Undercover Policing as Private Self-Help in Nineteenth-Century America

Observing the French example, the framers of the United States Constitution feared the tyranny of state surveillance. With less fear of the private sector, and greater suspicion of the state, neither local, state, nor federal levels of government in nineteenth-century America possessed or even aspired to a monopoly of legitimate force, let alone of legitimate stealth.Footnote ¹⁶ Undercover tactics were not the exclusive preserve of the state, nor was the state even a major protagonist in the use of undercover tactics for most of the nineteenth century.

In the United States, it was the private sector that originated undercover tactics. During the antebellum period, industrialization and the advent of the railroad heightened the demand for new, systematic ways of monitoring what Lawrence Friedman calls “crimes of mobility,” including “trust” crimes such as embezzlement, seduction, and fraud.Footnote ¹⁷ Large enterprises resorted to such tactics as a form of self-help, hiring private detective agencies to replace the public sector in the under-policed rural stretches of the Midwest and the Western frontier and in urban areas where police departments were slow to develop their own detective divisions and often relied on assistance from private citizens and private detectives.

Nor were urban police departments much concerned with criminal investigations until the second half of the nineteenth century, since the first urban police departments emphasized crime prevention and riot control.Footnote ¹⁸ New York did not establish its own police detective division until 1857, while Philadelphia and Chicago established their own detective divisions in 1859 and 1861, respectively—well after Allan Pinkerton founded his Chicago-based detective agency in 1855.Footnote ¹⁹ Undercover work—which required no uniform—allowed American private detectives to replace the state on behalf of both public and private interests. The same mobility and easy anonymity that facilitated crime facilitated undercover investigations by private detectives.

Allan Pinkerton's highly fictionalized memoirs suggest that workforce surveillance was part of the private detectives’ business model from the outset. Pinkerton's memoirs were in part a form of advertising in which undercover policing played a prominent role. Between 1874 and 1884, he published sixteen detective books that emphasized the effectiveness of his undercover methods and the “necessity and respectability” of his profession.Footnote ²⁰ Pinkerton's memoirs brimmed with tales of operatives who befriended suspects, in one instance drawing incriminating admissions from a suspect by offering to invest the criminal proceeds in nonexistent oil and coal fields.Footnote ²¹ Undercover detectives like Charlie Siringo—who also worked for the Pinkerton agency—infiltrated outlaw gangs, writing memoirs of undercover exploits that linked the emerging legend of the private detective with the older mystique of the cowboy. (Siringo always referred to himself as a “cowboy-detective”.)Footnote ²² Pinkerton marketed his private detective agency's use of “spotters” to a consortium of six Midwestern railroads, for whom his undercover operatives monitored conductors to identify those who illegally pocketed the cash fares along the under-policed rural stretches of the expanding railroad network. But Pinkerton's undercover operatives also investigated theft of freight from railroad shipments.Footnote ²³

For much of the nineteenth century, the federal government actively policed primarily those activities—like theft of mail or the production and passing of counterfeit currency—that could affect its claims to sovereign control over its territory, and its ability to carry out basic governmental functions—and, even then, the Postal Service and the Secret Service both delegated undercover investigation of mail theft and counterfeit currency offenses to private detective agencies, and to the Pinkerton agency in particular.Footnote ²⁴ These delegations made it possible for private detectives to use their undercover tactics to amplify or replace state power.Footnote ²⁵ In 1873, when the United States Post Office hired private anti-vice entrepreneur Anthony Comstock to investigate the distribution of obscene literature through the United States mail, it inaugurated an investigative specialty, entrusted initially to the private sector, that relied chiefly on undercover tactics; the Postal Service retained Comstock's technique of posing as an interested buyer to correspond directly with suspected purveyors of obscenity and has turned this tradition into a modern specialty in the undercover investigation of child pornography. When the Department of Justice was established in 1870, no official spy system was approved, and instead, “a yearly appropriation was used to hire private detectives.”Footnote ²⁶ Until the Palmer Raids, the advent of Prohibition, and the subsequent War on Crime, there was simply no centralized national police force tasked with identifying and mitigating threats to the state. Delegation helped to normalize private detectives’ preferred investigative techniques, including the use of decoys, traps, and undercover agents. The Pinkerton detective agency pioneered many of the undercover tactics that later became law enforcement staples,Footnote ²⁷ including not only the use of test letters to tempt dishonest mail carriers but also the placement of undercover agents in jail cells to extract confessions for use at trial, deep cover infiltration of outlaw gangs, and so-called “buy-bust” operations, in which Alan Pinkerton bought contraband such as counterfeit currency from suspects before arresting them.Footnote ²⁸

Undercover private eyes were also useful to American prosecutors, who, unlike their French counterparts, could not call on judicial police to carry out investigative tasks. In the late 1880s, for example, District Attorney Kalter Skoll hired a Pinkerton detective to pose as an outlaw in order to track and capture the killer of a deputy sheriff.Footnote ²⁹ Police themselves sometimes hired private detectives when they were under pressure to solve notorious crimes that they lacked the resources to investigate, a fact that private detective memoirs like to emphasize in advertising the value of their services. In his memoirs of a 50-year career that started in 1862, Thomas Furlong, who was then a private detective, recalled being summoned from out of state by the Dallas police to help a prominent physician investigate the murder of his brother.Footnote ³⁰ But Furlong was also hired by other elites, including committees of influential citizens who pooled their resources on behalf of a friend who had been murdered under mysterious circumstances.Footnote ³¹ Insurance companies hired private detectives to avoid having to pay out on life insurance policies.Footnote ³²

The popularity of private detectives owed much to their use of undercover tactics. George McWatters was an officer of New York's Metropolitan Police Force from 1858 to 1870, before founding his own detective agency. In his memoirs, he described undercover tactics as the bread and butter of his métier as a private detective—and one for which the public police lacked the necessary resources.Footnote ³³

The dearth of law enforcement was even more severe on the frontier. But even if there had been more sheriffs, constables, and marshals on the Western frontier, they could not have invested the time and resources into solving crimes and tracking offenders that private businesses were willing and able to summon. In his memoirs, Charlie Siringo reports that a mining company dispatched him and a fellow detective to Alaska to investigate the theft of $10,000 in gold ore by unknown employees. The two operatives first took jobs at the mining company, where they heard about two employees who had bought a boat and disappeared shortly after the theft. The mining company then set Siringo and his partner W. O. Sayles up with their own boat and a large supply of whiskey, so that Siringo and Sayles could travel along the Alaska coast, selling whiskey to the native tribes and eventually attracting the interest of their suspects. Befriending the suspected thieves, the detectives presented themselves as experienced gold miners and used a smelter to entice the men to reveal and dig up the gold; only then did he summon a United States marshal to make the arrest.Footnote ³⁴

