Pinkerton’s Great Detective

by Beau Riffenburgh

  But that was not the worst of the situation. “For the next few months, I had to keep my hand on ‘old Colts 45,’ my best friend in those days, while in the operatives’ room when Doc Williams or Pat Barry were present, as they had sworn to get even with me,” Siringo wrote. “At one time pistols were drawn, but I had the drop and made the future chief of police of Portland, Ore., Pat Barry, lay down his gun.”39

  In the midst of this, in November 1887, McParland was appointed assistant superintendent. For several months, while outwardly concentrating on criminal investigations, he took note of everything that happened inside the office as well as outside of it. He was impressed with the abilities and honesty of Siringo but reported negatively about the others to the Pinkerton brothers, who promptly sacked virtually everyone in the Denver office. “A new set of employees were sent from the East,” Siringo reported, “I being the only one of the old ‘bunch’ left. This swelled my head, of course.”40

  McParland, too, remained, as on February 23, 1888, Robert A. Pinkerton informed his other superintendents that “Mr Jas McParland has been appointed Supt of the Denver office.”41

  • • •

  His sudden rise to the head of the agency’s westernmost office dramatically changed McParland’s life. The man who had earned his spurs as an undercover detective was now foremost an administrator. He still served as primary investigator at times, but more often he was an overseer and facilitator of other men’s work. To help run the Denver office—initially located at 1 and 2 Opera House Block—he was joined by assistant superintendent Charles K. Hibben, who was replaced by John C. Fraser in 1891. As the watch service had already been introduced, Captain John Howard was brought in from Chicago to run the now official Pinkerton’s Protective Patrol.42 When Farley became police chief in 1889, McParland had an understanding individual in charge of the city force, and therefore was able to maintain an alliance with the official local law-enforcement agency.

  McParland’s personal life also changed. For some time the widower of three years had been courting Mary H. Regan, a woman about ten years his junior and of Irish descent, who had been raised in Princeton, Wisconsin. In May 1888, McParland returned briefly to Chicago, where he and Mary were married.43 They settled into a house in Denver at 814 Broadway, along with his daughter Kittie and his precious bull terriers, which he had raised ever since his days in Schuylkill County.44 The move to Denver did require him to leave his brothers, however. Charles, with whom he was always closest, continued to live on Menomonee, and that same year their older brother John, also a shoemaker, moved into the same property. Edward, also now using the name McParland, had finally left Philadelphia and moved to Glencoe, in the Chicago area, the previous year.45

  Of his new associates in Denver, McParland became closest to Siringo. They clearly developed a mutual respect, and each identified with the work ethic and professional approach of the other, although they did not work in the field together, as Siringo did with Shores or another rugged outdoorsman, W. B. Sayers.46 McParland’s position—and even more, his temperament—meant that he remained, to a great extent, a lone wolf within the agency. It is clear, however, that he trusted Siringo more than his other operatives, and liked him more as well, as he extended him the unique power of—at least on occasion—choosing to turn down investigations that did not appeal to him.

  McParland and Siringo also formed a significant personal relationship. The Great Detective never had many intimate friends—those people most important to him tended to be older and to have helped advance his career—but Siringo appears to have been closer to him than most anybody other than his brother Charles. It is easy to imagine that—as they both enjoyed having a drink and telling stories, true and otherwise—the man who could be the embodiment of Irish blarney and the tough-as-an-old-boot range rider spent more than one evening together, bragging, fabricating, and scheming. Within a few years, they were also united in tragedy.

  Around the time that McParland took charge of the Denver office, Siringo was working with Doc Shores to hunt down three men who had robbed the Denver & Rio Grande Railroad in western Colorado.47 Knowing that two of them, the Smith brothers, were from near Cawker City, Kansas, the detectives went there, and Siringo took a job on their father’s farm. Their sixteen-year-old, dark-eyed sister was not much younger than Siringo’s wife, and he probably didn’t have trouble paying her special attention, with the result that she showed him a letter from her brothers that had been mailed in Price, Utah. With this information, Siringo and Shores headed to Utah, and Shores sent a telegram to his brother-in-law, undersheriff Roe Allison, to search the area. By the time they arrived in Utah, Allison had arrested all three.

