Pinkerton (detective agency)

Pinkerton was an American detective and security firm founded in 1850 by the Scottish-born Allan Pinkerton in Chicago. Pinkerton had emigrated from Glasgow in 1842, worked as a cooper, and became known as a detective after exposing counterfeiters and serving as a sheriff and as Chicago's first detective. His agency began with five detectives and a few administrative staff and described itself as a private police force able to cross local and state lines in pursuit of criminals. It wrote a code of ethics that refused divorce and other scandalous cases and hired the first woman detective in the country, Kate Warne. From the 1940s the business moved toward guarding property, and by 1990 more than 98 percent of its business was security guard contracts. Pinkerton's Inc. was later a publicly traded company listed on NASDAQ, with about 43,000 employees.