Glasgow Crime Stories: From the Gorbals to America's most famous detective

Many have been pioneers in the field of criminal investigation including forensics like fingerprinting, photofits and DNA.

However, the city can also lay claim to have given birth to America's most famous and innovative crimefighter.

A man whose influence still lives on to this day in movies, books and television and in the shape of an international security firm.

Allan Pinkerton was born in the Gorbals on August 25, 1819, the son of Isobel McQueen and William Pinkerton.

His father was a police sergeant and died after policing a political riot in Glasgow in 1826.

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Following his father's death, Pinkerton was forced to leave school at the age of 10.

He however read voraciously and trained as an apprentice cooper in Glasgow making wooden storage barrels.

By 1842, at the age of 23, he had also become politically active in the working-class Chartist movement which was campaigning for reforms to the political system and an end to poverty.

But their demonstrations often ended in violence and disorder and a warrant had been issued for his arrest

The self-educated Pinkerton had to get out of the country as he was facing deportation to Australia

So, he and his wife, Joan, decided to leave Glasgow and instead jump on a boat to America.

Settling in Chicago, Pinkerton worked for a brewery, then set himself up as a cooper in the nearby town of Dundee where he noticed a gang of counterfeiters were operating.

He reported the gang to the Chicago sheriff and even went with him on a raid, armed with a shotgun. The pair caught the gang and smashed the lucrative counterfeiting ring they were running.

The sheriff, impressed with the Scot's talents, gave him a job as his local deputy and then as a police officer in Chicago.

Pinkerton never looked back. 

In 1848, he recorded the city's highest number of arrests and was made one of its first-ever detectives. 

The city that would produce Al Capone 75 years later was already riddled with crime.

Meanwhile, Pinkerton had gained a reputation as an honest and effective police officer and he realised there was a gap in the market for his skills.

In the early 1850s, he left the police to set up the Pinkerton International Detective Agency. 

Most American cities, unlike Chicago, had no police force and relied on private detectives.

And they did not have Pinkerton's personal reputation for honesty and integrity.

As he set about establishing his business, he got a stroke of luck all successful people need.

He found work with the Rock Island and Illinois Railroad, and got to know its lawyer, Abraham Lincoln.

Lincoln had been impressed by the Scot and would later call on his services when he was elected President in 1861.

As Pinkerton's clients increased, he hired more and more staff to operate across the USA.

They were trained for the first time to shadow suspects and work undercover, techniques that would be copied by police forces across the world in the years to come.

Pinkerton devised the agency’s catchy slogan was “we never sleep” and its symbol was an unblinking eye - giving the world the term ‘private eye’ for the first time.

At that time thousands of people were settling in the West, in turn creating jobs and wealth.

Companies and banks hired Pinkerton to protect their growing cash assets from theft by robbery gangs. Though Pinkerton refused to take divorce cases and anything else he considered morally unacceptable.

He also had an eye for publicity with newspapers covering stories of his successful cases, which in turn made him a well-known public figure. 

In one case, he recovered £700,000 which had been stolen at gunpoint, a fortune at that time.

When Civil War broke out between the north and south 1861, President Lincoln made him the Union Army's chief of intelligence, with the rank of Major.

Earlier that year he had unearthed a plot to assassinate Lincoln as he travelled to Washington DC for his inauguration.

Pinkerton persuaded the President to change his travel plans and the assassination was thwarted.

However, he could only protect the President so far.

Four years later Pinkerton was in another part of America when actor John Wilkes Booth shot Lincoln dead while he attended the theatre in Washington.

During the four-year Civil War, Pinkerton developed spying techniques still used today - with his men acting as double agents, infiltrating Confederate organisations and setting up honey traps.

By the end of the war, his agency was well established and was quickly signed up to deal with thousands of armed bandits running wild all over the country.

Soldiers, particularly from the losing Confederate side, had no homes or farms to return to. 

After years of fighting, they continued to do what they had become good at - killing and robbing.

It was a difficult job for the private eyes since the bandits were not known, not recognisable, 

That's when Pinkerton got the idea of compiling mugshots of the main wanted men and circulating them to his agents.

It was an early form of the databases used today by every police force in the world.

Armed with the mugshots, his agents became renowned for being fast and ruthless in capturing the bandits.

Many gangs were arrested, sent to prison and often hanged.

But some escaped Pinkerton's clutches such as the infamous Jesse James and the Younger brothers.

The Glaswegian dispatched three of his top agents, who were all killed by the gang in less than a week.

His agents were said to have bombed the home of James' mother, when they thought he and his brother Frank were visiting. 

But Jesse and Frank weren't in the house. The bomb killed their young half-brother and blew off their mother's arm.

The James-Younger gang held up several trains after the bombing, not looking for money but for Allan Pinkerton himself. There's no doubt they planned to kill the Scot, but failed to find him.

Around this time the agency began to attract its first bad publicity.

Jesse James was seen as a freedom fighter in the defeated south and Pinkerton's agency became hated there overnight. 

Even the future president, Theodore Roosevelt, said: "Jesse James is America's Robin Hood."

Pinkerton didn't agree and was desperate to bring him to justice even if he had to do it himself.

He saddled a horse and set off after the James-Younger gang. One by one, he killed them himself, apart from Jesse and his brother Frank.

He was also hired to catch Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, known as the Hole in Wall Gang and later made famous by Robert Redford and Paul Newman in the classic movie.

Their robberies infuriated the railroad companies and the banks.

Pinkerton's agents were hired to hunt them down and they did for years, but never caught up with the pair. 

By the late 1870s, the company also began to attract criticism as strike breakers, a sharp contract to Pinkerton's Chartist days.

On one occasion they had accepted a commission to break up the Molly Maguires, an Irish group who used violence to force mine owners into giving the workers better conditions.

A Pinkerton agent infiltrated the Maguires and gave evidence at their trial leading to 10 of them being hung. 

It was a difficult time for the detective agency who no longer had the backing of the late President Lincoln.

However, tragedy was about to strike its leader and founder.

In June 1884, Pinkerton tripped on a pavement, fell and banged his chin, biting his tongue. Never one to fuss, he refused medical treatment.

A few days later he contracted gangrene and died, aged 65.

After his death the business was taken over by his three children and it went from strength to strength.

The newly formed US Secret Service began using many methods he developed, including sharing information with other countries' police forces, including Scotland Yard in London.

When the FBI was formed in 1908, its methods were also attributed to Allan Pinkerton. 

His agency also had a strong international reputation.

James Bond writer Ian Fleming had Bond's American CIA colleague, Felix Leiter, working for them at one stage.

Now the detective agency is part of Securitas, a Swedish group providing security services to governments and private companies throughout the world.

As his ship left Glasgow in 1842, Pinkerton could never have guessed that he would become America's most famous detective and President Abraham Lincoln's right-hand man.

Not bad for a barrel-maker from the Gorbals.