Allan Pinkerton Pinkerton in a Season 2 episode of "Drunk History". Pinkerton is also a recurring character in the 2014 series "The Pinkertons", played by Angus Macfadyen. Pinkerton is also portrayed in an episode of "The Life and Times of Grizzly Adams", by Don Galloway (1937-2009), and in the 1994 American biographical western film "Frank and Jesse" by William Atherton. In but in these cases, as in the others, he seems to be portrayed with an American accent, although he was Scottish by birth, and may still have retained his Scots accent. Hardboiled crime fiction writer Dashiell Hammett was employed by the
Pinkerton (detective agency) a few businessmen saw the need for greater control over their employees; their solution was to sponsor a private detective system. In February 1855, Allan Pinkerton, after consulting with six midwestern railroads, created such an agency in Chicago." In 1871, Congress appropriated $50,000 (about ) to the new Department of Justice (DOJ) to form a sub-organization devoted to "the detection and prosecution of those guilty of violating federal law." The amount was insufficient for the new DOJ to fashion an internal investigating unit, so they contracted out the services to the Pinkerton National Detective Agency. However, since passage of the