Uncle John’s True Crime (7 page)

C
HEAT

Meaning:
A dishonest person; the act of deceiving for gain

Origin:
“Comes from
escheat
—a medieval legal term for ‘the reversion of property to the state in the absence of legal heirs, and of the state’s right to such confiscation.’ The officer who looked after the king’s
escheats
was known as the
cheater
. The word’s dishonest connotations evolved among thieves in the 16th century.” (From
Wicked Words
, by Hugh Rawson)

TABOO

Meaning:
A behavior or activity that is prohibited

Origin:
“Originally a Tongan word,
tabu
, meaning ‘marked as holy.’ The first taboos were prohibitions against the use or even the mention of certain things because of religious belief that to do so would invoke the wrath of the gods. The word gradually was extended in use to cover all sorts of prohibitions or bans based upon social convention.” (From
Dictionary of Word and Phrase Origins, Vol. III
, by William and Mary Morris)

CRIME

Meaning:
An action that is forbidden by a predetermined set of laws

Origin:
“Derived from the Latin word
crimen
, which meant ‘charge’ or ‘cry of distress.’ The ancient Greek word
krima
, from which the Latin cognate was derived, typically referred to an intellectual mistake or an offense against the community, rather than a private or moral wrong.” (From
Klein’s Comprehensive Etymological Dictionary of the English Language
, by Ernest Klein)

ADULTERY

Meaning:
Having sexual relations with someone other than a spouse

Origin:
“You may be surprised to hear that there’s no ‘adult’ in ‘adultery.’ That’s because the word goes back to the Latin term
adulterare
, ‘to pollute,
corrupt, or defile.’ (This in turn comes from
alterare
, ‘to alter.’) Having extramarital relations was seen as defiling—or adulterating—the marriage vows, and the verb eventually turned into the noun ‘adultery.’ ‘Adult’ traces back to the Latin
adultus
, a form of the verb
adolescere
, ‘to grow up,’ which was the source of the word ‘adolescent.’” (From
The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Weird Word Origins
, by Paul McFedries)

Early 1800s female pirate Cheng I Sao beheaded any pirate who disobeyed orders
.

BLACKMAIL

Meaning:
To extort money by threatening to expose a hurtful truth

Origin:
“
Blackmail
has nothing whatsoever to do with the post office.
Black
is used in the figurative sense of ‘evil’ or ‘wicked.’
Mail
is a Scots word meaning ‘rent’ or ‘tribute.’ The term
blackmail
originated in Scotland, where Highland chiefs at one time extorted tribute from Lowlanders and Englishmen on the Scottish border in return for protection from being plundered.” (From
Word Mysteries & Histories
, by the Editors of American Heritage Dictionary)

BANDIT

Meaning:
A robber belonging to a gang, operating in a lawless area

Origin:
“A man who ventured outside a city could depend upon little or no protection from police. Italians discovered that banishing lawbreakers constituted a severe punishment. Crooks were brought before a crowd, proclaimed a public enemy, and banished. Originally from Latin
bandire
(‘to proclaim’), the subject of such a proclamation was called a
bandito
. Finding it difficult to survive alone, the bandito joined other outcasts. Bands of them lurked in the mountains of southern Europe. Forbidden to follow normal trades, they lived by robbery and murder. English visitors to Italy listened to
Bandito
tales.” (From
Why You Say It
, by Webb Garrison)

SWINDLER

Meaning:
One who cheats or defrauds someone else out of their money

Origin:
“It entered English circa 1762. From the Old High German word
swintan
, meaning ‘diminish, vanish, or lose consciousness.’ This gave rise to the verb
schwindeln
, first used to mean ‘to be dizzy’ or ‘giddy.’ Because such a person is often given to flights of fancy, the Germans applied the word as well to a ‘fantastic schemer,’ or ‘a participant in shady business deals.’” (From
The Merriam-Webster New Book of Word Histories
)

Since 2005, New York City has had the lowest crime rate of the 25 largest U.S. cities
.