Private detectives’ ability to replace the state for private and public clients depended on self-promotion, such as Pinkerton's effort to present himself as “the Founder in America of a noble profession,” as encapsulated on his memorial tombstone in Chicago's Graceland cemetery.Footnote ³⁵ Undercover tactics were his basis for these claims. In Pinkerton's memoirs, like those of Paris police detective Eugene-Francois Vidocq, undercover tactics feature prominently as the alchemy that transformed quasi-criminal conduct into a form of criminal investigation. But Pinkerton and his imitators sought to legitimate themselves and their tactics by presenting themselves as businesses in the mold of the large companies who hired them, not as quasi-informants and former criminals in the mold of French undercover innovators like Vidocq and his brigade of ex-convicts.

Private detectives’ claim to professionalism vis-à-vis informants and police also built on the refusal by some agencies like those of Pinkerton and Furlong to work for rewards (instead billing their clients for hours worked and expenses).Footnote ³⁶ Since the police still worked on the award system, Furlong, in his memoirs, claimed for himself the mantle of working in the public interest while denying this to the police, whom he repeatedly described as interested primarily in the rewards that had been posted for making arrests in particularly notorious cases.Footnote ³⁷

By standardizing its surveillance reports, the Pinkerton agency sought to market its detectives as professionals distinct from the informers who reaped municipal bounties for reporting Sabbath violations in places like Baltimore in the 1830s and 1840s.Footnote ³⁸ Alan Bilasky contends that the standardized surveillance reports that Pinkerton pioneered and delivered to his clients made it easier for corporate clients to integrate the Pinkertons’ work product into their information streams.Footnote ³⁹ Dashiell Hammett, who had himself been a Pinkerton private eye, recalled with amusement the editorial efforts that supervisors made in correcting his written reports. “A detective official in San Francisco once substituted “truthful” for “voracious” in one of my reports on the grounds that the client might not understand the latter.”Footnote ⁴⁰ Private detectives, unlike informants or vigilante committees, thus sought to market their undercover tactics as the hallmarks of an emerging new profession.

Instead of only replacing the state, however, private detectives sometimes bypassed the public sector altogether, as when businesses used undercover tactics to break unions, recoup losses, recapture stolen property, fire dishonest employees, or decide whether it was worth their while to pursue criminal sanctions.Footnote ⁴¹ Infiltrating labor unions likewise allowed management to bypass the state. According to the La Follette commission, the use of labor spies to infiltrate the workforce and manipulate unionization drives was “a common, almost universal practice in American industry. … No firm is too small to employ them.”Footnote ⁴² In the early twentieth century, for example, the owners of a Chicago movie theater hired the Burns detective agency to join its workforce to learn more about the unionization drive of its ushers.Footnote ⁴³ According to the anonymous memoirs of labor spy GT-99, detective agencies armed themselves with information about incipient organizing efforts before sending salesmen “to call at the plant where the men were being organized [to] sell the officials on the idea of employing a full-time [undercover] operator who would keep in close touch with the employees and report what was going on. When I was able to dig up exact information … it wasn't hard to scare an employer into giving us a job.”Footnote ⁴⁴

In the United States, undercover tactics not only allowed private detectives to replace and bypass law enforcement; undercover tactics also made it possible for private actors to harness the state's coercive apparatus, while alternating between serving private and public interests. The memoirs of Fred Dodge suggest the reciprocal ways in which private and public sectors served each other on the Western frontier, with private detectives sometimes replacing the state, sometimes bypassing it, and sometimes capturing the state's coercive apparatus to serve their own ends. Fred Dodge was a contemporary of Siringo's, whom Wells Fargo dispatched for long-term undercover work as a gambler in Tombstone, Arizona, in 1881, while Virgil Earp was United States marshal and Wyatt Earp was his deputy. Dodge posed as a gambler, but his real job was to protect Wells Fargo interests in the area. Befriending rustlers and outlaw gangs, he helped Wells Fargo collect evidence that could be used to mobilize the state's enforcement apparatus on his employer's behalf. But Dodge also rode posse and served sporadically as town constable.Footnote ⁴⁵ Occasionally, Dodge suggests, it was the private sector that harnessed the state, as when Dodge hired Wyatt Earp to “guard heavy shipments of Bullion and Money.”Footnote ⁴⁶

Private co-optation of the state was particularly rampant in prosecutions of labor leaders accused of violent crimes. Instead of accepting a delegation of power from the public sector, private detectives often worked for private sector elites like the Mine Owners’ Association (MOA)—which in turn mobilized the state apparatus against its enemies. During the prosecution of labor leaders for the 1905 assassination of Idaho's former governor Frank Steunenberg, private detective agencies vied for favor with the MOA by digging up evidence to link the known assassin to the leadership of the Western Federation of Miners.Footnote ⁴⁷ The extent to which the mine owners’ interest dominated the public agenda is suggested by the chief prosecutor's efforts to convince the MOA to defray his costs. Doing so, the prosecuted claimed, would “utterly discredit, and eventually destroy, the Western Federation, rouse public anger against its form of unionism, and pave the way for a new industrial climate in the West.”Footnote ⁴⁸

It was not unusual for states to permit private financing of public prosecutions. In 1884, a California court approved the private financing of public prosecutions as having “existed and been acquiesced in almost since the organization of the state.”Footnote ⁴⁹ After Franklin B. Gowan, President of the Philadelphia and Reading Railroad and Coal Company, hired the Pinkertons to investigate the Molly Maguires, Gowan had himself appointed the prosecutor to try them, leading Harold Aurand to describe the affair as “one of the most astounding surrenders of sovereignty in American history. A private corporation initiated the investigation through a private detective agency; a private police force arrested the alleged offenders; the coal company attorneys prosecuted them. The state only provided the courtroom and the hangman.”Footnote ⁵⁰ The state was, in a sense, an extension of the private sector, which outsourced the management of its labor strife to prosecutors and private detectives, using a criminal case against an individual actor to discredit the Western Federation of Miners as a whole.

