Allan Pinkerton is famous as the founder of the detective agency that still bears his name. What is less well known is that he was a prolific author who can lay claim to being one of the originators of the 'private eye' genre. In The Pinkerton Casebook Victorian crime expert Bruce Durie has gathered together the best of Pinkerton's writings, including accounts of how he foiled an attempt on the life of President Abraham Lincoln, his infiltration of the notorious Molly Maguires gang, and his dogged pursuit of Frank and Jesse James.

The fascinating story of the most notorious detective agency in US history. Between 1865 and 1937, Pinkerton’s National Detective Agency was at the center of countless conflicts between capital and labor, bandits and railroads, and strikers and state power. Some believed that the detectives were protecting society from dangerous criminal conspiracies; others thought that armed Pinkertons were capital’s tool to crush worker dissent. Yet the image of the Pinkerton detective also inspired romantic and sensationalist novels, reflected shifting ideals of Victorian manhood, and embodied a particular kind of rough frontier justice. Inventing the Pinkertons examines the evolution of the agency as a pivotal institution in the cultural history of American monopoly capitalism. Historian S. Paul O’Hara intertwines political, social, and cultural history to reveal how Scottish-born founder Allan Pinkerton insinuated his way to power and influence as a purveyor of valuable (and often wildly wrong) intelligence in the Union cause. During Reconstruction, Pinkerton turned his agents into icons of law and order in the Wild West. Finally, he transformed his firm into a for-rent private army in the war of industry against labor. Having begun life as peddlers of information and guardians of mail bags, the Pinkertons became armed mercenaries, protecting scabs and corporate property from angry strikers. O’Hara argues that American capitalists used the Pinkertons to enforce new structures of economic and political order. Yet the infamy of the Pinkerton agent also gave critics and working communities a villain against which to frame their resistance to the new industrial order. Ultimately, Inventing the Pinkertons is a gripping look at how the histories of American capitalism, industrial folklore, and the nation-state converged.

A thrilling historical account of Allan Pinkerton’s pivotal role in the Civil War and the birth of the Secret Service Scottish immigrant Allan Pinkerton is best known for creating the Pinkerton National Detective Agency, which gained renown for solving train robberies in the 1850s and battling the labor movement in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. But the central drama of his career, and the focus of this book, was his work as protector of President Abraham Lincoln and head of a network of Union spies (including himself!) who posed as Confederate soldiers and sympathizers in a deadly cat-and-mouse game. As here told in riveting prose by author Jay Bonansinga, Pinkerton’s politics and abolitionist sympathies drew the attention of supporters of presidential incumbent Abraham Lincoln—and Pinkerton was hired to act as his bodyguard. Pinkerton was asked to organize the U.S. government’s first “Secret Service,” and during the Civil War he managed a network of spies who worked behind confederate lines and tackled espionage at the highest levels in Washington. By war’s end, the agency’s reputation was so well established that it was often hired by the government to perform many of the same duties today assigned to the Secret Service, the FBI, the CIA, and, most recently, the Department of Homeland Security. -- Bonansigna is also the author of the novelization of the huge hit television series The Walking Dead, a book titled The Walking Dead: Rise of the Governor.

An in-depth, well-researched look at 100 hedge fund frauds Compared to mutual funds, hedge funds are the James Bonds of the marketplace. They have been relatively unfettered by government regulation, and they play bigger games, take bigger risks, use unorthodox methods, and have the power to capture the public imagination in a way that their lesser counterparts have difficulty approaching. At once fascinating and startling, The Hedge Fund Fraud Casebook provides readers with a broad knowledge of hedge fund regulation through a look at the first 100 cases of proven fraud at hedge funds. Compiling concrete data on cases of hedge fund fraud, The Hedge Fund Fraud Casebook provides you with a factual foundation for assessing this difficult area of risk. First comprehensive survey of hedge fund fraud including 100 chronological fraud cases Includes descriptions of each case, diagram of the player interaction, and tables detailing monies recovered, fines paid, prison terms, and professional sanctions Useful for both individual and professional investors, particularly given the last eighteen months of fraud and mismanagement among leading financial professionals and companies The Hedge Fund Fraud Casebook provides a hedge fund professional's look at fraud and can help you prevent or avoid similar frauds in the future. It's a vital resource for any hedge fund manager or investor.

Originally published: Cincinnati, Ohio: Betterway Books, 2000.

Timothy Webster, best known for his work as a spy for the Union during the Civil War, began his career as a New York City policeman. In the mid-1850s he left the police department and took a job for Allan Pinkerton with his newly formed detective agency. As an operative for Pinkerton's agency, Webster excelled. His cases included tracking a world famous forger, investigating grave robberies in a Chicago cemetery, and seeking to uncover a plot to destroy the Rock Island Bridge. It was also as a Pinkerton detective that Webster made his greatest contribution to his country when he was part of a small group of operatives that uncovered a plot to assassinate then President-elect Abraham Lincoln in 1861. Webster went on to serve the United States as a spy in the Civil War. He traveled to the Confederate Capital multiple times and made many connections high up in the Confederate military and government. For a time he was the Union's top spy, but his career came to an abrupt end when, in 1862, he was betrayed by fellow spies and became the first spy executed in the Civil War.