Timothy Webster, Pinkerton Spy for the Union Army

In Chicago’s Graceland Cemetery, there is a headstone bearing the name, “Timothy Webster,” but the grave is empty. 

Webster is actually buried beneath a simple white marble stone in the township cemetery at Onarga, an Iroquois County village some 90 miles south of Chicago. 

The headstone in the Chicago cemetery is actually a memorial, part of the Pinkerton National Detective Agency’s burial plot for its deceased agents.

Timothy Webster died at the age of 40 in Richmond, Virginia, where he was hanged as a Union spy on April 29, 1862, by the Confederate government. He was the first spy executed by the Confederates during the Civil War. more

Private Espionage Is Booming - The US Needs a Spy Registry

via Wired Magazine...
Years ago, while stationed in Moscow as the bureau chief for a major news magazine, I was approached by a representative of a multinational company and presented with a tantalizing offer. He said he had highly sensitive materials exposing possible criminal activity by a Russian competitor. The documents were mine with one condition: advance notice so he could be out of the country when any story was published.

I had every reason to think the materials came from a private intelligence operative hired by the company—there were many such operatives in Moscow—but I didn’t ask my source for his source. Instead I embarked on a somewhat harrowing investigation of my own, and on corroborating the materials, I was able to publish a splashy story.

This episode came back to me while reading Barry Meier’s new book, Spooked: The Trump Dossier, Black Cube, and the Rise of Private Spies. A former New York Times investigative reporter, Meier casts a harsh light on both “private spies” and journalists who make frequent use of nuggets unearthed by these operatives. In the book’s afterword, he revives an idea for “a kind of ‘spy registry’ in which operatives for hire would have to disclose the names of their clients and assignments,” just as Congress now requires of lobbyists hired to influence legislators.

Is this truly a problem in need of a solution? Or would a spy registry create worse problems?

It’s tempting to conclude that there is really nothing new here and that private spies may even supply a public service. In the original, late-19th-century Gilded Age, the Pinkerton Detective Agency devoted itself to the art of subterfuge. In 1890, a Pinkerton man went undercover on behalf of his client, the governor of North Dakota, and confirmed from rigorous barroom investigation that a fair amount of “boodle,” bribe money, was being dispensed by advocates of a state lottery opposed by the governor. The governor revealed the dirty dealings to the public, and the lottery scheme failed—all perhaps to the civic good.

Today’s circumstances are far different. Inexpensive, off-the-shelf technologies for surveillance, hacking, and spoofing make the spy game easier to play than ever before. What hired sleuth doesn’t now travel with one of those metallic-fabric bags that blocks cellphone GPS signals, like the GoDark Faraday model that sells online for $49.97? It’s an insignificant item on the expense report.  more

David Fechheimer, 76 - RIP

David Fechheimer, a budding flower child of the 1960s and aspiring English professor who was spurred overnight by the fictional gumshoe Sam Spade to switch careers and become one of the nation’s leading private investigators, died on Tuesday in Redwood City, Calif. He was 76...

“I called Pinkerton and asked if they needed someone who had no experience and a beard,” Mr. Fechheimer said. “To my surprise, they said they needed someone with a beard that day. I thought I would do it a couple of weeks as a goof. It looked like fun, being Sam Spade. Pinkerton put me under cover on the docks, and I was hooked. I never went back to school.”

...He later joined the practice of the celebrated private eye Hal Lipset (famous for secreting a microphone in a martini olive) and opened his own office in 1976. more

Pinkerton Detectives Still Exist

The security agents, who gained fame as Old West law enforcers, are still around—and they’re not happy about being antagonists in ‘Red Dead Redemption II’

Pinkerton’s National Detective Agency, formed in the 1800s to help law enforcement track down criminals, once sparred with the outlaw Jesse James. It later became entangled in the notorious labor disputes of industrial America.

In the hit videogame “Red Dead Redemption II,” players belong to a gang of bandits in the Old West in 1899 who spend a good deal of time offing Pinkerton agents, known simply as Pinkertons.

The plot twist comes in real life: Pinkerton still exists today as Pinkerton Consulting & Investigations Inc., a specialist in corporate security and risk management—and it’s tired of being the bad guy.

Pinkerton, now owned by the Swedish security firm Securitas AB, hoped a letter sent last month to Take-Two Interactive Software Inc. would persuade the game publisher to do right by the Pinkerton name. The letter included a demand for compensation in the form of a lump sum or “an appreciable percentage of each game sold.” more

To anyone who worked with me at Pinkertons, always feel free to say hello.