, as skillful in championing the law as Worth was adept at breaking it.

As the burglar Josiah Flynt recalled: “The guns leave the Big Man’s territory alone, if they can. If there was two banks standin’ close together, an’ one o’ them was a member of the Bankers’ Association an’ the other one wasn’t, the guns ’ud tackle the other one first. The Big Man protects the Bankers’ Association banks.” Eddie Guerin thought that “the Pinkertons did more than all the detective forces of the world combined together to smash up the big bank robbers.”

Pinkerton’s National Detective Agency had left the early days of mere bounty-hunting far behind, to become the most effective and, after the bitter labor disputes of the 1880s and early 1890s, the most detested detective force in the United States. Many considered them to be hired strike-breakers, private police in the pay of the large industrialists. The Pinkertons insisted, in the words of an official report into their activities, that “the practice of employing Pinkerton guards or watchmen by corporations in cases of strikes or labor trouble has grown very largely out of the sloth and inability of the civil authorities to render efficient and proper protection.” They had a point, but the participation of Pinkerton’s men in the Burlington strikes of 1888 and then the Homestead riots of 1892 was among the ugliest chapters in the agency’s history.

William Pinkerton, a man of unabashed conservative views, played a key role in those events, but he was always happier in the saddle, hunting down the bandits and thugs who terrorized the West. Whenever a train robbery was reported, William was usually the first to hasten to Denver and organize pursuit of the fresh breed of desperadoes: the Farringtons, the Burrows brothers, “Texas Jack” Searcy, Charles Morgan, the McCoys, Harvey Logan, alias “Kid Curry,” and, of course, Butch Cassidy and Harry Longabaugh, the Sundance Kid.

No area of criminal endeavor was beyond the scope of the Pinkerton brothers: outlaws, blackmailers, fences, forgers, fraudsters, killers, and cattle rustlers learned to respect and fear them.

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