evidence it needed to convict him, Maroney pleaded guilty, and was sentenced to ten years in prison. Adams Express put the Pinkertons on an annual retainer, and the Maroney case led to a wealth of new business for Pinkerton.
A S THE NATION collapsed into the Civil War, the Pinkerton Agency was the premier intelligence operation in the country. It had a nationwide force in place, and had developed unparalleled investigative techniques. An avowed abolitionist who worked to spirit escaped slaves to Canada, Pinkerton even helped raise money for the militant antislavery agitator John Brown’s escape from lawmen. When hostilities broke out in 1861, Pinkerton was well positioned and motivated to serve the Union. He knew President Lincoln—who, as a lawyer and budding politician, had drawn up Pinkerton’s contract with the Illinois Central railroad in 1855—and he was close to an energetic young railroad executive named George McClellan.
When McClellan reentered military service (he had once been at West Point) to lead the Ohio state volunteers, he summoned Pinkerton to his side as the head of a military “secret service.” In those days, there was no separate intelligence service, and individual military leaders gathered battlefield and political intelligence on their own. Using the nom de guerre “E. J. Allen,” since by then “Pinkerton” had become almost synonymous in the public imagination with detective work, the great investigator entered military service.
There’s no question that Pinkerton was an American patriot and a true believer in the Union cause. He’d put his career and life on the line more than once to help slaves escape to freedom. But much like his contemporary successors, Pinkerton was a private intelligence contractor who found war a profitable business. In his comprehensive history The Eye That Never Sleeps (1982), Frank Morn notes that Pinkerton earned what was then a princely sum of $38,567 for his government work between September 1861 and November 1862. After the war, he wrote in a letter to his son that he had been relatively poor before combat began, but that during the war, he “amassed considerable money, which was all invested in property of one kind or another in Chicago.”
To this day, selling private intelligence services to thegovernment in wartime can be a profitable enterprise. An entire industry has evolved around it, and many of these enterprises have headquarters outside Washington, D.C., where the other “Beltway bandits” set up shop selling services to the feds. Among the intelligence contractors of today are well-known names such as Booz Allen Hamilton, with 19,000 employees and more than $4 billion in annual revenue, which depends on consulting work for the U.S. intelligence community. At the other end of the scale is the relatively small corporation Abraxas, which, the Los Angeles Times revealed in 2006, creates fake identities and dummy companies for undercover CIA employees around the world. Some of today’s intelligence contractors have gotten into trouble. The CEO of an obscure contractor, MZM, was found in 2005 to have paid more than $1 million in illegal bribes to a powerful congressman in exchange for classified contracts. And the role of the security contractor Blackwater drew attention during congressional hearings in 2007 on the conduct of the firm’s employees in Iraq, who had been accused of murdering innocent civilians.
But first there was Pinkerton.
A FTER L INCOLN WAS elected president of the United States in November 1860, planning began for his triumphal journey from Illinois to the capital. Cities all along the rail route offered the president-elect the chance to speak to large, adoring crowds. But the route was scheduled to go south from Philadelphia to Baltimore, Maryland—an area with thousands of people, known as copperheads, who sympathized with the South. At that moment, it wasn’t clear whether Maryland would end up in the Union
A S THE NATION collapsed into the Civil War, the Pinkerton Agency was the premier intelligence operation in the country. It had a nationwide force in place, and had developed unparalleled investigative techniques. An avowed abolitionist who worked to spirit escaped slaves to Canada, Pinkerton even helped raise money for the militant antislavery agitator John Brown’s escape from lawmen. When hostilities broke out in 1861, Pinkerton was well positioned and motivated to serve the Union. He knew President Lincoln—who, as a lawyer and budding politician, had drawn up Pinkerton’s contract with the Illinois Central railroad in 1855—and he was close to an energetic young railroad executive named George McClellan.
When McClellan reentered military service (he had once been at West Point) to lead the Ohio state volunteers, he summoned Pinkerton to his side as the head of a military “secret service.” In those days, there was no separate intelligence service, and individual military leaders gathered battlefield and political intelligence on their own. Using the nom de guerre “E. J. Allen,” since by then “Pinkerton” had become almost synonymous in the public imagination with detective work, the great investigator entered military service.
There’s no question that Pinkerton was an American patriot and a true believer in the Union cause. He’d put his career and life on the line more than once to help slaves escape to freedom. But much like his contemporary successors, Pinkerton was a private intelligence contractor who found war a profitable business. In his comprehensive history The Eye That Never Sleeps (1982), Frank Morn notes that Pinkerton earned what was then a princely sum of $38,567 for his government work between September 1861 and November 1862. After the war, he wrote in a letter to his son that he had been relatively poor before combat began, but that during the war, he “amassed considerable money, which was all invested in property of one kind or another in Chicago.”
To this day, selling private intelligence services to thegovernment in wartime can be a profitable enterprise. An entire industry has evolved around it, and many of these enterprises have headquarters outside Washington, D.C., where the other “Beltway bandits” set up shop selling services to the feds. Among the intelligence contractors of today are well-known names such as Booz Allen Hamilton, with 19,000 employees and more than $4 billion in annual revenue, which depends on consulting work for the U.S. intelligence community. At the other end of the scale is the relatively small corporation Abraxas, which, the Los Angeles Times revealed in 2006, creates fake identities and dummy companies for undercover CIA employees around the world. Some of today’s intelligence contractors have gotten into trouble. The CEO of an obscure contractor, MZM, was found in 2005 to have paid more than $1 million in illegal bribes to a powerful congressman in exchange for classified contracts. And the role of the security contractor Blackwater drew attention during congressional hearings in 2007 on the conduct of the firm’s employees in Iraq, who had been accused of murdering innocent civilians.
But first there was Pinkerton.
A FTER L INCOLN WAS elected president of the United States in November 1860, planning began for his triumphal journey from Illinois to the capital. Cities all along the rail route offered the president-elect the chance to speak to large, adoring crowds. But the route was scheduled to go south from Philadelphia to Baltimore, Maryland—an area with thousands of people, known as copperheads, who sympathized with the South. At that moment, it wasn’t clear whether Maryland would end up in the Union
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