  The lawmen still did not have any proof of their captives’ crimes, however, so when Shores took the three men back for trial, he kept Siringo, posing as a desperate felon, shackled and chained like the others. When they reached Gunnison they were thrown into the same cell in which Hurley had committed suicide. “My three bedfellows were a dirty lot and were alive with vermin,” Siringo wrote. “And one of the Smiths had a bullet wound through the head, which gave out an odor that put on the finishing touch to the already foul air in the cell.”48 Yet Siringo’s talent for acting was so great that several outsiders thought he was by far the worst of the bunch. Not long after, all three confided in Siringo, which Shores used to prompt an official confession from them. They were each sentenced to seven years in the Colorado penitentiary.

  In the ensuing period, McParland assigned Siringo to a case with huge political ramifications.49 The lord mayor of London had purchased the Mudsill silver mine near Fairplay, Colorado, for one hundred ninety thousand dollars, and had then paid forty thousand dollars to Fraser & Chalmers—the world’s largest manufacturer of mining equipment—to build a mill on the property. The foundations of the mill had already been laid when a sample of silver proved to be different than those that had been tested prior to purchase. Pinkerton’s was asked to investigate, and McParland explained to Siringo that the case was particularly tricky because the findings might result in a cancellation of the mill order, and Chalmers of Fraser & Chalmers was married to the Pinkerton’s sister.

  Going undercover as Charles T. Leon, Siringo targeted Jack Allen, the right-hand man of the swindler who had sold the mine to the lord mayor. After a night on which Siringo and Allen became gloriously drunk together and danced with the “free-and-easy girls” until morning, Allen confided that he had spent several years in the state penitentiary in Lincoln, Nebraska, and also spilled enough about the mine to confirm Siringo’s assessment that it had been “salted” to make it appear productive. It took Siringo eight months to gather all the required information, during which he sent for Mamie and Viola, who moved into a hotel in nearby Alma. Four nights a week, Siringo went out drinking and dancing with Allen, and the other three he sneaked out to see his family. At one point his visits were noticed by the hotel’s landlady, who warned Mamie not to associate with Siringo because he was a “bad-un.” Eventually, Siringo learned the full story “from Jacky as to how he and his partner Andy, had spent three years salting the Mudsill mine,” allowing them to fool the two experts who had been sent by the lord mayor.50

  It was important to not let it be known that Charles T. Leon was actually a Pinkerton’s operative, so the case now passed to McParland. He obtained the prison record and photograph of Allen, and then decoyed him to Denver. Once there, McParland had him brought to his office, where, by all accounts, the Great Detective could play “good cop, bad cop” all by himself, smiling sweetly and crooning gently or being dangerously intimidating. Realizing that Allen did not want his background and true identity known in Fairplay, McParland used it to force a full confession. The courts were thereafter able to attach the property of the rogue who had developed the scam, as well as his primary financial backer, in order to allow the lord mayor to recover the vast majority of his funds.

  • • • />
  The year after he took over the Denver office McParland lost two more men who had made a substantial impact on his life. On July 12, 1889, his father, Eneas, died without so much as acknowledging his fifth son’s existence; it is uncertain how McParland took the news. Five months later, he was followed by a man who had helped propel McParland to the heights of fame—Franklin B. Gowen.