Private undercover tactics also influenced the public sector through a very different mechanism; undercover work allowed private detectives to work with local reformers to combat police corruption. Despite opposition from corrupt East St. Louis police, Thomas Furlong claims, he sent undercover private detectives into four local gambling dens to assist a local prosecutor unable to mobilize the local police.Footnote ⁵¹ Later on, undercover tactics were central to the success of Furlong protégé William J. Burns, who liked to catch corrupt politicians red-handed accepting bribes from undercover detectives.Footnote ⁵² Such exposés of corruption established early links between norm entrepreneurs such as anti-corruption activists, who mobilized around a cause, and tactical entrepreneurs, such as private detectives like Furlong and Burns, who mobilized their profession around their claimed expertise in undercover tactics. Building strategic alliances with social and political elites, private detectives used undercover tactics to challenge corrupt political machines from New York and St. Louis to San Francisco.

Undercover tactics helped prosecutors, politicians, and newspaper tell a gripping tale in the courtroom and in the press. During the Abe Ruef investigation of 1905, for example, prominent sugar magnate Rudolf Spreckels financed Francis Heney's corruption investigation of the Democratic politicians who ran the city, with prominent newspaper editor Fremont Older reporting the story and William J. Burns loaned out by the Secret Service to gather evidence for Heney, as “special agent of the district attorney.”Footnote ⁵³ Burns, who had founded his own private detective agency in 1909, brought his undercover techniques with him when he took the helm of the Bureau of Investigations in 1921. Cutting the Bureau's staff by 50%, he funneled a great deal of the Bureau's investigative work to his own agency.Footnote ⁵⁴ This embedded favored investigative tactics in the public realm while eroding the distinction between the respective investigative prerogatives of public and private investigators.

Indeed, it was the regular appointment of prominent private detectives like Furlong and Burns to positions of prominence in local policing and in federal law enforcement agencies that cemented the private detective agencies’ influence on the investigative tactics of public authorities. Allan Pinkerton helped to supplement the Chicago Police Department with private detectives, and in the late 1850s he advised the mayor on the reorganization of the Chicago police.Footnote ⁵⁵ A superintendent of the Thiel detective agency, John F. Farley became police chief of Denver in 1889.Footnote ⁵⁶ In the late 1890s, the Pinkerton agency's Philadelphia superintendent became chief of the Philadelphia Police Department. Another former Pinkerton employee became deputy commissioner and chief of detectives in the NYPD.Footnote ⁵⁷

The Progressive Era Vice Enforcement: Public Police versus Private Reformers

During the Progressive Era, popular associations actively challenged municipal administrations, as social reform and anti-vice activists sought to promote increasingly ambitious reform agendas and to challenge what they saw as the corruption or inaction of municipal police beholden to political machines. Private detectives’ use of undercover operations had turned them into tactical entrepreneurs. Progressive Era anti-vice activists and reformers in turn served as norm entrepreneurs who capitalized on undercover tactics pioneered by private detectives and sought to use these tactics to promote their own enforcement agenda, sometimes in alliance with private detectives and sometimes with their own team of undercover operatives.

Activists’ reliance on undercover work was a relatively recent phenomenon, even if vice enforcement was not. Morals regulation has a long history in nineteenth-century America. This older tradition included anti-liquor legislation and efforts by local notables to shut down “disorderly houses.”Footnote ⁵⁸ But the extent to which such prosecutions relied on neighbors giving character evidence about the proprietors’ reputation in the community suggests not only “a morals law devoted as much to reinforcing local status relationships as to punishing criminal actions.”Footnote ⁵⁹ It suggests that police and prosecutors were willing to investigate and prosecute these legal actions, that community members were willing to testify and convict, and that these prosecutions were not driven by the testimony of undercover agents or private reform societies seeking to circumvent reluctant police and municipal authorities.

Progressive moral purity societies emerged as a white middle-class response to growing urban density and anti-immigrant nativism. These associations hired their own undercover investigators to monitor the morals and recreational habits of working class immigrants. Civic associations mobilized to address shifting moral panics around saloons, gambling, dance halls, prostitution, homosexuality, and racial mingling.Footnote ⁶⁰ Moral purity activists from Anthony Comstock's Society for the Prevention of Vice to Rockefeller's American Social Hygiene Association sent undercover operatives to document prostitution, and New York's Committee of Fourteen used the reports of undercover agents to close down drinking establishments or dance halls that sold liquor outside of approved hours.Footnote ⁶¹ The moral entrepreneurs’ undercover tactics directly challenged the inaction of public authorities, producing investigative commissions and scandals that occasionally forced a reluctant municipality's hand and circumvented or harnessed its coercive resources. In 1879 alone, Gilfoyle contends, over ten establishments [in New York City] were described as “respectable and law-abiding by the police, contradicting reports by a preventive society.”Footnote ⁶²

Progressive reformers drew on evidence produced by undercover tactics to expand and to control definitions of deviance, to bypass the state's enforcement apparatus, and to harness that apparatus when they could. Reform proposals pressed by voluntary citizens’ associations benefited from vivid first-hand exposés presented through vice reports and live testimony before grand juries and public investigative commissions (like New York's Lexow and Mazet Commissions). These colorful narratives grounded claims to subject matter expertise by social activists seeking to mobilize legislative and executive branches of government around diverse reform agendas. But undercover investigations served evidentiary as well as diagnostic purposes, as undercover agents—both public and private—could present evidence of their first-hand observations in criminal prosecutions. The ambitious aims of Progressive Era reformers fed a quest for inside information that drew on social science, voyeurism, and the quest for admissible evidence.

Reverend Parkhurst's visits to New York's brothels in 1892 suggest the role that undercover tactics played in elite efforts to pressure the police into taking action against brothels.Footnote ⁶³ Reverend Parkhurst used his undercover excursions to put the New York police on the defensive. “Rather than focusing on individual saloons or brothels or gambling parlors,” Jennifer Fronc observes, “Parkhurst went to the source, pointing to the system of graft, bribery, and payoffs between proprietors and police that kept illegal and disorderly places running.”Footnote ⁶⁴

But while private reform societies sometimes worked with private detectives, they often preferred to hire their own undercover operatives. Although New York's Committee of Fifteen claimed to rely largely on private detectives; for example, Jennifer Fronc has shown that its undercover investigations of gambling and prostitution mostly relied on investigators who were suggested by local social service organizations.Footnote ⁶⁵ The Committee of Fourteen, which took the place of the Committee of Fifteen in 1905, openly eschewed private detectives. The Committee's executive director, Frederick Whitin, conducted the bulk of the undercover work himself, then hired temporary investigators, including journalists and workers from other social service organizations.Footnote ⁶⁶ Reformers themselves, not the detective profession, pushed the use of undercover tactics in vice enforcement.

