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) Anti-Pinkerton Act in 1893, federal law has stated that an "individual employed by the Pinkerton Detective Agency, or similar organization, may not be employed by the Government of the United States or the government of the District of Columbia." In the 1870s, Franklin B. Gowen, then president of the Philadelphia and Reading Railroad, hired the agency to "investigate" the labor unions in the company's mines. A Pinkerton agent, James McParland, using the alias "James McKenna", infiltrated the Molly Maguires, a 19th-century secret society of mainly Irish-American coal miners, leading to the downfall of the labor organization. The incident inspired Arthur