  Gowen’s apparent success in his early years as the president of the Reading had been, in many senses, a mirage. He had forced the Reading to borrow so heavily to purchase coal lands that it was never able to recover economic stability. When other business decisions led to the Reading formally declaring bankruptcy in May 1880, it led to Gowen’s ouster as president. Undaunted, he formed an alliance with William Vanderbilt of the New York Central Railroad, whose power politics helped Gowen regain the presidency of the Reading. But Gowen’s new policies could not overcome the huge debt the company faced, and in January 1884 he resigned. He returned for a third reign before being forced out once and for all in 1886 by a syndicate led by J. P. Morgan.51

  Gowen returned to his private legal practice, but despite seeming to be in good health and spirits, on December 13, 1889, he killed himself in his room at the Wormsley Hotel in Washington, D.C. Linden was called in from Philadelphia to investigate whether he had been murdered by the Molly Maguires, and reluctantly made the assessment that Gowen had committed suicide.52 When asked about the case, McParland showed the same perplexed attitude as most of those who knew Gowen: “I don’t see how he could have put an end to himself unless it was because he had over-taxed himself since leaving the Reading. . . . [H]e has been engaged in a desperate fight against Standard Oil.”53

  Linden was not the only superintendent actively conducting investigations. In the spring of 1890—with Siringo on a lengthy case concerning the dynamiting of two mine owners’ houses in Tuscarora, Nevada54—McParland, at the request of the Denver & Rio Grande Railroad, headed an investigation of complaints from mine owners that the weights of the ore they were shipping on the railroad kept coming up short, meaning that the ore was being stolen.55 In mid-July, Sheriff John White of Aspen, Colorado, arrested one man and McParland two, all of whom were switchmen in the railway yard. The next day, two more were picked up.

  When McParland confronted one of them, Charles Sligh, with details of the crimes, the man “saw he was caught and made a clean breast of everything. He said McParland knew too much and more than he wanted him to know and he thought he had better tell him straight.”56 From Sligh’s confession it was evident that it “was an easy matter to throw the ore from the cars onto the platform and then sweep it up as if it had fallen from the wagons in loading onto the cars.”57 This simplistic scheme had allowed the thieves to steal four or five tons of ore at a time.

  Once he began talking, Sligh revealed even more. He and three other men had several times broken into a warehouse owned by a wholesale liquor dealer and had stolen kegs of beer and boxes of cigars. The other three “beer burglars” were promptly arrested, and when they attended the preliminary hearing, Sligh’s testimony revealed that he was not the cleverest man. Having pled “not guilty,” he promptly confessed, and when asked why, he “said that the reason he plead [sic] not guilty was because he was not under oath. He said he was under oath at the present time and was telling the truth. He was guilty and expected to go to the penitentiary.”58

  In November, McParland returned to Aspen to testify in the ore-stealing case. By that time his personal losses had continued to mount. On September 19, 1890, his friend George Kaercher, the former Schuylkill County district attorney—who in 1883 had been appointed the general solicitor for the Reading—was killed in a train wreck.59 A much greater tragedy—from McParland’s perspective—occurred a week later when his beloved daughter Kittie died of diphtheria at the age of eight.60

  The personal losses continued that winter, as the wives of the two men to whom McParland was closest both died. On January 28, 1891, Charles’s wife, Mary Ann, gave birth to their fourth child, Agnes. But Mary Ann thereafter fell ill with what was diagnosed as puerperal fever, and on February 1 she died at the age of thirty-one. Later that month the three-week-old Agnes went into convulsions and died at home.61

  Meanwhile, Mamie Siringo’s health also deteriorated. She had been operated on earlier in the year for what doctors diagnosed as pleurisy, but her lungs had already been too damaged for a recovery. Once Siringo was back from Nevada, McParland made sure that the detective could stay home with his ailing wife. During that same winter, at the age of twenty-two, she died in his arms as he held her at an open window so she could get some fresh air. Soon thereafter, unable to look after Viola himself, Siringo let Mamie’s childless aunt and uncle take her, knowing they would raise her better than he could.62

  Around the time of Mamie’s death, Siringo, distraught from the tragedy, got into a fight outside a pawnshop with a policeman named Rease.63 Both reached for their guns, but Siringo was quicker and, pointing his at Rease’s heart, pulled the trigger. Fortunately another policeman grabbed the pistol, and the hammer came down on his thumb. Dragged by six members of Denver’s finest to a police wagon, Siringo was hauled off to jail. That night McParland visited Farley, the police chief, to negotiate the release of his operative. Having so recently experienced the loss of Kittie, McParland would fully have understood Siringo’s grief, and it is likely that these two men—at times so hard, cold, and determined—would have found comfort in each other’s presence, friends brought even closer by tragedy.

