Pinkerton (Detective Agency)

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We never sleep.jpg
Pinkerton's National Detective Agency logo
Pinkerton escorts hocking valley leslies.jpg
Pinkerton guards escort scabs into an operation ( Buchtel , Ohio , 1884).

The Pinkerton Agency is an American private security service and detective agency founded in 1850 by the detective Allan Pinkerton as Pinkerton's National Detective Agency in Chicago . It has been a subsidiary of the Swedish security group Securitas AB since 1999 .

history

The first resounding success of the Pinkerton Agency was the clearing up of a case in which the Adams Express Company had been robbed of a large amount of cash. The money could be returned. Even during the Civil War , the agency played a key role in the formation of the US military secret service . So she was entrusted with ever larger tasks. In 1861 a plot of murder against US President Abraham Lincoln failed because the Pinkerton Agency discovered the assassination plans in good time. After the agency was initially primarily active in cities, from 1874 it also took on orders from the railway companies. In doing so, she fought, among other things, the James Younger gang , which had caused unrest since the civil war and terrorized the railway companies with raids.

The Pinkertons were also accused of terrorism and vigilantism when they were hired by factory owners to fight unionists and strikers ; they are considered to be the first representatives of the union busting industry. Their factory security units often exceeded the strength of the regular army. During the railway strikes of 1877, for example, they recruited strikers specifically to demoralize the strikers. During the Homestead strike in 1892, there was a shooting between strikers and about 300 Pinkertons agents whom the manufacturer had hired. Several people were killed on both sides.

After Allan Pinkerton's death, his sons Robert and William took over the management of the agency.

In 1999 the company was taken over by the Swedish group Securitas AB ; it offers  corporate risk management solutions - still under the name Pinkerton .

In pop culture

Pinkerton has been portrayed in various media and works. For example, parallels to the detective agency can be found in Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes work The Valley of Fear , the stories about the children's book character Detective Pinky by Gert Prokop , in volume 88 by Lucky Luke , in Walter Satterthwait's novels Escapades, Masquerades, Charades, in several series of novels before the Second World War and from 1948 in Hans Günther's series Allan Pinkerton again.

Dashiell Hammett , a famous detective writer, was a member of the Pinkerton Agency. He processed his experiences as a detective and strike breaker in his novels, including Red Harvest .

In the BBC series Ripper Street or the video games BioShock Infinite as well as in its DLC Burial at Sea and Red Dead Redemption 2 , some characters are represented as Pinkerton agents.

In January 2019 it became known that the publisher of the computer game Red Dead Redemption 2, Take 2 Interactive , together with its developer Rockstar Games, took Pinkerton's payment request to Take 2 Interactive to court. Pinkerton demands payment for the use of the name, the plaintiff regards Pinkerton as "an integral part of US history". On April 4, 2019, Take 2 Interactive and Pinkerton, who had meanwhile filed counterclaims , withdrew their lawsuits.

Web links

Commons : Pinkerton  - collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Justin Akers Chacón, Mike Davis: Crossing the border. Berlin / Hamburg 2007, p. 13.
  2. Ripper Street: Season 1, Episode 7. www.imdb.com, accessed December 10, 2013 (English).
  3. ^ Bioshock infinite - Burial at sea episode one. www.ign.com, accessed December 10, 2013 .
  4. Red Dead Redemption 2: Legal dispute between Rockstar Games and Pinkerton - Golem.de. Retrieved January 15, 2019 .
  5. Amanda Farough: Rockstar squares off against real-world Pinkertons over trademark infringement claims [Update]. In: GameDaily.biz. April 11, 2019, accessed on July 24, 2020 .