Private security firms

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...of President Kennedy and the second interview would have been impossible until today. One was an interview with an official of – how shall I say it in English – a security agency, not a policeman, not a Secret Service man but an employee in the business of protecting public figures. There are many such organisations in the United States. They dress like cops, they look like cops but they don't wear the badge of any federal state or city government. They are often paid by rich men to guard their houses. Nowadays the inhabitants of many blocks, apartment dwellers, pay so much a month to have a private guard patrol the block, that's to say the street, at night. In my block, we have a night and day patrol in summer only since, for some reason the sociologists or the climatologists might go into, crime rises with the temperature. 

A couple of summer ago, I was downtown having dinner with a great friend of mine who, like me, is one of the breed of summer bachelors. We'd dine together always once a week. It was a hot night, though not anywhere in the air-conditioned paradise of his imposing house. We watched the late news, began to catch a movie and since it was midnight, and I lived four miles uptown, he said, 'Why don't you spend the night?' And it was a very welcome invitation and, shortly afterwards, I retired to the guest suite. I propped myself up and read a while and then noticed something which is true of all houses and buildings that are permanently air-conditioned winter and summer, unless somebody from time to time flings open all the windows when, say, a cool north wind is blowing, and nobody does ever seem to do this, the rooms tend to go on cooling the air that's settled in there a year or two ago. They tend, therefore, to give off a slightly musty smell. 

So I ambled out of bed, went over to one of the bedroom windows, opened it a crack and went to sleep. I came to like a man fighting his way out of a nightmare and when I looked over to the open door I thought I was still in a nightmare. There were three burly guys looking, in my half-wakened state, like Keystone Cops. To this day, I could not go on a witness stand and swear that they weren't wearing horizontally striped jerseys, peg-top pants and high button shoes. They were not ready to pounce on me – I would have been a piece of pulp if they had – they had a panting, but a kindly look. 

'What,' I stammered, 'seems to be the trouble?' 'Somebody,' one said, 'somebody opened a window.' 'I did!' I said. They seemed very relieved at this because they would have been off testing the enumerable windows of the house. 'Well,' they said, 'if you'll just sign this form, we'll be out of your way.' I saw that it had to be signed by the householder. 'I'm a guest,' I said, 'and the owner's asleep.' But that was the regulation. So I led them to the bedroom of my kindly and snoring host and they woke him up and I presume he signed while I tiptoed in considerable guilt back to my room. Eventually the front door slammed. My window, of course, had been closed by the Keystone Cops, who lowered it with great care, flipped some sort of catch, connected some gadget that sounded the alarm a mile away at their headquarters and departed with all the quiet pride of television repair men who arrive in suspicion and leave conveying that they are guardians of mysteries beyond you. 

The next morning, my host said, 'What went on last night?' 'Tell me!' I said, 'I thought we'd been invaded by a road company of Guys 'n Dolls.' 'Well,' he said comfortingly, 'it just shows they're on the job!' And then he told me, as if I were a total stranger, 'Somebody had opened a window.' 'Of course,' I said, 'I did!' He was thunderstruck. 'You’re not serious?' he said and he shook with laughter and he's a Dickensian, roly-poly who can shake like the Ghost of Christmas Present. 'My dear boy!' he said – he's about eight years older than I and he's been saying 'my dear boy' since we were both in our forties – 'My dear boy, how naive can you get opening bedroom windows at night? We might have had the entire New York Police Department on our doorstep!' 

Well, this is not an oddity. Practically every Hollywood film star – and lots that would like to think they are – have houses elaborately wired for security. I once called on a genuine and nubile Hollywood star and, finding the door off the latch, I walked in. Immediately a siren went off like the Blitz and within ten minutes another company of Guys 'n Dolls had come tearing into the place asking the actress if she was safe. She'd forgotten to turn the key that switched off a beam of light across the front door. She was safe, however, and the alert security guards stayed for coffee, which was not in my original plan. 

