Word: pinkertons
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Hammett was hardly unqualified. He had worked on and off, both before and after the first world war, for the famous Pinkerton detective agency; an agency which had started in the mid-19th century as a sort of freelance secret service, and by the 20s was the single largest and most famous private detective agency in the world. Their labors on behalf of big business, and their often distressing violent strikebreaking now gives the Pinkertons a hated name through much of the United States--but that was still only a small part of their business. Most of what they...
Born in 1894, Hammett grew up in Baltimore and quit high school after one semester to help bolster his family's income. He held some odd jobs and then joined Pinkerton's National Detective Agency in 1915 at a salary of $21 a week. Pinkerton's kept detective reports anonymous, so exactly what Hammett did in the line of duty cannot be checked. He later claimed that he was once sent out to find the thief who had stolen a Ferris wheel. He left Pinkerton's after three years to enlist in the Army, but less...
...security firms give to potential targets in industry is to keep a low profile: do not talk to the press or become a public figure, get out of the phone book, no names on company parking spots and no logos on company cars and planes. Tony Purbrick, who heads Pinkerton's executive and personnel protection program, was aghast to find that one client corporation routinely left its well-marked jet on an unguarded ramp and flight plans were widely circulated. "The first thing I had to do," he says, "was to get people to be just a little more...
John M. Dodson, a Pinkerton's detective AZ agency computer specialist, was watching the Hilton's lower-level VIP entrance from the seventh floor...
...ground: not least, the $50,000 War Department reward for his capture. It is up to Cosgrove, largely on his own, to trace the actual circumstances of Lincoln's assassination, Booth's escape and supposed death after a twelve-day hunt, and the mysterious burial. The Pinkerton man, a former Union spy, leaves no headstone unturned tracking the actor, a onetime Confederate agent. It is a harrowing assignment, leading him to prod such sacred cows as Robber Baron Jay Gould and General Lafayette C. Baker, Lincoln's spymaster. By carriage, train, boat and balloon, Cosgrove stumbles...