If you’re a fan of detective stories—which include everything from
The Maltese Falcon
to
The Pink Panther
to
CSI
—then you might be interested in this man: He was the real thing
.

W
HERE THERE’S SMOKE
...

One day in June 1846, Allan Pinkerton, a 27-year-old barrel maker from Dundee, Illinois, climbed onto his raft and floated down the Fox River looking for trees that he could use for lumber. He found a lot more than that—when he went to chop down some trees on an island in the middle of the river, he discovered a smoldering fire pit hidden among them.

If someone found a fire pit in such a beautiful spot today, they probably wouldn’t suspect anything unusual. But as Pinkerton explained in his memoirs, life was different in the 1840s: “There was no picnicking in those days; people had more serious matters to attend to and it required no great keenness to conclude that no honest men were in the habit of occupying the place.”

GOTCHA!

Pinkerton went back to the island a few more times during daylight, but no one was ever there. So a few days later, he snuck back in the middle of the night and waited to see if anyone would show up. After about an hour he heard a rowboat approaching the island. He waited a while and then crept close to the fire pit to see several shady-looking characters sitting around the campfire.

The next morning he went to the sheriff. After a few nights they went back to the island with a small posse and caught the men by surprise. Pinkerton’s suspicions were correct—the men were a gang of counterfeiters, and the posse caught them red-handed with “a bag of bogus dimes and the tools used in their manufacture.”

Counterfeiting was rampant in the 1840s: In those days each bank issued its own bills, and with so many different kinds of paper floating
around, fakes were easy to make and difficult to detect. Less than a month after the dime bust, somebody passed fake $10 bills to two shopkeepers in Dundee. The shopkeepers were pretty sure that a farmer named John Craig had something to do with it, but they had no proof. Pinkerton had done a good job catching the last bunch of counterfeiters, so they asked him to look into it.

It’s against the law to run out of gas in Youngstown, Ohio
.

Pinkerton set up a sting: He met Craig, struck up a conversation, and convinced him that he was looking to make some dishonest money on the side. Craig sold him $500 worth of the fake bills, but rather than have the sheriff arrest him right there, Pinkerton decided to bide his time. He got Craig to reveal the location of his headquarters (a hotel in Chicago) then made an appointment to buy more counterfeit bills. A few days later, Pinkerton met Craig in the hotel bar. Then, just as Craig was passing him $4,000 worth of fake bills, two plainclothes police officers stepped out of the shadows and arrested him.

CAREER CHANGE

Had Pinkerton been left alone, he might have remained a barrel maker, but the Craig bust changed everything. “The affair was in everybody’s mouth,” Pinkerton later wrote, “and I suddenly found myself called upon from every quarter to undertake matters of detective skill.” He quit making barrels and worked a number of different law-enforcement jobs over the next few years: deputy sheriff, Chicago police detective (the city’s first), and finally as a U.S. Post Office investigator.

Then in 1850, he decided to go to work for himself—he and a lawyer named Edward Rucker formed what would become the Pinkerton National Detective Agency. Rucker dropped out after a year or two, but Pinkerton stayed with it for the rest of his life.

THE EYE HAS IT

For his company motto, Pinkerton chose “We Never Sleep.” For his logo, he chose a large, unblinking eye. His agency wasn’t the world’s first private detective agency—a Frenchman named Eugène François Vidocq beat him by 17 years when he founded the Bureau des Renseignements (Office of Intelligence) in 1833. But it was Pinkerton who gave private detectives their famous nickname. Thanks to his choice of logo, they’ve been known as “private eyes” ever since.

Jeffrey Dahmer’s dad wrote a book,
A Father’s Story
and donated the earnings to his son’s victims’ families
.

TRAIN OF THOUGHT

Pinkerton’s timing was perfect. Railroads were beginning to transform the American way of life—in both good ways and bad. As rails began to link major American cities, people could travel greater distances in less time and at less cost than ever before. But criminals could, too: a bank robber could knock over a bank in one state, then hop a train and by the next morning be hundreds of miles away in another state.