Now all this started, for the record, in Glasgow. Not Glasgow Idaho or Tennessee, but Glasgow, Scotland where, in 1819, a baby was born and christened Alan Pinkerton. He immigrated to Chicago in his early twenties, ran down a gang of counterfeiters and was made a deputy sheriff. In the 1840s there were organisations of thieves who stole property from the new and shining railroad companies. Pinkerton organised a company of detectives to catch them. And in his early thirties, he decided that the regular police force was too dull, too pedestrian for his liking. So he quit and organised his own corps of private eyes – the first, I guess, if you don't count George Washington's public safety council as Pinkerton's National Detective Agency. 

It had considerable and well-touted success. It ran down the principals in a $700,000 railroad theft, it exposed a plot to assassinate Lincoln when he was president-elect, it planted agents among the Confederate Army in the Civil War to prise out military information for the north. And, ever since, it has flourished as a highly competent and disciplined corps of sleuths. By the way, Dashiel Hammett got to feel his way around the twilight zone of crime and criminals as a Pinkerton agent. 

Well, many other companies have bloomed and I don't suppose there's ever been a time when their services were more welcome or better paid than they are today. In most cities, the regular police simply cannot cope. Certainly not in New York City which, in its compulsory budget-trimming mood, has laid off several thousand police when it's obvious they should be taking on several thousand more. So the privates are mobilised. 

And it was one such man who came on the telly the other night and said that of all the public auditoriums he could think of, Madison Square Garden was the most impossible to guard. It's not the old Garden on Eighth Avenue up in the Fifties, it's down in a sleazy part of town and its steps and adjoining sidewalks are decorated by junkies and derelicts. And within a few blocks, on Eighth Avenue, the streets at night are alive with a troop or saunter of girls and women, nearly topless and wearing little hot pants up to their thigh bones. Between the Pennsylvania railroad station, Madison Square Garden and particularly along the malodorous stretch from 42nd Street to 48th, New York looks like a Soviet caricature of sin and squalor in the doomed cities of the capitalist West. Well, apart from them whose profession may be sinful but constitutes not much more than a public nuisance, Madison Square Garden is built right on top of one of the main tube stations, something over three quarters of a million people use it a day and there are very many stairways and corridors leading up into the nine surrounding tiers of the Garden's auditorium. 'Nine tiers!' the security man groaned, 'How can you patrol several miles of corridors on nine floors?' 

Well, once the delegates came jostling in, no more was said about security. The police and the Democratic National Committee had turned their attention to the boggling business of press passes and entrance tickets to the convention. For the first time in history, I imagine, the shape, colour, form and letter press of the tickets were kept a secret up to the morning of the convention. 'There are guys in this town,' the security man said, 'who can print up 20,000 fakes in an hour!' As it was, a whole block of tickets for the Maryland delegation was stolen. The New York delegation held a caucus at which, one man present later blabbed, one big political leader was going around saying, 'The printing press? Where's the printing press?' He was apparently moaning for a private printing press which one old politician could produce in a trice and print up unofficial tickets for friends of the New York delegates, friends who had powerful voices. It turned up that this wizard with the private printing press had died. 

To counter the prostitution nuisance, the city passed a hasty law against loitering with intent of solicitation, which exists in most capitals of the world, but it may last only for the week of the convention because various civil liberties' groups are bringing it to a court test maintaining that a girl's right to solicit and ensnare is one of those sacred American rights guaranteed by Washington, Jefferson et al. The second interview was with a pimp who was bitter over the surprising fact that the delegates had shown a disgusting apathy towards his clients. 

On Wednesday, as you may have heard, the coronation of Jimmy Carter took place. Never was there a convention with less suspense and the only visible suspense now is embodied in the question: will Carter be President? And the most distinguished prophet to be consulted is the renowned Jimmy the Greek, who'd come in from his kingdom in Las Vegas as a special convention oracle and he's giving something like 12-2 on Carter to enter the White House. 'It's simple,' he said, 'some of these bookmakers just can't figure. I look at a public opinion poll and I figure the odds right away.' 

A New York bookmaker with a striking resemblance to Nathan Detroit snorted, 'Why figure? Why bother? My clients don't care who's president unless they elect a horse!'

This transcript was typed from a recording of the original BBC broadcast (© BBC) and not copied from an original script. Because of the risk of mishearing, the BBC cannot vouch for its complete accuracy.

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