The reformers sought to shape not only the enforcement agenda but also the tactics of the police. During Theodore Roosevelt's brief tenure as one of New York's Police Commissioners, starting in 1895, undercover tactics were used to prosecute brothel owners as well as their employees for running “disorderly houses” and for excise tax violations related to the sale of liquor.Footnote ⁶⁷ Undercover tactics thus became an anti-vice tactic of public and private sectors alike. Indeed, the ordinariness of such tactics for police is evident from Roosevelt's outrage, during his tenure as police commissioner, over budget shortfalls that jeopardized reimbursement for detectives who “shelled out their own cash to pursue undercover gambling, brothel, and saloon arrests.”Footnote ⁶⁸ In response to members of the police administration who objected to the expense reimbursements, Roosevelt insisted that “the police for years had been spending money going undercover into brothels and that judges had recently been demanding two eyewitnesses before issuing warrants.” Roosevelt claimed that that “no other means existed for making these cases” and that, in a 6-month period “between forty and fifty houses in this precinct have been closed, not one of which could have been closed save by procuring testimony of the kind to which the Comptroller objects.”Footnote ⁶⁹

George Kneeland's undercover work for vice commissions exemplifies Progressive reformers’ use of undercover tactics to lay claim to subject matter expertise, define deviance in ways that supported their reform agenda, and press their reform agenda on public authorities. Kneeland was a social worker who succeeded in turning his use of undercover tactics into an industry and a motor of social reform.Footnote ⁷⁰ Kneeland's professional identity lent legitimacy to his undercover tactics.Footnote ⁷¹ The detailed vice report that Kneeland authored for Lancaster, Pennsylvania makes it clear how central undercover investigations were to Kneeland's empirical claims, his definitions of deviance, and his reform suggestions. Kneeland worked with four investigators from the Department of Investigation of the American Vigilance Association, who visited 53 Lancaster “vice resorts” in the fall of 1913, including 39 “parlor houses,” or brothels. Each visit was the subject of a report recounting the numbers of prostitutes and customers who frequented a particular establishment and the conditions that prevailed there. But the report's normative agenda was not only to suppress prostitution but also to define deviance down to include a much wider range of “immoral” conduct, such as “suggestive” dancing by girls who offered up toasts while “hitching up” their skirts, singing bawdy songs, and smoking cigarettes.

Undercover operations thus provided the empirical basis for the Vice Commission's recommendations that the city shut down brothels entirely instead of merely regulating them geographically, and the fist-hand accounts of undercover agents supplied steady source of political pressure on municipal administrations that would have preferred to restrict prostitution to designated zones. But undercover tactics also provided evidence for direct legal action against brothels and against the prostitutes who worked there, so as to circumvent the reluctance of successive municipal administrations to conduct their own investigation and force the city to take action.Footnote ⁷² Chicago's own Committee of Fifteen (COF), which had been formed in May 1911, took its impetus for further undercover action from Kneeland's vice report for Chicago, sending out undercover operatives to collect evidence that could be used to implement the report's abolitionist recommendations.Footnote ⁷³

In the lead-up to World War I, anti-vice and anti-subversive efforts of private sector norm entrepreneurs came to coalesce. Preventive societies’ initiatives against vice reinforced and came to encompass fears of organized labor and radical political movements. Undercover tactics underwrote the gradual transition from vice enforcement to the suppression of dangerous ideas. “The moral surveillance of preventive societies quietly, almost covertly, evolved into political surveillance … . Privatized vigilante tactics to counteract radicals and political dissidents in the early twentieth century were, in the case of the preventive society, borrowed from similar efforts to stem the subversive effects of illicit sex in the late nineteenth century.”Footnote ⁷⁴

As the Commission for Training Camp Activities (CTCA) sought to suppress prostitution during World War I, undercover investigations became the shared currency of public–private partnerships, and the balance of powers between private and public sectors shifted as the state gradually acquired and increased its own surveillance capacities.Footnote ⁷⁵ This process accelerated after the war. The COF's most experienced undercover agent in Harlem, for example, trained the NYPD in the use of undercover tactics in 1929, before the COF itself went out of business, in 1932.Footnote ⁷⁶ Labor infiltration took a similar turn from private infiltration that bypassed the state to private-public partnerships that gradually tilted more heavily towards the government. With the enactment of the Wagner Act and the La Follette Senate investigation of labor espionage, labor discipline marked a shift away from private surveillance of the labor movement. Fears of a Communist takeover of the labor movement spurred government involvement, as anti-union espionage became anti-radical espionage. If labor was largely policed by employers until World War I, the Justice Department's partnership with private detectives brought the private detectives’ own undercover methods into the Bureau of Investigations, suggesting, in Weiss's words, “the permeability of the membrane separating the private and public realms of policing,” including both personnel and tactics.Footnote ⁷⁷

Following the war, Prohibition marked both the high point of the private sector's agenda setting power,Footnote ⁷⁸ and the low point of its operational importance, as the state developed its own surveillance infrastructure.Footnote ⁷⁹ Prohibition agents like Izzy Einstein, who dedicated his memoirs to “the 4,932 persons I arrested,”Footnote ⁸⁰ took over the undercover tactics of the Committee of Fourteen and the American Saloon League. Einstein's memoir resonates with the genre of detective memoirs but is at the same time cartoonish, representing a reductio ad absurdum of the established crime-solving conventions of the detective genre or the vice reformers’ pursuit of moral purification. If French police memoirs lamenting the machinations of agents provocateurs sounded in tragedy, Einstein's memoirs of his battle against alcohol sounded in farce. Einstein's descriptions of his dramatic emergence from disguise to announce to New Year's Eve revelers that “you are all pinched” prefigures the modern uses of undercover tactics for entertainment purposes, embodying the carnivalesque spirit of P.T. Barnum rather than the police procedural or Allan Pinkerton's dogged pursuit of respectability as “founder in America of a noble profession.”