Have you ever seen a movie where the sheriff chases a bad guy and has to stop at the county line? That really was the way things worked back then—law-enforcement agencies were organized locally, and a police officer’s or sheriff’s powers ended as soon as he crossed the city or the county line. There were few if any state police in those days, and no national police to speak of, either. The Bureau of Investigation, predecessor to the FBI, wouldn’t come into existence until 1908. Pinkerton’s
private
detectives had no formal police powers, but they were free to chase criminals across county and state lines and then work with local law enforcers to arrest criminals and bring them to justice.

With no one else to turn to protect their interests, the railroads went to Pinkerton. By 1854 the agency was earning $10,000 a year (about $200,000 today) on railroad company retainers alone.

UNDERCOVER

Pinkerton’s agency achieved its greatest successes by sticking to the principle that Pinkerton himself had used to catch the counterfeiter John Craig back in 1846: The best way to catch a thief was by pretending to
be
a thief—a detective had to win the bad guy’s confidence, then get him to spill the beans. The agents infiltrated organized gangs of all types: Confederate spy rings, unions, even the Mafia.

The Pinkerton agency was ahead of their time in many areas. They pioneered the use of the mug shot and by the 1870s had the largest collection in the world. Their centralized criminal filing system has since been emulated by the FBI and other law enforcement organizations worldwide. The agency hired a female detective, a 23-year-old widow named Kate Warne, in 1856; by comparison, the New York City Police Department did not hire its first female investigator until 1903.

After the Civil War, the Pinkerton Detective Agency helped bring the Wild West era to a close by sending manhunters into the field to hunt
down infamous train and bank robbers: Jesse James, the Missouri Kid, the Reno brothers, and the Cole Younger gang. Why did Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid abandon their life of crime and flee to Argentina in 1901? Because Pinkerton detectives were hot on their trail. With the agency’s “wanted” posters and mug shots circulating throughout the United States, there was no place in the country left for them to hide.

END OF AN ERA

After suffering a stroke in 1869, Pinkerton began turning more and more of his responsibilities over to his sons, Robert and William. But he never retired, and he was still working at the agency in June 1884 when he tripped and bit his tongue while taking a walk. In the days before antibiotics, such injuries were very serious—a few days later gangrene set in, followed by blood poisoning, and on July 1, Pinkerton died.

The world of law enforcement has changed a great deal since the Pinkerton National Detective Agency opened its doors in 1850, and if anything, the pace accelerated following Allan Pinkerton’s death. The biggest change of all: in 1908 the Bureau of Investigation opened for business. The Pinkerton agency’s detective services became increasingly redundant—why pay good money to hire private detectives when the FBI, backed by the resources of the federal government, would investigate crimes for free? As the crime detection side of the business dried up, the agency’s security guard division, founded in 1858, came to assume a larger share. By the late 1930s, only a fraction of the company’s revenue came from its original detective services. In 1965 Allan Pinkerton’s great-grandson, Robert Allan Pinkerton II, acknowledged the inevitable by dropping the word “Detective” altogether and renamed the company Pinkerton’s, Inc. He was the last Pinkerton to head the Pinkerton Agency.

So can you still hire a Pinkerton agent today, at least as a security guard? No—in 1999 an international security company headquartered in Sweden, Securitas A.B., bought the firm and stopped doing business under the Pinkerton name.

*
*
*

He who holds the ladder is as bad as the thief.—
German proverb

Quick! Log off! Someone is a victim of a cybercrime every 10 seconds
.

Calling the grammar cops: It’s these headline writers who should have been brought up on charges
.

Juvenile Court To Try
Shooting Defendant

MAN ROBS, THEN
KILLS HIMSELF

NJ Judge to Rule on Nude Beach

Mayor Says D.C. is Safe
Except for Murders

Man, Shot Twice in Head,
Gets Mad

Deadline Passes
for Striking Police

C
OCKROACH
S
LAIN
,
H
USBAND
B
ADLY
H
URT

MAN SHOOTS NEIGHBOR
WITH MACHETE