  CHAPTER 14

  CALLING THE SHOTS

  Many years after the death of Kittie McParland in 1890, it was suggested that her passing had taken the last true happiness and joy from her father’s life, particularly as he and Mary remained childless.1 Although this may have been overstated, the reports of him being a free-spirited, devil-may-care Irish lad certainly disappeared, and he began to be seen as a distant, dour, and businesslike supervisor. The novelist and former Pinkerton’s agent Dashiell Hammett caught the essence of this view when he created a character based on McParland—“the Old Man”—who had “no more warmth in him than a hangman’s rope.”2

  Then again, McParland’s role was not to be popular but to efficiently run a major office in a growing and ever-evolving business, in which the requirements of the clients and the level of participation demanded of the agency were constantly changing. His promotion had made him one of seven superintendents responsible directly to Robert and William Pinkerton, who, on the death of their father, had assumed the titles of general superintendent, Eastern Division and general superintendent, Western Division, respectively.

  The seven offices emphasized different investigative priorities, due to the primary concerns of their local clients, but they were organized similarly, into four main sections: clerical, criminal, operating, and executive.3 The clerical department consisted of a chief clerk, who reported directly to the superintendent, and under whom were a bookkeeper, cashier, several stenographers, an office boy, and a janitor. The department was responsible for keeping the financial accounts, typing the detectives’ edited reports, and assisting the other departments with their correspondence.

  The criminal department was headed by the assistant superintendent, who drew personnel from the operating division as required. He was in charge of criminal investigations and correspondence and for the maintenance of the card index file and the Rogues’ Gallery—photographs of and information about all known criminals.

  The operating division was composed entirely of operatives, of which there were three kinds. The special operative was, in fact, the least special. Hired essentially as a freelance detective on a case-by-case basis, he was required to shadow a target or undertake an investigation when there was no general operative available.

  The general operative was the public image of an operative. Like Siringo or W. B. Sayers, he was “an all-round able man, bright, intelligent, and
capable of assuming any role, or impersonating any kind of character . . . and who will at all times act in a cool, discreet and level-headed manner.”4 General operatives were so important that every office was required to keep a few on staff at all times, and every effort was made to retain them once they had established themselves.

  The third kind of agent was the secret operative—whom unions called a “labor spy”—whose job was to infiltrate an organization, discover as much information as possible about its plans, and take any actions within or against it, as instructed. Although such tasks were relatively unusual when McParland took charge of the Denver office, as time passed they became the most frequent and significant, making the agents carrying them out also the most important, both to Pinkerton’s and other detective agencies.5

  The final section, which expanded as the offices’ workload increased, was the executive department, consisting of the superintendent and, as time went on, a variable number of assistant superintendents, depending on the volume of business. Among their functions were studying and analyzing incoming reports from operatives, editing or revising them for sending to the client,6 and suggesting policies or recommending actions for the employer. In addition, “letters of criticism and instruction are sent almost daily to the operative.”7 The executives were also expected to canvas for new business.8

  Although the seven offices were thus similar on the surface, the relative isolation of McParland’s Denver headquarters, as well as the fact that it covered the entire vast region to the west, north, and south, made it distinctive, and it gave McParland a day-to-day control that was greater than that of his counterparts at the other offices. It also made his leadership ability and managerial style somewhat more observable than those of the men who were more closely overseen by the Pinkertons.