The Rise of Undercover Tactics in France

Undercover tactics played a crucial state-building role in France. Beginning in the eighteenth century, the French state used such tactics to extend the central government's control over state territories and to respond to mobility and social upheaval. In the seventeenth century, in particular, Jean-Baptiste Colbert, the Minister of Finance for Louis XIV, built an information-gathering network that helped to wrest control over legal, financial, and administrative records away from the parlements and the local nobility. Colbert's efforts culminated in the creation of a corps of bureaucratic informers whom Colbert instructed “to find documents concerning the royal domain and ecclesiastical benefices in what amounted to potentially huge sums of income for Louis XIV.”Footnote ⁸¹ Colbert used his intendants to make covert acquisitions of archival holdings that could be used to press the central state's legal claims against its landed aristocracy. Colbert's encyclopedic information-gathering ambitions created a powerful police apparatus designed to funnel information to the top of a centralized hierarchy and to consolidate the administrative reach of a centralized state. This required the police to gather the information necessary to anticipate risks of insurrection, to monitor itinerant populations, to suppress all varieties of public disorder, and—not least—to solve crimes both low and high, with particular emphasis on ferreting out plots against the king. Undercover tactics remained fundamental for all of these purposes.

In the eighteenth century, accordingly, French police memoirs and treatises were written to build the institutional memory of the state's administrative apparatus and to advance its officials’ claims to professional expertise. Delamare's 1705 treatise on policing insisted that a vigilant state must acquire “knowledge of illicit assemblies, of the emotions of the people, of who was carrying guns,” as the right to bear arms was expressly reserved for high-level officials (“baillys et senechauds”).Footnote ⁸² The breadth of these administrative responsibilities presupposed an extensive surveillance network. Addressing himself to a readership of high-level administrators, Delamare sought to transmit expert knowledge about how to use secret surveillance to extend the state's reach while anticipating potential threats to the state's control over public order.

Jean-Baptiste-Charles Lemaire's Mémoire sur l'administration de la police de Paris suggests the centrality of covert surveillance to the French state-building project.Footnote ⁸³ In Lemaire's account, the Paris police encouraged active undercover work by informants and inspectors alike. Informants “continue to frequent dangerous subjects whom they know, to keep themselves in their [the subjects’] confidence, learn their plans, inform the inspectors, and put the inspectors in a position to take action accordingly.”Footnote ⁸⁴ Inspectors must recruit “observers” whom they pay “to listen to conversations in different public places … or wherever heated spirits” attack the conduct of government affairs.Footnote ⁸⁵ Informants may in turn recruit their own subcontractors, or “sous-mouches.” Tasked with “observation and investigation,”Footnote ⁸⁶ the inspectors who coordinate this network of informants must go undercover themselves, seeking to catch pickpockets and thieves in the act of fencing their stolen goods.Footnote ⁸⁷ Police inspectors, Lemaire insists, must be willing to play many sorts of people; must often plead a falsehood to get at the truth; must speak well or ill of someone to get information, or must “insinuate themselves into the confidence” of their subjects to extract their secrets, while taking care to conceal who they are.Footnote ⁸⁸ Steven Kaplan and Vincent Milliot remark that “in reading Lemaire one could get the impression that Parisian society divides itself neatly in two classes: those who keep the registers and those whose names get recorded there.”Footnote ⁸⁹ Lemaire's treatise suggests how important systematic surveillance became to the state's efforts to exert control over a restive population.Footnote ⁹⁰

In particular, Lemaire's treatise suggests that skillful use of undercover tactics was part of the professional know-how enabling police commissioners to supply a centralized hierarchy with the intelligence that decision makers needed to identify the most urgent public order problems and to address them effectively.Footnote ⁹¹ The ability to synthesize, cross-check, and write up secret information from various sources was important in a system that sought to institutionalize surveillance as a routine tool of governance. By producing and controlling the written record, commissioners decided which threats to treat as salient and what information to relay to the apex of the administrative pyramid; but this in turn depended on the commissioner's skillful collection and assemblage of information obtained from a dense network of infiltrators.Footnote ⁹²

In contrast with American uses of undercover tactics, however, Lemaire's use of such tactics accompanied a vigorous assertion of what one might term the government's monopoly of legitimate stealth. His treatise evinced a special concern with ferreting out impostors, people who use false names and disguises, soldiers who don the wrong uniform to conceal their true rank, or citizens who violate the ban on the wearing of masks and carrying of arms during carnival.Footnote ⁹³ Mixing among the people was one of the prerogatives of criminal investigators and was, at the same time, denied to the military (who were prohibited from wearing civilian clothes), just as it was illegal for ordinary members of the public to present themselves as someone they were not.Footnote ⁹⁴ In 1801, Napoleon issued a decree regulating the wearing of costumes during carnival and prohibited costumes that disturbed public order; costumed revelers were prohibited from ridiculing government or religion, nor could they dress in clerical garb.Footnote ⁹⁵ American willingness to tolerate undercover tactics by private detectives suggests a society in which social rules were more fluid, social prerogatives and hierarchies less well-defined, speech was less regulated, and in which it was more acceptable to reinvent oneself as whomever one wished to be.

The French Revolution brought a more critical perspective to the covert practices that Lemaire had celebrated as statecraft. Critics like Citizen Manuel denounced generalized surveillance as a form of despotism—a view that undergirds nineteenth-century American unwillingness to create a federal police force or a powerful administrative state reliant on surveillance.Footnote ⁹⁶ On the defensive, Lemaire's successor Lenoir edited Lemaire's unpublished manuscript by early 1790 to take out three paragraphs describing police inspectors’ reliance on informants who mingle with criminals.Footnote ⁹⁷ But this “refus du secret”Footnote ⁹⁸ soon gave way to the creation of an even more intrusive surveillance apparatus, under Joseph Fouché, to quiet internal unrest at a time of intense warfare against external enemies. Post-revolutionary efforts to decentralize policing by devolving responsibility to municipalities were gradually reversed, beginning with Napoleon Bonaparte's establishment of a police prefecture under the command of the Ministry of the Interior, in 1800, which in turn increased political control over the police.Footnote ⁹⁹

