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ALLAN Pinkerton was the Scot who fathered modern criminal detection technique. More: he was the father of modern espionage. He is best known for founding Pinkerton's National Detective Agency, which still exists.
Less well known is his industry in the American Civil War. He established the federal Secret Service, direct ancestor of the FBI and the CIA; a continuing Secret Service function today for the personal protection of the President and Presidential candidates.
Pinkerton was born in Glasgow in August 1819. His father was a sergeant in the city police, and in 1828 - after being viciously attacked by a prisoner in custody - Pinkerton senior died. Fourteen years later, Allan Pinkerton emigrated to America, where he set up in business as a cooper, making his barrels in a town called Dundee, in Kane County, Illinois.
This was then the frontier, the Wild West, where civil order was fragile and law enforcement had a vigilante character. The district was plagued with phoney dollar-bills, and Pinkerton soon found himself caught up in the quest to catch the counterfeiters. He ran down and brought in the principal gang, and was rewarded with formal office, becoming deputy sheriff of Kane County in 1846 and that same year of Cook County too - including Chicago, the Windy City itself, then, as today, synonymous with crime.
The big problem in Cook County was pilferage, and especially systematic theft from railway trains and railway sheds, with an ample black market...