Public Private Eye

Pinkerton's National Detective Agency, the firm that made "private eye" a popular phrase, finally went public last week. Under fourth-generation President Robert A. Pinkerton II, the family-owned firm, which has used "We Never Sleep" as a motto and an unblinking eye as its trademark while running up a record for running down all sorts of criminals, is now a quarry itself--for investors. Pegged at $23 a share when it went on sale, $6,900,000 worth of Pinkerton stock soon sold at $29.75.

Less Derring-Do. That nice price reflects the fact that the agency, presently known as Pinkerton's Inc., is profiting from the growing demand for unblinking private police services. Revenues last year reached $71,379,000 and profits were $1,936,000, owing less to derring-do involving rustlers and train robbers than to routine protection services for industrial plants and exhibitions. The return was particularly significant because it exceeded special revenues of the previous two years when Pinkerton, under the largest single contract ever negotiated by a detective agency, provided as many as 4,500 people a day for police, fire protection and special services at the New York World's Fair.

Pinkerton's present roster of 13,000 employees, of whom 10,000 are guards, spend most of their time on just such mundane assignments. They not only patrol plants for corporations but also undertake security checks or theft investigations inside the gates. Other agents, in a longtime arrangement with the Jewelers' Security Alliance, investigate jewel thefts and losses; under an agreement with Eastern race tracks, the Pinks guard thoroughbreds and chase away bookies and purse snatchers. Uniformed Pinkerton men stand watch at annual corporate meetings, and have been known to haul obstreperous stockholders out bodily on orders from the chair. The company turns down divorce cases, but its plainclothesmen will track missing persons, check out insurance frauds or, in white tie and tails, guard jewelry at a posh party. No rewards are ever accepted.

Lincoln's CIA. White tie is a far cry from the original force. Founder Allan Pinkerton, who was Chicago's first police-force detective, went into the private-eye business on his own in 1850. Later he organized a kind of CIA for Abraham Lincoln. Pinkerton unearthed one assassination plot against Lincoln, spirited the President-elect to Washington for his first inaugural by a circuitous rail route that produced a famous telegram: PLUMS [Pinkerton] ARRIVED WITH NUTS [Lincoln] THIS MORNING. Plums and his men acted as Union spies during the Civil War, set up the Secret Service, spent the postwar years chasing such outlaws as the Reno Boys and the James Brothers. About the only tarnished spot on the Pinks' badge of honor was their later service when they hired out as company spies or strikebreakers in incidents like the 1892 steelworkers' strike against Andrew Carnegie's Homestead plant outside Pittsburgh. Still sensitive about those years, Pinkerton's Inc. today turns down labor-relations cases as quickly as it does divorces.

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