Even amid growing criticism, undercover tactics remained a salient police practice. In 1800, for example, the General Police Commissioner of Lyon, François Louis Esprit Dubois, published a public accounting of the previous year's “secret expenditures,” justifying his use of undercover tactics. If Lemaire's treatise had conveyed confidential information about statecraft to the Austrian imperial court, Dubois's open accounting of expenditures evinced some degree of confidence that undercover tactics could be acknowledged and defended before a public weary of public strife and crime. Dubois vaunted his success in disseminating secret agents throughout public spaces and even in private clubs “where I could expect a partisan spirit and the possibility of some plot,” while claiming that, for most property crimes, “the resources of the secret police are the most efficient means of arriving at reliable results.”Footnote ¹⁰⁰ Wrestling with constant social and political upheaval, police reformer Jacques Peuchet changed his views about undercover tactics between the publication of his treatise in 1789 and 1791 and his later work in 1814. Immediately after the French Revolution, Peuchet had denounced undercover surveillance as the quintessence of despotism. In his 1814 treatise,Footnote ¹⁰¹ however, Peuchet argued that the police needed to expand its surveillance activities to better take the pulse of public opinion. Peuchet envisioned the police as a channel through which opposition forces could communicate directly with the government.Footnote ¹⁰² In 1822, a prefect made clear how intensive a form of undercover surveillance the newly expanded engagement with social protest movements entailed, instructing his commissioners that they were expected to prevent “all popular movements by being present in any crowd that could form for any reason.”Footnote ¹⁰³

Despite these concerns about political stability, French undercover tactics during the first third of the nineteenth century remained crime-fighting tactics, alongside the high policing uses that prefects and police commissioners made of infiltration in the pursuit of public order and political stability. Concerns about crime and political unrest sometimes coalesced, for the police, in the surveillance of itinerant populations. Associating geographic mobility with crime and with political unrest, the Ministry of the Interior and the state's prefects required the police to monitor itinerant beggars, peddlers, and traveling entertainers (saltimbanques), along with foreigners, traveling swindlers, and political “troublemakers.”Footnote ¹⁰⁴ Thus, mobility of populations, exacerbated by the advent of railroads and urban growth, was one of the problems to which undercover tactics presented themselves as solutions, in both the United States and France.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ But in France, as indeed elsewhere in Europe, the authorities defined the ensuing disorder as a threat first and foremost to the state, privileging these concerns over threats that this mobility might present to private business interests. In the United States, it was instead the threat that mobility presented to business interests that prompted the development of undercover tactics by the private sector, creating an opportunity for the emergence of a new profession of private detectives that could specialize in the use of undercover tactics to mitigate the impact of mobility and urbanization on private business interests.

Nationally appointed police commissioners in larger French cities presided over a municipal police recruited and funded by local mayors. Jean-Francois Tanguy, Dominique Kalifa, and Pierre Karila-Cohen contend that police commissioners were caught in the middle between mayors who privileged local interests and prefects who pursued national priorities, since commissioners were appointed, moved around, and promoted by the national state but paid by municipal councils.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ The tension between prosaic, local responsibilities and high policing thus translated into a tension between two types of undercover work: undercover policing of robbers and thieves, and “high policing” of political dissent. This conflict translates, roughly, into a tension between service to the public (who were concerned about crime and channeled these concerns through their mayors) and service to the state (which was concerned about threats to its power).Footnote ¹⁰⁷ The 1834 insurrection by silk workers allowed the national authorities to centralize control over policing, reducing the mayor's sway over the priorities of Lyon's police commissioner. As a result, police commissioners, who reported to prefects and national authorities, came to privilege the political over the crime-fighting uses of undercover tactics.Footnote ¹⁰⁸

There were a number of strategies by which the Ministry of the Interior ensured the primacy of political policing among the commissioners’ tasks. During the first third of the nineteenth century, the Ministry used central commissioners to supervise regular commissioners, thereby embedding its local representatives in hierarchies that held local commissioners accountable for their success in political policing. In addition, the Ministry entrusted commissioners with secret missions for the Ministry, which in turn contributed to the prestige of the commissioners’ office, as “more than one CP (commissaire de police) liked to give the impression that he enjoyed the confidence of high officials in Paris.”Footnote ¹⁰⁹ During the Second Republic (1848–51), the Ministry also introduced “special commissioners to oversee the infiltration of radical milieus, including that of railroad workers, due to the state's special concern with “‘nomadic’ workers employed to build France's railroads.”Footnote ¹¹⁰ And in 1880, the Director of the Sureté Generale penned a report “on the role…of the political police,” in which he insisted that dangers emanating from Jesuits, striking workers, unions, and revolutionary movements urgently required an increase in budget allocations for special commissioners, particularly of the railroad police, a euphemism for the national intelligence service that eventually became the Renseignements Generaux. Footnote ¹¹¹

Malcolm Anderson contends that the Boulanger crisis of 1887–89, along with “apprehensions about the possibility of a military coup d'etat … reconciled many Republicans to the necessity of some form of political police.” Increases in anarchist violence, violence accompanying strikes and public protests, and foreign radical groups motivated increases in political policing and in the undercover tactics that this entailed. Paris police prefect Louis Lepine was able to do this by building on a system of political policing proposed by Honore Cazelles in 1880.Footnote ¹¹²

Like those of Canler, the memoirs of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century police prefect Louis Lepine treated surveillance tactics as a distasteful necessity of political policing, while the increasingly professionalized métier of criminal investigations relied on more “scientific” methods, such as Bertillonage, ballistics, and photography, in which the Paris Sureté became an international leader.Footnote ¹¹³ Marking what Jean-Marc Berliere and Rene Levy term the transition “from ‘snitches’ to ‘experts,’”Footnote ¹¹⁴ the Paris Sureté modernized policing by subtracting old layers of expertise, effectively “downgrading other forms of know-how that have become obsolete.”Footnote ¹¹⁵

Much as in the United States, the advent of the railroad created opportunities for undercover investigations. But while it was the private sector, particularly private detectives, who capitalized on these opportunities in the United States, it was the state that first used the railroad network to facilitate surveillance in France, doing so for specifically political ends, not for workforce surveillance, as in the United States.

Undercover Policing of Labor and Vice in Late Nineteenth-Century France

In contrast with the United States, neither replacing, bypassing, harnessing, nor partnering with the French state was an option for private uses of undercover tactics in France. As the French state did not allow private detective agencies to use undercover tactics to collect evidence for criminal cases or to steer or disrupt the labor movement, private detective agencies could not expect to stake their fortunes or their professional identity on the undercover work that was so central to the rise of American private detectives.

