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of 2007, with a personal take of $750 million. Another partner at Atticus, David Slager, ranked number thirteen, with single-year earnings of $450 million. Rothschild himself tied for thirty-eighth place, earning $250 million that year. In 2007, the reporter Landon Thomas Jr. of the New York Times quoted Peter Munk, the founder and chairman of Barrick Gold, who overcame his early skepticism and agreed to Nat’s entreaties to invest in Atticus. “This kid is special,” Munk told the Times . “It’s back to when they were ruling the world.”
    The Rothschilds of old bestrode the globe and saw political leaders come to them for money. Nat Rothschild continues that tradition today, maintaining houses in Paris, London, Moscow, and Greece. He’s said to be an adviser to the Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska, who controls the Russian company Rusal, the world’s largest aluminum company. In March 2008, Rothschild and his father hosted the Republican presidential candidate John McCain at a fund-raiser at Spencer House on Saint James’s Place in London,the lavish estate built for the ancestors of Princess Diana. Under American campaign law, foreigners can’t contribute to presidential candidates, but they can host events. For the invited American donors, attendance at the Rothschild fund-raiser cost between $1,000 and the campaign maximum, $2,300.
    With connections like that, Nick Day and the corporate intelligence industry he represents have circled back to a much earlier era in which private business interests deployed their own intelligence networks around the globe. And although today’s corporate spies have the technology and techniques of modern espionage at their fingertips, their history is deeply interwoven with the history of capitalism itself.

C HAPTER T WO
A High and Honorable Calling
    The story of American private intelligence begins with Allan Pinkerton, a Scottish immigrant, an American patriot, and a dogged entrepreneur who used fists, brains, and force of personality to build an empire. In the mid-nineteenth century, 27-year-old Allan Pinkerton came to the United States with his young wife, Joan, to escape the desperate poverty and unstable politics of ghetto life in Glasgow, Scotland. The couple settled in Dundee, Illinois, a dairy farming outpost on America’s rapidly growing western frontier partway between Chicago and Milwaukee, Wisconsin. The town was founded by Scottish immigrants searching for work, land, and a future.
    Allan and Joan survived a dangerous Atlantic crossing and shipwreck on Sable Island near Halifax, Canada; endured the theft of Joan’s precious wedding ring by Indians; and worked their way across the country by boat and horse and wagon before arriving in Dundee. By 1846, Allan, a cooper by trade, had set up a barrel-making shop and employed eight men. It was good, honest work, and by any standard, Allan was a success.
    One June morning, he set out by small boat for a set of islands in the Fox River, where he spent the day chopping wood to supply his small business. Making his way through the forest, Pinkertonstumbled upon a burned-out fire pit deep in the woods, well beyond where any people should be. Something felt wrong, as if the people who had been there were hiding. His curiosity piqued, Pinkerton decided to return under cover of night to see who had been there—and what they were up to.
    Crouched in the weeds, Pinkerton staked out the site. Before very long, he saw several men arrive by boat and set up a campfire. It didn’t look good—a group of men this far from town must be up to something illegal or dangerous. Pinkerton returned to town and alerted the sheriff, Luther Dearborn. The mysterious campers turned out to be a group of counterfeiters. Together with a posse of men, Pinkerton and the sheriff returned to the site several nights later and arrested the entire band of criminals. At the site, they recovered a bag of tools and fake coins. Thereafter, the little patch of