Free Broker, Trader, Lawyer, Spy by Eamon Javers Page B

made his first appearance on the witness stand—giving the Mollies the first indication of how badly their organization had been penetrated. Here was a man they knew as a drunken brawler, transformed into a clean-shaven, articulate, well-dressed detective. One contemporary newspaper account described the astonishment of the Mollies as they realized what had happened. “Carroll was as if struck by lightning. Boyle shook like an aspen as the prosecutor announced, ‘We will produce to you the full and complete confession of James Carroll and Hugh McGehan of their part in this murder made to James McKenna, a detective.’”
    Eventually, twenty Mollies would hang for their crimes, with McParland’s testimony serving as the crucial evidence to break the gang’s back.
    McParland lived a long life, and went on to become one of the Pinkerton Agency’s most legendary detectives. He was still solving cases of mine-related violence in Idaho as late as 1906. But Franklin Gowen, who had started the whole Molly case, met a muchdifferent fate. The railroad company came close to failure, and Gowen was pushed out of its management. He became a private lawyer, and in 1889 he was summoned to Washington, D.C., as part of a case against Standard Oil. There, in his room at Wormsley’s Hotel, he shot himself.
    The Pinkertons thought his death might not be suicide at all, and investigated it as a possible hit by the Mollies. But despite their suspicions and a thorough investigation, they came up with no evidence that it had been anything other than a sad man alone in a hotel room, far from home, with a gun.
     
    T HE P INKERTONS HAD their share of casualties in their ongoing war against the enemies of their clients. The Adams Express Company hired the agency to track down a group of outlaws known as the Jesse James gang: former Confederates who had been robbing trains and banks across the middle of the country. In 1874, two Pinkerton detectives—Louis Lull and Joseph Wicher—were killed by the Jesse James gang. These brutal, execution-style killings seem to have unhinged Allan Pinkerton. He wrote to his deputy, “I know that the James Youngers [The Youngers were four brothers who made up the core of the James gang, along with Jesse’s brother, Frank] are desperate men, and that when we meet it, it must be the death of one or both of us…. My blood was spilt, and they must repay, there is no use talking, they must die.”
    The Pinkertons deployed their private army against the James gang, tracking them to their family farm in Missouri. They surrounded the place, nicknamed “Castle James” by the locals, and prepared for battle. What they didn’t know was that their own heavily armed band had attracted notice. The James brothers had skipped town, leaving their mother, Zerelda; her husband (who was not the James boys’ father); and the couple’s two children, who were half siblings of the James brothers.
    Someone from the Pinkerton side—exactly who was neverdetermined—lobbed an early type of hand grenade into the building, and Zerelda’s husband pounced on it, skittering it into the fireplace. The device exploded, lacerating Zerelda’s arm and wounding the James brothers’ eight-year-old half brother, Archie, who died soon afterward.
    Following this incident, the Pinkertons suddenly became bad guys in the eyes of the public. In the remnants of the Confederate south, the agency was seen as the heavy-handed enforcer of the northeastern moneymen who ran the railroads and banks. The James gang had captivated the public, since their targets tended to be large corporate concerns, and only rarely individuals. The local papers denounced the Pinkertons’ tactics, and the pulp press churned out homages to the glamorous James boys. The Pinkertons never caught the James gang. Jesse James would be killed by a traitor within his own ranks in 1882. Frank James surrendered to authorities a few months later. He lived into his seventies, and died