The scope and intensity of political policing increased significantly as France became industrialized in the nineteenth century.Footnote ¹¹⁶ With the advent of labor unions, striking workers became legitimate subjects of surveillance. Accordingly, the state was not willing to leave the suppression of the labor movement to the private sector. French labor strife was not treated as primarily a matter of private interest to large business concerns, but as a threat to the stability of the regime and its ability to keep public order. In his urgent appeal for a budget increase to fund secret agents, the Director of the Sureté Generale warned, in 1880, that “should a political party announce a plan of coordinating” the working class electorate “to make them the instrument of a social revolution,” the government would be caught unaware and unable to differentiate between law-abiding unions and proto-revolutionary unions that might be mobilized against the government.Footnote ¹¹⁷

Regulating prostitution had been a source of revenue for the French police since the days of Fouché, who replenished his fund for secret police operations using taxes on vice establishments.Footnote ¹¹⁸ Accordingly, the French police viewed vice regulation as an invaluable source of intelligence about politics and crime. Undercover tactics played a very different vice enforcement role in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century France than they came to play in the growing cities of the United States, particularly once the Progressive Era injected private reform societies into a leading role as anti-vice entrepreneurs. The French state did not need to act through private intermediaries, who would only have hindered the state's recruitment of prostitutes as informants.Footnote ¹¹⁹ Already during Lemaire's day, the police had monitored vice, but he insists that the police did so primarily with an eye to detecting and suppressing dissent.Footnote ¹²⁰ This tradition continued during the nineteenth century. The head of the vice brigade “communicated daily with the mistresses of the houses of tolerance [brothels], over whom the chief exercizes a power … without limits,” Canler reported.Footnote ¹²¹

Decades after Canler, Marie-Francois Goron claimed that the tolerance that police accorded to brothels was largely due to the information that the owners regularly relayed to the police.Footnote ¹²² The memoirs of Goron's contemporary, Louis Andrieux, who was prefect of police from 1879 to 1881, also treated prostitution as a useful window onto other offenses, which led him to merge the brigade de moeurs with the Sureté (detective division) in 1881, to facilitate the investigation of other offenses.Footnote ¹²³

Prostitution, then, was to be regulated, not suppressed. Beginning with the mobilization of Napoleonic armies, France had instituted a regulatory system of inscription, medical examination, and periodic administrative detention for all working-class prostitutes—a system that was further consolidated during the Restoration.Footnote ¹²⁴ Known as the French Model, this approach remained in place in modified form through World War I, the Interwar period, and World War II. Neither the regulationist approach nor its abolitionist challengers in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries relied on undercover tactics to investigate prostitutes.

Under the regulationist approach, unregistered prostitutes—known as “clandestines”—came to be “viewed as an obstacle not only to the regulatory system but also the health of nations.”Footnote ¹²⁵ But to catch these women, nineteenth-century French police appear not to have relied on undercover tactics, given contemporary complaints that “police inspectors arrest without distinction all women that they find walking alone on the boulevards after a certain hour.”Footnote ¹²⁶ Going on so-called “women hunts,” “[French] [a]uthorities followed women through the streets, hoping to see them enter or exit a brothel, or consort with known prostitutes. Prolonged ‘suspicious’ behavior was enough to merit arrest, as was another citizen denouncing a woman as a prostitute (or even a carrier of an STI).”Footnote ¹²⁷

Goron's memoirs describe raids on lodging houses—known as garnis—as favorite means of catching unregistered prostitutes,Footnote ¹²⁸ for each of which the brigade de moeurs would collect a bounty. And Jill Harsin reports that “public association with known prostitutes was sufficient reason for arrest. … Women picked up for public solicitation were formally charged, according to police guidelines, only after they had been observed several times on the street.”Footnote ¹²⁹ Undercover tactics played no recognized evidentiary role. Prostitution itself was not a criminal offense, so therefore the police would not have had the motivation that American investigators did to make first-hand observations in an undercover capacity, by passing themselves off as potential customers; instead, the registration of suspected prostitutes was an administrative procedure, for which it was not necessary to catch women “en flagrant delit.”

Yet France certainly did not lack for moral reform societies battling pornography, and licentiousness and had its own movement to abolish prostitution in late nineteenth century and early twentieth centuries. Yet when abolitionist Yves Guyot attempted to challenge policing of prostitution by angry denunciation of the Parisian vice squad (brigade de moeurs), he used somewhat different tactics from those preferred by American activists. Instead of pursuing evidence that might embarrass the legal system into taking action against prostitutes, he sought to discredit vice enforcement through the media, first through a report on the violence of vice squad raids, issued in 1872, then through a series of newspaper stories on suicides attributed to the violent tactics of the vice squad, in 1876, and through a fictitious document published in 1878 as the anonymous confessions of a former vice squad agent (Lettres d'un ex-agent des moeurs), which “detailed the various forms of blackmail, corruption, and illegalities that were routine in the Brigade des moeurs.”Footnote ¹³⁰

French abolitionists, like their American counterparts, advocated the complete suppression of brothels, but without themselves resorting to undercover tactics. The French abolitionist movement became a cohesive group in response to the visit, in 1874, of Josephine Butler, the British founder and representative of the International Abolitionist Federation. “At the national level, abolitionist efforts were virtually without result. When abolitionists chose to struggle at the more accessible local level, however, it meant that the battle had to be fought over and over again, in each separate municipality.” And while the American abolitionist movement was strongly inspired by religious reformers, “the abolitionist movement in France … had a strong anti-clerical flavor,” with prominent religious conservatives backing the regulationist approach.Footnote ¹³¹ That abolitionism was a left-wing cause in France led French reformers in a less punitive direction than American reformers, who sought to compel American law enforcement agencies to make more arrests of prostitutes, bring criminal prosecutions under the Mann Act, and deport foreign-born prostitutes.Footnote ¹³²

But in France, the main abolitionist opposition to the prefecture's regulationist approach came from the Paris municipal council, not from private organizations. French abolitionists argued for housing infected prostitutes in sanatoriums instead of detaining them in the St. Lazare prison, where prostitutes had traditionally been kept during their enforced treatment for venereal disease.Footnote ¹³³ The municipal council controlled the budget for the dispensary (of medicines of prostitutes with venereal disease) and it used that power to compel investigations and to advance proposals for more humane housing and treatment of prostitutes. Neither abolitionists nor regulationists espoused undercover tactics to gather first-hand evidence against prostitutes plying their trade.

At a time when Progressive-Era New York and Chicago saw private undercover agents supporting the vice enforcement agendas of prominent social reform organizations, French politicians did make some attempts to allow French reform organizations to pursue their own enforcement agenda independently of the police. In 1893, for example, lawyer and social activist Paul Nourrisson—a member of the National League against Atheism—proposed that the National Assembly give private morality leagues and religious organizations the power to bring criminal complaints to court directly, on their own initiative, thus relieving police and prosecutors of their gatekeeping function in offenses against public morality.Footnote ¹³⁴ Although the proposal received support from a prison reform society and from prominent social reformers like René Berenger, who headed several private associations dedicated to the improvement of public morals, the Senate defeated the proposal in 1898 and again in 1910.Footnote ¹³⁵

Instead of undercover stings, reformers channeled their energies into protests and political action. In one Paris district, known as the Goutte d'Or, Parisians formed a “defense committee of the moral interests of the district,” early in 1913, “bringing together socialists, radical socialists, and members of the morality societies.” Activists organized protest marches to call attention to the ways in which prostitution “harmed business, discouraged employers … and led to a rise in delinquency.”Footnote ¹³⁶ Candidates for municipal office and the vice president of the Ligue de protection sociale variously blamed capitalism, called for imprisonment of brothel keepers, and demanded that local residents “clean up the mess” in their own neighborhoods.Footnote ¹³⁷ For many reformers, the preferred instrument of change was political mobilization, not the covert collection of evidence against prostitutes.

Dominique Kalifa finds it surprising, even paradoxical, that French private detectives failed in their efforts to legitimate their métier as a true profession during the nineteenth century, given the concomitant development of new investigative techniques and narratives that propelled the way policing and journalism became professionalized.Footnote ¹³⁸ Investigations were, after all, central to private and public detective work alike, as they were to reporting. However, French private detectives lacked the option of deploying undercover tactics for entrepreneurial prosecutors or police. French prosecutors did not welcome evidence from investigators such as private detectives operating “at the margins of recognized professions,” such as notaries, scribes, lawyers, and accountants. Private detective Paul Cesar's memoirs lament his inability to win an acquittal for a man he believes may have been wrongly convicted of murder; the police showed no interest in the leads that he generated suggesting the identity of the “true” killers; and Cesar reports that he resorted unsuccessfully to the “ligue des Droits de l'Homme” as an intermediary, to convey his evidence to the judicial system.Footnote ¹³⁹

That French private detectives did not develop licensing procedures or governing legal structures until 1942 suggests that they lacked the professional status that could give them influence over the state's tactics or enforcement agenda. Without an established professional identity of their own—and subsisting largely “at the margins of recognized professions,” such as notaries, scribes, lawyers, and accountants, private detectives emulated the investigative work of journalists and of the police (as more and more private detectives came from both professions after 1890).Footnote ¹⁴⁰

But there are other reasons why French private detectives could not make crime-fighting use of undercover tactics on behalf of corporate clients, as their American counterparts did. Unlike their American counterparts, French detective agencies in the nineteenth century did not serve captains of industry, who could fund the elaborate undercover operations that mining companies and railroads sponsored in the United States. Not until the early twentieth century did French private detectives succeed in appealing to a big business clientele, Jean-Marc Berliere and Rene Levy report, as large hotels, railroads, and banks in nineteenth-century France all maintained security services of their own to guard against theft.Footnote ¹⁴¹

Accordingly, when undercover tactics do figure in the memoirs of French private detectives, particularly in the early twentieth century, the authors made mention of such tactics largely to underline their discretion in protecting family secrets, not to promote their tactics as a model for criminal investigations. When French private detective Cesar passed himself off as the private secretary to a government minister, he claims, he did so in order to spirit a young girl “discreetly” to a mental hospital, at the request of her family.Footnote ¹⁴² When Eugene Villiod used disguise and deception to locate an errant spouse or to retrieve compromising correspondence from a blackmailer, Villiod claimed to have done so to avoid police attention, whereas undercover tactics advertised by American private detectives often culminated in some form of official action by police, courts, or licensing authorities, who were more willing than their French counterparts to rely on the testimony or affidavits of undercover agents.Footnote ¹⁴³ In light of police mistrust, French private eyes had reason not to highlight the crime-fighting use of undercover tactics in their memoirs.

French private detectives simply lacked a favorable context that would have allowed them to replace let alone influence French criminal investigators in the public police. As early as 1832, when Vidocq was fired from the Bureau de Sureté, Paris was much more heavily policed than Chicago in 1855, when Pinkerton opened his agency, and the French police resented competition from private detectives.Footnote ¹⁴⁴ French private investigators whose work too closely resembled police work could themselves face arrest for infringement of sovereign prerogatives.

This proved Vidocq's undoing after he left the Sureté and founded his own private detective agency. Vidocq was prosecuted for false arrest of a swindler whom the police had been tracking unsuccessfully. The police particularly resented Vidocq's efforts to profit from foreign contacts he had made as chief of the SuretéFootnote ¹⁴⁵ and were angered by his use of files that he had kept after leaving office, which gave him access to the names of state informants and agents provocateurs. Private investigators in France who arrested pickpockets faced prosecution under article 258 of the Penal Code, which proscribed usurpation of titles and functions. And in 1888, a lawyer proposed applying this provision of the Penal Code to private investigators who sought access to information about a person’ private life—an approach which, if successful, would have made most private detective work illegal.Footnote ¹⁴⁶ Fearing that former police officers improperly traded on the secrets that they had acquired in public service, French police in 1895 raided the offices of Rossignol and Jaume to search for police files.Footnote ¹⁴⁷ René Cassellari's career as a private detective was effectively destroyed when the police arrested him in 1919 on charges of influence peddling and blackmail.Footnote ¹⁴⁸ The French state jealously guarded its secrets and its investigative prerogatives.

The French tradition of state liberalism reinforced a mistrust of private sector activity that too closely mimicked sovereign prerogatives. Critics inside and outside of the police—including most famously Balzac—characterize private investigation as a usurpation of a state function.Footnote ¹⁴⁹ In prosecuting Vidocq, the state insisted that criminal investigations are only legal under the control of public authorities. “Statist liberalism,” according to Kalifa, “located the guarantee of individual rights in the pre-eminence of the state.”Footnote ¹⁵⁰ If the state did not have a de facto monopoly of stealth, it did attempt to assert a monopoly of legitimate stealth over crime fighting and the regulation of prostitution and gambling.